Dan Simmons - Black Hills

“So, are you satisfied? Can we go back to Park Avenue now and see if she’s home?”

— No. Be silent until I say you can speak again. The appointment is at four p.m., and Mrs. Elmer in Brooklyn was very clear to say that we should not present ourselves—myself—before that time. So… silence. If I hear another word from you before I ask for it, I’ll skip the appointment and take the train home today and save myself several days’ pay.

No response. The only sounds are the rush of the trains, the hum of traffic on the bridge pavement, the slight whisper of wind through the giant cables and countless suspending bridge wires, and the constant honk–rumble–muted roar from the city behind them.

Paha Sapa hears voices and goes to the railing of the promenade deck. Four men in coveralls are on a scaffold strung below, smoking cigarettes and laughing, while one of them makes a halfhearted display of passing a paintbrush over the scrolled metalwork descending below the wood floor of the deck.

Paha Sapa clears his throat.

— Excuse me…. Can any of you gentlemen tell me if there’s a Mr. Farrington working on the bridge today?

The four look up and two of them laugh. The fattest one, a short man who seems to be in charge of the work detail, laughs the loudest.

— Hey, what’s with you, old fellow? Are those braids? Are you a Chinaman or some kind of Indian?

— Some kind of Indian.

The short, fat man in the stained overalls laughs again.

— Good, ’cause I don’t think we allow any old Chinamen to cross the bridge on Saturdays. Not unless they pay a toll, anyways.

— Do you know if there’s a Mr. Farrington still working here? E. F. Farrington… I don’t know what the E or F stands for. I promised a friend I’d look him up.

The four men look at one another and mumble and there’s more laughter. Paha Sapa doesn’t have to work hard to imagine what Mr. Borglum would do if he came across some of his workers smoking on the job, only pretending to work, and treating visitors to the monument with this disrespect. As Lincoln Borglum once said to him— After a while, everyone realizes that my father wears those big boots all the time for a reason.

A tall man with a straggly mustache—Jeff to the fat crew leader’s Mutt (Paha Sapa had always gotten the two comic strip characters mixed up until he met a tall, skinny, mustached worker at the Monument named Jefferson “Jeff” Greer, not to be confused with “Big Dick” Huntimer or Hoot or Little Hoot Leach)—gives out a strange giggle for a grown man and says—

— Yeah, well, Chief, Mr. Farrington’s still working here. He’s up on the top of the nearest tower. He’s one of the bosses.

Paha Sapa blinks at this news. If Farrington had been thirty when Big Bill Slovak met him in 1870, he’d be ninety-three now. Hardly the age for someone to be employed and still working atop one of the towers here. A son, perhaps?

— E. F. Farrington? Master mechanic? Older man or young?

More inexplicable giggling from the men below. It’s the Mutt crew chief who answers this time.

— Farrington’s a mechanic, yeah. And he’s as old as Moses’s molars. Don’t know about the “master” part, though. You oughta go up and ask him.

Paha Sapa looks up at the looming stone tower. He knows there’s no stairway inside or on the outside of the solid-stone double-arched monolith, much less an elevator.

— It’s all right if I go up?

The tall one, the Mutt, answers.

— Sure, Chief. The bridge is open to the public, ain’t it? We don’t even charge for you to walk across no more. Go ahead.

Paha Sapa is squinting into the sun.

— How?

Short, fat Jeff answers and the sudden silence of the other three is suspicious.

— Oh, any of the four cables will take you up. I prefer the one to the right of the promenade. If you fall from that one, you don’t go all the way to the river—the tracks or promenade or car lanes’ll break your fall.

— Thank you.

Paha Sapa has had enough of these men. He hopes that they’re not typical of all New Yorkers.

Mutt speaks again.

— Think nothing of it, Sitting Bull. Say hi to your squaw for us when you get back to the reservation.

FOUR CABLES run the width of the river and beyond, each finding support just below the summit of its respective tower. Two of the cables rise on either side of the promenade here at the beginning of the long walk and arch up to the Brooklyn Tower, some 208 supporting cable wires, called suspenders, coming down from them, more scores of diagonal cable wires—“stays” in naval terminology—also coming down from the tower to help support the roadway. In the center of the river, coming down to the roadway, the four cables dip in that most perfect of geometric forms—a catenary curve. Paha Sapa’s son, Robert, who loved math and science so much but who often seemed more poet than geometrician, once described a catenary curve to Paha Sapa as “the universe’s most artistic and elegant response to gravity—the signature of God.”

Paha Sapa also knows that each of the four major cables on each side ends in a giant anchorage, each anchorage an eighty-foot tower in its own right—a sight when the bridge was first built and New York was a low city—and each weighing 60,000 tons. And in each of those anchorages, all that weight of the towers, the roadway, the trains, the people, the thousands of miles of wire, and the dead weight of the cables themselves is carried, the way the flying buttresses of medieval cathedrals carry the weight of gravity from the arched interior, into anchor plates each weighing more than twenty-three tons a plate, and those plates, sitting at the bottom of a stone mass equal to a 60,000-ton pyramid, are linked to anchor bars twelve and a half feet long, which link to smaller links, which eventually lead to red-painted giant iron eyebars protruding from the huge anchorage of stone, iron, and steel, each eyebar connected to its cable, the four cables together sustaining the full weight of the bridge.

But none of that is important to Paha Sapa now. He has to decide if one of the four cables is actually walkable. He wants to talk to this Mr. Farrington.

So Paha Sapa stands at the south railing of the promenade, looking down at one of the four broad cables that runs up to the tower. At this point it dips below the level of the promenade deck and, farther back toward the New York shore, beneath the level of the bridge itself. The metal-covered and white-painted cable is not very large for something carrying so much weight—only 153⁄4 inches in diameter, the same size as the other three supporting cables—but he remembers that there are 5,434 wires in each major cable, each of those wires bundled and crimped in clusters of other cables within the main cables.

Big Bill Slovak loved that number—5,434. He thought there was something mystical about it. Even wasichus , it seemed, had their faith in spirits and signs.

Paha Sapa easily vaults over the low railing onto the cable that descends past the promenade on the right side. It’s easy enough to balance on—a pipe with a diameter just under sixteen inches—but the painted and curved metal is slippery. He wishes again that he hadn’t worn these uncomfortable and slick-soled cheap dress shoes.

He guesses that the cable rises about 750 to 800 feet from this point to its pass-through notch near the top of the tower about 275 feet above the river. Big Bill could have told him the exact length. Actually, he did tell him the exact length of the supported land span of the bridge here and its cable, 930 feet, but that span (and its cable running alongside behind him) runs behind him a couple of hundred feet to the anchorage.