Black Hills (38 page)

The conductor, who Paha Sapa heard introduce himself to the grandparent couple as being named Kovacs, clears his throat and gives a superior chuckle.

—
Nothin’ to worry about, ladies and gents… and little ones. Nothing at all. These here steel posts we’re hangin’ from—trunnions, they’re called—could hold ten times the weight of this fine car, even if we were fully loaded.

The seven passengers watch silently as the car begins rising again and the eastern end of the Midway Plaisance and the domes of the White City appear. Beyond the domes, sunlight makes the band of Lake Michigan glow bright and visible above the trees and giant buildings. They see a cluster of ships in the harbor—mere masted points of
horizontal blackness from their exhalted position—and a ferry bringing more Fair visitors to the end of the long arrival pier.

Closer in, the Midway Plaisance stretches east beneath them, filled with happy dark specks. Below and to their left are the red roofs and forested grounds of the German Village. To the right of the Midway rise the domes and minarets and odd spires of the Turkish Village. Beyond the Turkish Village on the right is the large, round, strange structure that holds the simulated Burmese Alps exhibit, and opposite that across the Midway is the Javanese Village known as the Dutch Settlement, across the street from the main Dutch Settlement.

Beyond these structures are the Irish Village on the left, with its popular Donegan Castle and Blarney Stone; the round amphitheater on the right for the animal show; and—farther down, marking the east end of the Midway—the twin and opposing glasswork buildings, Murano on the right and Libby on the left.

As he thinks the word
Libby
, Paha Sapa feels a dull stirring in his skull and wonders if General Custer’s ghost is watching through his, Paha Sapa’s, eyes, listening through his ears. Damn him if he is.

It is while they are stopped next, waiting for another six cars below them to load quickly, that the little boy, no older than five, breaks away from his grandparents and comes running around the car, waving his arms as if he is flying. The boy’s fingers brush Paha Sapa’s bare wrist above his gloves as the child flaps and flutters by.

He realizes then what an attuned state of sensitivity he is in, for at once there is an
into-the-person
vision flash of images and thoughts from the child. Paha Sapa has to clutch the railing at the window and close his eyes as vertigo assails him again.

The elderly couple at the other end of the car, even now calling the wayward child back to them, are named Doyle and Rheva. They are from Indiana. Paha Sapa noticed that the man has a droopy left eye and a strangely downturned mouth, and now—through the little boy’s unfocused memory—he learns of the stroke the year before that caused it. Doyle has a long, thin nose, and Rheva, a slightly plump former beauty with full, flushed cheeks, kind eyes, and shorter-than-the-fashion wavy silver hair, has always been embarrassed by her behind. Everyone in the family—even the little boy—calls it the “DeHaven Butt.”
It is Rheva’s greatest secret, known only by the entire family, that she has never had to purchase or wear a bustle in order to be seen as wearing a bustle. The little boy does not know what a “bustle” is.

The boy’s name is Alex and he has been so inspired by the exhibits at the Fair—especially Mr. Tesla’s and Mr. Edison’s—that his new goal in life is to grow up to invent a mechanical adding machine that can think.

Paha Sapa shakes his head to rid himself of these unwanted, swirling images and words and names and child-memories. His sensitivity to inward-seeing visions right now is as heightened as he’d feared, all because of his proximity to Miss de Plachette… and all the more reason to avoid any possible skin-to-skin contact with Miss de Plachette. He does
not
want to see into her mind or memories. It is very important to him that he does not do that. Not now. Not yet. With luck, never.

He realizes that she is whispering to him.

—
Paha Sapa, are you all right?

He opens his eyes and sees that her gloved hand hovers too near his wrist.

He moves his arm away and smiles.

—
Perfect. Wonderful. I just discovered that I’m afraid of heights, is all.

The guard-conductor with the waxed mustache, Kovacs, looks over at Paha Sapa suspiciously, as if this nonwhite passenger with the long braided hair may go berserk and begin battering the walls, shattering glass, and bending the iron of the door in his wild effort to escape, even though they are a hundred feet up, just as another height-crazed passenger was reported to have done just a week earlier. In that incident, so the newspaper accounts went, a woman finally stopped the crazy man by removing her skirt and throwing it over the man’s head, immediately causing him to become docile.

Paha Sapa knows that such a blinding hood works with panicked horses. Why not with crazed Ferris Wheel passengers? More effective than the sap filled with shot purportedly in the guard’s pocket.

Brakes release, the car wobbles again, and they resume their rise.

It is at the apogee of their circle—
apogee
being a word Paha Sapa learned when the three Jesuits at the tiny tent school on the mountain above Deadwood attempted for a year to drive Greek into his unwilling
head—that Miss de Plachette does something… extraordinary. And changes his life forever.

The car stops suddenly at the top of the Wheel and begins rocking more noticeably than at their previous two stops. Rheva and her granddaughter let out moans. Little Alex shouts with joy at what he probably thinks to be their imminent destruction. Long-nosed Granddad Doyle pats the boy on the head.

The conductor’s mouth slacks open. He cries out—

—
Miss!

The shout is due to the fact that Miss de Plachette has suddenly moved to the center of the car, gathered her long skirt, jumped up onto one of the low, round plush velvet chairs, and is now standing there, balancing easily, very straight, arms full out from her sides, palms down, head back, eyes closed.

—
Miss, please… you mustn’t, ma’am!

The guard, Kovacs, sounds sincerely alarmed, but when he moves toward Rain, Paha Sapa instinctively steps forward to come between them. No man is going to touch Miss de Plachette while he is around.

Smiling broadly, head still far back as if tasting ocean air, Rain seems ready to leap forward and begin soaring out—magically, because of the glaze and wire mesh—through the windows into the blue Illinois sky. Instead, she lowers both arms and offers her right hand to Paha Sapa.

