The Ploughmen: A Novel (26 page)

“There was a man. It was nothing. The wind blowing and my imagination going crazy over nothing.”

“I’m out of town. I could have someone come by.”

“No, that’s okay.”

“I could get them to send a car by.”

“How are you, Val?”

“I can’t sleep, either. I haven’t slept it seems like for a year.”

“You can get something for that.”

“I know. I hate taking anything.”

“Val, that’s not where she is.”

“You mean the Life Flight.”

“You could probably have checked on that. Checked if there was an accident.”

“I’m really tired, Jean.”

“I mean you could have that checked. With your department.”

“Sure. I could. Why would I?”

“Val, that’s not where she is.”

“She’s not out on the Life Flight.”

“Yes. That’s not right. I can’t say anything more.” She exhaled deeply into the receiver—a liquid sigh laden with weariness and all the heart-cracking mundane sorrow of her profession. “It just won’t do any good anyway.”

“Jean,” he said. “Jean?”

EIGHTEEN

He’d made no attempt to hide the car though the uncut ditch weeds when he’d driven it off the road rose above the fenders and little could be seen of it but the roof and windows. There was much to do and the old man gathered pencil and paper and started in immediately, pacing deliberately down the narrow orchard lane that led to his house. He paced and stopped to scribble in a small wide-ruled notebook and paced again. To his right the scraggly orchard, where songbirds flitted and chirruped softly and on his left the old right-of-way fence whose strands of rusted wire hung in low bights or lay hopelessly garbled on the ground among the weeds. Beyond it acres of parched sage, running to the breaks of the river and into the low hills dotted in that arid place with random tortured junipers and bull pine. Pace, stop, write. Turn, pace. He consulted the sun, the shadows of the trees upon the ground. He noted the direction of the wind and with his head erect and eyes closed he appeared to be taking the scent of something. At last he stopped and turned in a circle, made a final notation with the stub of pencil and then, like a child who’d tired of a game, walked from the midst of tangled trees and through the weedy ditch toward the house.

At his table he transcribed his notes onto a larger sheet of paper, the pencil stub scraping slow and painfully along the page. He sat back and examined the work for a long moment then crumpled it and began again on a second sheet. By the fifth page he was satisfied. He held it at arm’s length. He set it down and stood back and looked at it from a distance. He walked around the table and looked at it from several angles with a squinted eye.

Beneath the sink he found a coffee can Francie had used for compost waste. He took it to the back-door stoop and put in the note pad and the failed drawings and at last even the pencil and burned it all, the flames a comfortable orange in the velvet blue light of dusk. Nighthawks as he stood over the guttering can flared above the apple trees against a rose sky. A distant squall was prophesied on the breeze by the smell of wet sage. When the can had cooled he took it up and bore it like a monstrance before him down the lane where he trod the ashes into the dirt. He flattened the can under his heavy shoes and sailed it far out into the brush. The day’s last sunrays gleamed on the rear window of Wexler’s car, dangerously atilt in the borrow ditch of the county road. While the nighthawks veered and swooped above him he stood listening. If it was the end, and it almost certainly was, he had set things right. He felt a kind of peace he’d not known for years, since he was a boy. The day was done, the field plowed.

He turned then and went through the ditch and wove among the trees, no longer counting his steps now because they were counted and recorded and archived and he sat with his back against a tree under the dangling harrow tines in the mild evening air until it was quite dark.

*   *   *

“Some kid out sighting in his aught-6 found Wexler. Or his dog did. Part of him. The dog found part of Wexler. It was just a damn accident.”

“Oh, God.”

“God only knows where the rest of him is. Buried out there with his other bones. Or in the river. I don’t know. We got the dogs out, boats in the water.” The sheriff paused, swiveled his chair to the window. “He did his old best number on him.”

Val sought a chair and sat unbidden. The sheriff swiveled back, considered him with weary eyes over the rim of his reading glasses.

“You know when they found him he was just sitting in a chair out at his place like he was waiting for a cab.”

“I know.”

“Just like the first time. Didn’t make a bit of fuss. Put out his hands for the bracelets, said howdy boys.”

