Border Songs (26 page)

She flagged the waitress, ordered sandwiches for them both and lit a Camel to ease the pinging in her head. There was no grand scheme behind this lunch. Her unease dissipated with the smoke and turned to amusement when she thought of the super-serious questions Toby had told her to put to Brandon, but she knew she’d ask them. She had to stay on Toby’s good side so that when it was time to get out, he’d let her. She ground the last half of her cigarette beneath her heel as she watched Brandon stride back, glancing at the trees, roof and phone lines before laying two photos faceup in front of her.

“You on assignment, Agent Vanderkool?” she asked without looking up.

“In this shirt? Just wanted to warn you that your friend there’s supposedly in the dope business. But you probably know that.”

“Met him at a weird party,” she began breathlessly, pointing with her pinky. So Toby was right. There is a mole. “Sees himself as a lady’s man, I guess. Led us around like show dogs. Didn’t catch his name.”

“Tobias C. Foster.” Brandon was delighted. She barely knew him!
“They recorded him talking to Hells Angels in Peace Arch on the Fourth. You’re not in the dope business, are ya, Maddy?”

She closed her eyes and bobbed, as if listening to jazz, then forced a smile. “I come from a long line of wine drinkers.” Once she got past the alarm that people were secretly snapping photos of her, she realized this was a heads-up, a favor. Brandon was looking out for
her
.

He could barely contain himself. She’s clean—and smiling at him! “Well, I guess the Mounties assume you’re in it because they know this guy’s in it, right?”

“Whatever you say.” She slid the photos back, having memorized when and where and at what angles they were shot. “What bird is that singing?” she asked, eager for a new topic.

“A starling. You hear a bird, it’s probably a starling. People hate ’em, but they can sing anything. Mozart had a pet starling that helped him improve a melody by changing it to G-sharp. He had a funeral for it when it died. People got dressed up and everything.”

Unbelievable. She asked about his work, the hours, the shifts, the upsides and downsides, then clicked through Toby’s queries about the tools and habits of the patrol—how many agents, rigs, helicopters and boats, their staffing at nights, how often they patrolled the Cascades and the bays. She felt guiltier with each question.

She was interested in what he was doing! The last few times he’d seen her, it had been hard to sustain her attention. Now she found everything so interesting! He explained his strategy of rotating stakeouts on smuggling routes, then told her about all the ratting-out of locals and the drug busts of people she might know.

“Pot never was my thing,” she finally said.

“Me neither,” he said. “Only time I tried it was with Danny.”

Just the thought of this amused her.

“It was the third Christmas he came back from college. Said he had something I had to try called Paul McCartney pot. Kept saying it was the stuff Paul McCartney smoked whenever he went to New York. ‘Makes you happy,’ he kept saying. ‘Happy happy happy! All you do is laugh!’” Madeline started giggling, so he repeated it, louder, “Happy
happy happy.” He wouldn’t stop snorting until she urged him on. “So we smoked some the day he left, just a little, because we didn’t want to get too happy seeing as how he had to get on a plane. But we didn’t get happy at all. We didn’t say anything for a couple hours. Danny barely moved. I drove him to the airport, then got lost coming home.”

Madeline’s laugh had everyone staring at their table. He scrambled to say whatever he could to keep her laughing, but couldn’t think of anything to add. “You probably know this,” he said, “but you laugh when you’re beautiful.”

She rearranged the words. The most she could recall being called was cute or appealing or, her least favorite, not unattractive. But
beautiful?
That was her sister’s adjective. She tilted her head back so her eyes wouldn’t overflow.

He tried again. “When you are laughing … What I—”

“Thanks, Brandon. Got it.” She watched him demolish his Reuben and plow into the helpless fries, as focused on the food as if he were eating alone. “Still doing your art?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t know how to stop,” he said, not looking up.

“Still painting birds?”

“And people.”

“Getting better?”

He shrugged.

Awkward with the silence, she said, “How’s your mom doing?”

“She just took some big memory test to see what’s wrong. Could just be menopause, you know? But she couldn’t remember her favorite song the other night, and that really bothered her. She knew the notes, but none of the words or even the title.”

“What was it?”

“A Beatles song.”

