Border Songs

by Jim Lynch

  Abruptly, the wind slackened and the rain began. It felt ridiculous, standing there with his kite in the grass at his feet, but he didn’t feel like leaving. So he sat down, let the rain soak him and hoped for a storm.

  What electrical activity there was looked hopelessly far away, but it was gradually getting gusty again. Fifteen minutes later he popped the kite up at the steepest angle yet, and it alternately dipped and rose as the sky growled. Wayne assumed the strands he saw protruding from the taut string were wind-related. The next time it happened, though, he raised his knuckle to the key.

  The zap reminded him of the shock he got replacing the washer outlet in the basement. But wait a minute. Why, exactly, was he on his back in the wet grass? He moved his toes, knees and hips, his fingers, wrist, shoulders, neck and lips, feeling his entire body loosen as he stared, clear headed and exalted, into the infinite vault of rain.

  Part Three

  30

  SOPHIE STITCHED together most of what happened by interviewing McAfferty, Dionne and Patera. But no matter how much she heard it still didn’t add up, exactly, as if somewhere in this chain of events the reaction had been cubed.

  The park evacuation actually went astonishingly well, considering that thousands of children had to be rushed from the grounds. Fortunately, the festivities were in their final hour and most troops were ready to leave anyway, especially once the curtain of rain started falling, which also helped the Blaine firemen extinguish the blazing house on Harvey Street.

  Patera was in the park, speed-talking on two cell phones long before the ATF finally showed up in matching jackets, looking like some aging softball team. “This is our release,” McAfferty heard the chief shout at one point. “Our agent found it.”

  Mac’s take was that Patera’s judgment had been warped by adrenaline. What amazing luck to have a bomb found by his very own crackerjack female agent—at a Girl Scout festival! You mean your agents aren’t all men? That’s right, folks. And not just any woman agent, but the mother of an innocent little scout at the exact same park that very afternoon!

  Unfortunately, the story wasn’t that simple. A lot was going on at once, and the potential connections were alarming if unclear. Everything was further complicated by early television deadlines and the time it took for the bomb squad to get there from Seattle.

  And while Patera did eventually admit to one small and two large mistakes, he swore he never intentionally misled anyone. He simply tried to keep everyone as informed as possible. The problem was the urgency of local TV reporters. One such rushed conversation, according to the chief, went like this:

  Has there been an evacuation?

  Yes.

  Why?

  A bomb threat was called in to the Blaine sector.

  What kind of bomb?

  A dirty bomb.

  A dirty bomb?

  Yes, which would typically mean explosives tied to radioactive materials.

  Has there been any confirmation of an actual bomb?

  This, Patera told Sophie, is where he committed one of his two large mistakes. He should have just said, no—or “Hell no!” as McAfferty later suggested. But what he said was, border agents have confirmed some radioactivity in an ice chest of interest in the park.

  What does the squad say?

  Nothing yet.

  And was there a firebombing of a nearby home?

  The local station did respond to a house fire, yes. It’s not clear whether it was arson.

  And that’s when Patera made his second big mistake, mentioning to a Seattle reporter that there was a simultaneous investigation—based on a panicky voice message from veterinarian Eugene Stremler—into the possible poisoning of several American dairies along the border. Patera’s third, considerably smaller, blunder was speculating aloud on the possibility of a curfew.

  A dirty-bomb scare that caused the evacuation of eight thousand Girl Scouts at Peace Arch Park was enough to lead a slow news day, especially with the kickers of dairy terrorism, a firebombing and an impending curfew. A war of sorts—what else could you call it?—had seemingly rolled over the Canadian border into the Pacific Northwest.

  Meanwhile, the bomb squad treated the picnic cooler as if it were about to explode. Nobody else peeked inside, as Dionne had, or even approached it at all. They taped off a quarter-mile perimeter, then rolled out a wheeled robot outfitted with a video camera and remote-controlled hands. It had a hell of a time with the cooler latch, which gobbled another ten minutes, while Patera fielded more frantic questions right before the coverage went live. It was almost an hour before the deliberative bomb-squad commander blandly declared that the “dirty bomb” amounted to two six-volt batteries, some unconnected wires and a sack of kitty litter, which was emitting enough trace amounts of uranium and thorium to trigger sensors. There were no explosives in the cooler.

