Sunday, September 26, 1999 -- 2:30 a.m.

Yesterday I took Mom up into the Hills to see the leaves. She asked. She doesn't ask for much, so when she does, you go.

We went up Spearfish Canyon the long way, windows down and the heater on, which is how she likes it. The aspens are turning. The whole canyon is yellow, gold like somebody lit it from inside, with the dark pines in between and the creek down at the bottom and the rock walls going straight up. Every mile or so she said, "Look," and I looked.

We stopped at the falls and she walked down slow in her good shoes, holding my arm, and stood there a long time. She hummed something under her breath, an old song, the kind she sang when I was little and couldn't sleep. I didn't ask what it was. Some things you don't ask. You just stand next to them.

On the way home she said, "Your dad and I came up here once, before you were born. He was sober that day." That's all she said. I've been thinking about it all night. One good day she kept for forty-four years. I wonder which of mine my kids will keep.

First real cold tonight. Eleven rooms. Hunters coming soon, and the snow after that, and the long nights, which are my nights. Coffee's on. The buffalo's limping along out front.

Toksa ake. See you later.

Tuesday, September 21, 1999 -- 3:30 a.m.

Derek came by the desk tonight at eleven-thirty, which he's never done. He'd been at a party out past the airport. Somebody's older brother bought beer. He didn't have any. He wanted me to know that, and he wanted to ask me something, and it took him about forty minutes of reading the brochure rack to ask it.

He asked, "When did you know?" Meaning when did I know I had a problem.

I told him the truth. I knew for about fifteen years before I did anything about it. Knowing isn't the hard part. Everybody knows. I told him about my dad, which he's heard some of, and my dad's dad, which he hadn't. I told him it runs in families the way tall does, the way basketball does, and he's got a little more chance of it than the guy next to him, and that isn't a curse, it's information. Like a weather report. You dress for it.

He listened. He didn't say much. Then he said, "Okay." Then he ate two of the powdered donuts Mrs. Bhakta leaves out for the morning people and drove home. He called when he got in. He didn't have to. He called anyway.

Sixteen years old, standing in a motel lobby at midnight asking his dad questions. That's a different family than the one I came out of. We made it, him and me and his mom and Ron and a lot of people. It's new.

Friday, September 17, 1999 -- 4:20 a.m.

Quiet night. Seven rooms. I'm reading a little book Harlan lent me, by a Roman emperor who wrote notes to himself. One of the first things he says, more or less, is that when you get up you should expect to meet rude and ungrateful people that day, and do your job right anyway. I didn't know emperors worked nights. Eighteen hundred years and it's still good advice for the desk.

Sunday, September 12, 1999 -- 2:45 a.m.

Every September an old man comes and stays three nights. He's eighty-one this year, from Iowa, and drives himself in a big Oldsmobile with the seat way up. In 1935 he was seventeen and came out here with the CCC, the government work camps, planting trees and building roads and little dams in the Hills. He comes back every year to look at the trees he planted. "They're big now," he says, like they're his grandkids.

He always asks me the same question, sometime around midnight when he can't sleep and comes down for decaf: whether it bothers me, him coming out here to love these hills when they were ours first. He asks it honestly. So I answer it honestly. This year I told him it would bother me a lot more if he didn't love them.

The Hills were ours. Paha Sapa. The treaty said so. The Supreme Court said so too, in 1980, and said the government owed us money for them, and the tribes wouldn't take the money, because taking it would mean the Hills were sold. The money is still sitting somewhere getting bigger. My mom says she'd rather be poor with a claim than rich with a receipt. That's my mother.

His trees are the tall ponderosas along the road up toward Keystone. I've driven past them a thousand times. I'll look at them different now.

Thursday, September 2, 1999 -- 3:00 a.m.

Derek started his junior year this week. He's had his license since March, and when I'm sleeping days he borrows the Buick for open gym and brings it back with the seat pushed all the way back and the radio on a station that plays a band that sounds like somebody fell down the stairs with a guitar.

He's six-one. Varsity this year, the coach says, if he works. He works. He's out on the court behind the school at seven in the morning when I'm driving home, shooting by himself, the ball going chk, chk, chk on the cement. I honk. He doesn't look up. That's the right answer.

