Border Songs

by Jim Lynch

  “What’s the problem?” the driver whined. “I just went through all this.”

  “Where you going?” Brandon asked, following Dionne’s advice to always ignore a suspect’s questions.

  The man snapped that he was headed to a couple grocery stores in Bellingham, that it was bad enough having to work on the Fourth without getting hassled.

  Recognizing something in his pout, Brandon read the name on the license again—Gregory Olin Dawson—and pulled up the image of a slender, effortless golf star who was nicknamed “God” and sauntered the halls like a man in slippers, talking to girls with big teeth. “You went to Lynden High.”

  “That’s right!” The sulk turned to jubilation. “And you’re Brandon, aren’t you? Couple years behind me?”

  “Until I was homeschooled.” Brandon handed the license back, wishing he hadn’t pulled God over and dreading what was left of this conversation.

  “Well, hey, good for you!” Dawson said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Getting on with the Border Patrol and all. That is so cool. Good for you.”

  Brandon considered the tone, the words, the coffee-stained smile. “Would you let me show you something?” he asked, back on script.

  “What’s that?” Dawson grimaced again, mouth-breathing. “Got a truck full of salmon here, and I’m already running behind.”

  “Grab the keys and step out for a sec,” Brandon said, as casually as he’d ever delivered the line.

  Dawson slid reluctantly onto the street, looking twice his high-school weight, his khakis stuck to his thighs.

  “You’ve got some cloth dragging under here,” Brandon told him, pointing.

  “I do?” Dawson half-squatted to see for himself.

  “I’ll get it for you.” Brandon dropped to the pavement, leaning on one hand, and saw the cloth was actually a dangling sleeve and above it was a plywood platform wedged below the axle. He craned his neck to watch Dawson’s restless sneakers, then yanked on the sleeve. Hearing gasps and whispers, he slapped the board hard, twice. “Everybody out.”

  “Who the hell are they?” Dawson sputtered as Brandon brushed the dirt off his uniform and radioed it in. “I mean, really. Really! What the hell are they doing under there?”

  Brandon asked him to stand behind the van on the shoulder, then helped four thin Chinese women emerge from their hot little shelf. They squabbled at a volume that could be heard for blocks, their noisy anguish focused on the flush-faced golfer.

  Dawson started babbling even faster. “Seriously, I don’t have any idea who these people are. Not a clue! I drive the van, okay? That’s what I do. I don’t look underneath it, ya know? Can I call ya Brandon? I mean, why would I look under there, Brandon? Who would … I’ll be damned!”

  Brandon handcuffed two women and cinched PlastiCuffs on the others. He didn’t know what to do with Dawson, who was rattling off the details of his route and where and when these women might have snuck in there, stressing repeatedly that he’d never driven this particular van before. The longer he talked, the more believable he seemed, so Brandon tuned him out, flinching along with the percussion of nearby firecrackers until McAfferty rolled up, his spinning lights adding to the spectacle.

  Mac listened to Dawson’s increasingly breathless alibi, grunted sympathetically, unhitched a pair of handcuffs and said in his most understanding tone that there’d be plenty of time to discuss everything at HQ.

  The women continued shouting at God in Chinese as he ducked into McAfferty’s rig, their stretched faces, slit eyes, childlike bodies and odd vocal rhythms filling Brandon’s memory banks.

  SOPHIE POURED MORE WINE. “Still worrying about Maddy?”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “Have you always worried about her?”

  “Ever since she declared war on normalcy.”

  “When’d that start?”

  “A year or two after her mother died. Her sister just got more cautious and selfish. Went into the investment business and married an anesthesiologist who makes me yawn whenever he walks through the door.”

  Sophie emptied three envelopes full of photos onto the table. “And Madeline?”

  “Opposite story. I don’t know, maybe she needed a mother more. But suddenly she got extreme about everything. Wouldn’t go sailing unless it was blowing thirty. Backpacking was too mundane, so she scaled cliffs with some longhair named Harley who drove a pickup with a sticker that said LIVE TO CLIMB, CLIMB TO DIE. She’s obviously drinking and drugging and has no interest in college or knowledge or anything. She’s still sweet, don’t get me wrong, but the people I see her with, they all look so extreme, and I find myself wondering what people like that do for sex.”

