The Ploughmen: A Novel Read online

  The little car rattled and bumped slowly once again up the hill to the unlit cabin. Millimaki stood leaning on the hood of the car for its warmth and his wife lay as before on the rear seat. The dog had come to the wire of his kennel and he whimpered softly.

  As Val stood, dusk went to dark. From among the crevasses in the coulee rimrock to the south bats emerged by the hundreds and they swarmed among the constellations burning coldly through the black palisade of the pines. The single yard light had flickered on. He went to the rear door to wake her. She lay with one hand beneath her head and he stood looking at her through the dusty window glass. In the queer light she looked made of wax.

  EIGHT

  As he’d been instructed, Val after his shift the following week reported to the sheriff’s office where he was ushered into the inner sanctum by the secretary with a brief backhand wave, the woman’s eyes, inches from her monitor’s screen, blank and iridescent as an insect’s. Within, Millimaki stood before the man’s desk with its bedlam of paper and plastic bags with esoteric articles enclosed and he felt a sudden pang of guilt, as though he were about to violate some priestly pact.

  The sheriff regarded him over the top of his half-glasses. He said, “Did I send for you?”

  “Sort of, sir. You told me last week to come and talk to you. About Gload. You said if I heard anything.”

  The man stared at Val critically. “It would seem the remedy I recommended for your malady has failed to work.”

  “I’ve been trying it. For some reason drinking beer that early in the day gives me a headache.”

  “It’s not early, exactly, when you’re on graveyards. For Christ sake, it’s Miller Time.”

  “I can’t get my head to figure that out.”

  The sheriff wagged his head sadly and the glasses that seemed so out of place on his face slid to the end of his nose. He pushed them up and leaned his head back to study the younger man through the magnifying lenses, as if that scumbled focus might present a more lucid picture.

  “You still partnered up with that old man?” he said.

  “I guess so.”

  “You must be his long-lost spawn, for Christ sake. I never knew of him to say much more than two words to any uniform and those two were ‘Fuck you.’”

  “I can’t explain it.”

  “On top of that he’s been talking to Wexler and that really puzzles me. Maybe the old sonofabitch is getting soft. Or soft in the head.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “That he was talking to Wexler or soft in the head?”

  “Wexler.”

  “He never mentioned it?”

  “Well, just that Wexler had been to see him. Not so much that he was really talking to him.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

  Val didn’t say anything. The sheriff busied himself with the mess atop his desk.

  “So what do you have?”

  “He told me about an old woman he killed.”

  “The hell he did.” The older man took down the glasses and set them among the papers strewn on his desk. He was suddenly interested. He rifled through the top desk drawer and came up with a small brown pipe, looked into its bowl and put the stem in the corner of his mouth.

  “Yes he did.”

  “Terrific. Did you see anything on his sheet about it?”

  Millimaki held his wrists crossed before him and he held his cap by the brim and stood staring at the county logo on the face of it. “I don’t know if this is what you had in mind when you said to come in, sir.”

  “Well, you let me decide that, Deputy.”

  “It was over east, in Wibaux, I think.”

  “And? That doesn’t make any difference.”

  Val looked out the window. “He was fourteen.”

  “Fourteen years old.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Christ, that had to have been, what, sixty-some years ago?”

  “Sixty-five.”

  “Well, that doesn’t do us a lot of good, does it?”

  Millimaki stood fingering the bill of his cap. “He said it didn’t bother him. Not for long, anyway.”

  “Well, that’s our boy.”

  “That he saw after that he wouldn’t have to do real work ever again.”

  The sheriff sat back in his chair. “The beginning of a long and colorful career.” He placed his hands together beneath his chin as if in prayer, steepled his index fingers as in the child’s game. He ran his eyes over the thin sallow figure of the young deputy.

  “And how is Gail?” he said.

  “She’s okay. It’s actually Glenda.”

  “For Christ sake, of course it is.”

  “Fine. She’s fine.”

  The sheriff stared at him. Val looked toward the single window, high and arched and brilliant in the early morning despite the calligraphy of water streaks and splashes of bird shit from the vile and mumbling pigeons roosted in the rain gutters at the roof edge. Because it had once been part of the jail itself, there were bars on the window, and their shadows lay across the floor and laddered the far wall.

  “Your mouth says fine but your face says otherwise.”

  “She’s having a hard time with me being on nights.”

  “Harder than you.”

  “Harder than me, yessir. I think so.”

  “It’s tough. I know. I did it. We all did it.”

  “I know. I’m not asking for anything.”

  “I know you’re not. I couldn’t hardly change things, anyway, Val. It’s all low-man-on-the-totem-pole stuff. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “This might not be the best analogy, but it’s kind of like breaking a horse. It’s tough on everybody at first and then pretty quick all parties involved don’t think anything of it. It’s just how it is.”

  “I might choose to not tell her that comparison if it’s all the same to you.”

  “My wife if she heard it would leave me singing like Liberace for a week. For some reason women don’t like being compared to livestock.” He removed the cold pipe from his mouth and sat looking at it. “And that might be the extent of my wisdom on the matter.”

