The Ploughmen: A Novel (13 page)

“No, sir. It’ll be all right. Plus, I don’t think it’s a good time to lay off as far as Gload’s concerned.”

“Well, as far as that goes, I don’t think it matters. It looks pretty good we’ve got him on this guy up north of town.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“You read his M.O. on making his guys anonymous, did you not?”

“Where he takes the teeth and hands? Did he not do it this time?”

“Oh, no. Our boy is thorough. It isn’t that. But it seems this poor kid had had open-heart surgery here a while back. Two years and some. What they’re saying is that they can identify him by the way he was put back together. The chest-crackers have a kind of signature way of wiring them back up.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Hell, I didn’t either. And safe to say John Gload didn’t or he’d have carved the chest right out of him and thrown that in the drink, too.”

“Is that what he did with the head and stuff?”

“What the kid White said. Threw them over the dam. Hell, that head’s probably rolling along outside of St. Louis by now.” The sheriff pointed his pipestem vaguely out the window to indicate where that city lay. “Anyway, your old boy’s going away until he dies. It would be nice to know where all the bodies are buried—metaphorical and otherwise—but you don’t have to milk him anymore if you don’t want. He’s had it.” He looked down, selected an envelope seemingly at random and studied it through the half-lenses of his small glasses. He said, “The
end
of a long and colorful career.”

“I guess so.”

The sheriff laid the envelope down and became preoccupied with some other and he turned his head oddly to read it as though it were fixed to the desktop and could not be turned. He rested his elbows atop the clutter and held the pipe by its bowl in one hand and sat reading. Millimaki stood quietly. Then he put his cap on.

The sheriff did not look up. “Remember what he is, Val. Think of what he did to that young man out there and how he did it and how many others he did the same way. He doesn’t deserve your pity.”

“Yes, sir.”

He was almost out the door when the sheriff said, “And, Val. That was good work on the old boy with the Buick or Pontiac or whatever it was. His family was very grateful.”

“Buick, sir. And it wasn’t anything, really. He didn’t get too far and Tom went right to him.”

“Well.” The sheriff laid his pipe carefully on the jumble atop his desk, as if it might shatter or disturb some order there known only to him. “How long has it been?”

“Fifteen months and a couple weeks. Or thereabouts. Not that I’m counting.”

“You’ll get past this streak, Val. It all equals out.”

“How so?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Just that some you find alive who should be dead. Some you find dead after a warm night in the trees with nothing more than a bruise on their shin.”

“With all due respect, sir, that doesn’t even make sense.”

“It doesn’t have to make sense, son. You should know that much by now. But it’s the way it is.”

“I’ll just have to trust you on that point, sir.”

“You do that.” He took up the unlit pipe and stuck it in his mouth and waved Millimaki away. “Now go home and be nice to your wife.”

*   *   *

That day he forsook his routine beside the river and drove north of town to view the scene of the disinterment. The yellow crime scene tape had been left or forgotten and it writhed among the weed bines like some exotic jungle viper and flapped and snapped in the wind. He sat on the ground near the very place John Gload had stood conducting the young man’s burial with the barrel of his pistol. Millimaki could see where the hole had been, the earth dished and dark from having been so recently turned and much of it had been sifted for evidence. It lay at the edges of the hole as fine as talc. He imagined the thing they’d dug up would have been, after two months, no more than a rawhide headless mannequin, the incriminating Frankenstein scar at its breastbone hidden beneath dirty rags. For John Gload there would have been much sawing and twisting, stubborn elastic tendons to be cut or bent over a knee and snapped. Vertebrae would have to be unlocked, the head twisted. He tried to imagine the sound. Little blood had been found at the scene, so Gload must have bled the victim somewhere else. There had been a time, he thought, not long ago, when coyotes had come tacking out of the night with the alien scent in their nostrils to roll in the gore and muddy their teeth.