  “Probably kiss each other very, very gently,” Sophie whispered, arranging the photos in neat rows.

  Wayne started to say something, then caught himself and leaned forward. “What’s all this?”

  “What do you think of ’em?”

  “I have no idea what to think. What are they?”

  “Pictures of Brandon Vanderkool’s work in chronological order.”

  “What do you mean, his work?”

  “Just that.”

  “He did all—”

  “It’s his temporary art.”

  “Wha?”

  She reached over to the side table for the weekly. “You heard about the nest he built on the flats, right?”

  MADELINE FLOATED on three tequila shots through crowded Peace Arch Park with Toby, Fisher, Marcus and the King.

  She took in the whistling skyrockets, the fizzling sparklers and the colorful fireballs arcing from cannons or buzzing on the ground. She sprinted ahead when an errant glow-in-the-dark Frisbee spun into view, trying to catch it, laughing when she couldn’t.

  In the month since the big party, she’d tended more grows than ever. The work kept getting easier, and the cash was pouring in faster than she could deposit it. Most days, her life felt exciting and daring. The catch was that Toby increasingly acted as if he owned her, especially now that he’d set her up just down the street from her father in the old Damant house. To which he had his own key.

  Just now, for no apparent reason, he kissed her too hard on the mouth, then excused himself to a picnic table where three leathered bikers seemed to be waiting for him.

  “The King’s gonna make some sort of statement before the show,” Fisher whispered to her as they approached the arch.

  Madeline glanced around. “To who?”

  “Hey, there’s television cameras here. Don’t kid yourself. And knowing him, he’s just itching to get arrested.”

  Madeline scanned the crowd, then saw one large camera on a tripod and several others on bulky shoulders barreling toward them.

  “We stand tonight in solidarity with other B.C. cannabis activists to protest America’s corrupt administration,” the King announced amid the crackling family fireworks. “Its brazen disregard for Canada’s sovereignty is now so complete it stations drug agents on our soil, which amounts to an undeclared war.”

  To Madeline, this was comic theater, but nobody was laughing. Two more cameras arrived as the crowd swelled and the legalization rant droned on. She watched Marcus break up a bud and roll and light a joint as casually as if shelling pistachios. He handed it to the King, who took several quick inhales and held his breath behind a long smile before popping sloppy smoke rings at a camera.

  “You see where Time wrote that the world’s best pot comes from Vancouver?” he asked playfully. “So evidently some of you reporters must be tokers, since how else would you know?” He handed the joint back to Marcus, who snuffed it as another cameraman closed in as well as Mounties and BPs.

  Madeline looked for a head looming above the others, both dreading and hoping to see Brandon, but then stepped back, not wanting her face to pop up on her father’s television as Marcus handed the King an American flag the size of a large bandanna. He dutifully held it up and casually lit it, the boos and jeers followe
d by a collective gasp when the right arm of his brown angora sweater ignited too. The King was still smirking and unaware until Fisher ripped off his jacket and tackled him with it.

  HE REAMED the barrel of the .22 bolt-action Remington he hadn’t fired in decades, his hands surprisingly steady. Might as well do it now, he figured, before losing the gumption.

  He’d watched his father clean it so many times. You couldn’t talk to Henri Rousseau while he did it, either, as if the wrong comment might set the thing off. He was like that on most things, his father’s goal being to get from A to Z with the fewest words possible. Wayne trudged upstairs to peel back the pain.

  “Your daughter ’round?” The question had been posed so casually that he hadn’t made much of it. Having talked to the same undercover Mountie a dozen times, he’d never liked his mildewed smell, but he wasn’t bad company for a cop whose office was an old Dodge truck. “Madeline livin’ here these days?” he’d asked again, as if small-talking, the implications snowballing a few hours after the fireworks ended.

  Wayne changed into boots and pants he hadn’t worn in years and found a moldy ankle-length raincoat he didn’t mind throwing out, then shuffled outside, rifle in one hand, flashlight in the other, the George Bush mask Maddy’d given him years ago tucked flat against his stomach behind a belt on its tightest notch.

