The Ploughmen: A Novel Page 18

  “It was a difference of opinion.”

  “Yes, no shit.” He called, “Raylene.” Shortly the secretary’s head appeared in the door. “Raylene, would you please do me the favor of going down to the dispensary and getting me some aspirin.”

  “There’s some right there in front of you, in the drawer.”

  “I’ve been looking for it for fifteen minutes.”

  “Oh, all right. For goodness’ sake, if your head wasn’t attached.”

  He listened to her heels clack-clacking down the marble hallway.

  “She is a wonderful woman but cursed with a lively curiosity and a certain lack of discretion in matters concerning interdepartmental conflict. If you understand. I don’t have a headache, not counting, metaphorically, you and Dobek.”

  “I understand.”

  “And did you in fact blindside Officer Dobek in the locker room as he came around the corner?”

  Millimaki stared at him.

  “I didn’t think so. And I might add that it speaks well for you that no one has come forward to corroborate his dim recollection of events.”

  “There wasn’t anybody around at the time.”

  “That doesn’t sometimes make a bit of difference.”

  “It was just me and him there.”

  “I imagine before the day is out Raylene will be able to tell me exactly what happened, but if you’d like to speed the process.”

  “It was a difference—”

  “Of fucking opinion. Yes, I got that the first time.”

  “He said something about my wife.”

  The sheriff stood up then, raked a hand through his newly barbered hair, and called out, “Raylene.” There was no answer. He said, “You know that I know what kind of a cop Dobek is, Val, do you not? What kind of man?”

  “I have no way of knowing.”

  “Well, goddamn it, yes you do. You see these two round things on the front of my face?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Voyle is just a guy who’s been around too long and somewhere or other took the other course.” He examined his nails. “He is a burdensome man.”

  Millimaki said, “It’s not what started it but he seemed to object to me talking to Gload.”

  “Did you tell him I asked you to?”

  “No, sir. I guess I figured that was between you and me.”

  “I’ll talk to Voyle about that. In the meantime you’re taking two days off. My suggestion, from the look of you, would be to try and sleep most of that time.” He stood with his hands on the desktop, his pale eyes looking beyond Val’s head to the door, and called out once again to his secretary. When he got no response he said, “Your behavior is not acceptable, Deputy Millimaki, and will not be tolerated. That being said, I would have done the same thing to that big prick and if a word of that last sentence leaves this room other than in your thick head you will be gone forever and I would not recommend you for a crossing guard.” Into the ensuing quiet came the rapid clacking of Raylene’s heels down the corridor and the sheriff said, “And now I’m going to on account of you have to take two aspirins I don’t need because she’ll sure as hell sit here and watch me. So I have you to blame also for the subsequent heartburn.” He sat abruptly into his chair. “You’ll not be seen here until your shift Thursday night.” By way of augmenting his performance, as Raylene came into the room he said gruffly, “First and last warning, Deputy Millimaki. Now get your ass out of here.”

  * * *

  That night he sat at his table once again and the fire of old lodgepole he had set in the fireplace veered and swayed with the wind that came down the old river rock chimney. The flames rose up suddenly, flaring high into the pipe as though like a sprite or comet they would escape out into the night and leave a cold jumble of blackened logs on the grate. The dog raised his head from his extended paws and stared at the fire. He looked at Millimaki and with a sigh lay back again with his square snout atop his forelegs and the fire moaned up the flue. In the brief silences lulls in the wind afforded Millimaki could hear coyotes in the hills calling across the dark.

  He slept on the couch opposite the fire, wrapped in a quilt his sister had given them for a wedding present and through his sleep low shapes prowled, only their slavering mouths visible, phosphorescent as seafoam, snuffling at the cupboard doors and running their rough tongues along the cutting board where he’d earlier trimmed a piece of meat, and in the dream the shapeless predators clawing at the walls and floorboards as if seeking something and not finding it turned their glowing muzzles toward him.