He took up a handful of dirt and let it sift through his fingers. The wind came down from the northern benchlands and rattled the strange larval pods on the yuccas and brought the faint thin cries of gulls he could see afloat and stationary as kites against the morning sky. He tried to reconcile the avuncular old man tendering comfort and counsel from his dark cage with the creature who could placidly dismember a fellow human being. A lifetime ago while eating an apple (an apple, Val thought, like me that day, eating that apple) beside railroad tracks on a golden spring day, John Gload had observed in himself with a curious detachment the absence of passion. Perhaps he was somehow exempt from responsibility at all, could no more be blamed than a child born without feet could be blamed for his inability to run.

Millimaki sat in the dirt staring blankly at the grave, benumbed by his sleeplessness. Gload seemed capable of kindness, but it may have been just a kind of vestigial feature, like the webbed and blunted limbs of thalidomide children—a half-developed grotesquery that made him more pitiable for the reminder of what it might have been like to be whole.

For the rest of us though, thought Millimaki, the distance from reason to rage is short, a frontier as thin as parchment and as frail, restraining the monster. It was there in everyone, he thought. It was there in himself. A half second of simple blind fury and the hatchet falls down. He stared at the patch of turned earth where so recently a body had been. At some point, he thought wearily, it was only meat.

He sat for some time, the wind coursing through the sparse bluestem and whipping the yellow tape. His pallid hands were in his lap and he stared into them. The sun felt good on his face and he closed his eyes. Fifteen minutes later he woke with a start. He’d fallen asleep sprawled in the grass above the grave and when he raised up there was dirt stuck to the side of his face and one arm was numb and dead. He sat up looking around wildly, as if someone might have crept up on him in that lonesome place. “For Christ sake,” he said aloud. “Look at your ass, sleeping in the dirt like a bindlestiff.”

*   *   *

The weeds had grown up in the road between the wheel ruts and they hissed along the undercarriage as he climbed toward the cabin. On the opposite coulee side among the rimrocks, marmots scuttled and froze and it appeared at that distance that the rocks themselves moved. The church-steeple tops of the lodgepole behind the little house quaked in the wind. His wife’s car was still in its place and he could see Tom pacing in his kennel. He parked and walked across to the dog run. The shepherd sat and whined. “Hey kid, how you doing?” He stroked the dog’s nose with two fingers through the chain link. He looked toward the house, and the windows in the early sunlight dazzled his tired eyes.

He went in and hung his hat on a 16-penny nail driven into a wall log and when he turned he saw her standing at the sink in her street clothes and she didn’t look at him.

“Hey,” he said, “how come you’re not at work?”

“It’s my day off. You should know that.”

“Is it Tuesday? Man, my head-clock is all screwed up.”

“Your everything is screwed up, Val.”

He expected her to turn and laugh but she did not.

“What’s Tom doing locked up?”

She didn’t answer.

“Glenda,” he said, “why’s the dog penned?”

She spoke to the window. “Because he kept following me around.” There were no dishes in the sink and no water running. She stood gripping the counter edge. “Every time I made a trip to the car he followed me and he followed me back and I just got tired of it.”

He stood for a while looking at her and then walked onto the porch. He could see boxes jumbled in the backseat of the Datsun and clothes hanging from the hooks above each side window. He went back in and stood behind her. The window was a bright rectangle framed with box elder trees and the coulee rim beyond was green with spring and the sky the kind of blue, with its Van Gogh brushstrokes of cloud, that had made them, in the early years, jump in the truck and drive the country with no purpose whatever. It was enough to be together under the spring sun in the greening and open country. He stood looking out at it, over her shoulder. Her yellow hair glowed with the sun in it and he suddenly wanted to take it in his hands, press it to his face.

“It’s a driving-and-drinking sky we got today.”

She studied her hands before her, glanced up briefly to the perfect day. She said, “Where have you been? You should have been home two hours ago.”

He made a wiping motion across his face. There was still a trace of dirt on his cheek and in his hair. “I had to go up north of town and look at a site. Really, I forgot it was your day off.”

“A site,” she said.

“We found a body up there.”

She turned then and he could see she had been crying. “Oh. Well. A body. That’s okay. At least someone you can relate to.”

“What’s going on, Glenda?”

