The Ploughmen: A Novel Read online

  “With an offer of what he said he can sit and wait till doomsday comes,” Gload said. “If you come back here without a number in your mouth that is twelve thousand then I am gone home. And I’ll not send you back with a different number. I’ll not dicker like a Mexican over a clay pot. There is one number that will work and I just told you it.”

  Sid White stood openmouthed in front of Gload, who had by then turned to the television and begun roaming the stations, his face no more than a foot from the screen as he turned the dial, its crags awash in a kaleidoscope of lurid colors. This old man, White thought, is going to get me fucked over. He considered his options and decided that should the numbers not work he could come back with something in his pocket to take care of John Gload. Gload was an old man and the kid didn’t care about all the things he had supposedly done a hundred years ago. He wastes one queer, so what? He would still go down with a blade in his spine, same as any man would. He could make a deal with the Colonel, he was sure, and who would miss this sonofabitch with anyway one foot already in the grave?

  “We could go ten,” the kid said. “Show our good whatchacall. Intentions.”

  “I am leaving in the morning with what I said or nothing,” Gload said to the television screen. “And the shit goes back in the trunk.”

  In ten minutes the kid came into the room and sat on the edge of one of the beds. Gload did not look up. White sat with his hands on his knees, his mouth slightly ajar. He sat so for some time, his tongue darting out with the regularity of a heartbeat. Finally he said, “Well, I will be goddamned all to hell.” He looked at Gload then. “He said come in in the morning and he’ll have the money.” The kid was looking at Gload’s great sloping back beneath a T-shirt worn to near transparency. A gray fringe of hair bristled at the neck. “Hey, old man, I said he’ll have the money. What you wanted, twelve grand, all of it.” He shook his head. “He didn’t piss and moan or nothing. Just sat there for a half minute and said it: come by in the morning. Unfuckingbelievable.” He was about to clap the old man on the back, but thought better of it.

  “You are something else, you know that?”

  Gload looked up then. He said, “You left the door open.”

  * * *

  Morning, heralded by a raw wind that pawed and moaned at the door and by a bar of wan light beneath the draperies, saw John Gload paring his nails in the coned light of a bed lamp and on the twin bed opposite Sidney White was an inappreciable bundle, as though beneath the horse blanket bedspread stickwood and stones were arranged to approximate the shape of a man. A faint whistle issued from under the covers and on the pillow Gload could see but the top of the boy’s head, a medusa of lank blue-black stringlets against the linen. He sat with the knife in his hand for a long time.

  An hour later White sat in the passenger seat of the car, bleary-eyed and shivering in his thin denim jacket, and watched as Gload came from the Colonel’s office, slewing bearlike down the ludicrous duckboard walkway. The car was loaded and running and John Gload settled behind the wheel. From an envelope he counted out ten five hundred dollar notes and handed them across to the kid.

  “This ain’t half,” White said. “I can figure that much.”

  Gload levered the car in gear and pulled onto the highway west, the asphalt a ribbon of brass unspooling in the rearview mirror, wherein small birds feeding at the road edge rose like sea spume and tumbled shimmering in their slipstream.

  “You were ready to settle for four and you get five,” Gload said. “What you might call a ‘handsome offer.’”

  The kid regarded Gload’s profile, adamantine as those granite visages chiseled from the mountain a few miles’ drive south. He fanned the money in his hands—new stiff bills, undreamed-of fortune—and knew it was pointless to argue. As they sped past the array of strip malls and truck stops, he sat with his forehead against the side window. He said, “What a fucked-up town.”

  By the time they got to Miles City the kid’s mood had brightened considerably. His head swiveled as they drove through town and he took note of the number of bars and of the garish rodeo posters in shop fronts of bucking and rearing horses and he goggled at teenage girls with books clamped to their chests and their long hair swaying down their backs. Suddenly he turned to Gload and said, “What’s the best hotel in this shithole?”

  “Pioneer, I suppose. Used to be anyway.”

  “Drop me off there.”

  “It was on the other end of town. We passed it.”

  The kid seemed not to hear. He sat with his face pressed to the window glass, patting his left breast pocket wherein the folded bills lay, and Gload shook his head. It would not be long, he knew, before the kid and money parted company. He slowed and glanced at his mirrors and U-turned the car in the wide avenue, cranking the wheel around with one finger.

  “If I can’t get laid here,” the kid said, “I don’t have a hair on my ass.”

  Having retrieved his small gym bag from the trunk, the kid swung open the passenger side door and leaning in made a gun of his thumb and forefinger, aimed it at the old man behind the wheel. He said, “Okay. I’ll catch you back on the home turf, pardner.” Gload bent down to watch him mount the hotel steps, swaggering atop three-inch riding heels with his jeans stuffed bronc rider style into his boot tops. He paused at the door to rake back his snarled hair and turn up his collar and he swept into the lobby like some kind of outland prince come to take the little town by storm. For all that, Gload thought, he was no more than a boy.

