Black Hills

Chapter 19 New York City

PAHA SAPA IS READING ABOUT ADOLF HITLER 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.

Pity the poor Jews in Germany, thinks Paha Sapa, unless their long-quiet god with a capital G proves an equal to the Wakinyan Thunder Beings. Despite his reading and discussions with Doane Robinson—and even with the poor Jesuits in Deadwood—on the subject of Judaism, Paha Sapa has no real idea if the Jews believe in their god possessing them with the full berserker killing spirit. But he suspects that Hitler and his group know the joys, terror, and reflected power of that possession by fierce gods all too well.

Paha Sapa sighs. He has trouble sleeping on trains and is very tired after three days and nights sitting up on a series of hard wicker seats. He’s glad when the conductor comes through the cars announcing that the next stop will be Grand Central Terminal and the end of the line.

PAHA SAPA HAULS HIS BAG the few blocks to the cheap hotel on 42nd Street that Whiskey Art Johnson told him about. The place has his reservation, but the room won’t be ready until afternoon, so Paha Sapa takes an apple out of his bag, stores the bag with the clerk, and begins walking south along Park Avenue.

“Her apartment cooperative is only three blocks south of here, at Seventy-one Park Avenue. Will you stop?”

No. We agreed. The appointment is not until four p.m.

“But you’ll be going right by her place….”

I’ll come back at four. I have things and people of my own to see before then.

“But she might be home now! It’s almost certain she is. She never goes out anymore, according to Mrs. Elmer. We could just stop, ask the doorman…”

No.

“What if we went the other way, then, up to One Twenty-two East Sixty-sixth Street, to the Cosmopolitan Club, where she used to…”

Silence!

The last is not a request but an absolute command. Paha Sapa has discovered that he can send the ghost back to his sightless, soundless hole any time he chooses.

If his hotel room had been available, Paha Sapa might have considered napping for an hour or two after his days sitting up on the train, rarely even dozing through the nights across the prairie and grain fields of the Midwest, then the dark wooded hills and tunnels of Pennsylvania and beyond, but he realizes a good, bracing walk is better. And it is a good walk.

He does glance at the apartment building at 71 Park Avenue, only three blocks south of his hotel, but does not linger. As such places in a city go, it is an attractive enough building. He feels his own anxiety over the imminent interview—it took almost two years to arrange—and can’t even imagine the anxiety of his resident spirit. In truth, he doesn’t want to know.

Paha Sapa smiles as he walks briskly down Park Avenue. He thought he was ready for New York City; he was wrong. The buildings, the myriad and maze of streets, the blocking of the early-morning sun, the countless automobiles and ice and delivery wagons, the streetcars and taxis, the constant flow of pedestrians. It’s been almost forty years since he was in a city of any real size—Chicago during the 1893 Exposition—and the downtown of that Black City was nothing compared to any part of this metropolis. The effect on the aging and weary Natural Free Human Being—which translates as “rube” or “bumpkin” here—from the Dust Bowl western state is immediate and overwhelming.

At first the scale and pace of everything here are oddly exhilarating, making Paha Sapa almost dizzy on top of his fatigue, but within ten minutes all that scale and pace has become like a heavy pressure on every part of his body. (He thinks of Big Bill Slovak’s caisson stories.) Everywhere else he’s ever been, he’s felt like a person—whether anyone knows his true name or not—but here he’s just one of millions, and a pathetic one at that: a very thin and weary-looking Indian with long braids still black but dark circles under his eyes and wrinkles on his face. He catches sight of his quickly marching reflection in shop and restaurant windows—another pressure that he’s not used to, this seeing himself constantly—and notes how ill-fitting and out of style his black suit and clumsily knotted dark tie and soft cap are. His rarely worn and highly polished dress shoes squeak with every step and are killing his feet. Smiling ruefully, Paha Sapa realizes that he’s dressed for this trip in his going-to-funeral clothes, and that fact becomes more obvious in every reflective surface he passes. He imagines that he smells of sweat, cigar smoke from the train, and mothballs. Paha Sapa does not own a topcoat to go with this baggy old suit, and he has been cold since the train left Rapid City…. Spring is coming late this year on the plains and in the heartland.

Even though the sunny morning here in New York City is warming toward the promised low sixties he read about in the newspaper, he wishes he’d worn the thick leather jacket that Robert had left with him in 1917 and that he’s worn everywhere except at work for the sixteen autumns, winters, and springs since. That and his comfortable work boots.

He strides down the broad Park Avenue from 42nd Street to Union Square and then follows Fourth Avenue southeast into the Bowery. He’s soon south of all the numbered streets and passing through Little Italy, past Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, past Hester Street, past Delancey and toward Canal Street, striding through all the teeming and seething immigrant neighborhoods that fed its second generation of laborers and builders to the rest of America. He muses that if he had been born American, rather than Indian, his parents might have lived in these tenements, in these neighborhoods, after coming in through Castle Garden from heaven knows where across the sea. (Doane Robinson once told Paha Sapa that before 1855 there was no processing point in America for immigrants. People moving here simply made a declaration—when they bothered to—to customs officials on the steamships or sailing ships and went on about their business in their new country. Robinson described how at Castle Garden, on an island off the southwest tip of Manhattan—also called Castle Clinton—the state of New York, not the federal government, had processed would-be immigrants until it closed in 1890. The government had taken over then and dealt with the immigration flow at a temporary center on a barge until Ellis Island opened for business in 1900. Since 1924, Doane told him, most would-be immigrants were once again being processed aboard the ships, with Ellis Island being the destination only for those who required hearings or some sort of physical quarantine.)

For some reason, Paha Sapa wishes he had time enough in New York City to visit all of these sites, even though immigration has nothing to do with him. Then he remembers the dead wasichu bluecoat soldiers littering the rolling hills above the Greasy Grass, their white and mutilated bodies so shocking against the green and brown grass. The majority of those dead men, he learned in his year as scout with Crook’s cavalry out of Fort Robinson, were Irish and German and other immigrants fresh off the boat. The serious recession of 1876 had left signing up with the army an attractive alternative to starving in these very tenement neighborhoods Paha Sapa is walking through. Half of the micks and krauts in Custer’s command, Curly told him in his winkte broken Lakota and even more broken English, hadn’t understood their sergeants’ and officers’ commands.

There is no comment on this from the ghost sulking inside him.

The distance from Grand Central Terminal to the Brooklyn Bridge is not that long—less than four miles is Paha Sapa’s guess—and walking between such high buildings, from shadow to sun and then back to shade again at each intersection, crossing to the west side of the street to get out of the chilly shadow when the buildings are lower, reminds him of canyons he has hiked in Colorado, Utah, Montana, and, to a much lesser extent, in his own Black Hills. But in Paha Sapa’s part of the West there are only a few canyons, such as the one the wasichus are now calling Spearfish Canyon, deep enough or steep enough to give this echoing, stark-sunlight and then sudden-shade lower-Bowery effect.

