by Jim Lynch
“Why are you doing this?”
Brandon looked up, startled. He’d forgotten Sophie had followed him out and was still sitting on the bank, silently filming.
“What?”
“Why do you do all this?”
He started coating another rock with red maples. “It relaxes me. And the better I get to know the land, the more it feels like something’s gonna happen. Is this it? No. Is it this? No. Is this—”
“You see things other people don’t see, don’t you?”
“How would I know?”
“I think you do.”
“Reality’s always more complicated than anybody says it is.”
“Who said that?”
Brandon frowned and looked around. “Who’s here but you and me?” He turned back to the river before she asked another question and he’d lost his feel for the rocks. He still couldn’t find enough flat ones for the cone no matter how carefully he assembled them. He tried again, drawn to the moment before collapse, then walked down the river to look for even flatter stones. He was on his eighth failed cone when a Townsend’s warbler broke his concentration with a high buzzy solo and he noticed his hands ached and he was shivering and hungry and it was almost dark. When had Sophie left?
He trolled through downtown Lynden with the heater fan on high, looking for food and a bathroom before remembering it was Sunday and everything was closed. He continued past the windmills; the old barbershop; the post office; the red, white and blue banners; and the stately elms flanking Front Street, noticing how their leaves had begun yellowing on the colder side of the street.
When he got home his mother was staring at photos on the dinner table. She was in all of them. On her father’s shoulders at the beach. Graduating from high school. Getting married. Smiling in her garden. Slow-dancing with Norm at their thirtieth. “I just want to be who I’ve always been,” she said. “Nothing fancy. Just me.”
“You’re still you,” Brandon said, draping a damp arm over her, which was enough to snap her back and tell him to shower while she cooked.
He chewed his pork chops to the bones and downed a bowl of red potatoes and a quart of raw milk before telling her what the leaves looked like underwater and that there were more signs of autumn the farther upriver he went. It was hard to tell if she was still listening. He heard her breathing and glanced at her crossed legs, her top slipper bobbing slightly, keeping time with her heart.
“I know I blew that test,” she said.
“No, you didn’t.” “Yes, Brandon, I did.” “Then it’s because you were nervous.”
After a long pause, she said, “A cat has twenty muscles in each ear.” “That’s right,” he replied. “And sharks have been around longer than trees.”
SOPHIE CAME HOME to two urgent messages from Wayne saying he absolutely had to see her. So she set up the camera and called him over for a drink.
He was twice as manic and bloodshot as usual, overgesticulating and making incomprehensible statements until he told her about getting zapped by the kite. “The world flashed into focus. And I felt no pain. None.”
“You’re a lunatic.”
“No, I’m just getting closer.”
“To death?”
“To what matters! You know what genius is, Soph? It’s the thrill of originality so profound it can surprise you, move you, even lift you. How can anyone hear Glenn Gould, really hear him, and not be moved? He read music before he could read words. Or Coltrane, who spent eleven hours a day doing nothing but scales. Nothing but scales, Sophie. Or Einstein! That weirdo changed our notion of time! Don’t just say it. Feel it! Changed our notion of time. Or Franklin! Ben might have been brighter than the next ten great men combined. These people were all too excited to sleep. Listen to this.” He pulled out a typed sheet of paper, glanced at it for several seconds, then set it aside. “Max Perutz,” he said.
Sophie shrugged behind the camera.
“Max Perutz was an Austrian who accepted the Nobel Prize in 1962 for discovering the structure of hemoglobin. P-e-r-u-t-z. And get this, just found this last night, this ridiculous genius apologized, in his acceptance speech, for not having made a more conclusive report.”
He closed his eyes and delivered the words from memory in a bad Austrian accent. “‘Please forgive me for presenting, on such a great occasion, results which are still in the making. But the glaring sunlight of certain knowledge is dull, and one feels most exhilarated by the twilight and expectancy of the dawn.’” He glanced up, his eyes bulging. “That’s all I want, Soph, the exhilaration of twilight. Even if it’s vicarious! The expectancy of the dawn!” He rose, his hands reaching for the ceiling.
