by Dan Simmons
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.
INSTEAD OF HEADING DOWN TO RAPID CITY, 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 suspende
rs 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.
PAHA SAPA CAMPS that night just off the road in a high, wooded plateau in the forty-mile empty stretch of Montana between Epsie and Ashland. He’s certain that this long north-south pine-covered plateau will be a national forest, if it’s not already, and that it will be named after Custer.
He’s brought no tent, but folded on the floor of the motorcycle’s sidecar is a ground tarp and another, waterproof tarp to rig as a lean-to if it rains. This night is warm and cloudless. The moon is just past full and, although it rises late, it ruins his star counting. He realizes that this is the same full moon by which he’s recently danced weightless across the face of Mount Rushmore, placing his dynamite charges. That event seems more lost in history to him than the Custer wagon ruts he paid good cash to see. Somewhere north in the forest of pines or the adjoining high prairie, coyotes begin howling. Then a single, deeper, more terrifying howl—it sounds like a wolf to Paha Sapa, although Montana has fewer and fewer wolves these days—and all the coyotes fall silent.
Paha Sapa remembers Doane Robinson discussing the ancient Greek maxim of the agon—of how life separates everything into categories of equal to, lesser than, or greater than. The coyotes honor the agon with their craven silence. Paha Sapa knows how they feel.
Seeking more pleasant if still painful thoughts, he remembers how the full moon looked over the huge black silhouette of Mato Tepee when he and Robert camped there in the summer of 1906, and how late he and his eight-year-old son talked into those nights. Perhaps that was the summer when Paha Sapa fully realized how gifted his son truly was.
When he sleeps this night, Paha Sapa has a single dream. In the dream, he is on the ledge at Mount Rushmore again, with Abraham Lincoln’s head exploding and disintegrating around him, the ledge under him crumbling, but this time he can read the note in the otherwise empty dynamite crate.
It is Robert’s handwriting, of course, and the message is short—
Father—
I would have caught the Spanish Flu even if I’d gone to Dartmouth or stayed home with you. As it was, I was with brave friends of mine at the end and I fulfilled my destiny of meeting the loveliest of all girls. The flu would have found me anywhere. The girl might not have. It’s important that you understand that. Mother agrees with me.
Robert
Paha Sapa is weeping when he awakens from the dream. Later, he is not sure whether it was seeing Robert’s signature again that made him weep in his sleep or the painfully, malignantly hopeful “Mother agrees with me.”
HIS MORNING DRIVE west through low, rolling hills dotted with scrub pine and intervals of low-grass prairie too dry to support cattle soon takes him into the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. All reservation Indians, in his experience, are sullen and suspicious of outsiders—he certainly was during his years at Pine Ridge—and the ancient Cheyenne clerk when he stops at the only store in Busby to buy bologna confirms that experience, even though the Cheyenne and Sioux have gotten along better than most. Just beyond Busby, he knows, he’ll be entering the large Crow Agency for the rest of his trip (the rest of his life, he thinks and bats the pathetic, sorry-for-himself thought aside), and the Crows and Lakota have not gotten along, historically speaking. He knows that reservation sullenness will turn to open animosity in Crow country and hopes that he won’t have to stop anywhere there.
A little clerkly sullenness doesn’t matter to Paha Sapa. He’s only about thirty miles from his destination. He can carry out his plan long before the sun goes down. For some reason, it’s important to him that it still be daylight.
But a few miles beyond Busby, the Harley’s engine seizes and stops. Paha Sapa parks it in the low grass off the road, sets out the ground tarp, and slowly strips the engine down to its component parts; he is in no hurry and working on the motorcycle always reminds him of the hours and nights and Sundays he spent rebuilding this machine with Robert.
Hours pass as Paha Sapa sits in the sunlight next to the gray-painted motorcycle, carefully setting out the pieces on the tarp in their proper order and relation to one another: intake valves, rocker arms, the delicate springs, the spark plug (fairly new), the heads of the intake ports, the cylinder heads themselves, then the camshaft… placing each in its proper spot, ready for rebuilding even if he were blindfolded as Robert must have learned to field-strip his Model 1917 American Enfield bolt-action rifle, learning each piece by feel as well as by sight, taking care not to allow dust to gather on the oiled and greased pieces or to get into the interior.
