Border Songs (18 page)

“All right,” Madeline said, not sure if she’d been insulted. “Next party, I’ll come painted and you can show up in this boring sweatshirt.” She edged away, but the woman started talking—and it could only be to her—about all the shitty job offers she’d received that night and how she’d recently dumped an abusive boyfriend hooked on blow. Madeline nodded knowingly, as if she’d been slapped around by her share of cokeheads.

“First few times I did this I felt ridiculous,” the woman admitted. “Now I don’t even notice the looks.”

“I once snuck Cuervo into a concert in Ziploc bags inside my bra,” Madeline told her. “I’ve never gotten looks like that before or since.”

The woman yawned. “You like tequila?” She reached behind her and handed Madeline half a pint. “Whaddaya think of the toilets?”

Madeline chugged, her mind racing for context.

“Haven’t gone? They don’t make
any
sound. I flushed twice because I thought there’s no way it was that quiet.” She looked at her earnestly. “Best job I ever had was as a hairdresser. I can cut hair, ’specially men’s.”

Madeline spontaneously offered her a job as a bud clipper at twice the going rate even though she didn’t do the hiring. Luckily, the offer simply triggered more disjointed stories. When Madeline couldn’t scare up a single thought worth sharing, the woman half-yawned and swiveled away, blue paint smearing and bubbling along the muscled groove of her spine.

Once again, Madeline realized she was getting even higher. She hadn’t noticed the music in how long? “I-I-I-I seeeeem to recogniiiiize your faaace.” She went looking for Fisher or Michael or anyone who
could haul her away, trying not to look too alone, wondering how much time had careened past. She roamed up the stairs, needing the railing and hoping Toby wasn’t around to see her in this condition. Amazingly, all that remained of the trade show was a smattering of stoners and a couple pressed passionately against the floor-to-ceiling window.

She followed snorting giggles downstairs into a room where three strangers were sprawled on a round bed and two others draped across couch arms, everyone smirking in the same direction. She leaned against the doorjamb and slowly placed the cartoon faces on the large flat screen.
The Simpsons
.

Had the party adjourned to some secret room? She peeked into the bonging den where she’d first seen Fisher and saw an ensemble of sober-looking young men—many of them teenagers—listening to Toby’s thoughtful murmurs while he secured a map with ceramic bongs. It was too late to retreat, though his attention was the last thing she wanted. “She’s with me,” Toby said, nodding toward an open chair. Then he began pointing out where the thirty-two cameras were going in, one by one, as if they were military targets, everyone crowding in, mumble-cussing.

An older guy with a swashbuckling mustache was eyeballing her. She felt her stomach roll and jerked her sandals beneath the chair, looking everywhere but at him.

Toby crossed the den and examined her pink eyes. “You okay?”

“Where’s Fisher and Michael?” Her lips felt numb.

“I’m your ride,” he said. “We’re almost done.”

“Maybe we go back through the main portals?” someone asked as Toby returned to the table.

“No way.” Toby snorted and shook his head. “They do randoms now. They’ll search thirty cars in a row if they feel like it. And if one of those dogs signals, they’ll pull you in for a secondary and you’re toast.”

“What about the truck routes?”

Toby bobbed his head. “They X-ray every load, and bud jumps out unless it’s packed with something of identical density. I’ve got somebody working on that, but we’re not there yet. So for now we’ve just gotta do what we do better than we’re doing it. Once those cameras are up, we’ll reevaluate.”

Madeline listened to Toby’s money-handling tips and watched him hand out business cards of realtors, car dealers, insurance agents and bank tellers who took cash without questions, all of which made her worry about the awkward bricks of U.S. hundreds stacked in the bathroom closet of her father’s cottage.

Spiraling downhill in Toby’s restored Impala, she tried not to look at the fuzzy lights, but every time she closed her eyes her belly moved. He lowered her window from his side, and she heard her head bounce off the frame. “Sip this.” She felt a cold plastic bottle in her left hand and brought it to her mouth. Pepsi.

Toby was talking again, but it might as well have been a baby babbling. She had a vague sense he was following the speed limit, using blinkers, staying in his lane, but when they got to Highway 1 they didn’t head west. “You’ve got an hour or so, don’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

She nodded helplessly, wishing she could go home, afraid she would now be expected to perform.

