Black Hills (20 page)

But for all the clear sky and warm day, Paha Sapa knew that something was
wrong.

It was about two p.m., and they were nearing the Kansas state line when it hit them.

—
Hi-yay! Hi-yay! Mitakuye oyasin!

Paha Sapa was not even aware that he had shouted in Lakota. He shook the snoring and snorting Hoot awake.

—
Hoot, wake up! Look to the north. Wake up, goddamn it!

A wall of blackness rising three thousand feet or more was rushing at them like a tsunami of dirt.

Hoot sat straight up. He pointed through the open windshield and shouted.

—
Holy shit! It’s a duster. A black blizzard!

Paha Sapa stopped the Dodge immediately. Ahead of them, the pickup paused, then stopped.

There had been an intersection with a wide dirt road not a hundred
yards behind them, and Paha Sapa almost stripped gears as he threw the overladen truck into reverse and backed wildly toward that crossing. Just before the intersection, he remembered seeing a dust-drifted little farmhouse set back amid the skeletons of a few trees.

—
What the hell you doin’, Billy?

—
We have to get these trucks turned around. Get the hoods and engines turned away from that wall of dirt. We’d never get them started again.

Normally, backing that heavy load onto the dirt road and turning the Dodge around would have taken Paha Sapa five minutes of careful backing and turning. Now he made the turn in thirty wild seconds, looking over his shoulder at the advancing wall of blackness all the time.

Lincoln pulled alongside the Dodge and shouted across the wide-eyed Red Anderson.

—
That’s one hell of a duster!

Paha Sapa shouted back.

—
We have to get to that farmhouse.

The ramshackle, tumbledown structure was less than a quarter of a mile ahead on the left as they drove back to the southwest. The only clues that it wasn’t abandoned were the Model A in the driveway and two rusted tractors tucked under a shed overhang and half buried in dirt and dust. But both were so ancient that they might have been abandoned there with the house.

Paha Sapa didn’t think they’d make it in time, and they did not. Beside him, Hoot was shouting the same mantra over and over, as if it were a religious invocation.

—
Holy shit Jesus Christ! Holy shit Jesus Christ! Holy shit Jesus Christ.

Paha Sapa learned later that he would have seen this giant roller even if he’d stayed at Mount Rushmore. The cold front had slid across the Dakotas that morning, dropping temperatures thirty degrees in its wake and burying Rapid City and a thousand tinier towns in dust and howling winds. But the front was soon out of the Dakotas and rolling into Nebraska, picking up strength, velocity, and thousands upon thousands of tons of dust and dirt as it advanced.

Paha Sapa would also learn later that the temperature dropped twenty-five degrees in less than an hour when the west edge of the black-blizzard duster-roller passed by Denver. The width of the storm
by the time Paha Sapa and his three fellow workers saw it approaching in southeast Colorado was more than two hundred miles and growing—advancing like a solid defensive line of brown-jerseyed football players—and it would be almost five hundred miles wide by the time it reached the real Dust Bowl states to the south and east.

None of this mattered as Paha Sapa floored the accelerator, getting the overloaded Dodge truck up to its maximum sprint speed of twelve miles per hour, watching in the rearview mirror and over his shoulder as the monster bore down on them.

Paha Sapa had spent his life on the Plains and it was easy for him to estimate the height of this black moving wall of dirt: the duster was coming over a low range of very eroded hills to the north and northwest, there were lower hills to the northeast—although the Dodge would have labored at the grade with the submarine engines on the flatbed—and just based on the size comparison with the hills, boulders, and the few pine trees disappearing into the black blizzard’s maw, Paha Sapa knew that the wall was three thousand feet high and growing. Paha Sapa had also spent much of his life watching horses rushing toward or away from him on the Plains and could calculate speeds well; this moving wall was hurtling toward them at sixty-five miles per hour or more. The low range of hills it had appeared above was no more than twelve miles away. The duster wall of black had covered half of that distance in the past minute or so.

