The Ploughmen: A Novel Page 2

  In the side-view mirror he watched Gload walk to the rocky shoreline and throw something into the murky chop. The gulls, substantiating from seeming nowhere, began to dive and keen while John Gload waved his arms about like a conjurer. He stooped and threw handfuls of gravel. The kid watched this in the mirror and finally turned in the seat to watch out the window and when Gload came back the kid was smiling.

  “You can’t never hit nothing with just rocks.”

  The old man favored the kid briefly with a bland look and settled into his seat without replying. The kid shrugged, levered the car into gear, and drove west on the narrow blacktop, in the windshield the sun a tangerine shard wedged among the distant black peaks.

  “A shotgun, now,” White said. “That’d get your point acrost.”

  They went in silence toward the garish sunset and then Gload said, “Pull over at the dam.”

  “Hell, it’ll be dark here pretty quick.”

  Gload ignored him. “Pull over up here.” Sid eased the car into a pullout for utility company vehicles, at the head of a long set of wooden stairs descending to gloom. “Pop the trunk and wait here,” Gload said.

  The kid watched him go down the stairs with the grain sack. Below, the lights along the great curve of the dam began to flicker on. Presently he saw John Gload appear in the first circle of light and fade and reappear in the next, progressing this way along the concrete catwalk, incorporeal as a phantom.

  A fine spray rose above the dam’s railings from the torrent roaring through the floodgates and when Gload finally stopped it appeared as a downy luminescent cloud above his head. He stood at the rail and watched the amber water of spring thaw surge through the sluicegates. He turned. Behind him in the curve of the dam, tree limbs wheeled about in a huge scum-covered whirlpool, rising and falling like the arms of drowning giants. Half-inflated plastic grocery bags like men-of-war bobbed in the wrack and there were animals so terribly bloated that they may have been cats or hogs and he could make out the dented prow of a skiff and there was all manner of floatable trash and slim branches fluted by beaver teeth and there were ducks and small waterbirds, their dead eyes gemlike in the glare and everywhere in the slime like a grotesque choir the round sucking mouths of voracious river carp.

  Gload turned and strode across the concrete walkway and dropped the sack into a great spout of water and it shot forward and past the brief yellow corona and was gone. On that ancient riverbed were the bones of fish long extinct the size of dolphins and there were the bones of plesiosaurs and mastodons and the disjoined skeletons of luckless Cree and Blackfeet two centuries old. Standing in the dark interstice between the spillway lights, Gload felt connected with history, a part of a greater plan. For all that, he took no chances. He had taken the young man’s hands and chopped the teeth from his head and with these now settling on the river bottom the corpse was as nameless as the fossilized bones of preadamite fish.

  When he got back to the car, Sid the Kid was asleep sitting up with his hands on the wheel, a cigarette smoldering above his knuckle. Gload stood outside smoking and waiting and then the kid began to yowl and shake his hand and stuck two fingers in his mouth. Gload slid in on the passenger side, shaking his head.

  “Take me home,” he said. “Tomorrow we go get rid of the stuff.”

  * * *

  Amber leaves of the previous fall lay pooled beneath the apple trees, thin and black against the gunmetal sky. A covey of Hungarian partridge scuttled across the weedy lot, articulated like a tiny train, in the window’s light the males’ ruby throatbands flashing an electric brilliancy amid all the dun color of the wild grass. In that yellowed rectangle he could see Francie pass and repass. The chimney issued bone-white smoke that stood in the strangely still air as rigid and substantial as a church spire. As he watched her, the uneasiness once more fluttered past. He batted the air beside his head as though it were a living thing.

  He had walked the half mile up his drive from the county road where he’d had the kid drop him and now he stood among his trees smoking. Though the river was two miles away its smell was on the air and it was faintly perfumed by the sage on the benchlands that lay just to the south.