  When he awoke the front door stood rocking open on its antique hinges, the trapezoid of milky light it admitted falling across the kitchen floor and illuminating a shirring flotsam of brittle box elder leaves. With his heart throbbing wildly against the planks of his ribs he latched the door and shot home the old-fashioned slidebolt and in his bare feet went about the house holding a pair of fire tongs like a baseball bat, throwing light switches and moving into the three small side rooms, looking behind doors and inside closets. He suddenly felt foolish, standing in his own bedroom with sooty hands around the tongs. His pistol hung in its belt from a chairback in the kitchen. “Tongs,” he said aloud. “You’re a dangerous man.” He went to the outer room and added a split of pine to the coals, stirring them alive with the fire tongs, and curled once more in the goose down as the breathing embers provoked the dog’s smoldering eyes from the dark.

  Hours later his eyes opened to window light golden as grain dust and Tom sat staring into his face as though willing him awake for his breakfast.

  SIXTEEN

  The elms in full leaf shuddered above him and through the verdure he could make out an occasional star, a shard of moon. From their secret fissures in the courthouse dome, bats came afield, darting even beneath the trees for the legions of big moths so abundant there that night they blundered against Millimaki’s face like the brush of an eyelash.

  For his lunch he had an apple and a hard roll he had found in the bread drawer at home, having no idea of its age other than it was somewhere short of old enough to grow mold. He had a four-inch round of hard salami and on the bench under the elms he alternated bites of meat and bread and for dessert ate the apple, cold and hard, while stretched out on the bench like a vagrant, one hand behind his head and his eyes on the stars that sought him out beneath the green cupola.

  When he used the bathroom on his return to the jail, the haggard face in the mirror above the sink wore on its forehead a smudge of moth soot like the ashes left from a priest’s thumb long years ago.

  * * *

  When Millimaki returned to escort duty after his involuntary time off, the old killer had grown more fond and familiar, taking the deputy’s hand in his between the bars and holding it there a long while. He seemed troubled by Millimaki’s silences and stared at him with basset hound eyes. Wexler in Millimaki’s absence had been Gload’s escort and companion but the old man spoke little of him. “My pal Weldon,” he would say. “My old buddy Weldon.” Despite frequent inquiries Millimaki divulged little more than that his wife at the end of her day stayed with a girlfriend in town. It might be true, he thought. It might be true.

  Gload, an inveterate reader of newspapers, had noted that county extension agents statewide were predicting record harvests and absurd per-bushel prices. Millimaki sat with a letter from his sister in his lap and Gload spoke of machinery and the cost of diesel fuel, in the slant of surgical light from the overhead fluorescents figuring and refiguring on his yellow legal pad the amount of money he and his father might have realized from harvesting the field of his dreams, imagining that sere and rocky plot an animated gilded drapery of ripe wheat. He seemed very much taken with the notion.

  “Can that be right,” he said incredulously, “five dollars a bushel?”

  Millimaki glanced up briefly. “I guess it is, if that’s what the paper says.”

  “You’re in the wrong business, Valentine. You ought to of stayed on the far
m. You’d have chains on your neck and a Coupe de Ville under your ass.”

  “I don’t think it would look too good on me,” Millimaki said distantly.

  Gload returned to his calculations, his huge disembodied hands like cumbersome string puppets moving across the yellow page. It was near three in the morning and Millimaki sat with his legs crossed reading his sister’s letter and eating a sandwich made of cheese and bread which he balanced on his knee. News of her daughter, her husband, news of a world that seemed of another universe. The world for these men was reduced to floor, ceiling, walls, and bars, and his own differed little—an unfixed cubicle of solitude that, like a carapace, went with him everywhere and was impervious to the warming sun or the wind in the trees or even the unconditional affections of a sister who seemed not to care he did not write in return and send his love, which she deserved.

