Border Songs (29 page)

He’d called Madeline again to tell her about the park fiasco. And when she’d called back, he was so excited that her words didn’t sting until after she’d hung up. “Quit calling me,” she’d said in a groggy whine. “I’m not your girlfriend, okay? We’re not even really friends.” Her voice turned husky and distant, the phone slipping from her mouth. “You need to stay away from me.”

What had he missed? Wasn’t her laughter real? And hadn’t she reached across and put her hand on his? But the more he thought about their lunch, the stupider his singing seemed. What was he thinking?
We’re not even really friends
. Her words moped inside him like a tumor. If he couldn’t read Madeline Rousseau, who could he ever hope to know?

He found a calm stretch high on the Nooksack and waded to his boot tops with a heavy stick that he swung over and over against the flat surface, creating one misty rainbow after another until his feet were numb, his shoulders aching, and he was no longer thinking about Madeline or dead cows.

He sorted riverside maple leaves by color, licking their undersides
and sticking them to similarly colored leaves to form an eight-by-three-foot quilt fading from red to yellow. He found piles of orange birch leaves and threaded a hundred together lengthwise by their stems, then attached one end to a steep bank and unfurled the rest into an eddy below, creating what looked like a skinny orange waterfall until it broke apart and looked like nothing. He dug through more maple leaves for the largest yellow ones, unfaded by sunlight, and fixed them next to one another in the riverbed with small stones, fashioning an underwater stripe—the yellow all the brighter through the exaggerated and distorted lens of the clear water.

Seasonal shifts had always unnerved him. Even after he learned how predictable they were, he couldn’t shake the sensation that he’d blink and miss some critical phase. He often heard that barn swallows assembled in massive departure flocks, but he’d never witnessed any grand exodus and feared he’d already missed out again.

He gathered the flattest stones he could find and tried to construct a cone in the shallows, but it kept collapsing midway up. Then he studied the shed-sized boulders upstream and imagined thawing glaciers dropping them from their mile-thick floes, as his mother had described it, huge rocks settling randomly on the land like carrots and charcoal briquettes from melting snowmen. He covered several rocks, head-sized or larger, with wet leaves, and they looked like giant Easter eggs wrapped in tissue paper. He pulled his shirt off and plastered cotton-wood leaves over his damp torso and face until he was nothing but leaves from the hips up.

“Why are you doing this?”

Brandon looked up, startled. He’d forgotten Sophie had followed him out and was still sitting on the bank, silently filming.

“What?”

“Why do you do all this?”

He started coating another rock with red maples. “It relaxes me. And the better I get to know the land, the more it feels like something’s gonna happen. Is this it? No. Is it this? No. Is this—”

“You see things other people don’t see, don’t you?”

“How would I know?”

“I think you do.”

“Reality’s always more complicated than anybody says it is.”

“Who said that?”

Brandon frowned and looked around. “Who’s here but you and me?” He turned back to the river before she asked another question and he’d lost his feel for the rocks. He still couldn’t find enough flat ones for the cone no matter how carefully he assembled them. He tried again, drawn to the moment before collapse, then walked down the river to look for even flatter stones. He was on his eighth failed cone when a Townsend’s warbler broke his concentration with a high buzzy solo and he noticed his hands ached and he was shivering and hungry and it was almost dark. When had Sophie left?

He trolled through downtown Lynden with the heater fan on high, looking for food and a bathroom before remembering it was Sunday and everything was closed. He continued past the windmills; the old barbershop; the post office; the red, white and blue banners; and the stately elms flanking Front Street, noticing how their leaves had begun yellowing on the colder side of the street.

When he got home his mother was staring at photos on the dinner table. She was in all of them. On her father’s shoulders at the beach. Graduating from high school. Getting married. Smiling in her garden. Slow-dancing with Norm at their thirtieth. “I just want to be who I’ve always been,” she said. “Nothing fancy. Just me.”

“You’re still you,” Brandon said, draping a damp arm over her, which was enough to snap her back and tell him to shower while she cooked.

