Border Songs (23 page)

He flinched, as if slapped.

“Easy, now.” Dale shifted into a French accent. “Everyone knows
Monsieur
Rousseau did it.”

He nodded vacantly and was straining to overhear a scrum of Lyn-den ladies behind him discussing Brandon when Tom Dunbar waddled up from the other side and bumped him off balance.

This hulking bastard, who routinely proved he could knock you onto one foot with just a nudge, watched Norm wince. “Didn’t know you were so gimpy there. My older brother just got his knee replaced—better than new. But maybe you’re a little squeamish about surgery, huh, Norm?”

He shook his head and missed the follow-up question, his entire being focused on the raging tissues inside his knee. Once that subsided, he found Jeanette in the corner of his vision, looking perplexed, listening to Alexandra Cole and Katrina Montfort like she’d just met them. Behind her, Sophie was chatting, eavesdropping, pollinating.

He excused himself from Big Tom and had started back to rescue Jeanette when one of the raspberry millionaires cut him off.

“How’s that boat coming along, captain?”

Norm scrambled to recall the man’s name—Arnold, Ronald, Roland? “Slowly,” he said.

“Yeah? Well, slow can be good. How ’bout the dairy biz?”

“Lucrative as ever.”

“You must love cows, Norm. That’s all I can say.”

He grunted and scowled but had no escape route. Behind him, he heard more banter about Brandon, and beyond that a crescendo of whispers that could have been about anybody.

“Seriously, Norm. None of you like to admit it, but why else would you spend so much time with ’em? I mean
every day!
It’s not for the
money, so what other motive is there? Seriously, Norm. There’s nothin’ wrong with it. You just
love
cows.”

“Not the way you would if you ever got alone with one,” he growled, the rich farmer leaning in with his good ear, then horse-laughing as Norm hobbled off toward Jeanette, distracted again, this time by Ray Lankhaar’s profile. He scrambled for the appropriate words before clumsily grabbing his shoulder. Ray reared back and gave him the once-over.

“Been meaning to see how you’re farin’,” Norm began, realizing anything he said now was too late so he left it at that. Even after getting skewered by his own bull, Ray still looked a good ten years younger than he did. His face wore time well, with plenty of lines but all working in his favor. He’d once heard him attribute his youthfulness to the quart of raw milk he drank every morning to wash down a thick slice of his homemade cheddar, which he humbly speculated could cure stomach cancer.

Norm was spared from his stand-off with Ray when an Everson farmer he vaguely recognized leaned in to ask whether they were interested in cheap feed.

“Possibly,” Ray said. “Whatcha got?”

The farmer told them what all he’d grown, then rambled on about how everyone was sick and tired of paying to haul alfalfa over the mountains. Norm nodded along, his feed bill having jumped to $7,000 a month even with a lame herd.

“Count me in,” Ray said, after the farmer laid out his mixtures and prices, and they both looked at Norm.

“I’m good for at least one load,” he muttered.

“Hear your boy’s quite the
arteest,”
Ray said once the Everson fellow pushed on. “A regular Michelangelo.”

“He was on his dinner break,” Norm said mildly, though he could feel himself heating up. “You can do whatever you want on your breaks.” Then he navigated the crowd again, trying to ignore the smug glances. Was he limping? How had all these people suspended aging, and what did
that
cost? Jeanette, he saw, was chattering away at
Sophie. He couldn’t get there fast enough, a compulsion rising to bust up the conversation.

His eyes suddenly locked with Michael’s. Halfway across the room, the kid nodded slowly like he was confirming something. Norm bit down and looked away, enjoying the ambiguity of it. What was the risk? Nobody got hanged for a yawn or a nod. He beelined it toward Jeanette, but Alexandra Cole blocked his path and leaned close. “Have you tried Aricept?” she whispered.

“Come again,” he said, irritated, trying not to lose sight of Jeanette.

“Slows the deterioration, especially in the early stages. My aunt’s got it too.”

Norm pursed his lips, blinked slowly and excused himself, arriving breathless and sweaty next to the two women in his life. Either the church was getting hotter or he had a fever. Sophie smiled, bowed and stepped away from Jeanette, who looked lost and off balance until he casually braced his palm against the shoulder she was listing toward.

