Border Songs (27 page)

Norm wince-galloped over, his face instantly sweaty behind the mask. Hypocalcemia? Hypomagnesmia? Rumen acidosis? Despite the glare, he could see the gray roots of Ray’s hair and, beyond him, another collapsing cow. Norm grabbed the upper lip of one already down and opened its mouth wide enough to slide a two-foot pipe down its throat and pour baking soda inside. It was reassuring to know that even sanctimonious Raymond Lankhaar got served a shit sandwich from time to time, but what the hell was going on here? As he
ripped off his shirt and tied it off over his broiling scalp, his thoughts finally caught up with the action—the masks, Stremler’s urgency, Patera’s dire warnings. “Why so many down at once?” he yelled.

“Think I haven’t wondered about that?” Stremler barked. Then, to Ray, “We’ve gotta open one up.”

“What?”

“Now! Fifty-six is gone. We’ve gotta do it now.”

“Oh, Christ,” Ray whined. “Should I get a—?”

“I got everything here.”

Norm ran the chief’s warnings back through his head. That the government values its dairy product. That mad-cow could be spread with a spray bottle. That a toxin dropped in a bulk tank could kill half a million Americans.

Transfixed, he watched Stremler abbreviate the autopsy protocol. He didn’t cut off a front leg or peel the cow open from the shoulder. He punctured and sawed straight into the belly until the entrails sloshed out onto the ground. The doc picked through this pungent ooze like a man shopping for melons, then slit a bloated blue-gray sack and ran his hands through its contents several times. He ignored Ray’s questions before ripping off his mask and looking up to demand, “Where did you get this feed?”

“What’s wrong with—”

“Where’d you get it?”

“An Everson farmer named Pal—”

“Dried corn,” Stremler shouted. “Too much dried corn.”

“You mean—”

“Yes! I mean killer levels of dried corn and who knows what else. How many have fed already?” The doc glanced around, his lips moving while he counted. Then another cow dropped.

Ray whipped off his mask and scurried toward his parlor as Norm recalled that Palmer had said he’d deliver his bargain feed that afternoon. “No,” he pleaded, stumbling toward the shade. “Noooo!”

“What?” Stremler jolted upright, poised to quarrel over his diagnosis
as Norm desperately punched numbers into his cell phone, messing up and redialing. “Do
not
tell me that …”

He left in a mad hobble, his mind so fixed on getting back to the dairy there was no room for other thoughts, passing cars on blind hills with his old truck screaming at over ninety on the straightaways. He was shouting “Roony!” before he got out and stormed into the parlor to find him propped against the back wall, listening to sports talk radio at such high volume that he didn’t hear or see Norm until he was upon him. “Did Palmer deliver the—?”

“Yeah, don’t worry. He came.” Roony waved a hand toward the six full stalls.

“Stop the feeding!” Norm shouted, then yanked the hoses from 57’s udder and pushed her massive head out of the trough.

“What?”

“Get ’em outta here!”

“Talk to me, Norm!”

“The feed’s bad! How many milked already?”

“Two rounds and what you—”

“Get ’em out!” He yanked the hoses off 91 while Roony did the same with 17, all the cows now grunting and whining. One of them squealed and bucked her hind legs, grazing Roony’s left thigh and sending him yelping toward the back wall.

Norm continued slapping the cows out, furious, yelling, then storming out back to where everything looked normal until he saw three tipped over on their sides, including—oh,
God
—Pearl. She looked up, and her gaze went through him. Of course. The first to feed would be the first to die. He dropped to his best knee and heard another cow fall, realizing he had no idea what to do other than to fill them with baking soda and apologize. He left Pearl to check on the others and found her twins splayed, blinking skyward. He stooped to soothe 59 as Roony hobbled from the parlor like some animated gargoyle.

Norm sensed that all his wrongs, his shortcuts and weaknesses and infidelities had finally returned to roost. He looked up, not so much for
forgiveness as for explanation, and saw a blimp and a surveillance drone in the otherwise indifferent sky.

B
RANDON WADED
through hundreds of girls who came up to his hips. Dozens followed behind him, mouths upturned like they wanted to be fed, tugging on his uniform and demanding photos with him. He hadn’t seen or heard any birds in days except for lazy gulls, crows and blackbirds, as if the heat had shoved the songbirds from the valley and left nothing but screaming Brownies, Juniors and Cadets whose voices sounded like wind chimes in his floaty, birdless blur.

