Border Songs

by Jim Lynch

  “If you saw her laughing, you wouldn’t say that.”

  “Huh?”

  “Plain.”

  McAfferty studied the picture again. “Whatever you say.” He shuffled the photos. “Here she is with her boyfriend again.”

  Brandon felt his face heat up. They were both smiling this time, though not at the camera. She still didn’t look happy. “Who is he?”

  “Tobias C. Foster.” McAfferty flicked the man’s forehead with a fingernail. “World-class douche who’s in with the Angels and arrogant as a senator. Trolls the border like he owns it.”

  “Where is this?”

  “Looks like a party to me. Date’s in the corner there.”

  “How’d we get these?”

  “What, you worried about her privacy? Evidently the Mounties finally turned somebody.”

  “What am I supposed to do about it?”

  “You just did it. Beyond that, hell if I know. She doesn’t have a record, and the fact they needed your ID says they don’t know shit. It’s all part of this new international kumbaya we got goin’. You know, sharing, collaborating, circle jerkin’. Gather they heard you grew up next door or something, and seeing as how you’re the new James Bond they probably hope she’ll tell you where all the weed’s coming across—not that the Canucks’ll do jack about it. Just talk to her if you get the chance—not officially, for God’s sake. You know, get caught up on when you two used to play doctor.”

  It was all Brandon could do to resist blurting that she wouldn’t even return his calls. “She’s real nice.”

  McAfferty smiled his mustache straight. “I’ll pass along that too. Yes, it’s Miss Rousseau, and she’s a sweetheart with a beautiful laugh.”

  HE SPENT the warm afternoon trolling Blaine’s simple grid for anyone who didn’t belong, illegals slipping into idling cars or mules trying to blend into a city so small it was hard for strangers to loiter convincingly no matter how disinterested they seemed. Clothes air-dried over railings on the forlorn apartments abutting Zero Ave., where three young men were smoking in the shade and trying not to look spooked when Brandon wheeled into the lot. A block away, a shirtless red-haired boy with a fishing rod stepped out of an abandoned school bus into an overgrown yard. He gawked but didn’t return Brandon’s wave, then began casting into the dandelions.

  Within minutes he was cruising spiffier cul-de-sacs, past happy children in bright shirts riding pricey bicycles on hosed sidewalks. He pulled over, opened his cell phone, scrolled down and stared at Madeline’s number as if it were some code he needed to crack. Danny Crawford would just dial her and the right words would pop out, but what would they be? He pulled out McAfferty’s photos again. It looked to him like she was in danger.

  He hated the claustrophobia of the Blaine beat, the lack of open space, the recurring sensation that he was hassling or scaring people. He breathed deeper after rolling across the railroad tracks onto the pier, with the windows down, taking in the low-tide stink of diesel and clam spit. The BP shared responsibility for policing border waters with the Coast Guard and Customs, but owned just one leaky Bayliner. That was something else the chief was working on, McAfferty told him, a navy to go along with his two-chopper air force, his growing army and his Big Brother cams.

  Brandon swept the harbor with binoculars, finding only year-round cormorants, hybrid gulls and a few mourning doves. Birds always were scarce when the heat rose, though he couldn’t remember it ever being this bad by late June. He was scanning the tidal flats, desperate for a sandpiper or godwit, when he noticed, midway out, a large tangle of marooned driftwood. He spent several minutes surveying the midsized logs, branches and what looked like curved planks, then reluctantly drove back into town.

  He feared he’d missed something important when he saw the overflow of BPs and Blaine Police at the Chevron, but so far as he could tell the only thing going on was a bloated city cop soliciting compliments on how much weight he’d lost. “You guys are killing me. Had to go down a shirt size here, in case you haven’t noticed. Where’s the love?”

  Brandon lingered in the laughter with his lopsided smirk, then slipped away unnoticed to ask the breast-feeding barista a question: “If you had an old friend who wanted to see you, but didn’t want you to think it was a big deal, what would you want him to say?” He took in her nearly invisible mustache, her askew eyes, her raspberry tongue flicking the chapped corners of thin lips.

