The Ploughmen: A Novel (18 page)

Shadows lay long across the ground and stars began to materialize and from the uplands stretching off toward the Judith River Millimaki heard the first tentative yawps of coyotes. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead on his knees. The dog slept. The old man slumbered rigidly near his feet.

And then he saw her, standing young and fresh and a little impatiently on the bluff, the wind moving her hair. She waited and soon her knight, this haggard warrior—burner of trash, sweeper of floors—went to her. And there was nothing else but her, not the crushing sorrow, not the sun that baked his skin or the pain in his leg or the vile writhing thing around his arm. His steps were light and he gained the top of the hill with scarcely a breath and they stood together on that palisade gazing out over the green and perfect flowering prairielands of their life. In his dream Millimaki watched as Tom scrabbled up the rocky slope and circled whimpering and at last lost the scent he’d followed as it spiraled into the troposphere like a wisp of smoke.

Millimaki woke and sat looking fondly at the dark terrible shape and then put his head on his knees once more as the blue dusk settled over him with the whisper of bees. Tom came to nuzzle him, staring into his face with sad moist eyes and finally lay down beside his feet. A three-quarter moon ascended above the hills and all was silvery light. Millimaki was reluctant to leave the old gentleman’s company.

*   *   *

He held the dog by the collar and stood for a long time in the dark. Driftwood in the fire snapped with the sound of breaking bones. When he approached, the man and his wife sat stupefied before the flames and they stared at Millimaki wide eyed and amazed as though he were the conjurement of their bleak thoughts, a figure portioned out from the darkness itself. Beyond them the lake was a sheet of quicksilver, so flat and calm Millimaki could make out gulls or ducks arrayed on its surface hundreds of yards out and could as well have been a fleet of ships at anchor.

“God almighty, you scared us, Deputy.”

Millimaki stood in the circle of light. “Could I get a drink of water for Tom?”

The family had drug up a cottonwood log from the lake that had been worn white and smooth as a great tusk and he stepped over it and sat. The dog disappeared into the dark and could be heard lapping endlessly at the lake edge. The man set the bowl down next to Millimaki.

“Anyways, in case he wants it,” he said. He handed Millimaki a long-necked beer, its sides pearled with dew. Millimaki felt something in his pocket and he fished out the boy’s cap and set it on the log beside him.

The woman had not taken her eyes from him as he came up and sat and she said at last, “He’s dead out there, isn’t he?”

Millimaki regarded the shifting coals. “Yes, he is,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I knew it, anyways,” she said. “It’s all right. It’s what he wanted.”

“He was a strong man. You didn’t tell me that,” Millimaki said blearily. “He went a long ways.” The heat and lack of sleep and general unnamed sadness lay atop him like a succubus. He sat with his forearms on his knees and was surprised to find a bottle in his hand. He couldn’t bring himself to tell them about the snake and it seemed sufficient tonight that they picture their father intact and comfortably asleep under the cosseting sky. Almost to himself he said, “I can’t believe how far he went. In that heat.” He shook his head. “Might have been seven miles. More maybe. Eight or nine.”

“He’s done that a couple of times back at home,” the husband said. “One time they found him out by the airport, better than twelve miles from the house.”

“Anyways, it’s what he wanted.” The old man’s daughter wore a thin sweater thrown over her shoulders and she pulled it tighter around her. “He’s with Mother now.”

The man sat sunk in a canvas camp chair, a beer bottle dangling from his hand while he stared back at the sputtering coals. “Why couldn’t he of just died in his chair at home,” he said. He shook his head. “To go out there in that.” He tipped his bottle vaguely toward the Breaks, the headlands and blunt pines rumored against a backdrop of outrageous starfields. “It’s awful. It’s undignified is what it is.”

“I won’t hear that,” his wife said. “Lawrence, I won’t hear it.”

“Well.”

“It’s not true.” She was quiet for a long while. The fire welled brightly as a breeze rose up, collapsing wood sending up a rosary of brilliant embers. A luminous cloud lay across the moon.

“He was on a search is what I believe.” The woman paused, her face in the firelight ruddled and exaggerated as a native mask. “A kind of search. I can’t think of the word.”

Millimaki did not look up. He spoke almost as if from a dream. “A quest,” he said.

