The Ploughmen: A Novel (7 page)

“I’m the only one on today,” she said. She smiled down at him, a pretty girl twenty pounds overweight with gaps in her teeth and sorrel hair in a knot atop her head, the seams and buttons on her uniform restraining burgeoning excesses of soft flesh at hip and bosom.

Sid shook his head. “No, the other one.” He pointed at her tag, at her breast. She shook her head in confusion. “Hell, your other tittie,” he said. “This here one’s named Jessy, I can see that, but you ain’t named the other one.”

Gload looked up at the girl briefly and then at White. “Shut your mouth,” he said. He spun his plate of eggs and ham around in front of him on the newspaper and began eating and those were the last words spoken between them until they reached Rapid City three and a half hours later.

The building was weathered board and bat, proclaiming in great red letters on its façade: “Old West Trading Post.” The duckboards leading to saloon doors lay in a piebald shade beneath an archway of woven antlers. A marquee atop an iron pole of rudely welded four-inch pipe rose from within a ring of whitewashed stones, bearing skyward its message: “Coldest Beer in the west, postcards, IndiaN beAdwork, friendly. Clean rooms afFordable. Genuine antiquEs of the OLd West.”

Gload pointed wordlessly and Sid nosed the big car up to a hitching rail. He swung the door open and said, “Stay in the car.”

“We’re partners on this deal,” Sid said.

Gload, standing outside the car, leaned his head down to speak into the open door.

“Stay in the fucking car.”

In ten minutes he came back. White sat brooding with his boots propped on the car’s dash, his arms crossed at his chest.

Gload said, “Get your feet off of there. We’ll meet the man tonight, eight o’clock. Drive around to the side over here.” He fumbled with the plastic key fob. “One oh one.” He glared at the swinging doors and at the name in foot-high gold letters above them. “Colonel,” he said. He spat onto the gravel between his feet. “What’s he a fucking colonel of?”

“I don’t know.”

“Colonel of bullshit, maybe.”

“What’d he say?”

Gload went to the passenger side door and got in. “One oh one,” he said. He pointed with the key. “Over there.”

“Don’t I even get my own room?”

“Once we take care of business you can get you a room and stay a month for all I give a shit,” Gload said. “Until then we stay together.” He looked over at him. “Partner.”

Full dark at that early hour afforded them cover to unload from the car’s trunk the boxes of plates and cups and saucers, glasses, glazed and painted bowls and all manner of dishware, the uses for which Gload could only guess. He had no more interest in them than in stones or books or the workings of a car’s engine. He was in many ways as simple as a child, though without a child’s curiosity. In the efficiency of his work he took pride though not necessarily pleasure, any more than would a man running sawlogs through a mill or for his prescribed hours soldering senseless components onto a board. He was handy at his work and it afforded him a living. His pleasures were few and modest—sitting in the sun at the door of his house in the orchard above the Breaks; a slow drive along the vacant county gravel roads with Francie to park finally above the river to watch the sun fall down toward the crimson close of the day. Once a year he loaded a stout pole and reel and drug the muddy Missouri bottom for paddlefish.

The Colonel, a small wizened figure seeming smaller yet within his huge swivel chair, instructed Sid the Kid to display the goods on a long folding table, making benevolent sweeping motions as he spoke and when this was done he got up with pipe in hand and walked up and down before them as if inspecting troops, picking up an occasional saucer or bowl to squint at runes on its underside. Gload had taken a chair opposite the Colonel and the exhibited wares, that he might see the man’s eyes. He smoked and appeared to pay little attention to the production. Like a tradesman, his talents were primarily manual—the use of a knife, manipulation of flesh—but they ran also to cards and the reading of men’s faces. So when the Colonel sat back and packed his pipe and said a number, Gload stubbed out his cigarette, stood and walked through the door into the night without a word, as though he were taken with a mild whim or notion, or had remembered suddenly some domestic errand. The Colonel and Sid White sat quietly dandling their feet in their chairs. They did so for fifteen minutes. The Colonel began to swivel and fidget in his chair and Sid began to sweat.

As if to answer a question that had not been asked, Sid said, “Well, hell, I don’t know. He might of had, you know, one of them deals.” He made a rotating motion near his ear. “A stroke.” He rose. “I’d best go and check on him.”

