The Ploughmen: A Novel (12 page)

“You were twitching there like you had jumper cables hooked to your ass.”

“No shit?”

“Yes you were. You doing okay?”

Millimaki attempted to smooth his uniform shirt. The cruel light pierced his eyes and he pressed his thumbs to them to damp the pain.

“Except that I can’t sleep anymore,” he said. “I get off, my wife’s gone to work, I go home and I can’t sleep. I just got off shift.” He looked at his watch. “Well, two hours ago. I get home and I’m dead-ass tired but I’m wound up tight as a two-dollar watch.”

Moon stood up and surveyed the brilliant day and the silken river with its myriad birds and he looked back to his idling patrol car. His uniform shirt was tailored, the sleeves cuffed up to show his biceps. He removed a small notebook from his breast pocket and began to write in it. “Used to take me about six of them sonsofbitches to fall asleep,” he said. “It was terrible.” He turned the tablet for Millimaki to read, running his finger beneath the printed letters as if instructing a child. “So this here’s the answer. It’s herbal, all natural, no side effects, nothing. It’s goddamn magic.”

He tore loose the sheet and held it through the window with two fingers like a traffic citation. “Yeah,” he said, “I was starting to get a belly on me.” He rubbed his hands over his flat shirtfront. “Knocking out eight hundred sit-ups a day and still getting fat. All that beer.” He had been bending down to talk to Millimaki through the side window. He stood again and put his hands on the roof of Millimaki’s truck. “Course, I was drinking in the bosom of my own home, not down by the river like a high school punk.”

“Well, Patrolman Moon, maybe I will just pick me up some of these hippie pills. Then I can catch up on my sleep in the Daylite Donuts parking lot during duty hours like you.”

Moon backed away from the car. “Please step out of the vehicle, sir. I’m afraid I’m going to have to crush your head.”

“Moon, man, listen to yourself.” Millimaki ran a hand over his eyes and suddenly felt he could sleep there or anywhere for a day and a night and intersect the right world of diurnal creatures the bright morning that followed. “If you’re this way with a fellow officer, I can’t imagine you’re too cool with the citizenry.”

Moon smiled. “Seriously, Val, get you some of those things and go home and get some sleep.” He reached in suddenly and took the beer from between Millimaki’s legs and pitched it into the willows. “You fucking rummy.”

*   *   *

He made the hour’s drive home in a haze. All along the creek the cottonwoods and alder were in a frenzy of new leaf and calves ran and leapt along the banks where their mothers stood feeding, drowsy and hock deep in the vivid turf. He drove with the window down. Meadowlarks and red-winged blackbirds sang on the fence posts at the road edge and from the willows along the stream. Through the window the bright notes he had heard all his life fell garbled and indistinct on Millimaki’s ears like the song of some alien species.

At home there was not the usual note from his wife and there was no dinner made and there was little to indicate she had even been there recently. He sat in his chair in front of the fireplace. There were bone-white ashes stirring on the cold grate. He sat for a long time looking into the white jailhouse hands in his lap.

*   *   *

“He’s not a carpenter, Mother, and he’s not a mechanic and not a whatever they are, road worker to fix the road.”

He shuffled from the bedroom in his bare feet. His hair stood up on his head in a ragged coiffure and his eyeballs felt as if they’d been rolled in sand. Her back was to him and she leaned over the supper table, supporting herself on one arm, the phone pressed to her shoulder. He could see the boyish outline of her narrow back through the tight yellow T-shirt, the bones of her spine, the effect vaguely serpentine, and he fought the urge to run his hands down the length of it.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It is the way it is.” She stood listening. “I’ll have to live with it. Yes, Mother, thank you, that’s very sound advice.”

She held the receiver six inches away from her ear as though it had suddenly become hot.

“No, I’m sorry.” She said it again, weakly, resignedly. “Yes. It’s the way it is.” She listened. “Yes. Love to Daddy, too.”

She set the phone deliberately in its cradle and stood leaning with her fists balled atop the table, her head bowed.

To her back Millimaki said, “Who says I’m not a carpenter?”

