Border Songs

by Jim Lynch

  Sophie waited for a lull, then recounted Dionne’s full rendition of how he’d chased five illegals into her arms, and how the nationality of the injured couple remained a mystery. “They put them on the phone with AT&T translators and passed the call around, but nobody could place their accent. Can you imagine?”

  She was mentioning that the woman Brandon caught had been wearing clothes made of silk and lamé when Madeline volunteered, “He called me.”

  “Who?” Sophie asked, sensing that Madeline was drunker than she looked.

  “Brandon.”

  “Last night?”

  “Uh-huh. He wanted to know if we’d seen anything. Needed to talk, I think.”

  Sophie waited out the commentary. “So that was it?”

  “Said the most interesting people he meets these days are criminals.”

  “Out of the blue?”

  Madeline smiled. “Completely.”

  “He is the strangest,” Alexandra began over the rising gabble. “I mean, have any of you actually—”

  “Speaking of strange,” Danielle interjected, saliva whistling in the corners of her mouth, “I hear you had a date with some foot-sucker, Madeline.”

  Madeline’s head fell, and Sophie leaned forward as if to catch it. “Dessert anyone?”

  She then glided toward the kitchen, blocking out the chatter and reimagining Brandon’s tiny, nameless couple flying into Vancouver, and waiting a few anxious days until some overpriced stranger they couldn’t understand coaxed them across the ditch. Is this America? The air, soil and trees looked and smelled the same. Are we really in America? And then—YES!—to be in the land of liberty for all of three electrifying minutes before getting chased and crushed by the largest, most unusual agent in the history of the U.S. Border Patrol.

  Welcome to America, whoever you are.

  7

  NORM WATCHED his son lope up the stairs three in a bound, still resembling a giant Boy Scout in that silly uniform, ducking beneath the beam and looking so alive and powerful that if he inhaled too deeply everyone else in the room might pass out.

  As usual, he seemed to see everything in a glance, his eyes sweeping from the ice on his father’s knee to his mother hunched over stacks of photos on the sun-faded couch that her husband had promised to replace years ago. She’d written the names of friends and relatives on the back so she could flip through the prints like flash cards. From what Norm could tell, this exercise only complicated matters; the images were so meshed with memories it was like separating salt from sugar. At what click of the second hand, he wondered, would those names become meaningless jumbles of letters?

  Until the past eight months—yes, it began when Brandon went away to the academy—she’d been their memory, their crossword whiz, their Jeopardy! champ. Norm had never read much except Hoard’s Dairyman while she inhaled everything from The Economist to Darwin’s original essays to National Geographic Kids—a holdover from Brandon’s childhood—and armed herself with believe-it-or-not facts she nimbly recycled into conversations. Now these tidbits were part of her daily memory exercises and came out like meteors, if they came at all. “When you’re one in a million in China,” she’d told him recently, “there are still fourteen hundred people as good as you.”

  The dinner table was covered with clashing flavors and odors, braised lamb chops, red potatoes, spinach salad and a cod chowder made with coconut milk. Meals had become adventures. Nothing tasted the same twice anymore, and Jeanette was always adding some miracle food like kimchi, roasted garlic or pickled beets on the side too, as if her memory slump, as she called it, was just one healthy meal away from ending. But at least tonight she hadn’t botched another recipe she’d known by heart.

  As usual, he’d almost finished before she got started, and he spent the rest of the dinner picking through his salad, sipping the lone Pabst he allowed himself and watching Brandon plow through a second and third serving. Norm stopped nibbling on the rabbit food once he realized the dressing was pure vinegar, then studied Brandon’s smooth face. “You all right? Lookin’ kind of pale.”

  “Me?”

  “Who else?”

  “It’s March,” Brandon said, not looking up from the precise teamwork of his knife and fork. “Don’t we all look pale?”

  “You know what I mean. How do you—”

  “What?” Brandon asked, still eating, avoiding eye contact.

  “I’m getting my fillings pulled.” Jeanette smiled. “And no, Norm, I don’t know, or care, how much it’ll cost.”

  He waited. “Where’d that come from?”

