Border Songs (9 page)

Fifty yards later, however, glancing back and forth from the smugglers to the treetops, he saw the high curling swoop of a raptor. The
creamy underwings looked like a red-tail’s, but the body was more like a rough-legged, though the wings weren’t long enough and the tail wasn’t quite right. Once its wings flapped the mystery was solved. A short-eared owl,
sixty-seven
.

“A short-ear!” he exclaimed, pointing at its angular glide back into the treetops.

The smugglers spun and craned awkwardly to see what he was pointing at but saw nothing at all. They glanced at one another, then back at Brandon, who dropped their bags so he could demonstrate the owl’s exaggerated mothlike wing strokes, which was what Dionne and Agent Talley saw as they jogged around the bend toward them, flashlights and batons jostling on their hips.

B
RANDON DIDN’T
have to attempt to lie. He was doing a lay-in, of sorts, got soaked in a squall, then got lucky. He kept his words slow and under control, imitating Dionne’s tone and syntax. Everyone was focusing on the stats anyway. A hundred and twenty pounds of B.C. bud worth $310,000 in Seattle and $360,000 in L.A. if the DEA knew what it was talking about, which Dionne, of course, said it didn’t. Within an hour they were calling him shit magnet. All of them.
Shiiiiit Magneeeet!

Dionne led the interrogation, grilling each mule separately, repeating her questions with slightly different words, aping their every arm cross, collar pull and nose scratch, invading their personal space, willing them to speak, then talking for them and adding a question mark at the end so that a nod could turn her words into theirs. Then she came at them again, closing in without making it obvious, just as good birders approach birds without ever walking directly at them. When none of that worked, she got close enough to make their eyes water from her spearmint gum and pointed at Brandon. “You really want to piss him off?”

She asked each of them about “an Angel named Manny” and another guy named Toby, scanning their faces for flinches of recognition. “You’re running dope for Manny, aren’t ya?” Their responses were nearly identical. They didn’t know what was in the bags or the names of the men who’d hired them. Their job, they said, was simply to leave the bags where Brandon found them. They had no idea who
was picking them up. None. They were all Canadians and apparently first offenders, which helped explain the older man’s calm.

Dionne showed Brandon how to download cell contacts and log GPS waypoints, then stranded him to type up the report. As the shifts switched, agents crowded his desk to listen to Agent McAfferty mimic DEA agents officiously taking custody of the buds, rolling joints and talking on the inhale with the same robotic diction. “This tastes a bit like that Matanuska Thunderfuck, doesn’t it, Walter?” Agents egged him on until Chief Patera squeezed through. “All right, people, only those of you who need to be here.”

McAfferty waited Patera out to tell another story to Brandon, who bobbed his head politely, half-listening, eyes aching as he ground through the computerized paperwork, the simplest questions baffling him.

“Yeah, yeah, we’d do lay-ins like you did here—but at night,” McAfferty began. “We’d hang in the dark with our hearts popping waiting for these illegals, then we’d jump up and say, ‘Surprise!’ Could be quite the rush, if you had company, but I was never big on solos. Know what I’m saying? An owl says hello and I shit my pants if it’s dark enough. Ever see
The Blair Witch Project?
Movie scared the shit out of me. But the lay-ins down south were nothing compared to the war-wagon shift. You’ve heard about the wagons, right? Brandon, ya with me here?”

“Uh-huh.” It was a high-wire act for Brandon to spell and type even when he wasn’t distracted by McAfferty’s needy nonstop chatter or the siren of house sparrows—
sixty-eight
—outside the door that only he seemed to hear. He tried whispering the words as he typed them.

“Either ya know or ya don’t,” McAfferty pressed. “Gotta picture this to appreciate it. You got thousands trying to cross each day. Thousands, know what I’m saying? So they’d try to overwhelm us. If enough of ’em run all at once, most of ’em’ll make it, right?”

Brandon nodded aimlessly, exhaled and refocused on McAfferty’s flabby face, twitching mustache and sideburns shaped like Nevada.

