The Ploughmen: A Novel (27 page)

“The damnedest thing you should ask that, Valentine.” The old man wore a thin smile. “I’m just getting to that in a way.”

“So what’s on your mind, John?”

Gload adjusted the ashtray a half inch nearer, turned it on the tabletop which told in its gouges a hundred-year history of wrist chains. “I told you about a lot of things, Val, in those months we had together and I know you passed some of the shit on to the Bull and I do not hold that against you in the very least because I know it’s your job. Was your job, anyways. But I’m going to tell you one last thing and I need your promise before I do. Your word that this is just between you and me.”

“How in hell can you ask a promise of me after all that’s happened?”

“Because we’re friends, Val, aren’t we? Can you sit there and deny that we’re friends?”

“I don’t know what we are.”

“Friends, by God. Friends is what we are.”

“John, I don’t know if you can be friends with somebody who you think might cut your throat if the opportunity arose.”

“Valentine,” Gload said. He said the young man’s name with a long exhalation, like a sigh. He passed one hand down his forehead and rubbed at his inflamed eyes. For a full minute, as Millimaki shifted on his chair, the old man sat with his hands cupped to his ears as if he would shut out further lies, further hurt.

Finally he rose up and spoke. “Think about this, Deputy. I want you to think about the times we were alone together and it was the same thing with that Wexler asshole. It was the same thing. It was nothing for me to get him. Think about how many times we stood out there in that park full of trees in the dark and there wasn’t nobody around and you turned your back on me. Just like Wexler did. Many many times. Twenty or thirty. A hundred times. That many times I could of got hold of you. So, yes, friends is what I think we are.”

“Is that how it happened? With Wexler?”

“I don’t want to talk about that on account of I don’t want you to be thinking about it for the rest of your life. I wouldn’t do that to you. Val, I got a lot of feelings for you.”

“Friendship, then, because you didn’t kill me.”

His tired eyes stared into Millimaki’s. “It does not, Deputy, get truer than that.”

“What’s the promise, John? I can’t promise you anything without hearing it.”

“You won’t have to do nothing for a while. I don’t know how long but not for a while.”

“What is it?”

“I want you to claim me when I cash in and to bury my ashes.”

“For Christ sake, I can’t do that. That’s something your family does.”

“Now you know good and goddamn well I don’t have nobody. I told you all that.”

“There’s got to be somebody. Hell, Francie. Your wife. Francie.”

“Gone.”

“She’d come back for something like that.”

“She’s not coming back, Val, that’s the thing. Or maybe I should say she never left. That’s why I never kited out.”

“I don’t even know what the hell that means. In any case, when it does happen, the state takes care of that. Down on the prison farm I think. I could check on that.”

“No.”

“I can’t do it.”

“In my orchard with no stone or nothing. All’s you need to do is to dig a hole.”

“I can’t.”

“You can, too. A simple hole in the ground. And here’s the deal. I can pay you for your troubles.”

“You’re not paying me because I can’t do it.”

“Val, I’ve checked into all this. I’m about a half jailhouse lawyer after all these years in and out of such places.”

“Has to be next of kin or nobody.”

“Well, yes. I done that.”

“What?”

“You’re my next of kin, Val.”

“I am no such thing.”

“Well, you’re a few years behind the times, Deputy. They don’t call it that anymore. They call it ‘appointing a personal representative.’ But it’s the same thing. I prefer the sound of ‘next of kin’ because it’s, you know, more familiar. But it’s a what-you-call bygone term. And so I done that and I made a holographic will and a devisee. Which is you, Valentine.”

Millimaki stared openmouthed at the old killer, who favored him through the Plexiglas with a smile so tranquil he seemed a different Gload altogether.

“This is crazy.”

“Devisee is like an heir.”

“This would take years.”

“It’s all set up and legal as God.”

“I won’t do it.”

Gload turned his attention to the Camel on the ashtray, shaping its end with great care and nodding his head as though in affirmation of something. To Millimaki’s left the young Mexican woman sat yet, ashen and immobile as a caryatid, her eyes reflecting an emptiness beyond the chair where her husband had so recently sat, in those black portals an unreckonable vacancy cold as far space where tears could neither form or fall. She was very small and seemed more waiflike still when she rose, passing a mesmerized Millimaki with steps so deliberate it was as if her bones were of frailest glass, and she left in her wake a scent of springtime blooms.

