The Ploughmen: A Novel (9 page)

“Do they look anything at all like the ones you have on your head, sir?”

“Oh, for Christ sake.” He reached and took them down and glared at them maliciously and then as if addressing them he said, “Lest you think me a fool or a liar, Deputy, I’m one of them who wouldn’t ever want to run into John Gload with no bars in front of him.”

“I wasn’t thinking anything.”

They were half-glasses and seemed indeed to not fit the sheriff’s handsome face and he set them with distaste on his nose. Over these he looked at Millimaki for a long second. “I don’t believe for one minute that you’re ever not thinking, Deputy.” He opened his drawer again and began to set things in order. “Come and see me next week if I forget to send for you. And disregard that it’s eight-thirty in the morning and try a glass of beer when you get home. Used to work for me and near as I can tell I never turned out to be a juicer.”

When he came out into the outer room a large woman with voluminous red hair set atop her head with two sticks looked up from her desk. She wore an elaborate betasseled shawl held in place over her capacious bust with a pin of pewter or silver in the shape of the state of Montana and she held the telephone receiver pressed against her shoulder with her chin. When she saw Millimaki she said, “What’s he caterwauling about in there?”

“It’s nothing. He couldn’t find something but then he did.”

The woman squinted at him, her head cocked oddly, still clenching the phone to her shoulder. “Them goddamn glasses, am I right?” she said. “If he wasn’t so vain and would just get a chain for those things.” Her manner was proprietary and kind for all she meant to appear the picture of stern subaltern righteousness. She spoke curtly to someone on the phone. When Millimaki looked back from the door he saw she was smiling.

*   *   *

He had spent one normal evening with his wife, though he found himself dozing off during supper and during conversation, and then in their bed later, even as his wife breathed beside him, he could not sleep. Nor the next day. Knowing the dark confinement awaited him he pottered around the empty cabin in his slippers like a shut-in, the early spring sunlight an admonition or taunt. By the time he resumed his shift at the jail, except for those brief snatches in chairs he had barely slept for thirty-six hours. His wife when she left had not bothered to kiss him good-bye.

*   *   *

Gload said, “Good to see you, Deptee. Where you been hiding?”

“I got called out on a lost hiker.”

“Have any luck?”

“I found him, if that’s what you mean.”

“Found him cold.”

“Yes.”

“Found another one cold and now you’re back on shit duty nursemaiding the old man.”

It had become their routine. Gload pulled his chair to the bars and arranged his smoking gear beside him on the floor and on his knee balanced the tin bean can, and the young deputy sat his chair under the bank of lights, their faces long waxen caricatures under the purpled sheen.

Gload said, “All manner of excitement while you were out. Brother Wexler hauled in some dangerous criminals, three kids he caught with a twelve-pack of beer. He put ’em in a cell next to that short-eyes asshole and left ’em. Forgot to call their parents for three hours.”

“They were minors in possession,” Millimaki said.

Gload smoked within his shadows and continued as if he hadn’t heard. “Come and sat here and bragged about it to me.” Val could hear the old man’s breath quicken. “I could hear that fucking pervert Shoals whispering and one of them boys for a long time crying down there.”

“He’s a letter-of-the-law man. Those boys were in violation of the MIP laws.”

“You’d of cut them loose, wouldn’t you of?”

“They had violated the law.”

Gload hissed suddenly, “Fuck that. You wouldn’t of done it. You’d of taken their beer and followed them home and cut them loose, goddamn it.”

Millimaki sat. John Gload was breathing heavily.

“Wexler’s the worst kind of asshole. I would bet any money you care to name he was a little picked-on turd his whole life and now he’s got just a little bit of whack and he’s making everybody pay for it. I seen that kind pretty near my whole life. Thousand bucks says he was a turd all his growing up and now he’s getting his paybacks.” The killer’s hand appeared in the light, ghost-white, pointing down toward the now empty cell where a third-offense child molester had recently slept. “Doing shit like that.”

Millimaki knew Wexler was capable of such things and he despised him for it and suddenly he hated all of it, the incremental passing of the hours, the eternal darkness he seemed to reside in, the smell, the pettiness and small cruelties that populated his life. The unnamable tension that was present on the rare occasions these days when he saw his wife, who seemed to feel he had chosen this imprisonment as a way of not seeing her and not dealing with the issues of married life.

