The Ploughmen: A Novel (16 page)

“This is definitely cocked and I’m nervous and I’m breathing real hard,” the patrolman said. “And there ain’t anybody around for a long long ways to tell how it was you come to have your face splattered on the ground. So don’t twitch a eyelash while I put these on you. Put your hands back.”

“No, sir,” Gload said. “I ain’t going to die on account of a speeding ticket.”

“Stand up now.”

He stood. He turned to face the man then and the sound of the Beechcraft suddenly came to him and above his breathing and the hard breathing of the patrolman he began to hear the whirr of grasshoppers among the amber stems and from the right-of-way fence posts the warble of meadowlarks proclaiming the glory of that day.

“Okay, goddamn it, where’s them fingers at?”

“I’d show you but they’re cuffed up.”

“The Chinaman fingers, asshole.”

“Chinaman fingers?”

The plastic bag he’d thrown aside hung atop a clump of wheat stalks and wavered there. The patrolman glanced at it briefly and Gload thought, Blow, wind. He jangled his wrist cuffs and the man looked back to him and the bag filled with air and went skeltering over the grain field like a child’s balloon and disappeared.

“Here. Stand out of the way.” Gload took two sideways steps in the wheat. “Stand there.” The patrolman, a man of perhaps forty-five, began to search about in the wheat, one hand with his service revolver held straight out and his eyes sweeping the ground under their feet. From a distance he might have seemed to be performing some strange ritual dance with the stoic and smiling John Gload for a partner.

“Are they in the car?” he said. “You wouldn’t have left them in the car, would you?”

“Officer, you’re making my head hurt.”

“Shit.”

They made their way back through the grain field and at the car the lawman spread Gload on the hot car hood. He sifted through glove compartment papers and with the barrel of his pistol pushed aside crumpled receipts and week-old newspapers lying on the floorboards and atop the Oldsmobile’s commodious seats. He took the keys from the ignition and opened the trunk, rummaging for a long while among suitcases and tire chains and an enormous tackle box full of rusted treble snagging hooks and comical oversized lures on wire leaders, raising his head occasionally to scowl at the implacable John Gload. Fifteen minutes later, red-faced and profusely sweating, he leaned against the car’s rear quarter panel.

“Goddamn you, Gload,” he said, “you didn’t eat the sonsofbitches, did you?”

The old man paused in his telling, smiling, and held up his forgotten cigarette to display its long ash and he sat for a moment with his head to one side listening to the twilight birdnotes from above among the tender leaves.

“Sheriff was so pissed off he sent ten men out there to search that field, up and back, on their goddamn hands and knees and one with a metal detector, I heard. There was a track in the wheat there looked like somebody had drove a truck through by the time me and that highway patrolman got through, so no mistake where we’d been at. Never found nothing.” He smiled at Val and shook his head. “That just about damn near killed them. They had to cut me loose.”

He sat back then and waited, counting to himself one two three four.

“So what happened to the fingers?” Val said.

Gload smiled. “What do you think?”

“Coyotes? Hell, I don’t know. Birds?”

“Val, Val, Val.” The old man sighed, as if the task of imparting his knowledge were too cumbrous a burden. “It’s just like I said. Any line of work you care to name you got what you call degrees of good. Might be the doctor who’s the best doctor in the world at what he does but he cheats on his missus. Or say a priest who will sit all night holding the hand of some poor sonofabitch rotten with the cancer and crying for Jesus and this same man of the cloth pounds down a fifth of Seagram’s before lunch. And there are cops who steal, Val. Make no mistake about that.”

“The highway patrolman?”

“Give the man a cigar.”

“I would doubt that,” Val said. “I think that’s real unlikely.”

Gload went on as if he hadn’t heard, his voice distant and quiet with wonderment. “Fucker came within two inches of shooting the top of my head off, then saves my ass out of greed. But can you blame him? Makes probably a thousand a month chasing drunks and scraping people out of burnt cars. He gets a chance to give his girlfriend something nice for once and have a little walking-around money.” Gload laughed his croaking laugh. “And nobody out nothing except me and that Chinaman’s cat. Bet he puked his guts up, though, getting them rings off. Hell, Val, he earned it right there.”

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.