Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Leaving only the saddle blanket, I swung up on Vic’s broad (but not too broad) back. The sorrel (Victory had the blaze face and white socks, you remember, my dearest Libbie) smelled the blood seeping into the ground and on us and he was skittish, but I pulled hard back on the reins and told you to stand on the saddle on the ground, reach up, and I would swing you up behind me.

“No,” you said, that strange, radiant, laughingly mad and excited look on your face again, “in front of you, Autie.”

“It would be more comfortable for you riding behind me and holding on with…” I began.

You laid your breasts and face against my bare leg and thigh. “In front of you, Autie,” you whispered up. “Facing you.”

And so we rode the mile to the hidden creek. Your breasts pressed against me, and the bison’s blood flowed over them onto my chest and down. Your arms held me fiercely. In your left hand you held a wad of petticoats—our towels if we ever got to the stream.

I had Vic walking, but I spurred him to a canter and you set your hands on my shoulders and hitched yourself up higher against me, your blood-spattered white thighs rising and engulfing. I was already excited. Then you mounted me.

Your breath was hot against the side of my neck. “Faster,” you groaned.

I spurred Vic to a slow, steady, but still violent gallop. I rose and fell in you with each downward pounding of his hooves and great, heaving trunk. I held you tight with my right arm, held Vic’s reins with my left hand. The sorrel wanted to run hard. I let him.

We cried out together, I believe—both of us squeezing the other impossibly tighter and closer as we rose and fell, rose and fell to Vic’s hard gallop. We could not have been closer. Both of us threw our heads far back at the same instant, shouting at the sun.

I remember the ecstasy as being so intense that it went beyond pain. The blood smeared across us, dripping from us, flying behind us as Vic galloped, seemed appropriate. Even the sour-blood-and-bile aftertaste of the slivers of buffalo liver were part of the pain and sunlight and release—a source of unbelievable and never-to-be-recaptured strength and passion.

And love.

There was a tiny bit of water left in the creek, enough to get the worst of the blood and gore off us, but we had to take turns lying in the deepest part, our bodies wider than the stream, each of us rolling and rubbing against the pebbled stream bottom like crazy otters. We ended up using the petticoats more as sponges than as towels and simply buried them in the mud and reeds when we were done.

When we came out of the willows to remount Vic, I shared my fear with you, my darling Libbie… that all of the Seventh Cavalry would be coming into sight from the east just as we mounted up, still a mile from your hobbled horse and our clothes.

That set us laughing. You were behind me riding back, your breasts full and insistent against my back, one of your hands flat across my chest but the other possessively on my inner thigh, and we could not stop laughing even as we dressed (your one remaining petticoat did little to fill out the riding outfit). We laughed most of the way back to the fort and when we managed to gain control of ourselves, one of us would glance across at the other and the laughter would start up again.

It was love, of course, Libbie, and passion for each other, but it was you yourself who later said it—“I have never felt more alive, Autie!” I had, but only in the heat of combat. I did not tell you that then and do so now only because I know that you will understand.

Sometimes, my darling, I wonder if this restorative sleep I am in now might not slip into coma and the coma inexorably into death, but then I remember moments such as that morning on the prairie and know that this is not possible…. I will not, I cannot, I shall not die before seeing you again. Before talking to you again.

Before making love to you again.

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT IS DEFINITELY COMING TO THE BLACK Hills.

Word on the cliff face and on the faces themselves is that the president has given in to Borglum’s endless pleadings and will include in his busy South Dakota itinerary a formal dedication of the Thomas Jefferson head, probably on Sunday, August 30.

Less than a week’s time , thinks Paha Sapa. He can be ready by then.

Work on Mount Rushmore continues at the fastest pace in the project’s history despite the fact that this summer of 1936 is the hottest in the wasichus’ own recorded history.

Every day this summer, Paha Sapa listens to the other men talking about the temperature and about the forest fires to the north and about the Dust Bowl to the south. Average temperatures in July registered a full ten degrees above normal and August has been worse. Out on the plains where Rapid City swelters, midday temperatures hover around 110 and have touched 115 at least once. For Paha Sapa and the others working on the Rushmore cliff face, it is like being in a giant white bowl that focuses the sun’s rays. Not only does a worker’s back blister from the sun, but the heat and light reflected from the increasingly white layers of granite strike them like some sort of focused heat ray out of a science-fiction magazine.

All this August, the stone has been too hot to touch with ungloved hands for the long daylight hours. Paha Sapa’s and the other powdermen’s placement of the dynamite has been riskier than ever, with even the new sticks and blasting caps less stable in the searing, focused heat, and the rock itself threatening to ignite any one of the hundreds of shortened and fused sticks as they are tamped into place. On some days this August, despite his overpowering rush to finish the Jefferson head, Borglum has ordered the men off the cliff face for hours at a time, at least until lengthening shadows offer some relief from the heat.

Dehydration is the serious threat. Paha Sapa’s presumably cancer-ridden body feels it constantly, but now all the men are fearful of it. Borglum has set some men dangling full-time in their bosun’s chairs just to keep delivering water to the men working on the drilling and polishing, but it seems that no matter how many times a man drinks, his body always craves more. Paha Sapa has never seen the workers as tired as these slouching, shuffling, dust-coated figures coming down the 506 wooden steps each evening. Even the youngest, strongest men shuffle like the red-eyed, white-coated walking dead they are by the end of the workday up here.

With less than a week to go before President Roosevelt arrives, Paha Sapa spends his hours crimping and placing dynamite thinking about how to deliver the ton or more of explosives he will need next Sunday to bring down all three of the presidents’ heads in front of the horrified crowd (but not, he will take measures, down on them). But his epiphany on that matter the previous week makes Paha Sapa smile; all this time he’s been thinking about the problem as if he were planting the charges in their predrilled holes—hundreds upon hundreds of them for a blast this large—requiring weeks or months of drilling, if nothing else. But this will be no careful, business-as-usual carving of the Monument; this is the destruction of it. There will be no follow-up polishing charges or drilling or buffing, only ragged stone left—blasted away to the bedrock so that Borglum (or anyone) can never carve out sculptures here again. Paha Sapa smiles again at his own stupidity, bred by too many years working here as a faithful, skilled employee.