Black Hills (75 page)

“A hearty meal for the condemned man?”

Paha Sapa jumped at the sudden sound of the voice in his ear and looked around. No one was near. Paha Sapa’s lips didn’t visibly move as he answered.

—
Something like that. I’m hungry.

“Have you composed your Death Song yet?”

A wave of guilt flowed over Paha Sapa. Lakota warriors were not fanatical about singing their death songs when they had little time to do so before the end—sometimes the death songs were composed by relatives and friends and chanted after the man’s death—but Paha Sapa had no relatives or Lakota friends left alive and he felt that he’d be betraying Limps-a-Lot, who believed in such things, if he didn’t at least try. Often he wondered if Limps-a-Lot had found time to chant his own Death Song before the Hotchkiss guns had opened up.

No personal death songs had occurred to Paha Sapa and none did now in the glow of the largest breakfast he’d eaten in years and five cups of coffee. The only song that came to mind had been one that Limps-a-Lot himself had shared when Paha Sapa was nine or ten years old:

It sounded good. If he thought of nothing else between here and the battlefield only some fifteen miles south, he might try chanting that in his last seconds.

But now he whispered to the ghost—

—
Not yet. I’ll think of something.

The ghost’s reply was low and—Paha Sapa realized to his surprise—serious.

“Next to ‘Garry Owen,’ I was always partial to ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me.’ I had the regimental band play it the day we rode out from Fort Abraham Lincoln that last time. It always made some of the troopers and all of the watching, waving wives blubber.”

—
Let me get this straight, Long Hair. You want me to chant “The Girl I Left Behind Me” as my Death Song?

“Why not? It sort of applies to both of us, although Rain left you behind rather than the other way around. I left Libbie behind—we both knew it could happen, although I don’t think either one of us really believed it—but she never abandoned me. All those years alone as a widow… ”

Paha Sapa was in a good mood from the giant breakfast—certainly the best breakfast he’d eaten since Rain had died—and he didn’t want it spoiled by morose thoughts, his or his ghost’s.

—
Well, I don’t have a regimental band with me today, so I don’t think I’ll try “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

Then, without thinking about it, he whispered—

—
Are you frightened, Long Hair?

Paha Sapa half-expected the irritating boyish laughter, but it did not come.

“Of the bullet in the brain…
your
brain… no. Not at all. But since you asked, what I’m frightened of is that this magic forty-five-caliber bullet might put you out of
your
misery forever but won’t kill
me
—since I am, after all, only a ghost. Imagine still being conscious and thinking and aware, through what’s left of
your
senses, after they bury your dead and rotting body in the ground… down there in the darkness and loam, with the worms, for how long until the last of your brain is consumed and…”

—
All right, all right. Do you want me to leave a note asking that my remains be cremated?

Paha Sapa meant it as a joke, although he was feeling a little ill after the helpful cascade of images, but Long Hair’s ghost evidently took him seriously.

“I’d appreciate it, my friend.”

Paha Sapa shook his head, noticed that other men in other booths
had
noticed him whispering to himself, left a very large tip, paid his check, and went back to the restroom—the first indoor plumbing he’d had at his disposal in many, many weeks (his shack in Keystone had an outhouse) and a great luxury.

“A hearty bowel movement for the condemned man.”

—
Oh
, do
shut the hell up. I beseech you.

Paha Sapa thought that he had never used the word
beseech
aloud before, and he felt ridiculous doing so then. But the ghost of General (Colonel at the time of his death) George Armstrong Custer did shut up long enough for Paha Sapa to enjoy the miracle of indoor plumbing.

The restroom was very clean.

I
T IS LATE MORNING
when he turns off Highway 87—a modern two-lane highway busy with trucks and dark cars—back onto the gravel road he took from Busby. The entrance to the battlefield park runs off to the right of this smaller road. There is a sort of gate at the entrance to the park or monument or whatever it’s become, but no one is there, and Paha Sapa is relieved at that. He spent enough of his life’s savings on the huge breakfast.

Paha Sapa has almost no sense of recogntion as he rides his son’s motorcycle down the narrow strip of road along the ridge where Custer died. Below is the Greasy Grass—what
wasichus
still call the Little Big Horn—and he can see the giant cottonwoods where the hundreds of lodges of the Sioux and Cheyenne had stretched out of sight around the bend in the valley to the south.

The ghost’s self-imposed silence has not lasted long.

“I do have one regret.”

—
Other than getting yourself and a third of your regiment killed, you mean?

Paha Sapa feels sorry he’s thought that even as he thinks it. It’s too late in the game, as the Mount Rushmore workers and baseball players might say, for petty jibes.

The ghost doesn’t seem to have heard.

“I just wish I’d had a chance to drive—ride—whatever you do—this motorcycle you and your boy rebuilt. I rode a bicycle once, but it’s not the same.”

Paha Sapa has to chuckle.

—
I can see the whole Seventh Cavalry on Harley-Davidsons.

“We’d need leather jackets. And some sort of new insignia.”

—
Skulls, perhaps.

They arrive at what a small sign announces as last stand hill. Paha Sapa parks the motorcycle and starts to take the valise with him but then thinks better of it. He’s put the Colt into a canvas bag with a shoulder strap, but he leaves that in the valise. This isn’t the place. There are three cars parked here: two old Fords and a fancier Chevrolet. He sees a few people in summer linens moving among the white crosses and headstones on the grassy hillside.

Paha Sapa stops at a stone monument put up not long after the battle here. The names of the Seventh Cavalry dead are listed on a bronze plaque burnished gold by age and touch.

