by Jim Lynch
Brandon stooped through the narrow passages, looking for what was injuring their right flanks, something sharp enough to bruise but not puncture. He noticed plenty of limps, too, that the cows weren’t able to hide. And all that was before he went into the sick barn, which was where his father found him petting 89.
“What’re you doing out here?” Norm demanded.
“You didn’t call the doc, did you?” Brandon asked, without looking at him.
Norm hesitated. “What’s he gonna say besides iodine, iodine, iodine?”
Brandon unshuttered two windows. Gnats and dust motes twirled in the trapezoids of light spreading across the floor.
“What’re you doing?”
He opened a third window, and the barn brightened evenly. “How many got it?” he asked, dropping to a knee to examine 43’s inflamed udder.
“Thought we had an agreement.” Norm sighed. “A dozen or so.”
“So what are the others doing in here?”
“Precautionary.”
Brandon inspected more infected udders. “It’s normal mastitis?”
“That’s right.”
“You back-flushing the—”
“Thought we had an agreement,” Norm repeated.
“We did.” Brandon looked away. “You were gonna take care of the cows.”
“This isn’t your concern for now, son.”
“What do the tank numbers look like?”
“What did I just say?”
Brandon heard a chain jingling on the latch to the insemination box, strode over and tied it off on itself. “Where are all the calves?”
“Where they always are.”
Brandon removed the rubber stop from a rarely used gate and secured it to the bare latch of the barn’s busiest one. “I only saw three out there.”
“That’s right.”
“Have some abortions?”
“A few.”
“Quite a few? Lepto?”
Norm nodded. “Looks like.”
Brandon glanced around for signs of rodents. “You vaccinating them before they’re freshening?”
Norm nodded again, almost imperceptibly, as if his head were getting too heavy to move. “You saw the Holstein calf, didn’t ya? She’s as healthy as they come.”
Brandon climbed a stepladder to shift the slant of a barn lamp, then tucked the ladder out of sight.
“Think I’m not concerned enough?” Norm asked. “That I’m not adequately alarmed?”
The question didn’t register with Brandon, other than that it was loud enough to agitate the cows. He once felt a calf’s heart rate double at the ring of his father’s cell phone. “You’re feeding calves milk from the sick cows, aren’t you?”
Norm’s jaw loosened and his palms flipped upward.
“Can tell by how the Jerseys are walking that they’ve got bacteria in their joints.”
“So I’m not concerned enough,” Norm said flatly. “Is that it?”
Brandon noticed half of the sick cows staring in the same direction. The slightest shift in texture, color or noise could spook them; something as simple as this bale wrap flapping halfway across the barn could drive them nuts. “Could I see your knife?”
“Well, I’m plenty concerned,” Norm told him. “And I’ve got a few other concerns too, in case you haven’t noticed.”
Brandon cut off the loose plastic, wadded it into a ball, then folded the knife, handed it back and looked away from the deepening creases in his father’s splotched forehead. “Either you call Stremler or I will,” he said, surprising himself.
Norm took a deep breath as if gathering a shout. “I’ll call him,” he whispered. Then, after a pause, “We need to talk about your mother.”
Brandon blushed. “Her mind’s just in a slump,” he said, repeating Jeanette’s favorite theory.
“She couldn’t even remember where she parked yesterday, Brandon. Walked around for an hour before she finally called.”
“Menopause alone,” Brandon said, rolling out another of his mother’s lines, “can make women foggy.”
“Not like this. I think we should get her to talk to somebody about it. We need to know what’s going on.”
“Some doctor putting a label on her won’t help. Memory’s a muscle, and she’s exercising it every way she can.”
“Well, I just think we need to encourage—”
“She doesn’t have Alzheimer’s,” Brandon half-shouted, then strode to the near wall, snatched Norm’s new red Darigold hat from its nail, flung it out of sight and marched from the barn.
AFTER DINNER, he drove out past Dirk Hoffman’s reader board—SPEAK ENGLISH—and cruised East Badger Road before rolling up Garrison to where the Sumas River curled around three oaks and dairymen dumped stillborns for roosting eagles.