The wind has a nip to it despite the growing warmth of the day. Usually Paha Sapa ignores high and low temperatures, but this year the cold has bothered him and this New York chill makes him wish again for a topcoat or Robert’s leather motorcycle jacket. The streets are getting too narrow ahead, and he turns right and walks to the southwest along Canal Street back toward Broadway, turning left again onto Centre Street.

He can see City Hall Park ahead and… suddenly… he has arrived.

The Brooklyn Bridge stretches above low buildings and arches out over the East River. The rising sun is still low enough that the two towers and the elevated, arching roadway throw long shadows toward Manhattan, the closer tower—the so-called New York tower—shading the narrow waterfront streets and old warehouses on either side of the broad approach.

“This is what you came for?”

—Yes. You and your wife were in New York the winter before you died. Weren’t the towers finished then?

“The Brooklyn tower was. The New York tower wasn’t quite finished when we left in February. Both of them were a mass of derricks and scaffolds, but grand even so. There were no cables strung yet…. Look at that roadway! Look at those suspension cables! We could never have imagined that the finished bridge would look so grand!”

Paha Sapa says nothing to this. It does look grand. He’s seen photographs of the bridge, but nothing could have quite prepared him for the reality. Even on this island of new architectural giants, the Brooklyn Bridge—even seen from the cluttered approach vistas here on the Manhattan side—has a grandeur and power all its own.

Paha Sapa could—but chooses not to—tell his resident ghost about the endless ten-hour workdays down in the dangerous blackness and dust and smoke of the Holy Terror Mine in Keystone and about his mentor Tarkulich “Big Bill” Slovak’s constant talk, in that booming whatever-it-was Eastern European accent, the giant’s shouts somehow carrying over the rattling of steam drills and the pounding of sledgehammers and the rusty screech and squeal and rumble of the mine carts squeezing past them in the midnight-dark chaos, and about his—Big Bill’s—part in building the Brooklyn Bridge.

Having left the “Old Country” just a few steps ahead of the police after killing another teenager in a fight in some city that sounded to Paha Sapa as if it had no vowels at all in its name, in May of 1870, the 17-year-old Big Bill Slovak had arrived in New York and immediately hired on as a worker for the Bridge Company that had been incorporated to build what was then being called the New York and Brooklyn Bridge.

There were no towers or cables to be seen then. Big Bill admitted that he had lied through his teeth when he applied—saying that he was twenty-one years old, saying that he was a skilled worker (his only job in the Old Country, wherever that was, had been as a herder of goats for a crippled uncle), and—most important—saying that he had advanced skills as a powderman. (In truth, he had never lit a fuse attached to anything more powerful than a Roman candle, but there were other powdermen being hired that hot day in May, and Big Bill knew that he could learn from them if necessary. It turned out that most of them were lying about their skills as much as or more than Big Bill was.)

In 1870, as Big Bill said more than a few times down in the stinking black confines of the Holy Terror more than thirty years later, one had to have some real imagination to see the New York and Brooklyn Bridge. All that existed when Big Bill went to work was a huge caisson that had been launched like a ship, floated down the East River to its position near the Brooklyn shore, and deliberately sunk. That caisson, filled with compressed air to keep the river out and the men working inside alive, was going to be the foundation for the huge Brooklyn-side tower built on it and above it. But first the caisson—and then its near twin for the New York side—had to be sunk down through the river, mud, ooze, sand, gravel, and stone until it was on bedrock.

Big Bill loved numbers. (Paha Sapa had often thought that if the giant blasting expert had stayed in his Old Country and somehow gotten an education, he might have become a mathematician.) Even their first year together, Big Bill never tired of shouting the statistics at his thirty-seven-year-old assistant (the Indian widower working down there to make money to feed his five-year-old son, who was being watched days and night shifts by Crazy Maria, Keystone’s all-purpose Mexican woman).

The caisson young Big Bill had worked in under the East River was a giant rectangular box, 168 feet long and 102 feet wide, divided into six separate chambers each 28 feet long by 102 feet wide. Both caissons, Big Bill said often, “were big enough to hold four tennis courts inside,” which had amused Paha Sapa as he ate his lunch down there in the stinking gloom of the Holy Terror, since he had never seen a tennis court and he was damn sure Big Bill hadn’t either.

There was no bottom to the caisson box, of course. The men walked and worked directly on the mud, silt, sewage, boulders, gravel, and bedrock at the bottom of the river. And it was the presence of these boulders around the descending edges of the caisson—the box was built to descend until it could go no farther and then the building of the towers on it would begin—that brought in Big Bill’s fictional specialty of dynamiting.

The working conditions down in the Brooklyn-side caisson—and later in the New York–side caisson, which went much deeper—were horrific. Stinking mud, constant high temperatures, pressurized air so thick that a man couldn’t whistle, literally couldn’t force the air out of his body against the pressure, while each man’s body and organs were daily assaulted by the constant descent into and climb up out of the high-pressure hole in the river.

Paha Sapa never did quite understand the math and science of the air pressure thing, but he believed Big Bill when the giant talked about the problems the men had with something they all called caisson disease and which others called “the bends.” No one could predict whom it would hit or how hard, only that it would affect everyone sooner or later and that a lot of men would die horribly from it.

Colonel Washington Roebling himself, the chief engineer and son of the bridge’s designer, John Roebling—who died of tetanus after getting his toes crushed on the site in the first days of work on the bridge—came down with caisson disease, and it ruined his health, turning him into an invalid for the rest of his long life. Big Bill said that the pressure-related disease wasn’t so bad during the work in the first caisson, on the Brooklyn side, since that foundation box reached its lowest point at about 44 feet, but the New York caisson had to be sunk to more than 78 feet. The external pressure on the caisson and the corresponding air pressure on the workers inside were incredibly high. Men died of the caisson disease in both boxes, but the New York caisson, Bill said, was the real killer.

Slovak had been struck by the bends scores of times over his years working in the caissons and described the symptoms to Paha Sapa: blinding headaches, constant vomiting, overwhelming weakness, paralysis, tremendous shooting pains in various parts of the body, a feeling like one had been shot in the spine or stabbed in the lungs, and then, in many cases, blindness and death.

The worst cases, including Colonel Roebling when he was struck down after a day and night battling a slow fire in the Brooklyn caisson with all of his many rises and descents during that crisis, were treated with massive amounts of morphine just to relieve the agony until the worker either recovered or died.

Big Bill had had his own cure. However terrible the symptoms, he would drag himself down the stairs, into the air lock, and then plunge back into the darkness and pressure and smoke and sledgehammer crashes and plank-over-river-bottom-mud chaos of the caisson again. It always relieved his symptoms within minutes. Usually, he said, he’d work for an extra unpaid hour or two swinging sledges or priming charges while the caisson disease agony relented and then disappeared.

