Black Hills (71 page)

Paha Sapa understands nothing.

—
You’ll let me go?

Borglum shrugs. Paha Sapa realizes, not for the first time, how powerful the sculptor’s hands, forearms, shoulders, and personality are.

—
It’s a free country. You’re overdue for a real vacation. I’m gonna have the boys work on the Lincoln head here through September and start the serious honeycombing for Teddy Roosevelt in October. But when you come back, I’ll have a job for you.

—
You have to be kidding.

The quality of Borglum’s grin and gaze shows that he is not.

—
I don’t think you should be powderman anymore, Old Man, although I know it’d be all right if you were. I thought maybe you should work with Lincoln on supervising the drilling and bumping on the TR head, then work with the second team to start the serious work on the Hall of Records and the Entablature. We’ll talk about it when you get back from vacation.

They stand then, both men easy on the narrow ledge with nothing between them and two hundred feet of clear air other than their experience and sense of balance. The long August day is shading into a golden evening that—suddenly, sharply, inexplicably—feels more like the benediction of autumn than the constant test of endlessly blazing summer.

Borglum is slipping into his bosun’s chair and safety strap and Paha Sapa looks up to see a second bosun’s chair dropping down for him on its almost invisible steel wire.

P
AHA
S
APA HAS THE SIDECAR LOADED AND IS READY TO LEAVE
at dawn, but Lincoln Borglum and a work crew show up early to check out the extra stored dynamite and transport it elsewhere. The younger Borglum knows what’s going on and acts embarrassed, almost apologetic, but powdermen Clyde “Spot” Denton and Alfred Berg, as well as Red Anderson, Howdy Peterson, Palooka Payne, and the other men carrying the crates out to the waiting truck are just confused.

It’s Red who asks the question.

—
Where you goin’, Billy?

Paha Sapa tells the truth.

—
Home.

He’s dug up the coffee can from the backyard so he has all his remaining money in the sidecar. He’s also loaded everything else he’ll need for the rest of his life—some food for the trip, a change of clothes, the oversized leather jacket Robert left for him when he went in the Army, and the loaded Colt revolver.

Lincoln Borglum offers to shake hands and although it confuses Paha Sapa, he sees no reason not to do it. Then he kicks the motorcycle alive and drives down the hill to the highway that runs through Keystone.

First he stops at the blacksmith shop to fill the bike’s gas tank. Gene Turnball, bustling around with his one dead eye, says chattily—

—
Didja hear that Mune Mercer killed hisself last night?

Paha Sapa pauses in the act of checking the oil.

—
Mune? How?

—
He was blind drunk over to Deadwood when he left Number Nine and drove a car off that bad curve above the Homestake. Flinny said it rolled over an’ over for three, four hundred feet before it come to a stop on the talus there. Mune wasn’t even throwed out—and it was a topless roadster—but it took his head clean off.

—
Mune didn’t have a roadster. He didn’t have any car.

—
That’s true. He stole it from his drinkin’ buddy at Number Nine, that big Polack who works in the mine, you know who I mean, the mean one with the sister who’s real popular at Madame Delarge’s, and Flinny said the Polack’s really pissed off about it.

Well
, thinks Paha Sapa as he pays his thirty cents and drives out of town for the last time,
my little conspiracy claimed a life after all.

I
NSTEAD OF HEADING DOWN TO
R
APID
C
ITY
, Paha Sapa drives west and then north through the Black Hills a final time. This takes him past Mount Rushmore, and he pauses just once, west of the Monument at the point where the road curves and only George Washington’s head is visible almost straight above the highway. Paha Sapa has always thought that this was the best view of the Monument.

Except for some lumber trucks, the roads are almost empty all the way to Lead. The air is cooler today—it’s not just the speed of his passage, he’s sure, since the old motorcycle rarely gets above forty miles per hour—and somehow the sunlight has shifted from end-of-summer to early-autumn illumination in just a day. From Lead he takes the canyon down to Spearfish and the sound of the Harley-Davidson J’s little engine pangs echoes off the steep canyon walls on either side.

Beyond Spearfish (where Paha Sapa always imagines the fat trout in the hatchery having nightmares of Calvin Coolidge’s return), he heads north toward Belle Fourche but turns left on unpaved Highway 24 before he gets to that little town. The tiny white sign that tells him that he’s entered Wyoming is illegible because of the rifle bullet holes and shotgun pellet splatters.

He’s
come this way rather than heading straight to Montana because he wants to see
Mato Tepee
—what the
wasichu
have named “Devil’s Tower”—again. He brought Robert there on one of their summer camping trips when the boy was eight.

The 867-foot promontory with its broad, flat top and deeply ribbed sides—it looks like a fossilized tree stump in the scale of the
Wasichu
Stone Giants—is most sacred to the Kiowa, who call it
T’sou’a’e
or “Aloft on a Rock,” but all the tribes have borrowed the Kiowa’s story of how the giant bear chased seven sisters to the top of the tree stump after the
wagi
of the stump said “Climb on me” to them. Once the girls were on the ordinary stump, the stump began to grow, the gigantic bear pawing and clawing wildly at them, leaving the vertical grooves that one could still see on the huge rock formation.

