The Ploughmen: A Novel Read online

  Val sought a chair and sat unbidden. The sheriff swiveled back, considered him with weary eyes over the rim of his reading glasses.

  “You know when they found him he was just sitting in a chair out at his place like he was waiting for a cab.”

  “I know.”

  “Just like the first time. Didn’t make a bit of fuss. Put out his hands for the bracelets, said howdy boys.”

  Val looked into his palms. He could feel the sheriff’s eyes on him.

  “Then he asked where was Deputy Millimaki.”

  Val said nothing.

  “Said he was expecting Millimaki. Said he’d like to talk to the deputy.”

  “I can’t explain that.”

  “I’m not asking you to.”

  “He won’t tell me where Wexler is, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I’m sure he won’t. That’s another secret John Gload will take to his grave. And by Christ I hope he takes it there soon.”

  “Yessir. I hope so.”

  The sheriff removed his half-glasses and set them deliberately on his desk atop its chaos of papers. He passed his hands across his face in a washing motion. When he looked up, his eyes were fond and enormously sad. “Do you in point of fact, Val? Do you hope that?”

  That question Millimaki considered as he drove home that afternoon and it occupied his thoughts all that evening as he sat on his porch watching the sky dim and the stars emerge from the void with their vanguard of bats and he even had the opportunity to discuss the difficult matter later with Weldon Wexler when he appeared in Millimaki’s dream. But Wexler, carrying an armload of bloodless limbs like stovewood and wearing a vivid carmine scar on his neck, was disinclined to speak.

  * * *

  John Gload in the month of October was convicted of first-degree murder and was to spend the rest of his life in the Montana State Penitentiary in Deer Lodge. A casualty of the strenuous proceedings, his lawyer succumbed finally to the ravages of his vice and had been committed to a detoxification center in Billings. He’d shown up for trial in the suit he’d slept in, his bald dome white as an egg beneath the lights, and his tremors would not allow him to open his briefcase or lift a glass of water to his cracked and spluttering lips. John Gload accepted this as an inevitability and seemed hardly to notice.

  Gruesome photographs and mock-ups of the young man disinterred from his unsatisfactory grave in the Breaks were set upon easels at the front of the courtroom and the heart surgeon for two long hours explicated them, in his thousand-dollar suit parading up and back like a university don, poking and slapping at the exploded images with a wooden pointer. He described the damage to the heart and how the chest must be accessed for its repair and at last setting aside the pointer and weaving his gracile fingers through the air like a tailor or shoemaker he illustrated his method for wiring together the sternum where it had been split. A technique unlike any other, he said. Unique. Proprietary. The prosecuting attorneys rolled their eyes at one another discreetly and Gload’s young public defender stammered his objections. Even so, Gload had been intensely interested. He was at that time seventy-seven years old. Sidney White, in view of his cooperation, at an earlier date had been given forty years, ten suspended. His place of incarceration was yet to be determined. It was thought he should not inhabit the same institution as John Gload. White’s trial for the Miles City rape and assault was pending. Regardless, he would be nearly the age of his mentor before he resumed his short and inglorious career in the world of free men.

  NINETEEN

  He went slowly along a long gray corridor, the redoubtable masonry of clammy stone on either side stacked and mortared against the penetration of hope. The familiar smell of disinfectant and floor wax was in his nostrils, the walls lined with scarred wooden benches with high backs that may have been pews rescued from a desanctified church. In passing he read names carved into the seats circumscribed with hearts or conjoined with chains and there were admonitions in crude calligraphy to fuck off, to eat shit. In one high seat back an optimistic vandal had inscribed his assurance that Millimaki would be reborn. The work of feral children, of wives and lovers mutely enraged by their celibacy, their infidelities. Mothers had dug their nails into the soft wood as they waited in the dank corridor to see the fruit of their wombs turned out so briefly from their cages.

