Border Songs

by Jim Lynch

  She couldn’t hear what he said next, but then Duval added, “Well, she didn’t get here by keeping her legs crossed.”

  By the time her eyes snapped open Toby had sprung through the front door, shadowed by Fisher.

  “Let’s go,” Fisher told the diggers, and Toby rummaged around in the kitchen for a clean water glass. “Drive slow.” He wheeled a hand to get them moving. “And stay off Zero.”

  The dustballs exited swiftly, as if trying to slip out before Toby finished hand-washing a glass to his satisfaction. He then opened two windows and stood before her, sipping water as if it were gin. “Told you not to party in here, and didn’t I say there should never be any bud on the premises? Could’ve sworn I said that.” He turned to Fisher, then swung back to her. “Or am I losing my mind?”

  “You’d know better than I would.”

  He stared at her, then strolled to her bedroom, nursing the water, pushing the door and looking down at the laundry. “You better start taking better care of yourself.”

  “Or?” she asked, still startled by what the stoners had said. She cleared her throat, realizing she might cry, and held out callused and lacerated fingers. “Who else is gonna grow your goddamn plants?”

  He raised a hand of his own, as if to slap her, then just said, “Please.”

  Her payouts were half of what they used to be. He blamed a slumping U.S. dollar but, according to Fisher, it had more to do with Vancouver ops getting ripped off, which had only intensified Toby’s mole hunt.

  “A little birdy just informed me about something.” He rocked his skull from side to side like a prizefighter. “Your clumsy childhood pal, as you’ve described him, intercepted another load tonight. Imagine that. A big one, too. An important one.”

  “Three hundred and twenty thou,” Fisher added, “and thirteen—”

  Toby cut him off with an eyebrow, then examined her. “Talk to him recently? No? Well, you might ask what tipped him off because there were no sensors, no cameras, no nothing. We’ve never lost a load through that swamp before. So he obviously got a tip, eh? Or are you gonna suggest it’s just dumb luck again?” He stepped closer, head swiveling, eyes wiggling. “I didn’t realize you’d dated Monty. Some coincidence, isn’t it? Your clumsy pal stumbles upon a smuggler you went out with?”

  She glanced at Fisher, who wouldn’t make eye contact, and cleared her throat again.

  “Having trouble speaking?” Toby asked. “Get you some water?”

  “I haven’t talked to Brandon since that lunch I told you all about.” It was hard not to slur.

  Toby shaped his left hand like a pistol and pointed it at her chest. “If your friend’s as unassuming as you say, why not just ask him where he’s getting all his tips? I should think you’d be motivated to help me find that answer.”

  “I’ve got a couple questions of my own,” she rasped.

  “By all means.”

  “What happened to your no-pesticides policy?”

  Bruised skin twitched beneath his left eye. In the background, Fisher was patting the air and shaking his head, mouthing, not tonight.

  “And what about your no-weapons policy?” she asked. “What happened to that?”

  “Let me know what Brandon says,” Toby said after a long stare, then led Fisher out the door.

  A half hour later, she braced herself against the kitchen sink and listened to her messages. One from Nicole reminding her of their father’s birthday party. The nerve. Another from Helen at the nursery, wondering if she was still sick. Her father had called as well, “just checking in,” trying not to sound worried. She looked through the window and across the border to where the Crawfords’ and the Moffats’ lights were burning. Beyond them, the Vanderkools’ porch bulb. And was the basement light on too? She splashed her face and chugged water from the faucet, rinsing her mouth and soaking her hair, then walked outside.

  36

  BRANDON PAINTED from memory. He started out realistically, then veered toward the abstract until only what had to be there remained, a green-black face with domineering eyebrows and a long mustache. He painted fast, a productive frenzy coming on.

  His mind shuffled images from the night: the mallards’ hysterics, the smuggler’s heaving wheeze, the chief’s giddiness afterward, bursting disheveled into the bullpen, wearing jeans and his wife’s reading glasses, brainstorming on a catchy nickname for the smuggler and settling on Swamp Man.