He hadn’t more than spun by since he’d returned from the academy, and he’d never seen so many bald eagles there, almost a dozen per tree, fixed to limbs and stoic as gargoyles. He watched them perch, fly and land, chatting in high, delicate voices better suited for pigeons. Their ramshackle nests were the size of satellite dishes, as if designed to look even larger than they were. What did a bald eagle have to fear? Try to find self-doubt in those pale yellow eyes that can discern a snow goose’s limp from a couple miles away.
Brandon set up the birding scope he now carried everywhere, which Dionne touted as further evidence of his commitment to the job. He studied how amazingly comfortable the couples were with each other, then zoomed in on the largest female, her head a thousand miniature white feathers above a shimmering black vest and a bleached tail. She pushed off into effortless flight across the field and along the river before returning to the same exact perch, gripping it with talons as sharp as X-Acto knives.
When his gaze finally wandered, he noticed cottonwood seeds floating around his head like weightless snowflakes, then the snags, stumps, deadheads and boxy bales drifting down the muddy Sumas. The hay, with its bright orange twine, looked so fresh he figured it must have tumbled off a flatbed that morning, but he couldn’t think of a bridge or even a farm upriver likely to lose bales to high water. He wished he hadn’t spotted them in the first place because he soon counted six more. No telling how many he’d already missed.
The hay was followed by three conspicuously clean logs lacking the slimy green-black sheen they accumulate after a week in water. He glanced up at the eagles, reluctantly back at the river, then climbed inside his rig and drove down to the Lindsay Road bridge, where the water widened and shoaled amid stones the size of softballs. He parked and baby-stepped out on the slick rocks, slip-sliding to his knees in the central flow, to retrieve stranded or drifting bales. The weight of the first one felt about right, seeing how it was wet, but he felt plastic beneath the outer layer of hay.
He heaved seven bales onto the bank—at least one must have beached higher up—and ripped one open. Packed in thick plastic were compact buds the size of his thumb. He stalled for a moment, mumbling to himself before climbing the bank for a better view. Nobody was in sight, either in a car or on foot, and nothing but fields beneath the darkening clouds. Yet he knew people were despairing somewhere, the only glitch in their plan being that he’d decided to check out the eagles after dinner. “Got buds,” he reluctantly murmured into his Motorola.
By the time Agent Talley joined him, his mouth full of sunflower seeds, Brandon had found two more corked logs—Rick called them “coffins”—and the missing bale, too. After inspecting a bag of buds, Talley started photographing everything. “Chief wants to e-mail pictures to some congressman tonight. He’s absolutely loving this shit. You wouldn’t believe how jacked up he was when you called this in.”
Brandon was helping him stack buds photogenically in the back of his rig when Talley pulled a crisp newspaper from the cab and handed it to him. “Brought you something. Seen this?”
It wasn’t the same woman Brandon had stored in his head. She was turning toward the camera with the ambushed surprise you
see in Hollywood tabloids, her sprung eyes making her features even more dramatic. The photo was such a close-up that you could make out her individual hairs below the Seattle Weekly masthead and above the headline STUCK IN LIMBO HELL. “The Border Patrol calls her the Princess from Nowhere,” Brandon read, read it again, then stumbled into the next sentence.
“Heard some Seattle comic held that up last night and went, ‘Talk about the perfect date!’” Talley said, slipping into a stage voice. “‘No small talk. No past. No baggage. And we want to build fences to keep these women out?’”
Brandon read on, but the story wasn’t actually about her. It was about how some illegals were put in a detention center, given blue jumpsuits and issued numbers; the princess was 908, just like Pearl was 39. Most of them, it said, would wait in cells for months, even years—if the government didn’t know where to send them—before they ever got a hearing.
“You hear your bomber woke up?”
Brandon shook his head numbly, suddenly so queasy he had to sit down in the dirt. Rain started falling, abruptly and aggressively, as if the heavens were getting in on it, if a little late, trying to raise the river and help the smugglers float their weed.
“They say he’s fine, but I guess they kind of fucked up on identifying him.”
Brandon looked up into the rain. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said.”
“Well, who is he?”
“Fuck if I know.” Talley pulled on a hooded jacket. “Gonna give me a hand with these buds here?”
19
MADELINE’S DRIVER pulled away from the maple-shaded split-level with blooming daffodils out front and a basement full of flowering cannabis. It was the fifth crop she’d tended to that day without a glitch, no longer feeling any relief that it had all passed without consequence. This illicit work still induced more adrenaline than nursing orchids and lilies but it had, as odd as it sounded, become a job, though a lucrative one.