The problem is with the right cylinder of the little 61-cubic-inch V-twin engine. The rod bearing between the piston connecting rod and the crankshaft has burned out and split in two.
Paha Sapa sighs. There was a rudimentary garage, another former blacksmith shop, attached to the cluttered and smelly one-room general store back in tiny Busby, but even if the garage were still a blacksmith shop, he couldn’t engineer his own bearing. He’ll need a replacement.
His highway map shows no town at all ahead of him, westward into hostile Crow country as he still thinks of it, so he replaces the parts he can, sets the broken bearing, piston, and connecting rod in a bag in the sidecar, and pushes the motorcycle the four miles back to Busby in the grasshopper-leaping heat. Two old cars pass him, both driven by Indian men, but neither stops to offer help or a ride. They can see that he’s an outsider.
Back in Busby—Paha Sapa sees a few houses off to the north of the highway, no trees, and guesses the population of Busby to be somewhere around a hundred souls—the mechanic in the general store–garage is the same old man who grudgingly sold him the bologna earlier. The Cheyenne has to be in his eighties and admits, when asked, that his name is John Strange Owl but quickly informs Paha Sapa that he will answer only to “Mr. Strange Owl.” Mr. Strange Owl studies the parts that Paha Sapa has set out on the only clean expanse of the filthy garage bench and solemnly reports to Paha Sapa that the problem with the machine is a burned-out and broken rod bearing. Paha Sapa thanks him for the diagnosis and wonders when he might get a replacement. Mr. Strange Owl has Paha Sapa wait while the old Cheyenne confers with two other old men and a teenager who’ve been hollered in to help deal with the crisis.
All right, Mr. Strange Owl announces at last, for something as exotic as this Harley-Davidson J V-Twin machine, they’ll have to send not just to Garryowen or the warehouse at Crow Agency or even to Hardin, but all the way to Billings to get a bearing. And since Tommy don’t go to Billings except on Friday mornings, and this being Tuesday and all, they won’t get the bearing back ’til Friday evening, probably around suppertime, and Mr. Strange Owl closes up exactly at five, every day, no exception, and never opens the store or garage on Saturdays or Sundays, no matter how much folks around Busby fuss and want him to, so it’ll be Monday, September seventh (today is the first of September), before Mr. Strange Owl and young Russell and maybe John Red Hawk here, who owned a motorsickle once, can get around to working on it.
Paha Sapa nods his understanding.
—Is there a bus that comes through here? I’m just going thirty miles or so to the Little Big Horn battlefield.
—What the hell do you want to go to a battlefield for? Nothing there. Not even a restaurant.
Paha Sapa smiles as if sharing in the understanding of how totally foolish that goal would be.
—Is there a bus, Mr. Strange Owl?
There is. It comes through every Saturday on its way from Belle Fourche to Billings. It doesn’t stop at the old battlefield, though. Why would it? But it takes on mail at Crow Agency headquarters, just down the road from the battlefield.
—Do you think anyone here would like to earn a dollar by driving me to the Little Big Horn sooner than Saturday?
There is much earnest conversation about this, but in the end the three old men decide that Tommy Counts the Crows is really the only one who can or would want to drive anyone to the battlefield, and that would have to be during his regular run to Hardin and Billings on Friday, three days from now, and Tommy will probably have to charge three dollars for that, not one dollar, and does Mr. Slow Horse want to sell the broken motorcycle for… oh, say… ten dollars? Odds are good, the Northern Cheyenne old men and boy agree, that the Harley-Davidson can’t be fixed at all. A burned-out bearing’s a terrible thing and who knows what trouble it’s already caused in the rest of that old engine? Mr. Strange Owl might see his way clear to paying the ten dollars for the broken motorcycle and have Tommy Counts the Crows drive the Lakota stranger to Crow Agency for only one dollar, not three.
Paha Sapa suggests that he pay the three dollars to use some of Mr. Strange Owl’s tools and to rent space inside the closed garage on Friday evening after Tommy Counts the Crows gets back with his bearing. Mr. Strange Owl thinks that three dollars for the use of his tools is fair, but the rental of the garage space and use of its electric lights would require another two dollars.
Impressed by the old fart’s negotiating ability, Paha Sapa asks—