Watching Lincoln’s pickup truck swerve into the dust-drifted driveway of the half-collapsed farmhouse, Paha Sapa glanced over his shoulder again and realized that the wall was black at the bottom, lighter more than half a mile higher at the top, but that strange, swirling, tornado-like columns of white were rushing in front of the solid wall, like pale cowboys herding stampeding cattle. Whatever those columns were (and Paha Sapa was never to learn), they seemed to be pulling the black wall along behind them and toward Paha Sapa and his truck with ever-increasing velocity.

He realized that Hoot was screaming something other than his former mantra now.

—
Jesus fucking Christ! We ain’t gonna make it.

To the farmhouse, no. But Paha Sapa had known that. There were a
hundred yards yet to go to the shack’s driveway, and time was up—the black wall was roaring behind them, audible now, and tactile as well, as the blackness blotted out the sun and the temperature dropped twenty or thirty degrees around them. Paha Sapa switched on the Dodge’s headlights and then the wall was on them and over them and around them.

It was like being swallowed by some huge predator.

Paha Sapa found himself stifling the urge to scream
Hokay hey!
and to shout to Hoot across the storm roar and static—

—
It is a good day to die!

But there was no use trying to shout now. The roar was too loud.

A white horse ran by from the direction of the fenced farmhouse field. Disoriented and made crazy by the outer wall of flying dirt, the horse was running blindly
toward
the storm. But what Paha Sapa noticed—and would never forget—was the aura of chain lightning, ball lightning, Saint Elmo’s fire, and other static discharges that limned the horse in electrical flame. Lightning danced among the galloping horse’s mane and tail and leaped along its back.

Then the static enveloped the Dodge and the truck’s engine seized and stopped immediately.

Paha Sapa’s long hair stood on end, the black tendrils writhing like electrified snakes. There was a brilliant strobe flash from beneath the truck and for a second Paha Sapa was certain that the truck’s huge gas tank had ignited, but then he realized that it was lightning discharge from the drag chain attached to the rear axle. The flash lit up a fifty-foot radius in the sudden advancing darkness.

The truck rolled to a stop as blasts of dirt exploded inward through the open windshield and side windows. The dust was everywhere instantly—blinding them, choking them, flowing into their nostrils and closed mouths and ears. Paha Sapa grabbed Hoot’s flapping flannel shirt.

—
Out! Now!

They staggered out into absolute darkness punctuated by nonilluminating lightning crashes. The Dodge’s engine seemed to be on fire, the hood thrown back, but it was only more electrical discharges frying everything there. Paha Sapa dragged Hoot forward—finding “forward” in the pitch-darkness only by feeling his way along the cab
and fender to the bumper—and paused to grab the large canvas bag of water strung over the radiator. Paha Sapa tied his kerchief around his face after soaking it with water. He poured water in his eyes and felt the mud rolling down his face. With his powerful left hand, he kept Hoot from running while he handed the man the water bag.

Hoot had no kerchief. He tried to hike his shirt up over his mouth and nose while pouring water over both.

The darkness intensified even as the roar did. Hoot leaned closer and shouted into Paha Sapa’s ear, but the words were lost before they were out of the man’s mouth. Paha Sapa kept his grip on Hoot’s shirt and dragged him into the roaring darkness beyond the truck, closing his eyes so that he could see the distance and direction to the driveway and farmhouse at least in his mind’s eye.

Hoot seemed to be struggling, trying to break away—to go back to the truck?—but Paha Sapa dragged him onward.

Paha Sapa realized that the Dodge’s headlights had somehow remained on, but they’d become invisible after only three or four steps into the roaring darkness. The lightning all around them still illuminated nothing. Paha Sapa wondered if they would be trampled by the fleeing white horse turned back toward its barn or field and had a sudden urge to giggle at the thought. He knew that he would never earn a newspaper obituary, but that would have been a great one after seventy years of life.

He staggered forward—it was impossible to stand upright, and even as they hunkered into a crouch, the wind threatened to throw them both down and scuttle them away across the ditch and fields like so much wind-tossed detritus—and then Paha Sapa decided that they should be even with the driveway, so he tugged the still-struggling and writhing Hoot left and let the wind shove them south.

Once they bumped into something unmoving and solid in the darkness, but it was only Lincoln’s pickup truck, abandoned in the driveway. The driver’s-side door was wide open, and Paha Sapa could feel the dust already filling the cab. They did not tarry there.

