The Ploughmen: A Novel Page 13

  Millimaki shook his head in disbelief.

  “Here’s my point. Is that if that poor sonofabitch did that for just a little bit of pocket money, don’t think for a minute that your pal Wexler wouldn’t blindside you for the sake of his so-called career. You know him. He’s more than capable of doing that. I just want you to know how things work, Val. I just want you to realize how the world works.”

  TEN

  “A story about a Butte Chinaman and some rings,” Millimaki said.

  “Oh, Christ, yes.”

  “Something about fingers and an HP officer.”

  “Ancient history, Val.” The sheriff waved a dismissive hand. “An old story before my time and most likely without merit.”

  Millimaki experienced a moment of great relief. The prospect of recalling details of Gload’s tale of dismemberment and implied departmental failings left him exhausted. Beyond that, he realized with some surprise, he would have felt a sense of betrayal.

  “In any event, Deputy, I mostly called you in by way of a follow-up. The last time we spoke there was an issue or issues with your wife. Has that situation improved?”

  Millimaki had taken the hard chair opposite the sheriff’s desk and he glanced toward the door, beyond which Raylene sat at her vast desk, more formidable at her station there than the ghoulish nightshift bailiff.

  “Don’t worry about her, Val. Until she finishes her morning crossword she doesn’t pay a lick of attention to me. I could be cold as a dead cod in here. When I have my inevitable myocardial infarction I hope it’s in the PM.”

  Together they regarded her back, a broad expanse of garish tropical blooms. Her head beneath its plumed vortex of hair nodded above the page.

  “You can close the door if you want, but that usually just sets off her radar.”

  Millimaki had finished his shift twenty-six hours earlier and had forced himself to stay awake until dark and still he’d hardly slept. The cabin door from its planing now shuddered under the wind and when he’d gotten up and shimmed it tight with two table knives it instead produced a muttering as though words were forming in the outer dark and came encrypted through the moaning gaps. At some point in the very early morning he dreamt again of his mother, her stained lips forming these night sounds into words he could not decipher, though he woke and lay among tangled sheets for an hour trying. He knew he should sleep but the image would not abate. He relented and sat on the edge of his bed watching the new long day paint the windowpanes. Now he sat in front of the cluttered desk blearily regarding his unpolished boots.

  “She’s staying in town with a friend,” he said.

  “Ah.”

  “She’s going to stay in town for a while,” he said. He looked up, his gaze reaching no higher than the sheriff’s chest. “We needed some space. Well, she did anyway.”

  “Yes. Space. Space is a common theme.”

  “That’s my word. The conversation was a bit more involved than just that.”

  The sheriff leaned back in his chair. He rested the tips of his index fingers in the slack underside of his jaw. The chair as he imperceptibly rocked emitted a faint feline noise.

  “The department is a testing ground for marital Darwinism, Val. This is what we do, one might say what we love to do, but it is frequently opposed to or at least makes difficult the husbanding of marriage. I mean that in the agricultural sense, husbanding. There are additional factors, such as a spouse’s profession if there is one outside the home, children from the union. The strongest—” he said.

  The younger man had turned his gaze to the streaked single window with its latticework of bars and seemed altogether lost there. The sheriff was unsure if he’d even heard. In any case he was embarrassed to have spoken aloud the philosophy he’d formulated through years of such counseling, years of his own uncounselable grief. He noted in the cruel light the deep furrow that had appeared between Millimaki’s brows since he had last seen him and that his pale eyes within their dark grottos were set in a perpetual squint, as if in seeking sense in his world, or succor, he had taken to examining life at the level of mites or atoms.

  “You know, Val, my old mother always said that if you make a face long enough it’ll be stuck that way.”

  Millimaki stared into the bright spring day, a long horizontal shadow across his eyes like a man masked before a firing squad. “Does it mean we make a choice?” he said. “Because it seems like it means that if you choose to do your job, I mean to do it right, then your marriage isn’t anything more than two people sharing a room for convenience. One gets in bed when the other one goes off to work.”