  “Lunch,” she said. “Nothing intimidating about that. Dinner’s a date. Lunch is more like, ‘What ya been up to?’ But you can’t just call up and ask her out for lunch. That would sound like a date—and a boring one.” Before he could ask her to explain, her baby started warbling and she waved in her next customer.

  Now strolling through Peace Arch, Brandon tried practicing chitchat with strangers, though everyone he approached acted annoyed. He asked a backpacking drifter what stood out from his travels, hoping for an exotic image. “Nothing, brother. Nothing” was all he got. The only people willing to talk were the aspiring derelicts who’d chime, “Hey, big man,” as if they were pals because he hadn’t busted them yet. But he couldn’t sustain those conversations either, even if he parroted Dionne’s effortless queries about where they’d had lunch or if they’d seen a decent flick lately.

  He sat at the picnic table closest to the jungle gym and watched couples sprawled on blankets in the grass, chatting, touching, smooching or reclining in each other’s armpits, baring their smooth stomachs to the gentle sun. He finally dialed Madeline and froze after the beep. “It’s me,” he said finally. “Brandon Vanderkool again. You will call me…. Okay?” Another pause. “Bye.”

  He bolted from the table, furious with himself. You will call me. He heard a mother and her screeching toddler in the bathroom and saw two Mounties lazily smoking near the Canadian gardens. Beyond the arch, a line of southbound drivers gazed at him across the sloped greenery, his size pulling them in, some pointing him out as if they’d spotted a moose.

  He couldn’t stand patrolling the park a moment longer. The only significant smuggler he’d ever caught sneaking across there was a man in a wrinkled suit trying to use a wedding party as cover. So Brandon strode at a determined diagonal past the weathered concrete arch, which needed grass seed along the worn patch where tourists stood to get photographed, and cut briskly through the jammed lanes without looking at the drivers, then hurdled the blackberry brambles down the small bluff to the flats.

  Once he got his bearings he loped toward the storm debris beyond a dozen black-haired people, most of them shorter than swans, the smallest ones playing chicken with the waves, their black-and-white outfits flapping in the wind. Asians, probably Japanese or Chinese. He didn’t care if they were illegals carrying buds or nuclear devices, yet one by one they stopped whatever they were doing and faced the enormous uniformed man jogging up, his massive boots sinking well above the soles.

  Brandon waved and slouched, but it was no use. Whether tourists or illegals, foreigners always panicked at the sight of him. He pointed at the debris line behind them as they bunched together like swallows being chased by a falcon. After he slowed to a swift walk and offered his friendliest wave, one of the men raised his passport in surrender and started timidly toward him shouting, “Posspolt!”

  Too anxious to smile, Brandon waved off the eager little man without slowing or changing direction. He heard confusion and relief in what sounded like Japanese, then blocked them out altogether as he took in the trove of surf-rounded logs the size of his legs, waterlogged boat planks, several head-sized boulders and tangles of snapped branches and boughs, as if a ship and several firs had been mauled, milled and spindled by the sea.

  Almost everything would be floating again within an hour, so he quickly braced the heaviest, flattest logs with boulders and built a six-foot circular base on which he balanced more logs, filling any gaps with branches, and then stacked ship planks, their uniform flatness steadying the structure. Working faster now, the bi
gger waves closing in, he piled more logs, tucking and weaving branches and boughs vertically to tie them together, snapping them by hand and foot to get the sizes right, mixing ship planks with logs. There was plenty of driftwood to stack higher still, though on the water side he was already wading. Soon the tower was almost up to his shoulders, which were beginning to ache. When he next looked around, the Japanese were gathering driftwood at the lacy edge and handing the pieces to the posspolt man, who cradled them and waded above his knees to pass them to Brandon with an odd mix of urgency and gratitude.

  Waves lapped against the base, the structure—now over six feet tall all the way around—was creaking but holding. A child got stuck in the mud, but there was no commotion beyond an efficient rescue Brandon was only dimly aware of. Then came a sharp cry, and he turned from his project and focused on the tiny people below him on the flats. The man who’d helped him was bowing, then the others, even the women and children.