  Once in a drought year a bear had come, shambling down from the Highwood Mountains twenty miles distant, and taken up residence in the grove, eating the fallen bitter little apples and sleeping there unabashed on the ground amid the brittle leaves and rimed grass and leaving like spilled preserves huge piles of his shit everywhere. In the end he took to climbing the trees for the few apples that would not fall and at night from their bed they could hear the small knurred branches crack under his weight with the sound of distant fireworks. Gload had left it alone, seeing in its shape and nature something of himself.

  * * *

  When he’d gone in and poured coffee into his favorite cup and sat at the table, she said, “Do I look any better through a window than I do in person?” She had turned from her work, smiling, swirling ice in the glass she held.

  “You won’t sing when I’m in the room. I like your singing.”

  “I could have you run in for spying on a lady like that.”

  “For a hell of a lot more than that,” he said.

  From behind the kitchen counter she approached him a little unsteadily and she laid a soft, cool hand alongside John Gload’s face. She stared down into his eyes, dark wells wherein such things existed that he could not tell her or anyone. And as if she glimpsed some of what was there she said, “There’s some good in you, Johnny. And I might be the only one knows it.” Gload’s hands lay on either side of his cup and she took her hand from his face and placed it atop one of his. He looked down at them wordlessly. It might have been what he loved most about her, that she seemed to know some things, horrible things, but she forgave him them and this small act—of laying her smooth hand atop his own, which had so recently held the bloodied instruments of his trade—was a sort of absolution.

  “I got to leave tomorrow. For a few days.”

  “I ought to know the pattern by now. So we’ll eat a nice dinner and watch the TV and go to bed early.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “Am I allowed to ask when you’ll be back?”

  “Sure you can ask, but I don’t know. Three, four days.”

  “What if one time you don’t come back? Me out here all by myself? I couldn’t do it. For a few days I’m okay. But even a week is getting to be too hard, Johnny.”

  “I always come back. Have I never not come back?”

  “If you never did come back we wouldn’t be talking right now about you coming back.”

  John Gload extricated his hand from under hers, a quavering translucent bird of a hand, and cupped his own brutal paws over his ears.

  “Let’s eat,” he said. “You’re making my head hurt.”

  They ate a long leisurely meal and Francie for her dessert drank two glasses of port wine in a jam jar and as was their long habit sat at the side door listening to the evening sounds and watching the western sky flame and slowly transubstantiate to an ebony velvet arrayed with shards of quartz. They went to bed and made love on the cool sheets with the windows opened slightly to a cross breeze. Pale skin, pale sheets—beneath him she seemed a being fading from view, the look she wore, so dreamy and distant, as if like a person going down slowly down in a lake, she watched the cruel surface recede with bemused carelessness. Before John Gload’s heartbeats subsided Francie was asleep and softly snoring and he lay listening to miller moths battering themselves on the window screen behind his head—small souls seeking the freedom of the greater world. Recently he’d begun to imagine Francie’s spirit fluttering among them.

  He could not sleep but neither did he want to get out of bed. She would not wake up, he knew, because she slept as deeply as a child, but he hated to be far from her when he knew he was leaving. So he lay in the dark. She slept on her back composed as if by an undertaker, even to her white hands crossed on her small breasts, though one
leg stretched out to rest against his. A tether, a lifeline. The wind shifted the thin curtains and rattled the curtain rings on the brass rod that held them and in the neglected orchard beside the house an owl called. Some long time later, with her breathing close at his ear and the curtains like pale spirits hovering at the edge of his sight, he slept. He had been imagining a long-ago field and he rode the plow around and around in that dreamy sunlight.

  TWO

  It was dark among the trees and when the young man came into a clearing the snow lay deep and untrammeled, lit softly blue from the quarter moon and the stars swarming in the cloudless vault above the peaks. After a while the boles of the ponderosa and lodgepole revealed themselves from the blackness and then soon the lower branches hung with moss like hag’s hair, and small birds began to rouse and dart out before them like vanguards. The small stream he followed muttered beneath a thin pane of ice and among the topmost branches of the trees a faint wind was another secret voice and he stopped to listen. He peered ahead to the black rampart of timber. Maybe today, he thought. Maybe it will be today.