He chewed his pork chops to the bones and downed a bowl of red potatoes and a quart of raw milk before telling her what the leaves looked like underwater and that there were more signs of autumn the farther upriver he went. It was hard to tell if she was still listening. He heard her breathing and glanced at her crossed legs, her top slipper bobbing slightly, keeping time with her heart.

“I know I blew that test,” she said.

“No, you didn’t.” “Yes, Brandon, I did.” “Then it’s because you were nervous.”

After a long pause, she said, “A cat has twenty muscles in each ear.” “That’s right,” he replied. “And sharks have been around longer than trees.”

S
OPHIE CAME HOME
to two urgent messages from Wayne saying he absolutely had to see her. So she set up the camera and called him over for a drink.

He was twice as manic and bloodshot as usual, overgesticulating and making incomprehensible statements until he told her about getting zapped by the kite. “The world flashed into focus. And I felt no pain. None.”

“You’re a lunatic.”

“No, I’m just getting closer.”

“To death?”

“To what matters! You know what genius is, Soph? It’s the thrill of originality so profound it can surprise you, move you, even lift you. How can anyone hear Glenn Gould,
really
hear him, and not be moved? He read music before he could read
words
. Or Coltrane, who spent eleven hours a day doing nothing but scales. Nothing but scales, Sophie. Or Einstein! That weirdo changed our notion of time! Don’t just say it.
Feel
it! Changed our notion of time. Or Franklin! Ben might have been brighter than the next ten great men combined. These people were all too excited to
sleep
. Listen to this.” He pulled out a typed sheet of paper, glanced at it for several seconds, then set it aside. “Max Perutz,” he said.

Sophie shrugged behind the camera.

“Max Perutz was an Austrian who accepted the Nobel Prize in 1962 for discovering the structure of hemoglobin. P-e-r-u-t-z. And get this, just found this last night, this ridiculous genius apologized, in his acceptance speech, for not having made a more conclusive report.”

He closed his eyes and delivered the words from memory in a bad Austrian accent. “‘Please forgive me for presenting, on such a great occasion, results which are still in the making. But the glaring sunlight of certain knowledge is dull, and one feels most exhilarated by the twilight and expectancy of the dawn.’” He glanced up, his eyes bulging. “That’s all I want, Soph, the exhilaration of twilight. Even if it’s vicarious! The expectancy of the dawn!” He rose, his hands reaching for the ceiling.

“Sit down.”

“What?”

“Sit.”

“Where?”

“Right there.”

After he sat down, she flicked on the television and started the video.

“What the hell are—”

“Just watch.”

“Oh, please tell me it’s not Brandon. Please. Oh, sweet Jesus.”

“Shush. Just keep your eyes on this while you give me the latest on Madeline.”

S
HE WATCHED
Toby grunt out slow-motion push-ups in the grass next to the Impala while they waited for the chopper.

They were up to two flights a day, he’d explained as they bounced up logging roads into a quiet clearing ringed by blow-down and littered with shotgun shells. He had everyone working overtime to harvest and hump as many loads as possible while a suddenly tentative Border Patrol floundered in bad publicity. Curing times were cut in half. Growers and clippers doubled as smugglers. Five boats were in play now, and the ground crew tripled its daily volumes. But nothing moved product quite like a helicopter, the heaping backlog of B.C. bud flooding Seattle’s market and overflowing into Portland and San Francisco and Los Angeles.

She was still unsure whether Toby was educating, courting or trapping her. She wasn’t aware of any other girl in his life, but she’d lost the ability to talk to him and had gone from liking to tolerating to dreading his volatile affections and peculiar control over her. He’d told her, for example, exactly which skirt to wear today.

She wished like hell she’d never shared all Brandon had said over lunch. Toby’s mole hunt had turned maniacal and he immediately fired three people—a clipper, a smuggler and a grower—without explanation. It didn’t stop there. He interrogated everyone, even Fisher. She’d hoped the photos might help her escape now that her cover was blown. But the way he saw it, she was the only one he knew for certain wasn’t
taking the pictures. That, however, didn’t stop him from grilling her about Brandon over and over again.

After their lunch, Brandon had left multiple messages. He wanted to go out to dinner, tell her more about his work and show her his new dog. His last call spluttered around before ending with, “Not to get mushy on you, my friend, but you’re well above average.” She vaguely recalled leaving him a drunken retort. He hadn’t called since, but it continued to unnerve her that he was such a fixture in Toby’s thoughts.

