The Ploughmen: A Novel Page 5

  “Why, hell, don’t worry about it, kid. We’re just making talk.”

  “I’d better do a walk-around,” Val said. “I’ll come back here in a bit.” He went down the aisle and out the sally door. In the office he stood and watched the clock, which seemed hardly to have changed since he’d last checked. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Minutes had become hours, hours become days. He watched the second hand creep slowly down the face to assure that the clock had not altogether frozen and the big hand with a savage click at last registered the minute.

  He’d not had a chance to read the letter from his sister that had arrived the previous day and now he slipped it from among the meager contents of his lunch, where it had taken on the shape of an apple, and smoothed the pages atop his knee. Above him the jailer sat upon his high chair and seemed altogether lost in the book before him. A moth fluttered down brokenly from the sooty hanging globe light above the man’s head and it hovered near his face and alighted briefly on the book he held but he did not move. Millimaki stared at him for a moment then raised a hand and waved it in the air. Still he did not move and Millimaki realized he was asleep, his eyes protuberant and unwavering, gaudy with bruised flesh, eye-whites thatched with veins.

  He opened the letter and read of his new niece and about life in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where his little sister’s husband was stationed, the letter chatty and loving and without substance. Though she was nineteen years old and a new mother, Millimaki still thought of her as a child. The words were written with large loops and backward slants, I’s dotted with hearts. In the end she sent her love and love from the infant he’d never seen and inscribed for him at the bottom of the page the X’s and O’s of a schoolgirl. So the PS she added hit him like a gut punch: “How old would Mom be now?”

  Perhaps being a mother herself now set her thinking of the woman she’d hardly known—who could only be a shadow in her memory, a flicker of a face in profile, a hand in the tangle of her hair, a fragrance vaguely haunting. He both pitied and envied her. Her memories were fleeting and phantasmal, almost a dream of a mother, and so there was little to cherish. But she did not carry, either, the pain of loss.

  Millimaki counted the years—their mother would be sixty years old, a middle-aged woman. But he never thought of her as any older than she was the day she died. When he thought of his parents together the picture that appeared was one more of father and daughter—one frozen in time, the other, dead now, too, worn and gray, beaten, his face hard and cracked as trace reins.

  And then from this picture, another—his mother on the porch with one hand to her mouth, another to her throat as the rain blackened the sky to the east or south, watching like someone marooned as a ship beyond signal fire or semaphore plows doggedly on toward a far foreign shoreline, lush and safe.

  The jailer in his catatonia stared down unblinkingly. Millimaki imagined the man’s eyes drying in their abysmal sockets and clattering out atop the desk. When he consulted his wristwatch he found that ten minutes had passed. Above his head the second hand on the wall clock crept glacially down, its ticks in the silence loud as bell tolls.

  As though it were a monologue he had been uttering for hours into the dark without seam or interruption, almost before Millimaki had taken his chair John Gload began to talk again about farming. He told the young deputy that many nights, to combat sleeplessness, as a kind of self-trickery, he revisited a favorite field. He paused to light a cigarette from the smoldering butt of the last, which he dropped into the bean can. He stared after it as if it were of great interest to him. Then he corrected himself, said no, that’s not quite exactly right, it wasn’t tricking himself but tricking the insomnia, which he imagined as a palpable thing, a kind of shade or haunt that bent over him in his repose, passing rattling hand bones in the air above him to ward off the visitation of sweet slumber. It’s common knowledge that every child can sleep, he said. That they hadn’t learned how not to. But he had learned to hoodwink the leaning shape, to leave it standing bewildered above whatever bed he’d made or been given, by becoming once again John Gload the child, Gload the farmboy, whistling from the tractor seat in the sunshine of innocence on a brilliant day in a season that never changed in a year that could never be again.

