The Ploughmen Read online

  Dobek, his round smooth dome gleaming, stood off several feet with his sidearm leveled at the old man’s broad back. One of the older deputies on the force, he wore a tailored uniform that now fit too tightly across his gut, and the short sleeves he favored revealed a faded USMC tattoo on one biceps and on the other some snarling animal—wolf or panther—it, too, indistinct, whether from age or maladroit artistry, but its message of predation was clear. He was an enforcer, a departmental bogeyman to be conjured when all reason failed to mollify prisoners gone mad in their cages. Now he motioned with his chin and the two younger men got Gload to his feet and Wexler began patting him down. In his agitated state he’d leaned the scattergun carelessly against the chair’s seat where it teetered, and Millimaki stepped around him and took it up and punched the safety on. Wexler ran his hands up and down the old man’s faded shirt and beneath his arms and moved to his feet, slapping and chopping up the bowed legs and finally leering up at the two other men as he squeezed the old man’s genitals, saying, “Nothing.”

  “Who’s inside?” Dobek asked.

  “No need to holler. I can hear as good as you.”

  “I said, Who’s inside, goddamn it.”

  “Nobody.”

  “Nobody’s ass. We’ll see.” Dobek nodded to Wexler, who took up the shotgun, and they moved toward the rear door of the house. “Millimaki, keep your piece on this fuck.” He jerked the screen door open savagely and nodded Wexler to the fore and they banged through the main door in combat positions. The screen door, weather-checked and paintless, hung askew, the top hinge screws pulled nearly loose.

  Gload had watched them enter his house and when he turned to Millimaki he wore an expression of deep sadness. “Now look what they done to that door.”

  “That can be fixed easy enough.”

  “It’s got some dry rot. You got to be gentle with it.”

  Millimaki said, “Is anyone here?”

  “Like I said, nobody.”

  The deputy brushed the dirt and grass from the old man’s shirtfront and trousers and brought forward the chair for him to sit. Millimaki turned and looked at the wild orchard where spring was foretold by minute buds and the presence of tiny birds among the brambles. He noted crocuses in bloom along the walk and bright yellow flowers turned toward the sun.

  “What are these?” he said. “Daffodils?”

  The old man shrugged. He’d begun to watch the young deputy with interest.

  Millimaki turned his back to the old man and studied the tangle of trees. “You might have wanted to cut these trees back without any mercy. It’s out of control in there.”

  The old man stared at him with his mouth ajar.

  Millimaki said, “What kind of apples are they?”

  “Couldn’t tell you,” Gload said.

  Millimaki ducked into the trees and, reaching to a high branch, picked an apple from the previous year that had somehow not fallen, shrunken and hard as ornamental fruit. He rolled it in his palms, sniffed it. Around him the small birds swirled, their tiny black eyes following his every move. John Gload watched him. He looked to the young man in the trees and he glanced at the door of his house where the two deputies had gone and he looked down the narrow lane to the county road beyond.

  Millimaki came out of the trees. “Best guess is they’re some kind of old McIntosh,” he said.

  Before the old man could reply, Dobek and Wexler banged out of the house, the older deputy at ease now and smirking and eating a pear he’d found inside. When he saw the two other men conversing, the older man sitting cross-legged in his chair, Millimaki once again examining the apple, the pear exploded out of his mouth. He sputtered, “Christ, Millimaki, I said put your piece on him. Did I not say that?” He’d holstered his sidearm and now he had it out again and pointed at the old man in the chair. “Wexler, did I not say to him, Put your piece on this piece of shit?”

  “You did, Voyle. Definitely.”

  “The fuck’s the matter with you?”

  “Cuffed and sitting in a chair,” Millimaki said. “Where’s he gonna go?”

  “Fuck.” Dobek looked from the young deputy to the old man, who placidly sat in his chair, cocking his long equine head carelessly to the trills and frantic fluttering of the springtime birds in his arbor. The old man’s insouciance seemed to enrage the veteran deputy and the flesh of his neck bulged above his uniform collar red as a coxcomb. “Fuck,” he said again. Wexler’s small blue eyes swung from Dobek to Gload and to Dobek again, reading the veteran’s face. He raised the scattergun to his waist, his finger massaging the trigger guard nervously. With his free hand Dobek thumbed a line of sweat from his forehead and slung it to the side.

