Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Before neuritis interfered with her walking she was a famous figure on the sunny side of Park Avenue as she took leisurely strolls about the neighborhood. She frequented the Cosmopolitan Club, which is near her home. She is quoted as saying that the modern club is a consolation for the widow and old maid. On her walks she was accompanied by her companion, Mrs. Margaret Flood, who, with her husband, Patrick Flood, an ex-service man, were permanent fixtures in the household.

In addition to war relics her apartment contained many Colonial treasures. One of her greatest treasures was the first Confederation flag of truce. In her hall was a long photograph showing the unveiling of a statue to her husband’s memory in Monroe, Neb.

Good-bye, Libbie. Farewell, my darling girl. We shall not meet again.

But, as Paha Sapa has taught me without knowing he has taught me —

Toksha ake čante ista wacinyanktin ktelo.

I shall see you again with the eye of my heart.

AFTER RIDING THE ABOMINABLE TRAMCAR BACK UP THE MOUNTAIN and standing there looking down at the Hall of Records canyon while listening to Gutzon Borglum talk about blasting out the rock saved for the Theodore Roosevelt head, Paha Sapa willingly rides with his boss down on the same tramcar rather than face the 506 steps again. He’s descended them once this hot August evening, and he hurts too much to do it again.

It’s the pain rather than the rock dust and sweat that sends Paha Sapa straight home to his shack in Keystone. Rather than make dinner—it’s almost seven p.m. by the time he gets home—he builds a fire in the woodstove, despite the remaining intense heat of the day, and heats up two big tubs of water he’s pumped outside. It takes six of these big buckets to get enough water in his bathtub for a real bath, and by the time he’s poured in the last two steaming tubs, the water from the first two are cooling off.

But most of it is still steaming hot as he strips off his work clothes and boots and socks and settles into the claw-footed freestanding bathtub.

The pain from the cancer has become a problem. Paha Sapa feels it creeping up from his colon or prostate or lower bowels or wherever it’s advancing from—threatening to overwhelm him for the first time in his frequently pain-filled life—and stealing his strength. His one great secret ally has been his strength, quite unusual for a man of his modest weight and height, and now it is leaking away like the heat from this water or like the water itself once he pulls out the plug.

Once dressed in clean clothes, Paha Sapa goes to feed the donkeys before he feeds himself.

They are both there in their rough new pen, both Advocatus and Diaboli. Paha Sapa refills their water and makes sure they have grain to eat as well as the hay scattered around their enclosure. Diaboli tries to bite him, but Paha Sapa is prepared for that. He is not prepared for Advocatus’s sideways kick and that catches Paha Sapa squarely in the upper thigh, numbing his entire leg for a moment and causing him to have to lean on the fence while fighting the nausea rising in him.

The donkeys belong to Father Pierre Marie in Deadwood, the truly ancient priest and only survivor of the three friars who taught a young Indian boy so long ago, and Paha Sapa has promised to get the animals back by Saturday afternoon. He rented the old Dodge flatbed—the same one that transported the submarine engines from Colorado—from Howdy Peterson’s cousin, also from Deadwood, and Paha Sapa put fresh straw and hay in the now-fenced-in flatbed to transport the donkeys from Deadwood. He needs the truck again tonight but he plans to return it to Howdy after hauling the donkeys home early Saturday morning.

That is, if he doesn’t blow himself and the Dodge to tiny bits tonight in the transfer of the dynamite. He plans to drive the donkeys to the site first and tie them up in the woods below the canyon, so that they don’t blow if the dynamite and he and the truck do on the next trip. With that possibility in mind, Paha Sapa has already written a note asking Hap Doland, his nearest neighbor there in Keystone, to drive the donkeys home “should something unforeseen happen to me.” The note is propped on his mantel. (Although he imagines that it will be the sheriff or Mr. Borglum who comes to the shack first, not Hap.)

Donkeys fed, Paha Sapa goes in to make some beans and franks and coffee for himself. He’s very tired and though the hot bath distracted him, this time it has not leached away any of the pain. Paha Sapa wonders if he should have taken the Casper doctor up on his offer of morphine tablets to be dissolved and injected with a syringe.

After dinner, with the Keystone valley in shadow—the evenings are growing shorter now at the end of August—and with V-tailed swallows and terns slicing the air into chorded arcs of pale blue in search of insects and the first bats emerging to their zigzag flights, Paha Sapa starts up Robert’s rackety motorcycle and drives the three miles up to Mune Mercer’s cabin.

The cabin looks dark as Paha Sapa approaches and for a moment he thinks he has lost his gamble that Mune wouldn’t have enough money to be out getting drunk this particular Friday night. Then the door opens and a huge, hulking form—Mune is six-foot-six and must weigh close to 300 pounds—steps out onto the rickety porch.

Paha Sapa turns off the motorcycle’s little engine.

— Don’t shoot, Mune. It’s me, Billy.

The massive silhouette grunts and lowers the double-barreled shotgun.

— ’Bout goddamned time you got here, Slow Horse, Slovak, Slow Ass. You promised me the night work and money more ’n three weeks ago, goddamn your half-breed eyes.

Mune is fair on the way to getting drunk, Paha Sapa sees and hears, but only on his private moonshine, which will probably blind him within a year if it doesn’t kill him first. Paha Sapa can see now that there is the slightest lantern glow visible through the open door but that the blinds are closed tight on the front windows.

— You going to invite me in, Mune? I’ve got the details about tomorrow night’s job and I brought what’s left of a fifth for you.

Mune grunts again but takes a step sideways to allow Paha Sapa to squeeze through into the cluttered, filthy, and foul-smelling one-room cabin.

Mune Mercer, whose first name—probably a family name—has always been pronounced “Moon,” was invariably called “Moon Mullins” during the short time he worked on the Monument as a winch man and general laborer, and, like the cartoon character, Mune is rarely seen, even on the mountain, without his undersized derby squeezed down onto his short-stubbled dome of a skull and an unlit stogie clamped in his teeth. Mune even has a scruffy and surprisingly petite mutt who, like Moon Mullins’s little brother (or is he his son?), is named Kayo and, like the kid in the comic strip, sleeps in a lower drawer of a dresser next to Mune’s bed. Kayo—the canine version—looks up sleepily at Paha Sapa but does not bark. Paha Sapa wonders if the mutt has also been drinking.

There are two chairs at the small rough-planked table near the sink with a short-handed pump and stove and Paha Sapa drops tiredly into one without being invited to sit. He takes out the fifth of whiskey, about a third full, and sets it on the table.