She spun quickly. A gold strand of her hair caught up on her angry mouth and she swept it away. “Jesus, Val, don’t do that.” She glanced down at the phone on the table as if it had betrayed her and looked back at him. “I thought you were asleep. You should be.”

“If you need a carpenter I can give you plumb and level till hell won’t have it.” Like a supplicant he stood before her in his ragged pajama pants, his hands upturned, his eyes from the luminous April daytime asquint after the shuttered gloom of their bedroom. He studied her face. Too often lately it had been a geometry of sharp lines and hard shapes and in the brief and infrequent intersecting of their lives she had been immune to his teasing, which in their marriage had been the ice breaker, the mender of rifts, the poultice on the inflamed wound of an argument.

“Is it too much to ask, Val, that a door actually works?”

“No,” he said. “It is not. Most definitely not asking too much.”

“I’ve fought that door since day one. I practically broke my thumb trying to open it today.” She held up her left thumb as she spoke. “And it lets in the dirt and the snow and God knows what else. Bugs. Snakes. Absolutely from day one. I hate it.”

“Okay, Glenda. But not snakes.”

“I detest it.”

He was smiling at her. “It’s an awful thing to hate something as lovely and practical as a door.”

“I’m just not in that kind of mood. I’m just not.” She glared down at his bare feet. “And, God, where are your slippers?”

“I’m all over that door,” he said. “Like white on rice.”

“Just don’t. I’m not kidding, really.”

He spent two hours planing the door edge with his grandfather’s old jack plane until the door swung freely on its medieval hinges. The bright excelsior from the plane lay in ribbons about his feet. His palms were raw. The cabin atop its unmortared foundation stones heaved and shifted like a trawler with each frost and thaw. In a few months the door would come untrued. He had learned to wait it out. October would see it stuck again in its skewed and unplumb jamb.

They ate dinner in near silence, the sound of fork on porcelain overloud in the still room, and then, as was their habit, left the table with its unwashed plates and empty wineglasses to take a drive. In Glenda’s pale yellow Datsun they wove slowly down the hill, negotiating ruts and rocks exposed by the rains of spring, and onto the highway blacktop. Twelve miles on they turned onto gravel that wound south and east toward the old mining town of Hughesville. The sun burned in the mirrors and dust rose roiling bloodred behind them. From the limestone canyon walls, grave ill-formed statues and faces took shape among the shadowed clefts and spires. Glenda stared out the side window. Cow elk with their speckled calves stood off in the sparse lodgepole and reddening willow and sumac along the stream, eyeing them warily, and when Val pointed them out her head did not move and she did not speak.

They parked in the barrow ditch and wove through the trelliswork of brush to the small creek. She took his hand mutely. At the bank they stretched out in the grass, the burbling lullaby of the water in their ears. In a very short time he fell asleep. He awoke from a sumptuous dreamless nap and Glenda was gone. He found her in the car, curled on the backseat like a child. He got in and eased shut the door. She did not wake, or pretended not to, as he drove home through a cool blue light descended upon the canyon. Above, the day diminished in a brilliant unfurling of color, the tottering pines atop the ridges as vivid as candle flames.

The little car rattled and bumped slowly once again up the hill to the unlit cabin. Millimaki stood leaning on the hood of the car for its warmth and his wife lay as before on the rear seat. The dog had come to the wire of his kennel and he whimpered softly.

As Val stood, dusk went to dark. From among the crevasses in the coulee rimrock to the south bats emerged by the hundreds and they swarmed among the constellations burning coldly through the black palisade of the pines. The single yard light had flickered on. He went to the rear door to wake her. She lay with one hand beneath her head and he stood looking at her through the dusty window glass. In the queer light she looked made of wax.

EIGHT

As he’d been instructed, Val after his shift the following week reported to the sheriff’s office where he was ushered into the inner sanctum by the secretary with a brief backhand wave, the woman’s eyes, inches from her monitor’s screen, blank and iridescent as an insect’s. Within, Millimaki stood before the man’s desk with its bedlam of paper and plastic bags with esoteric articles enclosed and he felt a sudden pang of guilt, as though he were about to violate some priestly pact.

The sheriff regarded him over the top of his half-glasses. He said, “Did I send for you?”

