Border Songs (25 page)

“Did he offer you money?”

“Yes.”

“Are you taking it?”

“No.”

“Will you?”

“Doubt anybody wants to go through my farm now they’ve got the cameras up.”

Her hands rose to his left knee, her fingers studying its construction, then less gently maneuvering muscles and tendons on all sides of it. “You mentioned your healthy calves. Are things really looking better?”

He heard himself moaning. “One calf,” he managed to say. “I just need a break.” He caught a sob before it popped out. “I really, really need a break.”

Her fingers continued probing his wounded joint. “If you knew you wouldn’t get caught, would you take it?”

“The money?”

“For looking the other way.”

“At what point is it too late to try to be honorable?”

“Wayne Rousseau thinks he can find honor by
experiencing
other people’s greatness.”

“By what?”

“How tempting is the money, Norm?”

“I think about it every day.”

“Do you know how to sail?”

“Did it as a kid.”

“A lot?”

“Enough.”

“Enough to know how to sail across—”

“Wayne,” Norm interrupted, “is an ass.”

“There. That’s better.”

“Twice.”

“Twice what?”

“My grandfather took me out twice. That’s my sailing background. Only twice, but I don’t have any clearer memories than those two afternoons.”

“When I spoke with Jeanette at church, her spirits were as high as ever.”

“Some days,” Norm said softly, not wanting to mix the rubbing sensation with thoughts of his wife. “And other days making dinner’s an adventure. She kept saying, ‘Something’s wrong with my mind.’ And I kept saying, ‘We all get old and forget.’”

“Ever cheated on her, Norm?”

“Once. And I’ve waited too long to tell her about it to be adequately punished.”

“Or is it that you want to cheat on her again?”

His breath caught. “A man can’t help but wonder,” he ventured, “if a pretty lady other than his wife might have sex with him.”

A recorder wound to a clicking stop.

“What was that?”

“The music.”

“But … it’s still playing.”

“That’s good.
Shhhhh.”

Five minutes of silent frenzied thigh rubbing later: “Norm?” Her voice barely made it through. “Let that energy exit through your feet.”

“Energy?”

“Just picture it leaving through your feet.”

“What the—”

“Or think about your mortgage, how much you still owe, that sort of thing.”

H
E GOOSE-STEPPED
back through the poplars toward his farm, cupping his hands to see if his breath stunk, his mind a jumble of virility and humiliation. How embarrassing! Well, at least she knows he’s fully operable, right? Then came the shame of what he’d shared, things he’d never said aloud. But the truth was his body felt oddly youthful, a strange and blissful lightness overtaking him.

“Full Bonnie?” somebody yelled.

The professor. “What?” Norm shouted, neither slowing nor veering from his path to the boat barn. Manners be damned.

“Full body?”

“What’re you saying?” Norm yapped, reluctantly straying closer to the ditch, daring him to repeat it one more time.

“Was it a full body massaaaage?” Wayne sang. “C’mon, I can smell the oils from here. Let me guess: It was perfect, except she missed one little spot, eh?”

Norm scowled at the scrawny elf, a marijuana cigarette burning between tiny fingers.

“You get naked in there? Or’d you leave your gutchies on? Don’t feel inadequate, Norm. From what I gather, you probably wouldn’t survive sex with that woman anyway.”

“Hah!” was all Norm could get out before Wayne said, “Last two guys? One went temporarily blind in the left eye, the other broke his penis.”

“Bull—”

“Oh, it can happen, my friend. If the ligament walls collapse and the chamber snaps, the whole thing fills up with blood.”

Without thinking it through, Norm tried to parrot what Patera had told him. “Your miracle medicine there induces mental illness and panic disorders, as well as bipolar and delusional disorders and schizophrenia paranoid.”

Wayne laughed at the sky. “That was truly wonderful. Would you repeat that please?”

“You shoot the camera out?” Norm demanded, jabbing his thumb down the road.

“Was gonna ask you the same thing.”

“People say it was you.”

“People will say anything, won’t they? They’ll say half the Americans along the border are on the take, that you’ve got the EPA crawling up your ass and that your son’s in the new gestapo. Who cares what they say. You miss the camera, Norm?”

“Not a bit,” he admitted. “They already replaced it, anyway.”

