The Ploughmen: A Novel (19 page)

“They’re all asleep, Val,” the old man said.

Millimaki paused, his shadow leaning to merge with the dark of Gload’s cell.

“Why not pull up your chair, Deptee?”

Gload had come to the bars from his chair and his hands dangled atop the door’s horizontal cross member, the cigarette smoldering at his stained knuckle. He stood with his sloping equine forehead pressed to the bars. Rarely in their talks had he come forward from the gloom and Millimaki had long since grown accustomed to speaking to a voice in the dark and hearing one issue from the dark and their relationship because of that had taken on the aspect of priest and confessor, the roles unfixed and seeming to change by the minute. The old man stood staring at the ember of his cigarette, waiting.

“Why not sit for a bit?”

Millimaki stood. He listened. Lights flared in the street-level window, and tires on the wet pavement beyond made a brief adder’s hiss. He turned and found his chair against the corridor wall where for the first time he noted the paint peeling in long yellow skeins and it lay on the floor like molted skins and the walls wept a drapery of griseous stains under every window where water had breached the rotting jambs. He brought the chair forward and sat heavily.

“This new Murphy guy seems to of pushed some kind of button on you,” Gload said.

Millimaki ran his hand through his hair and massaged a spot at the base of his skull. “He just happened to be within reach. I lost my cool.”

“I wouldn’t give it a second thought, Val. He’s a bad one.”

“Not many wind up here for their good Christian deeds.”

The old man smiled. “You’re right, Valentine. But there’s bad and then there’s crazy. With your crazies like this Murphy you lose the whole benefit of knowing what they might do next. I’ve walked a wide circle around his type my whole life.”

“And it’s served you well.”

Gload sat frozen with the cigarette halfway to his lips. “Your point being that I’m in this place and so is he and so what have I gained.”

With the heels of his hands Millimaki ground at his eye sockets and he sighed. “I’m sorry, John. I’m not much in the way of company tonight.”

“I hear you had a walk in the toolies with your dog. Is that the problem?”

“Like you said, it’s a small town in here.”

“Nobody has nothing to do but talk, Val. Myself I mostly listen.”

“Not much of what these guys say would seem too interesting.”

“So you found another one cold and stiff. You’re on a bum run of luck, Valentine. But that will change.”

“I keep hearing that.”

Gload stood with his arms through the bars. When he pulled his head back to bring the burning cigarette to his lips, two faint outlines of the bars were pressed onto his forehead.

“You haven’t had a lot to say these days, Deputy. What’s on your mind?”

“Very little, John. Sleep. Sleep is on my mind.”

“You could try my little trick.”

“It’s three in the morning and you’re standing here talking to me. Not a particularly good advertisement for it.”

“Sometimes,” Gload said. “Sometimes.” With his Camel clinched between knuckles he sat hingeing his wrist up and back, watching in the gloom the tiny bolide of its burning tip. “Tonight I thought you might want to talk.”

“So you stayed up to talk to me.”

“I’m sorry that after what we been through you’d be so surprised by that.” He blew his smoke toward the overhead lights and watched it vanish. “Yes, Deputy, I stayed up to talk to you.”

It was out of his mouth before he’d time to consider it and in the intervening short moment of silence afterward he felt ridiculous. “It’s my wife.”

Gload received the news with gravity. He ground out his cigarette in the tin can and the chair’s legs chirped as he inched it closer to the bars and he composed his hands in his lap like a man at prayer. “You sorta had that look,” he said.

“She’s gone to stay in town with a girlfriend. I hardly saw her before. Now I never do.”

“That’s no way to carry on a relationship. If I was to add up the days I was gone while I was with Francie I’d say it was damn near two of the five years. I don’t recommend it.”

“Francie. That’s your wife?”

“Not wife, exactly.”

“What then?”

There came a long pause during which the sounds of the old building seemed to insinuate themselves overloud like crickets on an August evening. Fans whirred somewhere far away in its mechanical heart and its breath came fusty and dry from the ductwork. Gload’s voice when he finally spoke was scarcely louder than the indifferent mutterings of the air conditioner.

