The Ploughmen: A Novel (24 page)

A cloud of dust appeared on the county road and he and the dog watched it approach. A sheriff’s cruiser pulled in beside Millimaki’s rig and a young deputy rolled down his window and said, “Just follow me. It’s down the way a bit.” He backed out and together they drove a half mile east and then north again and pulled through a wire gate and parked beside a small blue car.

The young man came toward Millimaki with his hand outstretched. He was taller than Millimaki and about his age. His hair beneath the Pondera County Sheriff’s Department cap was an outrageous red, approaching orange, and every inch of visible skin was freckled.

“Malmberg,” he said. “They call me Red.”

“That’s crazy,” Millimaki said. “Where’d they come up with that?”

“Yeah. Go figure.”

“What’s with the tape?” Val said. “Must have taken about a half mile of it.” The field was enclosed by yellow crime scene tape strung between cocked haphazard dowels pressed into the soil like a barrier erected by circus clowns and it snapped and fluttered and threatened to kite off on the wind.

“Yeah, no shit. I strung it myself.” Malmberg pointed toward a rank of combines at the field’s edge, new expensive machines with enclosed cabs, header blades with their rows of gleaming spring tines aligned. They seemed animate and rapacious and the sun turned their windshields to diamond.

“Old Farmer Brown wanted to roll in here and start to cutting. This was the only way I could keep him out. Says he’s got something like a bazillion dollars sitting here and it’s somebody’s ass if it don’t get cut more or less right away. I believe mine was the ass he was talking about. Anyways, I ain’t too worried about it.” He swung his arm east to west across the barley field in a papal gesture. “He ain’t going to be too happy regardless.” The grain was thoroughly trod, rows of parallel tracks where sheriffs and volunteers had ranged through and the ground was amber with grain as though it had been sown anew.

“We walked the whole shitteree, up and back. Nothing. Tracks go in and don’t come out. Somebody thought she was picked up on that little bitty road at the end of this thing, but there ain’t any tracks. Not a one. It’s like she just flew away.”

“What about over there?”

“It’s a ditch. You got to be right on top of it to see it. There’s no more than six inches of water in it now.”

“Did you walk it?”

“Well, I didn’t, personally, but it got walked. Like I said, it’s nothing more’n a trickle. Not like you could have drownded in it.”

“This her car?”

“We’ve been all through it.”

They stood there looking. A gust came down off the Front Range and the field came alive, shuddering and undulant like a cat’s back and issuing a long forlorn sigh.

“What do you think?” Millimaki said.

“I think if she’d wanted to disappear she’d had to of caught a bus and somebody or other would of seen her.”

“True enough.”

“If she’d wanted to disappear permanently for good she’d just as soon driven that piece of shit up there.” Malmberg turned and pointed a milky and mottled hand toward the sawblade peaks. “And find a pile of brush the hell and gone. Way on up.”

“That’s what you’d think.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“I guess most anybody with a lick of sense would.”

The deputy stared long and longingly into the west. He gouged a hole in the ground with the toe of his boot, leaned and spat into it. “You know about her, right? Did they tell you?”

“Yeah, they told me,” Val said. “I remember reading about it. But I didn’t know all the fine points.”

“She wasn’t one of these bad kids. Just a kind of average girl. It was a hell of a thing. She’d grown up with every one of them kids.”

“She might turn up yet, right as rain.”

“A hell of a thing.” The deputy went on as if he hadn’t heard. “I got a twelve-year-old boy. Not much younger’n them boys that did that to her. Here after that happened for a week or so I looked at him like he might be some kind of different creature. I couldn’t help it. We didn’t raise him that way but still. He knew something was wrong, too. He finally just came up and got on my lap and started crying. Kids know a lot more than what you give them credit for, don’t they?”

“I don’t know.”

“No kids?”

“No.”

“You’ll see,” he said. “You just wait.”

Malmberg’s radio came to life and he went to his car. Millimaki opened the rear door of his truck and Tom jumped down and began running his nose on the ground. He went around to sniff Malmberg’s knees and the deputy tousled the dog’s ears while he spoke into his mike. Val had retrieved the dog’s lead and stood holding it, surveying the barley field. The wind came down and like a ventriloquist’s trick the field hissed and sighed from every quarter. Malmberg came to stand beside him.