For the first time in his life, he wasn’t sleeping. Part of it was the grind of the night shift. Most of it was Madeline. After their lunch, it took great restraint not to call her every day. And the messages he left were never returned. He’d replayed the lunch in his head a few dozen times, looking for body language he’d missed or misunderstood. Her laughter was genuine, he was sure of that. Madeline used to be a Girl Scout too—a Girl Guide as the Canadians called them—and it was easy to imagine her at twelve, looking like a war hero with all her badges. Though he’d always known about this event, this was the first time he’d witnessed the craft-swapping horde of laughing, squealing girls spilling across the park and the closed freeway.

He tried to smile for the pictures, but he’d never been able to do that to anyone’s satisfaction, the shots inevitably coming out lopsided, capturing little more than his uncertainty. Yet the requests kept coming, for photos of just him, of him towering over one or two little girls or entire troops. One kid shouted, “I want a picture with the dinosaur!”

Brandon finally escaped, to the irritation of bossy troop leaders, and was patting his empty pockets—he’d forgotten both his wallet and phone—when McAfferty and Dionne strolled up, apparently in mid-argument. “What the hell you doin’ here?” Mac asked him.

“I’m scheduled.”

“Of course. All hands on deck! Even if they worked until four this
morning and they’re too tired to line up their buttons and zip their barn door.” He winked at Brandon, who pulled up his zipper and looked down at his shirt buttons. “Something huge might happen, like some little scout gets thirsty. Go find yourself some shade, bud. I’ll wake you if we spot any pedophiles.”

Dionne gave McAfferty a shove. “Would you
please
shut up?”

“Come on, you gotta admit this is a pervert’s dream. Why else—”

“Do you
ever
consider your audience when you—”

“Never have, never will.”

Agent Canfield wandered up. “How many days you got left, Mac?” he asked, sniffling hard.

“A hundred and fifty-six. Thanks for asking.”

“Got some plans?” He sniffled hard again.

“Sure, little of this, little of that, mostly entrepreneurial stuff.”

“Yeah, like what?”

McAfferty twisted the loose ends of his mustache. “Like creating memorable moments for paying customers.”

“And how exactly do you intend to do that?” Dionne said.

“First rule of good ideas is to keep them to yourself.”

“Come on, just a glimpse.”

McAfferty scanned their faces. “You’ve all snow skied, right?”

Canfield and Dionne began talking simultaneously as Brandon pictured himself skiing with Madeline and Danny Crawford in a blizzard, following her voice all the way down the mountain. But what could he say about that?

“All right,” McAfferty said, waiting for Canfield to clear his nasal passages. “Y’all know what it’s like, or can imagine what it’s like, to get stuck on a slow lift when you gotta piss like a donkey. Not only are you not gonna be able to for a long, long while, it’ll also be mission impossible getting off the mountain and clomping up and down in the lodge to find a can while you’re wearing boots that make you walk like Frankenstein, know what I’m saying?”

Brandon studied how he built suspense by interrupting his own stories.

“And complicating your desperate need to take a leak is the fact that your toes are turning into painful blocks of ice, right? So my idea,” he said, slowing to a crawl, “is to sell a rubberized kit that runs down your legs and pools around your toes so you not only don’t have to trek to the lodge pissoir, you can thaw your feet with your own urine. Whaddaya think?”

Brandon snorted along with the laughter, though his attention was fixed on a darker patch of sky than he’d seen in weeks.

“What if you’ve got more piss than storage space?” Canfield asked.

“Then it backs up your leg,” McAfferty snapped.

“But what if you wipe out?” Canfield asked. “Then it’ll be all over you like somebody nailed ya with a piss balloon.”

“Now that,” Dionne said, “sounds like a truly memorable moment.”

“Everybody’s a critic,” McAfferty groused.

Brandon watched girls lining up, hand in hand, to march through the arch from the American to the Canadian side.

“Don’t like that one? How ’bout strip bars in airports?” McAfferty asked. “For men
and
women. Who isn’t bored and horny in airports?”

“When female pigs get horny,” Brandon said, thrilled with his timing and relevance, “their ears pop straight up. Farmers call it ‘popping.’”