“You asked me once before if she was my wife and I never answered you which was rude and I apologize. But I hadn’t ever the need to describe her to anybody which you’ll think is kind of peculiar but I guess that tells you something about how we lived. Not exactly out in the public eye much, so to speak.”

“So would you say ‘girlfriend’ then? Or your ‘Old Lady’?”

“Old Lady,” he snorted. “Gah. I hate that. Sounds like some of that bullshit biker talk.” He paused to draw on his smoke and exhale into the light. “No, and I’m too goddamn old for ‘girlfriend.’ So I guess ‘wife’ is the best one. It’s how I feel about her anyways.”

“And she left you.”

“What I said was—” What he’d said was she was gone and that was a different thing entirely. But from his innominate shadows he could read in the young man’s eyes—insomniacal and familiar, so much like those that regarded him in the scarred and untrue polished metal of his cell’s mirror—a need for the comfort bestowed by mutual anguish.

“Yes she did,” Gload said and thought, My little Francie. “She left me for something better.”

Millimaki nodded. Like two men at a campfire they sat listening to the night sounds in the dark beyond their strange violet circle of light. Millimaki had closed his eyes and soon his head began to bob as if the bones in his neck had turned to jelly. He lurched upright, his eyes wild. The old man had been watching him solemnly.

“Shit,” Millimaki said. “I need to get up and get moving before I crap out right here.”

In his weariness Millimaki in rising placed a hand on the flat horizontal bar of John Gload’s cell and the old man reached and laid his enormous paw over it. Val stared at the great hairy thing, white and thick and heavy, and made no move to pull away. The old man left it there for a moment and then it was gone into shadow. It was the first human contact Millimaki had experienced in weeks. The last person he’d touched—the old janitor wandering in the badlands in search of his young bride—had been made of oak.

Gload sat back. “I feel like I want to tell you this one thing, Valentine. Sit down. Sit for just a minute.”

Millimaki hesitated briefly. He cast his gaze to the right where the nicked and rusty bars on the cells seemed to diminish infinitely like notches numerating the dead. The caged men behind them slept on.

When the deputy had taken his chair, Gload said, “One thing I always did, Val, was to live my life. It wasn’t a particularly interesting life but it was on my terms. Now in here I’m just living it out.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Now it’s just waiting. It’s only a life technically because you’re breathing in and out. Putting in the time until you clock out.” He brought forward his chair with a squawk yet again and slid his bean can beside his foot.

“I was in this little town once some years ago over east of here and every day I’d walk past this place for old people. Hospital for old people. A whatyacallit—old folks’ home?”

“Nursing home?”

“I don’t know. Whatever they call it these days. But with this line of people sitting in their chairs or wheelchairs just looking out. Me walking by was the best part of their day. A week I went by there every morning on the way for a paper up the street and back and I seen them there, heads moved all of a piece to follow me just like cattle. They were just living it out, you see what I mean, Val? Waiting it out. And one day I just turned and went in. They were sitting there, didn’t look at me at all because it was out the window where the world was. Didn’t even turn their heads. They were nothing but sticks in clothes. Blankets on their laps, hair standing up all which-way. I just stood there. Pretty soon I folded the paper and put it in my back pocket. I thought that in about half a minute I could snap their necks one two three down the line and then this pogue comes in eating a chicken leg in his dirty white jacket and says can I help you and then that was that.”

Millimaki studied the old man or rather studied the space he knew him to occupy in the dark and then from that space smoke rolled into the artificial light.

“You’re serious.”

“Serious as God.” Through the bars a hand appeared, corpse-white in the light and brutal, two fingers held a fraction of an inch apart. It was not at all the same warm thing that had rested on his own hand a few short minutes before. “That fucking close,” he said. “I was fixing to do it and I could of. Don’t think I couldn’t.”

“An act of kindness, then?” Millimaki said.

“In that case I believe it was mostly just impatience on my part.”

“Those people had memories at least. To go back to.”

“They had shit, Valentine.” Gload tapped a finger twice above his pendulous ear. “There was nothing upstairs but oatmeal.” He sat back into shadow and was quiet a long while. The tube lights throbbed and hissed. Millimaki waited. “But it would of been a kindness, Val, yes indeed. Or a blessing, some might call it, who believe in such things. Like you. Didn’t you not tell me once you were a mackerel snapper?”

