The last stand of the late General George Armstrong Custer

They're circling now ... we shot the last of the horses as a bulwark and now he's at the centre with the severed chord of a dial-up telephone dangling and disconnected before his very fair visage.

This is Custer in dream and we are the young men reading the story of the last stand whilst the Lakota and Cheyenne ride out from the pages of  'Bury my heart at Wounded Knee'.  There, look! The gatling guns are long behind us now and no sign of help to hand.  Just an endless William S Burroughs cut-up dub that reaches a finger into the dial of the disconnected telephone and pulls it around and around.

The bell rings …

A blue-gloved hand that shoos us away in the sweating heat-filled dusty afternoon of long-reach copse. Shooting bullets senselessly into the flies, pooled and limpid in a nightmare visitation of a telephone that rings and rings and rings …

He dare not answer it for fear of failing.

The Lakota Cheyenne rise hot tail-feathers up and plunge deep to the ranks of serried and terrified cavalrymen who have now surrendered all hope of ever seeing wives and children and loved ones ever again. Why won't Custer just answer the 'phone?

He is lost and forever at the potential crossing point on the Chickahominy River where his dream splits in three and dust-choked soldiers scurry to keep pace. Flanks exposed they whither and die in the relentless fusillade. This is not going well, but the late General George Armstrong Custer is baptised in cinnamon-scented hair oil.

A disconnected telephone rings across the battle-field of Little Big Horn.

There is no-one to answer for two bullets have penetrated the now lifeless form of our hero, struck down from the saddle by the blows of Buffalo Calf Road Woman. 

He stands …. no more.