  The gentle knock was enough to trip the three-dog alarm, Leo’s yip followed by Maggie’s yap and Clyde’s startled half-bark. Brandon thought it was a false alarm until he saw Madeline standing on the other side of the glass door, her arms and ankles crossed, as if she’d been watching for some time. She looked wrung out, but it was her!

  He quieted the dogs with a toothy whistle, then slid the door open. “You okay?”

  “Me?” She looked at him, barefoot and shirtless in paint-smothered jeans, green and black smudges winding up his muscled torso, his eyes blurry. She smelled paint, sour laundry, damp dogs and basement mildew. A monotone behind him said, “Blue grouse,” and after a few seconds there was a hollow sound, like someone blowing into a beer bottle.

  “Half of your hair’s wet,” he said. “You look …”

  Her smile tightened as she squatted to pet the wagging mutts. “Drunk? Hope I didn’t set off any sensors.”

  “Where’d you cross?” Brandon sent the dogs to their pads with a finger snap.

  She told him. He bunched his lips and shook his head.

  The monotone spoke again—“red-breasted nuthatch”—followed by evenly spaced beeps, like a truck backing up.

  “What’re we listening to?”

  “Bird Songs of the Puget …” He stepped toward the stereo. “I’ll turn it off.”

  “Leave it,” she said.

  He started to speak but just stared at her with a half smile, as if he’d lost an amusing thought on the way to his lips.

  She followed his eyes to one of his Rorschachs—complete or in progress, she had no idea. Two cold eyes above a familiar mustache. “Wow! Whatcha got there?”

  “The guy I found tonight in the swamp.”

  She cut her laugh off. “You paint the people you—”

  “All of them.” He made a circular motion with his finger. “Every last one.”

  She took in the entire room for the first time. An extra-long, king-sized bed with neither foot- nor headboards. Bedside books stacked vertically. A desk and easels that came up to her shoulders. Gallon jugs of water. Three dogs curled on individual flying-saucer pads of ascending size. Canvases stacked a half dozen deep against every wall. A lamp in the middle with a moose silhouette on its shade.

  “Double-crested cormorant,” said the robotic voice before a screech like nails being wrenched from wood.

  Brandon showed her more canvases stacked near the bathroom, talking in gusts about whom he caught where and what they did or said.

  “These’re amazing,” Madeline said, squatting on her haunches to get closer.

  “Yeah?”

  “Not just for you, for anybody. But if you can make people look so real, why make them seem so weird most of the time?”

  He hesitated. “I’m not trying to be a camera.”

  “How’d you catch that guy tonight, Brandon?” His cockeyed expression made her worry he was onto her. “I mean, did a sensor go off, or did you catch him on camera or something?”

  “No.”

  “Somebody tip you? Some homeowner? Or a Canadian?”

  Again he studied her, as if straining to translate a language he almost understood. “No.”

  “Well,” she pressed, her mouth drying out, “so why are you always in the right spot at the right time?”

  “I was looking for owls.”

  “Owls?” She smiled. “That’s the reason you were there?”

  “Yep.” How drunk was she? Some of her words dragged, and she had a boneless quality to her. He was determined not to miss any body la
nguage this time.

  “There wasn’t any tip or anything?”

  “Just the heron and the ducks,” he said. “The mallards were going crazy. Wack-wack-wack-wack-wack!”

  She lingered on a painting that looked like kids with psychedelic skin holding hands and rising off an invisible trampoline. She moved to the next one, then returned to the bouncing children: a huge boy and a slender, dark-haired girl. “You believe in heaven, Brandon?” She suddenly felt like she might start bawling.

  “I believe in reincarnation.”

  She grinned up at him. “So what did someone do to come back as you?”

  He paused. “Doubt it was a person,” he said, then started listing the animals he felt closest to—Jersey cows, snowy owls, Australian shepherds, blue herons and so on—until he noticed her flexing forehead and wandering eyes. When he heard the western meadowlark’s insecure melody, he wished like hell he’d turned off that CD.

  “Why do you keep calling me?” she asked, her eyes fixed on another startling painting, a flock of birds with Asian faces. “Haven’t I scared you off by now?”

  “I like you, Maddy”

  “In what way?”

  “Every way.”