The more she learned about Toby’s empire, the less anxious she felt. Cars parked in front of every house. Bills paid in advance. Lawns mowed. Christmas lights hung through December. Even the birdfeeders were always full. The growing logistics, too, were reassuringly consistent: Tables and lights on wheels. Holes drilled through water-meter paddles, the power meters bypassed on any op with more than ten lights. Five to six crops a year. Fourteen to seventeen pounds per harvest. And not one of the twenty-three sites she’d nursed over the last two months had been busted or ripped off. Still, Toby grew clones simultaneously in different locations to guard against losing a popular strain all at once. And he only hired people without records, reasoning that first-time offenders got such light sentences they were less likely to turn on him. All of which made everyone more careful, especially because Toby paid better than the competition.
Her driver, Michael, a large UBC undergrad, chattered about his door-to-door recruitment efforts on the American side of the border. She pretended to listen earnestly as the beige minivan navigated Abbotsford’s rush-hour snarls until Essendene Avenue turned into Old Yale Road and ascended through suburbs, past freshly logged lots into neighborhoods of mock castles with vast stone decks, climbing still higher to where unique houses hung on blond cliffs and the hill narrowed to a rocky cone and the fresh asphalt finally ended in a broad, Lexus-jammed, clamshell driveway beneath a stilted glass palace.
The giggling woman standing by the door didn’t appear naked until Madeline got close enough to see her gooseflesh and paint smears. She swapped smiles, then glided through a candle-ringed vestibule into a high-ceilinged room with glass-jeweled chandeliers and a long oval table shoved against a wall cluttered with appetizers. Michael offered his hand and guided her past two more painted women—one so skinny that her hip bones flared like handrails—and through dozens of conversations and past strangers with intentionally messy hair to an even smokier room with a ceiling higher still and a massive diamond-shaped window overlooking the checkerboard of American farms. Her hand felt lost in Michael’s, tugging her toward a glass table behind which towered a loud, tuxedoed man with a gummy smile and a lime-green cannabis leaf stitched into his black cummerbund.
He spoke nonstop to four queues of people, interrupting himself with impersonations and asides, throwing his voice and answering questions with the agility of an auctioneer. Four tiny glass pipes billowed, the puffers smacking lips, closing eyes, wincing and squinting as if trying to remember something important.
“None of these are Vietnamese B-grade,” he told them. “This ain’t your father’s schwag. These are all pedigreed triple-A sativas or indicas or some mischievous blend thereof, cured for at least a week and usually two. You won’t see any freaky growths on these buds. No purple fungus here, my fellow stoners. Check out the crystal resin on these colas. You’re looking at the Bordeaux of buds.”
“Taste tests,” Michael explained, pulling her aside so she could see the featured buds displayed on gold platters. “Marcus,” he said, pointing at the man in the tuxedo, “loves these things.” The chalkboard menu read:
Afghan Dream
Time Warp
Burmese Incredible
Love Potion #2
Marcus was coaching the testers now to notice the various flavors, the orange mango chutney of one bud, the bubble-gum fruitiness of another, and to differentiate between the swift body high one strain offered and the soaring cerebral rocker of another.
Once Madeline ditched Michael she explored the noisy house on her own, taking in the neon sculptures and erotic ceiling murals, repetitive reggae pulsing from invisible speakers in every room.
All Fisher had told her was that it was a Drug War Party and everybody who was anybody in the B.C. cannabis scene would be there. A retort, he explained, to a flurry of news flashes, the first being Forbes’s report that indoor pot was now B.C.’s largest agricultural export, followed by the U.S. drug czar accusing Canada of flooding the States with “the crack cocaine of marijuana” and citing the Space Needle Bomber as proof of the link between drugs and terror. “If you buy B.C. bud,” he concluded, “you are sending a check to the terrorists.”
Madeline wished she’d showered and changed. Nobody else looked like they’d just come from work. Searching for a bathroom, she stepped into a den and found six men and one woman slouching on green leather couches and loveseats, listening to some mohawk in a wheelchair. “We’re all just animals,” he said, his voice reminding Madeline of pull-cord dolls. “I mean, we’re essentially advanced squirrels, aren’t we? Not as agile, but smarter. Or maybe glorified possums with big brains? Well, pretty big.” He cocked his head toward the lanky redhead sucking gently on a bubbling glass bong, smoke rising toward her exaggerated lips.