“Wanna show you something.”

“What?” was all she could muster. She tried to raise the window, but either he child-locked it or she was pressing the wrong button. “I’m cold.”

“Have some more Pepsi,” he said.

A sip steadied her right before his first question about Brandon Vanderkool.

“Do you think your large Border Patrol friend would’ve known anybody at that party besides you?”

She hesitated, thinking she’d misheard.

“Well, he must have a mole, don’t you figure? How else would he
know to hang out on the Sumas on the one day we try to float a big load?”

Madeline sorted his words and waited.

“Sure you didn’t see anyone he’d know?”

She shrugged warily. “He’s not my friend,” she said, trying to focus. “He’s just a kid I knew who never figured out how to … act normal.” She suddenly pictured him painting furiously. “He’s an innocent.”

Toby clucked his tongue. “An innocent who’s bad for business.”

Stars brightened the deeper they drove into the valley on dairy-lined Chilliwack Lake Road. Finally the pavement surrendered to gravel, then to dirt, and the Impala ground to a noisy halt. When Toby killed the lights, Madeline realized they were far beyond the last farmhouse, where any scream would blend with the whine of coyotes. She thought she saw meteorite showers, but couldn’t be sure. Toby stepped out and hustled around the hood to open her door. Her legs balked, as if warning her to stay in the car, though suddenly she was standing in mud beneath stars that quivered like fireflies. The only weapon she could think of was her keys.

He popped a heavy shovel from the trunk and shut it with a violent
thunk
. He handed her the flashlight, his thick fingers settling on her spine, a couple aggressive notches lower than at the party. They walked thirty yards, the beam illuminating a prior stampede of boot tracks. “See anything?” he asked.

She wanted to plead her case—I’m not a mole!—but instead looked for somewhere to run.

“Look around. Where do you think we’re going?”

Her small circle of light bounced uselessly across a grim field of mud, orchard grass and tangles of scrapped barbwire. Her mind raced. He had to have more than a hunch that she’d tipped off Brandon. Had she talked out of school? She’d blown it somehow, that much was alarmingly clear. She poked keys between the fingers of her left fist and held the flashlight in her right, gauging its heft. Was all his affection at
the party designed to make his grieving more convincing? Her heart wasn’t racing so much as missing.

“Hear anything?” he pressed.

About Brandon? She tried to shake her head, but then … “Yes!” she exclaimed, as if the right answer might rescue her. “A humming sound.”

He told her where to point the flashlight, then began digging what she tried not to think of as her grave, skimming dirt until it sounded like he’d hit a rock. She flinched when he peeled back a long rug and flung it aside, clods flying. The hum was louder now, sounding like a muffled motor. She focused the flashlight on what looked like a flat handle welded to a rounded plate of scratched yellow steel.

Toby squatted and tugged at the handle until the three-by-two-foot hatch popped upright, unleashing a nimbus of white light, as if the earth had opened to its bright core.

She staggered back until the six-hundred-watt halogens and the reek of blooming cannabis rendered her nightmare harmless and familiar.

“Holy,” she managed. “What is—”

“We dug a hole with an excavator,” he explained, “then lowered a gutted school bus down there and filled it with lights, tables, plants and a generator. You like it?”

Her giggles sputtered into tears, but Toby pretended not to notice. “Not a great producer by any stretch,” he said, “but a worthwhile pilot. Least I think so. Not everyone agrees. I’ll take you inside sometime when we’re not messed up.” He dropped the lid back in place, replaced the rug and dirt, then guided her back to the car, telling her where to step, his hand sobering now, the stars returning to fixed pinpricks of light.

“Something came up tonight, an opportunity I’d like to offer you if it comes together,” Toby said neutrally. “But for it to work, I can’t have you showing up at parties like this, understand? What about the others? you might ask. Well, they don’t matter to me. You do. And I need
you to come off as a young woman who has a real job and takes care of her dad.”

A new fear rolled through her: She already knew too much to ever get out. That’s what this was about.

He locked her elbow inside his. “How would you like,” he asked, now as gentle and solicitous as a department-store Santa, “to live in a nice house less than a kilometer from your father, right there along the border?”

