Border Songs

by Jim Lynch

  She ignored his calming, pilotlike tenor and unloaded on Fisher. “You got fucking gnats down there like I said you would. And you’ve got too many plants on too many schedules and the whole thing’s way too hot. And, if you haven’t noticed, you’ve already waited too long on replanting half of—”

  Fisher shushed her. “That’s one of the reasons—”

  “She’s right,” Toby said before Fisher could finish or she could reload, “on all counts.” He handed her a tiny tube of aloe vera. “It’s new. Keep it.”

  She opened it, dabbed some on her face and slid it into her jeans without thanking him. “You’ve got whiteflies down there too.”

  Fisher wondered aloud which pesticide would do the trick.

  “Can’t use insecticides on anything you smoke,” Toby told him, “especially when you’re calling it organic.” He rocked his shoulders, and slabs of muscle shifted beneath his shirt. “Seeing how the room is sealed, we can up the CO2 levels to ten thousand parts per million for forty-five minutes. If that doesn’t work we’ll bring in ladybugs.”

  “Beautiful,” Madeline said. “Then you’ll have another infestation.”

  “They’re easy to vacuum.” Toby grinned. “Then you just seal the bag and store them in the fridge till you need ’em again.”

  “We cool, Madness?” Fisher thumbed through a roll of hundreds. “It’s my fault,” he said, lip-counting to twelve. “We’ll get you everything you need by Wednesday. Cool?”

  She didn’t concede anything, though her anger was dissipating faster than she would have liked. What she desired now was a peaceful exit, without telling anyone off, without even admitting she was out.

  “What do you think of Fisher’s ducks?” Toby asked.

  “Ingenious.”

  Fisher turned to Toby. “You said you loved the idea.”

  “A few ducks, sure.” He carefully applied ChapStick. “But you got a marching band out here.”

  “You start harvesting yet?” Fisher asked Madeline.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Pretty sweet buds, eh?”

  “Not really.”

  Fisher acted like he hadn’t heard. “Toby handles all the loads.”

  “Yeah?” Madeline slid the thick fold of hundreds into a back pocket and inched toward the door.

  “Fifty-nine by land,” Toby said, “eighteen by air, six by sea. And I’ve overseen three times that many.”

  The more specific the details, Madeline’s father had taught her, the more thorough the lies.

  “Any close calls?” Fisher asked.

  She wanted to spare them the recruitment routine but couldn’t bring herself to interrupt.

  “People only get caught if they’re reckless or wasted.” Toby raised a thick eyebrow. “It’s not something you do stoned or out of shape. Fact is, even morons usually don’t get caught unless they pull up to Peace Arch when the drug dogs are out. Then anyone’s screwed. Their best dogs can smell a seed beneath your floor mat when you roll by at twenty.”

  Madeline liked his voice. Maybe she was overreacting to a few gnat bites. Who knew better than her that only dumbshits got caught crossing a ditch she’d lived alongside most of her life? And she did just get paid, didn’t she? And when you compared it to nursery money …

  “There are always risks.” Toby bounced from flexed quad to flexed quad. “But do you think the guy who buys a 7-Eleven or opens a bar doesn’t have risks? Or the logger? The crabber? Think they aren’t gambling? I’ve got my worries, but I own three houses outright and I’ve got two good lawyers if problems arise.”

  “If you’ve already got three houses,” Madeline asked, “why still mess with all this?”

  “It’s my profession. I take pride in mine just as an engineer or carpenter or doctor takes pride in his. I drive this stretch of the border ten times a week. I talk to hunters, hikers and tugboat captains. And I probably know enough about dairy and raspberry farming to pinch-hit at either. I also know the names and habits of at least half the residents—their dogs, too—along Zero and Boundary.”

  She noticed that his tiny teeth looked out of place on his broad face, and realized she was taking mental notes for Sophie Winslow. What an odd request—Sophie pulling her aside after that bizarre bunco gathering to ask her to help keep her informed. About what? “About everything, hon.” She got so close Madeline could smell the wine on her breath. “What you see and hear. I collect all the details.” Then she’d cupped the back of Madeline’s skull and kissed her nose, as if blessing her.

