The Ploughmen: A Novel (11 page)

“I just want to be clear on that.”

“You are perfectly clear, Deputy.”

“Okay.”

Having shifted forward, Gload now sat half in light, half in dark, and he looked to have been sheared in two and set for display, head and shoulders of a taxidermied felon, a trophy displayed for tourists or schoolchildren in a diorama of prison life: table, chair, cot. Killer.

*   *   *

He lasted no more than six months at the Catholic orphanage where he was remanded as a ward of the neighboring state where the bones of his mother were buried. The first months there were marked by long gloomy silences and merciless teasing as the boy sought for his solitude the comforting dark of closets and gardening sheds and kitchen pantries. Then he began to fight. For young John Gload there was nothing of sport in these contests, and almost from the first, blood was the common consequence, as if like some pagan sacrament they could not be otherwise consummated. Boys three and four years older and twenty pounds heavier went about with torn ears and gouged eyes, the corners of their mouths split where Gload had jammed in his fingers and simply pulled, as though trying to tear a gunnysack. The screams of his dorm mates or threats from nuns or priests went unheard and Gload was more than once blindsided with a sap by one of the tough old Jesuits as he worked blood-speckled and stoical atop a boy who may have simply laughed at the wrong time.

Few of the residents or staff was saddened by his departure and when he set out under a shard of moon wending westward on his barely healed feet he was neither sought nor reported missing. He progressed across that state afoot and by car. He shared the back of a pickup with a six-year-old girl alone with her 4-H hog which was so huge it might have crushed and eaten her. He rode in an Oldsmobile with a candy salesman from Duluth, Minnesota, who offered him twenty dollars to show his underwear. There were two phlegmatic wheat farmers, brothers and perhaps twins, so preoccupied with the clouds marshaled in the skies over Canada just to the north that they abandoned the road altogether and drove cross-country through fallow and farm toward a strange metal structure bristling with antennae which they called the Weather Temple of Christ Jesus and offered to let him stay and pray if he could prove the purity of his heart and he rode with a half-mad rancher’s wife abroad at midday drinking, who would have killed them both on a bridge abutment had not Gload taken the wheel as she nodded into unconsciousness. By these and other such means he crossed the border back into the state of Montana in the summer of 1947.

In the little town he arrived at that afternoon, boys his age on bicycles stared after him and there were boys walking toward the river with fishing poles on their shoulders and except for the filthiness of his clothes and the look of the wolf in his eye he may have been just another of them.

He was hot and tired, having walked several miles that morning from the highway where a car had dropped him off. The air was syrupy with the smell of roadside sweet clover and his pants cuffs were yellow from it as though he’d walked through a field of chalk.

He had seen her as he passed down a neighborhood, an older woman in her bathrobe kneeling on a gardening pad behind a wire fence and turning the soil in her flowerbeds with a hand trowel. A tiny ivory Pomeranian attended her and sat panting in the shade of a lilac. Gload went down the street and returned and as he did he saw her get up and put her hands to the small of her back and look up at the sun. She bent to speak to the dog and it rose and began yammering and running in circles like a wind-up toy.

He went in through a back gate, pausing under a hanging feeder where small yellow birds fluttered, raining tiny seeds down on him. A bird flew up onto an overhead branch gaudy with purple plum blossom and began a long sweet canzonet as if in greeting.

He went silently in the door and among the rooms looking for he knew not what. He pocketed a hairbrush, a watch, change from a china bowl on a nightstand. He felt comfortable there, as though these smells and plaster saints and faintly ticking and chiming clocks were the things of his own childhood, the ghosts of forgotten longings. When the old woman came into the room, young John Gload stood before a mantelpiece studying the faces in framed photographs as though among those grainy images he might find his own staring back. She did not speak but only gazed openmouthed to find this ragged boy in her house. The Pomeranian began to yelp and it lunged and sank its needle teeth into John Gload’s bare ankle and without thinking he snatched it up and threw it against the wall. It was only then she began to scream. Young Gload in one motion picked up a table lamp, swung, and hit her above her left ear with its heavy leaded base. He was surprised that she went down as hard and as fast as she did and she lay on the carpet in the summer sunlight perfectly still.