  Some time later he stopped the car at a small creek which like an oasis in the bald prairieland along its course supported a stand of old cottonwoods. He walked through the tangled ditch weeds into the trees, the trunks gray and immense as menhirs. An incongruous crane labored up from the bracken along the muddy stream, towing its lean shadow through the heeling bluestem toward water rumored in the distance by a slash of green. Gload stood and relieved his swollen bladder against a tree and stared up into branches so high the ragged April scud seemed caught there like wisps of tapestry, a high circling bird caged in a wickerwork of pale spring bud. He stood for a long while, until the earth under his feet became as capricious as the deck of a ship. The line of song in his head was this, from when or where he could not remember: “Above Earth’s Lamentation.”

  FOUR

  They’d come for Gload in the late afternoon. He’d had time to put things in careful order and he sat for perhaps the last time on his chair, listening to the calls and flutterings of birds just arrived north and looking at the desolate faces of last year’s sunflowers at the orchard’s verge. He felt strangely at peace. He got up once and walked down the little orchard lane, bordered already by senseless weeds woven like basketry and he stared long across the sage where the river was. He kept his eyes there as he walked and soon they appeared, like wind-borne trash, rising and falling from view and appearing again, kiting effortlessly on set wings. The old man felt their terrible eyes on him.

  The wind shook the trees and their branches gnashed and shuddered and the wheat-pale needlegrass down every row lay on the ground. He stood at the prescribed spot looking through the gnarled trunks beyond which the sun burned slowly down. He moved forward a few paces and looked and he moved back, trying to see it as a stranger might. He squinted his eyes and through the ruddled apertures the cured orchard grass and the dark slender tree boles quaking against the sky were an impressionist’s blur of blue, ocher, dun. The grass bowed and hissed in the wind and waiting he heard the dull pong of the harrow tines, hung in a tree like a rude mobile or wind chime, and then he went back.

  Long before they arrived he could see the dust trail, patrol cars dragging a dirty cumulus across the evening sky, and he could see within it lights throbbing like a foundry fire and finally the cars themselves appeared, bumping and slewing up the narrow road, their windshields aflame.

  They found a house in neat order, dishes washed, bed made, plants in pots set up to the south-facing windows newly watered. They
found Francie’s clothes and perfumes and creams, her shoes paired and aligned in a closet. They asked about her and John Gload told them she was gone and he did not lie.

  * * *

  Five weeks later, astride the chair in his cell, John Gload recalled the moment under the cottonwood trees, not as one of the greatest miscalculations of his career but the instant of its realization. Standing pissing on a tree and embarked upon one course of action, the other concocting itself like a visitation out of the leaves of the trees.

  That morning Sid White had been led shuffling into the courtroom and he wasn’t in such spirits as Gload had seen him last. He sat hunched and childlike in a strange purple suit piped in gold and around his gaping shirt collar a bolo tie cinched with an outlandish shard of turquoise. Entering he did not raise a hand in greeting or so much as meet the old man’s eyes, as he seemed altogether transfixed by the troubling new jewelry adorning his wrists and ankles.

  Out of the cell’s tangible dark Gload alchemized an early morning in Rapid City. He sat beneath yellow lamplight with the knife in his hand as the kid slept and it would have been such an easy thing, a simple matter of drawing back the coverlet, getting a grip of hair and pulling the blade across Sid White’s throat. For that matter, he could have gotten in the car, driven back from the grove of cottonwoods a scant hundred miles and waited in the room in Miles City for the kid to come back drunk. In a way, he thought, it was like two mistakes, one stacked on top of the other. “I could of had him rolled in a bed quilt, into the trunk and underground and it wouldn’t of cost me no more than two hours tops,” he said.

  As he spoke, the young deputy who had befriended him came to sit in his accustomed chair. Millimaki thought with the appearance of Sid White today that the old man would be inclined to talk. He seemed, though, to regard Millimaki as no more animate than the chair he occupied. Gload sat back and disappeared into the darkness and a match flame revealed a ghostly theatrical mask of profound abstraction.

  Millimaki said, “Did you say something, John?”

  The old killer said, “For example, there’s one thing that if I would of done it and if I would of followed my goddamn instinks I’d be sitting in my little trees right now with a blanket on my lap. Instead.” He raised his hands palm up, turning his head left and right, inviting the attendant darkness to regard the conditions of his current life.

  Val turned in his chair to see if perhaps someone had come silently to stand behind him.

  Gload sat astraddle his chair, his hands atop his knees and his chin nearly on his chest. He looked very old then, his thin gray hair awry and hanging before his eyes and Val could see deep vertical creases in his neck like watercourses.

  “What one thing, John?”

  Gload shook his head ruefully.

  “The trouble with being old in my business is that all your old partners are dead or laying up dying slow in the joint somewheres. I was plumb out of good help, is how I come to get White. The young blood,” he said wearily. “Good Lord.” A hand rose from his knee as if of its own accord and he sat looking at the burning cigarette there and then put it to his lips. He spoke squinting through the smoke. “I tried to show him some things, but the way it is with these young guys is they already know everything and they want to be the boss. If they don’t know shit from apple butter.” A pause, a long liquid exhale from the shadows. “Golf clubs,” he said. “Sweet Jesus.”

  “What? Golf clubs? Are you talking about Sid White?”