“That’s right, and I hear they’re gonna be flying drones and blimps along here in no time. Personally, I hope somebody shoots them down too.” Wayne scrunched his nose and sniffed melodramatically. “That yours?”

It took Norm a beat to catch up. Taking credit for the odor was admitting he’d been spraying much more manure than usual, which hinted at the trouble he was in—and Wayne, clearly, already knew all about it. One thing led to another.

“What’s the latest on that evildoer your boy caught?” Wayne asked.

“How’re those reinventions coming?” Norm countered. “Been thinking I might branch out too, maybe take up the cello and join some symphony that performs in Vienna.”

Wayne took his ball cap off and shook his shaved head—the latest disguise. “You should get more massages.”

Norm spun to turn and go, his knee almost entirely painless, awaiting the final retort. The professor never let him win; there always had to be another shot.

“What you don’t understand, Norm,” he began softly, “is that I envy you. You don’t have to learn the cello or read the classics or indulge in any other last-minute self-improvement crusade. You’re perfectly content being
you
.”

Norm examined the compliment from several angles, then
stomped back to him. “That comment, more than anything else you’ve ever said”—all this under his breath, tit for tat, forcing the professor to lean closer—“proves that despite living across that ditch for thirty-one years, you still don’t know the first thing about me.”

“Touché!” Wayne shouted.

Norm’s fading triumph was interrupted by the sound of a plane flying slow and low over his dairy, forcing him to kink his neck and stub his left foot just enough to tweak his knee.

When he stepped inside, Jeanette was waiting on the couch, a stress rash rising on her neck, her face so creased with worries she didn’t look like his wife. In a flash Norm realized he’d forgotten that he was taking her to the memory clinic.

“Where’ve you been?” she asked.

J
EANETTE FELT
small and hollow in the large, brightly lit room across the long table from a young woman in a white lab coat who was lobbing questions at her as if she were a child. What was the date, the season, the month? What state, county and city was she in? The answers were easy, but she could feel the pressure and judgment behind them. This alarmingly loud girl asked her to repeat words back to her:
bird, drum, lake
. Next she was instructed to count backwards from a hundred by eight, which didn’t seem fair considering that she’d never been able to do math in her head.

The lab girl interrupted her—had she already messed up?—to wonder if she could spell the word
earth
. Then again, but backwards.

“A moment ago”—now she sounded like a recording—“I asked you to remember three words. Can you tell me those three words again?”

Jeanette froze, the words hidden behind a wall of fear.

But the questions and instructions kept coming: “Please read the words on this page and do what they say.”

What a horrible place! She was too nervous to be examined. This
test wouldn’t prove anything! Then she was asked to connect numbered dots on a page.

The woman checked her watch and looked up critically.

Feeling like a mouse on drugs, Jeanette heard herself breathing. She snuck another look at the upside-down title on the examination sheet:
DEMENTIA BATTERY SUMMARY REPORT
.

S
INCE BRANDON
was twenty minutes early, he drove around the block twice, then parked and strolled past McGiver’s Café to scout the territory, debating whether to sit inside or out. Inside would be quieter, but outside he’d be able to see more. He picked a gap in the traffic and hoofed it across the street for another perspective, absently browsing an antiques shop, a used-clothing store and a locked nameless storefront with tinted windows and a long manifesto on its door about the
Nazification of Canada
. He got lost in the opening sentence:
Drug prohibitions make gangsters and addicts and homeless people out of our children
.

He walked in and out of the café three times before choosing a tiny wrought-iron sidewalk table where he sang softly to himself and gazed above the traffic at the rock pigeons strutting along the roof across the street. He was into his third iced tea refill by the time she showed up, twenty-five minutes late.

“You’re easy to find.”

He glanced around, confused, as if he should’ve sat inside, elated she was there and still
her
, but suddenly wordless and lost.

“Your shirt,” she explained. “Don’t see a whole lot of Hawaiian shirts around here, and I had no idea they made ’em that red or that big.”

She’d almost kept walking, the awkwardness of the lunch settling in, but he’d clearly spotted her before she saw him. Amazingly, he seemed to still be growing, demanding more space, his chest and shoulders
expanding, his face rounding, his Adam’s apple settling into a fleshier neck. He had the same lopsided smile and unintentional pompadour, but didn’t come off as an overgrown child anymore. More like an overgrown young man—until he spoke.