  “That’s more than some.”

  The sheriff smiled. “More than some, yes it is.” He put the pipe in his mouth again and began to pass his hands over the mess of files and paper on his desk as if waiting for one or the other to insinuate its urgency. He said, “Do you feel the need to take some time off? I could arrange that.”

  “No, sir. It’ll be all right. Plus, I don’t think it’s a good time to lay off as far as Gload’s concerned.”

  “Well, as far as that goes, I don’t think it matters. It looks pretty good we’ve got him on this guy up north of town.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “You read his M.O. on making his guys anonymous, did you not?”

  “Where he takes the teeth and hands? Did he not do it this time?”

  “Oh, no. Our boy is thorough. It isn’t that. But it seems this poor kid had had open-heart surgery here a while back. Two years and some. What they’re saying is that they can identify him by the way he was put back together. The chest-crackers have a kind of signature way of wiring them back up.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Hell, I didn’t either. And safe to say John Gload didn’t or he’d have carved the chest right out of him and thrown that in the drink, too.”

  “Is that what he did with the head and stuff?”

  “What the kid White said. Threw them over the dam. Hell, that head’s probably rolling along outside of St. Louis by now.” The sheriff pointed his pipestem vaguely out the window to indicate where that city lay. “Anyway, your old boy’s going away until he dies. It would be nice to know where all the bodies are buried—metaphorical and otherwise—but you don’t have to milk him anymore if you don’t want. He’s had it.” He looked down, selected an envelope seemingly at random and studied it through
the half-lenses of his small glasses. He said, “The end of a long and colorful career.”

  “I guess so.”

  The sheriff laid the envelope down and became preoccupied with some other and he turned his head oddly to read it as though it were fixed to the desktop and could not be turned. He rested his elbows atop the clutter and held the pipe by its bowl in one hand and sat reading. Millimaki stood quietly. Then he put his cap on.

  The sheriff did not look up. “Remember what he is, Val. Think of what he did to that young man out there and how he did it and how many others he did the same way. He doesn’t deserve your pity.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He was almost out the door when the sheriff said, “And, Val. That was good work on the old boy with the Buick or Pontiac or whatever it was. His family was very grateful.”

  “Buick, sir. And it wasn’t anything, really. He didn’t get too far and Tom went right to him.”

  “Well.” The sheriff laid his pipe carefully on the jumble atop his desk, as if it might shatter or disturb some order there known only to him. “How long has it been?”

  “Fifteen months and a couple weeks. Or thereabouts. Not that I’m counting.”

  “You’ll get past this streak, Val. It all equals out.”

  “How so?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Just that some you find alive who should be dead. Some you find dead after a warm night in the trees with nothing more than a bruise on their shin.”

  “With all due respect, sir, that doesn’t even make sense.”

  “It doesn’t have to make sense, son. You should know that much by now. But it’s the way it is.”

  “I’ll just have to trust you on that point, sir.”

  “You do that.” He took up the unlit pipe and stuck it in his mouth and waved Millimaki away. “Now go home and be nice to your wife.”

  * * *

  That day he forsook his routine beside the river and drove north of town to view the scene of the disinterment. The yellow crime scene tape had been left or forgotten and it writhed among the weed bines like some exotic jungle viper and flapped and snapped in the wind. He sat on the ground near the very place John Gload had stood conducting the young man’s burial with the barrel of his pistol. Millimaki could see where the hole had been, the earth dished and dark from having been so recently turned and much of it had been sifted for evidence. It lay at the edges of the hole as fine as talc. He imagined the thing they’d dug up would have been, after two months, no more than a rawhide headless mannequin, the incriminating Frankenstein scar at its breastbone hidden beneath dirty rags. For John Gload there would have been much sawing and twisting, stubborn elastic tendons to be cut or bent over a knee and snapped. Vertebrae would have to be unlocked, the head twisted. He tried to imagine the sound. Little blood had been found at the scene, so Gload must have bled the victim somewhere else. There had been a time, he thought, not long ago, when coyotes had come tacking out of the night with the alien scent in their nostrils to roll in the gore and muddy their teeth.

  He took up a handful of dirt and let it sift through his fingers. The wind came down from the northern benchlands and rattled the strange larval pods on the yuccas and brought the faint thin cries of gulls he could see afloat and stationary as kites against the morning sky. He tried to reconcile the avuncular old man tendering comfort and counsel from his dark cage with the creature who could placidly dismember a fellow human being. A lifetime ago while eating an apple (an apple, Val thought, like me that day, eating that apple) beside railroad tracks on a golden spring day, John Gload had observed in himself with a curious detachment the absence of passion. Perhaps he was somehow exempt from responsibility at all, could no more be blamed than a child born without feet could be blamed for his inability to run.

  Millimaki sat in the dirt staring blankly at the grave, benumbed by his sleeplessness. Gload seemed capable of kindness, but it may have been just a kind of vestigial feature, like the webbed and blunted limbs of thalidomide children—a half-developed grotesquery that made him more pitiable for the reminder of what it might have been like to be whole.