Val looked into his palms. He could feel the sheriff’s eyes on him.

“Then he asked where was Deputy Millimaki.”

Val said nothing.

“Said he was expecting Millimaki. Said he’d like to talk to the deputy.”

“I can’t explain that.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

“He won’t tell me where Wexler is, if that’s what you mean.”

“I’m sure he won’t. That’s another secret John Gload will take to his grave. And by Christ I hope he takes it there soon.”

“Yessir. I hope so.”

The sheriff removed his half-glasses and set them deliberately on his desk atop its chaos of papers. He passed his hands across his face in a washing motion. When he looked up, his eyes were fond and enormously sad. “Do you in point of fact, Val? Do you hope that?”

That question Millimaki considered as he drove home that afternoon and it occupied his thoughts all that evening as he sat on his porch watching the sky dim and the stars emerge from the void with their vanguard of bats and he even had the opportunity to discuss the difficult matter later with Weldon Wexler when he appeared in Millimaki’s dream. But Wexler, carrying an armload of bloodless limbs like stovewood and wearing a vivid carmine scar on his neck, was disinclined to speak.

*   *   *

John Gload in the month of October was convicted of first-degree murder and was to spend the rest of his life in the Montana State Penitentiary in Deer Lodge. A casualty of the strenuous proceedings, his lawyer succumbed finally to the ravages of his vice and had been committed to a detoxification center in Billings. He’d shown up for trial in the suit he’d slept in, his bald dome white as an egg beneath the lights, and his tremors would not allow him to open his briefcase or lift a glass of water to his cracked and spluttering lips. John Gload accepted this as an inevitability and seemed hardly to notice.

Gruesome photographs and mock-ups of the young man disinterred from his unsatisfactory grave in the Breaks were set upon easels at the front of the courtroom and the heart surgeon for two long hours explicated them, in his thousand-dollar suit parading up and back like a university don, poking and slapping at the exploded images with a wooden pointer. He described the damage to the heart and how the chest must be accessed for its repair and at last setting aside the pointer and weaving his gracile fingers through the air like a tailor or shoemaker he illustrated his method for wiring together the sternum where it had been split. A technique unlike any other, he said. Unique. Proprietary. The prosecuting attorneys rolled their eyes at one another discreetly and Gload’s young public defender stammered his objections. Even so, Gload had been intensely interested. He was at that time seventy-seven years old. Sidney White, in view of his cooperation, at an earlier date had been given forty years, ten suspended. His place of incarceration was yet to be determined. It was thought he should not inhabit the same institution as John Gload. White’s trial for the Miles City rape and assault was pending. Regardless, he would be nearly the age of his mentor before he resumed his short and inglorious career in the world of free men.

NINETEEN

He went slowly along a long gray corridor, the redoubtable masonry of clammy stone on either side stacked and mortared against the penetration of hope. The familiar smell of disinfectant and floor wax was in his nostrils, the walls lined with scarred wooden benches with high backs that may have been pews rescued from a desanctified church. In passing he read names carved into the seats circumscribed with hearts or conjoined with chains and there were admonitions in crude calligraphy to fuck off, to eat shit. In one high seat back an optimistic vandal had inscribed his assurance that Millimaki would be reborn. The work of feral children, of wives and lovers mutely enraged by their celibacy, their infidelities. Mothers had dug their nails into the soft wood as they waited in the dank corridor to see the fruit of their wombs turned out so briefly from their cages.

The familiar fluorescents as he walked cast their antiseptic light. Another sally gate slid open with a rasp of metal and shortly, on his right, through the scratched and foggy Plexiglas he saw the face of John Gload, more equine now, the long jaw bones prominent, his eyes seemingly grown larger. All else save his hands seemed diminished and he sat with them flat on the table, sphinxlike, staring vacantly into the glass before him, heedless of the clamor of voices and the scrape of chairs. The terrible light turned his skin to marble. Several small round Band-Aids adorned his forehead and neck, the spurious flesh color like mismatched patches on a creased and faded shirt.

“My, my,” he said. “Deptee.” His smile revealed now a dead tooth the color of oak. “You’re looking good.”

“Hello, John. How they treating you?”

