Border Songs (13 page)

“Isn’t that boat too big for a little thing like you?”

Once the water cleared her knees, she flopped her torso onto the stern and belly-crawled into the cockpit.

“What if the wind dies?”

She fanned the rudder to propel her out far enough to drop part of the centerboard, but a headwind rose up, knocked the boat sideways and shoved her back toward him.

“Can I help?” He started wading. “Need a hand, my sweet muffin?”

When she yanked on the main halyard, the wind grabbed the sail before it was halfway up and knocked the boat sideways again, back toward shore. Shit-shit-shit! She had to drop some board, but when she did it struck mud and the hull lurched onto its side, then popped loose again. Now he was shining his obnoxious light on her body and wading faster toward her. She shifted her weight leeward until she felt the sail tug well enough to ease the bow windward. After another ten yards of moving mostly sideways, she dropped more board and felt the boat track, then yanked the rest of the main up, dropped the entire center-board and fell back with a sigh that sounded like a sob, her hand trembling on the tiller. She heard clapping but didn’t look back.

Once free of the squirrelly land gusts, the wind steadied and her panic cooled toward blank exhaustion. She popped the jib, knowing she’d have to point higher or tack twice across the swath of bay where they’d dumped her mother, which brought back all the sweaty questions she’d never asked. If there were four in the tram when the cable snapped, how come her father and the other couple suffered only bruises and whiplash? Why was her mother cremated? How did they
know those ashes were actually hers? And why weren’t they stored in some quiet place where they could visit the woman who squealed on water-park rides and dressed up as a fortune-teller at her daughters’ birthday parties and crawled into bed to snuggle even after they hit their teens? In the end, she looked like dried soup flung overboard no matter what fancy words her father blubbered before the boom swung silently across the cockpit. Nicole took it personally, of course. But even Madeline wasn’t sure whether it was karma, a freak wind shift or her own volition that sent the wooden boom into her sister’s mouth.

Madeline vowed again that she’d take her cut and get out—did she need any more evidence that she didn’t have the nerves for this?—yet even while berating herself she couldn’t ignore the sizzle that came with $240,000 strapped to the mast, $2,400 of which Toby said she could keep. Minutes later, as the wind shifted and allowed her to tack five degrees higher, she revised her pledge and cantilevered all but her shins beyond the rail, arching her spine and neck until her head was just inches off invisible waves, the main sheet in one glove, the tiller in the other, her eyes on the sky. Two more weeks. Four of her six ops hit their harvest dates by the first of the month. Two more weeks.

Then what? She’d climb aboard a southbound plane. Costa Rica, maybe Rio.

Soon she was simply sailing, not scolding or doubting or daydreaming, just sailing. A victorylike giddiness filled her as she crossed into Canadian waters toward the marina’s steady green lamp. She heard herself mumbling, in part a celebration, in part a pleading, as she coasted toward the docks, sails flapping and falling, her mind skipping to images she still couldn’t file: her father trying to save himself with reinventions, Brandon chasing smugglers and bombers, the oddly irresistible Sophie Winslow connecting the dots with neither judgment nor bias.

B
RANDON AVOIDED
the HQ banter he couldn’t partake in and drove east into a valley that kept changing on him.

More retirement ranches were popping up with two-chimney chalets, stone facings, white trim and three-plank fences. Closer to Lyn-den, new cul-de-sacs sprouted alongside the bulldozed moonscape of the future Paradise Links and the corner gas station at Badger and Bender was turning into a neon destination with New York Pizza, the Maui Tanning Salon and the Nuthouse Grill. Closer to the border, bushy raspberry rows now doubled as potential smuggling lanes and the future casino’s steel girders lunged toward the sky.

The people were changing on him too. Even his parents looked at him differently. And when he’d burst into the saloon looking for Dionne a while back, people started clapping. The attention jammed his circuits. He wanted to say it was the wrong car and the guy was still in a coma, but all he could do was stand there, wondering where to put his hands, until they started laughing.

