The Ploughmen: A Novel by Kim Zupan Page A

wore an elaborate betasseled shawl held in place over her capacious bust with a pin of pewter or silver in the shape of the state of Montana and she held the telephone receiver pressed against her shoulder with her chin. When she saw Millimaki she said, “What’s he caterwauling about in there?”
    “It’s nothing. He couldn’t find something but then he did.”
    The woman squinted at him, her head cocked oddly, still clenching the phone to her shoulder. “Them goddamn glasses, am I right?” she said. “If he wasn’t so vain and would just get a chain for those things.” Her manner was proprietary and kind for all she meant to appear the picture of stern subaltern righteousness. She spoke curtly to someone on the phone. When Millimaki looked back from the door he saw she was smiling.
    *   *   *
    He had spent one normal evening with his wife, though he found himself dozing off during supper and during conversation, and then in their bed later, even as his wife breathed beside him, he could not sleep. Nor the next day. Knowing the dark confinement awaited him he pottered around the empty cabin in his slippers like a shut-in, the early spring sunlight an admonition or taunt. By the time he resumed his shift at the jail, except for those brief snatches in chairs he had barely slept for thirty-six hours. His wife when she left had not bothered to kiss him good-bye.
    *   *   *
    Gload said, “Good to see you, Deptee. Where you been hiding?”
    “I got called out on a lost hiker.”
    “Have any luck?”
    “I found him, if that’s what you mean.”
    “Found him cold.”
    “Yes.”
    “Found another one cold and now you’re back on shit duty nursemaiding the old man.”
    It had become their routine. Gload pulled his chair to the bars and arranged his smoking gear beside him on the floor and on his knee balanced the tin bean can, and the young deputy sat his chair under the bank of lights, their faces long waxen caricatures under the purpled sheen.
    Gload said, “All manner of excitement while you were out. Brother Wexler hauled in some dangerous criminals, three kids he caught with a twelve-pack of beer. He put ’em in a cell next to that short-eyes asshole and left ’em. Forgot to call their parents for three hours.”
    “They were minors in possession,” Millimaki said.
    Gload smoked within his shadows and continued as if he hadn’t heard. “Come and sat here and bragged about it to me.” Val could hear the old man’s breath quicken. “I could hear that fucking pervert Shoals whispering and one of them boys for a long time crying down there.”
    “He’s a letter-of-the-law man. Those boys were in violation of the MIP laws.”
    “You’d of cut them loose, wouldn’t you of?”
    “They had violated the law.”
    Gload hissed suddenly, “Fuck that. You wouldn’t of done it. You’d of taken their beer and followed them home and cut them loose, goddamn it.”
    Millimaki sat. John Gload was breathing heavily.
    “Wexler’s the worst kind of asshole. I would bet any money you care to name he was a little picked-on turd his whole life and now he’s got just a little bit of whack and he’s making everybody pay for it. I seen that kind pretty near my whole life. Thousand bucks says he was a turd all his growing up and now he’s getting his paybacks.” The killer’s hand appeared in the light, ghost-white, pointing down toward the now empty cell where a third-offense child molester had recently slept. “Doing shit like that.”
    Millimaki knew Wexler was capable of such things and he despised him for it and suddenly he hated all of it, the incremental passing of the hours, the eternal darkness he seemed to reside in, the smell, the pettiness and small cruelties that populated his life. The unnamable tension that was present on the rare occasions these days when he saw his wife, who seemed to feel he had chosen this imprisonment as a way of not seeing her and not dealing with the issues of