“Treat me like a goddamn convict, is what they do.”

“If the shoe fits.”

Gload stared frankly at the younger man’s face for a long uncomfortable moment and then grinned once again, the awful canine like a grub clinging to his smile.

“Did I ever tell you that in the old days they used to put concrete shoes on these assholes who tried to escape? Weighed twenty pounds. Had to wear them shoes every waking hour, walking around clank clank clank. Like that.”

“No, I guess you didn’t.”

“Well, it’s a fact.” He removed his cigarettes from a breast pocket and laid them in front of him, aligning the pack fastidiously with the table edge. He coughed. His voice had more gravel in it. “So you’re a fed now, is that it?”

Millimaki shook his head in amazement. “Still tapped into your jailbird pipeline. You’re a goddamn wonder.”

The old man made motions as if to snatch feathers swirling around his head. “Words float around, Val, and you pick them up.”

“Amazing. Any word out there regarding the color of my shorts?”

Gload effected a mirthless smile, the parchment skin of his horse’s jaw tight. His tongue worried at the dead tooth. He said, “Please tell me you ain’t FBI at least.”

“ATF. About two years now.”

“All Those Fuckers. If you’ll pardon me. It’s just a joke, Val.”

“I hadn’t heard that one,” Millimaki lied. “That’s not bad.”

Gload removed a cigarette from his pack and tapped an end on his thumbnail. He said, “I appreciated that picture you sent.”

“I took that on my last search. I was clearing out some stuff. Thought you might like it.”

“Nice picture,” he said. “Never did find the letter went with it, though.”

“I’m not much of a letter writer.”

The old man studied his hands and the burning cigarette between his fingers. “Kind of thought you might of stopped by and say good-bye before they shipped me out.”

“They put me on two weeks’ leave after that. You were gone by the time I got back. Then I got this gig and, well, on to other things.”

“Well, anyways.” Gload looked up. A weary smile, his lips thin and chapped. “They must treat you good. You’re looking better’n the last time I seen you. Eating good, getting more sleep, am I right? Making good money?”

“I’m doing okay, John. And what about you? How you making it?”

The old man was terribly thin and bent. The signs of his chronic insomnia were very much in evidence—even through the hazy plastic barrier Millimaki noted the old man’s eyes latticed with veins, the skin beneath them dark as war paint. His hand when he reached for his cigarettes exhibited a faint quaver.

“Oh, not what you might say thriving. I don’t sleep much. You know how it is. Just living it out, like I told you once. Living it out.” He struck his lighter to the end of a filterless Camel and blew smoke at the ceiling. “We’re like two trains going different ways, Val.”

“What about that farming dream?”

He snorted. “That gets harder and harder. Just like an old tattoo—the color has begun to fade and sometimes I can’t hardly see it no more.” He paused and wanly smiled. “Except for them gulls. Sonsofbitches are clear as ever.”

He sat smoking. In the adjacent cubicle a man began to shout in Spanish and pound the tabletop and the glass in front of him with the flat of his hand. He jumped to his feet and his chair lurched backward to the floor. Two guards moved toward him. He was led away in cuffs weeping. Beside Millimaki, beyond the insubstantial privacy barrier, a young woman sat in the chair as rigid as an obelisk, her hands covering her face. John Gload seemed to notice nothing. He had lifted his ashtray with the cigarette in it from the tabletop that it not be disturbed and when the man was taken away set it down.

“You speak that lingo?” he said.

“Not much.”

“He was asking her to save him. That’s a good one. Oh save me.” He did not look as the young man was drug away or at the girl beyond the glass but examined his cigarette or perhaps he considered the troubling phenomenon of its quivering end because he wore a wistful look. Finally the old man said, “So you were in the neighborhood?”

“Something like that,” Millimaki said. “I got your letter. You understand I couldn’t just come right away.”

“I wasn’t going nowheres.” By way of illustrating this fact he half turned in his chair and nodded toward a uniformed guard who stood sleepily in front of a door with wire running through the glass. He turned back, shaking his head.

Millimaki said, “I always have wondered, John, why you didn’t leg it out after Wexler. Why you waited out there.”