The Ploughmen: A Novel Read online

  After he retrieved the shackle keys from Wexler’s pocket and the clasp knife from his belt and folded away the topo map carefully so that it would not be torn or bloodied, he set his capable hands to their task. The work was difficult and even in the cool air he was shortly sweating profusely and he noted how soft he had become in the months of confinement. It felt good to take long strides down the path, and going back up with the entrenching tool from the car trunk he began to feel alive. There were tire chains kept in a burlap sack in the car’s trunk and he emptied them out and brought the sack with him. The digging was easy and he made several holes—some on the bald adjacent side hills, some deep in narrow defiles plowed out by the lashing rains of spring. Some in the coulee above, some below. One he stole from a badger, the bleak hollow socket gaping from beneath a rock the size and shape of a Stonehenge monolith.

  He took his time, tamping down the small holes with the flat of the shovel and with his feet and with a sage branch he smoothed away the tread marks of his shoes. Then he stood back, appraising each site from different angles, different heights. Descending, he swept the trail assiduously with the sage, bent and shuffling like a peasant crone. By the time he reached the car it was dusk. At the riverbank he cast several things into the river and almost immediately the gulls began to swarm and screech. He stooped and put a round rock in the sack and threw it far out into the chop and then he washed his hands and arms and shoes as best he could in the silty water. The gulls splashed and dove and with his hands pressed against his ears John Gload stood on the rocky riverbank for several minutes watching. Though they were for him malign and detestable they were nonetheless a facet of his dream and they conjured for him the plowed fields of his youth. He was suddenly very tired. Oh how I could sleep right now, he thought. Oh how I could sleep.

  The gulls came off the river and like the birds of his childhood memories began to home in on ground he had recently turned in the hills above. His thoughts of sleep were prurient and he turned his burning eyes toward the sun, low and molten in the west. Oh, yes, he would sleep. One errand and he would sleep indeed.

  * * *

  By the time the coroner had come and gone Millimaki was too tired to make the return drive, at the end of which was his empty cabin with its fire grate of cold ash and a refrigerator provisioned with little else but beer. He took a room in the town, ate his dinner at a truck stop where his companions were long-haul drivers sitting alone and catatonic in plastic booths, their harlequin eyes to the black window glass watching comets burn bleakly through the night on the interstate toward Canada. Wherever Millimaki looked he saw the girl’s dirty face, the image like a photographic negative seared into the back of his eyeballs. He went back to lie on his sterile bed in a room that smelled of stale smoke. The dog when he came in rose to nuzzle his hand and returned to the bed he’d made in the worn brown shag.

  Millimaki lay for half an hour squeezing his eyes against the shards of crimson neon penetrating the dusty draperies through lacerations that seemed to have been made with a knife. He got up, dressed, and went into the warm night and down the lone illuminated street of the deserted town. It was summer yet but soon the wind scouring the neglected asphalt and rustling the leaves in the infrequent box elder trees seemed to bear for him some message from the distant high snowfields. He turned up the collar of his coat. The swaying lamplights made a strange parade of jittering light pools through which Millimaki walked, encountering not a living creature afield.

  He trudged numbly past near-identical single-room houses sided with asphalt brick and trailers set upon ill-aligned cinder blocks all but encased in snarls of hemlock and rampant lilacs and soon beneath his feet the pavement gave way to gravel. Coyotes bayed from the bluffs rising darkly to the west of town, the stream weaving beneath them at that time of year little but a series of tepid pools and brackish plaits burbling from the tangled willows with the sound of muffled voices. There was no moon and as he passed beyond the last town lights it was if he had passed through a portal, from the civilized world to one where darkness prevailed. He stopped in the road and held up his hands against the sky as if he might sift the stars in their billions through his fingers and make sense of the equivocal black like an ancient pyromancer. He walked for a long time. Trash fluttered along the right-of-way fence. Near a culvert where the creek went beneath the road he sat down in the wild ditch weeds. Small things scurried away and then he could hear nothing but a muted electric hum the wind elicited from the fence wires.

  The girl’s face again appeared before him and there were others, emancipated to float free and wide in that great black dome—porcelain masks of winter’s victims, the drowned, sallow and bulbous, staring unperturbed from the stout embrace of submerged trees. Dismantled Picasso faces grinning crookedly from a bed of talus stones. There, too, was the blue-black mask his mother wore. The painted kewpie face of his recurrent dream was another lie, more deceit. Because it was not white and smooth but a bulging swollen thing above the rope with a half inch of black tongue that the flies had found. He put his face in his hands. After a few minutes he said the girl’s name aloud—Penelope Ann Carnahan—like a prayer or a conjuring, the exquisite beauty of her resolve a searing indictment of his shitty pathetic loneliness and self-pity. At home, in a closet, Glenda’s shirts and dresses hung like cartoon ghosts and only a day ago he had pressed his face into them, breathing her faint perfume and dampening the fabric like a child. He was ashamed.

