by Jim Lynch
“Not a problem.” Patera looked puzzled. “Already an FBI matter, Norm. I’ll handle what reporters we get. Nothing to worry about there. There’s just some coaching that needs to be done on what Brandon should and shouldn’t say in front of various officials and cameras, if and when we decide it’s appropriate. If and when, Norm.”
Driving home, Norm tried to fill the truck with the normalcy of his observations about the left-handed Japanese reliever the Mariners signed, Channel 4’s prediction of record rain the following week and Uncle Wyatt’s hip replacement. “Everyone says you got what it takes.” He felt like he was trying to convince himself. “They can’t stop telling me about your instincts.”
“Pull over,” Brandon said, lowering his window.
“What?”
“Pull … over.”
Norm straddled the shoulder between Dirk’s reader board, which he couldn’t make out in the dark, and Big Tom’s Statue of Liberty, which for whatever reason had its torch illuminated tonight. Brandon sounded like a dog barking himself raw.
Norm leaned back into a swoon, recalling Sophie’s most recent request for a dairy tour. She’d sauntered over to ask, this time in cowboy boots and a cotton dress. She had so many looks. She dipped in and out of decades and fashions, letting her hair tumble over her shoulders one day, piling it high the next or even slicking it back, all of which Norm assumed was designed to let you know that she could play whatever part you wanted her to play in whatever you had in mind.
His dairy looked grim even to him. Through her eyes it would probably look like a gulag.
Jeanette was waiting braless on the couch, sipping ginkgo tea in a nightgown so soft and faded it was impossible to know what colors it used to be. She listened silently to Norm, then patted her thighs after Brandon reappeared in a robe. He draped his knees over one couch arm and rolled himself out until his head landed in her lap.
“Your latest paintings,” she whispered, “are lovely.”
“He just needs sleep,” Norm said, feeling empty and invisible, pacing and muttering, “What can you do?” and other fillers. The dogs started yipping, and he knew they wouldn’t stop until they’d seen Brandon. So he hobbled down to the basement and freed them before climbing into his milking clothes.
Nothing had changed while he was gone, other than the three strays had curled up within worshipping distance of his son. One of Jeanette’s palms was on his forehead, the other on his chest, her eyes fixed to the TV as if it were on. When Norm saw an Alzheimer’s headline at the 7-Eleven his first thought was that maybe everyone was getting it, like some sort of bizarre virus. He bought the paper and read as much of the article as he could bear.
“Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair,” she whispered now to their son. “The earth’s temperature rises slightly during a full moon.”
“Good job,” he said, without opening his eyes.
Norm spread a light blanket across Brandon’s legs. “Gotta go …,” he began, stating the obvious, then reluctantly stepped into the chill, late for his cows. He saw Sophie’s kitchen light was still on. There’d be nothing he could tell her by sunup that she wouldn’t already know. He looked across the ditch. The professor’s lights were on too.
WAYNE ROUSSEAU was mumbling through another all-nighter. He’d progressed right through the tedious trials—although skipping over hundreds of failures, which seemed fair considering he didn’t have a staff—before finally discovering the remarkable resistance he could get from horseshoe-shaped carbon-coated filaments. And then, for the past two days, he’d wrestled with bad vacuum seals and imperfect carbonization, which resulted in sputtering light or broken glass. His sleep amounted to short couch naps, and he no longer played music. In fact, he wore earplugs to better simulate Edison’s hearing. He also smoked more cannabis than usual to feed the delusions and stay in character.
He clipped a perfectly baked and carbonized cotton filament into the tube, pumped out the oxygen and slowly lowered the switch. A bright yellow-white light filled his basement. Wayne squinted at the bulb as if it were an eclipse, waiting for it to flicker, shatter or both. And waited. Several minutes passed, then another ten without the slightest flickering. Think of it! The exact same bulb Edison burned for 550 hours in December 1879! The first bright steady light that wouldn’t waver in wind! A practical lamp that could change the experience of night! And not just for the rich—for the masses!