Though he’d since tried to notice as little as possible that could lead to arrests, paperwork or acclaim, it was no use. He saw more than ever. He intercepted buds on Halverstick, then caught a smuggler on Judson Lake and yet another in downtown Sumas. And the increased patrols didn’t seem to discourage the illegals he kept finding in fields and forests or sardined into muffler-dragging vans. He and Dionne apprehended five Filipinos in a Voyager on Froberg Road. Two nights later he watched a Monte Carlo cruising Markworth on an obvious decoy
run. So he left his rig, jogged up the street and saw four Cambodians crouched in the ferns, hands over their eyes like kids who didn’t understand hide-and-seek yet.
If I can’t see you, you can’t see me
. The next night he caught four Romanians, then three weepy Mexicans who pleaded with him in Spanish until he would have let them go if he hadn’t already radioed them in. They kept coming, as if racing to enter the States before the doors slammed shut for good. And nobody resembled the dangerous, lying scammers Dionne had warned him about. They were illegal—by definition, right?—but they didn’t look like criminals. Most of them struck Brandon as exotic, even beautiful, though they weren’t always endearing. Two Iranians lectured him in broken English about the Bill of Rights, followed by an indignant Sri Lankan couple who scolded him for ruining their honeymoon. Brandon stepped into the woods to pee later that night and nine Venezuelans surrendered. The shit-magnet razzing roared to new heights.

Brandon began to sketch all the illegals who stuck in his head, first by pencil, then with oils. A Moroccan with a flat nose and eyebrows like warning flares. A Frenchman with long, wide sideburns and swollen lips. An old Algerian with almond eyes and a creased mouth in a face as finely boned as any child’s. So much about the job burned his stomach, but he’d always wanted to see the world without actually having to travel. And now, seemingly, amazingly, the world was coming to him.

He turned off Badger onto Swanson and tried to focus on comforting familiar sights: freshly plowed fields of dirt the color of powdered chocolate; pastures so thick with dandelions he saw nothing but yellow; pom-poms of blooming maples, crabapples and alders packing the eastern hillsides; rows of hand-tied raspberry canes flickering past his window. He wheeled past a rusty dozer
4 SALE
and another handwritten sign,
HORSE MANURE $1.50,
before braking alongside a muddy El Camino with Arizona plates on the fringe of Gil Honcoop’s sixty wooded acres, a border-straddling mix of trees, bushes and meadows popular with smugglers and songbirds.

As he approached the trail, a warbling vireo rushed its insistent mating riff:
It’s-time-to-listen-to-me. It’s-time-to-listen-to-me
. A chestnut-backed chickadee cut short its laid-back come-on,
heyyy-there, heyyy-there
. And once he’d entered the canopy, a brown creeper offered its odd plea, always ending on three impossibly high notes, as if straining to stay upbeat. Brandon was too distracted to count the birds. In fact, he hadn’t been able to muster an accurate daily count for weeks now. He resisted the urge to call Madeline again as a know-it-all robin scampered nearby, letting loose its rising and falling
I know ever-y-thing. I know ever-y-thing
.

He followed fresh boot tracks, then veered off the path through the brush until he saw a Bewick’s wren’s sloppy decoy nest, which he doubted fooled anyone. He’d studied nests since he first watched barn swallows build mud igloos beneath every eave on the farm. He’d noticed that goldfinch nests are so tightly woven that the chicks often drown during big rains. He’d seen magpies weave nails, tin, tape, glass, rags and even barbed wire into their nests, and he’d happened upon an indignant robin incubating a Top-Flite golf ball and a dizzy cormorant sitting on a seventy-five-watt Sylvania lightbulb.

Back on the path he noticed the purple blooms of salmonberry and the white flash of Indian plum, then spent ten minutes cutting inch-long thorns off a black hawthorn tree and hacking the dried husks of last year’s blackberry vines into foot-long sections. He used the thorns to tack five husks together, pinned one to a low maple branch and carefully added husks—one by one—to the fragile form until it looked like an asymmetrical spiral of sticks floating in the air.

Nervous chickadees were the first to warn him that someone was approaching, followed by juncos and kinglets all curious as to what the chickadees were fussing over. Their Carhartt pants, canvas shirts and camo hats all fit with the El Camino and the footprints. “Hello there,” the larger one volunteered.

“Hi.” Brandon kept his eyes on his form, which the mildest gust could destroy.

They eyeballed the web of suspended sticks, then gawked up at him—his shirt untucked, its buttons misaligned—as if waiting for an explanation. “How’s this work?” the shorter one finally asked.