  “There was a time not all that long ago when we’d of just dropped a rope over something or other and been done with this suvabitch. But now.” He surveyed with clouded countenance the country around them for all its corruption and inefficacy, the weak imperfect world an insult to him. “Now we got to go through the whole song and dance and the spending of taxpayer money and feeding this suvabitch for ten or fifteen or however too many years to wind up with the same exact thing—a dead fucker hanging.”

  Wexler smiling, nodding. “Fucking right, Voyle.”

  John Gload throughout this gazed off wistfully toward the low hills that rose to the north, where juniper and scrub pine grew on stubbornly among the weeds and sage. Great shoals of cumulus scudding on the wind. Dobek stepped up from behind and ran the barrel of his pistol roughly along the old man’s bristled cheek, eliciting a sandpaper sound. With the cold nickel barrel he traced the curve of the old man’s ear. When Gload snatched his large head to the side Dobek stepped back as if scalded.

  Once more he troweled sweat from his forehead. “Okay,” he said. “All right. Where’s the woman of the house, old man.”

  “Not here.”

  “I deduced that all on my very own, asshole. Where’d she go?”

  “Just gone,” Gload said. “Gone off.”

  Dobek stood for a moment, tapping his handgun against the stripe of his uniform pants. He exchanged a look with Wexler then turned to Millimaki, his obsidian eyes lingering there longer as if considering his options. Finally he said, “Okay, Wexler, get him in the car. And I want the footwear on him, too.”

  John Gload’s expression never changed as he was jerked erect and pushed toward the car. He glanced once at the house and once longingly at the wild bosk of trees and he looked briefly to the sky to the south where skeins of thin cirrus mirrored the slow river below. His eyes too swung across Millimaki, who’d stood aside carefully among the radiant spring blooms to let the other two lead the old man away to his fate.

  * * *

  The corridor of cells was belowground and the darkness stayed long there, the sickly purple-blue light from the hissing fluorescents and the light that came in through the two high windows scant at any hour, any season. The snow had begun to melt and water poured from the downspouts of the old building and overran the gutters, cascading down the sandstone block and over the street-level windows in myriad rills. From within, the glass appeared to run and shift like mercury.

  The night jailer at the end of his shift walked with Millimaki as if in a trance down the dank corridor and introduced him to the old man and turned and retraced his steps and went out into the light of the new day, which he seemed altogether unsuited for. His eyes were so red and the circles under them so dark, he seemed to be wearing thespian’s makeup and the flesh seen above his collar and below his shirt cuffs had the yellow cast of a consumptive.

  Because of his age and reputation and the nature of his crimes John Gload was kept out of the bullpen and housed in one of the county jail’s hospital cells, different from the six other county jail cages of the general population only in that it was separated from them by a short hallway and a locking door. In the course of his long career the old man had inhabited such lodgings before. As a much younger man he had done ten years in the state penitentiary in Rawlins
, Wyoming, much of it in solitary confinement, and on an overhead water pipe in that cell he had done thousands of pull-ups, the only sounds for hours in the near-profound dark his breathing and the mouselike whingeing of the pipe protesting his weight. His arms, even at the age of seventy-seven, were so large that when he extended his hand toward Millimaki he could only get it through the bars just beyond the wrist.

  Gload had come forward, his face lit for an instant by the overheads and the aqueous niggardly light the high windows afforded and then receding to shadow.

  “We’ve met,” Millimaki said. “Informally, I guess you’d say.”

  From beyond the lightfall he heard Gload say, “I recanize you from the welcoming committee. The apple expert.”

  Millimaki drew up a chair from the opposite wall of the narrow hallway and sat. They waited for the call to move across the street to the courthouse. The cells beyond the sally gate were quiet—men asleep, men absent, in court themselves shackled and fearful and sweating in their issue coveralls. Men in their cages atop their bunks biding oppressive time, urgently listening to any voices but those inside their heads.