“Sort of, sir. You told me last week to come and talk to you. About Gload. You said if I heard anything.”

The man stared at Val critically. “It would seem the remedy I recommended for your malady has failed to work.”

“I’ve been trying it. For some reason drinking beer that early in the day gives me a headache.”

“It’s not early, exactly, when you’re on graveyards. For Christ sake, it’s Miller Time.”

“I can’t get my head to figure that out.”

The sheriff wagged his head sadly and the glasses that seemed so out of place on his face slid to the end of his nose. He pushed them up and leaned his head back to study the younger man through the magnifying lenses, as if that scumbled focus might present a more lucid picture.

“You still partnered up with that old man?” he said.

“I guess so.”

“You must be his long-lost spawn, for Christ sake. I never knew of him to say much more than two words to any uniform and those two were ‘Fuck you.’”

“I can’t explain it.”

“On top of that he’s been talking to Wexler and that really puzzles me. Maybe the old sonofabitch is getting soft. Or soft in the head.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“That he was talking to Wexler or soft in the head?”

“Wexler.”

“He never mentioned it?”

“Well, just that Wexler had been to see him. Not so much that he was really talking to him.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

Val didn’t say anything. The sheriff busied himself with the mess atop his desk.

“So what do you have?”

“He told me about an old woman he killed.”

“The hell he did.” The older man took down the glasses and set them among the papers strewn on his desk. He was suddenly interested. He rifled through the top desk drawer and came up with a small brown pipe, looked into its bowl and put the stem in the corner of his mouth.

“Yes he did.”

“Terrific. Did you see anything on his sheet about it?”

Millimaki held his wrists crossed before him and he held his cap by the brim and stood staring at the county logo on the face of it. “I don’t know if this is what you had in mind when you said to come in, sir.”

“Well, you let me decide that, Deputy.”

“It was over east, in Wibaux, I think.”

“And? That doesn’t make any difference.”

Val looked out the window. “He was fourteen.”

“Fourteen years old.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Christ, that had to have been, what, sixty-some years ago?”

“Sixty-five.”

“Well, that doesn’t do us a lot of good, does it?”

Millimaki stood fingering the bill of his cap. “He said it didn’t bother him. Not for long, anyway.”

“Well, that’s our boy.”

“That he saw after that he wouldn’t have to do real work ever again.”

The sheriff sat back in his chair. “The beginning of a long and colorful career.” He placed his hands together beneath his chin as if in prayer, steepled his index fingers as in the child’s game. He ran his eyes over the thin sallow figure of the young deputy.

“And how is Gail?” he said.

“She’s okay. It’s actually Glenda.”

“For Christ sake, of course it is.”

“Fine. She’s fine.”

The sheriff stared at him. Val looked toward the single window, high and arched and brilliant in the early morning despite the calligraphy of water streaks and splashes of bird shit from the vile and mumbling pigeons roosted in the rain gutters at the roof edge. Because it had once been part of the jail itself, there were bars on the window, and their shadows lay across the floor and laddered the far wall.

“Your mouth says fine but your face says otherwise.”

“She’s having a hard time with me being on nights.”

“Harder than you.”

“Harder than me, yessir. I think so.”

“It’s tough. I know. I did it. We all did it.”

“I know. I’m not asking for anything.”

“I know you’re not. I couldn’t hardly change things, anyway, Val. It’s all low-man-on-the-totem-pole stuff. You know that, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“This might not be the best analogy, but it’s kind of like breaking a horse. It’s tough on everybody at first and then pretty quick all parties involved don’t think anything of it. It’s just how it is.”

“I might choose to not tell her that comparison if it’s all the same to you.”

“My wife if she heard it would leave me singing like Liberace for a week. For some reason women don’t like being compared to livestock.” He removed the cold pipe from his mouth and sat looking at it. “And that might be the extent of my wisdom on the matter.”

“That’s more than some.”

The sheriff smiled. “More than some, yes it is.” He put the pipe in his mouth again and began to pass his hands over the mess of files and paper on his desk as if waiting for one or the other to insinuate its urgency. He said, “Do you feel the need to take some time off? I could arrange that.”