B
RANDON RODE
around the valley with Dionne at the wheel explaining that her daughter got sent home sick again because either her immune system had gone on strike or she was just allergic to this place. Brandon made listening murmurs while tracking wing strokes in the peacock-colored twilight and picturing what he’d wear to lunch with Madeline, imagining something considerably brighter than anything he owned.

When the call about the suspicious van on Markworth came in, they were already eastbound on H Street. So Dionne flipped the lights and pushed the Crown Vic up to eighty after they cleared a knoll and could safely straddle the yellow ribbon. “We’re coming home tonight,” she muttered as they hurtled past a 35 mph sign at 100.

The van could be nothing or anything. Brandon had caught sixteen distraught aliens since the angry Chinese women had crawled out from beneath Greg Dawson’s van. His latest roundup involved an old Lincoln on Jones Road. The driver, who lived nearby in Deming, handled the conversation gracefully enough and everything checked out until Brandon noticed there was no backseat. When he lifted the blanket he found six Indonesians lying sideways, head to toe, to the back of the trunk. Half of them started crying, the other half began praying.

Now he braced himself against the dashboard and hoped for a pot bust or, better yet, a false alarm.

Dionne slowed the Vic enough to make the Markworth turn and guessed right again by skidding onto Badger and sustaining her speed
until they almost rear-ended a long avocado-green van with tinted square windows. It abruptly cornered onto Sunrise, squealing and rocking but making the turn. Dionne skidded to a halt, popped it in reverse, sped backwards, then shifted into drive and carefully tailed the van through a new neighborhood, nearly a block behind, not wanting to cause a crash.

“This is the difference between us and cops,” she shouted. “Cops wait for backup!” The van rocked on its shocks through the next two turns, and the neighborhood turned into farms. When Dionne closed the gap, the van bucked off-road into tall grass and stopped. “I got the driver!” she barked, the Vic grinding to a halt and Brandon’s head bouncing off the roof. “You take the van!”

Then she was out, sprinting faster than Brandon imagined she could while he felt his own body charging into the night toward that van door—before it opened. His hand wrapped around the sliding-door handle and he swung it back in a fluid, full-body yank as Dionne shouted at the fleeing driver. The door careened to the end of its track and didn’t stop there, ripping loose in a screech of crashing steel, all of which he heard but didn’t see because he was counting twelve faces warped with fear, their skin pulling back from their eyes and teeth.

He held up his big hands to try to slow their hearts. “All right,” he said, then more softly, “s’all right. Just stay. Just …”

Dionne jogged back, pushing the gasping driver in front of her, head down and handcuffed.

“What ya got?”

Brandon pointed inside.

“Jesus. You haven’t”—she rocked at her hips, waiting for oxygen—“searched ’em yet?”

“No.”

“Then why don’t you have their hands where … What’ve you said so far?”

“Asked them to stay put.”

She glanced at his empty hands. “Get it free of the leather at least,
for Godsakes.” Then she shouted at them to put their hands on their heads, first in English, then in Spanish.
“¡Manos arriba!”

Brandon pulled his gun, pointed it at the ground, double-checked that the safety was on and looked into the childish faces. Dionne continued shouting in Spanish until he said, “They’re not Mexicans. East Indians, maybe, or Pakistanis?” Several nodded vigorously, as if not being Mexican might help. “And they’re couples, husbands and wives, I think.”

“Watch ’em!” Dionne snapped, then searched them one by one as another BP roared up, lights strobing and twirling.

Brandon finally got a clean look at the wheezing, downcast driver, a man of about fifty who’d once told him that the beauty of mathematics rivaled any sunset. “Mr. Pearson,” he said respectfully. “What’re you doing here?”

He was still thinking about him hours later while sipping his fourth pint and half-listening to Dionne tell the agents how petrified the aliens looked after Brandon ripped their door off like a fucking sardine lid and stuck his big head in the van. “One guy’s got a knife, another’s got a thirty-two, but they didn’t budge. Isn’t that beautiful?”

She’d been talking loud and fast ever since they got to the saloon, telling and retelling their story to as many audiences as she could find. “I come back waving my Beretta, and they couldn’t have cared less. Brandon doesn’t even unsnap, just asks if they’re okay, and they shit themselves. Then he turns to this driver who’s so out of shape that even I could run him down and says, ‘Mr. Pearson?’ Turns out the dirtbag was his fifth-grade math teacher.”