“Sorry, I got to run to town. Got a domestic.” He removed his cap and ran a hand through his tangerine hair. “This sonofabitch goes at his wife prit-near once a week. He’s a first-class scumbag and so I ask myself, Why does she stay with him? He’s tore hunks of hair off her head and then later in the week I see them sitting together in the café holding hands like teenagers. You ever figure that one out you let me know.”

He did not wait for Millimaki to respond. He clapped one of his speckled hands on Val’s shoulder, jumped into the cruiser’s seat and backed onto the county road and was gone. Val stood watching the dust plume recede down the string-straight road until it disappeared beyond a low rise. All about him the barley slewed and rasped in the wind.

Because it’s hard to be alone, Millimaki thought. That’s what I’ve figured out, Red. In this country, it’s just hard to be alone.

He went to the girl’s car and stood looking in the window. He raised his head and looked out over the wide rolling country. Not a house or shed. Not a telephone pole. Finally he opened the door and sat in the driver’s seat. He ran his hands lightly around the steering wheel. From the rearview mirror hung a tiny dream catcher and a plastic rosary. He inhaled the merest hint of perfume. “Penelope Ann Carnahan,” he said. “Your name is a poem.”

Reaching across he swung open the passenger side door. It squalled on a sprung hinge. He called the dog and he came and stuck his head into the car and began to snuffle at the floorboards, the seat. He nuzzled a hooded sweatshirt in the backseat. Millimaki held it up. On its chest, in sporadic spangles, it read
ROCKSTAR
. He laid it on the seat in front of the dog. “That’s her, Tom-boy. That’s our girl.”

Beyond the ground search, the area had been flown over by a helicopter from the Air Force base at Great Falls and a stagnant reservoir had been dragged, exhuming from the murk nothing more sinister than a rotting angus heifer calf thought to have been rustled a month previous. As Malmberg had said, the girl seemed to have been lifted into the sky. It was not the first time he’d heard that or similar words when he’d shown up with the dog as the instrument of last resort, as though searchers in their desperation and despair imbued the victims with the power to rescue themselves. Changelings sprouting the wings of swallows or eagles. Angels. Transmutation by hope. He thought again of the holy card his Slovene grandmother had given him when he was a boy: The Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven. He had kept it in his billfold for years, until the gilt edges were worn and the paper had become as pliable as cloth: angels with great immaculate wings escorting the Virgin toward Elysium on a stairway of feather clouds. Her face was awash with the sunlight of God. But Valentine Millimaki did not bring back angels. No, I did not, he thought. Souls did not aspire on his watch to safety or heaven but came trestled roughly from the dark woods, trapped in the alabaster statuary of rigid flesh.

*   *   *

The girl’s track when they entered the barley was clear though some of the searchers had walked atop it. Tom surged at his lead the length of the field but then stood confused at its northernmost edge where it terminated at the narrow road Malmberg had spoken of. It was no more than parallel ruts and no vehicle had passed on it in months. Millimaki walked for a way in the weeds at its edge. Runic tracks of birds, tracks of fox. The dog plunged at his lead, urgent to return the way they’d come and Val let him go. At the car once again the dog veered toward the weedy strip beside the ditch.

“Hold on for a minute, goddamn it. Let me catch my breath.” He tied the lead to the door handle of the girl’s car and the dog whined and pawed at the dirt. Leaning against the warm quarterpanel he breathed the dusty smell of ripe grain, a scent from his childhood. An image of his father sprang unbidden into his head—a rare happy picture of an unhappy man, passing his hands over the ripened heads as he walked toward the waiting combines.

Millimaki went once again to the first tracks entering the field, knelt and studied them: tiny feet, antic whorls of the treads of her shoes. He got on his knees and took a long look at one of the prints. Then he shuffled ahead on hands and knees and studied another. And another. At last he knelt in the dirt, his hands resting on his thighs. She had entered the barley from the hard ground and then had carefully retraced her steps, one footprint atop another as she backstepped from the grain field. Now the barley tassels bowing under the wind brushed at the flesh of Millimaki’s arms. “Bright girl,” he said. “Bright girl.” But he was not smiling.

Tom had torn up the ground at the limit of his lead and he bayed crazily when he saw Millimaki emerge from the barley. He untied the leather lead and the dog nearly pulled his arm out of the socket. “Okay, then, if you’re so fucking sure.” He unsnapped the leather lead and the dog vanished in the weeds.

