Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Pity the poor Jews in Germany, thinks Paha Sapa, unless their long-quiet god with a capital G proves an equal to the Wakinyan Thunder Beings. Despite his reading and discussions with Doane Robinson—and even with the poor Jesuits in Deadwood—on the subject of Judaism, Paha Sapa has no real idea if the Jews believe in their god possessing them with the full berserker killing spirit. But he suspects that Hitler and his group know the joys, terror, and reflected power of that possession by fierce gods all too well.

Paha Sapa sighs. He has trouble sleeping on trains and is very tired after three days and nights sitting up on a series of hard wicker seats. He’s glad when the conductor comes through the cars announcing that the next stop will be Grand Central Terminal and the end of the line.

PAHA SAPA HAULS HIS BAG the few blocks to the cheap hotel on 42nd Street that Whiskey Art Johnson told him about. The place has his reservation, but the room won’t be ready until afternoon, so Paha Sapa takes an apple out of his bag, stores the bag with the clerk, and begins walking south along Park Avenue.

“Her apartment cooperative is only three blocks south of here, at Seventy-one Park Avenue. Will you stop?”

No. We agreed. The appointment is not until four p.m.

“But you’ll be going right by her place….”

I’ll come back at four. I have things and people of my own to see before then.

“But she might be home now! It’s almost certain she is. She never goes out anymore, according to Mrs. Elmer. We could just stop, ask the doorman…”

No.

“What if we went the other way, then, up to One Twenty-two East Sixty-sixth Street, to the Cosmopolitan Club, where she used to…”

Silence!

The last is not a request but an absolute command. Paha Sapa has discovered that he can send the ghost back to his sightless, soundless hole any time he chooses.

If his hotel room had been available, Paha Sapa might have considered napping for an hour or two after his days sitting up on the train, rarely even dozing through the nights across the prairie and grain fields of the Midwest, then the dark wooded hills and tunnels of Pennsylvania and beyond, but he realizes a good, bracing walk is better. And it is a good walk.

He does glance at the apartment building at 71 Park Avenue, only three blocks south of his hotel, but does not linger. As such places in a city go, it is an attractive enough building. He feels his own anxiety over the imminent interview—it took almost two years to arrange—and can’t even imagine the anxiety of his resident spirit. In truth, he doesn’t want to know.

Paha Sapa smiles as he walks briskly down Park Avenue. He thought he was ready for New York City; he was wrong. The buildings, the myriad and maze of streets, the blocking of the early-morning sun, the countless automobiles and ice and delivery wagons, the streetcars and taxis, the constant flow of pedestrians. It’s been almost forty years since he was in a city of any real size—Chicago during the 1893 Exposition—and the downtown of that Black City was nothing compared to any part of this metropolis. The effect on the aging and weary Natural Free Human Being—which translates as “rube” or “bumpkin” here—from the Dust Bowl western state is immediate and overwhelming.

At first the scale and pace of everything here are oddly exhilarating, making Paha Sapa almost dizzy on top of his fatigue, but within ten minutes all that scale and pace has become like a heavy pressure on every part of his body. (He thinks of Big Bill Slovak’s caisson stories.) Everywhere else he’s ever been, he’s felt like a person—whether anyone knows his true name or not—but here he’s just one of millions, and a pathetic one at that: a very thin and weary-looking Indian with long braids still black but dark circles under his eyes and wrinkles on his face. He catches sight of his quickly marching reflection in shop and restaurant windows—another pressure that he’s not used to, this seeing himself constantly—and notes how ill-fitting and out of style his black suit and clumsily knotted dark tie and soft cap are. His rarely worn and highly polished dress shoes squeak with every step and are killing his feet. Smiling ruefully, Paha Sapa realizes that he’s dressed for this trip in his going-to-funeral clothes, and that fact becomes more obvious in every reflective surface he passes. He imagines that he smells of sweat, cigar smoke from the train, and mothballs. Paha Sapa does not own a topcoat to go with this baggy old suit, and he has been cold since the train left Rapid City…. Spring is coming late this year on the plains and in the heartland.

Even though the sunny morning here in New York City is warming toward the promised low sixties he read about in the newspaper, he wishes he’d worn the thick leather jacket that Robert had left with him in 1917 and that he’s worn everywhere except at work for the sixteen autumns, winters, and springs since. That and his comfortable work boots.

He strides down the broad Park Avenue from 42nd Street to Union Square and then follows Fourth Avenue southeast into the Bowery. He’s soon south of all the numbered streets and passing through Little Italy, past Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, past Hester Street, past Delancey and toward Canal Street, striding through all the teeming and seething immigrant neighborhoods that fed its second generation of laborers and builders to the rest of America. He muses that if he had been born American, rather than Indian, his parents might have lived in these tenements, in these neighborhoods, after coming in through Castle Garden from heaven knows where across the sea. (Doane Robinson once told Paha Sapa that before 1855 there was no processing point in America for immigrants. People moving here simply made a declaration—when they bothered to—to customs officials on the steamships or sailing ships and went on about their business in their new country. Robinson described how at Castle Garden, on an island off the southwest tip of Manhattan—also called Castle Clinton—the state of New York, not the federal government, had processed would-be immigrants until it closed in 1890. The government had taken over then and dealt with the immigration flow at a temporary center on a barge until Ellis Island opened for business in 1900. Since 1924, Doane told him, most would-be immigrants were once again being processed aboard the ships, with Ellis Island being the destination only for those who required hearings or some sort of physical quarantine.)

For some reason, Paha Sapa wishes he had time enough in New York City to visit all of these sites, even though immigration has nothing to do with him. Then he remembers the dead wasichu bluecoat soldiers littering the rolling hills above the Greasy Grass, their white and mutilated bodies so shocking against the green and brown grass. The majority of those dead men, he learned in his year as scout with Crook’s cavalry out of Fort Robinson, were Irish and German and other immigrants fresh off the boat. The serious recession of 1876 had left signing up with the army an attractive alternative to starving in these very tenement neighborhoods Paha Sapa is walking through. Half of the micks and krauts in Custer’s command, Curly told him in his winkte broken Lakota and even more broken English, hadn’t understood their sergeants’ and officers’ commands.

There is no comment on this from the ghost sulking inside him.

The distance from Grand Central Terminal to the Brooklyn Bridge is not that long—less than four miles is Paha Sapa’s guess—and walking between such high buildings, from shadow to sun and then back to shade again at each intersection, crossing to the west side of the street to get out of the chilly shadow when the buildings are lower, reminds him of canyons he has hiked in Colorado, Utah, Montana, and, to a much lesser extent, in his own Black Hills. But in Paha Sapa’s part of the West there are only a few canyons, such as the one the wasichus are now calling Spearfish Canyon, deep enough or steep enough to give this echoing, stark-sunlight and then sudden-shade lower-Bowery effect.