About twenty feet into the mud of the Brooklyn side of the East River, Big Bill told him, the caisson started encountering boulders too big to be broken up with sledgehammers and spikes and pry bars and sweat. Colonel Roebling conferred with Big Bill and two other new workers who, Bill thought, were also pretending to be experienced powdermen. Because the work of breaking up the boulders around the reinforced metal edge of the caisson—what they called the shoe—had moved from the almost impossible to the absolutely impossible no matter how hard the men labored down there in the heavy atmosphere in that box with the more than 27,000 tons of caisson roof and weights atop it, with tens of thousands of tons of weight of river and pressure above that, the workers were all for blasting.

Roebling had a few reservations. He explained to the three “powdermen” and the crew chiefs that in such a dense atmosphere inside the caisson, even a moderate explosion might blow out the eardrums of every worker in every room of the sunken box. Also, he explained, the compressed air in the caisson, already so filled with noxious gases as well as smoke and steam from the calcium limelights blazing at the end of their long iron rods, each torch throwing bizarre shadows and glare from its blue-white luminous jets, might become totally unbreathable when the smoke from an explosion was added to the mix. And the vibration from the blast, explained Colonel Roebling, might damage the doors and valves of the air lock—eliminating their only escape from the pressurized compartments on the bottom of the river.

Big Bill used to describe to Paha Sapa how the powdermen would look at one another so soberly after these explanations. But Roebling had an even greater worry.

The way rubble and sand were removed from the working area in the caissons was via water shafts—two huge columns of water that were being held in suspension above the spaces where the men worked merely by the great pressure of the air inside the caisson. The bottom of each water shaft pipe was open and only two feet above the pool of water they kept beneath it; handy for shoveling debris into and easy to send down a bucket through the standing column of water, but what—asked the Chief Engineer—would happen if an explosion inside the caisson to break up the boulders (and it had to be inside the caisson, of course) depressed that pool and allowed the air to escape up the shafts?

Big Bill said that he and the other work chiefs and powdermen had stared blankly.

Bill Slovak imitated Colonel Roebling’s voice, distorted by the terrible air pressure there in the corner of the caisson where they had the discussion, and the effect was strange, with Big Bill’s vocabulary suddenly enlarged, his voice distorted, and his accent lessened:

—It would be a total blowout, gentlemen. All the water suspended in that tall shaft above us, more than thirty-five feet today, perhaps all the water in both shafts, would erupt like a twin Vesuvius, and the compressed air that keeps us breathing and keeps the East River out would follow after it. I think that the eruption, seen from the outside, would rise at least five hundred feet. Parts of those workers nearest the water shafts would almost certainly be part of the extruded debris fountain. Then the full weight of the caisson, held up now only by the tremendous air pressure here, would come crashing down, smashing and flattening all the blocks and braces and frames and the outer edges of the shoe itself. All of these interior bulkheads…

Big Bill said that at this point the cluster of work chiefs and workmen, including the three “powdermen” so eager to light a fuse, had looked around them in the caisson, their wide, white eyes looking even wider and whiter in the blazing blue-white glare from the calcium limelights.

—… all of these interior bulkheads and supports would be crushed at once from the weight above. No one would have time to get to the air lock, or even to the narrow shafts serving the erupting geysers that were the water shafts until the blowout, and those fabrications of steel and iron—air shafts, air locks, water shafts, bracing, caisson shoe—would also be warped and crushed within seconds. And then the river would rush in, drowning any of us who might have survived the crushing force of the collapse.

The wide, white eyes, Big Bill told Paha Sapa (and sometimes five or six other listening miners) there in the black depths of the Holy Terror, then looked at one another a final time and turned back to Colonel Roebling.

—So, gentlemen, this new crop of boulders here is extruding outside the shoe beyond our reach and doesn’t seem to want to surrender to our ministrations by sledge and spike. The caisson’s own weight will continue to drop it deeper, and the shoe and framing will be inevitably damaged unless those boulders are removed. Shall we risk using explosives? We should decide today. Now.

To a man, they voted to try it.

But first, Big Bill Slovak explained, Roebling brought down his revolver left over from his service in the Civil War and tried firing it with increasingly heavier powder charges.

No one was deafened. The reports, said Big Bill, sounded strangely muffled in the hyperdense atmosphere of the caisson.

Then the colonel had Big Bill and the other two “experts” set off small charges of actual blasting powder in a remote corner of the caisson while others sheltered in the farthest rooms, slowly increasing the charge with each test.

The water shafts did not blow out, even as the amount of powder approached that necessary to break up the seemingly impervious boulders. The air locks were not damaged. The vibrations destroyed neither the inner bracings nor the workmen.

Big Bill said in the Holy Terror—

—The powder smoke, though, was a damned nuisance. We’d work for forty minutes or more in that thick, black cloud of smoke after each blast, not even being able to see the ends of our sledgehammers or pry bars, and I’d spit black phlegm the consistency of tar for weeks afterward.

But the results of a full charge were extraordinary. Boulders that would have held them up for days and damaged the settling caisson’s shoe were blown to bits in seconds, the bits then being pulverized and sent up the water shaft into the open world.

It was he himself, Big Bill told Paha Sapa, who suggested to Colonel Roebling that they adopt the miners’ technique of using a long steel drill hammered into the rock to create a hole for the blasting charge—the steam drill that they were all using at the Holy Terror in the Black Hills 1900 to 1903 hadn’t been invented yet in 1870 to ’71—and then the charge would be gently tamped in and set off. Big Bill, his hands twice the size of Paha Sapa’s, even at the decrepit old age of forty in the Holy Terror in 1902, had been in charge of the setting and tamping in the caissons.

In one eight-hour watch, said Big Bill, he and his two partners may have done twenty blasts. The other workers grew so used to the explosions that they—and the powdermen—would just calmly and slowly step into an adjacent chamber to escape all the flying rock and debris when an explosion was triggered.

Instead of descending six inches a week, as had been the case when they were breaking up boulders by hand, the Brooklyn caisson now dropped twelve to eighteen inches in six working days (everyone took Sundays off). Colonel Roebling raised Big Bill Slovak’s and the other powdermen’s pay twenty-five cents a week.

In March of 1871, when the Brooklyn caisson had reached its permanent home of solid rock 44 feet and 6 inches beneath the surface, Roebling had Big Bill and the men pump cement into it. The caisson had now become the foundation for the Brooklyn tower of the future bridge. Sunk that deep into the ancient Mesozoic bedrock of the East River, where no sea worms or other borers or normal agents of decay could get at them, Colonel Roebling had suggested that they—the caissons—might last a million years.

In May of 1871, when the New York caisson came sliding down the shipyard stays, 18-year-old Tarkulich “Big Bill” Slovak was riding on top of it like a sailor, helping guide it downriver to its final resting place in September. A year later, when the New York caisson had reached its own final depth of 78 feet and 6 inches—at a loss of many more lives to caisson disease due to the much greater pressure difference—Big Bill was the next to last man out as the cement pour to fill the interior was almost finished, offering his huge hand to help Colonel Roebling up as the air lock door swung shut a final time.