“So if you just sat there long enough, they’d eventually all run for it. There’s a whole lot of courage in numbers, know what I’m saying? And you could tell when they were gonna go for it too. One of them would hurl a rock, then a few more. Suddenly it’s raining rocks. Ya with me? That’s their cover, see, because no matter how big a weapon you come out the door with, you still don’t want to catch a rock in the face. A sawed-off won’t stop a rock, follow?” McAfferty winked, paused, then continued. “So after we’d replaced our fifteenth windshield, our supe, this lifer who hadn’t left his desk more than twice since the Kennedy assassination and who’d never once had a rock tossed at his bald head, came up with the brainstorm of these
war wagons
. So five of our trucks got customized with steel cages over the windows. Made them damn near rock-proof. Fantastic, right? Wrong. It just upped the ante. So now you’d get these spics—and I use the term lovingly—hurling rocks at you for hours, having the time of their lives, while you’re playing it cool like you don’t give a shit, like this is the sort of crap you do on holidays, sitting there reading the same paragraph, again and again, while you’re literally getting stoned.
Thud! Womp-womp-womp!
” Brandon flinched. “Could go on for hours while you’d wait for ’em to make their move. Then you’d jam the truck into drive and cut ’em off, right? You listening? Think about it! What would
you
do when they made their move? Jump out and risk getting stoned? Let me ask you a question, Brandon: Does that sound like a good idea?”

Brandon waggled his chin, unable to focus on the computer screen or McAfferty, an ache sliding down his neck into his shoulder blades, the room losing oxygen and color, the paralysis spreading.

“All right. But see, this is what I’m heading at here. We had an agent there who was just as aggressive as Dionne.” Another wink caught Brandon before he could look away. “And this daring fuck would wait, wait, wait, then fly out of his wagon and round ’em up single-handed. And keep in mind, this genius is making twenty-eight gross, but I’m tellin’ ya he’d hop out and corral ’em like some cowboy on meth. And he was excellent at it. I’ll give him that, but one time he caught a rock the size of a peach just past the temple. Right
here.”

McAfferty laid an index finger on the side of Brandon’s left eyebrow. “With a whole lotta luck, and some timely prayers, the dumbass lived. But he was left with one hell of a souvenir—a two-inch metal plate in his skull.” He clucked his tongue and tapped his own temple. “Wanna feel it?” He bent over, beady-eyed, as Brandon reached up in open-mouthed awe and pressed two hesitant fingers into his bristly hair.

McAfferty giggled, then stepped back and shadowboxed, jabbing the air with his little fists. “Do I look like a dumbass? I never once left the cage! Not
once!
And that’s my point, Rook. I mean, what are we really doing? Stopping people from getting work or—God forbid!—getting high. Know what I’m sayin’? You do what ya can, but always wait for backup and don’t try to show anybody up. Gotcha, didn’t I?” He winked, tapped the imaginary plate in his temple and shadowboxed again, his gut jiggling with each lunge, until Patera showed up with a frown and cocked eyebrows.

“Don’t you have somewhere else you could be, Mr. McAfferty?”

Patera examined Brandon’s report through the lower halves of his bifocals, eyes drifting between the screen and the rookie, sighing as he scrolled down through blank pages, then groaning.

T
HREE HOURS LATER
, McAfferty bellowed over the roar of the bar: “Pour the shit magnet another beer!”

Brandon felt like an exhausted child trying to prove he could stay up until midnight as the roadies vied for his attention. He took in the growing mob behind him through the slanted mirrors above McAfferty’s head, wet-lipped, glossy-eyed locals staring from every angle as if he were a circus bear in a tuxedo. There was too much going on at once. He’d always felt more alone in a crowd. And he avoided chaotic gatherings, especially bars. He tried to focus on the rhythm of voices at his table like Danny Crawford had taught him—so he might know when to talk and when to laugh.

After another pitcher, Agent Candido warned him about getting overconfident. “Can’t do anybody any good if you get hurt.”

“C’mon,” McAfferty said, “admit it, Candy. You’re afraid he’s gonna be another Dionne and make you look even worse than you already do.” He slid into a Patera impression: “I believe we all should strive to make arrests like the one Mr. Vanderkool made here a daily occurrence.”

“So we can stop six percent of what’s rolling through instead of three?” Agent Talley groused. “It’s all cat and mouse, and there’s more mice every day.”

“What does the DEA really do with the buds?” Brandon mumbled, then repeated it louder when he realized nobody heard him.