  The familiar fluorescents as he walked cast their antiseptic light. Another sally gate slid open with a rasp of metal and shortly, on his right, through the scratched and foggy Plexiglas he saw the face of John Gload, more equine now, the long jaw bones prominent, his eyes seemingly grown larger. All else save his hands seemed diminished and he sat with them flat on the table, sphinxlike, staring vacantly into the glass before him, heedless of the clamor of voices and the scrape of chairs. The terrible light turned his skin to marble. Several small round Band-Aids adorned his forehead and neck, the spurious flesh color like mismatched patches on a creased and faded shirt.

  “My, my,” he said. “Deptee.” His smile revealed now a dead tooth the color of oak. “You’re looking good.”

  “Hello, John. How they treating you?”

  “Treat me like a goddamn convict, is what they do.”

  “If the shoe fits.”

  Gload stared frankly at the younger man’s face for a long uncomfortable moment and then grinned once again, the awful canine like a grub clinging to his smile.

  “Did I ever tell you that in the old days they used to put concrete shoes on these assholes who tried to escape? Weighed twenty pounds. Had to wear them shoes every waking hour, walking around clank clank clank. Like that.”

  “No, I guess you didn’t.”

  “Well, it’s a fact.” He removed his cigarettes from a breast pocket and laid them in front of him, aligning the pack fastidiously with the table edge. He coughed. His voice had more gravel in it. “So you’re a fed now, is that it?”

  Millimaki shook his head in amazement. “Still tapped into your jailbird pipeline. You’re a goddamn wonder.”

  The old man made motions as if to snatch feathers swirling around his head. “Words float around, Val, and you pick them up.”

  “Amazing. Any word out there regarding the color of my shorts?”

  Gload effected a mirthless smile, the parchment skin of his horse’s jaw tight. His tongue worried at the dead tooth. He said, “Please tell me you ain’t FBI at least.”

  “ATF. About two years now.”

  “All Those Fuckers. If you’ll pardon me. It’s just a joke, Val.”

  “I hadn’t heard that one,” Millimaki lied. “That’s not bad.”

  Gload removed a cigarette from his pack and tapped an end on his thumbnail. He said, “I appreciated that picture you sent.”

  “I took that on my last search. I was clearing out some stuff. Thought you might like it.”

  “Nice picture,” he said. “Never did find the letter went with it, though.”

  “I’m not much of a letter writer.”

  The old man studied his hands and the burning cigarette between his fingers. “Kind of thought you might of stopped by and say good-bye before they shipped me out.”

  “They put me on two weeks’ leave after that. You were gone by the time I got back. Then I got this gig and, well, on to other things.”

  “Well, anyways.” Gload looked up. A weary smile, his lips thin and chapped. “They must treat you good. You’re looking better’n the last time I seen you. Eating good, getting more sleep, am I right? Making good money?”

  “I’m doing okay, John. And what about you? How you making it?”

  The old man was terribly thin and bent. The signs of his chronic insomnia were very much in evidence—even through the hazy plastic barrier Millimaki noted the old man’s eyes latticed with veins, the skin beneath them dark as war paint. His hand when he reached for his cigarettes exhibited a faint quaver.

  “Oh, not what you might say thriving. I don’t sleep much. You know how it is. Just living it out, like I told you onc
e. Living it out.” He struck his lighter to the end of a filterless Camel and blew smoke at the ceiling. “We’re like two trains going different ways, Val.”

  “What about that farming dream?”

  He snorted. “That gets harder and harder. Just like an old tattoo—the color has begun to fade and sometimes I can’t hardly see it no more.” He paused and wanly smiled. “Except for them gulls. Sonsofbitches are clear as ever.”

  He sat smoking. In the adjacent cubicle a man began to shout in Spanish and pound the tabletop and the glass in front of him with the flat of his hand. He jumped to his feet and his chair lurched backward to the floor. Two guards moved toward him. He was led away in cuffs weeping. Beside Millimaki, beyond the insubstantial privacy barrier, a young woman sat in the chair as rigid as an obelisk, her hands covering her face. John Gload seemed to notice nothing. He had lifted his ashtray with the cigarette in it from the tabletop that it not be disturbed and when the man was taken away set it down.