“I was raised that way. Pretty sure I never mentioned it though.”

Gload waved away the remark, his hand winking into the light and gone again. “Anyways, you have to see what I’m getting at.”

“I’m tired, John. Maybe you could help me see your point.”

“Like people at the end of the line. Like some of the folks you find, Valentine. They would of been better off dead, is my point.”

*   *   *

On the thin mattress Gload lay atop was a cartography of a thousand stains and there were more stains and thin fissures like the veins in a leaf on the ceiling above his head in the muddled dark. Across his counterfeit heaven, visions of Francie came and went like the random flares of headlights through the high corridor windows. As if he looked at her again through the old imperfect panes of their house or one washed with rain, her face was blurred. But her singing was in his ears, her voice calling his name as if it were a chant to ward off harm and finally on that vile cot he could nearly feel her, her leg seeking him out from her own nether bed.

My wife, he thought. Then to test the sound of it he said it aloud, but because he didn’t want to share it with the animals nearby in their cubicles he said it softly. “My wife, Francie.” He swung his legs and sat on the cot’s edge, smiling, and he spoke to her then softly. “I marry you now. Before whatever god you’d pick, it don’t matter. You’re my wife and I’m your husband.”

And when they talked of her from then on he called her his wife and it was not lost on Millimaki and when he asked about where she was or where he thought she might be Gload smiled wistfully and Millimaki felt a terrible fear for her because he had seen that smile before and he knew what it meant to be so spoken of by John Gload. He’d smiled telling him about a Chinaman and about an old woman and her Pom dog sixty years dead.

*   *   *

Hours later while sitting in the Blazer in the shade a towering prairie cottonwood in full leaf cast onto the shoulder of the two-lane highway, not far from where his wife those few years ago had come sparkling resplendent and naked from the creek, Valentine Millimaki thought perhaps he did see John Gload’s point. The cabin was still some miles south on the road. Too inhabited yet by Glenda, he avoided it. The jail, where once he found solace in its disconnectedness from the world, seemed now to be a stone bearing down on his neck. He stared unseeing out the streaked windshield. Grasshoppers sizzled in the brittle weeds and a chorus of meadowlark and red-winged blackbird filled the cab. It was comfortable here. If not for Tom he would have lived in the truck along the road and taken his meals there—cans of soup eaten cold, cheese cut from the block with his pocketknife and eaten on crackers, shaving in the dimming twilight before work beneath the dome light and sleeping across the seats through the warming brilliant days wrapped in his jacket like a bum and waking to the sound of passing traffic. He lurched red-eyed through his days in a purgatory described by home and the jail, content in neither place. A bird laboring in a hurricane wind, moving nowhere yet unable to alight. How different from the animated skeletons of Gload’s old folks’ home was he?

Among the papers on the dashboard that rose and fell with the breeze through the side window was the letter from his sister. He took it up and pulled it from the envelope and reread it and then refolded the pages carefully along their creases and put them back. On the dash it pulsed and fluttered against the window glass. As if the words within would escape to circle his head like carrion birds.

He’d been twelve years old. Should he have known his mother was living life out? For his paltry sins he’d had the kind alcoholic priest in his confessional to unburden himself to but the transgressions against his mother seemed too great to fit in that dim cubicle. He listed them instead in a notebook afterward, writing them out with a gnawed pencil in a mimicry of her elegant cursive: “Disrespect.” “Sullenness” (she had called it). “Slamming the back door.” “Didn’t make my bed.” Once he’d been caught stealing a fruit pie at the little market near the school and the proprietor had phoned. His mother related the conversation at the dinner table in a voice so flat and shamed that it burned his skin worse than the welts his father had later raised with the doubled belt. He had taken him by the arm wordlessly to the chicken shed so his sister couldn’t hear the thwack of the leather across his back, or the cries. The entries in his ledger of sins became less frequent. “I pretended to be asleep so she would not kiss me goodnight.” After six months, one or two others. He remembered the last: “The fucking slippers I knew she wouldn’t ever wear.” Two days later he had taken up the pencil and blacked out “fucking.” That was the last time he’d opened the notebook.