  “I’d have to say that that’s kind of a harsh view of things,” the sheriff said. He slid open a drawer and rummaged about. He came up with his pipe and stuck it cold in the corner of his mouth. “Okay, maybe my theory is just so much happy horseshit, Valentine. Maybe it’s just luck. Or chance, whatever you choose to call it. I’ve seen it a hundred times. Who you marry just goddamn turns out to be some other person after a while. Grows up into somebody else. Not better or worse. Just different.”

  “You put barley in the drills and six months later it comes up rye.”

  The sheriff smiled faintly around his pipestem. “Okay, something like that, if we want to keep the agricultural analogies going here.” He waited. He dug in the bowl of the pipe with a bent paper clip. Millimaki could see yellow birds, tiny and electric, pinballing from limb to limb in the elms across the street. He thought they might be finches. He watched them through the stained window glass, feeling momentarily as if he were in a cage looking out and the brilliant birds mocked him, flitted about imponderous and free in the wide world. He said, “I guess you get used to the bars after a while.”

  The sheriff turned to the window, observing as if for the first time the rusty bars there, then looked again at Millimaki. “You could talk to one of our counselors, Val. There’s no shame in that.”

  “I thought if I discharged my weapon. Something like that.”

  “That’s not the only reason we have them.”

  “I just need some solid sleep.”

  “We could get something for that. Whatever you need. One phone call.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I’m not all that good at pats on the back, Val. I hear it’s one of my many failures. But you’re a good officer. And I’ve not seen anyone better with a dog. Not since I’ve been here.” He took the pipe from his mouth and examined the bowl thoughtfully then set it on the desk. “In many ways you remind me of me.”

  “And you’re still married.”

  “Yes. Well. Again and still.”

  Millimaki turned from the window and looked at him. “I didn’t know that.”

  “It was a long time ago, Val. Don’t extrapolate anything from that.”

  A car passed on the street below. In the ensuing quiet only the rhythmical mewing of the sheriff’s chair. Finally he said, “Was Teagarden here when you started? I can’t recall.”

  “No, sir. I remember hearing the name.”

  “Ed Teagarden—married thirty-two years, the whole time he was on the force. Nice woman. Good woman. And smart.” He stopped abruptly then, remembering, and began to busy himself with the seeming unfathomable jumble atop his desk. His glasses were revealed and he put them on and looked down. He took them off and examined them as if they might be glasses left behind by someone else and then set them on the desk again.

  “Yes, sir. That’s it? He was the only one?”

  “No, hell.” The sheriff scanned the desk as if an answer might appear there, among the envelopes of overnight mail and yellow and red carbons and triplicate forms requiring his signature a thick dossier on the long and happily married men who had served under him. “Well, the only one comes to mind. There must have been more. I’m sure of it.”

  “Dobek?”

  “Voyle Dobek. Wedded four times that I’m aware of. But he’s Dobek. He is not representative.”

  Millimaki went out of
the office, his feet heavy and his head dull. As he passed Raylene’s desk he paused and seemed to study with great concern the floor beneath his feet. The secretary glanced up at him from her folded paper and after a moment looked up at him again and laid aside her pencil. “Can I help you, Deputy?”

  Millimaki said, “Is it too early for a goldfinch?”

  ELEVEN

  They tracked him along a dry watercourse in country that had been mapped for a hundred years but, like the charts of ancient seas with their dragons and monstrous waves, its details were little more than conjectural. There was in some years grass enough for cattle but the getting them in and bringing them out of such broken and waterless territory proved an enterprise of insufficient profit. Cattle wild as elk were said to live there, their numbers checked now by big cats and spectral wolves, drought and blizzard.