“Sit down.”
“What?”
“Sit.”
“Where?”
“Right there.”
After he sat down, she flicked on the television and started the video.
“What the hell are—”
“Just watch.”
“Oh, please tell me it’s not Brandon. Please. Oh, sweet Jesus.”
“Shush. Just keep your eyes on this while you give me the latest on Madeline.”
33
SHE WATCHED Toby grunt out slow-motion push-ups in the grass next to the Impala while they waited for the chopper.
They were up to two flights a day, he’d explained as they bounced up logging roads into a quiet clearing ringed by blow-down and littered with shotgun shells. He had everyone working overtime to harvest and hump as many loads as possible while a suddenly tentative Border Patrol floundered in bad publicity. Curing times were cut in half. Growers and clippers doubled as smugglers. Five boats were in play now, and the ground crew tripled its daily volumes. But nothing moved product quite like a helicopter, the heaping backlog of B.C. bud flooding Seattle’s market and overflowing into Portland and San Francisco and Los Angeles.
She was still unsure whether Toby was educating, courting or trapping her. She wasn’t aware of any other girl in his life, but she’d lost the ability to talk to him and had gone from liking to tolerating to dreading his volatile affections and peculiar control over her. He’d told her, for example, exactly which skirt to wear today.
She wished like hell she’d never shared all Brandon had said over lunch. Toby’s mole hunt had turned maniacal and he immediately fired three people—a clipper, a smuggler and a grower—without explanation. It didn’t stop there. He interrogated everyone, even Fisher. She’d hoped the photos might help her escape now that her cover was blown. But the way he saw it, she was the only one he knew for certain wasn’t taking the pictures. That, however, didn’t stop him from grilling her about Brandon over and over again.
After their lunch, Brandon had left multiple messages. He wanted to go out to dinner, tell her more about his work and show her his new dog. His last call spluttered around before ending with, “Not to get mushy on you, my friend, but you’re well above average.” She vaguely recalled leaving him a drunken retort. He hadn’t called since, but it continued to unnerve her that he was such a fixture in Toby’s thoughts.
He was still pumping on trembling arms, his sweat-glistened torso reminding her of the skinned and headless hogs she’d seen in meat coolers. It took the woka-woka of the incoming helicopter to get him, purple-faced, to his feet. “Turn around!” he advised, too late to spare her eyes and nostrils from the sandstorm.
He popped the Impala trunk and speed-walked two black hockey bags to the chopper, its registration number, she noticed, covered with duct tape. After three more trips to the trunk, they were loaded and rising before Madeline had buckled into the backseat. “Ninety-three seconds!” Toby called out as the Impala shrank below them.
She couldn’t look down at the lunging greenery without reeling. “Aren’t we too low?” Her eyes still burned from the sand, but when she shut them her stomach lurched. Though she tried staring up into the calm blue, that only made her dizzy. Mount Baker wasn’t a relaxing sight either, naked from the hips down, melting back into
the earth.
“Welcome to America!” the pilot shouted, leering back at her legs long enough for her to see a bloodshot eyeball behind his mirrored shades and an eraser-sized mole nestled between his cheek and nostril.
Toby was barking information at her. They were traveling at 118 miles an hour, heading 43 miles southeast into Washington to a drop spot they and the catcher both knew by GPS coordinates. She’d never seen him so amped. “Our only no-fly days now are sunny weekends,” he yelled, “because of all the hikers and rangers.”
The helicopter dropped in and out of green canyons. “Aren’t we too low?” she asked again, louder.
Toby turned and grinned. “Gotta stay below the radar. At this elevation, we’re not here, see? We don’t exist.”
We don’t? She turned away from his little teeth.
Fifteen minutes later, he was jabbing a finger at a green clearing that looked no larger than a marina slip. They circled the spot twice, to see if the catcher had been followed, before falling into a stomach-lurching descent. Her mother had died instantly—and she’d never understood why that was supposed to comfort her. Who wanted to die without even a chance of saying good-bye?
