The Ploughmen: A Novel Read online

  “I got a feeling he spent the day getting his ass full of prickly pear.”

  Millimaki turned to look at him then. “Why would you have a feeling like that, John?”

  “Here’s the deal, Valentine. He’s got it in his head there’s bodies buried all over the place out there, other side of the river. A regular goddamn battlefield. Figures if he can find them he’ll be the man of the hour. Detective First Grade. And especially,” he said, “if he’s the one finds them instead of you.”

  “How’d he get an idea like that?”

  The old man leered and began to shudder imperceptibly. “Ambition is a dangerous thing, Val.”

  “You shouldn’t do that, John, no shit. He could make it bad for you.”

  The old convict shook his head and his black eyes sparkled. The shuddering became more pronounced and Val thought he might be cold in the orange suit, thin and loose at the seams from a thousand launderings. “Oh, Christ,” Gload said. “Oh, Christ almighty, it would be worth it.” He wheezed and water sprang up in his eyes. “I got this picture in my head of him running up and down them hills with his notebook and a spade. Running and writing and digging and running some more. Oh sweet Christ on a crutch.” From his pursed lips came a series of snorts and sharp breaths. Val for a moment thought he may be beset by a fit. Small tears began to leak from the corners of Gload’s eyes. He leaned forward over his knee, shaking and swinging his great head like a drunken bear. Finally he wheezed, “Good Lord.” He ran the backs of his chained hands across his eyes and passed his hands over the huge dome of his head to lay back his hair. It was as close to happy as Val had ever seen Gload and the old man finally sat gasping and smiling his strange equine smile. The sun had fallen behind the courthouse and as they sat on their bench in the long blue shadow, small birds came and went to nests hidden among the leafed branches of the elms. Gload turned his attention there and seemed to address with great seriousness the trees, the sky beyond circumfused at that hour with sorrel light.

  “He’ll take your legs out from under you, Val, make no mistake about that.”

  “I’m not worried about it.”

  “You oughta be. I’m dead serious about this.”

  “John, I imagine you’ve heard the old thing about honor among thieves. Well, there damn sure is honor among law enforcement people, too.”

  “Total bullshit, Valentine. What there is among thieves is turpitude.” He smiled. “Now that right there is a hell of a useful word.”

  The old man stared after the sparrows long after they disappeared into the dusk of the leafy canopy. The church bell began to toll and he looked to Val’s watch, which he held up for Gload to read.

  “We ought to get on over, John. You’ll miss your supper.”

  Gload dropped his head and seemed to study the tops of his shoes, the thin, dechromed chains around his socks. Presently he said, “In any profession you care to name there are the good and the not so good. Not necessarily good and bad, just good and something short of that. Think about it. For every doctor graduated first in his class there’s the one who come out last. Still gets to call himself a doctor, though. Teachers the same. And cops. They ain’t all going to be good. There’s degrees. It’s a simple matter of fact. Fact of life.”

  “I won’t argue that. But it’s just that some guys have a different approach than others. Doesn’t necessarily make them bad cops.”

  Gload only smiled. “I’m going to tell you a little story here, Val.”

  Though he had only just looked at it, Millimaki consulted his watch again. “You’re going to miss the meatloaf, John, if we don’t go over.”

  “Couple more minutes.”

  “About the only thing worth a damn.”

  The old man looked over at him. “It is a loaf, true enough, but meat? The jury’s still out.”

  “In any case.”

  The old man sat forward again, his chained hands balanced on his thighs like a man at prayer. Then he sat back against the bench and patted his breast pocket. “Oh, hell,” he said. “Would you do me the favor, Val?”

  The deputy reached into the breast pocket of Gload’s coveralls and removed his smokes and matches. He shook out a cigarette and the old man took it and put it to his lips, his hands in their cuffs paired holding it there as if it were imbued with a great weight. Val struck the match and held it out and the old man moved his head to the flame in a benedictory nod. He drew on it and took it from his mouth with his paired hands. A car went by on the one-way street, teenaged boys already drunk on a beautiful spring evening and they hooted and jeered at the two men, the words tumbling away down the avenue in the rattle of muffler and the blue contrail of exhaust. Faggots. Jailbirds.

