by Jim Lynch
40
UNTIL NORM’S stroke, the growing roster of busted locals had been as titillating as it was unsettling. News of Eugene Stremler’s arrest flabbergasted just about everyone, especially those whose animals he’d cared for and those he’d enlisted in his anti-casino brigade. But the rich-vet-gone-bad zinger—Customs found forty pounds in his Mercedes trunk during a rare random search of NEXUS lane vehicles—was soon upstaged by news of Luther Stevens. The beloved principal, caught with 160 pounds in his wood shop? Still, from what Sophie could tell, people seemed more shocked by Norm’s alleged involvement.
When rumors first slipped about illegals buying access across his land, Sophie heard outrage. Things had gotten so absurd that even stalwarts like Norm were getting slandered. There was, however, another reaction. If Norm, Luther and the doc really were involved, then all the rules had changed, right? If they think it’s okay to cut themselves a piece of the pie, what’s to stop the rest of us?
And something about those busts and rumors brought on a mass confessional in which people almost lined up to tell Sophie about their indiscretions. Even the mousiest locals suddenly had stories. They started mild, with tales of sneaking undeclared cases of whiskey over the line, but often swerved into the bizarre. Beekeeper Tawni Metz admitted smuggling eight thousand queen bees to Victoria, where she sold them for $100,000. Another’s crime was profiting off the Beanie Babies craze in the nineties. Several farmers fessed up to hauling in hundreds of gallons of Canuck Gold, the Canadian version of Roundup. Elderly couples told Sophie about repeated trips to Canadian pharmacies for discounted Lipitor, Celebrex and Zoloft. Others shared old family secrets about rum-running uncles and grandfathers who bushwhacked the same routes bud runners used today. A few came forward saying they’d recently sold overpriced border parcels to shady out-of-towners.
To Sophie it felt as if the citizenry were undergoing some sort of group therapy. Even quiet Vern Moffat took a break from his leaf blowing to tell her how his younger brother had smuggled eighty pounds in the false floor of a horse trailer. “Nobody wants to get in there and shovel the manure out.” Smaller indiscretions—an ounce here, a gram there—were more prevalent, of course, back when the border wasn’t watched so closely, and there were also the oddball things people or their “friends” snuck over the line—whether grizzly hides, black-bear teeth, whale bones, wolf skulls, moose meat, crane jerky or Cuban cigars. Katrina Montfort veered off-topic to relate a twenty-five-year-old story about her teenage affair with a hazelnut farmer who kept hopping the ditch to sneak into her parents’ house on Peace Drive.
Sophie chronicled all of it, and people increasingly asked to go on camera. After three vodka tonics, even Alexandra Cole ventured into the light to describe exactly how the bank could tell which locals were laundering money, without naming individuals or businesses but making it tantalizingly clear who was about to get busted.
Still, the tiny blood clot that lodged in a narrow vessel in Norm Vanderkool’s brain while he rose to shake Dale Mesick’s hand at Duke’s on a two-for-one Tuesday took the fun out of this mass confessional, especially since Norm increasingly appeared innocent and wrongly maligned. They’d even ransacked his bank account!
The clot lasted just long enough to give Norm what the doctor called an ischemic stroke, though it did enough damage to launch a new prevailing notion: The increased security is killing us. Sophie heard rumblings about an anti-government posse forming to “take the county back,” a mood summed up by Dirk Hoffman’s new reader board: BP GO HOME.
As it played out, many agents were already on their way. Within a week, headquarters transferred fourteen of them to the southern line and flew a cost analyst out from D.C. to examine the sector’s books and particularly its handling of the border cams, which reportedly malfunctioned whenever temperatures rose above seventy-one degrees. Patrols were trimmed, and the green-and-whites soon blended in with the tractors and trucks lumbering along Boundary, H Street and beyond.
When Brandon Vanderkool quietly resigned to take care of the family dairy while his father recuperated, it felt, to most, like the end of a very peculiar era.