Brandon didn’t respond, his ears tuned to the distant jackhammer of a pileated woodpecker trying to attract females by slamming its head against a farmhouse drainpipe.

“Some kinda decoy?” the other speculated. “Psy-ops? Messin’ with their heads, right? When you’re dealing with a large group, Marty, you want to have ’em all lookin’ the same direction. Crowd control, right?”

Brandon connected another stick.

“So what would ya call this?”

“A form,” Brandon said, distracted by the bossy whine of a hummingbird he couldn’t see.

“Sir? I’m sorry, we haven’t introduced ourselves, have we? I’m Buford McKenzie Strom, and this here’s Martin T. Long, deputy state-chapter director of the Arizona Civil Homeland—”

“Minutemen,” Brandon said, at the same time identifying the first two notes of an olive-sided flycatcher’s call.

“That’s correct, sir. Here to help y’all with the border. And from what we can tell, you need all you can get. We were just talkin’ ’bout how we’d be happy to help build a fence of sorts from here to the water. In fact, that’s exactly what we’re gonna suggest when we meet with Chief Patton.”

Brandon looked down at them. The smaller one had the longest eyelashes he’d ever seen on a man. “Patera.”

“That’s the one.”

“He’ll tell you nobody wants a fence.”

“No kidding? So what is this, really?”

“A form.”

“Like a trail marker for navigatin’ in the dark?” Buford guessed. “Did you make that other form we saw up there? Kind of looked like a big nest, didn’t it, Marty?”

“That would be one large bird,” Martin offered.

“It’s art,” Brandon said.

Buford’s laugh turned into a gasp and a harsh cough. “Wrong pipe,” he hissed.

The fluttering and chirping rose to such a crescendo the Minutemen looked up too.

“May I ask how long it took you to make this?” Martin asked.

A whisper of wind wiggled the structure and Brandon’s hands shot up, willing it to stay intact.

“Please explain this like we’re mo-rons,” Martin said. “I mean, from where I’m standing, just one taxpayer’s opinion here, having someone your size just standing up on the border would do a whole lot more good than whatever it is you’re doing here. No offense, Agent …” He leaned forward, squinting at the name tag.

“The reason I’m here right now,” Brandon said, his eyes on his form, “is that Mr. Honcoop asked me to tell you to stay off his property.”

Brandon heard “well, well” and some muttering about landowners who may have a “vested interest” in keeping the border wide open, but he was barely listening. Their upturned faces and gaping mouths reminded him of what he’d intended to do earlier.

The Minutemen stopped chattering to watch the giant agent step through ferns and salal to an alder, which he shimmied to its first branch and removed a nest wedged against the trunk. He fanned a hand over the top of it and flipped it upside down, straining water through his fingers before returning the nest and its four pale-blue eggs to the nook.

“What’d you just do?” Buford asked while Martin snapped photos.

Brandon was debating whether to tell them about goldfinch nests when he felt the earth shake and glanced at his form just as it quivered and collapsed. “Feel that?” he asked. The men glanced at each other, then stared at the disconnected pieces scattered on the ground before looking back up at Brandon’s lopsided grin.

H
E WAS
expecting little Roony, so it took a couple beats to adjust to the sight of this imposing figure on the half-lit porch of his milking parlor at four a.m.

“Good morning, Mr. Vanderkool.” The large kid stood too close, with the overly friendly eyes of someone about to try to sell him something he didn’t need.

“Says who?” Norm grunted, widening his stance.

“How’re we doin’ today?” he said, his size and confidence vaguely menacing.

Norm’s frown deepened. “Too early to know, isn’t it? What is it you want?”

“I’m here, sir, on behalf of a small group of businessmen interested in leasing a path of sorts through your property.”

Norm struggled to attach meaning to the words. He hadn’t been able to sleep for more than fifteen minutes straight since the monthly milk-tank tests arrived the prior afternoon. After a frenzy of disinfecting and cleaning—just in case salmonella was also in play—he’d left a message for Roony to show up early so he could at least share the news that the dairy might lose its Grade-A status. “You a realtor?” he asked.

“I’m Michael.” He stuck out a large right hand at an odd diagonal. Norm didn’t register that the kid was offering a shake before it was casually withdrawn. “And like I said, we’re simply interested in whether you’d be willing to consider a little side arrangement that
compensated you for allowing us to pass discreetly through your property on occasion.”