  “I chart the weather and the tides and how bright the moon’s likely to be on any given night,” Toby went on. “And I use spotters with Gen Three night goggles and surveillance scopes. When there’s no BP within fifteen minutes of our location, we go. It used to be as simple as waiting till midnight, but the sector has eighty-two BPs now and night shifts too. So you gotta know the agents, which isn’t easy because a third of them are new. Still, I could spot most of ’em out of uniform from thirty yards, and I’ve memorized the sounds of their rigs, and I know where they like to park and how they burn time—which ones spit seeds, which ones smoke, which ones play the deterrence game, which ones do their best to see absolutely nothing. I’ve done well, but I’m not in it for the money. It doesn’t work like that. You’ve got to feel it here.” He patted his chest with an open palm and sucked air through his little teeth. “The way I look at it, I’m delivering a medicinal herb to a neighbor who desperately needs it.”

  She smothered a laugh.

  Toby studied her face, as if measuring it for a mask. “We need more capable people willing to hump it across the water, because that’s the safest route.”

  “Yeah?” She glanced at Fisher.

  “I’m willing to pay extra for skilled people willing to deliver by boat, especially by sailboat.”

  She caught Fisher grinning, his eyes glittering.

  “Understand you sail,” Toby ventured.

  “No,” she said.

  Toby slow-eyed Fisher, who instantly reddened.

  “I race,” she said. “There’s a difference. So, what do you know,” she couldn’t resist asking, “about that new agent who tackled those illegals just over the border a week ago?”

  Toby hesitated. “The big guy?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, I’m told he spends a lot of time in the woods, but do I know his name? Is that what you’re asking? I know he’s been in the sector since—”

  “Brandon,” Madeline interrupted as several ducks started squawking.

  “That’s his name?” Toby leaned toward her, his eyeballs straining.

  “Brandon Vanderkool. Got homeschooled his last few years of high school and somehow passed the GED. Helped out on his dad’s dairy until last fall. We used to play together, seeing as how our folks lived across from each other back when nobody cared about the border.”

  Toby stretched his neck, tugging gently on his curls. “You used to play with him?”

  “You could call it that.”

  “He’s huge. Much of an athlete?”

  “Could hit a baseball a hundred meters but didn’t know his right from his left, so occasionally he’d run straight to third base instead of first.”

  Fisher laughed. “What else?”

  “He carries flies and spiders out of his house in his hands.”

  “A Buddhist?” Toby asked. “No.”

  “A gentle giant?” Fisher asked. “You could say that. An artist too.” “Yeah? What kind?”

  She grinned. “Paints, sculpts, all sorts of things.” “Is he any good? What’s it like?”

  Madeline blushed, suddenly uneasy about volunteering so much information about Brandon. “It’s hard to describe.”

  9

  THE ROBIN sang first, even before the Moffats’ rooster, followed by eight other species politely waiting for their sunrise solos while Brandon sorted mating songs from territorial songs—handsome-and-available, handsome-and-available versus this-is-mi
ne, this-is-mine—until a song sparrow embarrassed them all with three different renditions of his manic ballad.

  A jolt of spring had followed the surprise snowstorm and stunned the valley all over again as trees, bushes and grasses strained to greet the long-lost sun and horses, goats, cows and deer browsed drying fields amid sudden insect hatches and incoming throngs of skinny, jet-legged birds from the south.

  Brandon didn’t have to work until late afternoon, so he rattled east in his father’s junker pickup after daybreak to see as many birds as possible. He heard a black-headed grosbeak, twelve, in the alders near the massive foundation of the new casino, then turned off Halverstick onto Holmquist and pulled over at its high point. From there he set up his Bushnell scope and zoomed in on little Judson Lake. He spotted a hunched green heron, then a fully extended blue heron and a smattering of ducks, including a cinnamon teal, eighteen, the color of clay. He surveyed the water again, then stepped into the woodlands, making pishing sounds until some curious chickadees, warblers and juncos flushed to be counted. He strolled deeper into the forest and patiently went through his owl calls. First the northern pygmy, then, after a pause to clear the air, a screech owl, followed by a barn and a great horned, all the while scanning branches for football-shaped bodies. After giving up on owls, he sped into the brightening valley toward the Mount Baker Highway to see what he could find before hitting snow.