“Are we tourists today, Mr. Paha Sapa?”

—
I thought you might want to see where you fell.

“I don’t, especially. Besides, my bones aren’t buried there. They moved me to West Point. Libbie’s buried there next to me.”

Paha Sapa looks down across the hillside, opening his vision to the ghost within him. The headstones, not all with names, were set where the men’s mutilated bodies were found and buried where they fell.

Why did he ride up the couloir onto the bluffs with the warriors that day? He can’t really remember. To count coup? Why? As a young
wikasa wakan
in training, he hadn’t even cared about such things… or so he’d thought.

Paha Sapa goes back to the motorcycle and drives south along the ridgetop, the gravel road barely wider than a walking path. There are no other cars here beyond Last Stand Hill. In ten minutes, the slowly moving motorcycle covers the three or four miles that separated Custer and his men from the rest of the Seventh Cavalry—and rescue. But Reno and Benteen didn’t attempt a rescue, Paha Sapa knows; they merely listened to the shooting go on and on to the north and then, horribly, fall silent. They had their own problems to deal with.

A little sign by a walking path says weir’s ATTEM TO RESC E C TER. Someone has shot the missing letters out with a high-power rifle. Paha Sapa drives on to a gravel parking area where an intact sign reads reno and benteen monument and battlefield.

The ghost’s whisper is almost inaudible even coming from inside Paha Sapa’s head.

“Libbie fought until she died to keep Reno from having a monument or mention anywhere on the battlefield. As soon as she died, they gave him one.”

—
Do you care?

“No.”

This time, Paha Sapa leaves the gladstone in the sidecar but takes the canvas bag, hitching the strap easily over his shoulder. In the bag is some bread, bologna, and the loaded Colt.

He walks across the broad crown of the hill toward the cliffs and valley.

“You’re hurting terribly, aren’t you, Black Hills?”

Paha Sapa considers not answering but decides he will. What harm can it do now?

—
Yes. The cancer has its grip on me today.

“Would you… do this thing… just because of the cancer? I mean, if you hadn’t failed at Mount Rushmore?”

Paha Sapa does not answer because he cannot. But he hopes he would not be here with the Colt just because of the pain and disease. It bothers him a little that he’ll never know.

Almost out of sight of the parking lot, he finds a smooth place to sit. The grasses here come up almost to his shoulder when he’s sitting in them. The clouds are breaking up some now, allowing patches of sunlight to move across the rolling hills and curving valley below, and everywhere the grasses are moving in languid thrall to the wind.

“Benteen and Reno had a better hill,” says the ghost, his tone calmly, coolly professional rather than wistful or envious. “I could have held out here all day and night with my men… if I’d had
this
hilltop.”

—
Does it matter?

There comes the faintest echo of sad laughter. It’s as if the ghost is already leaving him. But not quite yet.

“Paha Sapa, did you see those ravens? They followed us down the road. All the way in.”

Paha Sapa saw them and sees them now, perching on a rail twenty yards away on a splintered old fence that runs from the parking lot, perhaps delineating the end of the park boundary. The two ravens are watching him. Watching
them
.

He doesn’t like this. Who would? Ravens are symbols of death for the Lakota, but then most things are in one story or another. Some say that it’s the ravens that carry the
wanagi
of dead people up to the Milky Way to begin the spirit-journey there. Others, including Limps-a-Lot, did not believe this.

He tries to remember the Lakota word for raven. Was it
kagi taka
or
kan˙gi?
He can’t recall. He’s losing his own language.

It doesn’t matter now.

Paha Sapa sits cross-legged in the grass and takes out the heavy revolver. It smells of gun oil and warm metal. He’s left one chamber empty under the hammer so he doesn’t accidentally blow his foot off—advice from a Seventh Cavalry Crow scout who’s been dead for more than fifty-five years—but a loaded chamber revolves into place as he thumbs the hammer back.

He has decided that he’s not going to draw this out. No Death Song nonsense. No ceremony. He’s decided on the right temple and sets the muzzle there now.

“Wait. You promised me… about the cremation.”

Paha Sapa lowers the pistol only slightly.

—
I wrote it out. On a napkin. In the bathroom at the diner.

“I don’t believe you.”

—
Where were you? Dozing?

“I don’t pay attention to everything you do, you know. Especially at times like that. Where is it? Is it somewhere people will find it?”

—
It’s in my shirt pocket. Will you
please
shut up a minute? Just one minute.

“Show me the note.”

Paha Sapa sighs—truly irritated—and carefully lowers the hammer. He removes the napkin from his shirt pocket and holds it in front of his own eyes, thinking that Custer is being a shit to the last second of
his unfairly extended existence. The note in pencil begins “My Wishes” and is only one sentence long.

—
Satisfied?

“You misspelled
remains
—it’s not
manes
. There’s an
I
.”

—
Do you want me to go back to town to the diner and get the pencil I borrowed from the waitress?

“No.”

—
Good-bye, Long Hair.

“Good-bye, Paha Sapa.”

Paha Sapa lifts the revolver, cocks the hammer back, and sets his finger on the trigger. The sun is warm on his face. He takes a deep, sad breath.

—
Mr. Slow Horse!

It’s not the ghost; it’s a woman’s voice. Paha Sapa is so startled that he almost pulls the trigger by accident. Lowering the cocked hammer and then the pistol and looking over his shoulder, he sees two women moving in his direction through the tall grass.

His body was turned away from them such that it’s probable that they did not see the pistol. He hurriedly slips the Colt into the canvas bag and awkwardly gets to his feet. Everything in him cries out in the pain of rising.