  He ate. The dry bread and questionable cheese turned to a clot of clay in his mouth. He read the letter to the end and considered the PS which again conveyed his sister’s desire to solve the mystery of their mother. Of their abandonment. “PS,” she wrote. “Do you think Daddy had someone else?” But no. He’d barely had enough affection for the three of them and Millimaki could not imagine the old man mustering the energy to lavish embraces and scalding forbidden kisses on some other, the flame he carried in his tight paunch barely sufficient to propel him through the days and seasons and years of numbing labor. Little but stone remained of him at the end of the day. The extent of his tenderness in all the years was an occasional squeeze of the shoulder or a tousle of the hair. He had seen his parents kiss only once.

  From the shadowed recess of John Gload’s cell the old man’s voice came softly: “I have got one letter in my whole life,” nearly a whisper, as if the presence of a man there reading a letter merely stirred a memory which he may have shared with the darkness, may not even have spoken aloud. “It was from the maid in the house where I spent some years as a kid. I can remember the whole thing, but only because it was short. The nigger gal’s name was Vera Blue. She said, ‘Dear John-Jee, Miss Goldie dead from a stomach sickness down here in Thermopolis. She asked about you at the end. I thought you would want to know she was dead. From a stomach cancer. Your friend, Vera Blue.’ That’s it, word for word.” Gload made his chuckling noise. “Ain’t that a kick? If I could get rid of old worthless shit like that out of my head I’d have room for more important stuff.”

  Millimaki said, “I’m sorry. What?” He stared blankly at the writing on the page and the old man’s voice, so soft and distant, had barely registered. He’d only half heard. “What stuff?”

  “Hell, kid, I don’t know. Algebra maybe, or the business with triangles and shapes and all. That always interested me. What’s that, geometry?”

  “I believe it is.”

  “Those old Greeks or whatever they were and their geometry. Or Romans. And how about this while we’re at it. Been stuck in my head for, hell, fifty, sixty years. I read it of all places off the back of a little fancy pillow: Ex nihilo nihil fit. Probably didn’t say it right but I goddamn remember how it was spelled.” Which he did, letter by letter for Millimaki’s benefit, in the end rapping the smooth dome of his skull with his knuckles. “Now how did that stay in there? Don’t even know what lingo that is.”

  “It’s Latin,” Millimaki said, “but I don’t know what it means exactly.”

  “By God, you are a college boy.”

  “More because I was an altar boy.”

  “Sweet Jesus, an altar boy.” Gload made the blowing noise that replicated a laugh. “I’m partnered up with a goddamn altar boy.”

  Val sat back, folded the letter carefully and returned it to its envelope. He sat tapping it on the heel of his boot. He picked up the sandwich and looked at what remained for a moment and threw it into the paper bag. From the tenebrous cages issued the snores and rustlings of his charges which in the previous long months had become as familiar to him as wind in the box elders around his home. After several minutes, from the near darkness, he heard John Gload say, “I can take it, Valentine. Nobody needs to be out there defending my honor.”

  Millimaki stared into the ink of the old man’s cell. He could, as before, only see Gload’s hands, now folded like a schoolboy’s atop his writing desk.

  “You’ve lost me,” he said.

  “I’ve dealt with cops would make him look like a goddamn fairy princess. He ain’t nothing.”

  Millimaki thought the old man may have slipped off into his secret netherworld yet again, as he had after Sidney White had been brought in, so he merely sat and said nothing.

  “You hear me, Val? Dobek’s nothing but shit in a shirt. Don’t be getting yourself strung out on account of me.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Heard about your little dust-up. And I do appreciate it, don’t get me wrong.”

  “Somebody around here ought to have his lips riveted. And whatever you think, you think wrong. That had not one goddamn thing to do with you.”

  “All right, Deptee.”

  “Nothing to do with you and furthermore none of your goddamn business, either.”

  In his cage Gload was smiling, his brutal illuminated hands piously folded. “Yessir,” he said.