  Suddenly his radio blared. “Two-zero-five? You read? Two-zero-five?” He looked at the wet radio on his hip, back down at the Japanese, then up high to picture what it all might look like from above. Meanwhile, cameras were clicking. “Two-zero-five!” the radio barked. “Do you read?” White people were snapping pictures, too, and where’d they come from? Two of them looked familiar, though it would be hours before he remembered their names were Buford and Marty.

  Looking into the brightening sky, Brandon saw a stout black-and-white bird flapping toward him. Given its rounded, low-aspect wings, it was definitely an alcid, yet too hefty to be an auklet or a guillemot. As it passed overhead, he saw its dark belly and its long orange and yellow bill. A puffin—this far from the open sea? His mind flashed to images he’d seen, from above and below, male and female, mature and juvenile, breeding and nonbreeding, in the Peterson guide, Pyle’s guide and the Field Guide to Birds of North America. It definitely had the multicolored bill and bright orange legs, and as it banked back toward the bay, the blond hairlike pigtails on either side of its head swung into view. A tufted puffin! He pointed out this marvel, and the tickle in his throat morphed into a melodic humming.

  22

  NORM FLIPPED on the French station for his cows, though he doubted, regardless of what Brandon claimed, that this music relaxed them any better than country or classical. Insomnia had lightened Norm’s worries because he couldn’t keep his mind on a single fear long enough to generate genuine desperation. He’d played the freak rainfall alibi with the EPA lady, claiming his lagoon possibly had overflowed during the deluge. This wasn’t true, but was plausible enough to make her hesitate, which bought him another month of monitoring that might include aerial photography. She left him with a straight-faced warning that if her agency concluded his manure pond was leaking into the creek he’d have to patch it or build a new one or face fines up to twenty-five grand a day. He’d muttered his solemn acknowledgment, though it was hard not to giggle, his mind calculating that $175,000 a week meant $700,000 a month and $8.4 million a year.

  By the time Dirk Hoffman called mid-morning, firecrackers were already jolting the valley. Norm expected, once again, to be bullied into whatever Independence Day bluster his neighbor was pushing—a tractor parade, a hundred-dollar donation to the VFW or another invite to one of those parties where Dirk and Tom Dunbar dressed up like Founding Fathers to recite the Declaration. Instead, he was blindsided by Dirk’s observation that he hadn’t realized his tax dollars were paying Brandon to build forts on the beach, until he’d seen the paper. Norm yeah-yeahed through the accusation as he rifled through the mail for the weekly, flipping pages one-handed until he found the “photo of the week” on the next to last page. Christ. Dirk, tired of waiting for a reaction, shifted into bully mode. Would Norm care to join him and Big Tom in digging trenches along Boundary Road to stop the damn drive-thrus?

  “Love to, but I can’t,” he said, his humiliation rising the longer he looked at the photo of Brandon, in uniform, standing by a chin-high column of driftwood. No headline or words accompanied the picture, as if it either defied explanation or didn’t need any. When would the insults stop? Stremler assailed his cow care, the EPA doubted his honesty, the newspaper mocked his son and now his patriotism was being questioned. “I’ve got some calving ahead of me this afternoon,” he lied.

  “Can’t those cows reproduce without you, Norm?”

  Too worn out to work, too strung out to sleep, he wrote Jeanette a note and found himself in the boat barn for the first time in weeks, the drills, hammers, Sawzall, epoxy and varnish scattered exactly where he’d left them. He dusted off his rationalizations for the project, the most amusing of which was that it might give him honor. He picked up the bronze prop, feeling its heft, marveling once again at how the three blades retracted like wings on diving birds. He’d purchased it at his delusional pinnacle, thinking that if he used the best materials—$982 for a propeller!—he’d end up with a masterpiece. Now the fancy prop—a fixed three-blade at half the cost was more than adequate for any nonracer—felt like proof of his foolishness.

  The bare hull sat inside the thirty-by-fifty-foot barn like a ship in a bottle, with barely enough room for scaffolding. The dark, curved fiberglass shell had been intimidating at first, as if it were some massive black Buddha to worship, not hammer, glue and screw. But eventually he’d found a rhythm. The farm was stable those first several years when he’d committed two to four hours a day to her. His mentors were Chapelle and Steward, whose books taught him how to turn plywood, fiberglass, epoxy and teak into decks, cabins and bunks. Those days he woke up proud and excited about his secret—talking about it might jinx it—that something magnificent was emerging, this eleven-ton jewel inside his shabby barn.

