Border Songs (10 page)

“I could tell by the way she talked about you,” she said, her eyes fully dilated.

He reluctantly let go, aimlessly thanked her, then stood at a urinal so low it required a deep knee bend to avoid splashing. Madeline was talking about him?

The bar volume rose with more belly laughter and shouting. He saw Chas Landers in Sophie’s gravitational pull, his chair cocked onto its forelegs, leaning across the round table toward her, practically shouting to be heard, his smile impossibly white for a smoker his age. And Brandon noticed four more distracted men, their eyes following the hypnotic swing of Sophie’s bare foot in and out of her heeled clog.

Another foamy pitcher was getting divvied up as Brandon filled his seat, wishing he could just go home to his dogs and sleep. Yet he forced himself to try once again to learn the language between and beneath the words that everyone else played off.

“They can blame the exchange rate or the border lines all they want, but in my opinion they need to get more creative,” McAfferty was saying. “I had an entrepreneurial brainstorm yesterday, for example, which I’m perfectly willing to share.” Brandon studied McAfferty’s delivery, sucking everyone in, and then slowing down. “Anyone else notice the new barista at Border Brew—the one with the infant? Well, she was breast-feeding when I rolled up Wednesday, which isn’t something that typically moves me. Not that I’m prudish. But it’s not one of my fantasies, is what I’m saying. However, in this case I confess that I had a spontaneous desire for a breast-milk latte. Follow?”

Brandon tried to join the laughter with some timely snorts, noticing Dionne’s eyes roll and conversations stalling at surrounding tables.

“If she just breast-pumped her titty—pardon me, Dionne—into that metal pitcher they use, then steamed it until it’s good and foamy? Brrrrrrr!” He vibrated his upper body. “Then she could pour in the espresso, hand you your latte, take your ten-dollar tip, slip back inside her halter—and voilà! Exploitative? Not in the slightest. Showmanship? Definitely. And seriously, what could appeal to health-conscious, boob-loving customers more than that?”

Agent Talley bit his lower lip, and Canfield stopped laughing long enough to say, “C’mon, Dionne. Gotta admit there’s some humor there.” They smirked, tittering, waiting, while she futilely tried to tuck short bangs behind her ears.

“I’m drunk,” she said, “and it’s still not even close to being funny.”

That busted them up even more. Talley topped his laughter with a belch followed by a giggling apology. Dionne belched back even louder while Brandon waited for another conversation to take hold so he could exit without getting heckled. But nobody had anything to say.

“Thanks, everyone.” The room twirled slightly as he rose amid flashes that took him a beat to realize were coming from Sophie’s camera.

“Where’s the magnet going?” Talley demanded.

“Let him get some rest.” McAfferty was sipping port from a tiny glass. “It’s exhausting being a hero, isn’t it, Dionne?”

“I’ll follow you out,” she said, ignoring McAfferty’s “Uh-huh” and Talley’s giggles as she flung a ten toward her empty mug and sauntered out into the clearing night.

“They’re just jealous.” She started toward her car, then strolled back and grabbed his elbow. “You did great today. Really. Most of them couldn’t have brought those three in by themselves, and most trainees would’ve fucked it up somehow. You did great.”

Great? What Brandon couldn’t get past was how terrified the young smugglers were of him. That’s what stuck, that and the fierce reek of piss in the backseat of his rig.

Brandon noticed she still hadn’t released his elbow. “How’s your daughter?”

“That’s what I’m doing with my day off.” She took a step away, turned and faced him. “Taking her to some Bellingham doc McAfferty recommended. He’s not as much of an ass as he’d like you to believe.”

“Is your spine straight?” Brandon asked.

She half-laughed. “Where’d that come from? As a matter of fact, last anyone checked it curves twenty-one degrees to the right—not that anyone has noticed it, or at least said anything about it, in the last
twenty years, but thanks for asking.” She tilted her shoulders and gave him a crazed expression. “Now you know I’m not perfect.”

“If the earth wasn’t tilted we wouldn’t have seasons,” Brandon said, pleased with himself for finding a spot for one of his mother’s sayings.

Dionne smiled, then looked at the stars. “You can follow me home,” she said, “if you’d rather not drive all the way to yours.”

He missed her blush in the weak light. “Mine’s closer, isn’t it?”