The chopper leveled off into the tightest turn yet, then slowed and stabilized and settled on a surprisingly spacious and level pad forty feet from a green Toyota with a black canopy.
Toby told her to sit tight while he shuttled the bags. The truck driver looked as calm and respectable as a realtor showing property. The nameless pilot kept smacking his lips, trying to scare up saliva, and glancing at her legs.
Why had she been dragged along on this?
Toby climbed back inside, giddy and flushed, his minty B.O. filling the interior as he plopped down next to her and they lifted and twirled back into the canyon. Madeline shut her eyes until everything leveled again, and Toby was leaning his brawny torso against her, grinding her seatbelt into her pelvis and catching her mouth in mid-alarm with his own. She didn’t kiss him back, though that didn’t discourage his hand from sliding up her thigh.
She couldn’t find her voice, but then it came louder than she’d intended. “Stop!” She felt the helicopter dip and heard the pilot shouting. Just as fast, Toby leaned away and was talking rapidly. Apologizing? Complaining? She couldn’t make out anything beyond the revulsion pulsing through her. “I’m out!” she announced once she’d regained her breath.
He nodded. “We’ll talk next month.” While his voice was gentle, he wouldn’t look at her. “You can’t do this to me now.”
34
THE RADIO calls kept coming, a new one right on top of the last. The border-cam dispatcher spotted a drive-thru station wagon in fields near Hammer Road and three people running with duffel bags near Jones Road. Locals phoned in suspicious vehicles on Froberg and Peace Drive as well. The freshest tip was that a sedan carrying two people up Foxhurst exited with just one. Brandon was the closest agent to this north-south road, so he sped toward it.
He’d volunteered for the graveyard shift, thinking he’d stand a better chance of making it through eight hours without facing smirks, glares or sarcastic questions about the bomb-scare fiasco in the park. He was sick of trying to read people and didn’t want to talk to anyone except Madeline or his mom. The memory clinic had called his mother to say she’d scored poorly on their test, but that the results might have been skewed by nerves. They wanted her to take another exam. Though she was excited to get a second chance, Brandon felt his world slipping underfoot.
He followed Foxhurst toward the border, then veered off into dirt toward the big swamp. Setting out on foot, with night goggles now, he scanned the trees and sky for pulses of life. He reported to the supervisor that he saw plenty of tracks leading into the woods but couldn’t gauge their age, which triggered second-guessing grumbles about chasing swamp ghosts when so much shit was going down in the valley.
The swamp wasn’t even considered a smuggling route, as there was no easy route through or around it. Despite being larger than most lakes in the county, it was of so little interest that nobody had ever bothered to name it, though Brandon had always considered it the best place to find marsh wrens or Virginia rails.
He headed into the soggy woodlands toward the border, looking for tracks, trails or any warm-blooded life-form that flashed white in his goggles. It was hard to hear anything over the sucking sound of his boots, so he kept stopping and listening before pushing on again. On one break he heard the distant foghorn of a great horned owl, but forced himself not to reply.
He picked a fast route through scraggly trees and shrubs where roots offered enough traction to almost jog. Then he froze at the squawk of a blue heron that flushed a brood of mallards. Brandon scanned the air for rising ducks, but saw nothing. They were farther away than they sounded. A nighthawk or an owl might have rousted their bunkhouse, or perhaps they’d heard him running. Regardless, he strode toward the commotion until the swamp opened up. Here he stopped again and crouched, scanning the water and the sky and the water once more for motion, his gaze sweeping slowly across its surface. A raccoon or even an aggressive bass could have startled the birds, though he’d never seen a fish in this muck. He was about to resume wading when he saw something move. Through his goggles he could see its warm core. It was too large for a beaver or—then more ducks suddenly went berserk, and he lifted his goggles and shined a powerful beam on the muddy backside of a large man crouched hip-deep in sludge.
