The Ploughmen: A Novel (5 page)

“Yeah. It makes sense. I just wish I didn’t have to hear it from Jean and look like an ass.”

“Jean loves you. You couldn’t look like an ass to her. She has a thing for you.”

“She’s a nice lady. I don’t get that kind of take on the rest of the crowd.”

She sat rigidly, gloved hands in her lap. “Those are my friends and colleagues.”

“Yes, and by the way, did you catch your colleague’s slave décor by the front door?”

“Of all the wonderful things in that house, that’s all you can comment on?”

“I didn’t notice any other racist appointments. He may have had some.”

“It’s not a slave just because it’s black, Val. It’s an antique.”

“Well, just because it’s old doesn’t make it not a nigger waiting to hitch up Massa’s Beamer after a long day in the OR.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” She stared into the windshield. The truck’s heater fan whirred. After a long while she said dreamily, “It’s a beautiful lovely house. I mean everything is so—”

“Everything is so bought.”

She didn’t turn to look at him. Whatever she saw in the dark glass still held her. “You could have tried, Val,” she said at last. “They were trying. They are talented intelligent men.”

“Glenda, when I’m expending all of my energy trying not to punch someone in the throat for staring at my wife’s ass.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I have eyes.”

“Yes,” she said. “You have cop eyes.”

“Cop eyes?” he said. He turned on the seat to look at her. “This is new.”

“Just the way you look at things. Eyes that see around corners and under things where nobody else would think to look.”

He felt the night’s tension begin to veer toward a novel savagery. Unconsciously he dug one hand into the seat as if he might hold them in place against the quickening current. His long exhalation fogged the window glass.

“Okay,” he said. “Look, it’s just that I don’t have a thing in common with those guys.”

“You could have talked about hunting. You could have talked about that.”

“A goddamn rhino, Glenda. There was not one head shot in this country. Hell, on this continent.”

“Well. It’s still hunting.”

“It is and it isn’t. I mean a Chevy’s a car and a, whatever, a Lamborghini’s a car. The same, in name only.”

“But you know what, Val? When I’m with your sheriff’s department Neanderthals I try.”

“Once. Exactly one party you came to with me.”

“That’s not true.”

“One time. In three and a half years. And ‘Neanderthals’?”

“That’s not fair, of course. The sheriff seems very nice. One or two others I remember with eyebrows that didn’t meet in the middle.”

They sat staring out at the desolate lot. Trash cartwheeled past and caught up against cars parked in their numbered spaces. From a gap in a hedge of half-dead arborvitae a lean brindle dog shot past trailing a tether, its hair roached up on its back by the wind and it trotted with its head oddly angled to avoid stepping on the rope. In the harsh odd light its ribs showed clearly. She watched it until it vanished into the gloom between the austere complexes. Overhead powerlines swayed perilously, their shadows writhing on the icy pavement. When she spoke again her voice had softened.

“If the wind would not blow for one day.”

“You’ll wish a long time for that.”

She moved her slender wrist again into the green dashboard light.

“I guess I’d better go in before Jean locks me out.”

“Does she have an extra bed?”

“A couch. A foldout.”

“That’s just torture,” he said. “Does she have rocks? Rocks would be more comfortable.”

“I’ll be fine for one night.” She reached over and patted his hand briefly where it lay between them on the seat. “You be careful driving home.”

“I will.”

They both got out of the truck into the raw nighttime and she ran for the shelter of a stairwell. He stood there for a moment with the wind rifling down his jacket and whipping his pants legs and watched until he saw her on the second-level walkway hurrying beneath weak amber bulbs. She stopped at a door without looking back and disappeared within.

He considered the hour drive to the empty house in the hills where the snow would still be ankle deep. “That’s all right,” he said. “You can kiss me twice tomorrow night.” He got behind the wheel and looked up at the apartment door. “Or a wave. That might have been nice.”

*   *   *

During the first week of the trial, the young deputy took John Gload from his cell to the courthouse and escorted him to chambers to meet with his lawyer and he walked with him to the bathroom and during noon recess carried his lunch to him in the holding area. At the dark end of the day he held Gload’s elbow like an old companion as they crossed the frozen courthouse yard on the icy sidewalks, the old man in his leg irons shuffling among the stark shadows of still-leafless elms as black as columns of anthracite in the pearl moonlight of early April.