  * * *

  Millimaki’s sleeplessness worsened. No combination of the sheriff’s beer elixir or Moon’s organic pills provided relief. He shifted fitfully on the recliner or the couch beneath strangling sheets. He tried sleeping on an air mattress set in front of the fireplace and he tried the same arrangement on the open porch and was beset by mosquitoes. The one place he would not sleep or attempt to sleep was the bed he had shared with Glenda, where the most invidious ghost of all those that populated his hours, awake and asleep, resided.

  * * *

  In a snatch of sleep in his porch chair he dreamt his wife approaching in a strange bridal bedizenment of soiled bandages, a rope of intravenous tubes accoutering her neck. She walked up the lane in her gown of rags but seemed to come no nearer as though her small feet could find no purchase but her smile was as luminous as the sun. And so by the time he made his way from the porch chair to the jangling phone his heart hammered in his chest. It was not undone. Such portent in dream was not the stuff of mere wishing because what power do we have to shape our dreams? He could reason. He could even plead. Millimaki’s hand above the phone trembled.

  But it was not his wife and perhaps it was not her either in the dream but some other luminous creature meant to torment him with her apocryphal smile. He’d been home for less than three hours and had slept little of that time and so when he set out to search for the girl unaccountably lost among the blank tableland grain fields of Pondera County he was in sorry plight—burning eyes, the taste of ashes in his mouth. His heart chugged in his chest dull and distant and his veins seemed to pump lead to his sodden limbs. But awake, at least, he was not at the mercy of his dreams, a wilderness of guile where he wandered lost and powerless.

  “You don’t have to go,” the sheriff said. “I could call over to Silver Bow and have them send someone.”

  Val looked down at his feet in the worn leather moccasins. He looked out the window at the cottonwoods far down along the creek, and the water glimpsed among the trunks and quavering leaves ran sleek and aluminum like the backs of the cutthroat in their secret holes. Another day, what seemed long ago, he and his wife might have gone there together.

  “That’s all right, Sheriff. Tom could use the work.”

  “You sure about this? I know you haven’t had time for much sleep.”

  The skewed apparitional Glenda still lingered in his head. “Sleep,” he said wistfully. “No, sir. I just figured out here recently it’s overrated. I just need to get dressed and load my gear.”

  * * *

  Wexler let himself in through the sally gate and went along the corridor with a martial air, looking neither left nor right and ignoring the sounds from behind the bars that followed h
im. His name sung in falsetto. Kissing noises. Moans of mock ecstasy. There would be time enough, he thought. And Dobek since his humiliation in the locker room would require little urging to exercise his rage on these animals in the blind hours of the night. In and out, a visitation as silent as a priest. At that hour bruises and broken teeth became mere figments sprung from the delirium of caged men. They may slip and fall. And who knew but that they might inflict such pain upon themselves?

  Thus comforted he stood before John Gload’s cell door. The old man looked up. The pencil he held was little more than three inches long, worn from his fevered doodling and geoponic tabulations and he held it up.

  “I could use a new pencil, Weldon.”

  “I’ll see about it.”

  “And where’s our friend Deputy Millimaki?”

  Wexler snorted. “Off with Rin Tin Tin on one of his wild-goose chases.”

  “Seems like he just got off shift. Didn’t leave him much time at home.”

  “Ain’t nobody there but that shepherd dog anyways.”

  “His missus?”

  “Gone. Run off.”

  “My, my,” Gload said. He wagged his great head sadly. “That’s got to be tough on a young guy.”

  “I wouldn’t spend any time feeling sorry for him. Women don’t stray unless you’re not getting the job done.”

  “So she’s taken up with somebody?”

  “That’s the word. She’s a good-looking little gal. She needs to be getting it somewheres.” Wexler examined the backs of his hands. “I might take a run at her myself.” He favored the old man with a vulpine leer. Gload forced a smile. He realized he was blunting the stub of pencil, wearing a deep black hole in his tablet.

  Wexler took up Millimaki’s chair and swung it around as if he might sit in it, then reconsidered. He affected a businesslike tone. “John, I’m taking you out today. I got your topo maps for north of the river and I want to see something come of ’em. No more dicking around.”