  By then Patera had retrieved Stremler’s sheepish follow-up message that the cattle fatalities appeared to have been caused by excessive fermentation in bad feed. The torched house, the chief was belatedly informed, had been abandoned and condemned for years. Not a single town council along the border was discussing curfews.

  Bad news, though, spreads faster than good, so it took deep into the night before the truth began to cool the fear and confusion in the valley. There was a run on canned goods and ammo, and Tom Dunbar later admitted that he spent the night in a bomb shelter he’d built in the seventies. Others fired up ham radios and hid in basements, contacting one another and awaiting instructions. Many more went to bed numbed by the sensation that their country, their county, even their neighborhood, was under attack. And even those who got the full story before going to bed still found it hard to turn off the trepidation.

  Daybreak arrived with a blinding fog that lowered the sky to the tops of the silos and steeples, which might have gone unnoticed if not for a raucous, low-flying flock.

  Madeline jolted upright to what she assumed were Fisher’s guard ducks alerting her to an ambush. Norm awoke furious that the goddamn EPA was buzzing his farm again. Dirk fumbled for his bedside .357 with one thought: air raid. Wayne dreamt through the bedlam, sharing a joint with Franklin and van Gogh. Sophie reached for her camcorder and shuffled to the window. And Brandon lay in bed marveling at the loudest skein of Caspian terns he’d ever heard, picturing its loose formation plunging through the whiteout, the agile, black-masked, white-winged birds held together by sound and faith.

  31

  THE BAD Moon Saloon was overflowing before dinnertime. Even nondrinkers showed up, drunk on relief. The more people came, the faster word spread, and the drinking, smoking and laughter soon spilled out into the lot and beyond to where cars coagulated along the overgrown shoulders of H Street.

  Norm rolled up on the throng sleepless and unchanged. He’d had all he could handle of monitoring the health of his shrunken herd. He’d lost eight, including Pearl, and felt lucky that more hadn’t died, though the future productivity of some survivors remained unclear. The fact that Ray Lankhaar had lost twice as many meant that Norm and three other dairymen could piggyback on whatever redemption he and his Bellingham attorney bullied out of Palmer’s insurance company, which, knowing Ray, would dwarf the value of the cows—not that you could put a price tag on an animal like Pearl.

  He’d wheeled a backhoe to the corner of the property with the best view of Mount Baker and dug her a roomy hole. He dragged her over, dropped her in, covered her up and left her with a one-word eulogy: “Thanks.” Then he’d talked Roony into dealing with the rendering truck so he could skip that grim routine and grab himself a drink.

  He considered driving on when he saw the size of the mob, but he’d already lit his fuse with the vision of a whiskey twinkling on the bar top. And he’d always found it hard to roll past the Moon even when it was empty. It was the only bar that served the whole valley—smack between Lynden and Blaine, Holland and Iceland, or heaven and hell, if you listened to Lynden drinkers. He limped past youngsters who so closely
resembled older acquaintances that he nodded hello, getting nothing in return. Strangers, he remembered, can tell you how old you are without trying. The looks you get or don’t get let you know exactly where you’re at, where you’re headed and where you can never go again.