Mom's sugar is steady. She walks now, every morning, down the road to the mailboxes and back with Uncle Wilbur's dog. A mile and a half. She says the dog got fat on her fry bread so now they both need it. She hides the fry bread from me. I know every hiding place in that kitchen. I used to have a few of my own.

Monday, August 23, 1999 -- 2:10 a.m.

Shawna drove herself back to Vermillion yesterday. She bought a car with her gift shop money, an '89 Corsica with a hundred and forty thousand miles and one blue door, and Ron went over the whole thing with her in his driveway for two evenings and said it'll get there. Ron's word on a car is good.

I got up at five, which for me is the middle of the night, and drove over to Arlene's to see her off. She had the star quilt in a garbage bag on the passenger seat. She hugged her mom, and Ron, and Derek, who pretended he didn't want to be hugged, and me. She said, "I'll call when I get there. Collect." I said, "Drive safe." She looked at me. She said, "I know, Dad."

I stood in the street and watched the blue door go around the corner.

Last year I drove her the whole four hundred miles, and it was the best day I'd had in about twenty years. This year I watched her taillights for about eight seconds. That's how it's supposed to go, I know. You drive them, and then you watch them. Nobody tells you the watching is the harder part.

She called at 3:30 in the afternoon. Collect. "I'm here." That's all. Two words and a dollar-something. Best money I spent all week.

Monday, August 9, 1999 -- 4:00 a.m.

Rally week's over. The last of them pulled out this morning, a roar you could feel in your fillings. Mr. Bhakta counted the money twice and then went and lay down. His daughter's wedding got paid for two years ago; now he says the rally is paying for his son's college. Everything that roars pays for somebody's college.

The best guest of the week was a guy from Oklahoma, sixty years old, white beard down to his belt buckle, who came down every morning at three for coffee. The third night he saw the coin on my key ring, the one Harlan gave me, and he pulled the same kind out of his vest pocket. Twenty-two years. We didn't need to say anything else about it. We drank coffee and watched the rain come across the parking lot and talked about motorcycles, which I know nothing about, and our kids, which I'm learning.

Every night the lot was full of beer and noise till two. It didn't get to me like it did my first rally. That's not because I'm strong. It's because I've got five years of four a.m.s behind me, and a steel thermos, and a guy from Oklahoma.

Sunday, July 25, 1999 -- 3:20 a.m.

Some guests this week. No names; that's the rule.

A boy on a bicycle riding from Oregon to Maine, with his whole life in two bags on the back wheel. Twenty years old, legs like fence posts. He asked if there was a cheaper room. There isn't. I gave him the one by the ice machine that's loud, and threw in breakfast from the vending machine and my old road atlas. He's going across the bottom of the state, the same road I took with Shawna. I told him watch for Winner. It's a real town.

A family with a U-Haul trailer, moving from California to Minnesota. The dad has a job there. The mom told me she's never seen snow. I didn't tell her anything. She'll find out.

And a woman at 3:10 Thursday morning with a little girl asleep on her shoulder, who paid cash and asked me not to tell anybody she was here if anybody called. Nobody called. I didn't have to lie. In the morning Mrs. Bhakta gave the little girl a banana and a coloring book from somewhere, and they left early, headed west. I hope wherever that is, it's better.

That's the desk. People come in at night carrying whatever they're carrying. You hand them a key. You don't ask.

Thursday, July 8, 1999 -- 2:40 a.m.

The President came down to Pine Ridge yesterday. First one since Roosevelt, people say. Mom went. Uncle Wilbur drove her, and they got there early in the morning and stood in the heat for hours with half the reservation. She wore her good dress and her sneakers because of her foot. She got to shake his hand in the line. She says he held on a long time and looked her in the eye, and that his hands were soft "like a man who never fixed his own truck."

I asked her what she thought. She said, "We'll see." That's what the old people say about everything Washington promises. They've been saying "we'll see" for about a hundred and thirty years. Still, Wilbur says she kept that hand in her lap the whole ride home, like she was holding something in it.

I worked. The desk doesn't care who's president. Two families from Germany tonight, both on the same tour, both asking me about Winnetou. If you don't know, Winnetou is an Apache chief in some old German books that every kid over there reads, and they come all this way hoping to meet him. I told them he's not on shift tonight. They laughed. Germans are good guests. They fold the towels.

Earlier: January to June 1999 · 1998 · 1997