“Actually, we’re fancy monkeys,” said a man with a braided beard and an eyebrow ring. “Fancy monkeys clinging to an average planet orbiting a dying star. Who said that, anyway? Chomsky, or was it Leary? Whoever. Doesn’t matter. It’s as true as—”
“Hey!” Fisher crossed the room, smoke curling from his fingers, the spotlight swinging from him to her. “How ya like Marcus’s crib?” He unfurled his spindly arms as if to hug her, but to her relief simply passed a joint. She inhaled hot smoke while Fisher introduced her as “Dahlia,” as he’d said he would. To her unease, they all nodded knowingly, including the big-lipped redhead who walked the loaded bong over. Madeline wasn’t interested, but didn’t want to seem rude, so she sucked the flame into the bud-packed bowl and gave it a steady pull until the ashes plunged. Her vision blurred on the exhale as she strained to read the sign on the wall: OVERGROW THE GOVERNMENT.
“Toby here?” she asked once Fisher escorted her out.
“Doesn’t usually show up at these sorts of things,” he whispered. “But he’s got business here tonight, so we might see him.”
He led her upstairs into what felt like a trade show, complete with T-shirts, banners and bumper stickers for sale. In one corner, a television was replaying drug-czar sound bites. In ano
ther, a manic bald guy was barking out the virtues of vaporizing hash as an “alternate ingestion strategy.” People lined up to get vaporized while a gap-toothed, green-haired woman sold grams and seed packets with the bored efficiency of a blackjack dealer. Another woman was pushing a petition. “Decriminalizing isn’t the answer,” she insisted. “It still forces everything underground.” Men bobbed in agreement, lost in her cleavage.
Fisher pointed out a refugee from the U.S. drug war and veterans of the B.C. drug courts, including an old attorney milling around like a proud grandpa. The King of Cannabis himself floated up the stairs a moment later, his head tilted back and nostrils flared. The visionary who’d invented the Marijuana Party and recruited candidates to run for everything from premier to the Vancouver school board had an entourage that included Toby, in corduroy shorts and a bowling shirt. His tanned forearms rippled as he opened a bottle of artesian water and handed it to Madeline. He’d barely made eye contact before he laid his left hand on the small of her back, gently steering her away from Fisher.
People rose from couches and beanbags to meet “Dahlia,” whom Toby introduced as one of his top growers. Poached eyeballs settled on her respectfully, as if his flattery made her not only famous, but also desirable. They asked cloning and curing questions and whether she agreed that seabird shit was the best fertilizer until Toby grabbed a decorative sword off the wall and whirled it around with such grunting intensity and precision that it left Madeline sweating and others cheering. He put the blade back, his sword hand returning to the skin right above her belt, a disconcerting numbness creeping south from his fingers. He suddenly excused himself and stranded her with the king and his acoloytes, who took turns speculating on what effect the drug czar might have on local and federal politics and their legalization crusade.
The king offered no opinion until he finally decreed: “It’s Prohibition all over again. That eventually ended because it was impossible to enforce, because alcohol was everywhere.” He lit a joint the size of a breakfast sausage, and everyone waited for him to finish popping smoke rings. “A year after legalization, every stoner will grow an ass-load of weed and stick it in pickle jars like they used to.” He held the joint at eye level, rolling it between thumb and forefinger as if focusing binoculars. “And people won’t be able to smoke all they grow. It’ll go moldy long before they can suck it down. And they won’t be buying pot, either. Please get that through your heads. They will not be buying pot. Maybe one percent of the Canadians now making a decent living at it will still be in business, okay? The best will survive, yes, but nobody will be building these McMansions—not that I don’t love yours, Marcus. Trust me, this gold rush will pass, and that’s a good thing. Yes, there eventually will be Amsterdam-style coffee shops on every block in downtown Vancouver.” A cheer rose up. “And yes, people will be cooking with cannabis, breaking up buds, sprinkling them on salads and smothering them with balsamic.” He licked his dry lips, and everyone but Madeline laughed on cue. “And the persecution of people who enjoy cannabis, my friends, will finally be over. It’s not if, it’s how fuckin’ soon. And you know the biggest reason it won’t happen soon enough?”