  Gload continued. Millimaki felt invisible. “There’s times when you do that—look back and think, I should of done this or that or some other thing. Like with that kid. I don’t have a lot of those times, a handful, but what I do know is that you can’t never ever let them get under your skin. You did what you did at the time and at the time it was right. I regret almost nothing. This thing here lately. Some others. But I ain’t been eat up by them, either.”

  Val consulted his watch and waited. The night was well advanced. The old man sighed and Millimaki thought he might continue but he withdrew without a word and from the darkness came the creak of bunk chains.

  Val sat for a moment longer and stood to leave. From the dark came Gload’s voice. “Television. That’s the problem,” he said. “They seen it all on the television.”

  FIVE

  When Millimaki pulled into the yard the rancher who had phoned in the plate numbers stood leaning against a porch post, at four in the afternoon red-eyed and holding a tumbler a third full of something that looked like tea but was not. He did little more than point with his glass hand toward the low ridge where the car was and seemed otherwise indisposed to talk. Two scabrous heelers came on a dead run from a hay barn that leaned from its footings six inches from plumb and they made immediately for the flanks of the tracking dog and Val was forced to kick at them. When he turned the man had gone in, and when he came down off the mountain four hours later in the semidark there was no light burning anywhere on the place.

  It was a seldom-used ranch road the missing old man had taken, an apparently random turn from a random highway at the end of a fuddled and reckless drive. He had laid down the right-of-way gate and driven over the gate wires and posts and in the old Buick had bucked and churned upslope until the tires sank axle deep in the mud of a seep-spring.

  On the floorboards of the LeSabre were newspapers and balled filthy clothing and the dog snuffled at them, looking at Millimaki with his sad wet eyes and then set out lunging at his lead with the scent in his nose. The road wound steeply upward through sparse dwarf pine lopsided and scoured by the vicious winds that inhabited that place and then along a ridgetop where rocky spines like the backs of antediluvian plated beasts protruded from the soil. The wind did blow and it moaned among the trees and the dirt from the bare ridge seethed in the grass as the dog surged ahead, whining. Below and ahead of them an ancient tree rose from the center of a great rock, its limbs accoutered with crows. As man and dog approached, the birds rose by twos and threes croaking, their black beaks agape like panting dogs’, and their ragged wings beat furiously to hold against the wind.

  He had apparently tripped or had suffered a seizure or heart attack on the ridge and then had fallen head over heels like a circus tumbler, becoming lodged head downhill in the split trunk of the tree the birds had occupied. Old sawyers called these trees schoolmarms and the man’s head was wedged in the V of the trunk and was enlarged and black as a chunk of coal. His footfalls soundless through the pine duff, Millimaki circled the tree slowly, the film in the 35mm advancing with a whirr. He photographed close-up the terrible thing and then with some effort pried it from its horrible cunnilingual embrace and laid it back, where it sat rigored on the sidehill like a charred gargoyle. The dog sat whimpering. Millimaki snapped more pictures of the troll-like thing balanced on the slope and finally for his own purposes photographed the tree itself, groping freakishly into the daylight and wind as if from a stone egg, with its complement of funereal birds returned raucously to claim their rightful place.

  The mountains there were beyond the truck radio’s range and by the time he roused the rancher to call the coroner for permission to remove the body it was near dark. The rancher sat nearby at his kitchen table listening, dressed in the coveralls he had slept in. Millimaki negotiated the use of an ATV and a small cart. The exchange took perhaps ten words. The vehicle’s headlight when he arrived once again on the mountain pulsed bright and dim apace with its ragged idling and in this weird light he bagged the awkward corpse and rolled it onto the haycart among fencing pliers and staples and metal posts and at his truck loaded it with difficulty into the bed like a bale of wet hay.

  By the time he exchanged vehicles and made the drive to town through the dark on the empty highway and delivered his package to the morgue it was nearly six o’clock, and when he at last got home his wife was gone to work and his bed without her in it seemed as cold and bleak as the coroner’s trestle. An owl’s insistent call from the pines behind the cabin wa
s a din within which he could not sleep.

  * * *

  The sheriff sat rifling through a drawer in his desk and Millimaki could hear pens and loose change and perhaps pill bottles and cartridges clattering and then the man said, “Well, shit.” He looked up, surprised to see the young man standing there. He sat back and regarded him. “You look about half like a raccoon, Val, with those eyes. You been cattin’ around when you get off shift?”

  “No, sir. I just haven’t figured out how to sleep yet.”

  “Well, hell. It’s not your first graveyard.”

  Millimaki thought of the bright empty cabin without his wife moving about in her stocking feet, the muffled companionability at the verge of his sleep.

  “I slept better when my wife was home. Since she started working, I don’t know, it’s too quiet.”

  The sheriff nodded absently. “You’ll get it figured out. It takes a while. And about the time you do, it’s time to go back to the real world.” He looked down at the open drawer once more and then slid it shut. “I’ve got the finest system in the world for losing shit I need.”

  Millimaki stood. Out of boredom he’d eaten his lunch too early in his shift and now he felt the bad office coffee eroding the walls of his empty stomach. It churned and creaked and he hoped the sheriff would not hear it.