The epic significance of his accomplishment swelled inside Wayne until he hopped around the brilliant bulb shouting and whooping his throat raw as if he’d discovered fire.
Part Two
13
AFTER BRANDON’S bust it rained all day every day, mercifully at first, then violently, punishing the land and turning streams into rivers, puddles into ponds, marshes into lakes. For ten days the valley woke and retired to the roar of a deluge manufactured by the Pacific rain factory. The relentless downpour added to the sense of siege by trapping people indoors, but there was no getting away from it. The moisture seeped through walls and dampened bedding, clothes and the pores of your skin as water overflowed on both sides of the ditch, swamping stretches of Boundary and Zero where BPs and Mounties hydroplaned along in record numbers, squinting at a landscape blurred beyond recognition.
The entire border, after closing for twenty-seven hours, remained in paranoid mode. Commuters with NEXUS passes were no longer waved through, and most southbound drivers were interrogated as if all thirty million Canadians had suddenly become suspects. Cars were randomly searched, their undersides scrutinized with mirrors on poles. And haggard Customs agents found mother lodes of Cuban cigars, fake IDs, untaxed cigarettes, weapons—brass knuckles, swords and grenades—and bins of counterfeit Rolexes, eagle feathers and a never-ending cache of undeclared fruits and alcohol. The unspoken message as you crept toward the booths? Expect to get grilled. Grannies were asked if they carried mace in their purses. Children were questioned about their parents. Arabs were strip-searched, especially if they had accents.
When Customs claimed it had detained several “people of interest” at the Blaine and Lynden crossings, the anxiety escalated. Local BPs went to twelve-hour shifts, and Patera was assured that a dozen incoming transfers were being processed.
The media struggled with this vague and confusing story. The few juicy particulars were repeated endlessly: A trunk full of RDX, described as a relatively stable cousin of nitroglycerin. Three pounds of B.C. bud found stapled behind door panels. The suspected dope-toting terrorist still hadn’t been identified. There was no photo, no name and no information released about him other than that multiple IDs were found in the vehicle—stolen in Vancouver—along with a map of Seattle Center and the Space Needle. The mystery of his identity, according to the FBI, was compounded by the fact that he remained in a coma of sorts. Beyond that, the FBI would not discuss its probe until it was done. However, The Seattle Times asserted several days later that the FBI was ninety percent certain the unconscious suspect was Shareef Hasan Omar. Reputed to be a twenty-nine-year-old Algerian jihad trainer, he was suspected of recruiting in Toronto under multiple aliases, including one found on a fake passport inside the crumpled Pontiac.
Patera had kept Brandon’s identity hidden from the media. Part of it, he told Sophie, was that he had no idea what Brandon might say; the other part was those credit-stealing Feebs demanded complete control of the story. But his name leaked anyway, and reporters bombarded the Vanderkools’ answering machine, pleading or wheedling for return calls. The pursuit fizzled once the AP ran his sophomore class photo, which looked like a mug shot, alongside comments from his art teacher that Brandon possessed a “unique vision,” which amused locals and inspired this headline: SPACE NEEDLE BOMBER FOILED BY ROOKIE AGENT’S 6TH SENSE.
Just as the coverage started to cool, another suspected Algerian terrorist, this one armed with two handguns, was caught bushwhacking across the border into Vermont’s Kingdom County. Suddenly, for the first time a
nyone could recall, Americans were talking about the world’s longest undefended border as if it were some government gaffe as ridiculous as the Pentagon blowing $2,315 on a toilet seat or the Agriculture Department bankrolling cow-fart studies at Washington State University.
Television crews fanned out to illustrate just how unguarded these 4,200 miles actually were, and border seemed like too big a noun for what they found. Most of the boundary was less momentous than a state line, less delineated than the average cul-de-sac. There weren’t any fences, and many formal crossings were guarded after dark by nothing more than traffic cones. The border looked like a timid line drawn in pencil, especially west of Minnesota where it no longer followed the contours of rivers, mountains or lakes but simply traced the invisible arc of the 49th parallel out to the Pacific. People pulled out maps and globes and pondered the portion of the dotted line that turned into the ditch that was now in the news, a ditch like you’d see anywhere.
