Border Songs (4 page)

“What’s a roadie?” Brandon finally asked, his eyes scanning trees and sky for something other than blackbirds and crows.

“
R
etired
O
n
A
ctive
D
uty. When a roadie responds to a sensor, it’s always a deer. They see more deer than Jane Goodall saw monkeys.
I’ve seen a dozen in the thirty months I’ve been here. Guys like McAfferty see a few every day. And if they actually have to chase somebody, they like nothing better than to be told to abort their pursuit. But that’s for them to sleep with, okay? It has nothing to do with you. Don’t let anybody ten-three you unless you have to. They’ll want to ten-three anything that might get messy, which means just about everything. You gotta learn to tell them
too late
.”

They pulled into Peace Arch, where eighteen Canadian homes flanked the park’s northern rim with a view of every picnic, Girl Scout festival and international drug deal. Brandon recognized the blue swoop across a curtain of poplars before he heard the signature heckle of a Steller’s jay,
eleven
.

The park rolled west toward the bay, past the massive toothlike arch looming in the green expanse like a misplaced monument from some Parisian boulevard. Canada seemingly cared more about appearances, the U.S. side ratty and unimaginative compared to the sculpted shrubs and greener grass on the northern half of this shared space where citizens of both countries could mingle without consequence or scrutiny—although that notion felt increasingly dated, as did the arch’s feel-good etchings that called the two countries “Children of a Common Mother” and “Brethren Dwelling Together in Unity.”

“There are agents who haven’t made a bust the entire time they’ve been here,” Dionne said, and left that dangling.

They crossed rusty tracks so shabby that Amtrak barely used them anymore toward the marina and the defunct canneries where the continent unceremoniously tumbled down a modest bluff through dormant blackberry vines into Semiahmoo Bay, which the tugging moon transformed daily into a vast acreage of gleaming flats that turned to quicksand the farther out you strolled, and where Dionne had caught five Korean hookers—two of them stuck—one Sunday night when she first arrived, and where Brandon noticed three chevrons of water birds escorting an exiting tug.

“Some of these guys are just flat out nut jobs. You met Larabee yet? Had a couple disks fused and got hooked on painkillers, so he keeps
having what we call ‘OxyContin moments.’ When he saw me last Wednesday he
introduced
himself. Seen him almost daily for two and a half years and he acts like I just transferred in from San Diego. ‘Larabee, it’s me!’ ‘Ohhhh, Dionne. Yeah, you look different.’ Then we’ve got a couple gun freaks, which makes for great PR. Agent Talley shot a twelve-year-old Lab on Delta Line a week before you showed up. Didn’t yell ‘Sit!’ or ‘Stay!’ Just,
boom!
Shot Old Yeller in the head. ‘Greetings! We’re with the government!’ And three of our esteemed agents were arrested in the past year for getting hammered and assaulting somebody, usually their wives’ boyfriends. The standout of that bunch would have to be Buzzy Is there a better name for a fuckup? There were even odds in the Yuma Sector on whether he’d make it a month without getting arrested. Well, Buzzy made it a grand total of sixteen days before he hospitalized some dude with a chair. You gotta understand that half of these guys are bored shitless transplants who haven’t adjusted to patrolling up here. Down south you just react. Up here you have to think. The tracking is different. The soil, the weather, the scams, the drugs—everything’s different.” She smiled wide enough for him to notice a chipped incisor and five silver fillings. “But hey, you’re from here, and you’re plenty different too.”

Brandon’s mother had been the first to help him understand just how different. “You think in pictures, don’t you?” she’d asked when he was nine. Until then he’d assumed everyone did.

He picked up the binoculars, afraid the tug would scare them off. Buffleheads,
twelve
. Common loons,
thirteen
. And horned grebes,
fourteen
.

“See, that’s what I’m talking about,” Dionne said. “Not many agents would’ve even thought to take a closer look at that tug. Who knows what you’re gonna see, right? And if you don’t look, you won’t see. That makes life a whole lot easier now, doesn’t it?”

She directed him back into Blaine to the Border Brew drive-thru where he heard a European starling mimic a cell-phone ring,
fifteen
. “All that shit aside, most of these guys are brave and smart,” she said. “And you’re lucky to have ’em on your side—even the roadies.”