“Well, yes.” She looked at him in surprise. “That’s exactly the word. A quest. He was. He’s been on a quest for Mother since she died. Far as he was concerned, she was somewheres just out of sight, just around the next corner. And don’t look at me like that. Do you have to look at me that way?”

Her husband said, “I wasn’t looking any way.”

“I know that look.” Her voice quavered. “I know that look, Lawrence.”

The man stared at her for a long moment. The wind passed over them and Millimaki imagined it bringing the old man’s scent out across all the broken implacable country, to all the hunger that resided there and the wind blew the woman’s pale hair across her mouth and sent a chill down her frame. She was still, in middle age, as slender as a girl.

The man cast his eyes sidelong to look at Millimaki. “Deputy,” he said, “don’t you have someone waiting on you? You must want to bust out of here and get home.”

Enthralled by the pulsing coals and numb with fatigue, Millimaki registered the words slowly. Both of them watched him. The wind blew. Their shadows loomed and collapsed and loomed again on the ground beyond them.

“My wife,” he said stupidly, “she—”

“That’s right,” the man said. “Go on. You don’t need to wait on us. You go on and be with her.”

With that he set his bottle down carefully next to his feet and stood up. Millimaki watched him. He circled out into the dark and reappeared behind his wife, his face red and demonic in the upflare of the fire and his hard hands aglow and he wrapped his arms around his wife’s shoulders as tenderly as if he were trying to contain a cloud. She reached up and held his forearms in her small hands and began to softly cry. “Oh, he was, Lawrence. He was.”

The wind swept down and the old man’s daughter wept, repeating, like an affirmation of her father’s simple life, “Oh, he was, he was, he was.”

TWELVE

“I suppose I ought to mention this one other thing, though it don’t amount to any mystery or anything. When I was a young buck in Deer Lodge I had to get a guy who was after me. They never could prove who it was, though I had to do a two-week haul in Siberia East because they knew more or less what was going on and they figured it was me. There was a corner by the cellhouse, the only place the towers couldn’t see and I got this guy over there. There was a kind of outdoor urinal there that you maybe’ve seen if you’ve been there. A piss trough. Lot of shit went down there, guys trading dope and getting it on with one another and shit like that and I figured he’d come over when I was taking a piss just to have a look and of course he did, hissing terrible awful things to a boy. Yeah, that was the deal. You could find out easy enough I guess, if you cared. I don’t remember his name but he was a fat dago fairy from Butte, Montana, and he deserved what he got. It was that I didn’t have no choice is why I don’t mention it much and he come over and I put a shiv up under his fat gut and just pulled it upwards hard as I could and he fell down hard with his blue guts spilt out on the stones like a steer you’d butcher. And then I went and pissed the blood off my hands and walked away and that was that.

“I’m tired now, Val. There wasn’t anything more to it than that. Good night.”

THIRTEEN

He held the crude map in his hands and surveyed the country below him. He looked at the page then turned it half around and looked again. It was like a child’s drawing. The old criminal had drawn horseshoes to approximate the upper and lower dams and inverted Us with strange diacritical marks to indicate hills with their sparse native vegetation. He had incised thick black lines apparently with the paper poised on his knee because in places the paper was torn through, these meant to represent coulees, which converged like veins into a river replete with tiny waves and gulls. To Wexler finally it looked like an idiot’s rendering of a storybook land. The old man had drawn in trees and a series of inverted Vs that might have been distant mountains by which to orient oneself, and finally in various places he had marked a number of bold Xs. Wexler stared all around. He turned the pages once more.

By the time he returned to his car the sun was nearly down. He sat on the bumper, with a stick chiseling mud from the soles of his boots. When he was done he took the old man’s map and oriented it and sat looking up into the coulees he’d walked, which at that late hour lay in cool blue shadow. Beyond the bluff tops he could see the peaks of the Highwoods purple and insubstantial in the distance as a reef of summer storm cloud.

With the folding entrenching tool he’d dug three holes that day that had yielded nothing but rocks and the ironlike roots of sagebrush and one ancient bone that may have been the pinbone of a cow or buffalo. Wexler had examined it for some time and had laid it alongside his own thighbone and finally had thrown it away in disgust. Now, sitting at his car, he studied the maps once more in the failing light and looked to the north again and finally balled up the pages and threw them into the ditch weeds.

