Black Hills (45 page)

Paha Sapa slumped in his bullet-shattered saddle and let the slow horse plod him back behind the lines. Finally the nag stopped to graze again, and Paha Sapa slid out of the saddle and landed on his ass, too weak and drained to stand.

Soldiers milled around him. Suddenly Curly was there, face distorted as he jumped off his pony. The old Crow stood over Paha Sapa seated there in the mud, his forearms on his bare knees, and the scout raised and cocked his own Colt revolver.

—
Lakota Water Boy
, Bilé,
Three Weevils and Cuts Noses Off Frequently are dead, killed in this ambush
you
led us into.

Paha Sapa looked up then. And smiled.

—
Good. I hope their corpses are already filled with maggots and that their spirits stay in the mud forever.

Curly grunted and aimed his big pistol at Paha Sapa’s face.

This way, then, O Six Grandfathers? All right. I am sorry I did not compose my Song.

Horses slid to a stop, sending mud flying over Paha Sapa and the old Crow scout. It was General Crook, beaming through his idiot’s whiskers, and a cluster of officers and the guidon carrier. The general was babbling In Glass
wasichu
talk at Curly before his horse was to a full stop—no one seemed to notice the aimed pistol.

Curly’s round, stupid face gaped up at the
wasichu
war leader for a full minute before the Crow lowered the pistol and eventually lowered the cocked hammer gently down.

Then Crook and his men were gone.

Curly laughed the laugh of the not quite sane. He spat in the mud and looked at the pistol in his hand.

—
Gray Fox says that he knows you, Billy with the Slow Horse, are really Lakota, not Crow, but he welcomes you to be his scout for as long as he, Crook, Gray Fox, commands soldiers and cavalry troopers. He says your courage…

Curly’s face contorted as if the Crow were going to vomit, but he only spat again.

—…
he says he will never forget your courage today and only hopes his other scouts learn from it. Oh… and Gray Fox said to me that you are a skeleton and that if Drinks From a Hoofprint and I don’t feed you well and keep you alive, he will hang us both from the first stout tree he finds.

Curly laughed that insane-man’s laugh again. Paha Sapa could only stare at him.

T
HAT NIGHT
Paha Sapa slept, in the rain with no blanket or tarp covering him, for eight hours. Before dawn the bugles blew and Paha Sapa looked forward to another battle.

But no… despite the sound of continued shots between Crazy Horse’s warriors and a rear guard of cavalry and infantry commanded by Bear Coat, Captain Mills… and despite almost six months of searching for the Lakota warriors, two months of that time without any food except horseflesh, and with the two thousand men dedicated to revenge after Custer’s death… Crook was leaving the battlefield.

They’d crossed a wagon trail used by miners headed for the Black Hills, and now Crook put 1,700 of his starving men on that trail. Crazy Horse and his warriors pursued, sniping from the rear and sides day after day, making feints at night, but Crook refused battle.

Except for some two hundred Indian ponies and five thousand pounds of meat they’d stolen in the Indian camps they’d overrun at Slim Buttes, the long-wanted and long-awaited fight with Crazy Horse had shown no victory for Crook and his men. They’d come all the way from the center of Wyoming Territory, having left Fort Fetterman there on March 1 in a heavy snowstorm, and now, after all these months and miles… Crook kept refusing battle with Crazy Horse and the hostiles as the long column of men and horses staggered south into the Black Hills.

Paha Sapa entered his sacred
paha sapa
again with a growing sense of disbelief and disconnection. These muddy wagon roads and the stinking mining town of Deadwood near where Crook’s depleted army finally came to a halt and camped had nothing to do with the Black Hills of Paha Sapa’s world. The hairy
wasichus
here were tearing into the heart of the living hills to find their gold, just as Paha Sapa’s Vision had shown him.

General Crook was summoned off to Fort Laramie for a meeting with someone named General Sheridan.

Curly and the other scouts now could beat Paha Sapa as much as they wanted, but they were still afraid to kill him.

Paha Sapa, on the other hand, was free to run away… leave his stupid slow horse and infected blue coat, steal a real horse, and simply ride back out onto the Great Plains to find his people. He could have avoided Crazy Horse’s warriors and swung far west and then north to the white reaches of Grandmother’s Country to try to find Sitting Bull and other survivors he might know up there.

He did not do that. He could not do that. He was without any people, without any family, without any
tiyospaye
of his own.

He had led Crook’s army to Crazy Horse, and many Natural Free Human Being warriors had died that day.

He had lost the
Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa.

When the survivors of the Starvation March lined up again and rode and marched behind Crook to Fort Robinson south of the Black Hills
toward the Nebraska River, Paha Sapa—Billy Slow Horse—went with them.

He was beginning to learn
wasichu
English—not In Glass—and the first word he learned from the troopers was useful, both noun and verb—
fuck.
Eventually that winter they trusted him with a knife, and he mastered the phrase
“If you try it, I’ll cut your balls off
. ”

It was a long winter and spring and summer for Paha Sapa, and learning English meant that he now understood the lusty babblings of Long Hair’s ghost in his mind every night. And there was no longer any doubt that the ghost was Long Hair—Custer himself. Paha Sapa did his best to seal off the ghost and to mute the words.