  She focused again on the paintings, specifically a canvas of tiny but remarkably vivid faces, mostly gaping mouths, crammed inside what appeared to be the interior of a van. She caught his crooked smile on her. “Even after I tell you to get lost?”

  “I shouldn’t have sung ‘Blackbird’ at the restaurant,” he said. “That was really stupid.”

  She felt ready to cry again. “No, that was fine. A little weird, but sweet. I need to lay down, Brandon.”

  She reclined on the bed and then, after a long moment during which he just watched her, she sat up, crossed her arms at her hips and started to pull her shirt off.

  “I’m not good with—”

  “Should I stop?” She froze midway, just above the pink birthmark next to her belly button.

  “I’m good not—”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “No?”

  “I’m not in bed good, Maddy. I mean, I—”

  “You prefer the floor?”

  “No, it’s just—”

  She pulled off her shirt and dropped it on the floor.

  “Fox sparrow,” said the stereo, followed by a lewd whistle.

  Brandon lay as still as he could as she pulled his pants and underpants over his long legs and enormous flat feet. She giggled when she saw he was too shy or scared to look below her chin. She climbed up beside his head and whispered, “Simon says kiss me.”

  He mimicked her every move. When her lips pressed harder, he returned the pressure, careful to keep his teeth covered. He tried to remember everything: the smell of her smoky hair and peppermint mouth; the rash on her arched neck that reminded him of a red-throated loon; the bulb of her chin; her oval nostrils; the white slits of her almost closed eyes; the yamlike shape of her right breast, slightly larger than its partner and leaning outward, as if pointing to something across the room.

  He slowly raised a hand to align that breast with the other, astonished by its luxurious smoothness. There weren’t any surprise ledges, headboards or bedside tables to worry about. Everything felt suspended in this safe slow motion.

  Ten minutes later—or maybe twenty or thirty, while he concentrated on not moving, on not hurting her or himself, on not missing any sensation—she was suddenly, amazingly on him. Weightlessly, half-suspended, almost nonchalantly, as if it weren’t some tricky, anatomical safecracking or awkward skirmish of elbows, knees and teeth. He marveled at the simplicity of it if he just let her do all the moving, her slender left arm with the mole near the elbow flung out to the side for balance. He watched her concentration escalate as it had when as a child she’d tried to convince him and Danny that she could do things with her mind like turn up the stereo. And the sounds! Her sounds! Madeline Rousseau’s sounds! Her light growl got the dogs yipping, first Leo and then Maggie before Brandon snapped his fingers. She leaned forward and whispered that in a moment she would let him move just a little bit. No Simon says now, just a slight pleading for him to move—but not yet. When she finally, breathlessly, told him precisely how to move and he obeyed, her shudder reminded him of those old rockets that shook like they wouldn’t make it out of the atmosphere without ripping into a billion pieces before they popped through effortlessly to float freely above the blue earth.

  “Maddy?” he said, once he couldn’t bear the quiet any longer. “Are you floating?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you remember in school when they’d show videos of those old Apollos, back when they—”

  “Brandon?” Her thoughts flopped between thinking it was the sanest, gentlest sex she’d ever had and sensing she’d hit a shameful new low.

  “Yes?” he replied.

  “Please just be real, real quiet.”

  He didn’t notice the catch in her voice or the tears rolling into her ears. “Astronauts,” he whispered.

  “Please.”

  “It’s just a sentence. You’ll like it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Astronauts’ footprints stay on the moon forever,” he whispered, “because there’s no wind to blow them away.”

  37

  SOPHIE LISTENED to Tony Patera whine about the media underplaying Swamp Man and his ominous load of thirteen handguns and $320,000. But there was little time to contemplate that bust before it was steamrolled by an unrelated Seattle Times story that became international fodder by noon.

  The “Space Needle Bomber” who triggered a multimillion-dollar increase in northern border security and strained U.S.-Canadian relations this summer is not the Algerian terrorist federal agents originally suspected, but rather the troubled son of a wealthy couple from a posh Seattle suburb.

  While U.S. authorities initially thought they had Shareef Hasan Omar in custody, they actually had Michael T. Rosellini, twenty-six, who grew up in Broadmoor, one of Seattle’s most affluent neighborhoods. His father is a vice president at CellularOne, his mother a programmer for Microsoft.

