Black Hills

by Simmons, Dan

  The wind was rising, although it wasn’t carrying that much dirt. Lincoln used a little water from one of their spare bags of water to at least go through the motions of cleaning the plates.

  —With a little luck, we’ll be in a real bed, or at least a barn, tomorrow night, boys. Get some sleep. It’s going to be a long few days of hard driving and there’s nothing waiting for us at the end of this trek except two useless submarine engines that nobody wants, not even my father.

  LINCOLN HAD SPOKEN THE TRUTH in more ways than he knew. The submarine engines may have been the most abandoned- and unwanted-looking wasichu machines or devices that Paha Sapa had ever seen. The twin banks of diesel engines were the length of the Dodge truck’s extended flatbed, taller than the cab, and amounted to a terrifying mass of early-1920s pistons, steel, oil tubes, conduits, shaft columns, rust, stains, and open metal maws. It was hard for Paha Sapa to believe that so many awkward tons of steel and iron had ever gone to sea.

  They’d reached Pueblo, Colorado, on Saturday afternoon—April 13—and quickly found the steel plant and its associated companies, huddled around like so many piglets nursing at the sooty teats of the great black sow of the steel mill itself. The place looked bankrupt and abandoned—ten acres of parking lot empty, tall smoke stacks cold, gates chained—but Jocko the watchman explained that the plant merely shut down on alternate weeks during these hard times and that some or all of the men would be back on the job come the following Monday. Jocko knew right where the submarine engines had been parked and led the four men to a rail siding behind another siding at the back end of an abandoned building just behind the slag heaps. The toothless old man had the style to shout Voilà! when Lincoln, Red, Hoot, and “Billy Slovak” dragged off the dust-covered tarp draped over the house-sized mass of metal.

  Lincoln asked the watchman if they could get help loading the engines onto their Dodge flatbed. Monday, was the old man’s reply, since the only one who could handle the crane-on-rails parked just over there by the sludge pond was Verner, and Verner, of course, was probably out hunting this fine spring Saturday and wouldn’t even be thinking about work until Monday morning.

  In the end, two relatively crisp twenty-dollar bills exchanged hands (Paha Sapa had not seen many twenty-dollar bills in recent years)—one from Lincoln to the old fart Jocko, another for Verner, who was probably drinking in a bar somewhere right down the street, to come in and transfer the engines from the flatbed train car to the Dodge’s long and shaky platform.

  Jocko promised that he’d have Verner there by five p.m., and Lincoln and his three tired and dusty workers drove deeper into the little south Colorado steel town to find a place to get a beer and another place in which to spend the night.

  Paha Sapa had to admit that the thought of a real bed really appealed to him. (Some Lakota, were his thoughts—in English rather than Lakota, he realized, as if his wasichun brain was adding insult to injury.)

  “You’re getting old and soft, Black Hills,” whispered Long Hair’s ghost. “You’ll be all white before you die and as round and soft as an albino sow with no legs.”

  —Shut up, Paha Sapa snapped silently. In the few years since he and the ghost had actually communicated—rather than the ghost babbling in the dark and Paha Sapa merely having to listen—Paha Sapa hadn’t gained much from the exchanges. He couldn’t imagine ghosts of murdered men aging, but this ghost was getting old and surly and sarcastic.

  A town where half the population was made up of miners and their families (the mines were a few miles to the west, in the foothills) and the other half steelworkers and their families—a glut of Germans, Czechs, Swedes, Bohemians, and other odd lots—was sure to have good bars, and Lincoln and his boys found one within five minutes.

  The first beers were ice-cold—the mugs actually refrigerated until ice rimned them—and Red Anderson couldn’t stop grinning.

  —I could disappear into a dark little bar like this and not reemerge ’til the damned hard times are over.

  Lincoln sighed and wiped his upper lip.

  —Too many otherwise good men have, Red. We’ll spend the night at that boardinghouse across the street, but there’s no way I’m waiting ’til Monday.

  Red and Hoot looked at each other behind Lincoln’s back, and their thoughts were easy for Paha Sapa to read even without touching them for a vision; the two would be happy to stay here for a week until the mythical Verner came back from hunting.

  But one of the magical twenty-dollar bills brought Verner back just before sunset in time for the short, stubbled man to bring his railroad crane over from the main yard and get the great bulk of the submarine engines, pallets, tarps, and all, transferred to the Dodge’s flatbed. That flatbed sank eight inches on its nonexistent suspension, but no tires blew or wheels flew off or axles broke apart. Not right then, anyway.