A hundred yards along the ditch he came to the dog sitting, his ears pivoting as he registered some minute sounds—the burble of the ditch water, birdcalls, tiny things among the weed bines. Millimaki was about to speak when he saw the plastic straw. Later he would appreciate how very thorough she’d been. The straw approximated as well as possible the color of the barley and the August weed stems growing along the ditch—thistle and hemlock, volunteer wheat. He pulled but it seemed rooted there. He dug away at its base until the girl’s lips emerged from the dirt and he realized with a start that he was kneeling on her chest. He stood up abruptly and backpedaled, nearly tripping over the dog. “Oh, Christ,” he said. “Oh, Christ.” He stood looking down for a long while. He realized the dog was waiting and he went to him and roughly stroked his head. He could hardly speak. He managed, “Good, Tom,” and the dog stepped down the small incline to the ditch and lapped at the trickle of water. Millimaki sat among the dry weeds and he sat for a very long time. The dog came to lie at his feet. Finally with great effort Millimaki rose and began his routine. He did it all mechanically. He studied the ground, bent and snapped his pictures from several angles and he stood beside the grave turning to the four cardinal points and working the shutter—grain fields rolling endlessly to every horizon. Then at last he took a pair of latex gloves from his fanny pack and began to dig the girl out. The shepherd lay with his head on his extended forelegs, following the man’s movements with his eyes.

The girl had cut away the turf in her small approximate shape and it came away in rough squares and rectangles and then she had dug the hole where she would lie. While breathing through the straw she must have covered her face with loose dirt before somehow pulling lengths of the sod over her arms, taking her last breaths through the straw as the drugs moved slowly down the long corridors of her veins. He was amazed at her strength and will to leave no trace upon the earth. It must have taken her hours. Beside her in the hole were the kitchen knife and the pill bottle and she lay in it rigid and symmetrical as if composed by the hands of reverent priests. He lifted her hands each in turn, examining the torn and broken nails and turned them with difficulty to look at her palms where blisters had formed and ruptured and bled like stigmata. Millimaki brushed as much of the soil from her face as he could and with his belt knife sawed away the straw from her clenched teeth. In the end he leaned over as if he might kiss those cold lips and blew the sand from her eyelids, from the corners of her mouth.

*   *   *

While he waited for the coroner to make the twenty-mile trip from town, he cut away some of the crime scene tape Malmberg had taken such pains to erect and planted some of the dowels in the dirt and strung the yellow tape, defining the plot the girl had chosen for herself from the enormity of the unbearable world. She’d wanted nothing but to disappear and Millimaki and his dog had taken that from her. Soon again she would be antiseptically probed on the coroner’s tray when all she had wanted in the world was to not be touched again. He would not take her picture. When he’d lifted off the turf and stood looking at her so small and pale in her grave he realized what he’d taken, what he could not put back. If the coroner wanted those pictures he could take the sonsofbitches himself.

He sat at the edge of the ditch beside her watching the red sun fall slowly behind the western rim. A meadowlark sang. Pheasant and Hungarian partridge scuttled through the field, gorging on fallen grain. He could see them come gliding in in twos and threes and flare their wings against the paling sky. He stared at the tiny jackstraw figure at his feet. There had been no angel to bear her up. In the end only numbing chemical night falling on her eyes to damp the vision of the boys in the pickup bed with their bottles and shovel handles, in the plunder of her virginity not even the warmth of a human touch.

The birds picked among the furrows like barn fowl and the barley sawed hissing above them with the wind like a breath. It was a wonderful evening. He gazed down at Penelope Carnahan. He thought about taking her hand.

*   *   *

Together they went up the game trail and John Gload stopped periodically to turn and take in the country as if considering their solitude in the immensity, not assuring himself of it. Wexler beside him gloomily considered the new scuffs on his boots. He ran his finger along the looping lines of the topographic map, his tongue between his lips. The map popped and fluttered in the wind and they went on. They crossed a small divide, descended into a coulee, and presently the river disappeared as did Wexler’s car beside it and there was no sign whatever of the world of men on the dusty path fresh tracks of mule deer and older sign baked into the gumbo-clay like the spoor of cloven-footed prehistoric kin. In that desolate hole the wind that had raised chop on the river was a whisper and overhead a hawk drifted among the thin clouds like a harbinger, keening high and shrill.