Brandon started to ask questions as they rolled off with Dionne’s triple Americano, but she talked right over him. The same thing happened at the academy, others rattling endlessly about golf, girls or cars, but whenever he started talking they eyeballed him as if he’d recited some obscure passage in a foreign tongue. And if nobody pointed out his misspeaks—such as
angel
for
angle, awesome
for
assume, aminal
for
animal
—he wouldn’t notice until the giggling started.

His goal with Dionne was to keep his comments and questions as brief as possible. Danny Crawford taught him years ago to set an internal alarm that sounded whenever he heard only his voice for more than a couple minutes straight, and to watch for twitching eyebrows and curling lips that signaled he was talking too much or making no sense.

“Iranians are screamers,” Dionne was telling him. “‘I’ll be killed if I go bock to Eron!’ Oh yeah? Well, it says here that you went back in the spring? ‘That was chust do see my family!’ And Koreans show up in huge groups of women stinking like kimchi and looking like prostitutes because they are. We get shitloads of Korean hookers.”

“What about Russians?”

“Some of the most violent people you’ll ever see. There’s nothing you can do that better professionals than you haven’t already done to them back in Russia. They don’t bother to lie, just tell you to fuck off to your face.”

They glided east over the H Street hill through a tunnel of alders and firs and real estate signs pitching new subdivisions—
RIGHT ON THE BORDER!
—until the landscape broke into undulating pastures where glacial ice had rounded the hills into green and gold dunes before everything fell into a valley as flat as a pool table. Brandon felt familiar relief as the scenery opened up and they cut through the soothing geometry of farmlands toward Lynden.

The sector was responsible for the thirty-mile stretch between the mountains and the sea, and the agents were free to patrol all of the terrain and the smattering of towns within twenty miles of the line. Lynden, the largest of these burgs, sat just five miles south of the border, yet seemingly considered itself closer to Holland than Canada, touting
its Dutch roots with everything from windmills to an annual Dutch Days festival. The other towns were smaller and simpler, clinging to their fading cowboy, ranching or family-farm credentials.

Brandon turned north on the Guide Meridian, the valley’s main north-south drag, then wound toward the border through dairies and berry fields drained by large ruler-straight ditches deep enough to kayak through. He tuned out Dionne’s complaints when they got stuck behind a tractor pulling a dump wagon and watched the kitelike glide of a juvenile eagle,
sixteen
, the loopy trajectory of a northern shrike,
seventeen
, and the menacing hover of an American kestrel,
eighteen
. He scanned the sky for flocks of incoming songbirds. He’d heard of as many as a thousand exhausted barn swallows arriving at once from Panama or wherever they’d wintered. It had always dazzled him, the notion that boys near the equator considered his swallows theirs. The same acrobatic birds that made him feel like a Wright brother just watching them spent the colder months entertaining boys thousands of miles to the south, who as April approached looked up in the sky and asked,
“¿Adonde fueron mis pajaros?”

They rolled past small houses and the escalating indignation over the ongoing construction of the tribal casino within a mile of the border. A
NO CASINO!
placard was followed by a
CASINOS RUIN FAMILIES!
yard sign only to be topped by a ranch billboard that shouted
GAMBLING KILLS!
Brandon watched seven mares staring in unison at a stallion being led down a trailer ramp on the other side of the street as Dionne griped about her daughter always being sick. “I’ve stopped letting her drink the milk around here. Already heard enough stories about girls starting their periods as eight-year-olds to make me want to move. Imagine explaining that to a girl that age? She’d think she was dying.”

Brandon was staring at the horses and worrying about how strange Madeline Rousseau had sounded. Was she all right? She was the only girl he’d ever really known. So whenever he’d been approached by others, he’d always assumed they were probably similar to her, though they never were.

Dionne finished her coffee and shouted, “Where are you, two-zero-five?”

He knew he was on Trapline, but forgot the cross street, and stutter-mumbled a response.

“Know where you are at all times!” she scolded. A moment later, she slumped in her seat, shut her eyes and screamed, “I’ve been shot! What’re you gonna do?”