  The ground underfoot was hot and the very air seemed to shudder in the heat and everywhere was the hiss and crackle of grasshoppers. “You got a lot of heart for the old crazy man they say you are,” Millimaki said. The dog stopped to look back at him, his tongue lolling. They had already walked five miles and he could see ahead for nearly another mile into the empty country. A hawk far to the north circled above the invisible lake. A sparrow on a sage limb dazed by heat. The dog sniffed briefly at a cow dead some two or three years, disarticulated by flash flood or scavengers and it looked to have fallen from the sky and burst apart. A tatter of red hide lay across the cage of ribs like parchment.

  In pursuit of God knows what the old man had walked into that bleak quarter in the third week in July from a scorched and dust-blown campsite on the shore of Fort Peck Reservoir. His family searched for hours, until they feared becoming lost themselves in the utter dark, and the following late morning Valentine Millimaki arrived, having driven straight into the sunrise for three and a half hours after his interminable graveyard shift. He stood beside the exploded Hereford at seven-thirty in the evening and was himself beginning to suffer from lack of water and sleep.

  * * *

  “I set him up with a pole and a chair and a gob of worms and then we took the boat out,” the man said. “We weren’t gone but half an hour and he’s nowheres. Must of started walking soon as we started the goddamn motor.”

  “So you were gone about a half an hour.”

  “Something like that.”

  Val looked to the man’s wife for confirmation.

  “I wish you wouldn’t swear right at this time,” she said to her husband. She turned to Millimaki. “It could of been an hour,” she said. “Up to an hour.”

  “Might of been,” the man said. “It was like somebody just called him away to supper. Pole laying right there next to the chair with the line still out. It was all snagged up by the time we got back. I had to bust it off.”

  The missing man’s daughter stood with her husband near the lakeshore, very slender and pale, holding herself quite still as if, like gossamer or a clutch of down, she might come apart in the merest movement of summer air. Both of them from their frantic pursuit of hunch and shadows among the hills and along the beach were sunburned a terrifying red. She said, “It’s like a switch you throw.” The irises of her eyes were the color of sapphires and seemed to Millimaki about to liquefy, integuments too frail to restrain such pain. She studied the infinity of sky beyond his head. “He’d be so good and normal, calling me by my right, real name and even the kids’ names and then it’s like a switch. He’d get this terrible look on his face like who was this stranger in his house trying to make him eat poison food. That’s how it was.”

  “We fed him good,” the man offered.

  “That’s not what I’m telling him,” she said.

  “I know it isn’t.”

  “Then just don’t say anything.”

  She wept openly then, hugging herself like someone standing in a cold place. “Oh, Daddy.” Her husband seemed not to know how to comfort her, his hand wavering in the air above her head in a gesture of blessing and finally he merely rested it on the back of her sunburned neck.

  Shortly and with a visible effort she composed herself. “He’d say he heard her calling, say, ‘There’s Clara,’ and up he’d get, didn’t matter from where. From the dinner table, wherever. In church. Up he’d get and go off.”

  She stood with her red arms at her waist, the man’s hand on her neck. Beyond them the two children sat in the dirt in their bathing suits disconsolately batting an inflatable ball between them. The boy wore thick glasses and he looked up at Millimaki with enormous magnified eyes.

  “So I know where he went,” the woman said. Millimaki looked at her and her husband looked away. “He’s gone out there looking for Mother,” she said. “She’s been gone three years and he’s out there looking for her in the hills.”

  Tom sat at heel watching the ball and when the woman began to wail he turned to her, cocking his head side to side.

  “I’m sorry,” Val said. The couple stood before him, the water beyond their backs as flat and reflective as plate glass. “Can you tell me what he was wearing?”

  “Ain’t like there’s anybody else out there to confuse him with,” the man said.

  Val looked up at him. Far out in the dazzling lake a floating island of ethereal blue pines and sage frissoned in the heat haze—a realm of myth as axiomatic as the ground under him and then that quickly it was gone.

  “Colors,” he said. “I like to know what colors to look for.”

  “T-shirt and these brown pants he always wore,” the man said. “Them khaki pants, same as he wore to work for thirty years, sweeping at the school.” He shook his head. “Some whatchamacall pull-on type shoes ’cause he couldn’t work the laces no more. Is that sound about right, Honey?”

