Border Songs

by Jim Lynch

  Brandon stranded her with static as the door clicked shut behind Monty. She stared at her blushing feet, her toes as pink as baby mice. Why was Brandon telling her all this?

  “Madeline?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Called your father. Got no answer. So maybe he’s out. But the lights are on. Called again. I think they crossed down the street from him. Why would anyone try to cross in the snow—I mean, leaving tracks and all?”

  Madeline glanced out the steamed window toward her father’s illuminated house. “Maybe,” she heard herself say, “that’s what they thought you’d think.” She rubbed her foot with a towel, recalculating how much she’d drunk and ordering herself to focus.

  “Know something?” Brandon said. “I think the most interesting people I’ll meet these days will be criminals—or people about to become criminals.”

  The mini-fridge hummed a higher note. She had no idea what to say. Where was he headed? Did he know something?

  “Ahhh,” Brandon said. “Well, I hate to—”

  Her cell beeped twice, then the battery died. Shit! What was he going to say? What did he hate? And why’d he really call?

  She ran some water and frantically rinsed, soaped and toweled each foot. Should she ring Fisher on her dad’s phone and tell him the BP called, or was it just Brandon being Brandon? This kept happening nowadays. She’d plan on one cocktail or half a joint, then fall into these time warps. How did Brandon get her cell number anyway? They hadn’t been close since she was fourteen or fifteen, and they weren’t that close then. How close did anybody get to him? She stepped outside and hurried toward her father’s house along Zero Ave., disoriented by the blackness, skating across snow as slick as frosting.

  She scanned the dark southern landscape for patrol lights or any signs that something had truly happened, but saw only house and barn lights. Was Mr. V still building that boat? She felt the wind shift across her face. “Can sailing be taught?” he’d asked her so earnestly years ago, as if her answer might provide the password to the afterlife. She’d wanted to tell him, Yes, of course, but there was something about him that wouldn’t let her fudge it. “Either you’re good at it or you’re not.”

  That was back when the ditch was just a ditch, the Vanderkools just peculiar American neighbors and Brandon just an oversized kid who could watch barn swallows for hours and tell you which bird made which nest and which egg and which song. A year younger than she was, he towered above her like an adult once he turned eleven. And when he got nervous or excited his words came out wrong. Spluttering, Danny Crawford called it. Occasionally, in memorable gusts, he even spoke backwards. “Fair being not are you!” The first thought when people heard him derail? Retarded.

  Her father was sprawled on the love seat next to a half liter of port and two roaches with Glenn Gould’s piano clinking on repeat like the mutterings of a disturbed genius. The latest Maclean’s—GREATEST INVENTIONS OF THE YEAR—covered his shallow chest, his bifocals balanced mid-nose, his neck bent at an angle that would only make him crabbier. Early pass-outs were common now that there wasn’t any hockey to stay up for. From what Madeline could tell, the strike was realigning Canadian life. Couples were getting reacquainted, talking more, screwing more, divorcing more. A nation of men were rediscovering hobbies and remodeling kitchens or, in her father’s case, smoking pot and piddling with inventions. Or, to be precise, reinventions.

  He’d started the reinvention kick and the cannabis binge—she wasn’t sure which came first—soon after being diagnosed and retiring a year early. And he’d taken to them both with a startling fervor. Professor Wayne Rousseau, the irreverent quote master, had been reduced to a daily toker who spent his waking hours reinventing gunpowder, the compass, the steam engine and who knew what else.

  She played the three blinking messages without rousing him. “Mr. Rousseau? This is Brandon calling. Vanderkool. I mean I’m with the Border Patrol now and …” He rattled on disjointedly until he got cut off. Then a woman’s soothing voice: “Wayne, it’s Sophie. Call me if you want to hear about Brandon’s big bust.” Of course, that’s who gave Brandon her number, the mysterious masseuse. The third call was Brandon repeating himself until he got muzzled mid-sentence. Madeline regretted being so curt with him. He needed someone to calm him down, and she hadn’t even asked if he was all right. She glanced out the window, half-expecting to see him in the fields, yet saw only her own spooked reflection in the glass. She stared again at her father, his arms akimbo as if overacting his death. He’d always looked smaller and less imposing when he wasn’t talking, but MS added a boyish vulnerability. And his death—maybe tomorrow, maybe in five years and seventeen days—nonetheless loomed. She nudged him awake, noticing the familiar odors of sour laundry, cheap wine and expensive pot. After he blinked and smacked his lips, she casually mentioned Brandon’s calls and waited for his gears to catch.