  “Tough guys,” Val said.

  “Just rudeness is what it is.”

  As they watched the car recede, the streetlights began to flutter and shortly the light above the jailhouse door came on. Val said, “I need to get you back.”

  “A minute, Val,” he said. “Humor an old man. Then we can go in.” He smoked. “This is something that happened here, oh I guess thirty years ago now.” He stopped and smiled, looking as he did again into the green vault overhead. “Thirty years. Jesus Christ. The years do go.” And still gazing fondly upward he began to recount a night from his young manhood. It was a time, he said, when he was at the height of his powers. “Not bragging or anything. But I was.”

  He asked Millimaki if he’d ever told him about his days playing cards in Butte and the deputy said he had. He said there had been a card game with a Chinaman and that he was a real China Chinaman and that he could be barely understood. But poker was a language unto itself and besides it was a game that required little in the way of speech so it didn’t matter. The game went long into the night and Gload was well ahead and going along nicely but what caught his eye was the rings on the foreigner’s fingers, outsized and electric beneath the low lamp. He recalled that the man was a bit of a dandy, his hair upswept with reeking pomade and gleaming blue-black like a plasticine hat. The Chinaman twisted the rings on his fingers in sequence, a kind of nervous tic, changing the fanned cards from hand to hand, and though Gload could not read the tic as card-tell he read in it the value of the rings.

  Gload paused, smiled. “Let me tell you something, Val. It’s just like a guy with a full wallet and maybe you didn’t know this, but a guy with a full wallet will keep reaching back and putting his hand on it, patting it, like. That’s a giveaway. That’s just a little tip for you or cheap advice, if you happen to be the guy with the big wallet. So I knew this Chinaman’s rings were worth something, by the way he was fooling with them.” Val waited, thinking more advice was forthcoming but Gload only sat, erect and staring into the trees and then he continued.

  The man was a big bettor and a fair enough cardplayer and he turned the rings constantly, good hand or bad and Gload quickly gave up on that as a way of reading him. His plans began to shape themselves out of the smoke and gloom and they went beyond a game of chance. Chance was not at issue. The night wore on and John Gload from behind his cards studied the man for size and weight, for the fight in him.

  Finally he said only that it was a good score. When the game broke up he merely rose and followed the man casually into the alley and killed him. He’d not seen him upright for the entire night and was surprised at how small the man was and how insubstantial, almost like a child in his embrace.

  Gload paused and requested another smoke, lit it from the short butt of the previous one and then methodically ground out the stub on the edge of the bench and put it in the breast pocket of his jumpsuit. Millimaki sat mesmerized, found he’d been holding his breath. The old man said, “The hell of it was, I couldn’t get them rings off. Sonofabitch Chinaman must have been eating salt by the fistful.” He paused, flexed his own thick fingers. “There’s some more cheap advice for you, Val—go light on the salt. Salt killed more people than Hitler. Or that other one. The Russian.”

  With his head down a
nd occasionally turning to regard Millimaki’s face, the old man talked on for some time. Val looked over at the jail across the street where already the windows with their latticework of dark bars were burning yellow in the failing light. The small plain birds rose chittering into the harbor of trees.

  The old man saw Millimaki look toward the jail and said, “Bear with me just a second. This is going somewheres, I promise.”

  One of the other players found the luckless Chinaman, sitting spraddle-legged on the alley bricks, the pool of his blood throbbing in the light of a single neon beaconing its lurid color in that dim place. John Gload had held the oriental’s throat with one hand against his calling out and when found the little man with his scent of sweet flowers sat with his windpipe crushed and mouth agape as though poised to burst into song. His eyes were wide and they pulsed in the light too with blood pooled at his hands and the great puddle of it between his legs, seeping slowly then from the hole just below his sternum.