  The woman wiped at her eye with the back of her wrist. “A white T-shirt,” she said. “And a cap. I put a cap on his head when we left, for the sun. Just a ball cap of Jamie’s. I don’t know what was on it. It was black, I guess.”

  The boy looked over, pouting. “It was NASCAR and it was my favorite and now it’s gone.”

  The man turned to him. “Don’t you start that again.”

  “’S true, though.”

  “What color, son?” Val said.

  “Purple and yellow and red with 26 on it.” He stared at the dog. “Can he find it? Can Whatever-His-Name-Is find it for me?”

  “He’s Tom. He’ll give it a heck of a try.”

  “Just a white T-shirt,” the woman said. “And the cap and the pants.”

  “All right.”

  Heat waves shimmered up from the camp trailer, the blue tarp canopied over the doorway casting a rhombus of meager shade. Two cinder blocks secured it atop the trailer and through the grommet holes two poles held it bellied over the dirt where spavined lawn chairs had been placed.

  “I’d like some more water for the dog, and could you get a piece of your father’s clothes for me? A shirt or pants, something like that. It’ll help the dog getting started.”

  Val went to the truck and began provisioning himself for the long day. The man came over, holding a pale blue windbreaker that had been his father-in-law’s.

  “Sorry for what I said. It’s been pretty tough around here. She’s blaming me for it. I know she don’t mean it but she is.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Val said.

  “I looked everywhere.” He gazed out over the flat surface of the lake. “Could he be out there? He might of just waded out in the lake and that was it.”

  “Could have,” Millimaki said. “But Tom didn’t show any interest there. Sounds like he went walking. Pretty common with Alzheimer’s. They just walk and walk.”

  “Don’t I know it.” The man stood awkwardly with his huge laborer’s hands buried in the pockets of jeans that had apparently been sheared off rudely at the knee with a knife or an ax. The tops of his gnarled feet were crimson and peeling. “Sometimes he just pissed in his pants,” he said. His voice cracked. “Sitting there. My wife changes him like
a baby.”

  “You did good,” the deputy said. “You did all you could.”

  “I might go along with you.”

  “No. Stay with your family. Tom anyway gets all flummoxed if he’s got to keep an eye on more than one.”

  “All right. But ain’t there anything you want me to do?”

  “If I don’t come back call out a sheriff and his dog.”

  “Oh, hell.” The man took off his hat and ran his rough fingers through his hair and regarded the vast country sprawled behind them.

  “I’m kidding,” Val said. “But you might get a good fire going once it gets dark and keep it going. Should be able to see it from a long ways off. Maybe get your missus to sit out there with you. Give her something else to think about.”

  He adjusted the canteens on his belt and called the dog to heel and began to walk away when the man called after him. “Listen, I know you’re thinking what could he catch out of there.” He waved behind him at the murky lake just then the color of calcimine under the featureless sky. The water hissed softly on the graveled shingle. “I just wanted him to have something to do. Anyways, he might of tied into a carp or a goldeneye, something to tug on the line at least.”

  * * *

  After they set out the shepherd was immediately drawn to a streambed entering from the south and the going in that direction was slow: deep troughs and cutbanks and a twisted wrack of weathered plank and post and deadfall from some headland flood of the previous spring. Queer rocks lay atop the dirt as smooth and round as Jurassic eggs, and pinecones tumbled and abraded by the torrent lay all about like spined sea creatures of a past age. Grasshoppers wheeled up before them and rattled off into the weeds and sage.

  They walked on for some time, the dog working back and forth across the wash. Juniper and pine appeared atop the banks, the larger trees displaying weeping blazes where porcupine teeth had been at work. Roots snaked exposed over the parched ground, encircling stones as though to squeeze sustenance from them. Sandstone scarps filigreed with fossil fish and shells projected atop the cutbanks like the pulpits of sailing ships and everywhere startling columns of the ancient stone wind-carved and pocked like sculpture from a fever dream.