41
HE STROLLED through the dairy, picking up after Roony again—a bucket knocked over here, an empty juice bottle there, a bright jug of bleach and a pair of torn yellow rubber gloves dangling near the parlor exit, which helped explain why some cows had hesitated when he shooed them out that morning. He took a bright silver ladder out back and spray-painted it gray, then rearranged the pallets near the parlor’s entrance so the northeasterlies wouldn’t make them want to turn around and put their butts into the wind, which complicated everything.
He hopped on the Super Slicer and cut bales, then pulled a trailerful past the feed trough. He noticed 73’s swollen left eye and absently started checking the others, finding limps he hadn’t spotted in 17 and 69. It was getting harder to keep weight on some older ones, particularly 11 and 28. He strode around back to bottle-feed the youngest calf.
Dionne, McAfferty and the rest had tried to talk him out of it, yammering about all his wasted training and talent, his knack for the work, his gift. And Patera had initially refused to accept his resignation, insisting he take a week’s paid vacation to think it through. But the chief had eventually relented, in part because he was told to relieve or transfer another fifteen agents by December. Besides, it was obvious that Brandon’s father needed more recovery time.
He talked well enough and seemed the same physically, yet he looked strangely becalmed. He took his time eating, dressing and listening. When he did step outside, he shuffled through the dairy like an old man reminiscing. There was no argument from Norm when Brandon took over and left him with just the books. He routinely overslept and retreated after breakfast to his boat barn, where he hadn’t spent so much time since the gleaming hull had arrived on a flatbed and a small mob of doubters watched to see if it would fit inside.
When Brandon had called to tell Madeline about his father’s stroke, she apparently hadn’t checked caller ID because she groaned at the sound of his voice. He was so surprised she’d picked up that he hadn’t known what to say, then she started lecturing him—again—about what a mistake it had been. But now it wasn’t just a mistake, it was a “huge mistake.” Perhaps his all-time favorite hour had been reduced to a gigantic error. “We’re totally different people!” Then gentler, but still raspy and foreign: “I was so messed up. Please just forget about it.”
As if memories were optional. All he’d managed to blurt before she hung up? “I can’t not forget.”
He spent hours auditioning combinations of words that could change her mind before finally coming up with the perfect response to her comment about how different they were. He’d tell her his mother’s story about the moose that fell in love with a cow named Jessica in Vermont and courted her for seventy-six days. A moose and a cow! Seventy-six days! Complications arose once he pictured Madeline asking what happened next. He tried writing everything down, hoping his words would look more persuasive on paper. Maybe he could read them to her over the phone. But the longer he rewrote and rehearsed, the more garbled the words seemed. He forced himself to give it a break when he realized he was rocking so fast that his neck was swinging.
Luckily, he could lose himself in the rhythm of the dairy. He’d switched out all the bedding, regraded the barn alleys and changed the metal tracks on two sliding doors to a quieter plastic. He’d cleaned the vacuum controller and convinced his father to buy better semen. And today he intended to take advantage of a dry, windless lull to spray the fields without stinking up the valley. He could see his breath that morning, and the leaves were turning so fast they fit into his notion that everything was rushing by.
When he wasn’t working on the dairy, he poured himself into his paintings and forms. His rock cones, knotweed structures, leaf mosaics and oil paintings kept surprising him. Sophie often tagged along, snapping and filming with such an odd intensity that it sometimes fe
lt incomplete when she wasn’t there, setting up her tripod or adjusting her video camera.
After a grumpy new feed truck driver rattled up and filled the silo, Brandon shed his rubber boots and bib and stepped out of the barn beneath a quiet, birdless sky. He piled the dogs into the front seat and headed to town to get more tetracycline and ampicillin, studying the loopy telephone lines along the ditch where his mother swore barn swallows had assembled by the thousands one September. If they’d already left, why hadn’t the seabirds arrived yet? What if all the brants, wigeons, scoters, buffleheads, mergansers and trumpeters decided to forgo the exhausting flight and winter up north? Then what?