  He pushed his glasses higher on his nose and began clawing his thin beard. “This isn’t their jurisdiction.” Then a pause. “Does Nicole know?” Of course his first reaction would be outrage, his second to wonder what her older sister would make of it. “If the Border Patrol thinks it can run investigations on both sides of the border …,” he began, settling into lecture mode.

  Should she slip away and call Fisher? She realized she didn’t even know if Fisher was his first or last name. Meanwhile, the window was so large and the living room so bright that she felt like a target.

  “When’d he call? Exactly when did that fucking giraffe call?” Her father looked around wildly, started to rise, then fell back with a wince, rubbing the right side of his neck with blackened fingers. “What’d he want? What’d he say? You didn’t tell him anything, did you?”

  “What could I possibly tell him?” Madeline said slowly, hoping she’d only have to say it once. She dimmed the lights and shut the blinds, trying to puff herself up to match his anger. But she’d always been amused that college students so earnestly studied the morality lines her father laid down, not realizing how often he lifted those lines and dropped them wherever he pleased. She poured him some seltzer on ice and gathered his pills. After watering the coleus, poinsettias and philodendron, all she truly wanted to do was tell somebody about her encounter with the foot man, someone who could sympathize and laugh and keep a secret that strange.

  3

  WAYNE ROUSSEAU rose long before dawn to reinvent the light-bulb.

  Working in his basement by gas lanterns and candlelight—it would’ve been a farce otherwise—he fussed for hours with spiral threads of platinum, titanium, nickel and copper until he’d singed every finger on his right hand. Nothing stayed illuminated for more than eleven seconds before flickering or exploding.

  Over the prior week Wayne had tried Edison’s first eighty-four filaments, sticking to the arduous chronology of cutting, securing, electrifying and unlatching each material and combination thereof inside a replica vacuum tube he’d ordered from an oddball company in Montreal. Having completed less than a tenth of Edison’s trials, he already felt defeated and empty. Now he strapped tungsten inside the tube, sealed it, hooked it up to the battery and lowered the switch. The bulb lit briefly, flickered, then exploded. Wayne ripped off his goggles and began sweeping the floor.

  Edison and his lab boys tried twelve hundred materials—including beard hair, playing cards and fishing line—before discovering a reliable filament. Twelve hundred. The more Wayne inhabited Edison, the more he wondered how a man cultivates a stubborn streak so pronounced that it transforms a daily barrage of failures into stimulants.

  Edison was thirty-two when he perfected the lightbulb. Thirty-fucking-two. Half Wayne’s age. Studying the dueling portraits of the man—the visionary wizard who lit up the modern world and the credit-hogging prick of incomparable dimensions—Wayne increasingly leaned toward the latter. No single man could have invented the music and motion-picture industries, the pull-cord doll and more than a thousand other breakthroughs. But how long would e
verything have taken without Edison? That was the question. Yank this prick out of history and the oddsmakers who studied that sort of thing swore the electrical revolution would have taken another generation and the recording industry probably longer. All this from an uneducated, nearly deaf dropout who wasn’t sophisticated enough to realize that the things he imagined and demanded of himself and his underlings were not possible. And perhaps this was exactly the DNA, a quintessentially American prickishness, that all the giants possessed, whether Edison or Ford or Gates. They all turned less brilliant and more peculiar the closer you looked, didn’t they? And maybe it wasn’t just the Americans—most of the world’s innovators were colossal bullies who shoved society forward. That was all Wayne was squeezing from his morning exercise. No enlightenment, no glory, no revelation. Just the metallic, back-of-the-tongue aftertaste of the impatient prick. He crossed tungsten off the list, fatigue blowing through him. Fucking Edison.