As he left the room the little man said, “It’s a generous offer, tell him. A handsome offer.”

Gload sat in the room, smoking. He had turned on the TV but did not seem engaged by it. He sat with his head leaned back on the chair watching the smoke curl up to the ceiling. He had put his slippers on.

Sid looked at him incredulously. “What’re you doing? He’s waiting back there.”

Gload smoked. Presently he spoke, very slowly, as if instructing a child. “How much did the kid who previously owned all that shit say it was worth?” He continued to study the smoke, White presented with a view of the bristled hollows of the older man’s throat.

“What he said might not of been right,” White said. “He might of just been a fag trying to be Mister Big Shot.”

Gload only sat, waiting, his head back. One slippered foot jounced up and down to some slow rhythm sounding in his head.

“Okay,” Sid said, “he said seventeen-five.”

“Seventeen-five,” Gload repeated. “And your new buddy over there, the Colonel, offered what was it again?”

“It’s a handsome offer.”

Gload’s eyes were small and black like a pig’s and when he dropped his head and turned them on the kid, in the fluxing television glow they flashed a brief radioactive spark.

“Okay, okay,” the kid said. “Eight thousand dollars. That’s a shitload of money for dishes.”

“Eight thousand dollars. A difference of what?”

Sid sat figuring for some time. He began to cast about for pencil and paper.

Gload said, “Nine thousand five hundred dollars.”

“Right. Nine-five.”

Gload held a single finger aloft as if to admonish White to listen to something outside the room. White looked about, his head canted.

“What?” he said.

“That,” said Gload. “The sound of the Colonel making money off other people’s sweat and travail.”

White stood helplessly, his hands outstretched in an attitude of supplication.

“Travail?”

“My sweat and travail.”

The kid said, “Well, what do I tell him?” A vision he’d begun to concoct of himself attired in a western-cut Porter Waggoner–style suit, its trouser pockets ballasted with folded bills in a begemmed clip, began to wobble and fade. Even half of the money the Colonel had offered was money beyond reckoning. He had worked washing dishes in an Italian restaurant in Black Eagle and he had sold batteries stolen from cars and he had once worked briefly as a hay hand in the Judith Basin, feigning heat sickness after one long hot morning atop a haystack, riding to town on the bus and licking his blistered palms like a dog. From that foray into ranch work Sid White considered himself a cowboy. Four thousand dollars was the stuff of hallucination. “He ain’t going to sit there and wait on us forever.”

“With an offer of what he said he can sit and wait till doomsday comes,” Gload said. “If you come back here without a number in your mouth that is twelve thousand then I am gone home. And I’ll not send you back with a different number. I’ll not dicker like a Mexican over a clay pot. There is one number that will work and I just told you it.”

Sid White stood openmouthed in front of Gload, who had by then turned to the television and begun roaming the stations, his face no more than a foot from the screen as he turned the dial, its crags awash in a kaleidoscope of lurid colors. This old man, White thought, is going to get me fucked over. He considered his options and decided that should the numbers not work he could come back with something in his pocket to take care of John Gload. Gload was an old man and the kid didn’t care about all the things he had supposedly done a hundred years ago. He wastes one queer, so what? He would still go down with a blade in his spine, same as any man would. He could make a deal with the Colonel, he was sure, and who would miss this sonofabitch with anyway one foot already in the grave?

“We could go ten,” the kid said. “Show our good whatchacall. Intentions.”

“I am leaving in the morning with what I said or nothing,” Gload said to the television screen. “And the shit goes back in the trunk.”

In ten minutes the kid came into the room and sat on the edge of one of the beds. Gload did not look up. White sat with his hands on his knees, his mouth slightly ajar. He sat so for some time, his tongue darting out with the regularity of a heartbeat. Finally he said, “Well, I will be goddamned all to hell.” He looked at Gload then. “He said come in in the morning and he’ll have the money.” The kid was looking at Gload’s great sloping back beneath a T-shirt worn to near transparency. A gray fringe of hair bristled at the neck. “Hey, old man, I said he’ll have the money. What you wanted, twelve grand, all of it.” He shook his head. “He didn’t piss and moan or nothing. Just sat there for a half minute and said it: come by in the morning. Unfuckingbelievable.” He was about to clap the old man on the back, but thought better of it.

“You are something else, you know that?”