He was surprised to see the feed truck again, parked just a few blocks down Boundary in the primitive dirt and grass driveway leading to Dirk Hoffman’s roadside outbuilding on the northern fringe of his L-shaped property. The massive rig was parked so hastily that its last three feet were cantilevered sloppily into the oncoming lane. Puttering past, Brandon noticed that the rear of the truck was listing more to the left than the slope warranted.
“He have a flat?” he asked the dogs, their ears lifting. He pulled over and climbed out, the dogs clawing after him and flopping out his side. He shut the door, then crossed Boundary to have a look at the left-rear duo of deflated Goodyears. The driver was shouting inside his cab, probably yelling into a phone at somebody, Brandon figured, about those tires. He strode up to the cab, picturing the size of the jack this job would take, the dogs behind him in a single file from smallest to largest.
The man’s window was open, and Brandon’s head filled it without him having to step on the foot rail. “Got a flat?”
The driver was so alarmed he dropped his phone, then frantically groped around near his feet as a small voice whined through it. “Hold on a sec!” he growled, smothering the phone against his chest. “Having a row with the wife. Ya mind?”
His tone was hostile enough to start Leo yapping, which got Maggie going and Clyde too, halfheartedly. Brandon backed up, silenced all three with a wave, then strode back to the rear wheels again with Leo still acting like they’d treed a raccoon. On closer inspection, the tires didn’t appear deflated so much as sunken to their rims, though the soil looked dry and solid. He circled the truck as the driver’s griping rose into a wail. “Well, that’s what credit-card companies do!” The other twenty tires sat plump and firm atop the sun-baked earth.
Brandon glanced across Boundary and Zero. Was she there? With the curtains drawn and no cars in sight, the Damant house seemed abandoned, as it had since the cheerful couple left for a retirement home a year ago. The forgettable barn, slightly back and to the left, looked as unused as ever.
It wasn’t until the feed man hopped down on his foot rail to ask, with his arms flailing, what the hell he was doing that Brandon’s eyes followed the narrow dirt road leading from the rear of Dirk’s outbuilding through the maze of leased raspberry fields toward Pangborn Road. When he glanced back across the ditch at the Damant barn and then down at the sunken wheels, he pictured it all at once.
The question was, who should he call first?
42
MADELINE’S HEAD felt severed from her body. She had no awareness of time or place or even self. Her first fingerhold was recognizing Brandon’s voice spluttering through the phone, asking if she still lived in “the old Damant place.”
By the look of the dust-swirled air and the smoke-smeared ceiling, the answer was yes. Then she noticed her sweat and realized she’d overslept. The next thing he said came through remarkably clear, yanking her upright and making immediate, head-throbbing sense.
After hanging up, she tried desperately to connect Brandon’s words to reality and stumbled over clothes through the debris of another forgettable smoke-out. An enormous black fly slammed itself suicidally into a small windowpane. She peeled back the kitchen curtain and saw a Volvo hurtle past on Zero and then the feed truck across the ditch on the far side of Boundary. Beside it was the unmistakable silhouette of Brandon Vanderkool, slouching like a sunflower over some apple-faced man breaking his neck to talk up to him. And behind him, fanned out in formation and also staring up at him, were his three devout strays, the wiener dog, the little shepherd and the old Lab.
Shit! She could move only so fast without the vertigo kicking in. She pulled on some pants and stuffed clothes, books and pans into garbage bags, taking anything that was clearly hers. Everything else stayed. She guzzled from the tap and glanced at the wall clock. Five minutes had already whirled past. Two trucks roared along Zero, their backdraft shaking the house.
She reached into the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink for her large toiletries bag and panicked at its lack of heft, frantically unzipping it and staring inside at nothing. Then she clawed through shampoos, soaps and deodorants, but it wasn’t there. Had she moved it again? She checked every stash she’d ever used or even thought about—under the couch, in the duct behind the heating vent, in the cabinets above the fridge, behind the panel in the office closet. Fuck! She’d lost another six minutes. She had to get out now, now! She grabbed the three garbage bags and scurried barefoot from the house.