He was still pumping on trembling arms, his sweat-glistened torso reminding her of the skinned and headless hogs she’d seen in meat coolers. It took the
woka-woka
of the incoming helicopter to get him, purple-faced, to his feet. “Turn around!” he advised, too late to spare her eyes and nostrils from the sandstorm.

He popped the Impala trunk and speed-walked two black hockey bags to the chopper, its registration number, she noticed, covered with duct tape. After three more trips to the trunk, they were loaded and rising before Madeline had buckled into the backseat. “Ninety-three seconds!” Toby called out as the Impala shrank below them.

She couldn’t look down at the lunging greenery without reeling. “Aren’t we too low?” Her eyes still burned from the sand, but when she shut them her stomach lurched. Though she tried staring up into the calm blue, that only made her dizzy. Mount Baker wasn’t a relaxing sight either, naked from the hips down, melting back into the earth.

“Welcome to America!” the pilot shouted, leering back at her legs long enough for her to see a bloodshot eyeball behind his mirrored shades and an eraser-sized mole nestled between his cheek and nostril.

Toby was barking information at her. They were traveling at 118 miles an hour, heading 43 miles southeast into Washington to a drop spot they and the catcher both knew by GPS coordinates. She’d never seen him so amped. “Our only no-fly days now are sunny weekends,” he yelled, “because of all the hikers and rangers.”

The helicopter dropped in and out of green canyons. “Aren’t we too low?” she asked again, louder.

Toby turned and grinned. “Gotta stay below the radar. At this elevation, we’re not here, see? We don’t exist.”

We don’t?
She turned away from his little teeth.

Fifteen minutes later, he was jabbing a finger at a green clearing that looked no larger than a marina slip. They circled the spot twice, to see if the catcher had been followed, before falling into a stomach-lurching descent. Her mother had died instantly—and she’d never understood why that was supposed to comfort her. Who wanted to die without even a chance of saying good-bye?

The chopper leveled off into the tightest turn yet, then slowed and stabilized and settled on a surprisingly spacious and level pad forty feet from a green Toyota with a black canopy.

Toby told her to sit tight while he shuttled the bags. The truck driver looked as calm and respectable as a realtor showing property. The nameless pilot kept smacking his lips, trying to scare up saliva, and glancing at her legs.

Why had she been dragged along on this?

Toby climbed back inside, giddy and flushed, his minty B.O. filling the interior as he plopped down next to her and they lifted and twirled back into the canyon. Madeline shut her eyes until everything leveled again, and Toby was leaning his brawny torso against her, grinding her seatbelt into her pelvis and catching her mouth in mid-alarm with his own. She didn’t kiss him back, though that didn’t discourage his hand from sliding up her thigh.

She couldn’t find her voice, but then it came louder than she’d intended. “Stop!” She felt the helicopter dip and heard the pilot shouting. Just as fast, Toby leaned away and was talking rapidly. Apologizing? Complaining? She couldn’t make out anything beyond the revulsion pulsing through her. “I’m out!” she announced once she’d regained her breath.

He nodded. “We’ll talk next month.” While his voice was gentle, he wouldn’t look at her. “You can’t do this to me now.”

T
HE RADIO
calls kept coming, a new one right on top of the last. The border-cam dispatcher spotted a drive-thru station wagon in fields near Hammer Road and three people running with duffel bags near Jones Road. Locals phoned in suspicious vehicles on Froberg and Peace Drive as well. The freshest tip was that a sedan carrying two people up Foxhurst exited with just one. Brandon was the closest agent to this north-south road, so he sped toward it.

He’d volunteered for the graveyard shift, thinking he’d stand a better chance of making it through eight hours without facing smirks, glares or sarcastic questions about the bomb-scare fiasco in the park. He was sick of trying to read people and didn’t want to talk to anyone except Madeline or his mom. The memory clinic had called his mother to say she’d scored poorly on their test, but that the results might have been skewed by nerves. They wanted her to take another exam. Though she was excited to get a second chance, Brandon felt his world slipping underfoot.