The Ploughmen: A Novel (23 page)

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 farm. 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 him. 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.”

“You’re taking me out?”

“That’s right. And on my own time.”

“And you got maps?”

“I got maps and I want to see some fucking Xs and Os on the sonsofbitches.”

“What about Millimaki? I more or less promised him I’d go on out there with him.”

“Number one, he ain’t here. Two, like I said before, John, I’m the ranking officer. Deputy Shitkicker made you promises he couldn’t keep.”

“So you’re taking me out,” Gload said.

“One o’clock. Have your lunch and we’ll take a nice drive in the country and find some of your vics and put some poor people’s minds to rest for once and for all.”

“Val or no Val, I could sure use a little stretch of the legs.” He pointed toward the streaked street level windows, golden with August light. “Get out in some natural sunshine.”

“This ain’t a picnic, John. And by the way, another snipe hunt and things might get unpleasant for you around here. Deputy Dobek has a kind of hard-on about you already. It’s my fucking day off. I expect to come back with something.”

“I’m just plumb grateful, Weldon,” John Gload said. “I know once I get out there again it’ll all come back to me.”

When Wexler had gone, John Gload sat for a moment, his arm slung over the top slat of his chair. He rose and made a brief circuit of the cell, as it could only be brief, picking up in turn his accumulated wealth: a comb, a bar of soap, balled socks on a shelf. Pencil sharpener in the shape of a blue toad. He put his toothbrush in his shirt pocket, stood thinking, put it back on the shelf. Empty tablets. Magazines. Among them a John Deere dealership catalogue given him by Valentine Millimaki, which he transferred to the top of the pile. He smoothed the blanket atop his bed. Finally he sat once again. He tore loose several pages from the legal pad covered in his childish hand with smeared additions and subtractions and theoretical fields apportioned by theoretical acres, in the margins his doodlings of fabulous creatures and esoteric runes which occupied his hands while he considered perhaps the rich other-life of gentleman farmer, partnered with a father long ago frozen in the bull pines of Fergus County. He folded these neatly and buttoned them in his breast pocket and settled back to await his lunch.

SEVENTEEN

In the far west beyond the Teton Breaks, the Front Range marked the seeming edge of the world. Late August and the high cirques harbored yet crescents and stripes of snow, and in the summer haze they appeared to have been daubed on the purple-blue backcloth with a palette knife. Millimaki had arrived at the field and stood outside his sheriff’s department Blazer looking out over the incalculable expanse of grain fields, much of it already cut to stubble, stretching away in all directions. They broke against the mountains like a blond sea. His father’s rocky acreage had never looked like this. John Gload would have been agog.

Some small birds swarmed soundlessly in the distance. The dog sat erect in the backseat of the truck. Millimaki thought about the girl. And he remembered that ten years earlier, before he’d come on the force, a schoolteacher had been abducted and raped and left impaled on a duckfoot plow twelve miles to the east of where he stood. He wondered what in this beautiful country could inspire such evil. As if the wind that swept down from those bleak and frozen crags carried on it, like a microbe to infest the blood, the appetite of wolf and bear.