He appeared to be wearing army fatigues over a wetsuit that went up over his head, frogman-style, a large neoprene tube strapped to his back.
“Border Patrol!” Brandon shouted.
The man lunged deeper into the swamp. A car slowed on Zero, killed its headlights and glided past, its hopeful passenger within thirty yards of the line and charging for it. If he got there before Brandon got to him, he’d not only be free but could also stand on the other side and taunt him. This had happened to Dionne, who still fumed over it.
Brandon slogged diagonally away toward the shallower side, then galloped along its edge and, within fifteen yards of the border, holstered the flashlight and cut straight toward the man, charging through water up to his calves before finding a log to spring off. His foot slipped, so he got only half the launch he’d hoped for and splashed well short, chest-first. When he got up and sloshed ahead, the gasping man reached back into the top of his pack. That’s exactly when Brandon bear-hugged him as a truck howled past just twenty feet away on Zero. They both went underwater for a long moment, but this guy was so winded that Brandon soon felt like he was rescuing him. He practically dragged him to firmer ground, then slapped on handcuffs and propped him against a stump.
It was hard to see what this one looked like even with a flashlight. His face was painted green and black, his eyes wild, his mustache long, his mouth a noisy funnel. Listening to him wheeze, Brandon examined the backpack. Whatever had been in the top compartment was no longer there, but in the main sack he found plastic-wrapped bricks of money on top of two double-wrapped bags of what he slowly realized were handguns.
35
SHE FELT stapled to the recliner across from three young diggers on her tattered sofa, beneath which she’d hid almost $14,000. The floor between them was mined with Subway wrappers, Burger King sacks and Pizza Hut boxes, the coffee table an avalanche of grease-stained magazines and unopened mail. Why was her bedroom door wide open, or as wide as it could get without plowing into jeans, bras and towels? Her bed looked ransacked. Had she dozed off? She recalled snatches of conversation, but who with?
There were four of them now, sharing a joint and talking high on the inhale like kids sucking helium. The couch boys looked like they’d survived a dust storm together. Looking closer, she recognized one—Maniac—she couldn’t stand. The clean, older guy on the footstool was familiar, too: Duval. When he pitched forward to load a bong, a pistol grip rose from his coat pocket like an Afro comb.
What time was it, anyway?
When she’d mo
ved in almost two months ago, she never saw the diggers. That was how it was supposed to be. They entered from the rear, had their own toilet and weren’t even supposed to come in for water. Toby told her they were digging a subterranean grow twice the size of the one with all the ducks. He’d move her again, he promised, before a single seed was planted. Meanwhile, he said, just stay clear of the barn; the less you know, the more convincing your innocence. You’re renting the place to be near your sick father and have no idea what, if anything, the owner does in his barn.
But the less Toby was around, the more his rules were ignored, and he hadn’t spent the night since the helicopter fiasco. He’d apologized repeatedly for hitting on her so clumsily and had barely touched her since. But he gave her more work than ever, and she knew it wouldn’t be completely over until he let her quit.
Diggers shuffled in and out now as if she ran a halfway house for construction stoners. It was almost fun at first, having people to play with at any hour, though the crew kept changing. When one of them rotated his shoulders, she noticed the heft and snout of another gun.
“Everyone knows a CIA lab in Laos refined heroin in the seventies,” Duval began, as if answering a question. “Then they used Noriega, of course, to trade guns for coke with the Contras in the eighties. Remember that? And in the nineties, it’s undisputed that the agency supplied the camels to haul opium to labs along the Afghan-Paki border. So why would the U.S. allow the legalization of cannabis when it knows it would forfeit its ability to manipulate the world?”
“But like what does pot have to do with all that?” one of the dust-balls asked. “I mean, ya know, what does—”
“Everything starts with cannabis,” Duval explained. “Everything.”
“Amen,” Maniac said. “She gets too fucked up.”
Her eyelids fluttered. Who else could he be talking about?
“He needs to either get her out of here or …”