Many of the caisson workers took their low wages and went home after that, but Big Bill had then gone to work first on the Brooklyn Tower and, when that tower was completed in May of 1875, over to work on the New York Tower until its completion in July of 1875. He explained to Paha Sapa that he had swapped the blackness and pressure of the caissons seventy feet and more under the river for work dangling up to 270 feet above the East River. They used no safety harnesses. Their survival depended upon their sobriety and sense of balance and a simple bosun’s chair dangling from cable or scaffolds. When they worked atop the rising towers, they labored and lifted all day with their backs to a two-hundred-foot fall to the concrete-hard water below.

And then the dangerous spinning and spanning of the thousands upon thousands of miles of wire cable began. Big Bill Slovak learned that skill as well. He loved nothing as much as crossing the footbridge—a swaying, pitching four-foot-wide catwalk made of open slats swooping up to each tower at an angle of 35 degrees and more, all 200 feet and more above the river—and on the first day they’d begun spinning the strands of wire cable across, he and his boss, E. F. Farrington, had run back and forth across the entire river span of 1,595 feet and 6 inches of swaying footbridge at least fourteen times that one day alone.

Tarkulich “Big Bill” Slovak had loved every hour and day of his work on the Brooklyn Bridge, he’d told Paha Sapa a hundred times, and when the rest of New York and Brooklyn and America went crazy celebrating the official opening of the bridge on May 24, 1883, Big Bill had wept like a baby.

He was then thirty years old and had spent more than thirteen years of his life working for Colonel Roebling and the dream of the bridge. Suddenly… he didn’t know what his future held.

After six months of heavy drinking in New York, he’d finally headed west to the goldfields in Colorado and then the Black Hills. Every gold mine needed a good powderman. The pay was good in towns like Cripple Creek, he said, but the cost of whiskey and whores was correspondingly high.

The night Big Bill died in a cave-in—caused not by one of his own infinitely careful explosions but by sloppy work by some of the didn’t-give-a-fuck day supervisors on framing up the new support timbers on Horizontal Shaft Number 11—Paha Sapa was working a different shift. Instead of clocking in the next morning, he resigned, waited just long enough to be one of the few workers (and one Mexican woman) at Big Bill Slovak’s funeral in the windblown cemetery outside of Keystone, and then Paha Sapa used some of his money to buy a horse and took his young son and rode off north past Bear Butte onto the Great Plains.

PAHA SAPA WALKS OUT onto the wooden pedestrian promenade deck with the stone towers rising before him. To the right and left below him run the trains. Big Bill said that Colonel Roebling had put in cable cars like those in San Francisco, which ran by simply clamping onto an endless turning wire rope beneath them, but those had been superseded in the following decades first by regular trolley cars and then by train cars of the sort that ran everywhere else in New York and Brooklyn on elevated tracks. Glancing at the trains whooshing by into their steel-and-wood protective coverings, Paha Sapa guesses that it won’t be many years until they too are removed and the automobile traffic lanes widened from two lanes in each direction to three.

Even with only two lanes in each direction, the autos are making a roaring racket below and to each side of the promenade deck. Paha Sapa has to smile when he thinks of Colonel Roebling—and his father, John, in the 1850s—designing this bridge for pedestrian and horse-and-carriage traffic, only to have erected a structure so sturdy that it could handle millions upon millions of Fords and Chevys and Stutzes and Studebakers and Dodges and Packards and trucks of all sizes. The traffic is heavier this morning, Paha Sapa notices, coming toward Manhattan than it is going out.

The seemingly endless promenade deck is busy but not crowded. Even here the majority of walkers—men holding their hats against the light breeze, the far fewer women occasionally clutching at blowing skirts much shorter than is the style among wasichu wiyapi in South Dakota—are coming toward the city.

It’s a perfect day to stroll on the promenade of the Brooklyn Bridge. Even with the wind, it’s warmer out here away from the building shadows. Paha Sapa glances at his cheap drugstore watch: a little after eight a.m. He wonders what kind of jobs these men are hurrying toward that would start so late.

Just as a range of mountains, say the Tetons or Rockies, is best appreciated from a distance, farther away from the occluding foothills, so the skyline of New York City becomes more impressive the farther he walks out away from it. All the high buildings from the downtown running north along the river’s edge gleam gold in the morning light, and some of the higher skyscrapers behind that first line of structures rise so high and are so reflective that they appear to be columns of light themselves. Paha Sapa sees the light reflecting brightly from a very tall building farther north and wonders if it’s the new Chrysler Building that some in South Dakota think is constructed completely of steel.

Ahead of him, the first of the two towers rises 276 feet and 6 inches from the river’s surface. How many times did Big Bill Slovak repeat all these facts and precise numbers to Paha Sapa down there in the dangerous dark hole of the Holy Terror? Paha Sapa did not mind at the time; a repetition of certain facts and figures can be wakan, a sacred thing all by itself, a sort of mantra.

The East River and all of Manhattan are now festooned with bridges, fifty years after the completion of this first one, but these others—including the Manhattan Bridge so visible just to the northeast and the Williamsburg Bridge upriver beyond it—are made of steel and iron. They are, to Paha Sapa’s eye on this beautiful first day of April, actively ugly compared to the graceful but eternal-looking twin stone towers that suspend the Brooklyn Bridge.

He knows that these are not just the highest but the only such stone towers in North America, but it’s with some small sense of shock that he realizes that no other stone monuments to the human spirit, beyond these Roebling stone towers with their double gothic arches, exist in America other than Gutzon Borglum’s emerging stone heads in the Black Hills.

It’s a busy season of blasting there—Borglum is ready to give up work on the sketched-in Jefferson head to the left of George Washington (as one looks up at the monument) and is already blasting away rock to the right of Washington in search of better carving stone for a replacement Jefferson—and Borglum threatened to fire Paha Sapa when he asked for the six days off.

“So, are you satisfied? Can we go back to Park Avenue now and see if she’s home?”

—No. Be silent until I say you can speak again. The appointment is at four p.m., and Mrs. Elmer in Brooklyn was very clear to say that we should not present ourselves—myself—before that time. So… silence. If I hear another word from you before I ask for it, I’ll skip the appointment and take the train home today and save myself several days’ pay.

No response. The only sounds are the rush of the trains, the hum of traffic on the bridge pavement, the slight whisper of wind through the giant cables and countless suspending bridge wires, and the constant honk–rumble–muted roar from the city behind them.

Paha Sapa hears voices and goes to the railing of the promenade deck. Four men in coveralls are on a scaffold strung below, smoking cigarettes and laughing, while one of them makes a halfhearted display of passing a paintbrush over the scrolled metalwork descending below the wood floor of the deck.

Paha Sapa clears his throat.

—Excuse me…. Can any of you gentlemen tell me if there’s a Mr. Farrington working on the bridge today?