  The cardplayer had gone into the alleyway to relieve himself but instead stood gaping and vomited down the front of his shirt and ran wordlessly back into the room where the players save two still sat about the table smoking and finishing their whiskey ditches before going home. They stared at the mute ashen statue pointing toward the dark and they rose and followed him and when the police arrived they found them circling the Chinaman and the Chinaman held his place in the circle much as he had earlier.

  The players spoke with the police in their turn and dispersed, some to their sleeping wives, some to spare and musty bachelor rooms two floors above the card room that would seem that night emptier still.

  Among the bills and change in his pocket the Chinese man had an assortment of pills in a plastic bag and John Gload folded the bills into his own pockets and emptied the pills with a grunt of disgust and put the man’s fingers with their contrary prizes in the bag. He went unhurriedly down the cobbles of the dark alley and kept to the shadows of the awnings and coigns of the old union halls and by the time he got to his car, no more than ten minutes had passed since he’d thrown in his last hand.

  Through the starless night he drove north with the window down despite the cold. He stopped at a roadside pull-out at Elk Park Pass where icy spring water came sluicing from a pipe into a stone trough and he washed his hands and the knife and stripped off his trousers and shirt, which were damp yet and stained with the dead Chinaman’s dark arterial blood. He transferred his prizes to the pockets of his fresh pants and then went lurching like a blind man among pines and brush in the pitch-dark and buried his clothes under duff and deadfall. At the car he pared his nails beneath the dome light. He looked into his red eyes in the rearview mirror for a long moment and palmed back his hair and pulled once again onto the blacktop. Twice as he drove he was forced to swerve the Oldsmobile into the ditch weeds to avoid mule deer standing in the road like lawn statuary with phosphorescent eyes. Gravel rang in the wheelwells. The radio in that remote country was alive with static but he hummed to the sporadic music nonetheless and the pavement rolled along under his headlights like an endlessly spinning stage prop.

  The sun rose red and irresolute in an August sky hazy from distant fires and found John Gload that morning passing through high plains and the buttes of famous western paintings in the near distance began to take shape in roseate geometry, their tabletops afire and from the shadowed slopes birds of prey drifted out over the ripening wheat fields. The highway patrol car passed him going south and he could see its occupant’s head swivel and in that instant the light on the cartop began to pulse and the car swung about on the steaming asphalt, through the median in a maelstrom of dust and trash and was behind him, wailing.

  He erupted out the passenger side door and through the ditch weeds and took the barbed wire right-of-way fence with one step. The wheat stalks rasped against his legs as he ran but because of the slope of the ground and the difficult purchase of his feet in the soft furrows he seemed to proceed as if in some recurrent nightmare of running and the near-ripe grain flew about him like bees driven from a hive and then he heard the hiss of the first bullet and felt it go by and splat into a rock twenty feet beyond him at the level of his head and so he stopped. He fell to the ground as though in exhaustion and with his head below swaying grain he pulled the Chinaman’s fingers from his bloodied pockets, took them from the plastic bag, dug a hole in the soft earth and put them in. He continued forward on his hands and knees, dug another hole for the knife and then he stopped.

  “All right, all right,” he called. “You got me.”

  He did not turn but could hear the thud of the patrolman’s boots coming across the field and then he could hear the whish-hiss of the wheat stalks on his trousers and then at last the labored breathing.

  “Don’t move a fucking muscle,” the man said. He was breathing very hard. “You sonofabitch.”

  “You got me,” Gload said. “I know I must of been speeding. Didn’t know that crate could even go that fast.”

  “Shit, speeding,” the officer wheezed. “My ass speeding.”

  “Well, I ain’t drunk, if that’s what it is,” Gload said. “I’ll walk the line for you. I’m cold sober.”

  “Shut the fuck up.” Gload had taken a kneeling position, still facing the way he had run and he could see ahead of him a small plane in the distance lift off into the perfect blank sky without a sound. It seemed to arise from among the strips of wheat. He felt the barrel-tip press into the base of his skull.

  “This is definitely cocked and I’m nervous and I’m breathing real hard,” the patrolman said. “And there ain’t anybody around for a long long ways to tell how it was you come to have your face splattered on the ground. So don’t twitch a eyelash while I put these on you. Put your hands back.”