  He gawked at the glossy hull from several angles, his thoughts merely fragments and splinters of larger worries and embarrassments until he settled on his latest vision of Sophie’s good-neighbor special. He reached up and slid his hands along the aft of the hull, caressing the flawless gelcoat, his mind going dizzy and pornographic, closing his eyes as his palms slid over the stern.

  “Hey!”

  Startled to the point of gasping, he stepped back and watched Jeanette examine the hull herself, holding her arms behind her like a polite waitress. His belly told him she was finally grasping just how selfish and delusional it all was. Then she turned and said, “I forgot how gorgeous she is.”

  He coughed mid-swallow.

  “Even unfinished. Really, Norm, I know you worry about how long it’s taking, and what your parents would’ve said, but none of that matters. Your mother never liked the way I prayed, remember?” She closed on him, her hands still behind her back, and he smelled the Samsara she used to wear to distract him. “How could there possibly be a wrong way to pray?”

  She pulled a magnum of Brut and two slender glasses from behind her back, then dropped her chin and peered up at him from beneath dark eyebrows, looking so gentle and forgiving that he swayed toward unconsciousness.

  An hour later, he leaned on an elbow above his wife. Her skin draped past her jawline but her expression, smile and whisper were all timeless.

  She’d picked him. That was the incomprehensible part. Cornered him with a smile on a random bar-hopping night in Bellingham. And even back then he was talking about building a sailboat that could go anywhere. Just saying it made Norm like himself more. Even his killjoy father called her a catch, despite her being a Volvo-driving, bra-less Bellingham environmentalist.

  Norm blocked out Dirk Hoffman’s afternoon fireworks and tried to enjoy the splendor of his youthful wife. But against his will he slipped ahead ten years to a vista from which he was looking back on this sliver of time, already wistful for now.

  BRANDON TRIED to ignore the red cloth flapping beneath a fish truck as his least favorite day of the year crackled and thumped toward dusk. It could have blown off the road and wrapped around the axle, right? But now that he’d seen it … He reluctantly put his rig in drive and passed a VW pop-top, a produ
ce van with Playboy mudflaps and a Ryder truck until he was tailgating the fish wagon.

  His goal for this holiday shift had been to hide out near the Sumas border crossing and avoid talking to anyone. He didn’t want to hear any more gripes or jokes about the border cams or the beefed-up patrols or that thing he’d made out on the beach. The flatterers and suck-ups, as Dionne called them, were just as annoying, buttering him with praise then sharing suspicions that were none of his business. Milt Van Luven pointed out how plenty of half-assed farmers suddenly could afford new tractors—“not to name names,” which he then did. Almost everyone, it seemed, was turning into a griper, a gossip or a suspect. Even Madeline.

  Before Brandon’s beach art hit the paper, Patera had called him in for a confusing chat about being more careful about how he passed his time. “You need to find things to do in the vehicle. People are watching you, understand? They’ve seen you strolling around graveyards in uniform. What am I supposed to tell ’em?”

  “Owls like cemeteries,” Brandon said.

  The chief exhaled through his nose. “Find things to do inside your vehicle. Listen to ball games.”

  “I don’t like sports.”

  “What about crosswords?”

  “I’m dyslexic.”

  “Spend more time in your vehicle.”

  Brandon stared at the flapping red cloth, which definitely wasn’t signaling an oversized load. He called Sumas Customs and was transferred to the truck window, then got cut off. He didn’t redial. It was almost certainly nothing, but now he had to check it out. Yet to do that he had to flip on his obnoxious lights and stroll up to the truck while the driver studied him in the side mirror.

  People routinely went pop-eyed on him, so he didn’t think much of the sweat bubbles on the man’s forehead when he stopped behind the driver’s window, at the don’t-get-shot angle he’d been taught, playing his part and forcing the bulky man to twist his ruddy neck. “Can I see some identification, please?”