Gload looked up then. He said, “You left the door open.”

*   *   *

Morning, heralded by a raw wind that pawed and moaned at the door and by a bar of wan light beneath the draperies, saw John Gload paring his nails in the coned light of a bed lamp and on the twin bed opposite Sidney White was an inappreciable bundle, as though beneath the horse blanket bedspread stickwood and stones were arranged to approximate the shape of a man. A faint whistle issued from under the covers and on the pillow Gload could see but the top of the boy’s head, a medusa of lank blue-black stringlets against the linen. He sat with the knife in his hand for a long time.

An hour later White sat in the passenger seat of the car, bleary-eyed and shivering in his thin denim jacket, and watched as Gload came from the Colonel’s office, slewing bearlike down the ludicrous duckboard walkway. The car was loaded and running and John Gload settled behind the wheel. From an envelope he counted out ten five hundred dollar notes and handed them across to the kid.

“This ain’t half,” White said. “I can figure that much.”

Gload levered the car in gear and pulled onto the highway west, the asphalt a ribbon of brass unspooling in the rearview mirror, wherein small birds feeding at the road edge rose like sea spume and tumbled shimmering in their slipstream.

“You were ready to settle for four and you get five,” Gload said. “What you might call a ‘handsome offer.’”

The kid regarded Gload’s profile, adamantine as those granite visages chiseled from the mountain a few miles’ drive south. He fanned the money in his hands—new stiff bills, undreamed-of fortune—and knew it was pointless to argue. As they sped past the array of strip malls and truck stops, he sat with his forehead against the side window. He said, “What a fucked-up town.”

By the time they got to Miles City the kid’s mood had brightened considerably. His head swiveled as they drove through town and he took note of the number of bars and of the garish rodeo posters in shop fronts of bucking and rearing horses and he goggled at teenage girls with books clamped to their chests and their long hair swaying down their backs. Suddenly he turned to Gload and said, “What’s the best hotel in this shithole?”

“Pioneer, I suppose. Used to be anyway.”

“Drop me off there.”

“It was on the other end of town. We passed it.”

The kid seemed not to hear. He sat with his face pressed to the window glass, patting his left breast pocket wherein the folded bills lay, and Gload shook his head. It would not be long, he knew, before the kid and money parted company. He slowed and glanced at his mirrors and U-turned the car in the wide avenue, cranking the wheel around with one finger.

“If I can’t get laid here,” the kid said, “I don’t have a hair on my ass.”

Having retrieved his small gym bag from the trunk, the kid swung open the passenger side door and leaning in made a gun of his thumb and forefinger, aimed it at the old man behind the wheel. He said, “Okay. I’ll catch you back on the home turf, pardner.” Gload bent down to watch him mount the hotel steps, swaggering atop three-inch riding heels with his jeans stuffed bronc rider style into his boot tops. He paused at the door to rake back his snarled hair and turn up his collar and he swept into the lobby like some kind of outland prince come to take the little town by storm. For all that, Gload thought, he was no more than a boy.

Some time later he stopped the car at a small creek which like an oasis in the bald prairieland along its course supported a stand of old cottonwoods. He walked through the tangled ditch weeds into the trees, the trunks gray and immense as menhirs. An incongruous crane labored up from the bracken along the muddy stream, towing its lean shadow through the heeling bluestem toward water rumored in the distance by a slash of green. Gload stood and relieved his swollen bladder against a tree and stared up into branches so high the ragged April scud seemed caught there like wisps of tapestry, a high circling bird caged in a wickerwork of pale spring bud. He stood for a long while, until the earth under his feet became as capricious as the deck of a ship. The line of song in his head was this, from when or where he could not remember: “Above Earth’s Lamentation.”

FOUR

They’d come for Gload in the late afternoon. He’d had time to put things in careful order and he sat for perhaps the last time on his chair, listening to the calls and flutterings of birds just arrived north and looking at the desolate faces of last year’s sunflowers at the orchard’s verge. He felt strangely at peace. He got up once and walked down the little orchard lane, bordered already by senseless weeds woven like basketry and he stared long across the sage where the river was. He kept his eyes there as he walked and soon they appeared, like wind-borne trash, rising and falling from view and appearing again, kiting effortlessly on set wings. The old man felt their terrible eyes on him.