“Back to Paul.”

“Who?”

“Which song?”

“‘Blackbird,’” he said, unable to resist singing the rest of the opening line. Again, conversations stopped at the other tables.

“All right, Brandon,” she said, reddening.

He couldn’t see her expression because his mouth was skyward and bursting into “‘Take these broken wings and learn to
flyyyy …
’”

She simultaneously tried to shush him and memorize the moment, so busy thinking about how to describe it, how to do it justice, that she missed the disbelief and pity on people’s faces. He missed every high note, French fry smithereens gathering in the corners of his lips. “‘All your life’”—she signaled the waitress for the check—“‘you were only waiting for this moment to
ariiise.’
”

To Brandon, the song sounded so perfectly executed that it was hard to resist starting at the top again, but he felt Madeline’s hand squeezing his and when he looked down she was leaning toward him, sunburned, an eyebrow twitching, clearly moved. She was close enough to kiss. But how to get from here to there? He dared any of the jealous diners to think about wooing her. If necessary, he’d pound his head against a drainpipe five hundred times a day for Madeline Rousseau. When he opened his mouth to start singing again, she squeezed his hand harder. He felt hers trembling and covered it with the fingers of his other hand until it stilled.

S
HE COULD
feel the escalating stress and outrage in the trapezius knots, neck gristle and rigid joints of her moaning clients, especially once Dirk Hoffman’s story started bouncing around.

He was returning home from the saloon at half past midnight when Agent Rick Talley’s personal radiation detector went off. Nobody disputed that part. Exactly what happened next hinged on who was talking.

Agent Talley wrote it up as
a required vehicle stop
after Mr. Hoffman’s truck made his PRD flash and beep. The driver appeared to be intoxicated. After he turned verbally abusive, Agent Talley gently subdued Mr. Hoffman in order to properly search him and his vehicle.

The dairyman’s version: He was nearly home when Agent Hothead screeched into a U-turn and hit the lights as if he were Al Capone, then ordered him to step outside and “shut his fucking mouth.” When Dirk asked what the hell was going on, Agent Hothead ordered him facedown on the street, where he was searched, held at gunpoint and berated in Spanish.

While no nuclear weapon was found on Dirk or in his truck, the incident made it common knowledge that the pricey new toys on the BP’s hips were so sensitive they could detect such drive-by cancer patients as the sixty-nine-year-old Dirk Hoffman, who until then had managed to keep his radiation treatments secret.

This dustup unleashed other tales of harassment. Wildlife biologist Matthew Paust told Sophie he was interrogated for twenty minutes
about exactly why he was strolling alone at night along the edge of
his
property. Alexandra Cole confided at the next bunko party that a new BP ransacked her brother’s Audi after he visited a friend on Peace Drive. East Indians who’d grown raspberries along the U.S. side for decades stopped visiting Abbotsford relatives to avoid the humiliating questions and searches on the drive home.

And complaints about the border cams rose to a boil. They track us whenever we step outside! residents told local councils with no say over the patrol or its cameras. “How would you feel if you had a camera on you twenty-four/seven?” Melanie Mesick demanded. “Who’s to say some perverted imbecile won’t start using them to peer into our bedrooms?”

Still, the security and surveillance continued to escalate as Patera almost doubled patrols yet again to keep his ever-growing force busy. Most vehicles cruising the northern line after dusk were now green-and-whites. Few people took notice of the little flying drone when it first began traversing the 49th like some oversized, high-altitude bird, though they were alarmed to learn that the unmanned military aircraft’s cameras could read a cereal box from fifteen thousand feet.

Patera wanted even more gadgets, urging the Blaine council to seek grants for a radiation alarm system at its busiest four-way intersection. He also insisted that local fire and police should be equipped with PDAs that could tap into FBI databases at the scene of an incident.

Nobody was surprised to hear that Dirk Hoffman had hired a hotshot Seattle attorney to look into suing the goddamn Border Patrol. What everyone was waiting for was his next reader-board salvo:
WELCOME TO THE POLICE STATE
.