The four look up and two of them laugh. The fattest one, a short man who seems to be in charge of the work detail, laughs the loudest.

—Hey, what’s with you, old fellow? Are those braids? Are you a Chinaman or some kind of Indian?

—Some kind of Indian.

The short, fat man in the stained overalls laughs again.

—Good, ’cause I don’t think we allow any old Chinamen to cross the bridge on Saturdays. Not unless they pay a toll, anyways.

—Do you know if there’s a Mr. Farrington still working here? E. F. Farrington… I don’t know what the E or F stands for. I promised a friend I’d look him up.

The four men look at one another and mumble and there’s more laughter. Paha Sapa doesn’t have to work hard to imagine what Mr. Borglum would do if he came across some of his workers smoking on the job, only pretending to work, and treating visitors to the monument with this disrespect. As Lincoln Borglum once said to him—After a while, everyone realizes that my father wears those big boots all the time for a reason.

A tall man with a straggly mustache—Jeff to the fat crew leader’s Mutt (Paha Sapa had always gotten the two comic strip characters mixed up until he met a tall, skinny, mustached worker at the Monument named Jefferson “Jeff” Greer, not to be confused with “Big Dick” Huntimer or Hoot or Little Hoot Leach)—gives out a strange giggle for a grown man and says—

—Yeah, well, Chief, Mr. Farrington’s still working here. He’s up on the top of the nearest tower. He’s one of the bosses.

Paha Sapa blinks at this news. If Farrington had been thirty when Big Bill Slovak met him in 1870, he’d be ninety-three now. Hardly the age for someone to be employed and still working atop one of the towers here. A son, perhaps?

—E. F. Farrington? Master mechanic? Older man or young?

More inexplicable giggling from the men below. It’s the Mutt crew chief who answers this time.

—Farrington’s a mechanic, yeah. And he’s as old as Moses’s molars. Don’t know about the “master” part, though. You oughta go up and ask him.

Paha Sapa looks up at the looming stone tower. He knows there’s no stairway inside or on the outside of the solid-stone double-arched monolith, much less an elevator.

—It’s all right if I go up?

The tall one, the Mutt, answers.

—Sure, Chief. The bridge is open to the public, ain’t it? We don’t even charge for you to walk across no more. Go ahead.

Paha Sapa is squinting into the sun.

—How?

Short, fat Jeff answers and the sudden silence of the other three is suspicious.

—Oh, any of the four cables will take you up. I prefer the one to the right of the promenade. If you fall from that one, you don’t go all the way to the river—the tracks or promenade or car lanes’ll break your fall.

—Thank you.

Paha Sapa has had enough of these men. He hopes that they’re not typical of all New Yorkers.

Mutt speaks again.

—Think nothing of it, Sitting Bull. Say hi to your squaw for us when you get back to the reservation.

FOUR CABLES run the width of the river and beyond, each finding support just below the summit of its respective tower. Two of the cables rise on either side of the promenade here at the beginning of the long walk and arch up to the Brooklyn Tower, some 208 supporting cable wires, called suspenders, coming down from them, more scores of diagonal cable wires—“stays” in naval terminology—also coming down from the tower to help support the roadway. In the center of the river, coming down to the roadway, the four cables dip in that most perfect of geometric forms—a catenary curve. Paha Sapa’s son, Robert, who loved math and science so much but who often seemed more poet than geometrician, once described a catenary curve to Paha Sapa as “the universe’s most artistic and elegant response to gravity—the signature of God.”

Paha Sapa also knows that each of the four major cables on each side ends in a giant anchorage, each anchorage an eighty-foot tower in its own right—a sight when the bridge was first built and New York was a low city—and each weighing 60,000 tons. And in each of those anchorages, all that weight of the towers, the roadway, the trains, the people, the thousands of miles of wire, and the dead weight of the cables themselves is carried, the way the flying buttresses of medieval cathedrals carry the weight of gravity from the arched interior, into anchor plates each weighing more than twenty-three tons a plate, and those plates, sitting at the bottom of a stone mass equal to a 60,000-ton pyramid, are linked to anchor bars twelve and a half feet long, which link to smaller links, which eventually lead to red-painted giant iron eyebars protruding from the huge anchorage of stone, iron, and steel, each eyebar connected to its cable, the four cables together sustaining the full weight of the bridge.

But none of that is important to Paha Sapa now. He has to decide if one of the four cables is actually walkable. He wants to talk to this Mr. Farrington.

So Paha Sapa stands at the south railing of the promenade, looking down at one of the four broad cables that runs up to the tower. At this point it dips below the level of the promenade deck and, farther back toward the New York shore, beneath the level of the bridge itself. The metal-covered and white-painted cable is not very large for something carrying so much weight—only 153⁄4 inches in diameter, the same size as the other three supporting cables—but he remembers that there are 5,434 wires in each major cable, each of those wires bundled and crimped in clusters of other cables within the main cables.

Big Bill Slovak loved that number—5,434. He thought there was something mystical about it. Even wasichus, it seemed, had their faith in spirits and signs.

Paha Sapa easily vaults over the low railing onto the cable that descends past the promenade on the right side. It’s easy enough to balance on—a pipe with a diameter just under sixteen inches—but the painted and curved metal is slippery. He wishes again that he hadn’t worn these uncomfortable and slick-soled cheap dress shoes.

He guesses that the cable rises about 750 to 800 feet from this point to its pass-through notch near the top of the tower about 275 feet above the river. Big Bill could have told him the exact length. Actually, he did tell him the exact length of the supported land span of the bridge here and its cable, 930 feet, but that span (and its cable running alongside behind him) runs behind him a couple of hundred feet to the anchorage.

Perhaps about 725 feet of rising cable ahead of him. And it rises at an angle of about 35 degrees. Not sounding very steep until you’re actually on such a pitch or slope, Paha Sapa knows from his many years in mines and his two years at Mount Rushmore. Then a slip can be a dangerous thing.

There is a skinny cable running alongside the cable on the right side of the main cable and hanging about a foot out and perhaps three and a half feet higher than the big cable. It’s a handrail of sorts, but one would almost have to lean out over the drop to hang on to it. The gap between the main cable and the “handrail” thread of steel is considerable. Paha Sapa assumes it’s used more for some sort of harnesses or for hooking on gear or lowering equipment to scaffolds suspended from the main cable than as any sort of real railing.

He hops back over the railing onto the promenade deck. Several men bustling by look at him strangely but obviously assume he’s a bridge worker and hurry on.

Walking back to where the rude clowns were on their scaffold hanging out of sight below the promenade deck, Paha Sapa looks at the untidy pile of material they left up on the deck. It’s only the coil of extra rope that interests him. He lifts one end, stretches it, examines it. It’s not what he’d choose to replace his eighth-inch steel cable to hang off Abe Lincoln’s nose in his bosun’s chair while carrying a steam drill but it’s better than clothesline.