  “You speak that lingo?” he said.

  “Not much.”

  “He was asking her to save him. That’s a good one. Oh save me.” He did not look as the young man was drug away or at the girl beyond the glass but examined his cigarette or perhaps he considered the troubling phenomenon of its quivering end because he wore a wistful look. Finally the old man said, “So you were in the neighborhood?”

  “Something like that,” Millimaki said. “I got your letter. You understand I couldn’t just come right away.”

  “I wasn’t going nowheres.” By way of illustrating this fact he half turned in his chair and nodded toward a uniformed guard who stood sleepily in front of a door with wire running through the glass. He turned back, shaking his head.

  Millimaki said, “I always have wondered, John, why you didn’t leg it out after Wexler. Why you waited out there.”

  “The damnedest thing you should ask that, Valentine.” The old man wore a thin smile. “I’m just getting to that in a way.”

  “So what’s on your mind, John?”

  Gload adjusted the ashtray a half inch nearer, turned it on the tabletop which told in its gouges a hundred-year history of wrist chains. “I told you about a lot of things, Val, in those months we had together and I know you passed some of the shit on to the Bull and I do not hold that against you in the very least because I know it’s your job. Was your job, anyways. But I’m going to tell you one last thing and I need your promise before I do. Your word that this is just between you and me.”

  “How in hell can you ask a promise of me after all that’s happened?”

  “Because we’re friends, Val, aren’t we? Can you sit there and deny that we’re friends?”

  “I don’t know what we are.”

  “Friends, by God. Friends is what we are.”

  “John, I don’t know if you can be friends with somebody who you think might cut your throat if the opportunity arose.”

  “Valentine,” Gload said. He said the young man’s name with a long exhalation, like a sigh. He passed one hand down his forehead and rubbed at his inflamed eyes. For a full minute, as Millimaki shifted on his chair, the old man sat with his hands cupped to his ears as if he would shut out further lies, further hurt.

  Finally he rose up and spoke. “Think about this, Deputy. I want you to think about the times we were alone together and it was the same thing with that Wexler asshole. It was the same thing. It was nothing for me to get him. Think about how many times we stood out there in that park full of trees in the dark and there wasn’t nobody around and you turned your back on me. Just like Wexler did. Many many times. Twenty or thirty. A hundred times. That many times I could of got hold of you. So, yes, friends is what I think we are.”

  “Is that how it happened? With Wexler?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that on account of I don’t want you to be thinking about it for the rest of your life. I wouldn’t do that to you. Val, I got a lot of feelings for you.”

  “Friendship, then, because you didn’t kill me.”

  His tired eyes stared into Millimaki’s. “It does not, Deputy, get truer than that.”

  “What’s the promise, John? I can’t promise you anything without hearing it.”

  “You won’t have to do nothing for a while. I don’t know how long but not for a while.”

  “What is it?”

  “I want you to claim me when I cash in and to bury my ashes.”

  “For Christ sake, I can’t do that. That’s something your family does.”

  “Now you know good and goddamn well I don’t have nobody. I told you all that.”

  “There’s got to be somebody. Hell, Francie. Your wife. Francie.”

  “Gone.”

  “She’d come back for something like that.”

  “She’s not coming back, Val, that’s the thing. Or maybe I should say she never left. That’s why I never kited out.”

  “I don’t even know what the hell that means. In any case, when it does happen, the state takes care of that. Down on the prison farm I think. I could check on that.”

  “No.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “In my orchard with no stone or nothing. All’s you need to do is to dig a hole.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can, too. A simple hole in the ground. And here’s the deal. I can pay you for your troubles.”

  “You’re not paying me because I can’t do it.”

  “Val, I’ve checked into all this. I’m about a half jailhouse lawyer after all these years in and out of such places.”

  “Has to be next of kin or nobody.”

  “Well, yes. I done that.”

  “What?”