“I’m right, ain’t I?” Gload said.

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You wouldn’t know,” Gload repeated. “Don’t fucking bullshit me, Deputy. I thought we were friends.”

“We’re friends, John, inasmuch as you’re in there for possibly killing somebody and I’m out here making sure you stay alive to be punished for it.”

There was only their breathing, the sound of the lights. Past the high small windows that fronted the sidewalk and street a brief shadow went. Finally Gload said, “I don’t want no more company tonight.” He stood up and receded suddenly into the gloom of his concrete cage. “You go on and eat your lunch.”

Valentine Millimaki sat for a long moment and then stood and turned. But he heard Gload behind him hiss, “I would put him in a hole in the ground, Val. I would put him under and you nor your dog nor anyone would find his ass until his bones were as white as Custer’s.”

The voice was one he had not heard from Gload before, had not heard in his life, and he stared into the cell as if he might see this other animal that had taken possession of that place, come from some other more calamitous dark. As suddenly it was gone.

“Go on and have your sandwich now,” Gload said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

*   *   *

Gload had been in court all day following and seemed worn out by the day’s endeavors. When Val came on shift the old man was asleep on his thin cot.

He ate his lunch in the jail’s foyer, leafing through the battered magazines, and afterward filled out some paperwork at the request of the jailer. When he walked back through the corridor of cells he could see from a long way off the smoke materializing from the black of Gload’s cell.

He took his accustomed chair. Gload spoke a short while of the day’s events in the courtroom, what the prosecutors had said, what his defender had offered by way of rebuttal.

“You know one of them sonsofbitches used a word I never heard before. Maybe you know it. I wrote it down here on my pad.” He turned and reached just beyond lightfall to the tiny desk cantilevered by chain from the wall and took up a yellow legal pad. Oddly elegant writing on the lines and baroque fretwork penciled in the margins of imagined creatures and strange faces that may have been caricatures of courtroom players—lawyers or judge or baliff—elongate and leering like those in a funhouse mirror. Gload ran a finger down among his sentences and stopped, tapping the page, and he cast his eyes toward the hall ceiling lights. “Turpitude.” He sat staring at the word, twice underlined, his long sloping horse’s brow furrowed in concentration, as if the meaning may have been revealed in his recent dreams if he could only conjure it. Finally he said, “No, I haven’t never heard that word.”

“I never heard of it either,” Valentine said.

Gload smiled at him. “Thought you were some kind of college boy.”

“That’s one I missed.”

“He said, ‘This man’s life of turpitude’ and one other time. Seemed pretty proud of it.”

“I’ve got to go on up for a while,” Val said. “Want me to look it up?”

“I’d appreciate it.”

The old man listened to the clop and rasp of Millimaki’s steps diminishing down the darkened hallway. He tried to remember the dream he had had while he slept earlier and could recall only a chaos of amorphous people aswim in that murky realm wearing each other’s heads and loosed in the court were the cobbled beasts of sleep—minotaurs and griffins and creatures seen only in the mythology of men’s sleep.

He sat smoking in the dark, reading by its sounds the hour of the night and he was smoking still when the deputy came back. The younger man sat down as before on the ladderback chair and said, “Baseness, vileness, depravity.” He had written the words on his palm and he turned it to Gload as proof and turned it so the light would fall on the words, large block letters on the farmboy’s hand like jailhouse tattoos. Gload smiled above the cat-eye ember of his cigarette, imagining Val’s hand with its message easing up the flannel of his young wife’s nightdress.

“Well, thank you. I didn’t figure it to be anything that might be complimentary.”

“Nope. I guess you could have figured that much.”

Gload told the young deputy that he sensed something in the demeanor of the state’s attorneys. Above their opened files with their heads inclined together like children at a game, they seemed to have an unusual sense of confidence. His own attorney he thought of as little more than stage dressing. He had done work in the past for Gload and some of his contemporaries, but a proclivity toward fortified wine had much diminished him in the ensuing years, and the papers he compulsively shuffled above the table trembled alarmingly, his handwriting a faltering scrawl that for all its illegibility may have been another language entirely. He sat dwarfed beside John Gload with a fond look on his face, a strange small man of indeterminate age around whose balding head ran a lank fringe of hair like inexpertly dyed tree moss. At the end of the day he laid a hand on Gload’s shoulder and went out, to be seen no more until morning.