Paha Sapa takes his folding knife out of his pocket and cuts off an eight-foot length of the rope.

When he vaults back over the opposite railing back onto the large cable, it takes him only a few seconds to fashion a quick Prusik knot around the “handrail” cable. Bringing the doubled length of line back, he undoes his belt—wishing he’d worn his much broader workman’s belt—then refastens it with the ends of the rope looped twice and knotted in a smaller Prusik knot at his right hip.

Not exactly the kind of safety margin that Mr. Borglum would okay at the work site, but better than nothing.

Paha Sapa notices a horizontal cable—almost certainly a stay against winds—connecting the handrail cables about thirty feet up this main cable and overhanging the promenade, and there are a few other such steel wire stays and tie-downs on the long, steep rise up to the tower, but he knows it will take just a few seconds to undo the two friction-hitch knots, move the rope beyond the obstacle, and tie on again. It shouldn’t be a problem.

Paha Sapa begins walking briskly up the steepening incline of the cable, the rope in his right hand, occasionally pulling it taut enough to provide stability when a strong gust of wind hits him from the south.

Within a couple of minutes he’s approaching the height of the tower arches that he knows from Big Bill are 117 feet above the roadway—the two center cables run between the arches to the tower—and he pauses to catch his breath and look around, pulling the Prusik knot tighter as he does so.

The feeling of exposure is somehow greater than his usual work hanging two hundred feet and more above the valley floor on the mutilated Six Grandfathers. The proximity of the rock there gives a sense, however false, of something to grab on to. Here it’s just the 153⁄4-inch cable under his slick soles, the whole cable taut but seeming to sway a little, and the tiny handrail wire that definitely is moving against the rope and with the wind. He knows that it’s a little more than 276 feet from the top of the towers to the river, but anyone falling from one of these two center cables would never get to the river—his body would crash onto the promenade deck or, from this right cable, more likely onto the train tracks far below. If he leaped really hard over or under the swaying, almost-invisible-from-below handrail cable to his right, he guesses he might make it all the way to the automobile lanes below.

He turns around and looks at Manhattan.

The city is glorious in the midmorning light, the dozens of new tall buildings gleaming white or sandstone tan or gold. Thousands of windows catch the light. He sees countless black automobiles moving along the riverside roadways and streets, many lining up to cross the Brooklyn Bridge, all looking like a line of black beetles from this height.

A small group of pedestrians has gathered at about the spot on the promenade deck where he jumped over the railing, and he can see the white ovals of their lifted faces. Paha Sapa hopes that he isn’t doing something illegal—why would it be illegal?—and remembers that Mutt and Jeff, both bridge workers, told him that this is the way he could find Mr. Farrington on the tower. Of course, odds are strong that Mutt and Jeff were just making fun of an out-of-town “Chief ” and a rube to boot.

Paha Sapa shrugs, turns around, and continues his climb. Even used to working at heights as he is, he finds that it’s better if he focuses his gaze on the spot where the now steeply rising cable fits into a black notch near the pediment of the tower about a hundred and fifty feet above him. The wind coming up the East River from the south now is quite strong, and he has to release his gentle grip on the sliding rope for a moment to tug his cloth cap lower and tighter. He has no intention of losing a two-dollar hat to the river or having it run over by traffic on the New York–bound lanes.

Near the top, the sense of exposure increases as the great stone wall and the top of the two gothic arches come closer and closer. He finds that he’s setting one foot in front of the other for balance. The angle of approach is at its steepest here. Seeing how small the openings for the two cables are, he wonders if it’s even possible to get onto the top of the tower from this cable. There is an overhanging pediment that stretches about six feet beyond where both cables enter the tower, but it looks to be about seven feet high and has no steel grips or decent handholds on it. Paha Sapa would have to untie from the now freely moving thin handhold cable and leap up toward the flat overhang, hoping to get his arms over and either find something unseen to grab on to or use the friction of his hands and forearms to keep from falling backward. And if—when—he did fall, the chances of him being able to fall back onto the main cable and keep his balance there on its few inches of slippery, curved top surface are very small indeed.

But when he reaches the immense wall of giant stone blocks and overhanging pediments, he sees that if he gets down on his hands and knees, he can crawl into the square notch through which the cable and steel wire pass.

Inside in the relative darkness, stone just sixteen inches under him now, there’s an aged wooden ladder to his right and sunlight above. He coils the rope over his shoulder.

Paha Sapa climbs up and out of the hole onto the top of the New York Tower of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The wind is even stronger here, blowing the tails of his clumsy suitcoat and still trying to steal his hat, but it’s no factor up here on this broad, flat space. Paha Sapa tries to remember the magical numbers Big Bill recited to him about the tower tops: 136 feet wide by 53 feet across?—it was something like that. Certainly a wider expanse of segmented stone blocks up here than Mr. Borglum has left to blast and carve for the Teddy Roosevelt head at the narrowest part of the ridgeline south of the canyon where he wants to put the Hall of Records.

Paha Sapa walks easily back and forth on the top. No work crew or 93-year-old E. F. Farrington up here—the clowns tricked him after all. He hadn’t really expected the old man, of course, but he thought there might be a son or grandson working up here.

He walks to the east edge and looks out at the view. The cables and their gleaming suspender wires dropping away steeply below make his scrotum contract. The cars on the roadway about 160 feet below seem much smaller, the sounds of their tires on the roadway a distant thing. Paha Sapa guesses that it’s about a third of a mile to the Brooklyn Tower… 1600 feet perhaps?… but the view of that tower is astounding. There is a large American flag flapping atop that tower, and he can see small human figures there, but if that’s where Farrington is working… forget it. He’s not in the mood to try to descend one of these four continuing cables and climb again, perfect catenary curve or not.

Looking from the south edge of the tower top, the sheer drop to the river there seeming a lot more than a mere 276 feet, he sees ferries moving to and fro, the river filled with ships, and larger ships moving or anchored in the bay beyond. The Statue of Liberty lifts her torch on an island out there.

He looks back to the west. The fairly recently completed Empire State Building rises above the other high buildings like a redwood amid ponderosa pines. Paha Sapa feels a sudden catch in his throat at the beauty of that building, of these towers—and at the hubris of a race of his species that would construct all this and put it into motion. (Eight weeks later, he’ll see the Empire State Building again when he and thirty other workers follow Mr. Borglum to the Elks Theater in Rapid City to watch King Kong. Borglum will have seen it and have been so enthused about the movie—“the ultimate adventure!” he’ll call it, “a real man’s picture!”—that he’ll lead a caravan of old trucks and coupes and Paha Sapa on Robert’s motorcycle [with Red Anderson in the sidecar] to go see it again. Mr. Borglum will walk into the theater, for the hundredth time, without paying a cent—for some reason the Great Sculptor believes himself exempt from such petty fees as movie tickets—but Paha Sapa and the other men coerced by their boss into seeing the movie will shell out an outrageous twenty-five cents each. It will be worth it to Paha Sapa, who will look at all the images of New York at the end of the movie and think of his moments atop the western tower of the Brooklyn Bridge.)