John Gload watched him watch. He waited for Millimaki to turn once more to the glass.

“Here it is then, Val. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to play my hole card. That you’d do this for me out of pure friendship.” He leaned toward the barrier and opened the collar of his workshirt, revealing among the sparse gray hairs a tiny silver chain, tight as a choker, girdling the leathery wattle of his neck. The silver dolphin nestled at the hollow of his throat.

Millimaki stared in disbelief.

“This was my other gift to you, Deputy Millimaki. I gave you your life in a manner of speaking and that’s something. And I gave you hers, too. I could of took it but I chose to give it. Lots of times since I thought I should of took it because she caused you a lot of pain and it hurt me to see you thataway, it truly did. I thought about it for quite a long time, Val. I remember doing it real clear. I sat in that car for a long time, thinking about what would be the best thing to do for Valentine Millimaki, my friend. And I still do think about it. And then I ask this little tiny favor of you and you say you can’t do it. You say you won’t.” His terrible eyes bore through the Plexiglas. “Tell me how that’s right, Valentine. Tell me how that’s anywheres near fair.”

Millimaki could only stammer. “How?”

“How what?”

“Did you find her? Get that close?”

“A couple of phone calls, a couple of little white lies. It took nothing, Val. I got talents. You never really allowed that.”

Millimaki could scarcely find his voice. “You went in her place? Her apartment?”

The old man’s head drooped wearily, the years with their burden and the memories of difficult decisions settling at that instant like a great stone upon the knuckled bones of his neck. He ground out his cigarette, rolled his ravaged eyes up to Millimaki. He said, “I don’t know that I have a thing you’d call a soul, Val, but I recanize it in other people. You have such a thing. I seen it smudged across your face the very first time I seen you. So I know you’ll do this thing for me. Just put me up there next to Francie.”

“Christ, it was Jean. It was Glenda’s roommate you saw that night.”

Gload stared blandly through the barrier. “It don’t matter.”

“I called that night. Christ, Jean saw you. It wasn’t Glenda.”

“All that don’t matter, Val. I could of got her, one way or the other.”

“And you got the chain then.”

“Don’t be a fucking cop now when I need you, Val. I’m asking you, just put me up there next to Francie.”

“Where? Up where?”

“In the orchard. That’s where she is. And that’s where I’m going to be, too.”

“Your wife’s in the orchard?” Millimaki said. “On your place?”

But the old man did not hear, had retreated to his haven in the Breaks and his ears were filled with the sound of wind in the untended trees and the flutter of the songbirds that resided there. His eyes, gorged red blossoms dyed with the blood he had spilled on the world, stared beyond Millimaki’s head and beyond the unassailable stones and wire and the desolate prison town.

“In the apple trees,” he said.

TWENTY

John Gload had been in the state penitentiary for five and a half years and in that time his insomnia never left him. He was eighty-two years old. He accepted his age and that the elderly seldom slept well and considering that even as a younger man he had never slept, it was little surprise to him. But he had his trickery to fool it and at times it still worked. Perhaps this night. He lay on his narrow cot, the muted noises of the prison gallery in his ears—the snores and moans, the drone of the high suspended lights that were a curse in every joint he had ever been in, the maddening slow drip of the faulty showerheads down the corridor that seemed somehow as the night deepened to grow louder, at this desolate hour clanging like rivets on the concrete floor.

Beneath his bunk are two issues of
Successful Farming.
Taped to the cinder-block wall above his head the photograph of a field sent to him years ago by Valentine Millimaki—endless ripe grain and a slash of chalk sky adorned with a single bird of indeterminate species. In the photograph the bird is very small. In the uncertain enormity one could not tell its size in the actual world. It may have been vulture or crow or sparrow. In one corner of the picture is an unfocused yellow banner with black printed words which he cannot make out. On a paintless metal shelf in the cell a few swollen paperback books without covers, a comb and nail clippers, a yellow legal pad at a folding desk.