Just seeing her relieved him, even though she didn’t look like the humorous tomboy on file in his mind. The thin hips, narrow shoulders, flat chest and monkey arms hadn’t changed, but there was a momentousness about her like he’d seen in brides before weddings. He also noticed the new geometrics of her smile lines, eye radials and half circles framing her lips. Her irises were a brighter gray-blue, her voice huskier. Still, her mannerisms, her origami-like flexibility—shifting effortlessly from cross-legged to one foot beneath her butt—and her fidgeting hands, all but three nails bitten back, were all comfortingly familiar. He looked around, surprised all the other men weren’t ogling her. And once he started talking, he couldn’t stop.

He told her about his father’s sick cows, then the Princess from Nowhere in limbo hell and the angry Chinese women hiding under a fish truck and another van full of scared aliens huddled like chickadees trying to keep warm in a birdhouse. And how trying to stop the buds and illegals was like trying to stop the tide or the sun or the wind. The words and stories just flowed. Talking to her was so easy!

Madeline realized she couldn’t fake this one. Too much was going on to smile her way through lunch. For starters she had a nervous belly and a fogged head from the night before, which had somehow included topless chess with some manipulative creep who’d convinced her to call him later and talk dirty while he—from the sound of it—popped balloons in a bathtub. Now she lacked the clarity or patience to converse with anyone, much less Brandon.

His gushing monologue swung from intriguingly detailed to remarkably irrelevant to occasionally incomprehensible, but always loud enough for the other nine outdoor diners to hear every word. Though he was more coherent than he used to be, the quirks remained, and it came roaring back to her how Danny used to provide the subtitles. He hadn’t even brought up that craziness about her father, yet why
should she be surprised? He was incapable of hidden agendas. This was just Brandon Vanderkool unloading on the streets of Abbotsford, his eyes wandering above and behind and to the sides of her, his upper body rocking, his shoes drumming the concrete. Still, she felt something coming.

It was hard to talk over the traffic. Brandon could barely follow his own words and knew he’d jumbled some, what with all the distractions, including the congregating flocks—blackbirds on sagging telephone lines, crows displacing pigeons on the rooftops and a gaggle of purple finches in the collared sidewalk trees. He desperately wanted to point them all out, but if there was one thing he didn’t want to be today it was the bird freak. Suddenly she looked away and then back at him, as if preparing to leave.

“How’s your dad and sister?” he asked.

“Nicole is pretty much the same, just richer. And it’ll take more than MS to slow Dad down. But when you called, you said something weird about him shooting a camera. What made you say that?”

“It was easy to tell it was him.”

When she’d asked her father about it, his laugh was convincing, as was his aside that he wasn’t so anti-American that he was taking up arms. “But you said whoever shot it looked like a ghost, so how could you—”

“By build and posture, by how his left shoulder hangs lower, by the cock of his elbows, by the way he walks on the balls of his feet and the—”

“Okay, Brandon.”

“You wearing tinted contacts?” he asked.

“Nope.”

“Really? I didn’t know eyes got brighter with age.”

“Thanks for noticing.”

“Are you ovulating?” he asked louder, with the same head-tilting curiosity.

She looked at him incredulously. “So,” she drawled, realizing that
she was probably ovulating at that very moment, “why’d you want to have lunch?”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” he said, jolting upward and knocking his chair over. “Please stay there.” He picked up his seat and looked past her. “Please,” he said again, then stomped off into the café.

It wasn’t until he was gone that she heard and saw the birds behind her. Was he still obsessed? He’d once coaxed her and Danny into bicycling to a small Blaine cemetery after dark. When they got there, all sweaty from the ride, he started into his goofy calls, sounding like a cross between a kazoo and a geezer faking enthusiasm.
Who-ho-hooo-who-who
. She and Danny snickered until something called back. The dialogue continued for several volleys until a stout owl broke free from the canopy, gliding toward them over tombstones of Icelanders with names like Benedictson, Friedleifsdottir and Gudmunsson before realizing it had been duped and banking back into the trees. As Danny liked to say, “You don’t forget time spent with Brandon.”