  “Not but twelve years old, running a John Deere 3020 and a thirteen-foot duckfoot,” he said. “Eight foot of disk and drills.” He said it wasn’t a particularly good field, in fact being much of it a sidehill it was rocky and dry and for that reason he found it gratifying that it could raise up anything at all. It had been put into barley but it wasn’t the satisfaction of any crop that seemed his anodyne but the clear remembrance of the view from the tractor seat as he rounded the field and in a kind of somnolent monotone, an echo perhaps of the monotony of the plowing itself, he described for the younger man, in panorama, what he could see yet—sandstone bluffs bewigged with ancient sage, the stone chimney of a honyocker’s cabin standing amid a rubble of rust-colored timbers, the pale green of a river bottom and then, on another turn, much farther, a serrated line which seemed some days mountains within a day’s easy walk and on others a mere brushstroke of blue on blue that may well have been a cloudbank or was perhaps nothing at all, a phantasm. Bluffs, chimney, bottomland, mountains—a strange soporific concocted out of days and months and years with duckfoot, disk and drill a half century before.

  The field lay in the bed of some primordial sink or pothole, and on the outer passes, the tractor and plow rode perilously on the incline of the bowl and he was forced to put one foot against the fender to maintain balance, riding with a foot braced there and leaning uphill, as though his small weight would be the critical counterbalance against disaster. Beyond the outermost furrows was a den of foxes, the dark aperture facing south, and the young kits in those first warm days of spring would lie atop the mounded dirt and watch Gload unalarmed, when he came close lying low to the ground and then as though attached by invisible wires to the passing machine sit bolt upright when he had gone past, their outsized ears swiveling, small black noses sorting out the scent of a man, the scent of this other creature roaring and chugging and darkening the air with its perse breath.

  And he told the deputy that the gulls began to arrive. They appeared first as minute white tufts against the green of the river trees and he turned and made a pass going away and then suddenly they were among the furrows behind the plow, as though like the soldiers of myth they sprang from the ground itself. He wondered how they found him and thought they may have followed the dust cloud or perhaps like wolves or hounds on a blood scent they could smell the new-turned earth. He threw the tractor into neutral and sat watching as the birds gorged themselves on tiny infant mice he had exposed from under small rocks and glistening worms as long as garter snakes, and crickets and partridge nestlings and even above the pothering of the engine he could hear the gulls scream. There seemed to be no communion among them. They fought over every mouthful, the most successful of them gagging down pieces that would have choked a hyena and in the chaos of screeches there were times it seemed they would set upon one another until one gruesome bird remained, engorged and wallowing through the furrows unable even to raise his bloodied wings to fly.

  In the end he told Millimaki that that was how he was able to sleep, when he did sleep. He revisited the field as he lay in whatever darkness waiting for the blessing of that oblivion. In the memory he did not know if it was the same day or simply a day each time that was similar but the sun was bright overhead and unobscured and the den of foxes sat erect and regarded him with the same black eyes and like Harpies the seagulls came planing over the rim of the hills. The gulls were the only things that ruined the picture for him, with their rapacious mouths and their screaming, but they were as much a part of the memory as the plow or the field and he could not parse them out. He tried but they would not go and in the end if he could not sleep it was because of them.

  “I close my eyes and put my foot on that one step and even th
at I can see plain as anything under my boot and then I just ride round and round. It don’t always work but it works better than anything else,” Gload said. His hand came down and he stubbed out another cigarette. His chair squawked as he rose and then all of him was in darkness. “I believe I’ll try it right now.” Shortly from his own chair beyond the cage bars Millimaki heard the slight musical complaint of the cot’s metal latticework and the rustle of clothes or bedding. All along the corridor a chorus of liquid snores, bizarre snatches of dialogue from the fevered drama of mens’ nightmares. Often the names of women, slurred and lubricious pleas for that sweet thing. Hushed fervent promises of violent lovely torment. Millimaki listened, the midnight congress between men and their ghosts in this place as conventional as a heartbeat. He held his wrist up toward the light to read his watch and was amazed to see that an hour had passed.

  John Gload said, “Good night, Valentine. You might try my little trick next time you can’t sleep. In that field under the butte or wherever.” He had never told the old man his Christian name. He stood up and stared into Gload’s cage and then went slowly down the hallway, his shadow pooled about his boots.

