The Ploughmen: A Novel (8 page)

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 was 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.

“Goddamn it, I’m sorry. Your wife’s name is…”

“Glenda, sir.”

“I’ve got a pretty good system for forgetting shit, too. For Christ sake. Glenda. That’s right. She’s a nice girl. A nurse, isn’t she?”

“Yes, sir. An ICU nurse.”

“She been chasing you around when you get home?”

“If she was home she might. Or me her. But she’s gone to work by the time I get home.”

“Right, right. You just said that.”

As if some order in the tumult of papers arrayed across his desktop might be disturbed, he delicately lifted one then another and peered under them. “What is that drive for you, an hour or better?”

“This time of year little over an hour.”

“Uh-huh.” He patted down his shirt, felt in his pants pockets. He called, “Raylene!” There was no answer from the outer office. “Goddamn it.” He picked up a page of paper and held it away from himself and stared at it, scowling.

“You know about Gload, then,” he said. “I mean you read his sheet and all that.”

“I did some, since we brought him in. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it.”

“You know there are cops in this town, hell, all over this state, that if they were to pull over John Gload by accident would just about piss their pants? I mean old-time bulls, old-time tough beat cops and sheriffs, sonsofbitches who have seen it all.”

Millimaki said, “Officer Dobek did seem a little on edge.”

The sheriff smiled grimly. “Not having been there, I can only guess that’s a decided understatement.”

“But I did hear that about Gload from somewhere, yes, sir.” He thought about the old man stiffly astride his chair in the cell and his slow careful trudging along the icy walks, as though afraid in falling he would shatter like crockery. “It’s hard to believe now.”

“Don’t be fooled by that smile, Val, or him being an old man. You’ve seen those hands. He could squeeze juice out of a stove log.”

“Yes, sir. That’s true.”

“Take his sheet home and look over it. Study it. Hell, it might help you get to sleep, though it’s more likely to make you lock all the doors and sit up with your gun in your lap. I think we might finally have him on this thing, but there are a lot of unanswered questions floating around with Gload’s name hanging off of them.”

He shuffled more papers, patted his pockets again front and rear. “Anyway, the shitty thing is this, Val. I’m keeping you on nights. For one thing that old man has a hard-on about Wexler but also he seems to like you. I don’t know what it says about you and maybe I don’t want to know. He hates cops. Just hates cops like all get-out. But he talks to you. If you could just keep your ears open or maybe even steer him around to talking about some of the shit you’ll read on his sheet.” As he spoke the sheriff was variously leaning back and hunching forward in an effort to read the print on the files and forms fanned across his desk. He said finally, “Well. It’s a long shot. We might be able to clear up some of these things that have been left unfinished since he showed up in this country. And that was a hell of a long time ago.”

“All right.”

The sheriff eyed Millimaki. “What the hell is it about you, anyway, and that old killer?”

Millimaki thought for a minute. His head felt fat and his stomach rolled dangerously and his eyes burned. “We talk about farming.”

The sheriff stared at him. “Farming.”

“Other stuff. But farming, yes, sir.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” He waved Millimaki away and began running his hands beneath the papers on his desktop, feeling his pockets. “Would you please for the love of Christ ask Raylene when you go out if she’s seen my glasses anywhere?”