  The highway followed the foamy Nooksack up through cathedrals of cedars and birch and young hemlock as graceful as ballerinas. He watched treetops for incoming flocks and took side roads and quick strolls, drawing out a red-breasted sapsucker, a MacGillivray’s warbler and three different sparrows. He spotted an American dipper, twenty-seven, popping its signature knee bends on rounded river rocks, then sped higher past fake Bavarian lodges and steep green hillsides with firs angling skyward like arrows. When the road snowed out he parked and strode swiftly until he broke into a bright thawing meadow and stood there to listen. He heard the mock battle cry of a pileated woodpecker, then the chimelike mountain bluebird and a Townsend’s solitaire compensating for its drab appearance with its catchy mating riff: Doesn’t my song sound great to you? Doesn’t my song sound great to you? Then a ruffed grouse in the bush somewhere drumming louder and louder until a red-tailed hawk glided through, low and fast and effortless, shutting everyone up with an irritable scream that sounded like an incoming Piccolo Pete. Before leaving, Brandon heard the one-note song of the varied thrush, thirty-three, its long tone setting off a series of other peeps, trills and warbles just as one clear flute tunes a concert band.

  He followed the Nooksack out of the hills and felt the blush of exposure that came with rolling out of Baker’s cool canopy into the low, blinding valley. The stench and heat intensified. Time slowed. There was little shade and few hiding places. Everyone saw what you were up to, and the smarter ones could tell how well you were doing it. Brandon sped past Dirk Hoffman’s latest political statement—hundreds of shin-high crosses in orderly rows like a miniature Arlington National under his exhortation to: STOP SLAUGHTERING THE UNBORN. Farther west, cows were bounding in pastures like rambunctious calves. Seeing them play relaxed him, just as it enraged him to see them bullied. How could anyone be cruel to animals that were powerful enough to walk through walls yet hated to be alone and balked at stepping over hoses, puddles or even a bright line of paint?

  Brandon roared out of the valley along back roads toward Tennant Lake, where he spotted widgeons, coots, mallards and canvasbacks before climbing out of the truck. He heard a marsh wren trill as soon as he stepped on the boardwalk, then a gadwall burp. He strolled past a bittern without blowing its cover, its eyes on the sky, its streaked vertical neck blending with the reeds. He saw common yellowthroats and heard nine different songbirds. Heading back out, he lobbed rocks into the reeds until he was rewarded with the unmistakable whistle and croak of a Virginia rail, fifty-one.

  Brandon was eleven when his mother introduced him to the secret society of people who knew more about birds than he did. Most of them seemed like fussy librarians and doctors, but he looked forward to their Christmas bird counts more than Christmas itself. And they soon fought over him to boost their counts, especially after he won the twenty-four-hour birding contest, despite grumblings about insufficient documentation on 5 of the 118 species he’d claimed to see or hear. The problem was he never saw these people any other day of the year. And he never found anybody, much less anyone his age, who wanted to count birds every day.

  He pulled up at Semiahmoo Bay in time to see western and glaucous gulls, Canada geese, marbled godwits and two western sandpipers feasting side by side, like some Noah’s Ark spoof, along the banks of the creek winding down the flats. He coasted past all that onto the heavy-timbered pier and heard the cooo-ooo-ooo of mourning doves before finding them in the rigging of fishing boats, and beyond them the common murres, pigeon guillemots and even a few marbled murrelets diving for breakfast in the melon-green water. When he stepped onto the pier, a ball of dunlins flashed into view, following their leader, and shifting direction in unison, their white bellies flashing like aspen leaves while a low flock of eleven tundra swans soared overhead in subdued exile. Brandon sat down on the edge of the pier, overwhelmed.

  A black-and-white belted kingfisher with Elvis hair, sixty-three, rattled out from beneath him and hovered fifty feet above the bay, started to fall, then aborted its dive to hover and wait. Brandon watched it hunt for fifteen minutes before realizing the whitened expanse of water a mile out wasn’t one of the bay’s reflective tricks but one of the largest flocks of snow geese he’d ever seen. They wintered a couple counties to the south and rarely assembled in large numbers this close to the border, but this congregation had apparently taken an early pit stop on its return flight to Siberia. He heard the wings and squawks before he saw the first eagle circling. Once the second eagle buzzed them, the birds began lifting, fear spreading like electricity from wing to beak to wing, until this impossibly loud white curtain blotted out half the sky.