  * * *

  Once they had hiked to the top of the eastern flank of the Big Snowies and they could see from there five mountain ranges, blue and isolate in seas of emerald spring grass. In the southeast, toward the Musselshell, antelope it seemed for sheer joy of speed coursed among the sagebrush and in the north a great cloud hove up, as white and substantive as a massif thrust up new from the prairie. She stood for several minutes turning, with her hand visoring her eyes, and finally put her arm around him and thanked him for all of it. As though it were a gift he had given her.

  They ate their lunch atop a colossal lichened outcrop, which lay above the grass like the barnacled back of a whale and he told her about his uncle who had brought a Dutch woman home from the war and the marriage had lasted less than a year. When as a boy he’d asked about it his uncle had said simply, “It just didn’t take.”

  “What, like it was a grapevine?” she asked.

  “Those were the words. I don’t know. I was something like ten years old.”

  “Well, to continue the metaphor, Valentine, he must not have made a good bed for it.”

  And he thought now, what bed had he made for his own wife? A four-room cabin at the end of a bad road. Twelve hundred a month and an eleven-year-old Datsun and lodgepole pine to heat her house. That was the bed he’d made. A red-hot oven and flies on the windowsill and a half-warped door drift-locked half the winter mornings and boots caked with impossible gumbo from an impassable road. Him, with his murderous companion and his lousy fucking twelve hundred a month and a graveyard shift. And his retinue of dead—like family, she had said. Or like lovers.

  In his farmboy credulousness he had thought he could take her from the ivied trellises and green lawns of Dublin, Ohio, and make her happy with his mere fidelity. And she had starved on it, like a dog in a kennel with a bone alone for sustenance. Whatever there was left of himself he had given to the dead. She was right—the dead were easier. Like Penelope Carnahan, silent and beautiful in her eternal and seductive slumber.

  * * *

  The wind by the time he roused himself and began his walk back had come in earnest. Grit scoured from the bluffs stung his face like spoondrift, and tumbleweeds bowled past making clattering skeletal sounds in the blackness. He went before the gusts down the dark road with his arms outspread. His heart lay in his chest like a ballast stone and he thought that if not for that, he might kite away weightless and insubstantial as the feed sacks and bale-twine boxes pilloried to the fence wires.

  * * *


  She climbed the metal stairs in her practical shoes which, by shift’s end, seemed cobbled from stone. The wind skirled weirdly in the stairwell and trash flew about like vile birds and flapped and lodged among the metal balusters. She paused on the landing to catch her breath and when he appeared the old man wore a look of mild surprise. The wind blew his thin hair forward and he swept it back with a huge hand. She didn’t remember seeing him there before and wondered if he was someone’s father or grandfather. The wind swept the thin strands of hair across his face again and he held them back, his hand at his forehead in a strange salute. He stood for a moment on the stairs two steps above her and she smiled at him but he only stared, cocking his head, his expression mildly thoughtful, and then he went past her and she could hear his heavy tread on the metal stairs, marking his descent by the pong pong pong of the treads. The sound stopped somewhere short of the ground floor and she stood listening as did he and then she could hear his tread again and she hurried to her door along the walkway dimly illuminated by the globed halogens in the adjacent parking lot. She was horrified she’d forgotten to lock the apartment’s door and when she stepped inside she turned the thumb lock on the knob and threw home the deadbolt and slid the security chain into its track and for reasons she couldn’t name stood breathless with her ear to the door for a full minute.

  Through the parted blinds she watched the parking lot, weirdly blanched at that late hour beneath the buzzing lamps. Beyond the rows of cars she thought she saw the old man ambling slowly along the green boulevard or it may have been someone else or perhaps it was only her weary eyes at that late hour concocting from the windy shadows of the arborvitae a fairy-tale ogre shuffling his dirty brogans toward some far-off lair festooned with bones.

  * * *

  In the room again he lay with his fingers laced behind his head. Ribbons of ruby light shone through the rents in the curtains and lay across his legs like angry sutures. He’d been awake for nearly twenty-four hours and had walked nearly ten miles on the gravel in the dark and yet he could not sleep. He sat up on the edge of the bed. The television strobed. Women in scant clothing humped and churned to a manic Latin beat and there was much excited talk about abs and buns. He clicked it off.

  He sat for several minutes immobile as a stone, the primary-color efflux of the television like a flashbulb still erupting in his vision. When he’d left that day after talking to the sheriff he’d stopped at the mailbox and gathered up the mail and put it on the dashboard of the truck. There’d been catalogues and bills and Glenda’s magazines redolent of feminine scent. And there’d been a letter from his sister which now stood against the base of the bedside lamp. He picked it up and turned it over and over and in the end set it back. He could not take her PS tonight. It may not be this letter or the next but he felt eventually it would come: “PS—Why did you dawdle on the road?” “Why did you stand there and eat an apple?” “Why,” at last, “did you not save her?”