There was a slight delay before the laughter hit, with McAfferty beaming like a pleased father, when all their radios started squawking at once. “Agents switch on secure mode.” After only a few seconds, a supervisor’s voice crackled through the Motorolas. “Dispatch just received a call regarding an alleged dirty bomb in Peace Arch.” He then told McAfferty to divide the park into grids and assign an agent to search each section. “Anyone getting a positive PRD signal should respond to me immediately.”

Dionne darted off, running pell-mell through the crowd toward her daughter’s troop. Brandon felt fully awake for the first time in days, the noise and the multitudes coming into overwhelming focus, but he had no idea how to start looking for a bomb.

He began scanning his area for anything that didn’t belong, though all he saw were hundreds of sunburned children with hundreds of sacks and backpacks. Was he supposed to look inside each one? More girls wanted their pictures taken with him. He kept moving, looking for people who seemed out of place, but it was all girls! Was he supposed to start asking them questions? He was ten minutes into his confused search, his head aching with panic, when he heard Dionne shouting for him.

He ran toward where she was pacing with her radio and staring at a picnic table beneath which sat a plastic red, white and blue cooler. “Yes, of course, it went off!” she snapped. “That’s what I said…. Yes, I tried it twice…. Yeah, wires and a battery. That’s what I told you…. Well, it’s too late, I already opened it…. No, I won’t…. I already told you nobody’s claiming it. No. Look, it just started to pour. Hey, Brandon’s here. I’ll have him test it too.”

Brandon pulled out his radiation detector and had taken only a couple steps toward the cooler when it started beeping and flashing.

“He just confirmed it, okay?” Dionne shouted into her radio. “I want my daughter out of this park! Right fucking now!”

Soon every BP, Mountie and park ranger was telling scouts and guides and troop leaders to evacuate the park, now. Most of the girls blamed this on the rain, yet their high chattering voices suddenly sounded different to Brandon. It was probably the exact same racket, but for him the squeals had shifted from glee to horror. There was another sound, too, that of the distant rumbling sky, and then, so much closer, a concussive thump somewhere on the wooded hill east of the park, where flames abruptly shot up above the tree line.

W
AYNE STOOD
alone in the overgrown soccer field, watching the northerly bend grass and trees, villainous clouds hurtling overhead as if late for some appointment in the States.

Franklin’s instructions had been so easy to follow:
Make a small Cross of two light Strips of Cedar, the Arms so long as to reach to the
four Corners of a large thin Silk Handkerchief when extended. Tie the Corners of the Handkerchief to the extremities of the Cross so you have the body of a Kite, which being properly accommodated with a Tail, Loop and String will rise in the Air…
. Ben’s 250-year-old cheat sheet then went on to explain how to attach a wire to the top of the kite and a key and silk ribbon to the end of the string.

Despite the excited sky there’d been few signs of the forecasted thunderstorm, though it was blowing hard enough that he didn’t have to attempt to run. He simply let the kite go. It swerved back and forth nervously, its silk body filling like a spinnaker, the sticks bending and its shape warping until it spiraled down into the field. Relieved to find the sticks intact, he waited for the wind to lighten and tried again. The kite climbed less erratically this time, just not sharply enough to get anywhere near the clouds, though he noticed—or perhaps imagined—a flash to the north.

Abruptly, the wind slackened and the rain began. It felt ridiculous, standing there with his kite in the grass at his feet, but he didn’t feel like leaving. So he sat down, let the rain soak him and hoped for a storm.

What electrical activity there was looked hopelessly far away, but it was gradually getting gusty again. Fifteen minutes later he popped the kite up at the steepest angle yet, and it alternately dipped and rose as the sky growled. Wayne assumed the strands he saw protruding from the taut string were wind-related. The next time it happened, though, he raised his knuckle to the key.

The zap reminded him of the shock he got replacing the washer outlet in the basement. But wait a minute. Why, exactly, was he on his back in the wet grass? He moved his toes, knees and hips, his fingers, wrist, shoulders, neck and lips, feeling his entire body loosen as he stared, clear headed and exalted, into the infinite vault of rain.

S
OPHIE STITCHED
together most of what happened by interviewing McAfferty, Dionne and Patera. But no matter how much she heard it still didn’t add up, exactly, as if somewhere in this chain of events the reaction had been cubed.