H
E FELT
his scalp burning as he shuffled into the Blaine liquor store, as if some cruel giant were focusing a magnifying glass on the top of his head. Walking back out, he heard childish squeals coming from the park and remembered this happened to be the one day of the year they turned Peace Arch over to thousands of shrill Girl Scouts from both countries. Just their luck, this heat wave. He rolled east toward the valley through the queue of semis crawling toward the only open Customs station, exasperated drivers hanging out their windows, too hot to smoke.

Norm took weather personally. Windstorms spooked him, cold snaps tortured his knee and when it climbed over eighty, the sun was an open flame on his skin. Roll him out naked in this heat and he’d be a charred husk within three hours. The weather girl swore this two-week scorcher would snap that afternoon with rain, wind and, possibly, thunder and lightning. Yet for now, the valley remained a cloud-forsaken oven. And to think he had to drive to the east end of it, without air-conditioning, just to give Ray Lankhaar a belated get-well-soon bottle on the hottest day of the year.

He passed five BPs rolling out H Street. While he didn’t side with Dirk Hoffman and the other anti-fed nut jobs, it did make him queasy that his son was part of what had started to look like an occupying army. He’d asked Roony to pinch-hit for the afternoon milking after remembering his promise to swing by Ray’s around three. He
now hoped Roony still had enough on the ball to give them extra water.

South Pass Road suddenly featured three new toy ranches, their massive timbered gates announcing Hawk Heaven, Peace Meadows and Rainbow Ridge. The more useless the ranch, Norm observed, the grander its entrance. He saw that the county’s largest blueberry patch had five new windmills on it, powering God knows what—as if further proof was needed that he was the least imaginative guy in the whole valley. Even with a thermos of coffee in his belly, he still had to fend off the swoons before the mirage of Ray Lankhaar’s farm filled his windshield.

A row of firs and two massive
NO CASINO!
signs flanked the private drive curling up the knoll to a tidy house with a sensible metal roof. Beyond it were three freshly painted green barns and two rust-free silos flanked by freshly trimmed willows so the feed trucks had clearance.

Neither Ray nor his magazine-pretty wife, who’d never so much as blinked at Norm, answered the door, which forced him to trudge to the barns and have superior cow care shoved in his face once again. He hosed his boots, even though they were clean, to avoid that lecture. Ray prided himself on being the valley’s only dairyman who insisted visitors wash up before entering his barns, which was typical of how he did everything. He bought the most expensive semen and bulls. He shoveled the manure three times a day, not just once. But it was his beddings—including, for the love of God, fresh sand every month—that flabbergasted Norm. Tropical resorts were less particular about their sand. He even sloped each stall to keep the lounging cows’ heads slightly elevated. Why, so they could read in bed? The most galling aspect of this pampering was that it worked. He owned at least a dozen cows as old and valuable as Pearl, and his herd routinely produced the most milk per cow in the valley.

“Ray!” Norm shouted, hoping to just leave the bottle on the porch and bank the chit for a gift that would probably get written off as
table
wine
. On his next glance around, he saw the baby-shit beige Mercedes parked on the shady backside of the second willow. Why would Ray invite him out when the doc was scheduled? He stepped quietly into the closest barn, grateful for shade, dangling the overpriced Merlot by its neck.

“Raymond?” he called, softer now, still angling for an undetected visit. He lurched back at the homicidal snort and shuffle of the penned bull that must have gored Lankhaar. Why hadn’t Ray already auctioned the brute off? He was backpedaling gingerly when he heard rising voices and the sound—unthinkable on this dairy—of agitated cows. He pushed through a door hanging ajar, and once he’d stepped completely into the painful light he saw Ray shouting something through a surgical mask at the vet, who also wore one and was squatting next to a downed and bloated Jersey. Heat stroke? Maybe milk fever? But what’s with the masks? Drawing closer, he noticed three other bloated cows moaning on their sides. Then a few more.

“Norm!” Ray screamed, standing over a cow that was spouting gas and foam. “Get over here!”

Bangs matted against his know-it-all forehead, Stremler looked up and glared, as if everything happening was all Norm’s fault. “Put a mask on!” he yelled, folding a phone in a gloved hand and pointing at a box.

“Milk fever?” Norm asked.

“Put that bottle down and get over here!” Ray demanded, looking as wild-eyed as his ailing cows.