  He crossed the ditch at its shallowest, narrowest point near the Vanderkool house. He’d bumped into Jeanette a week earlier and couldn’t stop thinking about her. It had always defied some universal law that such a bright, pleasant woman chose to stick by Norm. Nowadays, the gaps in her thinking were as apparent as slats in a fence. She’d start talking about immigration reforms and end the sentence on the subject of glaciers hauling boulders north and south. “We’re new. The land is new. Everything about this place is new,” she’d said. “You can’t shut the door even if you want to.”

  He cut diagonally across Boundary Road, tiptoeing past the Moffats’ depressingly tidy property—who could devote his life to running a leaf blower?—and the Crawfords’ grassy driveway to where Boundary bumped into Assink, the coordinates of the newly installed border cam he could see from his deck.

  The camera, just like the thirty-one others he’d read about, was perched atop a metal tower twice the height and heft of a telephone pole and ten times as obnoxious.

  He slid the mask on before entering the camera’s range, which made it hotter and harder to see, then trained the flashlight on the camera until the lens swiveled toward him. When he flipped off the safety and raised the rifle, he heard his father telling him to hold his breath and squeeze the trigger as slowly as possible.

  The discharge was quieter than he’d remembered. He reloaded and backed up to improve the angle. Aim. The second shot felt and sounded true. Still, he loaded and fired a third, missing badly. He scooped up the cartridges and scampered down the cool street, hearing the whine of a vehicle clearing the H Street hill just as Norm’s porch light flashed on.

  Milking time already? When the car sounded like it was already on Assink, Wayne abandoned plans to cross near the Vanderkools’ in favor of the wider span in front of the Crawfords’, where his stumble-hop turned painful and splayed him on the Canadian slope of the ditch, scraping the knuckles on his rifle hand, his head finding something soft to bounce off.

  23

  IT LOOKED like an indoor Christmas-tree farm at first until she inhaled the hot sticky air and realized she was standing inside a cannabis factory the size of a Wal-Mart.

  Toby monitored her every reaction while explaining in a confidential mumble that he and his associates had rented the mothballed brewery eleven months ago through a make-believe coffee company. Seedlings were grown in old beer vats ideal for controlling moisture and heat. The ventilation system filtered odors, the tile floors provided drainage and a thousand lights were hooked to computers.

  Half an hour into the tour, Madeline’s hangover came to a clammy boil as she waited, out of earshot, for Toby to finish chatting with three deferential tattooed men. She still didn’t know what he considered her—top grower, confidante, lover or simply convenient front woman until his crew finished digging an underground op beneath the Damant barn. But why did he bother with that when he had something like this? Her vibrating phone interrupted her speculation, so she turned and quietly answered.

  “Madeline?”

  “Who’s—?”

  “Brandon. Brandon Vanderkool.”

  She waited.

  “Your dad shot out one of our border cams last night.”

  “What?” She checked on Toby’s conversation, where two others had joined in.

  “He looked like a ghost, but it was definitely him, raising a rifle and pow, out goes the light. Actually, two shots,” he said breathlessly. “Pow … and then pow again. I didn’t say anything, though. What would you say about lunch?”

  “Huh?”

  She looked up in time to find Toby striding purposefully toward her, thigh muscles popping, arms swinging, the other men watching him, then her, then him again as he slit his own throat with an imaginary blade.

  “Next Wednesday at McGiver’s?” Brandon said. “Noon or whenever you—”

  “Okay.” She cut off before Toby grabbed the phone, checked the last number—Restricted—and unclipped the battery. He spoke calmly, levelly, but his eyes were hot. “You know it’s easy to turn these things on remotely, and then they can hear everything. You know that, right?”

  She gently retrieved her phone and battery from his strong fingers and put them in separate pockets, her body encased in sweat.

  He crowded her. “Who was it?”

  “My father.”

  “He’s got a restricted number?”

  “He’s like that.”

  “What’d he want?”

  “He’s ill, remember?”

  “So, what’d he want?”

  “Milk and Motrin.”

  “Sure hope you’ve got all the bad decisions out of your system.” He’d lit into her just that morning about getting too drunk too often and being stupid enough to be caught on television with “those flag-burning idiots.” He gestured impatiently toward the drying room and more tattooed men, his thick fingers welded to her lower vertebrae.