  The mistaken identity was complicated by the twenty-three-day coma Rosellini endured after crashing his chased vehicle near Lyn-den on April 8. A subsequent search found a trunk full of explosives and three pounds of marijuana in the door panels.

  Rosellini’s former friends and coworkers described a troubled rebel who loved pot and couldn’t hold a job. “He reinvented himself five times by the age of twenty-two,” said one old friend. He was a punk rocker, a Nietzsche reader who liked to detonate homemade bombs in abandoned quarries. More recently, he frequented a Seattle mosque to show his support for oppressed Muslims and to agitate his Presbyterian parents. Three photos showed his progression from a clear-eyed senior to a shaggy Alaska deckhand to a bearded Costco worker who, with his mother’s East Indian coloring, arguably resembled Shareef Hasan Omar, also pictured.

  With the help of federal sources, the newspaper pieced together Rosellini’s recent exploits. A letter from a Seattle imam introduced him to leaders of a radical London mosque, but he was not embraced. He showed up next at Toronto mosques, exaggerating his ties to a London imam. Again he wasn’t trusted, though somehow he acquired fake identities—one of them was Hassan Mahjoub, a reputed alias for Omar—as well as explosives.

  It was unclear what, if anything, he had targeted. The Space Needle map found in his vehicle turned out to be a tourist pamphlet. Rosellini’s unconscious fingerprint didn’t help much, because neither he nor Omar had ever been arrested and printed. The mystery, however, was over once he awakened. The FBI’s only public comment was that he was being held on drug, explosives and other potential charges, including conspiracy to levy war against the United States.

  Friends were split on whether Rosellini was a con man, a believer or a wannabe, though none of them believed he was capable of harming anybody but himself.

  Sophie
watched the news sink in, nobody knowing quite how to react. A collective attention-deficit disorder took hold. People half-listened to one another, and even the prime minister couldn’t contain his smirk when asked if he found it ironic that Canada had caught so much hell from Washington, D.C., over someone who turned out to be a U.S. citizen.

  Sophie received multiple copies of a Maclean’s cover story called “America’s Clumsy Wars on Drugs and Terror” in which former UBC professor Wayne Rousseau was quoted as saying, “The U.S. is the paranoid bully of the world. From where I’m sitting, it looks like Americans are being terrorized by themselves. It’s a new wrinkle on FDR’s famous apothegm: All we have to fear is … ourselves.”

  38

  THE FATHERLY thrill that came with seeing both his daughters in his house at the same time quickly faded. The same tension that used to take hours to surface arose immediately with Nicole’s forearms-only embrace in exchange for Maddy’s bear hug. Meanwhile, her mannequin husband arrived with the wincing smile of someone serving soup at the Salvation Army for the very first time. Wayne’s friends, Lenny and Rocco, acted subdued from the beginning, nibbling around the kitchen, peeking at him to see if he was missing the undercurrents. Nicole dominated the dinner conversation, as if afraid where it might lead without her guidance, rattling on about neighborhoods getting renovated in Vancouver. Wayne resisted pointing out that gentrification is hardly a synonym for progress. He winked, smiled and passed the curried vegetables Maddy had cooked, which Rocco and Lenny praised, and Nicole and Mitchell picked through.

  It irritated Wayne that Nicole hadn’t said a word about his cameo in Maclean’s. He hadn’t received so much praise since his retirement party, which allowed him to indulge the daydream that he might ultimately be remembered for his ability to elucidate American hubris and hypocrisy. Who knows? Maybe relations would hit such a flashpoint there’d be a CBC retrospective on him, with producers scrambling for footage of incisive lectures or tracking down bootleg videos like Sophie Winslow’s doozy of his impromptu jousting with Congress. He’d stayed up the night before making notes on future essays, just the fearless ideas themselves, each more provocative than the last. People would want to hear his thoughts. It didn’t matter when or even if he published them. They wanted to hear! So he wrote and wrote, but the pot wore thin and he went from feeling like a modern Mencken to a washed-up simpleton. His comments in Maclean’s, he noticed for the first time, in fact, weren’t exactly what he’d said and suddenly sounded like arrogant cheap shots.