He set down the lamp on the table, aligning it in the dustless circle where it had stood and he looked at his hands. He studied the small crimson mark on the wall where the dog had struck, a small runic daub like a cave marking, and he stood above the clutch of animated rag where it lay working its obscene little mouth soundlessly.

Finally he stood over the woman. She was very pale and lay with her arms outthrown and one leg crossed beneath her as though she had only misstepped while dancing. Kneeling, he opened her robe and carefully straightened her long limbs, so light, he thought, as if the bones of her had already begun to go to dust. He raised her pale shift and examined the parts of her that boys at the orphanage had whispered about and he’d seen in nudist magazines some of them kept hidden from the nuns. He lay atop her fully clothed and after a while he put his arms around her and he spoke to her, said the name of one of the girls from the sister orphanage he’d once danced with and he said some of the things the other boys said in the locker room after gym class. The woman’s eyes were half-closed and from one nostril a single drop like a viscous red tear appeared.

He stood up. The little Pom dog lay as before and made a snoring sound and then was still, one eye agape, slightly bulged and aglow from the long afternoon sunrays breaching the gauzy curtains. He looked at the woman again and presently went to her and arranged the folds of her robe over her breasts and withered limbs. There was a small pillow on the sofa, a purfling of white lace for a border and incomprehensible words lovingly needlepointed across its face. He placed it under her head and but for the blood at her nose and the crease above her ear that had by then begun to leak a crimson pool beside her, she may well have been asleep.

In the kitchen he stopped and chose an apple from a turned wooden bowl and he stood in that bright clean room looking at the apple in his hand. He set it on the counter, returned to the outer room. Rummaging in a drawer he found a pair of men’s socks and he dabbed at the blood on his ankle with them and put them on. Passing the woman again he paused, looking down. He took the pillow from under her head and placed it over her face, reading again the words stitched there—foreign, hopelessly untranslatable, and for all that unforgettable, as he felt they were meant to convey a message, tidings as obscure and cataclysmic as the goldfinch’s song.

Leaving, he took the apple from the counter, closed and locked the door, and walked west progressing unhurriedly in his strangely nautical gait under an arcature of ponderous elms, more birdsong in his ears.

*   *   *

When he had finished his long narrative, the old man sat back stiffly with a barely audible groan, whether the protest of chair slats or of old bones Millimaki could not tell. He straightened in his own seat and was himself stiff and when he checked his watch from long habit he realized his shift was nearly up. His stomach creaked and turned. The corridor was brighter now with the marginal light from the high windows, and the new day was announced with the sound of men urinating and the striking of matches. Grogan had begun to cough.

Gload seemed to have gone far away in conjuring such memories and from his private darkness he was a long time speaking. Finally he leaned his long face out into the purple light and raised his eyes to look at the deputy as if he might read something in the younger man’s face.

“Funny, ain’t it, Val, I started out the way I did on account of a little Pom dog?”

“Wait,” Val said. “An apple? You ate an apple?”

“An apple, why not? Yeah. That’s not important, Val, but here’s the deal.” He sat with his forearms upon his knees, gazing into the palms of his enormous hands as if recorded there among the ridges and cracks was the transcript of his life and he was merely reading it aloud. “Along about two miles later I sat down on a railroad berm to catch my breath. It was an interesting moment. By the time I ate that apple, I didn’t feel a thing about that woman.” He rolled his eyes up to regard Millimaki, his hands still open on his knees in a sort of offertory pose. “Val, I knew right then I’d never in my life have to do a regular day of work again.”

SEVEN

He stood at the top of the steps taking in the morning. The birds in the elms across the street in the courthouse park sang and the sun through the branches mottled the damp walkway paving stones, in the periodic light the newly cut grass gleaming as if sown with diamond parings. Having emerged from the chill and artificial light of the jail into a golden April day of birdsong, Millimaki felt more than ever like a prisoner himself. A place of perpetual dark, where even on a glorious spring day the gloom did not abate entirely but merely withdrew, receding like a fog to linger near the ceiling where the light chains were hung. When he shaved in the late afternoon the outlier’s eyes that stared back were braided in red, the skin pasty, even yellow. He examined the backs of his hands in the daylight and they seemed to him soft and pale as a child’s. He worried that some jailhouse pathogen had invaded his body, contracted from a handshake, a cough, a sneeze. Or that he was simply becoming Gload. He wondered, too, if he had caught insomnia like a virus from the old man and could blame him for the sleeplessness that seemed without remedy.