As the story lingered, reporters scrambled over one another for fresh angles, casting the western end of the border as a farmer’s, retiree’s and outlaw’s paradise, or dredging up its rum-running days, and its historical ebb and flow of legal and illegal commerce. Papers ran fever charts showing recent spikes in bud seizures and alien captures, or highlighted the countries’ differences in immigration and drug laws. Old stories were rewritten with more hype, particularly on the study that identified fifty active terrorist groups in Canada. Editorialists, bloggers and cartoonists piled on as the outrage swelled. While Mexican farmhands faced a gauntlet of fences and agents and vigilantes, terrorists were driving across the unguarded northern border with trunks full of explosives! Congressmen were demanding more studies and greater investments in security. Not to be out-alarmed, Washington’s governor offered the state’s National Guard. And the same Minutemen exasperating BPs along the southern border vowed to help seal the north.
Meanwhile, sales of deadbolts and canned goods surged in the valley, hardware stores ran out of ammo and home alarms, mailbox flyers suddenly touted security consultants and local paranoia mined the unknowable: How many other cars were hauling explosives through here? Dirk Hoffman offered his concise reader-board commentary: CANADA EXPORTS DRUGS AND TERROR.
North of the line, black-humor asides about U.S. tanks rolling north morphed into genuine fear after the President warned that any country housing “evildoers” would be treated as an enemy.
And just when Sophie thought people couldn’t possibly talk more about Brandon, the chatter tripled. Most of the stories were exaggerations or fabrications, such as the claim that he broke arrest records during his first month, or, even more apocryphal, that he had a Spider-Man-like knack for sensing or anticipating crimes, or had suffered a breakdown after the bomber bust that made him speak backwards or—as Alexandra Cole kept claiming—in tongues. And then there was his art. Apparently he was making peculiar sculptures of sorts on public and private lands when he wasn’t swinging Tarzan-style from trees to arrest smugglers, aliens and bombers.
Sophie told McAfferty to roll onto his back, then asked, “What do you make of Brandon?”
“The shit magnet? Great kid. Wouldn’t want to stand too close to him in a lightning storm, but a great kid. Took him for an oddball at first, but he’s even odder than the average duck we hire. Know what I’m saying? Rarely wears a gun, which is probably good, considering he might be the worst shot we’ve ever had. As a matter of fact, he can’t even type. Hunts and pecks like something out of a Bogart movie. Dionne does most of it for him. What’s worse is he’s as gullible as a twelve-year-old. He’ll bring people in and say, ‘They didn’t know what was in the bags,’ or ‘They didn’t know they needed a visa.’ It’s all we can do not to bust up. We figured he was lucky at first. I mean amazingly lucky—though I still don’t know what to make of his so-called bomber.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for starters, who’d risk a dog hit on dope if you’re carrying RDX? Dogs aren’t trained for both, and most are dope dogs, not bomb dogs, so why risk hauling bud if your mission’s to blow something up? I’m just saying this guy, whoever he is, doesn’t strike me as any mastermind. But back to Brandon: It’s like he expects something to happen at every moment, no matter where he is or what he’s doing. And if he strolled through this room right now, I bet he could tell you almost everything that’s in it and exactly what you’re wearing and which of my bulging muscles you’re rubbing and what’s on the walls and the precise youthful hue of my skin. Most agents try not to see too much, know what I’m saying? Plus most of us have to puff up whatever courage we need. Brandon just is. And his eyes are really, really wide open. A sensor went off, okay, and he and Talley responded. Talley finds tracks and starts tearin’ off before Brandon tells him they’re old. Talley’s the veteran here. Can track as well as anybody. But the big rook points out a tiny spiderweb suspended directly above a boot print and says it took at least an hour to build. See what I’m saying? So yeah, he’s as strange as he is large and, yes, I worry about him getting killed. Next question?”