  John Gload counted the slow receding footfalls that had for him in that durance become the tickings of a clock, the regular mesh of gear on gear marking the order of time. He closed his eyes. But in a short time he realized that the gulls that night were particularly active, swarming behind his eyelids in a maelstrom of soiled feathers and beaks stained with gore. So he lay in the plot of darkness now allotted him in the world thinking about the woman who waited for him at home.

  THREE

  The morning following the night on the dam they drove east six hours to Rapid City to exchange for currency what they had earned from their labors: a trunkload of antique glassware. The young gay man they had kidnapped and murdered had inherited much of the collection and had added to it over a decade, never dreaming the seashell plates and fluted glasses so lovingly arrayed about his dead mother’s house where he lived yet would be the vehicles of his own death.

  They drove the bright spring day in near total silence, the kid sleepy and still pouting from Gload having stuck a gun in his ear and the cold and quiet atmosphere suited the old man.

  In Roundup they stopped to eat and the kid, revitalized at the prospect of food, flirted with the waitress. She was a girl of nineteen or twenty and White stared after her stout bare legs as she walked away.

  He said, “How’d you like to have those clamped around yer ass?” Gload looked up from his paper briefly and looked back. “She’d about buck you off and that’s no shit,” the kid said.

  When the girl came back with their platters, Sid looked up at her. Above her left breast was a tag with the name Jessy laboriously printed in childish block letters.

  “Jessy,” Sid said. “Hey, now, what’s the name of the other one?” The girl set the plates down and looked over her shoulder.

  “I’m the only one on today,” she said. She smiled down at him, a pretty girl twenty pounds overweight with gaps in her teeth and sorrel hair in a knot atop her head, the seams and buttons on her uniform restraining burgeoning excesses of soft flesh at hip and bosom.

  Sid shook his head. “No, the other one.” He pointed at her tag, at her breast. She shook her head in confusion. “Hell, your other tittie,” he said. “This here one’s named Jessy, I can see that, but you ain’t named the other one.”

  Gload looked up at the girl briefly and then at White. “Shut your mouth,” he said. He spun his plate of eggs and ham around in front of him on the newspaper and began eating and those were the last words spoken between them until they reached Rapid City three and a half hours later.

  The building was weathered board and bat, proclaiming in great red letters on its façade: “Old West Trading Post.” The duckboards leading to saloon doors lay in a piebald shade beneath an archway of woven antlers. A marquee atop an iron pole of rudely welded four-inch pipe rose from within a ring of whitewashed stones, bearing skyward its message: “Coldest Beer in the west, postcards, IndiaN beAdwork, friendly. Clean rooms afFordable. Genuine antiquEs of the OLd West.”

  Gload pointed wordlessly and Sid nosed the big car up to a hitching rail. He swung the door open and said, “Stay in the car.”

  “We’re partners on this deal,” Sid said.

  Gload, standing outside the car, leaned his head down to speak into the open door.

  “Stay in the fucking car.”

  In ten minutes he came back. White sat brooding with his boots propped on the car’s dash, his arms crossed at his chest.

  Gload said, “Get your feet off of there. We’ll meet the man tonight, eight o’clock. Drive around to the side over here.” He fumbled with the plastic key fob. “One oh one.” He glared at the swinging doors and at the name in foot-high gold letters above them. “Colonel,” he said. He spat onto the gravel between his feet. “What’s he a fucking colonel of?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Colonel of bullshit, maybe.”

  “What’d he say?”

  Gload went to the passenger side door and got in. “One oh one,” he said. He pointed with the key. “Over there.”

  “Don’t I even get my own room?”

  “Once we take care of business you can get you a room and stay a month for all I give a shit,” Gload said. “Until then we stay together.” He looked over at him. “Partner.”

  Full dark at that early hour afforded them cover to unload from the car’s trunk the boxes of plates and cups and saucers, glasses, glazed and painted bowls and all manner of dishware, the uses for which Gload could only guess. He had no more interest in them than in stones or books or the workings of a car’s engine. He was in many ways as simple as a child, though without a child’s curiosity. In the efficiency of his work he took pride though not necessarily pleasure, any more than would a man running sawlogs through a mill or for his prescribed hours soldering senseless components onto a board. He was handy at his work and it afforded him a living. His pleasures were few and modest—sitting in the sun at the door of his house in the orchard above the Breaks; a slow drive along the vacant county gravel roads with Francie to park finally above the river to watch the sun fall down toward the crimson close of the day. Once a year he loaded a stout pole and reel and drug the muddy Missouri bottom for paddlefish.