She stared at the smashed front-left panel of her Maxima, the cause of which she couldn’t pinpoint, and after looking east and west for Mounties—Brandon’s back to her—she sped down Zero and crunched into her father’s gravel as an angry face from last night floated through her head, shouting that she’d run a red right before he’d slid into her. She parked behind the fence and speed-dialed Fisher to give him one loud sentence: “A truck just fell into the goddamn tunnel you never told me about!” Then she ran to the sliding door on her father’s deck with a throat so dry it hurt.
A frenetic piano melody rang out from the basement while she drank from the faucet until she felt human again. She finally descended into the paint-fumed cellar, which was cluttered with canvases splashed with blacks, blues, yellows, golds, greens and browns all in similar swirling dashes, one horrific imitation after another of van Gogh’s famous last painting of a flock of blackbirds flying over farmlands into a menacing sky.
Her father choked, blushed and clutched his bony chest, his pinched face and spindly arms all so remarkably paint-splotched that he looked like a living rendition of the painting he was struggling to replicate. But from his stricken expression, Madeline realized she looked even worse.
He dropped his brush and swung his childlike arms around her, wet paint and all, her relief rising like anesthesia until she cried loud enough to compete with Glenn Gould’s desperate piano.
43
THE DECISION-MAKING process was second- and third-guessed, then mocked. Why hadn’t they waited and made certain they’d actually catch someone before raiding the first tunnel ever discovered along the Canadian border? Why had they forced the Mounties’ hand and left border cops with nobody to apprehend but chemo-ravaged Dirk Hoffman?
Patera argued that the sunken truck tires blew any chance of surprise. Still, the prospect of apprehending smugglers in the act at eleven in the morning seemed bleak. As Agent McAfferty asked Sophie, “What self-respecting douche bag gets to work before noon?”
Dirk professed complete ignorance of the nearly finished, ninety-yard tunnel that stretched from the Damants’ outbuilding just north of Zero to his large shed just south of Boundary. He’d sublet that entire thirty-acre rectangle, he explained repeatedly, to a Ferndale raspberry farmer named Daniel Stickney “Talk to him!”
No drugs were found inside the tunnel or on either side of it. What the Mounties did discover on the Damant side, however, was a barn full of lumber and dirt. The adjoining “party house,” as they called it, was owned by Roland P. Nichols, who apparently didn’t exist. Madeline Rousseau had been spotted there twice, yet under questioning she claimed she’d visited it only to see an acquaintance named Marilyn, who was sharing the house with others. No, she didn’t know her last name or whereabouts, nor was she aware of any tunnel. Her father backed her up, swearing that she’d
been living in his guest cottage for the past two months, caring and cooking for him on a daily basis.
This investigation was eclipsed three days later by a raid on a former Molson brewery east of Vancouver, in which seventy-three officers participated in the seizure of an indoor pot farm so huge the Mounties didn’t know how to describe it. “Thousands and thousands of plants” was all they said publicly, “worth tens of millions of dollars.” Nineteen people were arrested, including reputed kingpins Emmanuel “Manny” Pagaduan and Tobias C. Foster. This bust was the culmination of a yearlong undercover investigation, according to the Mounties, who suggested the brewery farm and the border tunnel were part of the same operation.
On the American side, locals marveled at the audacity of such a long four-by-four-foot underground passage, built to last with half-inch plywood, two-by-sixes and rebar. Its architects even thought to wire and vent it, though apparently hadn’t factored in the possibility of a twenty-ton feed truck parking on top of it. If this million-dollar tunnel, as everyone soon called it, had been uncovered a month earlier, Patera might have brokered further investments in northern security; but with nothing to show other than vague conspiracy charges against a Ferndale berry farmer, in effect it weakened his case. No congressional delegation flew out to gawk at this outrage, no budget adjustments were advocated, no editorials called to fortify the border, no Minutemen held vigils. The U.S. media spun it as comic relief, another aside from the border buffoons, especially once one reporter realized the pissed-off but still uncharged Dirk Hoffman was the cancer patient who’d previously set off false radiation alarms.