Gload said little during this time to anyone, and Millimaki made no attempt to draw him out. What conversation there was was remote and quotidian, the kind any two strangers might exchange. A word about the food, the weather. For the most part the old man sat before the high bench in the courtroom beside his lawyer with his head erect and unmoving and with his enormous arms atop the table in the pose of a leonine statue. Occasionally he slid a yellow legal pad close and scribbled on it feverishly. At times Millimaki caught the old man looking at him appraisingly where he stood nearby. When Millimaki returned his stare he did not look away and he did not smile.

When the week was out, on a Monday, Weldon Wexler assumed Millimaki’s escort duties and would take the old man to and from the courtroom where the nature or duration of his life would be decided. He’d been with the department a year longer than Millimaki and had parlayed this seniority and a troubling knee into a request for light duty, relegating Millimaki to an indefinite period of night shift at the jail. When they passed in the corridor that morning Wexler favored him with a smirk and a short two-fingered salute. He limped away down the bright corridor, favoring first one knee then the other, hair freshly barbered and meticulously combed, his uniform trousers creased smartly, sharp creases beneath the pockets of his shirt. Buckles, buttons, the snaps on his holster, polished to the luster of servingware. The men in their cells who like feral dogs sensed weakness in any form mocked him in hushed tones and would in the deep witnessless hours of the night concoct from his slewing gait and pretty mouth salacious tableaus, hissed from cage to cage to cage like some lascivious burlesque.

Valentine Millimaki would not see John Gload in the light of day for a month and his own wife for nearly as long. He left his small house in the foothills of the Little Belt Mountains as the sun burned to an ember through the timber at the ridgetops even as his wife arrived home and he spent the long nights ambling listlessly about the old building or sitting outside the prisoners’ cells, nearly maddened with boredom and claustrophobia.

He found it almost impossible to adapt to this place where in enduring his eight- or ten-hour shift he would differ so little from his charges in their cages.

All but asleep on his feet at the jailer’s desk on the third night, he was roused by the appearance through the streetside door of Voyle Dobek and another veteran deputy and they carried between them a slight dark figure seemingly as boneless as a straw man, the toes of his shoes squealing as he was dragged roughly along the polished floor. They turned toward the sally gate, blowing and sweating like draft horses and when Millimaki came forward Dobek said, “Just stick your ass right there, Millimaki, and buzz us in. We’ll take care of this blanketass.”

When he saw the man next, at three-thirty in the morning, he was shivering violently. The sound of his teeth chattering brought Val to the bars and he saw the man sitting on the bunk with the rough wool issue blanket wrapped around him and cowled monklike over his head. The hand that held the blanket was overlarge for a man his size, abraded and deeply fissured.

Millimaki said, “Are you sick?”

He was a Cree from the Rocky Boy reservation, his face in the beam of Millimaki’s flashlight a death’s-head of sunken cheeks and eyes in their caves the color of coal.

The man could barely speak. “Them bastards held me down in a g-goddamn puddle and I can’t can’t can’t get warmed up no more.”

Millimaki reached through the bars and felt the sleeve of the man’s worn western shirt. “You’re soaked.”

“I’m all s-soakin’ wet and I can’t get warm.”

“I’ll get you something.”

He had a spare shirt in his truck and he came with that and another blanket and a cup of burned coffee from the office hot plate. He’d expected to smell liquor when he entered the cell but he did not. The small man shook so badly he could not negotiate the shirt’s buttons and the deputy was forced to do it for him.

“All’s I wanted to do was to talk to her. That was all. I never in my life put a hand on that woman. She’s a drunk. I’m worried about my kids.”

“Yeah,” Millimaki said. “Okay.”

“She’s taken up with some white dude. I think he might be some kind of meth-head or something. Some junkie. I come down after work and all’s I want to do is to talk to her, man. Now I’m fixing to lose my job.”

“Where do you work?”

“I bust tires at a place up in Big Sandy. I ain’t never missed a day in four and some years.”