She looked at him. “What’s on your face? Jesus, Val, you look like a homeless man.”

He said, “I want you to tell me what’s going on.”

“I’m going to stay in town.”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight. For a while.”

“How long a while?” Millimaki said.

“I don’t know. Indefinitely.” She put the back of one wrist to each eye in turn and swept back her hair as though to put herself right. “I would have to say indefinitely.”

“You seem to have it all mapped out,” he said. “Isn’t this something that we ought to have at least talked about beforehand? For Christ sake, Glenda.”

“I tried to talk about it but every time I looked up you were asleep or on some other planet.”

“That might be a little bit true, but goddamn it, I can’t sleep anymore.”

“But it’s more than that.”

“More than what?”

“More than your emotional absence.”

He looked at her. She had composed herself in earnest and stonily studied a point above his head. “That sounds like something out of a book,” he said.

“It describes our situation.”

“When did this turn into a situation? For Christ sake, I come home and take off my hat and I’m in a situation.”

“All I know is I can’t think here and I have to have time to think.”

“You’ve got all the time in the world for that.”

“You’re not listening, goddamn it. I said I can’t think
here.
”

“Why not? I thought you loved it here. You’ve said that any number of times. This is your house, goddamn it.”

“I can’t think.” She enunciated each word slowly, as if she spoke to a foreigner or a lip reader. “And I feel small.”

“All this goddamn thinking,” Val said. He rubbed his hand over his face. He felt dull, his arms heavy as stones. He stared at her. Everything she said—her posture, the set of her jaw as she spoke to somewhere beyond him—seemed rehearsed. Millimaki in his fatigue fought the feeling that two other people were playing this scene, their doppelgängers, while he and his wife stood to the side merely watching.

“What’s all this goddamn thinking about?”

“Well, there it is. You don’t even know.”

“Okay,” he said. He ran his hand in a washing motion over his face again. “Okay, what do you mean ‘small’? Let’s start with that. That doesn’t even make any sense to me.”

“It means I feel unimportant. In your life and just in general. And it’s exacerbated by this place. I feel like it’s swallowing me up.”

He reached out to touch her crossed arms, to make some contact while reason and his own center were flying about the room. She took a half step away.

“That’s not one of your words,” he said. “It doesn’t even sound right coming out of your mouth.”

“It means it makes it worse here.”

“I know what the fuck it means. But you’re not the one saying it.”

Her words came in an exaggerated calm, as though to counteract his urgency. The room darkened suddenly, whether from a passing cloud or from some dimming behind his tortured eyes he could not tell. The exertion of mustering reason sufficient to the moment was enormous and his head swam.

“I need to have time to think and I can’t do that here, now. That’s what I’m saying.”

“You said it’s swallowing you up.”

“It is. Without you here I’m more alone than alone.” This thought seemed to suddenly attenuate her resolve and she began to cry again. “You don’t know. You couldn’t, because it’s so much a part of who you are. But not me, not by myself.” She repeated, “You don’t know.”

“What? What don’t I know?”

“At night. At night. It’s awful.”

“Why?”

She’d evidently not planned to let the conversation go this way and she paused to consider her words. “At night, outside the house is inside with me. It comes in with me and it’s like I can look down at myself and all I see is me in the bed and there’s nothing between me and everything out there.” She swept her hand toward the bright day. “Val, you don’t know. You couldn’t know. I’ve been sleeping with all the lights on. And don’t you dare say anything. One night an owl was in the house.”

“That’s just crazy.”

“I told you, don’t say it.”

“There isn’t a way for it to come in here, Glenda.”

“It was above the bed and it was just up there and beating the air with its wings. Fanning the air.”

“For Christ sake.”

She covered her face. “I could feel the air moving.”

“No. It couldn’t have come in the house.”

“And then last night, on the porch, there were coyotes.”

“It’s just nightmares, Glenda.”

“Don’t.”

“For Christ sake, Tom would have gone ape-shit if coyotes were on the porch.”

She pointed toward the front door as if to present concrete proof and he could see her hand trembling. “I heard their toenails on that porch, Val. I heard them breathing.”