He lay on his narrow cot thinking about the field. And in the field are things as familiar to him as his own face—the red kits outside their den; far-off butte tops, phantasmal in the summer heat-haze; roiling grasshoppers spinning from under the tires; the gulls. He went around the field, once, twice. And then the bull Doogan came by and shone his light and he was forced to begin again. The guard’s footfalls receded, the saffron light dimming, fading, gone. He took hold of the tractor’s ladder rail once again and placed his foot on the first rung but he could not pull himself up. He lay thinking, Damn, boy, lift your foot, one two three. But he could not move. The summer sun bore down and he saw his boot on the rung and his hand on the rail and the gulls came planing in, circling down and down and down until like summer insects they swarmed about his head. He could not raise a hand to warn them off nor could he call out and the cries that had haunted him awake and asleep for over seventy years drown out everything.

*   *   *

Guard Gerald Doogan carries in his belly a constant pain which he thinks is surely an ulcer and he walks down the row with his hands on his tender stomach in the posture of women who are several months pregnant. He worries about his young daughter who spends her evening hours in her room alone with the Virgin Mother and he worries about his wife whose joints are swollen and tender to the touch. In these cages are boys little older than his only child who have settled with blood disputes over vials of powder made from cold medicine and fertilizer and he worries about a world where such things happen. His daughter’s room is lit with candles and she prays on her knees in this dim place for hours. It wouldn’t hurt you to say a rosary, thinks Doogan. It has been years.

He pauses outside a cell to remove an antacid tablet from his pocket where he carries them by the dozen like coins and he chews it woodenly while lighting a cigarette. He shines his light into the cell. John Gload lies on his side with his back to the hallway and he shifts slightly, as though the beam of light possesses substance—heat or cold or movement, like wind.

Guard Doogan goes down the row. He stops to throw his cigarette in one of the toilets. The water in the bowl runs without stopping and the showerheads weep and spatter on the concrete.

He lights another cigarette and smokes and thinks of his wife with her poisoned joints and of his daughter and then he turns to retrace his steps, a route he has walked five thousand nights. He imagines his Wellingtons have worn a trough in the concrete walkway and he tells his wife this as a matter of fact: I have worn a trough with my boots in the floor. He flashes his light into the old man’s cell once again and the cone of light illuminates an empty bunk, a hanging blanket. He shines it toward the cell’s toilet and sees nothing and thinks for an illogical instant that John Gload is gone. He swings the light back and then sees the old man beneath his bunk. He calls to him, says, “Gload, get up from there,” but the old man does not move and does not move, says, “Get up, old man.”

*   *   *

He sits high on the spring seat and the tractor churns through the dirt and the polished disks are small brilliant suns themselves, turning the soil in long slow serpents. The river in the distance is a shimmering knife blade and when he passes, the foxes raise their heads and follow with their anthracite eyes the young Gload on his perch and he feels the thrum of the engine in his bones, like the beat of the heart of the earth.

EPILOGUE

From the grassy side yard as he walked around the house a covey of Hungarian partridge flushed, sailing beyond the apple trees. Once above the leafy topmost branches they simply turned their compact bodies and set their wings and the wind took them out of sight in an eyeblink. Though he’d only been there once and that nearly eight years ago, from his many discussions with John Gload the place seemed familiar to him. He noted its disrepair, the slow decrepitude occasioned by the long vacancy since Gload’s imprisonment. Clapboards hung loose from the walls and copper gutters sagged in perilous loops from the peeling fascia. All along the bellying soffit, hornets’ nests hung like sinister fruit. Beside the back door a wooden chair, the dowels loose in their sockets, seat split and splintery from rain and sun and snow. He stood there and imagined the man whose ashes he carried biding the evening cool. The garden a tangle of weeds, strangled blooms throbbing with bees, and four enormous sunflowers leaned above the chaos, forlorn and druidical in their shabby attire.

The screen door stood ajar, badly warped and canted from Dobek’s rough treatment when they’d first come for Gload those years ago and it made faint bird sounds as it rocked in the breeze. The door of the house was locked but he was able to push back the latch with his pocketknife blade so loose did it fit in the jamb. The door opened onto the kitchen, the linoleum there covered with a fine grit as if someone had recently sanded it for dancing. It displayed evidence of a brisk commerce of mice and packrats. Millimaki stooped to pick up a woman’s handkerchief from the floor but it proved to be only a paper napkin, its edges made curious and asymmetrical lace by tiny teeth. Curtains shifted as the wind insinuated itself through the shrunken sash sides and the brass rings on their rods clattered softly. The house creaked and moaned. The loose clapboards made a strange fluttering sound beneath a gust of wind like a deck of riffled cards.