The Ploughmen: A Novel by Kim Zupan Page B

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