N
ORM MADE
himself wait, not knowing if he should check his box before or after the postal truck came, finally deciding he couldn’t stand it any longer. What if the postman saw the money? If there was any, of course. He knew it was the longest of long shots, but he craved a shot, any shot, the image of free money rushing through him. Norm had clearly said no, hadn’t he? By now, he had reworked the conversation so many times—including all the kid’s insinuations and
discreetlys
and
prerogatives
—that what he’d said and what he
wished
he’d said were getting jumbled. He hadn’t agreed to anything, he knew that much, but who knew how it was interpreted? And what if they wouldn’t take no for an answer?

A minimum of $10,000 on the twenty-third day of the month? He had no idea what
that
would look like. Rubber-banded stacks of hundreds in a manila envelope? With a note, maybe:
Appreciate your business, Mr. Vanderkool
.

Wasn’t he due for a break? Doc Stremler would be there within an hour to lower his glasses and hand him a verdict, a lecture and a bill. Most of the night, Norm had been straightening and cleaning the barns until he had to ice both knees, his mind circling to Sophie’s recurring suggestion that he let her “work” on his legs. His curtness with her in the field seemingly hadn’t dented her desire to get to know the savages. She’d waited a couple days, then swiveled over and crawled right back inside his head to remind him of her “good-neighbor discount.”

He shuffled toward the end of the drive, glancing up Boundary
Road at the new motion-detecting video camera on the fifty-foot pole. It was hard not to take it personally. Everyone heard the cameras were coming, but they went from rumored to ordered to installed practically overnight and felt twice as intrusive as Norm expected. They’d be watching if he took a leak in his back ten, or if he strolled over to Sophie’s for a good-neighbor special…. And there were more coming, including one right on Northwood. He took a breath and shuffled toward the box, simultaneously hoping the money was there—so he could breathe!—and that it wasn’t, so he wouldn’t have to plumb his weaknesses any further. He’d clearly said no, so it wasn’t as if he’d been compromised, right?

“How’re the cows?”

Christ! He looked up to find Wayne leaning against the shady side of a telephone pole on Zero Ave. “Just great,” he snapped.

“Excellent.” The professor matched his sarcasm. “What about your boat? When do you launch that cruise ship?”

“Don’t know, Wayne. When’re you gonna patent that lightbulb?”

Wayne laughed. “I had no idea you knew about that sort—”

“I find it interesting,” Norm said, breathing harder, “that Edison’s father was run out of Canada.” He scrambled to recall what Patera had told him, bungling the details right out the gate and wishing he could start over.

Wayne grinned and waited.

“He got ousted from Canada,” Norm said, “as I recall for—”

“As you recall.”

“For rising up against a government that wouldn’t even stand up to the Brits.”

“Did someone read that to you?”

“Seemed pretty well documented,” Norm said, the insult sinking in.

“Oh, let me guess, you’re gonna tell me Edison was an opportunistic bastard who stepped on everybody for his own glory.”

“He sure doesn’t sound like your kind of hero.”

“Who stands up to that sort of test, Norm?”

“What?”

“Who looks like a white knight after all the historians and gossips get done with him?”

“I think Thomas Jeffer—”

“Banged his slaves.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Yes we do. A smart guy who knocked up Sally Hemings.”

“Well, I think it’s safe to say that perhaps Jesus has withstood the test of—”

“Modern
, Norm. Someone we actually know something about.”

“Well, I’d argue—”

“We are not gonna have that discussion. Who stands up—musicians? Mozart was an ass. Wagner hated Jews. Sinatra was a mobster. Edison was just fine, Norm. Brilliant, actually. Can we just admire the guy and accept his imperfections as part of the inev—”

“You’re defending Americans. Now, that I like.”

“Not at all. I’m saluting greatness and originality without pretending to know or to judge anybody’s integrity.”

Norm didn’t even know what he was arguing. One potshot about Edison and he was suddenly trapped in Wayne’s dissertation. “What about Ripken?”

“Who?”

“Cal Ripken,” he snapped. “The shortstop! Retired now, but he played in over twenty-six hundred straight games with—”

“The help of steroids.”