H
E DROVE
with the windows down to revive himself, then pulled over a mile from home to see if he could spot any of the constellations he’d invented at the academy. That’s what he’d liked most about New Mexico, a huge night sky that let him picture the whole universe, which his mother had told him was continually expanding, the stars like dots on an inflating balloon. True or not, it reinforced his growing sensation of standing on a shrinking planet beneath an expanding sky.

But tonight he couldn’t even find Taurus or Cassiopeia. He absently listened to his radio and the dispatcher’s monotone about three youths loitering in Peace Arch, a CI’s report of helicopter smuggling in the Cascades and a blue Cutlass on some drive-thru a Canadian phoned in. He took in the silhouettes of silos and barns and the Abbotsford mansions flickering in the low northeastern sky like candles through beveled glass. The night air burped, whined and rang with frogs, mosquitoes and field crickets before yielding to the rising drone of an approaching vehicle. Brandon smelled manure in the fields, which probably meant someone was spraying excessively at night. Or perhaps it was just the forgotten stench of dairy country in the spring, the one season when realtors didn’t coax out-of-town high rollers into their fields of dreams.

Brandon stepped around his hood into the headlights of a sedan that looked black or possibly midnight blue. The driver seemed to accelerate at the sight of him. Brandon hopped back inside, popped it
in gear and leaned on the gas. “Do we have plates on the drive-thru?” he asked slowly after the dispatcher responded.

“Negative. No plates.”

Brandon gave his coordinates and noticed he was drunker than he’d realized as he struggled to focus on the fleeing taillights. “I’m code two,” he said, more eagerly than he’d intended and before he remembered what code two meant.

“Two-zero-five, this is Supervisor Wheeler. What vehicle are you driving?”

“Private.”

After another long pause, Wheeler said, “Ten-three the pursuit, two-zero-five.”

“Too late,” Brandon replied.

Dionne had warned him that Patera didn’t want to catch hell for chasing hooligans through family neighborhoods or scaring tipsy locals off the road. Still, if a blue Cutlass hopped the border and blew past him and Dionne was his trainer …

Brandon eased his truck up to sixty yet fell farther behind. Was it even a Cutlass? He could tell trucks from cars and sedans from compacts, but beyond that he was guessing. What he did know was that the Bender Road straightaway curled into a tight S-turn before crossing Pangborn.

“Two-zero-five,” the supervisor repeated after the longest pause yet. “You have been officially ten-three’d.”

“Copy that,” Brandon said, accelerating to avoid falling farther behind. “But it’s too late.”

The sedan’s smoldering taillights blew past the yellow sign warning drivers to slow down.

As Brandon rounded the first curve he noticed the lack of lights ahead. Then he saw why. The sedan’s left rear wheel hung almost comically above the shoulder, its trunk sprung and gaping at the stars. The rest of it was stabbed diagonally, hood-first into the steaming ditch, as if the driver hadn’t even attempted to turn. When he radioed it in,
Brandon abandoned his contained mumble for a near-hysterical and repetitive cry for an ambulance.

He slammed his right knee lunging from the truck, then galloped, vision pulsing, to the back of the sedan, trying to take it all in at once. The depth of the ditch, the height of the water, the pitch of the hissing steam, the diagonal posture of the
green
car, the manufacturer’s name in raised gold letters below the popped trunk:
P-o-n-t-i-a-c S-u-n-b-i-r-d
.

It wasn’t even the right car! His mind jammed. No pictures, no words, just that hissing sound, yet his body kept moving and he heard himself shouting into the ditch, though the words didn’t sound like his. He used the cross brace on the telephone pole to help him climb down before slipping the final few feet and falling into freezing water up to his hips along the driver’s side of the bowed and steaming hood. Amazingly there didn’t appear to be water inside the car, but he wasn’t sure that mattered. The driver was lying on the steering wheel, his face cocked awkwardly toward the passenger seat. Brandon couldn’t see much beyond a thickly bearded cheek and dark hair buzzed close to the scalp.