Uniforms were arriving for their shifts and he watched as Weldon Wexler parked his car in the lot across the street. He watched as he righted his nightstick and holstered sidearm and stooped to adjust his hair using the car window as a mirror. Then he stood and turned. He set off across the street and then he began to affect a slight limp.

Val met him at the bottom of the stairs.

“You can go home to your wife now, Millimaki,” Wexler said. “She’s a little wore out but otherwise just fine.”

“You know, Wexler, even if I liked you that wouldn’t be funny.”

“I think we might of woke the neighbors with all the moaning and screaming and carrying on. But I just went out and told them, ‘Go back to sleep, I’m an officer of the law.’”

“Technically I guess it could be said that you are. You have the uniform.”

“You might try a little spit and polish yourself, pardner. You look like you just come from milking the cows.”

“What do you know about Dobek paying a call to Gload?”

“So that’s your problem? What, did we upset your pet killer?”

“There’s no need for that.”

“Listen, pardner.” Wexler ascended two steps that he might look down on Millimaki and when he spoke it was to the air above his head. “Let me put it thisaway. I intend to get information out of this Gload that could clear up God knows how many open cases. If by scaring this suspect we can get him to talk about some of these things then I will do that.”

“For Christ sake. Scare him? This guy has been letting blood out of people for a half a century. He’s seen and done about every shitty nasty terrible thing there is to do. Do you really think you can scare anything out of a man like that?”

Wexler’s smile was thin and insincere. He put one hand atop his holstered pistol and the other on the knob of his nightstick and stood erect and spraddle-legged, a pose perhaps seen on television and practiced in front of a mirror. He said the name Valentine in a way Millimaki had not heard since his days on a playground. A sneer, a taunt. “Valentine,” he said, “if I can’t scare him, I’ll be his buddy. Just like you.” He leaned down and held two crossed fingers in front of Millimaki’s face. “This tight. Asshole buddies.”

*   *   *

The river was two miles from the jailhouse and he drove there, parking beside the riprapped bank where, beyond, the water lay flat and calm as a lake. Everywhere movement filled the morning sky, rafts of ducks rising up and ducks moving back from stubble fields on the benchland and their cries came to him sounding all the world like the cries of young children, as if playing pirates they stood off there on a raft on the smooth water. The river’s organic smell rose to his nostrils like the breath of a living thing. On the far shore the rusted stacks of a refinery stood ranked and steaming against the sky like artillery and with the coming of blue twilight the compound there, with its pulsing lights and tongues of ultramarine flame, would look like a city besieged by war.

It was nine o’clock in the morning and he drank a beer, watching the ducks move off the river and circle and gather and in hundreds and thousands, in a cacophony of chatter, drift north toward the marshes and potholes of Canada. He lapsed briefly into addled sleep and the choir of waterfowl became in his dream the voices of people calling his name from a senseless otherworld of dark trees as animated as snakes from whose coils the pallid victims of his searches reached out, weeping.

He awoke with a jolt to find a city patrolman standing beside his half-opened window.

“What’s up there, Millimeter?”

“Officer Moon. Jesus.” Millimaki pawed at his hair and wiped at the sheen of clammy sweat that had formed on his forehead during his brief sleep. “You’re like a goddamn thief in the night.”

The officer smiled, revealing movie-star teeth. He was a farm kid from the Hi-Line. They’d spoken a few times at cop functions and found they had in common a desire to see nothing more of lean cattle or machinery stitched together with baling wire and prayer or to wake to the sound of flies snarling at the window glass. Despite his gym-rat physique, Millimaki knew him to be a gentle man and a good cop. He wore mirrored sunglasses and Millimaki could see his own bleary face in them, a newspaper crumpled on the seat, the beer can between his thighs.