  Inside, it looked more like New Year’s Eve or V-Day than some Sunday in late August. He was relieved and pained to spot Dirk, Shit-to-Power and a few other geezers his age. Hell, they were all older than plastic, older than television. But everyone was there. The Erickson punks, of course, but even Alexandra Cole, for Godsakes, laughing so fast and hard that people were backpedaling. There were dozens more he didn’t recognize or else hadn’t seen since they were kids. Almost everyone was half his age or younger, radiant and impervious to time. He covered a stool without drawing attention to his first public drink in over a year, ordering a shot of Crown and a bottle of Pabst to grease the first round of greetings. And another shot as Dirk and the others sidled up. “Great to see ya, Norm! Luck’s gotta turn here somewhere, huh?” Even the great Morris Crawford sauntered over to give Norm his due, as if he’d done something heroic by poisoning his cows with cheap feed from some Everson yahoo. Part of it, he knew, was the Lankhaar factor. Hell, if Ray fell for the scam, anyone could. Chas Landers—his fifteen minutes already in the rearview—sidled up with whitened teeth and a heavy gold necklace to pay his respects. “Good for you, Norm,” he echoed, as if hobbling in for a couple Crowns showed remarkable courage, everyone nodding like they’d been waiting months, maybe years, to drink with their old pal.

  “What can ya do?” Norm said again and again with a gunslinger’s wince, not really knowing what he was implying, yet every head bobbed as if bad luck had made him profound. A Deming dairyman he barely knew asked about his boat, then whistled at its dimensions and grinned like he was one clever son of a bitch to build an ocean yacht in his back barn.

  Norm spotted Clint Honcoop and Cleve Erickson in the swarm, their bald, sun-fried heads shaking with laughter, as if they’d been pardoned and their arrests were all part of the great mix-up.

  People took turns impersonating grave newscasters from the night before while others spoofed Patera, giggling themselves blind after Dirk cautioned them not to underestimate the difficulty of what the chief had accomplished. “You have any idea how hard it is—how goddamn flexible you have to be—to get both feet in your mouth at the same time?”

  “Seriously, Norm,” Shit-to-Power bellowed from three stools away, “at your lowest, darkest moment yesterday you still couldn’t have thought terrorists had targeted your farm.”

  He leaned back into a do-I-look-nuts grimace and everyone busted up, the laughter out of all proportion to the humor.

  “Well, how ’bout ole Lankhaar?” Chas asked. “What was he thinkin’?”

  All Norm had to do was lift his left eyebrow and they lost it again, mirth radiating in a half circle around him. What was that? What’d Norm say?

  He felt his aches and worries dissipating. Even now, his straits clearly weren’t nearly as dire as he kept telling himself they were. He made a silent vow to go out more often and toss back a couple if for no other reason than to get out from under his self-pity.

  Chas bought him and a dozen others another round and waved off the gratitude, but Norm gripped his shoulder and pulled him close. “Why don’t you just admit you kept at least ten grand instead of pimping around like this? We all know what cranberries are selling for.” He cuffed Chas’s stiffening neck as if to complete some inside joke.

  “So what do you think’s gonna happen to your buddy Patera,” Dirk prodded, “now that he screwed the pooch?”

  Laughter bounced around again until the riot of bar noise rose so high that Norm almost had to shout. “We’ve all screwed the pooch a time or two, haven’t we, Dirk?” He threw back the free Crown and basked in moist smiles from women in their thirties and forties. Just three shots and he’d already drunk his way back two decades. “The chief was just trying his damnedest to do the right thing,” he drawled, dragging out the attention. “Only thing he did wrong, in my opinion, was to expect the media wouldn’t hang him out to dry. That and putting too much stock in the hasty conclusions of a certain high-strung vet we all know.”

  He felt his mouth running loose on him. Sober, he’d never take a shot at Stremler. That was one of the main reasons he didn’t drink in public anymore—the self-loathing that followed. His father was a different drinker altogether. He had two whiskey sours every night in the privacy of his den. The first for arthritis, the second to examine his finances and the rest of his world in a more measured light. Norm drank to get drunk.

  “You must be excited about the casino going up down the street,” Shit-to-Power said.

  “I don’t like anything about it, but I don’t blame ’em for a minute. If I was them, I’d stick it to us as hard as I could, then twist it a few times,” he said, suddenly borrowing Wayne Rousseau’s rant verbatim. “And this whole self-righteous, anti-casino crusade has a racist aftertaste to it, if you ask me.”

  There were grumbles but plenty of nods as well. “Right on,” crooned a slender brunette with a reflective sheen of sweat in the hollow of her neck. “Somebody finally had the guts to say it out loud.”

