Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Paha Sapa didn’t mind the pain. It distracted him from the worse pain lower down.

They didn’t drive very long after dark, since dust was blowing up with the Nebraska wind and Borglum had told his son not to drive at night if the dust storms were obscuring vision. They got permission to camp in a farmer’s field that first night, hunkering the trucks down behind a lone line of pine trees put there a generation earlier to serve as a windbreak. They’d stopped by Halley’s Store in Keystone—the better of the two general stores there (Paha Sapa always expected Art Lyndoe’s store to go out of business, it extended so much credit to the miners and other locals)—and picked up some bread and bologna and canned goods for the trip.

There was no extra wood for a campfire, so they heated their pork and beans over cans of Sterno. It was a poor substitute for a real campfire, but they huddled in their sleeping bags—Paha Sapa had only two blankets—and tried to talk a few minutes before turning in to sleep at seven p.m.

With the wind and light dust storm, the talk invariably turned to the endless drought and the weather. Both of the Dakotas had seen their share of blowing dirt—just the year before, in ’34, Mount Rushmore and the Rapid City area had had two days of darkness as uncounted tons of topsoil blew high over them in the jet stream, darkening the sun, that “duster” finally reaching New York City and the Atlantic Ocean—but it was Nebraska and states south that were really drying up and blowing away. At least South Dakota still had grass on its prairie.

Red Anderson cleared his throat.

— I was talking to a CCC boss who says that President Roosevelt’s got men out traveling all over the world hunting for the right kind of pine or fir tree. Roosevelt’s got experts advising him that they could build a huge windbreak, just like this’n, only stretching from Mexico to Canada, and the farmers could huddle in its lee, like.

Lincoln Borglum and Hoot chuckled at the image. Red frowned at them.

— I’m serious. He really said it.

Lincoln nodded.

— And I bet they are considering such a windbreak, although where on earth they’ll find a pine tree that can put up with this heat and these droughts, all the way down through Texas, I have no idea. And I heard from another CCC boss that the president was also being advised by his so-called experts to just save the expense and evacuate the south of Nebraska, major parts of Kansas, most of Oklahoma, east Colorado, and all of the Texas Panhandle down to Lubbock… just let the plowed-up topsoil blow away and hope the grasses come back in a generation or two.

Hoot Lynch snorted as he scooped up the last of his beans.

— Well, that’s one shit-poor idea, if you ask me.

Red shot his pal a glance, and Hoot sort of bobbed his head in the direction of Borglum’s son.

— Sorry, didn’t mean to… I mean…

Lincoln Borglum grinned.

— I don’t mind a little cussin’, Hoot. If it doesn’t get in the way of things. I’m not a Mormon.

The other two men laughed at that, and Paha Sapa found himself holding back a smile. He knew that Lincoln’s father, Gutzon Borglum, had been a Mormon—his parents Mormon, his father with two wives—and that the woman Borglum listed as his mother was actually his father’s second wife, and his real mother had left the family after they’d moved due to persecution of the Mormons.

Paha Sapa knew this because he had had a confused glut of Gutzon Borglum’s memories, including the direst secrets, in his mind since that day in the Homestake Mine in 1931 when Borglum had come to hire him, Paha Sapa, and then offered to shake hands when the deal was done. With that handshake, Paha Sapa had almost staggered back as all of Borglum’s memories had flowed into him. Just as Crazy Horse’s had back in the late summer of 1876.

Just as Rain’s had that first night they’d kissed in 1893.

Luckily, these three people’s lifetimes of memories (and Rain’s was so sadly short!) were passive—there to confuse Paha Sapa at the time but not shouting out and interrupting and babbling away into the night the way the ghost of Custer still did.

Sometimes, Paha Sapa was sure that the bulk and weight and noise of these other memories, not to mention the ghost rattling its bars for almost sixty years now, were sure to drive him mad. But at other times he was glad the memories were there and he found himself walking through the corridors of Borglum’s past or Crazy Horse’s—more seldom Rain’s, since it was so painful to do so—the way Doane Robinson might wander the stacks of a particularly fine reference library.

Lincoln said to Paha Sapa—

— Did you attach the drag chain under the Dodge the way I said?

— Yes.

They were coming down into the land of dusters and black blizzards now—there were twenty other names for these sudden, fierce, sometimes weeklong dust storms—and discharges of static electricity were a real threat. A truck’s whole ignition system could be wiped out in an instant of white-static ball-lightning unless the drag chain grounded it, and then they’d be stuck for sure, a hundred miles from the nearest mechanic besides themselves. (It was the spare engine parts they lacked, although both vehicles hauled extra tires and wheels and fan belts and other parts in their carrying beds.)

The wind was rising, although it wasn’t carrying that much dirt. Lincoln used a little water from one of their spare bags of water to at least go through the motions of cleaning the plates.

— With a little luck, we’ll be in a real bed, or at least a barn, tomorrow night, boys. Get some sleep. It’s going to be a long few days of hard driving and there’s nothing waiting for us at the end of this trek except two useless submarine engines that nobody wants, not even my father.

LINCOLN HAD SPOKEN THE TRUTH in more ways than he knew. The submarine engines may have been the most abandoned- and unwanted-looking wasichu machines or devices that Paha Sapa had ever seen. The twin banks of diesel engines were the length of the Dodge truck’s extended flatbed, taller than the cab, and amounted to a terrifying mass of early-1920s pistons, steel, oil tubes, conduits, shaft columns, rust, stains, and open metal maws. It was hard for Paha Sapa to believe that so many awkward tons of steel and iron had ever gone to sea.

They’d reached Pueblo, Colorado, on Saturday afternoon—April 13—and quickly found the steel plant and its associated companies, huddled around like so many piglets nursing at the sooty teats of the great black sow of the steel mill itself. The place looked bankrupt and abandoned—ten acres of parking lot empty, tall smoke stacks cold, gates chained—but Jocko the watchman explained that the plant merely shut down on alternate weeks during these hard times and that some or all of the men would be back on the job come the following Monday. Jocko knew right where the submarine engines had been parked and led the four men to a rail siding behind another siding at the back end of an abandoned building just behind the slag heaps. The toothless old man had the style to shout Voilà! when Lincoln, Red, Hoot, and “Billy Slovak” dragged off the dust-covered tarp draped over the house-sized mass of metal.

Lincoln asked the watchman if they could get help loading the engines onto their Dodge flatbed. Monday, was the old man’s reply, since the only one who could handle the crane-on-rails parked just over there by the sludge pond was Verner, and Verner, of course, was probably out hunting this fine spring Saturday and wouldn’t even be thinking about work until Monday morning.