Free The Ploughmen: A Novel by Kim Zupan

again, kiting effortlessly on set wings. The old man felt their terrible eyes on him.
    The wind shook the trees and their branches gnashed and shuddered and the wheat-pale needlegrass down every row lay on the ground. He stood at the prescribed spot looking through the gnarled trunks beyond which the sun burned slowly down. He moved forward a few paces and looked and he moved back, trying to see it as a stranger might. He squinted his eyes and through the ruddled apertures the cured orchard grass and the dark slender tree boles quaking against the sky were an impressionist’s blur of blue, ocher, dun. The grass bowed and hissed in the wind and waiting he heard the dull pong of the harrow tines, hung in a tree like a rude mobile or wind chime, and then he went back.
    Long before they arrived he could see the dust trail, patrol cars dragging a dirty cumulus across the evening sky, and he could see within it lights throbbing like a foundry fire and finally the cars themselves appeared, bumping and slewing up the narrow road, their windshields aflame.
    They found a house in neat order, dishes washed, bed made, plants in pots set up to the south-facing windows newly watered. They found Francie’s clothes and perfumes and creams, her shoes paired and aligned in a closet. They asked about her and John Gload told them she was gone and he did not lie.
    *   *   *
    Five weeks later, astride the chair in his cell, John Gload recalled the moment under the cottonwood trees, not as one of the greatest miscalculations of his career but the instant of its realization. Standing pissing on a tree and embarked upon one course of action, the other concocting itself like a visitation out of the leaves of the trees.
    That morning Sid White had been led shuffling into the courtroom and he wasn’t in such spirits as Gload had seen him last. He sat hunched and childlike in a strange purple suit piped in gold and around his gaping shirt collar a bolo tie cinched with an outlandish shard of turquoise. Entering he did not raise a hand in greeting or so much as meet the old man’s eyes, as he seemed altogether transfixed by the troubling new jewelry adorning his wrists and ankles.
    Out of the cell’s tangible dark Gload alchemized an early morning in Rapid City. He sat beneath yellow lamplight with the knife in his hand as the kid slept and it would have been such an easy thing, a simple matter of drawing back the coverlet, getting a grip of hair and pulling the blade across Sid White’s throat. For that matter, he could have gotten in the car, driven back from the grove of cottonwoods a scant hundred miles and waited in the room in Miles City for the kid to come back drunk. In a way, he thought, it was like two mistakes, one stacked on top of the other. “I could of had him rolled in a bed quilt, into the trunk and underground and it wouldn’t of cost me no more than two hours tops,” he said.
    As he spoke, the young deputy who had befriended him came to sit in his accustomed chair. Millimaki thought with the appearance of Sid White today that the old man would be inclined to talk. He seemed, though, to regard Millimaki as no more animate than the chair he occupied. Gload sat back and disappeared into the darkness and a match flame revealed a ghostly theatrical mask of profound abstraction.
    Millimaki said, “Did you say something, John?”
    The old killer said, “For example, there’s one thing that if I would of done it and if I would of followed my goddamn instinks I’d be sitting in my little trees right now with a blanket on my lap. Instead.” He raised his hands palm up, turning his head left and right, inviting the attendant darkness to regard the conditions of his current life.
    Val turned in his chair to see if perhaps someone had come silently to stand behind him.
    Gload sat astraddle his chair, his hands atop his knees and his chin nearly on his chest. He looked very old then, his thin gray hair awry and hanging before his