“Goddamn you, old man,” he said. He seemed to address the papers now fluttering like wounded birds in a snarl of mullein and hemlock. “If you’re screwing me around I swear to God I’ll make your hayseed boyfriend wish he’d never left the farm.”

*   *   *

Walking in a daze, Millimaki followed the old man as he trundled slowly down the corridor, his shadow on the waxed concrete, giant and dwarf, as he passed beneath the buzzing overheads. From the cells some of the men called to him. Gload went along as if he were walking alone in his orchard and the voices of the inmates were to him less consequential than the trill of birds in the apple trees. They’d just returned from the infirmary after Gload had complained of chest pains and dizziness and the caged men behind the safety of their bars called him piker and scammer and goldbrick. Millimaki turned to one man whose narrow head nearly fit between the bars where he stood hissing a disjointed litany of obscenities.

“One more word and it’s lights out, right now,” Millimaki said. “Get back to your cot or I’ll call for Dobek.”

The man hissed a long “muthafucka.” Millimaki swung his baton viciously and hit the bars above the man’s head. “Get back to your goddamn cot, Murphy, or I swear to Christ I’ll come in there and crush your head myself.” He had raised the club again, his hand tingling and aflame and felt in that incandescent moment if the face appeared at the bars he could turn bone to gruel. But the man whined and slunk soundlessly into the shadows and could be heard for many minutes in conversation with himself there.

Gload stood before his cell door and waited for Val to turn the key in the lock and he went in without a word, though in passing he eyed the younger man with a bemused expression that furrowed his immense forehead. Millimaki heard him sit in his chair, saw the match flame erupt in the gloom.

“Would you like to talk about it, Val?” he said.

Millimaki with the keys in his hand stood outside the door. The men had settled down in their cells, but for Murphy, who addressed the dark recesses intimately in two separate voices, two separate selves. His moist and horrible lips made the sound of dripping water.

“Did you say something, John?”

“I said you might want to get it off your chest, whatever it is that’s eating on you.”

“It’s late, John. What don’t you get some sleep? That’s probably all that’s wrong with you.”

“That ain’t going to happen. I can feel it. Not tonight it ain’t.” He lit another cigarette and his mask appeared briefly hovering in the dark. “Take your walk, Valentine. I’ll be here should you feel the need to talk.”

Millimaki made his rounds. The jailer, who with every long week seemed to become more like the statue of some Old Testament god, gazed down from atop his platform with hollow eyes, his face carved from yellow stone by indifferent hands and deeply shadowed from the sallow overhead globelight. No longer sure when he was awake or when he slept, Millimaki had quit trying to speak to him and so sat silently filling in the night’s required forms and eating an apple from his simple lunch. A soft rain fell and muted the church bells tolling the three o’clock hour, and the lacquered street beyond the jailhouse door reflected the streetlight’s purple albedo and the lights of the infrequent passing cars. The phone rang and he turned to watch the jailer, willing him to nod and hold up the receiver toward him. The rain did not matter nor the hour. He would go to her then or anytime and pack her things into the truck to bring her home. The jailer from his imperious elevated seat would say to him, “It’s your wife, Millimaki,” and he’d go out under the weeping eaves and pass under the streetlamp. He could see himself doing it, getting up from his desk and opening the door to the slow gong, gong, gong, and feeling the cool kiss of mist on his face.

But the jailer only leered from his seat and half turned away from Millimaki for privacy and so he went through the sally gate and down the corridor of cells.

As if because he was cursed to sleeplessness, John Gload had become expert in the nuances of sleep. Sporadically, in stretches of months, sometimes years, he’d had time to decipher the night’s minute tickings, the folds and creases of it while caged men near him slept, twitching or writhing in unconsciousness while their breath rifled in and out through constricted throats and nostrils that had been malformed in fights and those still capable expiating their sins in the confessionals of dreamland. For some the commodious limits of the cell became in nightmare the close configuration of their own coffins and they battled their rough blankets as though they were the winding clothes they’d worn to the grave and there were others who relived in prurient languor trysts with women gagged with their own hosiery or mute children or other weaker men waylaid in the showers of a recurring incarceration and John Gload read in these moans and sighs, in the wet and strangled sounds in their mouths, the sins of flesh duplicated in their slumbering. Dead people paraded through Gload’s dreams, too, but he was untroubled by them and though they were his victims and wore rubious scars, they seemed no more strange to him than the random beings populating any man’s dreams.