  “Every time you bite into something a little bit of mercury gas squeezes out of your fillings.” She hissed through her teeth.

  “I see,” Norm said, gambling the issue would pass if he didn’t contest it. It was impossible to concentrate. He desperately wanted to tell them about the mastitis outbreak. That was the word he’d been flogging himself with for the past hour, outbreak, but Brandon would overreact and demand that he call in the doc even though nine out of ten times these things cleared themselves up no matter what you paid the vet.

  “What’s the problem?” Brandon asked, as if Norm had been thinking aloud. “Need some help?”

  “You’ve got a job. If I need somebody, I’ll call Roony”

  “We could go out after dinner,” Brandon offered. “Something happens, they’ll call.”

  “Thanks, but I got her.”

  His son cocked his head, then shrugged his eyebrows and dished himself more lamb before pointing his fork at his mother. “Saw a hundred and twenty trumpeters leaving today. Least I assume they were leaving.”

  “Saw a snowy owl on the Moffats’ fence,” she replied.

  Brandon looked to his father, then back to Jeanette. “Another one?” he asked hopefully.

  She looked past him, her eyes going glassy in her broad Scottish face.

  It would be so much more just, Norm thought, if he were the one losing it—a blessing, actually. No memory meant no regrets and no cover-ups. “Think you already told him ’bout that one, Jen.”

  She refocused and threw Norm a clearheaded smile that made him blush. “Don’t I listen to your stories no matter how many times you tell them?”

  He nodded, exhaling, then asked if they’d heard about Chas Landers finding all that cash in his field. Jeanette’s eyes sparkled, but Brandon didn’t seem to care. Money had never interested him, which Norm saw as further proof of his botched parenting. “So how’d it feel last night?” he finally asked.

  “What?”

  “You know what.”

  Getting Brandon to talk was sometimes like starting a chainsaw in the spring; you never knew how long it would take to get him going or when he’d shut off. He had the FM voice of a man but the jumbled rhythm of a child that made people turn to Norm for translation. He’s got his own take on things, was all Norm could often offer. He now sucked the last drops of his Pabst, waiting out his son’s silence.

  “Like when I’d hurt somebody by accident at recess,” Brandon finally said.

  For a moment Norm thought that was it, but then came a torrent of words, as if he were talking to the blind—Crawfords’ field unrolling like white shag, swirling snowflakes the size of chicken feathers, watching his own flying tackle from above … Norm hoped like hell he hadn’t shared that version with the chief or anyone else. His son’s face darkened with concentration as he described the injured “princess,” her cartoon-big eyes, her clever purple lips forming words nobody could understand. “All right,” Norm grunted, trying to rein him in without sounding impatient.

  Brandon mimicked her birdlike accent. Birds, birds, birds. It was almost cute at first. “Birds are easy to talk to,” Brandon used to say, which had always embarrassed Norm, but at least then he was a child.

  He forced himself to listen to his description of the black hair blooming from her head and her regal clothing. “All right,” he grumbled again, but it was obvious Brandon wouldn’t stop u
ntil he was finished.

  Norm groaned, his thoughts funneling toward doom. What if the herd had contracted something deadlier than mastitis? He’d read in Hoard’s how seven huge British dairies had to slaughter every last cow. A few caught foot-and-mouth and six thousand animals had four-inch steel bolts plunged into their skulls. His chest tightened. He knew he should call Doc Stremler, but that involved a minimum of $300, a dozen told-ya-sos and at least one wisecrack about his boat. Stremler would lower his glasses, glare at Norm’s duct-tape-and-baling-wire repairs and tell him that he desperately needed some experienced help. Then he’d glance around and say things like, You want your cows chewing cud and feeling good about life. As if Norm had gotten into dairies on a lark. You want them laying down, Norm, not walking around on concrete. Cow joints weren’t designed for concrete, you understand?

  Brandon was still talking, but his words were starting to swerve. “After she gets out of the hospital, they’ll take both of them to this center detention where they’ll stay in Tacoma till they can figure out where they should go. Chief said sometimes stay people there for months, even years, before—”

  “I had a dream,” Jeanette interrupted, “in which I woke up and nobody understood anything I said. Not a word. That was all in the same dream, the dreaming and the waking. At least I think it was. Was that last night?”