  Though the room seemed already warm, the wall heater unaccountably clicked on and stale air rolled across the room, conjuring out of the vile shag, with its smell of cigarettes and sweet perfumes, a desolate history of quick and forbidden couplings. Tom raised his head from his bed and looked at the heater and looked at the man and lay back. Nearby Millimaki’s holstered .357 hung on a chairback, its bluing sultry and inviting. Suddenly he remembered what he’d heard about Ed Teagarden—thirty-two years in the department, happily married, had taken a shotgun to his garage and inhaled a load of #6 upland game shot, the sudden inutility of unwanted retirement harvesting fruit from the garden of his secret dystopia. It blossomed outlandishly on the wall above his workbench.

  Millimaki fished through his wallet until he found the number written on the back of a receipt. A woman’s voice came on an answering machine and began to talk. He hung up and called again. And again.

  Finally a voice said, “Don’t you not get it, asshole. It’s three-fifteen in the morning. I’ll get the cops on your ass.”

  “Jean, I’m sorry. It’s Val.”

  “Oh, Val.” He could hear her exhale, and the timbre of her voice when she spoke again was soft and sympathetic. “She’s not here. I think she went out on a Life Flight. There was an accident in the Highwoods. I think the Highwoods. Somewhere out there. I thought she would be home by now.”

  “What was that about the cops? Is everything all right?”

  “I’m fine. I can’t sleep. I thought someone had been in the apartment.”

  “Lock the door.”

  “There was a man. It was nothing. The wind blowing and my imagination going crazy over nothing.”

  “I’m out of town. I could have someone come by.”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “I could get them to send a car by.”

  “How are you, Val?”

  “I can’t sleep, either. I haven’t slept it seems like for a year.”

  “You can get something for that.”

  “I know. I hate taking anything.”

  “Val, that’s not where she is.”

  “You mean the Life Flight.”

  “You could probably have checked on that. Checked if there was an accident.”

  “I’m really tired, Jean.”

  “I mean you could have that checked. With your department.”

  “Sure. I could. Why would I?”

  “Val, that’s not where she is.”

  “She’s not out on the Life Flight.”

  “Yes. That’s not right. I can’t say anything more.” She exhaled deeply into the receiver—a liquid sigh laden with weariness and all the heart-cracking mundane sorrow of her profession. “It just won’t do any good anyway.”

  “Jean,” he said. “Jean?”

  EIGHTEEN

  He’d made no attempt to hide the car though the uncut ditch weeds when he’d driven it off the road rose above the fenders and little could be seen of it but the roof and windows. There was much to do and the old man gathered pencil and paper and started in immediately, pacing deliberately down the narrow orchard lane that led to his house. He paced and stopped to scribble in a small wide-ruled notebook and paced again. To his right the scraggly orchard, where songbirds flitted and chirruped softly and on his left the old right-of-way fence whose strands of rusted wire hung in low bights or lay hopelessly garbled on the ground among the weeds. Beyond it acres of parched sage, running to the breaks of the river and into the low hills dotted in that arid place with random tortured junipers and bull pine. Pace, stop, write. Turn, pace. He consulted the sun, the shadows of the trees upon the ground. He noted the direction of the wind and with his head erect and eyes closed he appeared to be taking the scent of something. At last he stopped and turned in a circle, made a final notation with the stub of pencil and then, like a child who’d tired of a game, walked from the midst of tangled trees and through the weedy ditch toward the house.

  At his table he transcribed his notes onto a larger sheet of paper, the pencil stub scraping slow and painfully along the page. He sat back and examined the work for a long moment then crumpled it and began again on a second sheet. By the fifth page he was satisfied. He held it at arm’s length. He set it down and stood back and looked at it from a distance. He walked around the table and looked at it from several angles with a squinted eye.

  Beneath the sink he found a coffee can Francie had used for compost waste. He took it to the back-door stoop and put in the note pad and the failed drawings and at last even the pencil and burned it all, the flames a comfortable orange in the velvet blue light of dusk. Nighthawks as he stood over the guttering can flared above the apple trees against a rose sky. A distant squall was prophesied on the breeze by the smell of wet sage. When the can had cooled he took it up and bore it like a monstrance before him down the lane where he trod the ashes into the dirt. He flattened the can under his heavy shoes and sailed it far out into the brush. The day’s last sunrays gleamed on the rear window of Wexler’s car, dangerously atilt in the borrow
ditch of the county road. While the nighthawks veered and swooped above him he stood listening. If it was the end, and it almost certainly was, he had set things right. He felt a kind of peace he’d not known for years, since he was a boy. The day was done, the field plowed.

  He turned then and went through the ditch and wove among the trees, no longer counting his steps now because they were counted and recorded and archived and he sat with his back against a tree under the dangling harrow tines in the mild evening air until it was quite dark.

  * * *

  “Some kid out sighting in his aught-6 found Wexler. Or his dog did. Part of him. The dog found part of Wexler. It was just a damn accident.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “God only knows where the rest of him is. Buried out there with his other bones. Or in the river. I don’t know. We got the dogs out, boats in the water.” The sheriff paused, swiveled his chair to the window. “He did his old best number on him.”