  The Colonel, a small wizened figure seeming smaller yet within his huge swivel chair, instructed Sid the Kid to display the goods on a long folding table, making benevolent sweeping motions as he spoke and when this was done he got up with pipe in hand and walked up and down before them as if inspecting troops, picking up an occasional saucer or bowl to squint at runes on its underside. Gload had taken a chair opposite the Colonel and the exhibited wares, that he might see the man’s eyes. He smoked and appeared to pay little attention to the production. Like a tradesman, his talents were primarily manual—the use of a knife, manipulation of flesh—but they ran also to cards and the reading of men’s faces. So when the Colonel sat back and packed his pipe and said a number, Gload stubbed out his cigarette, stood and walked through the door into the night without a word, as though he were taken with a mild whim or notion, or had remembered suddenly some domestic errand. The Colonel and Sid White sat quietly dandling their feet in their chairs. They did so for fifteen minutes. The Colonel began to swivel and fidget in his chair and Sid began to sweat.

  As if to answer a question that had not been asked, Sid said, “Well, hell, I don’t know. He might of had, you know, one of them deals.” He made a rotating motion near his ear. “A stroke.” He rose. “I’d best go and check on him.”

  As he left the room the little man said, “It’s a generous offer, tell him. A handsome offer.”

  Gload sat in the room, smoking. He had turned on the TV but did not seem engaged by it. He sat with his head leaned back on the chair watching the smoke curl up to the ceiling. He had put his slippers on.

  Sid looked at him incredulously.
“What’re you doing? He’s waiting back there.”

  Gload smoked. Presently he spoke, very slowly, as if instructing a child. “How much did the kid who previously owned all that shit say it was worth?” He continued to study the smoke, White presented with a view of the bristled hollows of the older man’s throat.

  “What he said might not of been right,” White said. “He might of just been a fag trying to be Mister Big Shot.”

  Gload only sat, waiting, his head back. One slippered foot jounced up and down to some slow rhythm sounding in his head.

  “Okay,” Sid said, “he said seventeen-five.”

  “Seventeen-five,” Gload repeated. “And your new buddy over there, the Colonel, offered what was it again?”

  “It’s a handsome offer.”

  Gload’s eyes were small and black like a pig’s and when he dropped his head and turned them on the kid, in the fluxing television glow they flashed a brief radioactive spark.

  “Okay, okay,” the kid said. “Eight thousand dollars. That’s a shitload of money for dishes.”

  “Eight thousand dollars. A difference of what?”

  Sid sat figuring for some time. He began to cast about for pencil and paper.

  Gload said, “Nine thousand five hundred dollars.”

  “Right. Nine-five.”

  Gload held a single finger aloft as if to admonish White to listen to something outside the room. White looked about, his head canted.

  “What?” he said.

  “That,” said Gload. “The sound of the Colonel making money off other people’s sweat and travail.”

  White stood helplessly, his hands outstretched in an attitude of supplication.

  “Travail?”

  “My sweat and travail.”

  The kid said, “Well, what do I tell him?” A vision he’d begun to concoct of himself attired in a western-cut Porter Waggoner–style suit, its trouser pockets ballasted with folded bills in a begemmed clip, began to wobble and fade. Even half of the money the Colonel had offered was money beyond reckoning. He had worked washing dishes in an Italian restaurant in Black Eagle and he had sold batteries stolen from cars and he had once worked briefly as a hay hand in the Judith Basin, feigning heat sickness after one long hot morning atop a haystack, riding to town on the bus and licking his blistered palms like a dog. From that foray into ranch work Sid White considered himself a cowboy. Four thousand dollars was the stuff of hallucination. “He ain’t going to sit there and wait on us forever.”