Paha Sapa was no longer with Crook and the Army on September 5 the next year—1877 as the
wasichus
counted years—when Crazy Horse came in to surrender and was bayoneted to death. He, Paha Sapa, had already seen that death too many times; he did not want to see it in person and he knew he could not change it.

That August—in the Moon of the Ripening again, around his birthday and the first anniversary of his Vision—Paha Sapa had left the army and Fort Robinson quietly. No one chased him. Curly had died of appendicitis two months before and no one else paid any attention to the presence or absence of an eleven- or twelve-year-old Indian boy.

Paha Sapa returned to the Black Hills, but not to hunt or camp or worship. He came back to the stinking mining town of Deadwood to find work or to steal.

And there, already in jail after failing at his first attempt to steal and probably facing death by hanging, he met the holy men who dressed in black like ravens or crows with their white collars and who had their absurd tent school on the hill.

And if he had ever told that story to Rain or to Robert, he would have added that while the
wasichus
talked of the Starvation March and of the Battle for Slim Buttes, the Lakota forevermore referred to that battle—that battle where young Paha Sapa had led General Crook straight to Crazy Horse—as
the Fight Where We Lost the Black Hills.

P
AHA
S
APA IS READING ABOUT
A
DOLF
H
ITLER IN THE MORNING
paper as he comes into the city by train.

In Washington, FDR has been president for less than a month (and according to the majority of South Dakota voters, overwhelmingly Republican, already the outlines of that man in the White House’s socialist agenda are becoming clear), and in Germany, Hitler has been Chancellor since January. The problem there, so it appears in this and other recent newspaper articles, is not socialism but the new chancellor’s and his party’s anti-Semitism. Jews there are protesting, says the
New York Times
, but the Nazis just voted into full power are responding to these protests by having their goons picket at Jewish stores and rough up shoppers who patronize Jewish-owned businesses.

Here in the city Paha Sapa is entering, a series of protest rallies on March 27—just five days earlier—saw an overflow crowd of 55,000 at Madison Square Garden, where AFL president William Green, US senator Robert F. Wagner, and the popular former New York governor Al Smith all called for an end to the brutal treatment of German Jews. Parallel protest events were held in Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Boston, and more than a score of other cities.

In response to the weak protests of the German Jews and the loud protests in America, the Nazi propaganda minister—Goebbels—just announced a nationwide one-day boycott by “Aryan Germans” against
Jews in Germany. The
Times
has photographs of SA storm troopers with their signs preparing to block entrance to Jewish-owned businesses in Berlin. Paha Sapa has learned just enough German from the German miners and workers in the Black Hills to read the
Fraktur
script—“
Germans! Defend yourselves! Don’t buy from the Jews!”

Goebbels is quoted in the article as warning the Americans and others that if the protests against the Nazi behavior do not cease immediately, “the boycott will be resumed… until German Jewry has been annihilated.”

Paha Sapa sighs and sets the paper on the empty seat next to him. The train is crossing a bridge to Manhattan and all the skyscrapers and other high buildings are painted in the rich, cold light of the April first sunrise. It’s technically spring but the air outside is still chilly at night and there is frost on the window.

Paha Sapa wonders if Hitler and these Nazis could be the
wasichu
version of young Crazy Horse and the other
heyokas
—sacred clowns, Dreamers of the Thunder, spirit-possessed servants of the Thunder Beings whose failure to perform their duty meant death by lightning blast. Hasn’t he read somewhere that the Nazi SS officers wear twin lightning slashes on their collars or insignia somewhere…? Yes, Lila Kaufmann at the bakery in Rapid City told him that when she was a secretary in the city government in Munich before she and her family fled the country, the typewriters there had a dedicated key showing the double-lightning symbol of the SS. (Paha Sapa has no idea what those letters stand for, but can imagine the art deco straight-lined double-lightning-bolt insignia. Crazy Horse and his
heyoka akicita
“peacekeeper” tribal police pals would have loved wearing such an emblem.)

If Hitler, Goebbels, and the rest of these unfunny clowns really are
wasichu
Thunder Dreamers, that would explain a lot, thinks Paha Sapa, including their obsession with rubbing out all of their real and perceived enemies. The Thunder Beings are sources of great power and staggering amounts of motivating energy for individuals and their tribes, but they are treacherous spirits, dangerous to everyone, even to their chosen Dreamers. The
heyoka
clown-warrior servants of the Thunder Beings are living lightning conductors and can strike their friends as
well as enemies and themselves at any second with that terrible random ferocity of lightning.

Paha Sapa knows for a fact, after fifty-seven years of living with Crazy Horse’s memories, that
T’ašunka Witko’s
melancholy, sense of isolation, and frequent savagery were all manifestations of the Thunder Dreamers’ tribal license to terrible excess. The Natural Free Human Beings even have a word—
Kicamnayan
—for that sort of sudden, unpredictable flash of lightning, the frenzied swoop of swallows ahead of a thunderstorm, an otherwise placid horse’s sudden, senseless break into a panicked gallop, or the pitiless swoop and drop of the red-tailed hawk on its prey.
Kicamnayan
brought on by the surge of the
Wakinyans’
primal, unquenchable, and frequently violent spirit energies manifested in the frailer forms of mere living instruments as mere shadow of their cosmic rage.