  He hauled himself upstairs, a hot pain girdling his waist, into an alarmingly bright morning. He swallowed eleven pills, poached an egg, then flipped on the CBC in time to catch the back half of a report he knew would be retold on the half hour. The audacity! He knew exactly what to say if reporters called for comment. The paranoids were right! That’s what he’d tell them. And maybe he’d mention the unusual messages he’d received from the Vanderkool boy the night before. Perhaps the Mounties would find that interesting. It’s not a matter of when, he’d shout. They’re already here!

  But why wasn’t his phone ringing? He bombarded the answering machines of friends at the college and The Vancouver Sun. He sent out thirteen e-mails and waited, hitting refresh every few seconds. No responses but a home-loan pitch and a credit-card con. He called Nicole, but his older daughter was with clients. It grew so quiet that the kitchen clock sounded boisterous. He ground espresso beans to hear himself doing something and swallowed two doubles. He played the repetitious news loud enough to make himself feel part of it, then slid across his slushy deck with half of yesterday’s joint, pain sparking across his face as if the bones and ligaments holding it together were strung too tight.

  He patted pockets for his lighter until he heard the garden hose and reveled in the sight of Brandon Vanderkool’s father washing his enormous pickup once again, as if letting the big blue Ford stay dirty was as un-American as leaving the flag out overnight.

  Norm looked bulkier than ever, almost a meter deep in the chest with a boulder head that reminded Wayne of those old Soviet leaders, all of which made the dairyman favor his left leg more than ever. Wayne descended his slick porch steps, one at a time, before shouting across the ditch.

  NORM WASN’T CERTAIN what he’d heard other than his name, the word “Americans!” and some cussing alongside it. Knowing the likely mouth behind the noise, he ignored it, but the garbled yelling continued.

  Unfortunately, Norm’s driveway was within range of Wayne’s deck. Though the professor lived on the other side of Boundary Road, the ditch and Zero Ave., he was still Norm’s closest neighbor, if you could call him one. Used to be nothing but well-spaced farmhouses on both sides of the line until some Canadians sold border-front properties and a mini-suburb popped up with a view of Norm’s dairy. Ignore him, he told himself, but instead he reluctantly shut off the water and rocked stiff-kneed to his side of the ditch like a man on stilts, squinting into the silvery glare and feeling at a sluggish disadvantage, having been up since three thirty on one cup of coffee. “What’re you blaming us for today, Wayne?”

  “You didn’t hear?” The professor lit a stubby hand-rolled cigarette with a surfboard-shaped lighter. “Of course not. Why pay attention when you’re always right? Well, your drug czar marched into Vancouver last night and told the owner of the Amsterdam Café that he runs a disgraceful business. That’s the exact word he used: disgraceful. It’s all over the CBC.”

  “What should he have called it?” Norm drawled as casually as he could, suspecting this discussion was foreplay for more agitating topics.

  “Still don’t get it, do ya?” Wayne cocked his head on a neck no bigger than Norm’s wrist, shuffling to his left to keep the sun in Norm’s eyes. “You act like our land is your land.”

  He studied Wayne’s scratchy new beard. He’d had a Marxist goatee last week and was clean-shaven a month before that. Norm had hoped like hell the professor would move along once he’d retired, but here he was like some aging fugitive rotating through disguises. Nothing ever added up with Wayne Rousseau. Everybody heard about his wine parties—with fifty-dollar bottles on a teacher’s salary—and then came his greenhouse. Growing tomatoes, Wayne? He’d always been more of a challenge than Norm had signed up for. The Cuban and Iranian flags he flew on Sundays just to piss people off were mild irritants compared to the nuke he dropped two years ago. “The deaths of innocent Americans are the direct consequence of their government’s bloody foreign policy!” Instead of apologizing, the professor repeated it for every reporter who bothered to call, which led to Dirk Hoffman’s reader board—ROUSSEAU IS A TERRORIST—and Wayne’s retort, a flag that flapped for several gusty days before anyone identified it as representing Grenada.