  “It’s a nice place you have out there,” Millimaki said. “Hope you don’t mind I poked around a bit after you went to town.”

  “Why would I mind? Nothing to hide.”

  “Good soil. Out of the wind, for the most part. Nice little spot.”

  Gload nodded. “I appreciate that.” Small sounds came from the dark—a striking match, the noise of a tin can sliding. Blue smoke substantiated in the brighter hallway above the deputy’s head. The old man studied him, noting the scuffed boots and the khakis loosely hanging on a frame of prominent and elongate bones, the circles beneath his eyes. The lean and hungry look of him.

  He said, “Your two compadres have kind of a brisk manner about them.” Millimaki sat with his hands clasped, forearms resting on his thighs. He smiled at the floor between his feet but the old man could not see his face and he went on. “You seemed to be the odd man out in that dog and pony show.” Again, Millimaki merely sat. He turned one wrist slightly to consult his watch. Finally the old man leaned from his chair, one eye squinted against the unaccustomed light or the smoke from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth to read the nametag on the young deputy’s shirtfront. “That’s a mouthful. What is it, Finn or something?”

  “Yeah, Finn,” Millimaki said. “I didn’t have any say in the matter. The other half is Bohunk.”

  Gload smoked. “Hell of a deal.” He held a bean can bent to accept a cigarette in its edge and he tipped his ash into it. “I knew a lot of Finlanders and Hunkies down in Butte. A lot of ’em. Micks, too. You take the Harps and Finns and Bohunks out of Butte and you got a couple of Wops and a Welshman standing around a hole in the ground with their dicks in their hands.”

  Millimaki said, “I’ll have to take your word for it.”

  “Well,” the old man said, “that’s how it was.”

  * * *

  By shift’s end the old man was back in his cell, thoughtful and quietly smoking, and Millimaki left him and the jail and drove toward the grassy dune country southwest out of town where above the languid horseshoe bends of the Missouri River a settlement in recent years had sprung up, outsized homes he’d heard the sheriff once call “monuments to power and wealth.” On the sandy bluff the surgeon’s house where he was to meet his wife appeared fortresslike against the dusk, its roofline a complex topography of hips and gables and Dutch hip dormers and a phallic tower with a dome of hammered copper which at that hour beaconed its russet affluence to the working-class homes on the river below. From the hilltop eminence the prefabs and double-wide trailers looked like shoe boxes or children’s blocks set haphazardly beside a papier-mâché stream. The department made calls with equal frequency to the homes of the wealthy for spousal abuse and ODed teens and skeletal anorexic wives on the roadway in their teddies strung out and waving handguns at the passing cars. Millimaki had discovered fairly quickly that the problems of the rich were much the same as those of the unrich, though in the savage glare of the booking-room lights their sportswear and excellent dental work made for more attractive photographs.

  What he could see of the yard sloped down to the water’s edge, the acreage neatly cordoned from the rampant weeds of the vacant adjacent lots by a welded pole fence of black metal. In the center of the yard a bosk of sculpted junipers in the descending twilight looked like mourners nodding above a grave. A single robin sat atop the fence, a bold brushstroke of color, its breast more sanguine for the backdrop of freakish April snow.

  At the sheltered entry, a black iron footman greeted Millimaki and tendered his servitude with an upraised tray and a rictus of gleaming teeth. The woman who answered his knock affected a wide-eyed look of theatrical fear.

  “Oh, Gawd,” she said. “You finally caught up with me.” She threw her hands up, a cocktail the color of emeralds bleeding down her arm, a dozen thin silver bracelets chiming.

  Millimaki forced a smile. “My wife is here,” he said. The woman went away howling. He found Glenda in an enormous room standing among several men and she managed a quick kiss on his cheek.

  Their host called it the great room and from its twelve-foot walls glassine eyes of exotic trophy heads regarded the guests, well-turned-out men and women already aglow and garrulous from drink. Though it was barely spring and there was snow on the ground, a few of the men wore no socks with their tasseled loafers. They were polite. Millimaki sensed as they gripped his hand they were formulating a diagnosis from the dull thrum of his pulse, the red of his eye.