Millimaki took out his notebook and pen. “Write down the name of the place and your boss.” The little man wrote, his knobbly hand working laboriously across the small page, shaking.

“I don’t know that you can read that. See if you can.”

Millimaki read it back and the man said it was right.

“What’s your name?”

“George Gopher. Georgie they call me.”

“Drink that coffee.”

“I ain’t drunk, you know. Them sonsofbitches said I was drunk but I ain’t.”

“I know you’re not. Just to warm you up is what I meant.”

“All right.” He sipped at the cup, made a face. He held up one arm and the shirtsleeve dangled over his hand. “This shirt’s too big for me.”

“So sue me. I forgot your size.”

“It’s all right.”

When he left George Gopher’s cell half an hour later, the man was asleep on his cot under the two blankets and the hallway was as quiet as a mortuary. One of the tube lights was failing and it strobed weirdly, his footfalls syncopated like an antique movie reel and into this light a plume of cigarette smoke bloomed from John Gload’s cell.

*   *   *

The long hallway with its cells had been painted yellow halfway up and it looked as though it had, a half century before, endured a flood of bile. On one of the first nights Millimaki walked down, his boot heels resounded hollowly and above the insect-burr of the tubelights and from the invisible interiors of the cells came the sounds of sleeping men and their smells—sweat and hair cream, aftershave, urine, from some a distinctive metallic smell that Millimaki had decided was the smell of fear.

The thin Cree Georgie Gopher had made bail and was back north earning his difficult living and bearing upon those narrow shoulders the great burden of his endangered children.

Millimaki paused at the end of the hall, cocking his ear at a noise that might have been someone strangling, but it was only snoring or a man in that aphotic place struggling against some malign hands in dream. He was about to turn when a voice said, “Seems you got the shit-end of some stick or other, Deptee.”

“You scared the shit out of me, John. I thought everybody was asleep.”

“Sleep,” the old man said wistfully. “I don’t sleep much, kid.”

Millimaki approached the cell door and in the slant of light could make out but Gload’s disembodied legs and huge hands and wrists. The hands disappeared momentarily and he heard a scritch and then the flare of the match and Gload’s visage appeared for an instant from the black like a mask passed before a stage light.

“What’s the deal with this Weldon asshole?”

“Deputy Wexler, I think you mean.”

“Yeah, Wexler. Sorry-ass little turd. He wants me to call him Weldon I guess so we can be pals.” He grunted. “What’d you do to miss out on baby-sitting me, anyways? Seems like pretty fair duty.”

“Deputy Wexler has seniority on me. And he’s nursing a bum knee.”

Gload snorted. A pale cloud formed from out of the dark of his cell. “Right. From chasing bad guys.” He seemed incredulous. “That’s what he honest to Christ said.” He waited for Millimaki to say something but he did not. “Seems to get around on that war wound pretty good unless somebody’s watching him.” He snorted again. Millimaki would come to understand in the coming weeks that this was what passed for a laugh from the old man.

“I don’t know anything about how he got it.”

“He tells me you’re a farm kid. But he kind of says it like he has a mouthful of shit.”

He knew Gload was fishing, whether to combat the boredom of stir or for some other reason, and he chose to ignore it. He had been around enough of these jailbirds to know that it was in their nature to foment trouble and it didn’t matter whether it was among the jailed or their keepers. He said, “It’s a dryland farm-ranch outfit. I’ve got a cousin who’s running it now. West of town.”

“Rich cousin, I’d bet.”

“He came down off his folks’ place on the Hi-Line. They’ve done all right.”

“I figured as much. Do you wisht you was running it?”

“Not so much. Some of it I liked. Didn’t like cows too much but I liked the machinery.”

“Farming.”

“Yeah. The tedious stuff, dragging a harrow, plowing and seeding. Don’t know what that says about me. Probably that I’m boring.” What he didn’t say was that he welcomed the solitary time within the drone of the engine to think, apart from the room he still shared with his sister or the quiet moments at the supper table where his father’s silence broadcast nonetheless a tirade of bone-deep guilt and loneliness and accusation, his eyes from their shadowed hollows radiating a look of grim wonderment at the type of creature sprung from his own loins who could so placidly compose his mother on the floor of a chicken shed and fit slippers on her feet.