  “Imagine if a Canadian official, any official—our trade czar, our trash czar, our lost-pet czar, take your pick—barged across the border,” Wayne shouted, as if his audience far exceeded one drowsy American farmer, “and called any one of your business owners anything less than magnificent.”

  “You said he called the business disgraceful, not the owners.”

  “The fuck’s the difference, Norm?” Thinning smoke swirled above the ditch between them. “I know you think it’s all pothead bullshit, but do you have any idea what I’d feel like most days without a half gram of this MC-9 Skunk Bud Number Three?”

  Norm coughed. “That skunk doesn’t seem to be helping you much today. And do you have to smoke it out here?” Norm felt his steam rising, but sensed Wayne hadn’t started into whatever would truly rile him. “Does it have to be a performance?”

  Wayne blew smoke through a yellow smile and leveled his swollen eyes on him. “How’s Jeanette?”

  Norm wished he’d already retreated instead of standing there breathing illegal secondhand smoke wafting across a ditch he hadn’t crossed since Customs spotted an old DUI on his record and sent him back. He promptly vowed never to step foot in Canada again, though he’d grown up playing in it and drove tractors across it to help plow fields and, in the newlywed years, moseyed into Abbotsford on summer nights to get Jeanette her chocolate éclair, which she’d hold up like a half-eaten passport to get them waved back through. “She’s fine,” he finally volunteered, not sure what the professor knew about his wife.

  Wayne nodded. “Best of luck with that.”

  “Thanks,” Norm grunted, hating his reflexive manners. He knew he should ask about his health, but he’d never understood MS—sounded like some electrical problem—and had let it go for too long to ask about it now without sounding idiotic. Part of him suspected it was a scam to get high anyway, though if you looked hard at Wayne, and got past the youthful hair, the playful smirk, the disrespectful eyes and the commanding voice, you saw there wasn’t much left but an assembly of dry twigs easily snapped.

  “Your cows getting any better?” Wayne probed.

  “Not all of ’em.” Norm back-shuffled from the ditch, alarmed he knew anything about his ailing herd.

  Wayne winced. “Maybe you should lay off the antibiotics, huh? Kills off the good bacteria and messes with the stomach, isn’t that right?”

  “They’re cows,” Norm said, not bothering to point out that mastitis is usually treated with antiseptics, not antibiotics. “Their stomachs are different.”

  Wayne smirked through his exhale. “Can I ask you one question, my friend? Why do you think twenty million Americans smoke pot every year?”

  “Think we’ve had this discussion before, Professor.” This lecture usually digressed into the irony of Holland’s progressive drug laws in light
of the valley’s uptight Dutch immigrants, which left Norm feeling obliged to condemn or defend some flat old country he couldn’t care less about. Seemingly everyone but Norm had visited Amsterdam and returned to tell him about the hookers in the windows, to which he’d offer knowing grunts without admitting he’d never been there. Even the sight of the vowel-happy Dutch language made him uneasy. He felt the cobbled pavement beneath his left boot. Another step back and he could pivot on his good heel and go.

  “What about the two million Americans who smoke it every day?” Wayne’s voice climbed steadily higher. “They belong in prison? Cannabis isn’t some wicked invention by socialists or Muslims or gays, Norm. It’s organic, for God’s sake. An or-gan-ic weed growing wild in every single one of your states. Washington and Jefferson grew it, okay? Washington and fucking Jeff—”

  “Like I said, seems like I’ve heard all this before.” Norm tried to exit on an agreeable tone. “I think it’s illegal down here for a reason, that’s all.”

  “You’re right about that, and the reason is your leaders are cowards, your drug czar’s an audacious moron and most of you are not only homophobic and xenophobic but euphoriaphobic too.”

  “I see.” Norm sighed, folding his arms across his chest, rolling his hands into fists. He saw three birds settle on the telephone line above Wayne’s head and stared at them, willing them to shit. “Sorry if we make you feel uncomfortable about your habit, Wayne, but—”

  “Medicine. Understand the word? And it’s legal—up here—when a doctor, like mine, prescribes it. It’s med-i-cine. Can I ask you a—”

  “It’s more than that.” Norm heard himself start to pant. “It’s your new economy, isn’t it?”