After he stopped the rig and bumbled through that exercise, she sprang outside and pretended to be an illegal he’d just apprehended. “Watch my hands. Always watch my hands. My face can’t kill you, but my hands can! Assume everybody is shit and let them work their way up.” Chastising him further, she circled back to broader maxims: “Always look for what doesn’t belong; always watch their hands. And no matter what happens, Brandon, always tell yourself: ‘I’m coming home tonight. I
am
coming home tonight.’”

He pretended to listen while his eyes surveyed maples stenciled against an aluminum sky and the violet-green swallows on the telephone line.
Nineteen
.

He felt a sustained quake he estimated at magnitude 1.8, followed by a brassy clamor in the mattress-flat field behind the trees and the horses. How had he missed the trumpeters?
Twenty
.

“Brandon! Look at me.”

He tried, but he couldn’t. “Watch this,” he whispered as the flock lifted in unison, their garden-hose necks extended and resonant, their jumbled music rising like clown horns. He counted more than a hundred of the world’s largest swans separating themselves from the earth like a noisy snowfield returning to the sky.

Brandon imagined his own bones hollowing, his legs disappearing, his neck stretching, his pectoral muscles thickening, his brain shrinking to fit into a tiny soft skull, his 17,238 feathers working as one to catch up with the others. He twitched his butt muscles, steering with his tail feathers, and raised his arms, fully extending his seven-foot wingspan until his right hand was six inches in front of Dionne’s face, obstructing her view.

“Brandon,” she said calmly, “what
the fuck
are you doing?”

N
ORM HAD
to wait until Jeanette got back from aqua aerobics to vent about the professor. And by the time he stomped inside, he found his wife clutching her chest and cooing as if soothing an imaginary infant. “Coca-Cola was originally green,” she whispered, then followed that with “Astronauts can’t whistle on the moon.”

The last time they’d made love her unfocused expression made him worry that nothing was registering. The sensation of multiple alarms ticking at different speeds left him dry-mouthed, a loose wire flickering in his chest. How long before her mind misplaced the yellowing image of him that had attracted her in the first place? Then what? Even with Brandon helping with the bills, he still didn’t know if he could finish the boat in time for Jeanette to remember anywhere they went on it, no matter how hard she exercised her mind memorizing strange facts or how optimistically she pumped herself full of ginkgo, choline, garlic, flaxseed oil and apple-cider vinegar.

Norm spent the rest of the day Wayne ruined worrying about his wife, his son and his cows, and dwelling on the rumor Sophie Winslow shared that Chas Landers found a duffel bag stuffed with $68,000 on the corner of his cranberry bog. Chas apparently assumed it was smuggling money, the masseuse told him, so he turned it over to the sheriff’s office. That’s right: Money fell from the sky, and Chas gave it to the county.

When Norm wasn’t moping about all that, he was lamenting his own miserable luck after finding four more cows with inflamed teats.
Almost a third of his eighty-one Jerseys and Holsteins had it, according to the latest round of milk stats. Next month’s cell count would tell the whole story. Even with a closed herd, mastitis rarely spread this fast and was simple to treat. Iodine and more iodine. So what was going on? And exactly why had the last six calves aborted? Still, he resisted ringing his surly vet, given the expense and scolding that came with that. He led the four cows into the sick barn with the others, then reluctantly grabbed his sharpest blade and lopped five gangrenous teats he’d rubber-banded off the day before. That was another difference between him and the big boys. They didn’t bother numbing anything, just strolled up and whacked away like they were pruning trees. Norm was cleaning the knife when he heard the cattle trailer rattle up. Damn. He’d forgotten about the livestock auction. The entire day was wobbling off its axle.

Norm made sure Roony knew which two unproductive Jerseys to haul away, 29 and 71, then stepped out of sight of it all behind the barn for a smoke. Pushing sixty-three and still sneaking cigarettes. Copenhagen wasn’t killing him fast enough? He carefully positioned his body and clothes upwind, smoking arm extended, as if pointing out land through fog. Jeanette had troubles recalling some yesterdays, but her nose missed nothing. He inhaled deeper when the cows started their mournful bellowing. “It’s not that they know their cousins are gonna be butchered,” Brandon reassured him once, as if he’d recently chatted with them. “It’s just that they hate change.”