“I don’t think my little friend Calvert C. Benjamin, attorney at law, knows shit from Shinola, Val,” Gload said. “Them other guys are holding some kind of hole card, I can tell you that, and he’s a man wandering in the dark.” He gave Millimaki a hard inquiring look.

“I don’t hear a thing, John, swear to God. By the time I come on shift there’s just me and the jailer and the janitor, and he’s deaf as a rock.”

“Yeah. Well.”

“Anything the state’s guys have, your guy’d have too, John.”

“True enough. The sonofabitch might just not know what to do with it. But something’s up. I can feel it and I smell White.”

Gload looked beyond Millimaki to the small arched windows opposite, high up on the wall, and watched as phantom legs scissored across the rectangle of dull yellow streetlamp. The old barred windows let in the wind with a faint moan and it swayed the tube lights overhead on their chains in a barely audible metallic creaking like the turning of a distant windmill. From somewhere down the line of shadowed cages a man coughed deeply and swore.

Gload said, “The good deputy Dobek stopped by earlier to tell me how I’m going to piss my pants when they drop the trap and that my eyes are going to pooch out of my head and shit like that.” He snorted. “Hell, they ain’t hung nobody in this state for twenty-four years, he ought to know that. But it was sort of sweet of him to stop off and share all that with me just the same.”

“I’m sorry about that, John, I really am.”

“I believe friend Wexler was there, too, down the way where I couldn’t see him.”

Gload beyond the latticework of shadows drew on his cigarette and leaned back, and the shadow line clove his face. His eyes were gone. Smoke in twinned plumes hissed from his nostrils. Down the corridor a lodger coughed again and another in his troubled slumber whimpered like a child and John Gload snorted his facsimile laugh. “The wicked flee where none pursueth,” he said. “Even in their sleep.”

“Bad dreams,” Val said.

“Bad dreams. Right.” He paused, nodded his head slowly up and down as if agreeing with some muttered point put forth from the obscured region behind him. He inclined into the light, pointed two fingers at Val with the cigarette clenched between them. “You earn those, Val. They don’t just show up on their own.”

He blew smoke at the floor, leaned and tipped his ash into the bean can. “When I don’t sleep it ain’t because of bad dreams. It ain’t because of ghosts or nothing like that. So what does that tell you?”

“Don’t know.”

“I don’t know either.” He studied the polished concrete between his feet. He looked up. “Yes I do. I know what I am, Val.”

He was quiet for a long time. He was about to speak when the man cried out from the grip of his troubled sleep and seemed to wake himself and he was cursed by men in adjacent cells and curses and threats went from cage to cage like an echo. Millimaki stood and went down the corridor a short way and stood listening until the noise slowly subsided and there was nothing to be heard but snoring and soft and regular breathing and over all like a swarm of electric bees the maddening hum of the fluorescents.

When Millimaki returned and resumed his seat, Gload said, “Dying is something I ain’t afraid of, Val. Don’t worry about that shithead Dobek. For one thing, they won’t hang me or shoot me the juice or whatever. I’m too old. That’d be bad press for ’em. Hanging is a young man’s deal. Nobody gets any satisfaction from jerking an old man’s neck.”

He paused to shake out a smoke from his pack and kindle it from the previous one and he did so in the dark as a blind man would, by touch and sound, movements done a thousand times in a thousand darks.

“But I will say this—I don’t much care for the idea of dying in lock-up. That’s just pitiful. You’re dead in a field of other loser cons like you were throwed in a landfill.”

“That’s only if the family doesn’t claim the remains.”

“First you got to have family.”

“But you have someone, John, right? Your wife, is it? The woman out at your place?”

“Nope,” he said. “No one.”

“Well, I saw her stuff there. We saw a woman’s stuff.”

“I ain’t saying she wasn’t there. But like I told you before—gone.”

“She’d come back for that, would she not?”