  It was the first week in April and the deputy sheriff and his dog tracked a young woman separated from her skiing companions during a brief and vicious early spring storm at a forked drainage in the Crazy Mountains. A night and a day and another night had passed and on the following morning Valentine Millimaki on snowshoes set out from the trailhead in frigid darkness.

  In the course of his duties with the Copper County Sheriff’s Department he spent time investigating rural crimes and he endured his required hours in the old jail building adjacent to the county courthouse, a grim edifice of sandstone blocks hewn by Croatian masons which in its earliest days had held cattle rustlers and horse thieves. But it was work outdoors that he loved, with the three-year-old shepherd dog tracking through the woods and brush and sudden canyons in wildlands where maps of some blank and forgotten corners were still mere suggestions of one’s place in the world.

  Some he found scratched and bruised or limping aimlessly atop a fractured ankle with a tree branch for a crutch, some in the late stages of hypothermia doddering half-naked through drifts in pursuit of ghosts and visions. Hunters, hikers, felons afoot from stolen vehicles at the dead ends of logging roads. All alive. Thirteen months ago he’d found an autistic child, scratched and shivering in the timber in the rain with his lapdog clinched beneath his arm like a shabby carnival prize, limp and strangled. That had been the last. For over a year now there had been only bodies.

  The dog was working well, lunging with difficulty through the heavy snow, and Millimaki told him so. “Good Tom. Find the girl.” The shepherd stopped to look at him, his tongue already hanging long from his mouth, and he lapped once at the snow and went on.

  Millimaki halted briefly to examine new tracks quartering across their path. Prints of deer stove into the virgin snow, overlaid with those of a big cat. The hair along the dog’s back rose and his lip turned back quivering to show his gleaming teeth and Millimaki spoke to him again. Other tracks atop the new snow, hieroglyphics of mice and squirrels—frantic senseless diasporas into the perilous open where owls swept down spectral and silent as the night itself. Today, Millimaki thought again. Our luck may change today.

  Some ten miles in she lay on her back in a trail under a dusting of new snow with a topographical map spread atop her chest as if in her bed she had fallen asleep reading. Tom sat on his haunches at the side of the trail cocking his ears at Millimaki, who squatted beside the woman, brushing away the snow from her face. He sat looking at her, so white, white as porcelain, her blue lips drawn tight as though in deep concentration, but for all that a peaceful sylvan sleeper, her skis and poles arrayed beside her neatly to be taken up after that brief consultation of the map.

  The day was utterly silent and brilliant now, the sun at that hour straight overhead and the sky above the clearing where the woman had stopped was galleried by a coven of ghostly pinetops. Perhaps she’d stood gazing uncomprehendingly at the emerging stars, in their milky light superimposing the enormous order wheeling overhead onto the map that seemed to hold her life in its obtuse loops and lines. Perhaps she would lie down and from that vantage Polaris might appear, or another far sun that could reinstate her in the paradoxical world. For just a moment, a few short minutes. The unknowable stars looking down. A brief nap in the clearing in the starlight.

  These are the things Valentine Millimaki imagined. A small bird came to sit on the branch of a tree and took in the scene—dog, man, statue—then flew. He watched it disappear into the sun. The young woman had lost a mitten and her bare hand lay atop the map. Wearing the snowshoes, Millimaki squatted with some difficulty. The dog sat watching him. He removed his own mitten and extended his hand and touched her wrist. As he touched all of them. What remained, he told himself, was not what they had been.

  He stood and considered the long trek out and eventual return leg after hours of delay while protocol was satisfied. His day was just begun. His ungloved hand was numb and pale and he stood thwacking it clublike against his leg, the whop whop whop unreasonably loud in the sepulchral stillness. The dog looked at him quizzically. He said, “Let’s go, Tom.” The dog stood and circled once and looked from him to the woman in the snow. She slept on. “Come on. She’s all right now.”