Brandon wanted to explain that Mr. Pearson was actually his sixth-grade teacher, and one of his favorites, but by the time he’d marshaled the right words and waited out the laughter, McAfferty had taken the floor.

“All math teachers should be considered prime suspects,” he said. “Who better to understand just how lucrative and easy this game really is?”

Brandon could sense everyone else in the bar listening to McAfferty and sizing up the seven BPs, including three new transfers from Arizona. He sorted the faces in the back and saw Eddie Erickson jerk his head back, then twirl the shot glass in his fingers.

“The honorable Mr. Pearson was probably pocketing a grand or two per alien to get them to Seattle,” McAfferty speculated. “So he was looking at twelve to twenty-four thou for two hours of sweaty driving. And maybe this wasn’t his first load. Maybe it was his twenty-first, or sixty-first, know what I’m saying? If he’s been in it a while he won’t have any problem posting bail. And if it’s a big operation, they have
can money
for just this sort of thing and he won’t even have to post it himself.”

Dionne asked McAfferty for a smoke and stuck it behind her ear, then listed all the habits she’d been trying to swear off: the two daily scones, the three triple Americanos, the four—now six, sometimes eight—ciggies a day.

“The resolutions we make at first light are always different than the ones we make at midnight,” McAfferty said, the other agents tuning in to his mock sermon. “I mean, we all have high hopes for ourselves at sunrise. Take last Saturday: I start the day, as I often do, by weeding the cemetery and paintin’ the church. I avoid every vice I’ve ever indulged until lunch, when I cheat on my no-dessert pledge. By dinner I’m itching for just one drink. Then, of course, I head out for another, just to be out with the little people, you know? Another three gimlets into the evening, I spring for a pack of Pall Malls. At this point, fuck the filters. Know what I’m saying? And even this dreary joint suddenly seems packed with possibilities, though we’re clearly the new pariahs around here.” He raised his voice. “Because obviously it’s our fault that everybody’s smugglin’ something.”

He dropped back into an intimate tone that had everyone leaning closer except for Brandon, who wanted to leave before something bad happened. “But see,” he continued, “you gotta understand I’m in this crazy mind-set where I think being a pariah makes me sexier. And by closing time, it’s just me and two ladies I wouldn’t notice sober if they
had strobe lights in their cleavage. Know what I’m saying? So of course I close in on the one who smokes because I figure she’s living for
now
. And nobody, even at last call, looks at me and thinks long-term, right?” The agents jackknifed with laughter, and Brandon did his best to snort along. “But at the last minute I go for the gusto and try to pick ’em
both
up because I’m suddenly willing to gamble they’re a package deal.”

Talley poured another round. “So?”

“Turns out—and this will probably astonish most of you—they aren’t interested in me. I mean not even slightly. So I swerve home and call my ex again, naturally—two thirty a.m. my time, five thirty Sunday morning there.”

“How’d that go over?” Talley asked.

“Wasn’t all that well received.”

“There’s some phone service,” Dionne offered, “where you can block yourself from dialing certain numbers after a certain hour.”

McAfferty grunted. “As if that would stop me.”

The bartender moseyed up as the story ended. “Can I get you the check?”

McAfferty looked up, stroking his chin whiskers. “Trying to run us out already?”

“Not at all.” The bartender blanched, his eyes flicking to the dozen patrons standing in the back corner.

“Would you please explain to those Rhodes Scholars,” McAfferty began, as the waiter retied his stained apron, “that the Border Patrol doesn’t police drunk driving and doesn’t give a shit how impaired they get. And after you do that, another pitcher would be much appreciated.”

All the agents except Brandon turned to swap glares with the gang in the back. The bar turned oddly quiet until Eddie Erickson shouted into the lull, “Hey, Repeat! Aren’t you even gonna say hi?”

Brandon blushed instantly, desperately hoping nobody understood that the nickname was aimed at him. Certain facts or phrases used to pop out of his mouth again and again. It took years for Danny Crawford
to convince him to ignore the taunts, but the end result felt the same. He caught himself rocking at the hips and went rigid. By the time he risked looking up, McAfferty and Dionne were staring at him. Then Talley said, in a low rumble, “Just say the word, big fella, and I’ll gladly shoot the douche.”