  After a long silence, during which she scrambled to make sense of Brandon’s call, she brushed his hand away. “I thought you said you’d never work with the Angels.”

  It wasn’t clear he’d heard her until a dozen steps later. “There’s bad Angels and good Angels. I had to jump your shit for their benefit, all right?”

  He led her past labeled drying racks and four sallow workers busily vacuum-packing buds with some industrial-looking gadget Toby swore cost $3,000 and was worth twice that. “People want fresh pillows,” he said, turning it into a marketing jingle. “The buds don’t get crushed. Even the resin doesn’t fall off.”

  Three middle-aged women appeared to be aggressively washing clothes by hand in the next room, engrossed in their labor, pouring liquid through cloth filters into a bucket, again and again, a mound of pot leaves on the table next to them. When Toby asked if there were any dry samples, they pointed blankly at a tray cluttered with crumbly wedges the color of wheat. He packed a glass pipe and offered it to Madeline, who shook her head. “Be a sport,” he said. “Does the body good.”

  She took a couple puffs and tried to imagine having lunch with Brandon.

  Toby thanked the ladies, who didn’t look up, and then led Madeline through heavy double doors into the largest room yet, with a vast expanse of more flowering thick-leafed pot plants than Madeline had ever imagined. He pulled out two pairs of paper sunglasses, and they strolled beneath the fierce lights through the indoor forest, the air wet and thick with the reek and sting of chemical fertilizers. “You’re looking at what might be the largest indoor grow in the world,” he told her.

  The hash was kicking in so hard that she couldn’t stop smiling, although she fully expected dozens of polic
emen to burst into the room slinging rifles like the one in her father’s basement.

  “Now you can see,” Toby said, offering his warm, meaty hand, “why we need to come up with new methods of getting much bigger loads across the border.”

  24

  JUST BEING in public, especially in church, felt like a bold statement to Norm. Doin’ just fine, thank you very much, was what it amounted to. A hard patch, no doubt about it, but we’re makin’ it.

  It was easy to pinpoint the source of his newfound optimism. One of Pearl’s most productive offspring had delivered a perfect calf, and bottle-feeding a stunning new Jersey—maybe the next Pearl—cast a hopeful light on everything, even if the mastitis hadn’t completely stabilized yet and the feds were monitoring his property from aircraft and his wife was having a run of bad days. A healthy new calf was a healthy new calf.

  The pews were unusually packed, as if church were needed more now than ever. Even Sophie Winslow was singing hymns she’d clearly memorized despite the fact that she drove a Subaru with a Darwin insignia. Still, Norm’s mood soured, as usual, when people lined up for the stale wafer and cheap wine, hands clasped over their genitals like soccer defenders. Doc Stremler, of course, stood right at the front, another showy display of his superiority. Dirk Hoffman was close behind in cowboy boots, tight Wranglers and his signature red, white and blue shirt. Chas Landers was there too, looking as benevolent as a monk. But Cleve Erickson? Out on bail, apparently. Patera told Norm that he hadn’t put up any argument at all and even offered the agents coffee. While everybody knew his sons were punks, Cleve was one of the last true dairymen and Norm had never questioned his word. Now he was just a name and a mug shot next to “Conspiracy to Aid in Smuggling Contraband.” Norm had nodded earnestly when Roony insisted Cleve was innocent. How could he know what his hooligan boys were doing with those smugglers cutting through his farm? Well, Norm knew, and others, no doubt, did too. Nobody seemed astonished when Gil Honcoop got busted on the same charge, not after he’d made such a stink about the Minutemen. And June and Cleo Schifferli, caught three days prior with twenty-eight pounds beneath fertilizer sacks, weren’t missing communion either. Posting bail apparently wasn’t that big a deal. Then Norm noticed Dr. Dawson, dressed even more vainly than usual, a silk handkerchief flashing from his breast pocket, as if he were hoping to dress his way out of his son’s disgrace for smuggling Chinese women into the country beneath a fish truck. Well, good for him, Norm thought, right up until the dentist threw him a look that suggested he should be embarrassed about his own son.