“The first thing,” McAfferty said, “is they’re gonna write it up quick so it shows up in the stats as their bust.” He made a steeple with his fingers. “And after they take credit for your work, they’ll burn the buds in their inferno and stand outside and watch the seagulls get stoned.” He lowered his eyelids and flapped his fingers like mini-wings near his shoulders.

The more Brandon glanced around, the more people he caught eavesdropping or staring at their table and its five uniformed agents.

“There’s no denying the Holy War is great for finances,” McAfferty said. “But of course”—he lowered his voice to a whisper—“we’re not actually stopping any terrorists, just helping Canuck drug dealers jack their prices by driving up the value of their merchandise.” He raised his mug. “To the Border Patrol!”

“Personally,” Dionne interrupted, “I feel pretty good about keeping the Hells Angels from selling drugs to elementary-school kids.”

McAfferty shielded his mouth from her and whispered, to the other agents, “Hero complex.”

“Why don’t you quit, Mac?” Dionne’s lips stretched across a cold smile. “If that’s all I thought I was doing, I’d quit tonight.” She took a long swallow, giving her face a chance to lose its color.

McAfferty laughed. “Don’t worry, Dionne. I’ve only got two hundred
and ninety-one days to go. See if you can put up with my honesty until then.”

“Honesty?” She grunted, her face softening. “Bullshit’s the word.”

“Show me the terrorists we’ve caught, Dionne. Name them, please.”

Brandon felt all eyes on him as he rose.

McAfferty interrupted himself to say, “You ain’t leaving yet, Rook.”

“Going to the bathroom.” Brandon left the laughter behind him and stooped toward the rear of the saloon, trying to make himself appear smaller, ignoring Eddie Erickson’s come-over wave—“Hey, Vanderfool!”—and absorbing all the smirks and stares, the how’s-it-goings, the lookin’-goods, the wolf calls. He was used to the attention that came with being the biggest fish in the tank, people’s eyes automatically following and measuring him. Danny Crawford had taught him to mimic other kids’ behavior and emotions so his own stood out less, but he had no experience at trying to blend in with this much commotion, especially in a uniform. He tried to study the bar language anyway, how friends and lovers touched, how they cut insults with affection.
You’re all right for a dumb SOB
. Or,
I love your sorry ass
. He’d watched McAfferty swing a clumsy arm around Dionne two beers ago and say: “Not to get mushy on you, my friend, but you are well above average.”

He tried to block out the music and the crescendo of voices and just take in the beer-brightened visuals, everyone in their loudest garb like songbirds in spring. Milt Van Luven in baby-blue suspenders
and
a purple belt, even though his Wranglers were already too tight to button at the top. His younger brother, Lester, in electric-green trousers rolled to his ankles as if his legs had shrunk overnight, his left palm just above the right knee on the long bare leg of his wife, Julia, in a blouse so blindingly red it could provoke a bull. She covered her mouth at the sight of Brandon, though he assumed she’d been blabbing about him ever since she’d tried to seduce him three long summers ago.

Sophie Winslow and her flamingo-pink lips stood between him and
the restroom. He heard conflicting speculation every time her name popped up. What he knew for sure was that she was remarkably easy to talk to.

She cocked her head to take him in. “You doing all right?”

“Me?”

“Look a bit wiped.”

“I’m just—”

“Congratulations about today,” she said. “Heard you were laying down.”

He looked down at her looking up at him.

“When you caught them: You were laying on the ground, then popped up, right?” She grabbed his forearm and pulled him slightly to see if dirt on his backside could prove her case. He looked down at her upturned wrist and saw a scar angling across her veins like a purple seam.

“They call ’em lay-ins,” he said. “I was doing a lay-in.”

“Making what kind of art?”

He hesitated. “Where’d you hear that?”

“I didn’t.”

Her lipstick ran slightly wider and longer than her lips.

“They call ’em lay-ins,” he said again.

She grinned. “Yeah, but …” She pointed an index finger at her forehead.

He shrugged, palms up, baffled.

She set her hands séance-style on top of his as if channeling the dead. They were so warm he wanted to lie down. “How’s your mom?” she asked.

Brandon hesitated. It was impossible for him to respond quickly to complicated questions.
How’s life? You believe in God? How’s your mother?
Instead of answering, he made a mental note to ask people how their family members were. It seemed to be expected.

“I didn’t know you were friends with Madeline Rousseau,” she said.

Brandon studied her grin. “Did you see her? Did she say that?”