  “You were doing your job,” Norm said.

  “Nightmares are my job?” Jeanette said hesitantly.

  Norm shook his head. “Brandon was.”

  “They’re Brandon’s job?”

  Norm wanted to tell his son that everyone kept telling him what a terrific job he’d done, but he knew that if he started into that he couldn’t resist asking why he’d left his gun and flashlight in the car with the engine running, knowing that, as usual, the end result would sound like an ass-chewing. Plus, there was the matter of his taking ten times longer than normal to file a report jammed with so many misspellings and absurd time estimates that Patera wondered aloud how Brandon ever passed the academy. Still, Norm couldn’t avoid everything. “Gather you talked to the professor.”

  Brandon looked up, curious. “Madeline. I talked to Madeline.”

  Norm scratched his scalp. “You talked to her father too, right?”

  “Nope.”

  The sanctimonious bastard.

  “Left a couple messages,” Brandon noted.

  “But you did talk to Madeline?”

  “Didn’t I just say that?”

  “What’d she say?”

  Brandon shrugged and squinted.

  “You don’t have any authority,” Norm said, more officiously than he’d intended, “to question Wayne or any other Canadian.”

  Brandon looked to his mother and then back at Norm, as if gauging how much trouble he was in. “Was just,” he whispered, “asking …”

  Norm was about to explain that intent didn’t matter when his wife said, “The only first lady to carry a gun was Eleanor Roosevelt.”

  Brandon tried to smile, but Norm could tell he’d shut the boy down.

  “Ostriches are looking for water when they stick their heads in the sand,” she continued. “And all polar bears are left-handed.”

  “Me too,” Brandon whispered, reaching for the jug of raw milk.

  Norm scrambled for a neutral subject. “Madeline still racing?” The thought of her sailing was one of his favorite images for reasons he couldn’t place, but there it was—little Madeline Rousseau, shifting her weight to rock her boat and create her own wind, arriving at the marina a mile ahead of her becalmed competition. “She still racing Lasers?” he pressed when Brandon didn’t respond. “One hell of a sailor,” he added, as if defending the question.

  He decided right then not to tell anyone about the mastitis just yet. The longer he kept the severity to himself, the less real it seemed—even if it coiled inside him like a scream. He imagined his herd, led by old Pearl herself, marching up the slaughter chute. Then Norm too, the steel bolt crushing the thumb-sized notch at the back of his skull, birds scattering at the pneumatic hiss.

  8

  MADELINE KNEW the guard ducks wouldn’t shut up until long after she’d closed the trapdoor beneath the garage of the well-kept rental house nobody lived in on the western outskirts of Abbotsford.

  The ducks were Fisher’s brainstorm. A dog they’d have to feed, train and walk, but if they built a shallow pond and planted barley and buckwheat, the mallards would come. And there was no more delicate or reliable alarm system, he insisted, than nervous mallards.

  She felt the familiar rush of fear and excitement as the hatch clanked into place above her and muffled the quacking, leaving her with the ruckus of rustling PVC pipes, humming lights and a hissing CO2 generator. It was sweaty-hot, the moist air ripe with too many plants growing and exhaling in too small a space.

  When Fisher first led her into this dungeon he’d acted like he was showing her some sunken treasure. The cockiness of pot growers astounded her, everyone was so self-congratulatory about growing hearty weeds that would stand five feet in September if you tossed seeds behind the barn in May. Still, they fawned over their homely shrubs and sticky flowers as if they were purple orchids. Please. Even the most spectacular buds looked like glorified sedge or burweed. Yet pot apparently brainwashed people into thinking it was not only breathtakingly beautiful and smelled heavenly but also channeled the supernatural—hallelujah!—and was worth, pound for pound, more than gold. So they grew these pumped-up clones that maximized speed and potency such that if you lit one on fire you could forget your name in the time it took for one long inhale.