  And the sound! A solo snow goose flying overhead sounds lost and pathetic. Hel-lo? But with thousands honking simultaneously it is a wildly different noise, like the tribal roar you hear in stadiums, yet even greater than that, beyond animalistic, more like an enormous avalanche or the howl of the earth itself, the high-pitched hum of the sphere, if you could actually hear it, hurtling through space at sixty-six thousand miles an hour. Brandon tilted back and joined in, honking along with the flock until it split into long loose Vs and the bedlam faded to an industrial squeal, then to an ambient wail as the skeins turned to threads before fading to blue.

  THAT AFTERNOON, Brandon blew past Big Tom’s raspberries where two Mexicans were clipping and restringing canes. He was supposed to run farm workers’ names and DOBs through the computer whenever they stepped onto public streets—yet another part of the job he couldn’t picture himself doing. He waved but got nothing but twitches in exchange. Seemingly everyone treated him differently or didn’t even recognize him in uniform, as if it blurred their vision. He finished his rounds in less than an hour and strayed east toward the Sumas River, which shimmered diagonally through the valley. He slowed at its bends where debris gathered, drivers idling respectfully behind him, craning to see if he’d spotted drugs or bodies before signaling hesitantly around him and glancing back at the enormous BP—Is that the Vanderkool boy?—who was out of his rig now, squatting next to the slow water like a golfer studying the tilt of a green.

  He plucked and overlapped two salal leaves and tried stitching them together with a pine needle. It took a while to find leaves supple enough and needles sharp enough, but within fifteen minutes he’d strung together an eight-foot garland. He lowered it delicately into the stream and watched the lazy current carry it over submerged stones into swifter water. Brandon scampered alongside his leaf snake, his ears sorting birds in the trees and bushes behind him, the ohhh-so-sweetly of a hermit thrush, sixty-five, and the yaank-yaank-yaank o
f a red-breasted nuthatch, sixty-six. He caught a cottonwood branch in the cheek, snagged his pants and stumbled as his creation broke into three smaller snakes that no longer undulated with life.

  “Seven-eighty to two-oh-five.”

  “Two-oh-five, copy,” he murmured once he got over being startled.

  “Sensor at Markworth.”

  “Copy,” he mumbled. “Be there shortly.”

  He sped along Garrison, then Badger and finally H Street, hurtling west out of the valley into the hilly woodlands like he’d seen Dionne drive, faster than he figured was safe. Once on Markworth he parked quietly, then loped across a clearing toward the woods and the trail sensor, the windblown spruce groaning like settling houses. He was noticing how the exhaust of a Vancouver-bound jet split the blue-black sky when he stubbed his boot on a root, and during his fall he heard, then saw, a doe and its fawn leap over ferns like cartoon reindeer. He rose, brushing dirt and needles from his thighs and chest, inspecting wrists and shoulders, before noticing his gun, planted cock-eyed in the dirt, the barrel pointed at his chest as if the earth itself was holding him at gunpoint. He’d barely passed the range test; his shots usually flew high, as though he thought he had to arc the bullets. He picked up the Beretta and waited for his breath to stabilize before calling it in with his best murmur. “Seven-eighty, this is two-oh-five.”

  “Go ahead, two-oh-five.”

  “Least two deer down here.”

  “Ten-four, I’ll mark it down as animal.”

  Brandon followed some tracks into a mossy meadow with surprisingly powdery dirt, which was where he saw the first large raindrop splat. More big drops splashed his hair and nose before he glanced up, then studied the dirt again for the smoothest, driest patch and carefully sat down, slowly reclining until his legs were spread-eagled and his arms perpendicular to his trunk, as if he were strapped to an imaginary wheel, his gun extended in his left hand for artistic purposes.

  Rain continued falling in random splats, then in grape-sized drops and finally in noisy ropes that silenced the birds. He let it wash his face and soak his uniform. He lay there trying to come up with a good excuse to call Madeline Rousseau again, until the rain subsided. After it completely stopped, he lurched upright, his gun arm swinging forward with the exertion, and then heard gasps and curses thirty feet in front of him.