  Norm felt like an oracle. Through his tangled audience, he spotted Sophie making the rounds, lathering men with the intense close-talking attention he’d hoped she reserved for him. He looked back at the brunette, who was still nodding in his direction, and experienced a fleeting notion that Sophie Winslow was too old for him. His fourth Crown went down like apple juice.

  The next thing he knew, another young woman he didn’t recognize strutted through the bar, amid booming laughter, wearing what looked like a bomb. “Make way for the suicide bomber!” she shouted. As she got closer, Norm could see it was just a computer circuit board strapped to her chest and something like Play-Doh in her hands. She tried to offer a drunken speech but kept saying “tourists” when she meant to say “terrorists,” which doubled everybody over, including herself.

  “So what’s the story with that Space Needle bomber your boy caught?” Chas ventured once the moment passed, a payback bite to his voice. “Sure don’t hear anything about him anymore.”

  Norm started to answer but didn’t know what to say now that the conversation had swerved toward Brandon. And before he could coax words to the surface, he was distracted by the ever-present flash of Sophie’s camera, snapping photos of the Jack Daniel’s mirror behind him that reflected the side of his sun-spotted head and all the anxious pink faces hanging on his pause, leaning in for another hit of Norm Vanderkool, the room starting to list slightly, pleasantly, like a seaworthy ship in gentle seas.

  32

  BRANDON HAND-RAKED a mound of alder leaves, then tossed compact armfuls off a ridgetop overlooking the valley. The same southerly that swept the fog out that morning provided the lift, with the driest, largest leaves taking the longest flights. He did the same thing with sticks, then again with leaves, again and again, his mind freezing images at intervals from multiple angles.

  He’d called Madeline again to tell her about the park fiasco. And when she’d called back, he was so excited that her words didn’t sting until after she’d hung up. “Quit calling me,” she’d said in a groggy whine. “I’m not your girlfriend, okay? We’re not even really friends.” Her voice turned husky and distant, the phone slipping from her mouth. “You need to stay away from me.”

  What had he missed? Wasn’t her laughter real? And hadn’t she reached across and put her hand on his? But the more he thought about their lunch, the stupider his singing seemed. What was he thinking? We’re not even really friends. Her words moped inside him like a tumor. If he couldn’t read Madeline Rousseau, who could he ever hope to know?

  He found a calm stretch high on the Nooksack and waded to his boot tops with a heavy stick that he swung over and over against the flat surface, creating one misty rainbow after another until his feet were numb, his sho
ulders aching, and he was no longer thinking about Madeline or dead cows.

  He sorted riverside maple leaves by color, licking their undersides and sticking them to similarly colored leaves to form an eight-by-three-foot quilt fading from red to yellow. He found piles of orange birch leaves and threaded a hundred together lengthwise by their stems, then attached one end to a steep bank and unfurled the rest into an eddy below, creating what looked like a skinny orange waterfall until it broke apart and looked like nothing. He dug through more maple leaves for the largest yellow ones, unfaded by sunlight, and fixed them next to one another in the riverbed with small stones, fashioning an underwater stripe—the yellow all the brighter through the exaggerated and distorted lens of the clear water.

  Seasonal shifts had always unnerved him. Even after he learned how predictable they were, he couldn’t shake the sensation that he’d blink and miss some critical phase. He often heard that barn swallows assembled in massive departure flocks, but he’d never witnessed any grand exodus and feared he’d already missed out again.

  He gathered the flattest stones he could find and tried to construct a cone in the shallows, but it kept collapsing midway up. Then he studied the shed-sized boulders upstream and imagined thawing glaciers dropping them from their mile-thick floes, as his mother had described it, huge rocks settling randomly on the land like carrots and charcoal briquettes from melting snowmen. He covered several rocks, head-sized or larger, with wet leaves, and they looked like giant Easter eggs wrapped in tissue paper. He pulled his shirt off and plastered cotton-wood leaves over his damp torso and face until he was nothing but leaves from the hips up.