  Theoretically, there wasn’t all that much for her to do other than prune, harvest, clip and cure. Timers and pumps watered and fed the plants the nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus they would’ve absorbed naturally if they’d been rooted in soil instead of rock wool. And six-hundred-watt bulbs delivered as much fake sunshine as the plants could handle. Still, there were so many things that could go wrong. If the power failed, everything died within twenty-four hours. Too many nutrients? The plants suffered heart attacks. She studied watermarks in the low ceiling. If water dripped onto the sodium lights, they’d explode.

  Madeline hadn’t been here in five days. It didn’t look like anyone else had, either, except to cram more plants inside. Fisher had promised a max of four hundred. Right. There was barely enough room to get around the tables. After counting more than five hundred wide-leafed clones quivering in a fake two-knot breeze, she considered climbing out for good instead of being trapped inside when the trigger-fingered Mounties showed up wired on bad coffee. Fisher admitted he was juggling more than ten grows, which probably meant over twenty. But he insisted this was their baby, their safest op. Sure.

  Dozens of baby clones—still trapped beneath humidity domes—should have been replanted days ago. And half the plants in the vegetation room belonged in the flowering room. She checked the thermostat: ninety-three. Far too hot, particularly considering that the rooms weren’t adequately divided. She was supposed to harvest quadrant four, but most of quad three had slid into reproduction, which meant the plants needed darkness. Even a kid’s night-light could ruin them. She studied the gray speckles on the harvest buds. Mold? Even worse, gnats! It was too late. A cloud of them drifted in her direction. She gasped, inhaling the tiny bugs, fanning her Expos hat and backpedaling until she bumped into the concrete wall. Once they scattered, she rubbed her face, coughed and blew her nose. When she risked opening her eyes again she saw a dozen greenhouse whiteflies, then dozens more. She fanned another gnat cloud while snipping and bagging buds as fast as she could.

  Was this the double or nothing she’d been craving—this chance to rise above the oncoming rut of credit cards, mortgages and meaningless jobs? And do what? Travel! Yes, travel. Maybe she’d start in Indonesia—Bali!—and then crew on some exotic schooner headed even farther south. Sydney, then what? The exhilarating unknown. That’s what. But the only daydream she could su
stain in this hot, buggy hole involved prison.

  She’d received only two U.S. hundreds—real convenient—for her prior six visits. Today, Fisher promised, she’d be paid in full, including her cut of the successful run the night Brandon’s call rescued her from the foot freak.

  Her intuition kept screaming at her to climb out. Now! But she was still furiously clipping and bagging buds, fending off real and imagined insects, when the ducks fired up again, first in random solos, then in riotous quacking unison. Shit! She turned up the baby monitor and panted until she heard Fisher’s familiar mumble into the microphone stashed behind the bicycles: “Jus’ me, Madness.”

  He had a nickname for everyone, and apparently there was nothing you could do about it. But he was easy to like, and while he didn’t look like the sort you went into business with, he wasn’t the type you worried about either. When she climbed up, he appeared to be staggering from some joke. Lizard-thin in expensive jeans and green fleece, he had a smoked, wrung-out look, his skin as dry as jerky. What startled her was that he wasn’t alone.

  She’d made it clear she didn’t want to meet anyone, which of course was another part of the deal that had already been broken, although he’d apologized so profusely about sending Monty to her nursery that she’d asked him to drop it.

  “Who the hell’s this?” she said, not caring how it sounded, twitchy from her fingertips to her lips, heart hammering, jaw wiggling, ready to shout.

  “Easy, Madeline. This is Toby. And this is …” He laughed awkwardly. “Well, this is his show.”

  Toby bowed slightly with the confidence of a senator in his gray T-shirt, corduroy shorts and sockless slip-ons. He wasn’t all that large, but brawny, with neck muscles that angled up like rebar, and his bright, deep-set eyes looked as if they’d been screwed in too tight.

  “If it is,” Madeline snapped, “your show sucks big-time.”

  Fisher patted the air in front of him until Toby held up a palm as if testifying. “Thanks for all your work. Really. You are very good. And yes, this one has a ways to go.”