The Ploughmen: A Novel (22 page)

“We’re having a private conversation.”

“Not all that private, Deputy, it turns out, because I could hear it over yonder.”

“This is private.”

“Maybe this ain’t the place for this sort of business.”

Millimaki ignored him. Glenda said, “We’re just leaving.”

“We’re not just leaving.”

“Deputy,” the man said. “Conductation of this business to be done elsewhere.”

Through the sudden diminishment of the world the man had become a vague and watery shape uttering words from far away. Millimaki glanced briefly to his left. “Fuck off. That’s not even a word.”

“Val, stop it.”

“Fuck your conductation.” He brought his hands up to the tabletop, his fists clenched. His ears rang strangely, as if he’d been clubbed.

“And it’s a doctor,” he said. “Couldn’t it have been at least a fucking janitor?”

“It doesn’t matter who it is.”

“And he gave you that chain, is that not correct? That fish.” He’d meant to point but as if they did not belong to him his hands rose toward her pale neck in a clutching gesture.

Her hand went reflexively to her throat. “Please please stop.”

“A fucking doctor,” he repeated. “All this mystery about doctors, all this, whatever, glorification.” His voice was rising. People at the nearby tables had begun to stare. “All the fucking mystery. Cutting and sawing and rooting around. Christ, they’re high-priced carpenters. They’re nothing.”

The guard said, “Deputy, I’m asking please.”

Glenda buried her face in her hands, not crying, not ashamed, Val noted, but merely embarrassed.

Through her fingers she said wearily, “Oh, Val.”

“I would cut every goddamn one of them from crotch to eyeball, I swear to Christ.”

She took down her hands. Her perfect face was hard and smooth as topaz. In a harsh whisper she said, “My God, Val. You’re scaring people. You’re wearing a gun. That scares people.”

He leaned closer to her, the silver neck charm inches from his face. “Okay,” he whispered. “Exactly. And how about if I take this gun and shove it up your doctor’s ass? I could do that. I could do that just for a smile.”

“That’s enough, Val. This is a public place.”

The security guard had been staring at Glenda’s throat or perhaps trying to see down the front of her uniform. His left hand hovered near the mace canister at his belt. “Like the young lady says, pardner,” he said. “Not here, not at this time.”

“Yes,” Millimaki said. “A public place. And it just now occurred to me why you decided to tell me all this here, because of your misguided idea that I would not do anything to embarrass you and this is the part where you’re oh so very fucking wrong.” He wiped a sleeve across his eyes and stood up. From the foggy periphery of his vision he noted the shape of the guard moving toward him. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am a Copper County sheriff’s deputy officer can I have your attention I am a law enforcement officer and my wife has just informed me she is
seeing someone
and please remain calm. I assure all present that should he be here I will not at this time discharge my firearm into the anal region of the medical professional who is fucking my wife.”

*   *   *

Two days later he sat lacing his boots on a long varnished bench in the locker room at the end of his shift, through the diamond mesh of the high windows a luminous light the color of wheat. He did not look up at the sound of boot heels coming down the row of lockers.

John Gload that night had been more reticent than usual and sat smoking quietly in his cell in the dark. The night wore on. Even the craziest of the men in their cages were subdued, as though the old man had cast a spell on them that he might have peace for his night’s plowing and eventual sleep. Millimaki had himself barely slept since his seizure of grief and rage at the hospital and his shift beneath the tube lights had seemed without end.

Now Voyle Dobek stood over him. “I seen you in the park talking to Gload,” he said. Against the bright backdrop of the morning’s light, when Millimaki looked up, Dobek’s figure was in shadow, his breath that close a nauseating admixture of coffee and Skoal. Millimaki’s stomach lurched. The act of lacing his boots in his state of exhaustion seemed impossible work. He stared stupidly at hands suddenly as inept as a toddler’s. Beside his scuffed boot toes Dobek’s spit-shined Wellingtons were dazzling.

“How can you sit and talk to a piece of shit like that?” Dobek said.

“Which exactly piece of shit would we be talking about, Voyle? I thought they were all pieces of shit to you.”

“Your old psycho.” He effected a nasal sound of disgust. “The way you sit out there.”

“You pretty much nailed it, Voyle. Two guys, a bench, the exchange of words. That’s how it’s done.”

“No, that ain’t the way you do it, asshole. Not out there.”

“Out where?”

“Out in the public. Where the civilians can see you.”

“Haven’t noticed anybody watching.”

“You’d be surprised. The fuckers see everything.”

“I don’t know what there is to see, Voyle. Two guys sitting on a bench.”

“There’s a right fucking way and a wrong fucking way is what I’m telling you and you don’t sit out there with a psycho piece of shit for the citizens to see. If
you
don’t give a shit.” He waved a hand vaguely about the vacant room. “It looks bad on us.”

“I’m very sorry, Officer Dobek,” Millimaki said. “To make you look bad would just about ruin my whole entire day.”

“I had you pegged as a smart-ass from the minute you come on. I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. But then I don’t know.” He straightened his back, looked around the room as if to address an audience. “Heard about your little performance up at the hospital. I guess if my wife was fucking some doctor, it might make me out to be a smart-ass too.”

Because he was sitting down and had to come up off the bench as he swung, the uppercut caught Dobek squarely in the groin and Millimaki felt the soft give of the man’s balls. His fist seemed to disappear and he had just enough time to pull back before the big man fell, clattering to the floor like a bagful of loose change as his billy, keys, cuffs and gun butt hit the tile. When from the other side of the lockers men came running, Val was astride the man’s back with his nightstick under Dobek’s chin and may well have choked him to death as he remembered nothing. He had heard the word “wife” come from Dobek’s mouth, later remembered just that, as if like a cartoon voice balloon it hung in the air, or like a plume of winter breath, and after that there was nothing—a void washed in red.

As if drunk he arrived home with no memory either of the drive and he sat in his recliner staring out at the scarcely moving portraiture of the brilliant day—clouds, quavering branches heavy with leaf, a nervous sparrow on the windowsill. He became aware of a terrible odor and got up and walked about the room and sniffed at the dog, asleep on his bed. “You didn’t puke somewhere, Tom, did you, bud?” He walked into the empty bedroom and found the smell there too and realized it was him, on him. He shucked his pants and saw the stain on his knees then, vomit he must have knelt in while riding Voyle Dobek like some giant tortoise in a crimson sea of oblivion.

*   *   *

Even as Millimaki closed the office door, the sheriff said, “I don’t know what it is but we’ve got to get at this problem and solve it right fucking now.”

“Yes, sir.”

“My ass, ‘Yes, sir.’ Spit it out, Val. I cannot have my officers killing each other in the locker room.”

“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.