  When the transfer was complete and the four men had lashed the engines down with more straps and ropes than the Lilliputians had used on Gulliver (one of the first books he’d borrowed from Doane Robinson’s library), Paha Sapa drove the Dodge a hundred yards or so to a parking place outside the steel plant’s chained gates—the Dodge moved, eventually, after a sluggish fashion, although he didn’t think that it would climb any hill with a grade of more than 1 percent, and the steering had changed from difficult to damned near impossible—and the four left the mass there and went back to a café for dinner and then to the boardinghouse.

  The last thing Jocko shouted after them was—

  —You four look like good Christians to me. Well, at least three of you do. If you’re gonna stay over for Palm Sunday services in the mornin’, I can show you the way to the Methodist and Baptist churches.

  None of the four looked back.

  Lincoln showed the three men to their room—the Borglum largesse for this vacation didn’t extend to private rooms for anyone but Lincoln, but rather to three cots crowded into a nonheated second-floor room where the blankets looked like they would get up and crawl away on their own if not nailed down.

  Paha Sapa had brought in his own blankets and extra sleeping layers. Red and Hoot looked dubiously at the sprung cots and then out the window, where the few lights of Pueblo’s modest but very serious about debauchery red-light district beckoned. (The bars still had their speakeasy false fronts and peepholes, even two years after Prohibition had been lifted.)

  Lincoln Borglum sounded tired and dejected, or perhaps he was just as depressed by the dusty steel town as was Paha Sapa.

  —A beer or two, you two, but nothing serious tonight. We’re leaving at dawn, and I’m going to have the three of you take turns tomorrow wrestling that Dodge east to Kansas and then north. It’ll be a long day.

  Everyone nodded, but Hoot and Red tiptoed out in their stocking feet, carrying their boots, no more than twenty minutes later. Paha Sapa heard the stairway creak softly and then he pulled his thick and relatively vermin-free blankets up over his head and fell asleep. The last time he glanced at his wristwatch, it read 8:22.

  Hoot and Red came stumbling in smelling of much more than whiskey and beer a little after five a.m. One of them was busy retching into a bucket that he carried with him. At 5:20 a.m., Lincoln Borglum not only rapped hard on the door, but came in and overturned the two slugabeds’ cots. Paha Sapa was up, dressed, packed, and washing his face in the basin with what little water was left in a chipped pitcher that the management had begrudged them. The moans from the tangle of blankets on the floor were pitiful.

  Lincoln and Paha Sapa ate alone and in silence at the small café across the street.

  The pickup truck and absurdly weighted Dodge rolled east out of town a little before seven. The streets were empty. The air was very warm for mid-April. The sky was clear.

  Something felt wrong to Paha Sapa all that long morning of driving northeast and into the afternoon. Of course, the slowly crawling Dodge with its mass of dead weight—if the load shifted forward, Paha Sapa would not even have time to jump free before the fli
msy old cab was crushed—took up most of his attention as he literally wrestled it around the simplest turns and had to flog it up the shallowest of grades. Lincoln had sent Hoot back to share in the driving, and all that morning into the afternoon, Hoot snored and sprawled on the passenger side of the ripped old seat, waking occasionally only to open the door, jump off the running board, vomit into the weeds, and then run to catch up to the slowly moving Dodge.

  What little traffic there was, even the oldest Model T’s, swung around the slowly moving Dodge and its Ford pickup escort.

  But through all the snoring beside him and the roaring of the overtaxed engine and his need to concentrate on the driving, Paha Sapa sensed something wrong… something wrong with the world.

  The birds were flying south in an unnatural way. The few animals he saw—some jackrabbits, scurrying voles, one deer, even livestock in the dust-filled fields—were also rushing south. They were trying to escape. Paha Sapa could feel it.

  But escape what? The skies remained clear. The air remained warm, too warm. The cab of the Dodge truck smelled to high heaven of the whiskey in Hoot’s sweat, and for once Paha Sapa was glad that the windshield would not click shut.

  This was country that gave the slightest hint of what would soon be called the Dust Bowl stretching a thousand miles to the south, but that hint was dramatic. Farms were abandoned. Even those farmhouses still occupied had had the last of their paint sandblasted off the walls. Sand drifted to the eaves of homes and outbuildings. Soil was so drifted against fences that Paha Sapa could see only a foot or less of the top of the fence posts poking up through the sand and soil. Farther south, he knew, farmers and ranchers said that they could walk miles on the dirt-buried carcasses of their livestock piled up against the buried fences, but even up here in the southeastern corner of Colorado, the dirt drifts were everywhere. Several times, Paha Sapa had to slow the Dodge to a stop while Lincoln, driving the Ford pickup, crashed repeatedly through heaps of reddish-brown soil that had covered the narrow highway like snowdrifts.

  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.