  He wandered beneath the gaudy taxidermy and stood finally before a bank of windows watching the evening dim and the great room lights appear as uncertain phosphorescent portals on the black water below. A nurse whom Millimaki had always thought of as an older and heavier version of his wife swept toward him and gave him an uncomfortably long hug.

  “Howdy, Sheriff. Come to arrest me?”

  “I sort of heard that one already tonight, Jean.”

  “Oh, shit. I hate being unoriginal.”

  “That’s all right. Yours came with more warmth.”

  She put her hand on his arm. “Are you okay? Your eyes look like two piss holes in a snowbank.”

  “Now that’s better. That’s fresh stuff.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I’m fine, Jean.”

  His wife was across the room, cornered by a man who seemed to be indicating where an incision might be made on her chest. Jean glanced their way and squeezed Millimaki’s arm.

  “What can I get you to drink, Val?”

  “I think Glenda has a head start so I’ll have to drive us home.”

  “She’s staying with me tonight, didn’t she tell you?”

  Above his wife and her companion a leopard was poised to leap from stagecraft cover of savannah grass, its jaundiced eyes bright as candle flames beneath the floodlights.

  “Of course. Right,” he said.

  “I’ll just get one more for myself and that’s it.” Jean moved off somewhat unsteadily toward a table arrayed with bottles and containers of ice. At the same time a Japanese woman who worked with his wife in the ICU approached from the makeshift bar. She had been married to an Air Force major and they’d lived on the base east of the town, a sprawling city-state of tarmac and austere cinder-block buildings where the green of lawns and trees after the brief springtimes faded quickly to the color of the prairie and the window glass in the identical houses shuddered under the bellowing of lumbering cargo jets and where she one day awoke to find the major gone. The surprise of her abandonment never left her face and when she bore down on Millimaki her eyes were wide and her tiny mouth was set in an O. She chattered excitedly about his debt book. Her voice was shrill and her accent thick and he was not sure what she’d said.

  “I’m sorry. My what?”

  “Debt book, debt book.” She pantomimed with frantic fluttering hands the turning of pages. “Book. With a
ll your debt people in it.”

  “I’m not getting—”

  Jean had come with her drink and put her hand on his forearm. “She means ‘dead,’ Val.”

  “Yes, debt, of course. With collecting pictures of debt people. How funny.”

  He began to explain that he took the pictures as part of his work, but she was already reeling off toward a group of men clustered beneath the grizzled head of a Cape buffalo, the great sweep of its horns under the floodlights glowing like burnished ebony. “How funny,” he could hear her say. “Debt pictures of debt people.” Her voice from across the cavernous room sounded like breaking glass. The men looked at her and as she pointed looked at Millimaki.

  Jean said, “I’m sorry, Val. Let’s call it a cultural thing.”

  “Did Glenda tell you guys about those pictures?”

  “No, Val. I’m sure she wouldn’t have done that.”

  But she must have said something, he thought. Dead book. Had Glenda called it that? But debt book, that was also true. He did owe something to the dead.

  The woman from the front door swept by and spoke without stopping or looking at him. “I’m a goddamn fugitive from justice.” She was shoeless, her dress iridescent.

  “Somebody’s having a good time.”

  “She’s harmless,” Jean said. Millimaki saw her across the room. She eyed him malignly from over the rim of her neon tumbler. Her virid tongue flicked like a lizard’s.

  Like a jackal harmless, he thought. She should be skulking through the veldt among the other predators on the great room’s wall.

  * * *

  They drove down the long slope of the hill with the house blazing behind them, and soon were on the river flats. In silence they passed shabby shotgun houses and tire-buttressed trailers where no window lights burned and the river rolled beside the road like oil, in the headlights cannibalized pickups set on blocks, appliances upended and rusting, the acetylene eyes of feral cats.

  In the sudden lights of town the traffic was sparse and she directed him wordlessly to the apartment complex. He parked the truck beneath the polar glow of halogens and left the engine idling. The wind shook the lamp poles and the truck shuddered in the gusts. Low gray berms of plowed snow seemed animated under the quaking light.