At this moment on the morning of the first of April 1933, Paha Sapa has no thoughts of giant apes swinging from any of the buildings he’s admiring. The morning has been cloudless until now, but suddenly a few moving clouds obscure the sun, sending their shapeless shadows flitting over bay, steamships, island, ferries, the southern point of Manhattan, and parts of Brooklyn. When two of these newcomer clouds diverge, Paha Sapa watches a shaft of almost vertical sunlight reach down and strike the water to the south of the bridge. The reflection is so bright that he has to raise his hand to shield his eyes.

Without warning there are men standing all around him.

Paha Sapa actually jumps in alarm, thinking that police have somehow managed to sneak up on him and are going to handcuff him and haul him away down the cable—no small feat, that.

But these are no wasichu police.

The last time he saw these six old men, they stood hundreds of feet tall and were each surrounded by a corona of brilliance. Now they are just old men, all but one of them shorter than Paha Sapa. They wear dress-up buckskins and moccasins, the tunics adorned with necklaces and chestplates of bones, everything augmented by the most beautiful beadwork, but the once-white deerskin has grown dark and smoky with age, as have the faces and necks and hands of the six old men.

The oldest and closest of the Six Grandfathers speaks, and his voice is now just the voice of an older Natural Free Human Being, not of the wind or stars.

—Do you understand now, Paha Sapa?

—Understand what, Tunkašila?

—That the All, the Mystery, Wakan Tanka himself, shows his facets and has his avatars share their power with the Fat Takers as well as with the Sisuni and Shahiyela and the Kangi Wicasha as well as with the Ikče Wičaśa. This…

The old man gestures toward the bridge tower beneath, toward the roadway far below with its moving trains and automobiles, toward the skyline of New York and the gleaming Empire State Building.

—… this is all wakan. It is all a demonstration of how the Wasicun has listened to the gods and borrowed their energies.

Paha Sapa feels something like anger filling him. Beneath that there is only sorrow.

—So you are saying, Grandfather, that the Fat Takers—the Great Stone Heads who rose out of our Black Hills—deserve to rule the world and that we must fade away and die and disappear as the buffalo did?

Another Grandfather, this one with his gray hair parted in the middle and a single red feather matching the intricately woven red blanket draped over his left arm, speaks.

—You should know by now, Paha Sapa, the life you have lived should have told you, that we are not saying that. But the tide of men and their peoples and even of their gods ebbs and flows like the Great Seas on each coast of this continent we gave you. A people no longer proud of itself or confident in their gods or in their own energies recedes, like the waning tide, and leaves only reeking emptiness behind. These Fat Takers also shall know that one day. But the Mystery and your Grandfathers—even the Thunder Beings, fickle as they seem—do not abandon those they love.

Paha Sapa looks at the face of each of the six old men. He is tempted to touch them. Each man is as solid and physical as Paha Sapa’s own body. He can smell the scent from them despite the breeze—a mixture of tobacco, clean sweat, tanned leather, and something sweet but not cloying, like sage after the rain.

He shakes his head, still furious with himself and with the Grandfathers’ complicated, unclear statements.

—I don’t understand, Grandfathers. I’m sorry…. I’ve planned to… you know my plans… but I’m one man, almost an old man, by myself, and I can’t… I don’t… I want to understand; I would give my life to understand, but…

The shortest Grandfather, one with all-black hair and equally all-black eyes and features as weathered and eroded as the Badlands, speaks softly.

—Paha Sapa, why did your sculptor choose to carve the wasichu heads on the Six Grandfathers?

Paha Sapa blinks.

—The granite was good for carving there, Grandfather. The south-facing cliff meant that the men could work there most of the year and that the finished heads would receive sunlight. Also the…

—No.

The syllable stops Paha Sapa in mid-sentence.

—Your sculptor knows a sacred place when he finds it. He senses the energy there. That, not gold, is what really brought the Wasicun to your sacred Black Hills. They wish to put their imprint on the place just as the Natural Free Human Beings have sought their destinies there. But the future of our people is like the future of a single man… it is not set. It can be changed, Paha Sapa. You can change it.

Paha Sapa thinks of the dynamite he has begun to store in his shed in Keystone and says nothing.

The fourth Grandfather, the one who looks most like an old woman, speaks, and his voice is the deepest of all.

—Paha Sapa, think of the braids in your hair. Then think of the thousands upon thousands of braids of steel wire in the cables on this bridge and how each large cable in turn is made up totally of joined and intertwined smaller strands of braided steel—the whole stronger than any strand of steel by itself, however thick, however resilient. The twining is the secret. The twining is the wakan.

Paha Sapa looks at the fourth Grandfather but has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. Is it possible, he wonders, for ancient spirits to go senile?

When the first Grandfather speaks again, his voice is soft but as solid and strong as the tower beneath them.

—Wait, Paha Sapa. Believe. Trust.

The other five’s voices are like a whisper only slightly louder than the wind.

—Wait.

Paha Sapa puts his hands over his eyes for a second. For only the second time in his sixty-eight years, he is overcome by emotion.

—Hey… you! Old man! What the hell do you think you’re doing?

When Paha Sapa removes his hand from his eyes, the six Grandfathers are gone. The shouting is coming from a white man’s disembodied head rising from the solid stone.

—I said, what do you think you’re doing up here?

The man’s head is round with no cap, short-cropped hair, red-flushed face, jug ears. He grunts and pulls himself up out of the north cable hole. He’s wearing a stained white coverall and some sort of web harness with a single safety strap and metal clasp wrapped around his thick waist. The man is as short as Paha Sapa but seems to be all thick muscle, including his broad chest, which he appears to be thrusting at Paha Sapa as he comes closer.

—You heard me. How’d you get up here?

Paha Sapa looks around as if the Six Grandfathers might still be hiding somewhere on the pediment or on one of the cables. Far below and to the northeast, a large ship blows a steam horn that sounds like a woman’s scream.

—I walked up. Are you Mr. Farrington?

—Walked up the cable? With no safety equipment? Are you nuts?

Paha Sapa touches the short rope still curled over his shoulder. The red-faced man blinks three times.

—What? You came up to hang yourself? Just jump off; it’s easier.

—I used a Prusik hitch. I would have preferred better rope, but this is all the clowns had.

—Clowns?

—Mutt and Jeff. Two of the four men working on not painting the ironwork below the promenade. I asked if Mr. Farrington was working on the bridge, and they told me he was working here and that I should walk up the cable.

—Mutt and Jeff. Connors and Reinhardt. Jesus Christ. Prusik hitch? That’s a fairly new friction knot. The Austrians just put that in their climbing manual a couple of years ago, and we use it ourselves from time to time. Are you a mountain climber?

—No. I work for Gutzon Borglum in South Dakota.

—Borglum? That crazy son-of-a-bitch? On Mount Rushmore?

