Dan Simmons - Black Hills

In the end, two relatively crisp twenty-dollar bills exchanged hands (Paha Sapa had not seen many twenty-dollar bills in recent years)—one from Lincoln to the old fart Jocko, another for Verner, who was probably drinking in a bar somewhere right down the street, to come in and transfer the engines from the flatbed train car to the Dodge’s long and shaky platform.

Jocko promised that he’d have Verner there by five p.m., and Lincoln and his three tired and dusty workers drove deeper into the little south Colorado steel town to find a place to get a beer and another place in which to spend the night.

Paha Sapa had to admit that the thought of a real bed really appealed to him. ( Some Lakota , were his thoughts—in English rather than Lakota, he realized, as if his wasichun brain was adding insult to injury.)

“You’re getting old and soft, Black Hills,” whispered Long Hair’s ghost. “You’ll be all white before you die and as round and soft as an albino sow with no legs.”

— Shut up , Paha Sapa snapped silently. In the few years since he and the ghost had actually communicated—rather than the ghost babbling in the dark and Paha Sapa merely having to listen—Paha Sapa hadn’t gained much from the exchanges. He couldn’t imagine ghosts of murdered men aging, but this ghost was getting old and surly and sarcastic.

A town where half the population was made up of miners and their families (the mines were a few miles to the west, in the foothills) and the other half steelworkers and their families—a glut of Germans, Czechs, Swedes, Bohemians, and other odd lots—was sure to have good bars, and Lincoln and his boys found one within five minutes.

The first beers were ice-cold—the mugs actually refrigerated until ice rimned them—and Red Anderson couldn’t stop grinning.

— I could disappear into a dark little bar like this and not reemerge ’til the damned hard times are over.

Lincoln sighed and wiped his upper lip.

— Too many otherwise good men have, Red. We’ll spend the night at that boardinghouse across the street, but there’s no way I’m waiting ’til Monday.

Red and Hoot looked at each other behind Lincoln’s back, and their thoughts were easy for Paha Sapa to read even without touching them for a vision; the two would be happy to stay here for a week until the mythical Verner came back from hunting.

But one of the magical twenty-dollar bills brought Verner back just before sunset in time for the short, stubbled man to bring his railroad crane over from the main yard and get the great bulk of the submarine engines, pallets, tarps, and all, transferred to the Dodge’s flatbed. That flatbed sank eight inches on its nonexistent suspension, but no tires blew or wheels flew off or axles broke apart. Not right then, anyway.

When the transfer was complete and the four men had lashed the engines down with more straps and ropes than the Lilliputians had used on Gulliver (one of the first books he’d borrowed from Doane Robinson’s library), Paha Sapa drove the Dodge a hundred yards or so to a parking place outside the steel plant’s chained gates—the Dodge moved, eventually, after a sluggish fashion, although he didn’t think that it would climb any hill with a grade of more than 1 percent, and the steering had changed from difficult to damned near impossible—and the four left the mass there and went back to a café for dinner and then to the boardinghouse.

The last thing Jocko shouted after them was—

— You four look like good Christians to me. Well, at least three of you do. If you’re gonna stay over for Palm Sunday services in the mornin’, I can show you the way to the Methodist and Baptist churches.

None of the four looked back.

Lincoln showed the three men to their room—the Borglum largesse for this vacation didn’t extend to private rooms for anyone but Lincoln, but rather to three cots crowded into a nonheated second-floor room where the blankets looked like they would get up and crawl away on their own if not nailed down.

Paha Sapa had brought in his own blankets and extra sleeping layers. Red and Hoot looked dubiously at the sprung cots and then out the window, where the few lights of Pueblo’s modest but very serious about debauchery red-light district beckoned. (The bars still had their speakeasy false fronts and peepholes, even two years after Prohibition had been lifted.)

Lincoln Borglum sounded tired and dejected, or perhaps he was just as depressed by the dusty steel town as was Paha Sapa.

— A beer or two, you two, but nothing serious tonight. We’re leaving at dawn, and I’m going to have the three of you take turns tomorrow wrestling that Dodge east to Kansas and then north. It’ll be a long day.

Everyone nodded, but Hoot and Red tiptoed out in their stocking feet, carrying their boots, no more than twenty minutes later. Paha Sapa heard the stairway creak softly and then he pulled his thick and relatively vermin-free blankets up over his head and fell asleep. The last time he glanced at his wristwatch, it read 8:22.

Hoot and Red came stumbling in smelling of much more than whiskey and beer a little after five a.m. One of them was busy retching into a bucket that he carried with him. At 5:20 a.m., Lincoln Borglum not only rapped hard on the door, but came in and overturned the two slugabeds’ cots. Paha Sapa was up, dressed, packed, and washing his face in the basin with what little water was left in a chipped pitcher that the management had begrudged them. The moans from the tangle of blankets on the floor were pitiful.

Lincoln and Paha Sapa ate alone and in silence at the small café across the street.

The pickup truck and absurdly weighted Dodge rolled east out of town a little before seven. The streets were empty. The air was very warm for mid-April. The sky was clear.

Something felt wrong to Paha Sapa all that long morning of driving northeast and into the afternoon. Of course, the slowly crawling Dodge with its mass of dead weight—if the load shifted forward, Paha Sapa would not even have time to jump free before the flimsy old cab was crushed—took up most of his attention as he literally wrestled it around the simplest turns and had to flog it up the shallowest of grades. Lincoln had sent Hoot back to share in the driving, and all that morning into the afternoon, Hoot snored and sprawled on the passenger side of the ripped old seat, waking occasionally only to open the door, jump off the running board, vomit into the weeds, and then run to catch up to the slowly moving Dodge.

What little traffic there was, even the oldest Model T’s, swung around the slowly moving Dodge and its Ford pickup escort.

But through all the snoring beside him and the roaring of the overtaxed engine and his need to concentrate on the driving, Paha Sapa sensed something wrong… something wrong with the world.

The birds were flying south in an unnatural way. The few animals he saw—some jackrabbits, scurrying voles, one deer, even livestock in the dust-filled fields—were also rushing south. They were trying to escape . Paha Sapa could feel it.

But escape what? The skies remained clear. The air remained warm, too warm. The cab of the Dodge truck smelled to high heaven of the whiskey in Hoot’s sweat, and for once Paha Sapa was glad that the windshield would not click shut.

This was country that gave the slightest hint of what would soon be called the Dust Bowl stretching a thousand miles to the south, but that hint was dramatic. Farms were abandoned. Even those farmhouses still occupied had had the last of their paint sandblasted off the walls. Sand drifted to the eaves of homes and outbuildings. Soil was so drifted against fences that Paha Sapa could see only a foot or less of the top of the fence posts poking up through the sand and soil. Farther south, he knew, farmers and ranchers said that they could walk miles on the dirt-buried carcasses of their livestock piled up against the buried fences, but even up here in the southeastern corner of Colorado, the dirt drifts were everywhere. Several times, Paha Sapa had to slow the Dodge to a stop while Lincoln, driving the Ford pickup, crashed repeatedly through heaps of reddish-brown soil that had covered the narrow highway like snowdrifts.