He found the front porch by tripping over the step. For a second as he fell forward in the howling darkness, he lost Hoot, but then he swung his arms out and around and caught a grip on the stumbling
wasichu’s
hair and then his collar. Paha Sapa fell forward a few more
steps. Already he could feel his lungs filling with the swirling, pressing, flying dirt—grains of sand and silica like so much molecule-sized sharp glass already cutting the insides of his nose and throat. Stay out here for thirty minutes of this, and their bodies, if they were found at all after the storm, would show lungs so packed solid with dirt that the autopsy doctor could compare them to vacuum cleaner bags that had never been emptied.

The front door! Paha Sapa felt it with the flat of his hand in the darkness and pounded around the edges to make sure. It was a door.

And it was boarded up.

Resisting the urge to laugh or cry or to call out to
Wakan Tanka
or to Coyote the Trickster in a dead man’s glee, Paha Sapa pulled Hoot through the darkness as he felt his way along the house to the left.

They fell off the low and sagging porch together. Paha Sapa was on his feet in a second, lunging toward the side of the house. If he lost the house, they were dead.

For a short, sagging shack, the farmhouse seemed to go on forever. Paha Sapa felt boarded windows under his splintered palms. If there was no way into this house…

He left that thought alone and tugged Hoot along with him. The sturdy mine worker had fallen down and not regained his feet. Paha Sapa dragged him. Drifts were building around his legs as he moved. Paha Sapa suddenly felt disoriented, as if he were climbing a steep cliff—as if the flat, baked earth of this east-Colorado farmhouse were the vertical wall of Mount Rushmore, of the defiled Six Grandfathers.

Paha Sapa felt a sudden exhilaration welling up in him. He did weep then, the tears turning to clumps of mud on his eyelids, caking and sealing his eyes shut.

He would not have to be the cause of the Four Heads’ destruction on the sacred mountain in the sacred Hills.

Wakan Tanka
and the Thunder Beings had acted in his stead. Surely this terrible storm, this terrible
blotting out
, could not be resisted.

Lincoln and Hoot and Red had talked of President Roosevelt pondering abandoning all of the Plains states and the middle of America if no windbreak of pine trees could protect the farms and ranches and sandblasted ghost shells of the dying towns here and south of here.
Suddenly Paha Sapa realized that the gods of the Lakota and the All, and possibly the ancestral ghost spirits of his people, had already acted. For more than five years, the winds had blown and the topsoil had lifted into the sky and the farms had gone fallow and been buried in their own excreta and the ranches had counted their dead cattle in the thousands as the soil dried up and blew away, carrying the last remnants of overcropped grasses with it.

The gods were acting. Nothing on earth could resist a series of storms like this. Paha Sapa knew that this—this black blizzard, this booger of a duster, this big roller—could not be resisted by mere soft, fat, God-praying
wasichu.
Paha Sapa knew nature intimately, and this storm, all these increasingly violent storms he’d read about and caught glimpses of in newsreels and experienced in South Dakota’s milder forms were not part of nature. No cycle of nature in the history of North America or the world had seen months of winds like this, years of drought like this, and screaming, wailing, roiling walls of suffocating death like this.

This was the gods of his people telling the
Wasicun
to leave forever.

Paha Sapa sobbed silently behind his kerchief, sobbed mostly from relief that he would not have to be the agent of the
wasichus’
destruction. He was old. He was tired. He knew the enemy too well. He wanted this cup to pass from him—and now it had.

Inside his heart and brain and chest, the ghost of Long Hair gibbered at him. Paha Sapa could understand the words now, of course—had been able to for most of the decades he had been alive, ever since Curly and the Seventh Cavalry and the battle at Slim Buttes—but he chose not to listen now.

Suddenly Paha Sapa’s flailing left hand found nothingness… the back end of the house.

He tugged Hoot’s body through high dirt drifts into the blessed lee of the house, away from the wind.

But the dirt swirled and intruded and compelled here as well, and it was no lighter. Paha Sapa took his free hand and held it a few inches in front of his mud-caked face even as he pried open his eyelids against the mud and stinging particles.