Free The Ploughmen: A Novel by Kim Zupan Page A

eyes and Val could see deep vertical creases in his neck like watercourses.
    “What one thing, John?”
    Gload shook his head ruefully.
    “The trouble with being old in my business is that all your old partners are dead or laying up dying slow in the joint somewheres. I was plumb out of good help, is how I come to get White. The young blood,” he said wearily. “Good Lord.” A hand rose from his knee as if of its own accord and he sat looking at the burning cigarette there and then put it to his lips. He spoke squinting through the smoke. “I tried to show him some things, but the way it is with these young guys is they already know everything and they want to be the boss. If they don’t know shit from apple butter.” A pause, a long liquid exhale from the shadows. “Golf clubs,” he said. “Sweet Jesus.”
    “What? Golf clubs? Are you talking about Sid White?”
    Gload continued. Millimaki felt invisible. “There’s times when you do that—look back and think, I should of done this or that or some other thing. Like with that kid. I don’t have a lot of those times, a handful, but what I do know is that you can’t never ever let them get under your skin. You did what you did at the time and at the time it was right. I regret almost nothing. This thing here lately. Some others. But I ain’t been eat up by them, either.”
    Val consulted his watch and waited. The night was well advanced. The old man sighed and Millimaki thought he might continue but he withdrew without a word and from the darkness came the creak of bunk chains.
    Val sat for a moment longer and stood to leave. From the dark came Gload’s voice. “Television. That’s the problem,” he said. “They seen it all on the television.”

 
    FIVE
    When Millimaki pulled into the yard the rancher who had phoned in the plate numbers stood leaning against a porch post, at four in the afternoon red-eyed and holding a tumbler a third full of something that looked like tea but was not. He did little more than point with his glass hand toward the low ridge where the car was and seemed otherwise indisposed to talk. Two scabrous heelers came on a dead run from a hay barn that leaned from its footings six inches from plumb and they made immediately for the flanks of the tracking dog and Val was forced to kick at them. When he turned the man had gone in, and when he came down off the mountain four hours later in the semidark there was no light burning anywhere on the place.
    It was a seldom-used ranch road the missing old man had taken, an apparently random turn from a random highway at the end of a fuddled and reckless drive. He had laid down the right-of-way gate and driven over the gate wires and posts and in the old Buick had bucked and churned upslope until the tires sank axle deep in the mud of a seep-spring.
    On the floorboards of the LeSabre were newspapers and balled filthy clothing and the dog snuffled at them, looking at Millimaki with his sad wet eyes and then set out lunging at his lead with the scent in his nose. The road wound steeply upward through sparse dwarf pine lopsided and scoured by the vicious winds that inhabited that place and then along a ridgetop where rocky spines like the backs of antediluvian plated beasts protruded from the soil. The wind did blow and it moaned among the trees and the dirt from the bare ridge seethed in the grass as the dog surged ahead, whining. Below and ahead of them an ancient tree rose from the center of a great rock, its limbs accoutered with crows. As man and dog approached, the birds rose by twos and threes croaking, their black beaks agape like panting dogs’, and their ragged wings beat furiously to hold against the wind.
    He had apparently tripped or had suffered a seizure or heart attack on the ridge and then had fallen head over heels like a circus tumbler, becoming lodged head downhill in the split trunk of the tree the birds had occupied. Old sawyers called these trees schoolmarms and the