—
Your hand, please, dear sir?

Paha Sapa takes it—grateful for his gloves and hers so that there can be no contact of skin on skin that might trigger any into-vision—and she steps down lightly and gracefully. The guard, Kovacs, returns to his post at the bolted south door and literally saves face by stroking his waxed mustache.

Miss de Plachette speaks softly, no apology audible in her voice.

—
I just wanted to be the highest person in Illinois—perhaps in the country—for a few seconds. I’ve got that out of my system now.

The Wheel begins to move again.

Paha Sapa realizes in that second that he is going to love this woman for the rest of his life.

Paha Sapa says nothing. The two move to the west-facing windows now—the grandparents Rheva and Doyle and little Alex and the other two children giving the madwoman room, but also smiling.

Below them to the west, Paha Sapa and Miss de Plachette look down on the pretend turrets and towers of the Old Vienna attraction. Music from the multiple-domed Algerian Theater filters up to them. Farther up the Midway, a string of ostriches and reindeer from the Laplander Village mingle in wonderful but obscure mixed metaphor. To the north, there is a dark smudge above the city of Chicago and Paha Sapa realizes it must be from all the industry and smokestacks and locomotives and other machines there. He wonders how dark the sky gets in the winter with the hive-city’s tens or hundreds of thousands of coal fires burning. Chicago, he has already seen, is the Black City to the Fair’s pretend White City.

Miss de Plachette smiles and points to the captive balloon farther west along the Midway Plaisance and to their right. The balloon is at least a hundred feet up on its thick tether, but it’s
below
them. (Three days later, on July 9, Paha Sapa will watch from the Wild West Show grounds as dark clouds gather, a funnel cloud appears, and then cyclone winds of more than 100 miles per hour lash the Midway, the Ferris Wheel, and all the buildings and exhibits. Huge glass panes will blow off the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building and a forty-foot segment of roof will be torn off the dome of the Machinery Building. The sudden winds will catch the empty captive balloon before it can be hauled down and the beautiful mushroom of colored silk he and Miss de Plachette are looking at now will be ripped into nine thousand yards of silk rags, many scattered more than a half mile away. Mr. Ferris’s Wheel, on the other hand, filled almost to capacity when the storm strikes it, will weather the wind’s impact without a problem.)

They swoop down and start up again. There is no more loading or pausing. The second revolution is more wonderful than the first.

Paha Sapa knows that the boilers that provide the steam for Ferris’s Wheel, for aesthetic reasons, are more than seven hundred feet away across Lexington Avenue, but he imagines as the great wheel accelerates that he can hear the boilers roar louder. He
knows
that he can hear the steam pressure in the giant cylinders of the thousand-horsepower engine at the base of the wheel rise in volume. One glance at Rain de Plachette’s flushed features and bright eyes tells him that she hears this as well.

The rest is silence. Not even Doyle and Rheva and Alex and the other two children in the opposite corner make a noise. The conductor has turned his back to them and is at the door looking out his own window. The only hint of sound now is the whoosh of the large cabin through the air and the occasional creak of the cage shifting on the overhead trunnions or a low, almost inaudible grind from the gigantic central axle more than seventy feet from them.

The Wheel rises higher, higher, the White City in the east distance coming back into full view as they rise smoothly and silently. Paha Sapa looks out past the wooded island and lagoons and treetops, out to Lake Michigan, and sees the high afternoon sun break through the clouds and shine a single shaft of light down on the waters of the lake. The shaft of sunlight is so bright that everything else seems to fade and darken—the Midway, the White City, the trees and lagoons, the people, the harbor and lake itself—until there is only that powerful searchlight of pure sunshine pouring down on a limited circle of Lake Michigan wave tops far to the east.

Why is that image so hauntingly familiar? Why does it move him so?

Paha Sapa realizes and remembers just as the car heads up over the curve of the high arc, leaving the White City, Lake Michigan, and the prophetic shaft of light behind; then the car completes its voyage over the top and shows them all the western end of the Midway Plaisance and the distant prairies again. Even this view is striking, with the many shades of green and brown receding to the distant horizon—toward the prairies he knows so well a thousand miles west—but also with a web of train tracks and moving locomotives moving in toward Chicago, streaking the sky with their plumes of dark smoke.

But it is not the view that grips Paha Sapa and—he is sure, with no vision tricks necessary—Rain de Plachette on this second revolution and downward rush. It is the pure thrill and pleasure of speed and movement through space. Paha Sapa is surprised at the thought that strikes him next—
Only the
wasichu
can do such things. The Fat Takers are
wakan
in their own way, and it is a powerful magic.

Then it is over and they are stopped and the guard has taken his brass key and unlocked the north door and they are all disembarking the cabin as mobs wait to board on the opposite, south side. The
platforms and steps under girders and metal arches around and beneath the huge Wheel are an environment out of Jules Verne. (The friars at the Deadwood tent school, for some inexplicable reason, had English-language versions—he was sure the friars had translated them themselves—of
Voyage to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
, and the newest,
Around the World in Eighty Days
hidden away in a trunk in their own tent, and Paha Sapa crept in and stole—borrowed—and read all of them within weeks of his learning to read.)

Miss de Plachette’s expression is one of pure joy. She seizes his forearm in a death grip that shuts off all circulation.

—
Oh, Paha Sapa… I would give
anything
to experience that again.

Paha Sapa removes from his pocket another dollar, a week’s wages for him, gently takes her by the elbow, and leads her around through the Jules Verne world-of-the-future girder-and-metal-arch maze to the back of the growing line waiting to board on the south side. He surreptitiously checked his watch while they were still riding. They have time.