The window was half open and Brandon shouted louder than he intended to that help was coming. He reached for the door handle, then realized he couldn’t open it wide enough to pull the little man out without letting water in. He ransacked his memory for guidance in such situations, groped through the window, fumbled for the man’s pulse and, finding none, slid a panicky hand beneath his armpit to palm his chest. After recoiling from the thumping heart, he unleashed a jumble of apologies and promises. His flashlight darted around the interior of a vehicle that looked as clean and impersonal as a rental car. “Gonna be all right,” he told the man and himself, then straightened up in the ditch, the mud suction starting to control his boots. “Gonna be all right.”

Brandon watched himself from above, climbing in slow motion out into his headlights, unsure about what to do next or how much time
had passed, feeling severed from the moment, moving through air, his torso floating above numbed legs. Radioing in again, nauseous now, he pleaded for the ambulance that had already been sent, described the driver’s condition and shared the vehicle’s model and plate.

The supervisor’s tone had changed. He slowly and clearly enunciated every word, as if for a jury. Brandon realized he was over-talking and began offering the minimum, chattering before cutting out and limping hesitantly to the ditch, pants heavy and sagging, body shivering, checking to make sure the water hadn’t climbed any higher on the driver’s side. Wanting to call his mother.

It wasn’t until he shuffled around the back of the sedan again that he heard the reassuring wail of a siren. And it wasn’t until the too-bright, too-loud ambulance stormed down Badger Road and turned up Bender that it occurred to him that he still hadn’t looked inside the yawning trunk.

He didn’t know what to make of most of the mess—mason jars full of dry powder and fluids leaking from tubes in a slotted Styrofoam case. But after helping his father blow up a dozen stumps he knew what blasting caps looked like. He held up his icy hands, as if surrendering, to slow the ambulance. A BP rig sped up behind it, doubling the light show. Three medics unloaded and charged toward his shivering figure and the cockeyed Sunbird, which was also when Brandon saw, behind and above the men, the faint, sprawling, nine-star, barn-shaped constellation he’d invented in New Mexico but never named.

T
HE LITTLE
squawk box told Norm where to go after they beeped him through security. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, but was immediately lost. The three bunkerlike buildings all looked the same. There didn’t seem to be a goddamn entrance anywhere. The entire compound was rung with razor wire. Who, exactly, was the Border Patrol trying to keep out? When he finally came to a door that opened, he felt like as much of an outsider as he had the night he went prowling for one bourbon too many and stumbled into a hall full of grown men wearing antlers and exchanging moose calls. No animal costumes this time, just the corny green uniforms that made them all look like Smokey the Bear, but the noise was similar, everyone seemingly lit and talking simultaneously, yet with no sign of liquor
or his son
at 1:27 in the morn. The hubbub raged until the door shut noisily behind him.

Norm initially thought that Patera had called to tell him that Brandon had been injured in a bombing, though the real story wasn’t much more comforting. The patrol had always looked like glorified security work, but now he felt as if he’d sent his son to the front lines of a war he hadn’t realized was going on in his own neighborhood. If there was a worse crime than shoving your child into danger, he couldn’t think of one.

Conversations hushed as faces swiveled toward him and a meaty uniformed woman with a courteous smile stepped from behind one of the fancy desks and pricey computer screens. “Mr. Vanderkool? I’m Dionne, Brandon’s trainer.”

Her shake made him wonder how often she had to prove her manhood. He followed her through agents stinking of beer who gave him the clumsy deference doled out to grieving parents. “Brandon has amazing instincts,” she told him, without actually looking at his unshaven face. “It’s rarer than you think to find a trainee with great instincts for this work, or, for that matter, even experienced agents.” Her grin surprised him, as if they were sharing secrets.

“He’s all right?” Norm said.

“A bit shook up, but that’s to be expected, really. Totally normal.”

“So when’d it happen?”

“Five after midnight.”

More than an hour ago and he’s
still
shook up? Why was Norm even called? If he was too shaken to drive, why couldn’t someone give him a lift? Norm hadn’t asked for any middle-of-the-night courtesies.

“Excuse me, Chief. Mr. Vanderkool is here.”

Tony Patera held up a ringed finger as Dionne whispered an apology, not realizing he was talking on a cell phone clamped to his left ear. He was mumbling, but what Norm heard included something about how to word a release about closing the border.

“The border’s closing?” he asked incredulously, but the woman agent had stepped into the hall and Patera was still yakking into his fancy phone and hadn’t acknowledged Norm’s existence yet.