  “No, sir,” Gload said. “I ain’t going to die on account of a speeding ticket.”

  “Stand up now.”

  He stood. He turned to face the man then and the sound of the Beechcraft suddenly came to him and above his breathing and the hard breathing of the patrolman he began to hear the whirr of grasshoppers among the amber stems and from the right-of-way fence posts the warble of meadowlarks proclaiming the glory of that day.

  “Okay, goddamn it, where’s them fingers at?”

  “I’d show you but they’re cuffed up.”

  “The Chinaman fingers, asshole.”

  “Chinaman fingers?”

  The plastic bag he’d thrown aside hung atop a clump of wheat stalks and wavered there. The patrolman glanced at it briefly and Gload thought, Blow, wind. He jangled his wrist cuffs and the man looked back to him and the bag filled with air and went skeltering over the grain field like a child’s balloon and disappeared.

  “Here. Stand out of the way.” Gload took two sideways steps in the wheat. “Stand there.” The patrolman, a man of perhaps forty-five, began to search about in the wheat, one hand with his service revolver held straight out and his eyes sweeping the ground under their feet. From a distance he might have seemed to be performing some strange ritual dance with the stoic and smiling John Gload for a partner.

  “Are they in the car?” he said. “You wouldn’t have left them in the car, would you?”

  “Officer, you’re making my head hurt.”

  “Shit.”

  They made their way back through the grain field and at the car the lawman spread Gload on the hot car hood. He sifted through glove compartment papers and with the barrel of his pistol pushed aside crumpled receipts and week-old newspapers lying on the floorboards and atop the Oldsmobile’s commodious seats. He took the keys from the ignition and opened the trunk, rummaging for a long while among suitcases and tire chains and an enormous tackle box full of rusted treble snagging hooks and comical oversized lures on wire leaders, raising his head occasionally to scowl at the implacable John Gload. Fifteen minutes later, red-faced and profusely sweating, he leaned against the car’s rear quarter panel.

  “Goddamn you, Gload,” he said, “yo
u didn’t eat the sonsofbitches, did you?”

  The old man paused in his telling, smiling, and held up his forgotten cigarette to display its long ash and he sat for a moment with his head to one side listening to the twilight birdnotes from above among the tender leaves.

  “Sheriff was so pissed off he sent ten men out there to search that field, up and back, on their goddamn hands and knees and one with a metal detector, I heard. There was a track in the wheat there looked like somebody had drove a truck through by the time me and that highway patrolman got through, so no mistake where we’d been at. Never found nothing.” He smiled at Val and shook his head. “That just about damn near killed them. They had to cut me loose.”

  He sat back then and waited, counting to himself one two three four.

  “So what happened to the fingers?” Val said.

  Gload smiled. “What do you think?”

  “Coyotes? Hell, I don’t know. Birds?”

  “Val, Val, Val.” The old man sighed, as if the task of imparting his knowledge were too cumbrous a burden. “It’s just like I said. Any line of work you care to name you got what you call degrees of good. Might be the doctor who’s the best doctor in the world at what he does but he cheats on his missus. Or say a priest who will sit all night holding the hand of some poor sonofabitch rotten with the cancer and crying for Jesus and this same man of the cloth pounds down a fifth of Seagram’s before lunch. And there are cops who steal, Val. Make no mistake about that.”

  “The highway patrolman?”

  “Give the man a cigar.”

  “I would doubt that,” Val said. “I think that’s real unlikely.”

  Gload went on as if he hadn’t heard, his voice distant and quiet with wonderment. “Fucker came within two inches of shooting the top of my head off, then saves my ass out of greed. But can you blame him? Makes probably a thousand a month chasing drunks and scraping people out of burnt cars. He gets a chance to give his girlfriend something nice for once and have a little walking-around money.” Gload laughed his croaking laugh. “And nobody out nothing except me and that Chinaman’s cat. Bet he puked his guts up, though, getting them rings off. Hell, Val, he earned it right there.”