Of course, the girls could not come down while the bear was there (and the bear would not leave), so
Wakan Tanka
allowed the seven sisters to ascend into the sky, where they became the seven-star formation known by
wasichus
as the Pleiades. (Although some Kiowa insist to this day that the sisters became the seven stars of the Big Dipper. Kiowa, Paha Sapa has always thought, make up in imagination what they lack in consistency.)

Paha Sapa and Robert visited
Mato Tepee
in 1906, the year President Teddy Roosevelt anointed the tower as America’s first national monument. Not only the Kiowa but the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Crow tribes formally objected to this, but the Park Service—which controlled all access to the formerly sacred site—hired an anthropologist who proclaimed (Paha Sapa remembers reading the announcement in the Rapid City
Journal
just two years earlier, in 1934), “It is extremely unlikely that any one tribe has been in the area of Devil’s Tower National Monument for a sufficiently long time to have occupied an important place in their lives or their religion and mythology.”

Paha Sapa smiled at that and could imagine how Limps-a-Lot would have laughed aloud at the idea. Not only did that stone tower go back generations in most of the tribes’ storytelling—Limps-a-Lot had told Paha Sapa and the other boys no fewer than ten differing stories about the seven sisters and the place—but that anthropologist had not appreciated, as Limps-a-Lot and even Robert had, how
quickly
the Natural
Free Human Beings and other bands could create new mythology about any new habitat they found themselves in and then insert that mythology—or new view of reality—as central to their thinking.

There is, shockingly, a gate on the dirt road leading to the tower now and a man in a park uniform and WWI campaign-style hat demanding fifty cents for entry. But Paha Sapa turns around and drives away. He saw enough of the tower as he approached and he’ll be damned if he’ll pay the same price to see a rock outcropping that looks like a giant tree stump as he once paid to get into the World’s Fair.

He has to backtrack a bit to take county roads that are no more than two ruts in the prairie north to intersect Highway 212 in Montana. Here on the ruts there are no signs at all to notify him when he has left Wyoming and entered Montana somewhere beyond a town (consisting of one store with a gas pump) called Rockypoint.

Paha Sapa stops at a dirt crossroads to buy a Coca-Cola where one building in the midst of endless prairie and distant hills shows how empty this part of Wyoming-Montana truly is. All the money from the coffee can bank, the bills now wedged in his back pocket, makes him feel rich.

The boy behind the counter is a dull-seeming
wasichu
and when he takes Paha Sapa’s nickel, he leans across the splintered wood counter and whispers conspiratorially—

—
Hey, Chief, you wanna see something really intrestin’?

Paha Sapa drinks the Coca-Cola in one head-back glug. The day’s driving and all the dust that is Wyoming have made him thirsty. The boy had whispered, so he whispers back—

—
Don’t tell me… a two-headed calf.

—
Naw, better’n that. This is history-like intrestin’. Nobody but us who live here know about it.

History. Paha Sapa is a sucker for history. Also, he realizes, he is a victim of it. (But so is everyone else.)

—
How much? And how long will it take to see it?

—
’Nuther nickel. And it’s just a couple minutes walk, ten tops.

Feeling rich in his last days, Paha Sapa slides two nickels across the counter, one for history and the second for another cold Coca-Cola.

It’s actually about a fifteen-minute walk behind the store. The boy seems to have a coordination problem and walks like a poorly handled marionette, arms and
legs all akimbo, booted feet lurching out at random, but he manages to lead Paha Sapa across a field where two bulls watch them with lethal intent in their eyes, then over a barbed-wire fence and up a small hill with a few pine trees at the top, then down a slope toward a broad low-grass valley.

—
There she is. Somethin’, huh?

For a moment Paha Sapa thinks it’s the retarded boy’s idea of a joke, but then he sees the old tracks and gouges in the lowest part of the valley, the old wagon wheel ruts stretching from the low ridge on the eastern horizon to an even lower ridge far to the west.

The boy puts his thumbs behind his suspenders and becomes an avatar of civic pride.

—
Them’s General George Armstrong Custer’s wagon ruts, Chief. From when he brought the Seventh Cavalry through here a long, long time ago with wagons, cattle, cannons, extra horses, even had his wife along, I hear tell…. Hell, it musta been a real circus. Wouldn’t ya’ve liked to have seen it?

—
It was worth the nickel, son. That Custer sure did get around.

Paha Sapa drinks the last of his second Coca-Cola and hurls the bottle out across the Spanish bayonet and other spindly shrubs toward the distant wagon ruts.

The kid screams—
Hey!
—and goes running after the bottle, bringing it back up the hill like a faithful if slightly glowering, uncoordinated, and dumber-than-usual Labrador retriever.

—
That’s a penny deposit, Chief.