Sophie recorded her interviews and photographed her subjects. I’m just a nutty scrapbooker, she told some people. To others she hinted at some kind of oral history. The rumor soon spread that she had a publisher, that she was an accomplished author with multiple pseudonyms working on her quirky border-town version of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. What was actually true didn’t seem to matter. People lined up to gossip and gripe, to speculate and get rubbed, to confess their temptations and share their biggest worries.
Wayne Rousseau confided his: Madeline.
14
LISTENING TO the French station, watching herself speed, Madeline drove Zero Ave. knowing she should have taken the back roads with a hatchback full of pot. She passed hundreds of greenhouses and miles of raspberry fields before cutting through new pinot, merlot and chardonnay vineyards. Every third car on the other side of the ditch was a green-and-white SUV, but the groggy BPs never glanced over. Beyond them, the valley still looked awash, and if she squinted it turned into a massive bay, the farmhouses and barns anchored freighters, the vehicles and sheds leisure boats.
She jotted mental notes on the popular foot-smuggling routes Toby had marked. He was right. Even with doubled patrols, it took an idiot to get caught. She wove through queues of exasperated drivers at the Pacific and Peace Arch crossings and rolled west away from the border toward White Rock, where steep, narrow streets turned into toboggan runs in the winter and tall houses jockeyed for peephole views of the bay.
Parking at the marina, she watched a lanky couple necking against a phone booth, cigarettes dangling behind their heads. The northwesterly breeze looked perfect, but she was an hour early and considered rolling a joint to relax before recalling Toby’s rules. She marveled uneasily at his growing influence. He’d said she needed to move out of her apartment here, promising to find her a better place closer to him. Could she say no to this man, no matter what the request? She rolled and smoked a pinner after convincing herself anything this skinny didn’t count, then strode into the silver twilight and the briny reek of exposed flats. From this angle, the United States looked barely discovered, with only a towering resort hotel and a smattering of lights visible on the fringe of a grand forest.
White Rock’s bayside strip of bars, restaurants, ice cream parlors and boutiques served as B.C.’s Riviera in July and August. In the offseason, it attracted an older set, like the graybeards Madeline found crammed into an oval alcove in Trudeau’s beneath photos of the Beatles cavorting, Sinatra in a gangster hat and a shirtless, defiant Jim Morrison. Their conversation was too intense for anyone to notice Wayne’s daughter order a margarita or to hear the bored bartender tell her the “gang of four” had expanded to the “gang of eight” over the past couple weeks and that the old boys were drinking twice as much as usual. She duck-flapped fingers and faked a yawn that turned real.
Madeline couldn’t see more than the back of he
r father’s head but could tell by his honking voice that he was flying on at least three vodka martinis. She eavesdropped on the laments about Vancouver’s traffic, the lack of hockey and the idiocy of the premier. Halfway through her second margarita, she realized she was listening for Sophie. The masseuse had obviously briefed her father on the trunk bomber, because right from the start he knew more than the papers about the type and amount of explosives, the feud between the BP and the FBI, how Brandon had, at the time, been driving home from the saloon in his own truck after celebrating his first pot bust—which Fisher told her cost Toby & Co. almost 300 K.
She’d saved the two messages Brandon left her, semicoherent rants about how he should have ten-three’d, how he was drunk and didn’t like to drink anyway, how impossible the paperwork was, how he’d talked backwards for the first time in years, then asking if she wanted to see his new dog and if she knew when Danny was coming back or—her favorite—how long “commas” usually lasted. His panicky voice triggered an old reflex to soothe him, though she couldn’t even bring herself to dial his number. She’d avoided him ever since Danny C wasn’t around to make his oddities so entertaining and endearing. He was the one she wanted to talk to, but after laughing over Brandon’s fluky heroics they’d have to catch up, and that conversation was predictable.
How’s med school? she’d ask.
Hard. Very hard. Still working at the nursery?
Uh-huh.
So, have you been looking out for Brandon?
Madeline sipped her cocktail and tuned in to her father’s powwow.
“We could hold them off for, what, ten minutes?” his pal Lenny Ribes asked.
“Maybe twenty.”
The men eyed the darkening bay as if checking for aircraft carriers or Marines crashing the beach.