  “You’re my next of kin, Val.”

  “I am no such thing.”

  “Well, you’re a few years behind the times, Deputy. They don’t call it that anymore. They call it ‘appointing a personal representative.’ But it’s the same thing. I prefer the sound of ‘next of kin’ because it’s, you know, more familiar. But it’s a what-you-call bygone term. And so I done that and I made a holographic will and a devisee. Which is you, Valentine.”

  Millimaki stared openmouthed at the old killer, who favored him through the Plexiglas with a smile so tranquil he seemed a different Gload altogether.

  “This is crazy.”

  “Devisee is like an heir.”

  “This would take years.”

  “It’s all set up and legal as God.”

  “I won’t do it.”

  Gload turned his attention to the Camel on the ashtray, shaping its end with great care and nodding his head as though in affirmation of something. To Millimaki’s left the young Mexican woman sat yet, ashen and immobile as a caryatid, her eyes reflecting an emptiness beyond the chair where her husband had so recently sat, in those black portals an unreckonable vacancy cold as far space where tears could neither form or fall. She was very small and seemed more waiflike still when she rose, passing a mesmerized Millimaki with steps so deliberate it was as if her bones were of frailest glass, and she left in her wake a scent of springtime blooms.

  John Gload watched him watch. He waited for Millimaki to turn once more to the glass.

  “Here it is then, Val. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to play my hole card. That you’d do this for me out of pure friendship.” He leaned toward the barrier and opened the collar of his workshirt, revealing among the sparse gray hairs a tiny silver chain, tight as a choker, girdling the leathery wattle of his neck. The silver dolphin nestled at the hollow of his throat.

  Millimaki stared in disbelief.

  “This was my other gift to you, Deputy Millimaki. I gave you your life in a manner of speaking and that’s something. And I gave you hers, too. I could of took it but I chose to give it. Lots of times since I thought I should of took it because she caused you a lot of pain and it hurt me to see you thataway, it truly did. I thought about it for quite a long time, Val. I remember doing it real clear. I sat in that car for a l
ong time, thinking about what would be the best thing to do for Valentine Millimaki, my friend. And I still do think about it. And then I ask this little tiny favor of you and you say you can’t do it. You say you won’t.” His terrible eyes bore through the Plexiglas. “Tell me how that’s right, Valentine. Tell me how that’s anywheres near fair.”

  Millimaki could only stammer. “How?”

  “How what?”

  “Did you find her? Get that close?”

  “A couple of phone calls, a couple of little white lies. It took nothing, Val. I got talents. You never really allowed that.”

  Millimaki could scarcely find his voice. “You went in her place? Her apartment?”

  The old man’s head drooped wearily, the years with their burden and the memories of difficult decisions settling at that instant like a great stone upon the knuckled bones of his neck. He ground out his cigarette, rolled his ravaged eyes up to Millimaki. He said, “I don’t know that I have a thing you’d call a soul, Val, but I recanize it in other people. You have such a thing. I seen it smudged across your face the very first time I seen you. So I know you’ll do this thing for me. Just put me up there next to Francie.”

  “Christ, it was Jean. It was Glenda’s roommate you saw that night.”

  Gload stared blandly through the barrier. “It don’t matter.”

  “I called that night. Christ, Jean saw you. It wasn’t Glenda.”

  “All that don’t matter, Val. I could of got her, one way or the other.”

  “And you got the chain then.”

  “Don’t be a fucking cop now when I need you, Val. I’m asking you, just put me up there next to Francie.”

  “Where? Up where?”

  “In the orchard. That’s where she is. And that’s where I’m going to be, too.”

  “Your wife’s in the orchard?” Millimaki said. “On your place?”

  But the old man did not hear, had retreated to his haven in the Breaks and his ears were filled with the sound of wind in the untended trees and the flutter of the songbirds that resided there. His eyes, gorged red blossoms dyed with the blood he had spilled on the world, stared beyond Millimaki’s head and beyond the unassailable stones and wire and the desolate prison town.