  * * *

  Fifteen hours later, at home in his bed, Millimaki thought again of the woman sleeping alone beneath her cold white counterpane in the woods. His wife had stirred when he crawled in beside her, the chill still gripping his bones, phantom pack straps furrowing his back.

  “I’m home,” he whispered. He shifted closer for the warmth of her, for the life in her. “I found her.”

  “What?” She spoke from the edge of a dream, her words slurred. “Who?”

  “The woman I was after, in the Crazies.”

  “That’s good.” From far away, barely audible, she said, “That’s nice.”

  “I didn’t get there in time.” In the darkness above his head he was seeing the woman again, blanched and rigid. “I didn’t make it.”

  He’d wanted his wife to say she was sorry, that this epidemic of woodenness would soon end. That the next one would be alive and breathing and grateful. To say, “It wasn’t your fault, Val. It’s not ever your fault.”

  “Oh, Val,” she said, “Please. Go to sleep. I need to sleep.”

  He put his hand on his wife’s warm back and soon he felt through the heave of her ribs the slow rhythm of sleep. After a long while he slept. A wind out of the prairies of Alberta rattled the branches of the box elder trees against the house eaves and the cabin door shuddered in its jamb. It blew and drifted deep all night and the country in the clear blue dawn would be new and immaculate and anything lost in it would be lost until there was little to be found but bones.

  He had saved her from that. He had done that at least.

  * * *

  The day following was Monday and after four scant hours of shallow sleep he dressed in the dark to not wake his wife. Lying beside her he was visited that night by the dream that in recent weeks was never far away. In it his mother’s mouth was not blue like the woman’s he had found earlier nor did it look as it did when as a boy he’d found her but was instead painted the color of cherries or of blood, horrible against the white of her doll’s-face.

  Palsied and leaden he drove the blank white country through the coming dawn to assume his shift as court security for the old man who had recently taken up residence in the Copper County jail. The hills’ incipient green, so faint and tenuous it may have been merely a trick of the eye after months of white on gray, was utterly erased by the storm. Songbirds gathered stunned and mute in the cottonwoods along the creek and on the right-of-way fence wires and the roadway was smeared and littered with gore, deer come to feed on weeds exposed by the county’s plows grotesquely disassembled by tractor trailers careening through the dark toward Billings and Cheyenne. Millimaki stopped once to drag a young doe from the centerline
of the highway, among the gray and glistening ropes of her umbles a tiny fawn spilling from its caul. Crows and magpies swarmed the humming powerlines overhead, awaiting the tender carrion and greeting with caws and croaks the plenitude of the refulgent day.

  * * *

  The day they’d gone for him, one week earlier, was a day so fine that Millimaki drove with his window rolled down, the ruddy road dust from the patrol car in front of him that seeped into the cab of little consequence because it made him believe in the possibility of spring.

  The old man stood up from his chair as if to greet old friends. Millimaki walked down the short length of road behind the other men as instructed, Dobek advancing with his piece drawn and aimed at the man’s midsection, Wexler beside him with the shotgun, the barrel wandering dangerously as he quick-stepped through the grass grown up in the center of the lane. It was a mild day but Dobek’s shaved head gleamed with sweat. Wexler was pale, his prominent adam’s apple jerking in his throat.

  Dobek called out as they approached, “Sit in the chair, asshole.” Gload showed his hands front and back like a magician and resumed his seat.

  “Now on your feet.” Dobek and Wexler stopped ten feet short, their guns upraised. They were breathing hard as if they’d run a great distance. The old man put his hands on his thighs and rose with an air of detachment or boredom, unconcerned with the two black boreholes wavering lethally in front of him, his eyes instead searching the pale blue vault above in the direction of the river where he seemed to be expecting something to appear.

  “Down on the fucking ground.”

  “Up, down, up, down,” the old man said.

  “Down in the fucking dirt, now,” Dobek bellowed. “Hands behind. Millimaki, get the bracelets on him.” Millimaki knelt and snapped the handcuffs in place. They were barely large enough to fit over the old man’s massive wrists, only two teeth of the ratchet end engaging the pawl.