—Yes.

The red-faced man shakes his head. Paha Sapa can feel the anger flowing out of the other man and guesses that he is usually fairly relaxed. His eyes are bright blue and Paha Sapa sees now that the red flush and blunt red nose are normal for him, a matter of capillaries and too many hours spent in the sun rather than a sign of rage.

—Are you Mr. Farrington, or were Connors and Reinhardt lying to me about that as well?

—I’m Farrington.

—Not Mr. E. F. Farrington, obviously, but perhaps a relative? Son? Grandson?

—No, I don’t know any… wait. I’ve heard that name. There was an E. F. Farrington working with Mr. Roebling when the bridge was built…. Master Mechanic, I think…

—That’s right. I had a friend, dead now, who worked for Mr. Farrington and asked me to look him up if I ever came to New York. He’d be in his nineties now.

—Yeah, well, I’m Mike Farrington and no relation. But I do remember about that now. That master mechanic Farrington had an argument with some of the bosses forty years ago, not with Colonel Roebling, and left the job shortly before the bridge was opened. Listen, you can’t just walk up here, you know. Prusik hitch or not.

Paha Sapa does not want to argue with this wrong Farrington. He feels suddenly weary and confused and absolutely stupid. He came to New York to fulfill a foolish promise to Long Hair and now he’s come to the bridge on this even more foolish errand. And, he realizes with a sick jolt to his empty stomach, he’ll miss the four o’clock appointment on Park Avenue because he’ll probably be in jail. He doubts that he’s brought enough money to meet bail. Mr. Borglum will fire him over the phone without even hearing his side of the story… and he has no side.

There are shouts from below the east side of the tower top and Mike Farrington walks to the edge. Paha Sapa follows listlessly.

A work scaffold is hanging beneath the north cable, about fifty feet down, and hidden from view by the nearer cable. Three men on it, all in matching coveralls with their thin harness straps clipped to a cable wire above, are waving their arms and shouting.

—Mike! Everything okay? You got a jumper there?

Farrington shouts back.

—No, it’s okay. Just an old gentleman who’s lost his way. Not a jumper.

Farrington turns to Paha Sapa and asks softly—

—You’re nuts, but you’re not a jumper, are you?

—No. And I didn’t have to come all the way to the top if I wanted to jump. The jump from the roadbed level to the river would’ve killed me. I may be nuts, but I’m not stupid.

Farrington can’t hold back the sudden flash of white teeth. He waves to the workers to continue their inspection or rust scraping or whatever they’re doing there, reaches into his pocket, and pulls out a cigar and a match.

—You want one… what’s your name?

Paha Sapa starts to say Billy Slovak and then does not. He starts to say Billy Slow Horse, but then does not. He likes this Mike Farrington even if he isn’t related to Big Bill’s old boss and friend.

—Paha Sapa is my name. It means Black Hills, which is also where I live.

—You some kind of Indian then?

—Lakota. Sioux.

Farrington flicks the match with one movement of his massive thumb, puffs the cigar alight, exhales, clamps the stogie in his teeth while he crosses his massive arms over his massive chest, grins again, and says—

—Sioux. You’re the guys who killed Custer, right?

—Yes. The Cheyenne helped, but we did it.

Again the white grin and the twinkling blue eyes. Paha Sapa has never smoked, other than from the Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa before he lost it on his hanblečeya, but the aromatic smoke from Farrington’s cigar smells wonderful. He is reminded of the Six Grandfathers.

Farrington says—

—You did, huh? With just a little help from the Cheyenne? Were you there at the Little Big Horn when it happened, Mr…. ah… Paha Sapa?

Paha Sapa looks the younger man in the eye. He does not smile or laugh.

—Yes, Mike. I was the last person or thing that General George Armstrong Custer saw in this life. I counted coup on him just as the second bullet hit him.

Farrington laughs—three loud, uninhibited barks that get his maintenance crew to shouting again—and then looks more closely at Paha Sapa and quits laughing. He pats Paha Sapa on the back, not gently.

—I believe you, sir. By God, I truly do. All right, now how do we get you down?

—I presume by the same cable I came up.

—You presume correctly, Mr. Paha Sapa. You with your little bit of clothesline and your Prusik knot friction hitch. I could get a harness from one of the boys back there, but I’m not sure you’d take it or need it. I’ll walk you down. I can see a crowd’s already gathered there, thirty or forty folks with nothing better to do than rubberneck on a Saturday morning, and I’m sure a couple of New York’s Finest will be there.

—New York’s Finest?

—Cops, Mr. Counting Coup Paha Sapa, sir. Cops. With their clubs and handcuffs at the ready. That crowd watched you climb up here and someone’s bound to have called it in or run to fetch a cop on the beat. But I’ll explain to them that you’re my father—or a new member of the bridge maintenance crew. Or something. Do you promise not to fall and get yourself killed on the way down? There’s a goddamned Depression on, you know, and I need this job.

—I’ll do my best, Mike.

Farrington looks hard at him again, the blue eyes squinting in the cloud of aromatic smoke. The crew chief clamps down harder on the cigar and the grin widens.

—I have a hunch that your best is pretty damned good, Mr. Paha Sapa. Pretty damned good.

TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, Mike Farrington’s explanation having satisfied two bemused-looking police officers in uniform but not the jostling crowd that had gathered—more like seventy-five people than thirty or forty—Paha Sapa has shaken hands with Farrington, extricated himself from a boy in oversized tweeds and carrying a notebook who said he was a reporter, and is walking toward Broadway, into the shadow of the tall buildings again, stopping and turning frequently to look back at the towers and the bridge.

“Paha Sapa, now that you’ve got that out of your system, can we go get ready to keep the appointment now?”

Usually the buzz of words in his head is an annoyance to Paha Sapa, but now it makes him feel less alone in a city and world too large for him.

—Yes, General. I’ll head back to the hotel, take a bath, get into a clean shirt, and we’ll head down Park Avenue.

“That’s the first time you’ve ever called me General. Or thought of me that way, as far as I know. Did something happen up there on that bridge when I wasn’t looking or listening?”

Paha Sapa doesn’t answer. He turns right on lower Broadway and starts walking north toward the Empire State Building and the gleaming Chrysler Building and the heart of the heart of the wasichu city. The day is growing warmer. Each time he looks over his shoulder, Paha Sapa sees that the Brooklyn Bridge is dwindling in the distance and partially hidden by intervening buildings, but it is never fully out of sight for long. Just as it will never again be fully out of his thoughts.

By the time he reaches Union Square, his hands are in his pockets and he is whistling “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf”—a song from a cartoon about three little pigs that won’t be released until May, but which Mr. Borglum somehow got a print of (he said direct from Mr. Walt Disney himself) and projected as part of the winter Saturday-night movies that he and Mrs. Borglum host twice a month at the sculptor’s studio.

Behind Paha Sapa, the bridge recedes and is obscured from time to time, but never completely disappears.