  For the rest of us though, thought Millimaki, the distance from reason to rage is short, a frontier as thin as parchment and as frail, restraining the monster. It was there in everyone, he thought. It was there in himself. A half second of simple blind fury and the hatchet falls down. He stared at the patch of turned earth where so recently a body had been. At some point, he thought wearily, it was only meat.

  He sat for some time, the wind coursing through the sparse bluestem and whipping the yellow tape. His pallid hands were in his lap and he stared into them. The sun felt good on his face and he closed his eyes. Fifteen minutes later he woke with a start. He’d fallen asleep sprawled in the grass above the grave and when he raised up there was dirt stuck to the side of his face and one arm was numb and dead. He sat up looking around wildly, as if someone might have crept up on him in that lonesome place. “For Christ sake,” he said aloud. “Look at your ass, sleeping in the dirt like a bindlestiff.”

  * * *

  The weeds had grown up in the road between the wheel ruts and they hissed along the undercarriage as he climbed toward the cabin. On the opposite coulee side among the rimrocks, marmots scuttled and froze and it appeared at that distance that the rocks themselves moved. The church-steeple tops of the lodgepole behind the little house quaked in the wind. His wife’s car was still in its place and he could see Tom pacing in his kennel. He parked and walked across to the dog run. The shepherd sat and whined. “Hey kid, how you doing?” He stroked the dog’s nose with two fingers through the chain link. He looked toward the house, and the windows in the early sunlight dazzled his tired eyes.

  He went in and hung his hat on a 16-penny nail driven into a wall log and when he turned he saw her standing at the sink in her street clothes and she didn’t look at him.

  “Hey,” he said, “how come you’re not at work?”

  “It’s my day off. You should know that.”

  “Is it Tuesday? Man, my head-clock is all screwed up.”

  “Your everything is screwed up, Val.”

  He expected her to turn and laugh but she did not.

  “What’s Tom doing locked up?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Glenda,” he said, “why’s the dog penned?”

  She spoke to the window. “Because he kept following me around.” There were no dishes in the sink and no water running. She stood gripping the counter edge. “Every time I made a trip to the car he followed me and he followed me back and I just got tired of it.”

  He stood for a while looking at her and then walked onto the porch. He could see boxes jumbled in the backseat of the Datsun and clothes hanging from the hooks above each side window. He went back in and stood behind her. The window was a bright rectangle framed with box elder trees and the coulee rim beyond was green with spring and the sky the kind of blue, with its Van Gogh brushstrokes of cloud, that had made them, in the early years, jump in the truck and drive the country with no purpose whatever. It was enough to be together under the spring sun in the greening and open country. He stood looking out at it, over her shoulder. Her yellow hair glowed with the sun in it and he suddenly wanted to take it in his hands, press it to his face.

  “It’s a driving-and-drinking sky we got today.”

  She studied her hands before her, glanced up briefly to the perfect day. She said, “Where have you been? You should have been home two hours ago.”

  He made a wiping motion across his face. There was still a trace of dirt on his cheek and in his hair. “I had to go up north of town and look at a site. Really, I forgot it was your day off.”

  “A site,” she said.

  “We found a body up there.”

  She turned then and he could see she had been crying. “Oh. Well. A body. That’s okay. At least someone you can relate to.”

  “What’s going on, Glenda?”

  She looked at him.
“What’s on your face? Jesus, Val, you look like a homeless man.”

  He said, “I want you to tell me what’s going on.”

  “I’m going to stay in town.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Tonight. For a while.”

  “How long a while?” Millimaki said.

  “I don’t know. Indefinitely.” She put the back of one wrist to each eye in turn and swept back her hair as though to put herself right. “I would have to say indefinitely.”

  “You seem to have it all mapped out,” he said. “Isn’t this something that we ought to have at least talked about beforehand? For Christ sake, Glenda.”

  “I tried to talk about it but every time I looked up you were asleep or on some other planet.”

  “That might be a little bit true, but goddamn it, I can’t sleep anymore.”

  “But it’s more than that.”

  “More than what?”

  “More than your emotional absence.”

  He looked at her. She had composed herself in earnest and stonily studied a point above his head. “That sounds like something out of a book,” he said.

  “It describes our situation.”

  “When did this turn into a situation? For Christ sake, I come home and take off my hat and I’m in a situation.”

  “All I know is I can’t think here and I have to have time to think.”

  “You’ve got all the time in the world for that.”

  “You’re not listening, goddamn it. I said I can’t think here.”

  “Why not? I thought you loved it here. You’ve said that any number of times. This is your house, goddamn it.”

  “I can’t think.” She enunciated each word slowly, as if she spoke to a foreigner or a lip reader. “And I feel small.”

  “All this goddamn thinking,” Val said. He rubbed his hand over his face. He felt dull, his arms heavy as stones. He stared at her. Everything she said—her posture, the set of her jaw as she spoke to somewhere beyond him—seemed rehearsed. Millimaki in his fatigue fought the feeling that two other people were playing this scene, their doppelgängers, while he and his wife stood to the side merely watching.