Border Songs (11 page)

He glanced around at the half-acre desk, the tidy in- and out-boxes, the walls sagging beneath heavy plaques, certificates and photos of a grinning Patera with other similarly self-important men. Beneath the window were stacks of
The New York Times, The Seattle Times, The Bellingham Herald, The Vancouver Sun
and
Abbotsford Times
. He’d heard Patera boast that he read all five cover-to-cover every day, which told Norm he was either a liar or had nothing to do. He reminded himself to ask him if Washington and Jefferson grew dope. Patera never ducked a question. He’d make something up before admitting he didn’t know.

The chief nodded gravely, said good-bye and retidied a stack of papers before hoisting himself to offer Norm his palm. He was as spiffy
as ever, starched and tailored but going jowly, with walrus creases in the back of his neck. Norm counted four rings on manicured fingers. How had he missed that omen? He’d never had any luck with men who wore more than one ring, much less those who paid women to snip their fingernails.

“Thanks for coming down, Norm. Your
sonnn,”
he said, stretching it out like he often did, one of his many tics that made his stories so exhausting, “may have just made the most significant arrest on the northern border in years. Well, truth is, we don’t really know what we’ve got yet. Lots of IDs on this guy, but if he is who the FBI thinks he—”

Norm’s patience had left him. “Where’s Brandon at?”

Patera pointed to the door, and Norm followed him into a piss-colored hallway. “He’s a little shaken up.” Patera made it sound like a medical term. “Lost his cookies, so to speak. Very common. Hasn’t thrown up since I called you, least I don’t …” He looked to Dionne, who shrugged her manly shoulders. “Something else,” he added. “Between us, without alarming people, I’d appreciate your help in spreading the word to tighten security at the dairies. You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t know.” Everything was moving too fast for Norm. Something important had shifted. Was Patera cashing in favors or viewing him as an ally or, worse, a minion?

“You know, like locking the milk tanks,” Patera told him, “and not letting strangers past the house, that sort of thing.”

Norm tried to picture suicide bombers hopping the ditch to blow up his milking parlor. “What do dairies have to worry about?”

“Well, you just don’t know anymore, do you? Mad cow could be spread pretty easily by a saboteur with a spray bottle, couldn’t it? Or what about botulinum, or whatever it’s called. From what I’m told, one bottle of that in your bulk tank gets trucked to a milk plant and mixed in with product from other farms and suddenly a half million lives are at risk. The government values its dairy product, Norm.”

“Who told you it’s the government’s product?” Norm felt like he was missing critical pieces of information.

“I think you know,” Patera whispered as more beefy agents approached with questions,
chief
this, and
chief
that, adjusting sleeves and belts like batters fidgeting at the plate, rattling off updates and questions about how long the border should be closed for and what they’d heard from the FBI, HQ, RCMP and other acronyms, and how a multiagency release was coming along. Finally, Patera arrived at a room crammed with yet more people, including Norm’s son in some undersized jacket, a dirty blanket spooled around his legs.

Norm was startled for the millionth time by Brandon’s size. Even hunched in a stubby chair, his head was more than five feet off the floor, his face so white he looked like an enormous mime.

One agent was typing, another asking questions. From Norm’s vantage, it appeared his boy was getting interrogated. Was he in trouble? He was definitely in spooked mode, mumbling, rocking slightly at the hips.

When Brandon glanced up, eyes fully dilated, Norm’s heart skipped. Not
now
. Please.

Patera told the agents to give it a break. They sighed, smirked and moseyed from the room, readjusting belts and crotches.

“How’re ya doin’?” Norm regretted his impersonal tone, but Patera and Dionne were still there and he didn’t want his son to start ranting or bawling. He rarely cried, but when he did it was hard to stop.

He rocked faster, then blurted: “Ten-three’d have should I.”

Dionne horse-laughed and Patera muttered, “What the …” as Norm watched Brandon recognize his gaffe, then carefully enunciate, “I. Should. Have. Ten-three’d.”

It astounded Norm that Brandon hadn’t grown out of these episodes. He rested a hand on his shoulder, gripped and released, then again. “C’mon,” he urged, “you’re all right.”

“He’s just like you’d expect him to be,” Patera said. “Juiced.” He winked knowingly, ambled bowlegged to the door, leaned his head out and called, “Linda!” Turning back to Norm he said, “He’s got instincts. Too much to chalk up to beginner’s luck. That’s for certain.”

Norm desperately wanted to grab his son and take him home before he shoved one more sentence over his lips or before Patera patronized him one more time and Norm shouted something he’d regret. “I don’t want any media at the house,” he grumbled.

“Not a problem.” Patera looked puzzled. “Already an FBI matter, Norm. I’ll handle what reporters we get. Nothing to worry about there. There’s just some coaching that needs to be done on what Brandon should and shouldn’t say in front of various officials and cameras, if and when we decide it’s appropriate. If and when, Norm.”

Driving home, Norm tried to fill the truck with the normalcy of his observations about the left-handed Japanese reliever the Mariners signed, Channel 4’s prediction of record rain the following week and Uncle Wyatt’s hip replacement. “Everyone says you got what it takes.” He felt like he was trying to convince himself. “They can’t stop telling me about your instincts.”

“Pull over,” Brandon said, lowering his window.

“What?”

“Pull …
over.”

Norm straddled the shoulder between Dirk’s reader board, which he couldn’t make out in the dark, and Big Tom’s Statue of Liberty, which for whatever reason had its torch illuminated tonight. Brandon sounded like a dog barking himself raw.

Norm leaned back into a swoon, recalling Sophie’s most recent request for a dairy tour. She’d sauntered over to ask, this time in cowboy boots and a cotton dress. She had so many looks. She dipped in and out of decades and fashions, letting her hair tumble over her shoulders one day, piling it high the next or even slicking it back, all of which Norm assumed was designed to let you know that she could play whatever part you wanted her to play in whatever you had in mind.

His dairy looked grim even to him. Through her eyes it would probably look like a gulag.

Jeanette was waiting braless on the couch, sipping ginkgo tea in a nightgown so soft and faded it was impossible to know what colors it used to be. She listened silently to Norm, then patted her thighs after
Brandon reappeared in a robe. He draped his knees over one couch arm and rolled himself out until his head landed in her lap.

“Your latest paintings,” she whispered, “are lovely.”

“He just needs sleep,” Norm said, feeling empty and invisible, pacing and muttering, “What can you do?” and other fillers. The dogs started yipping, and he knew they wouldn’t stop until they’d seen Brandon. So he hobbled down to the basement and freed them before climbing into his milking clothes.

Nothing had changed while he was gone, other than the three strays had curled up within worshipping distance of his son. One of Jeanette’s palms was on his forehead, the other on his chest, her eyes fixed to the TV as if it were on. When Norm saw an Alzheimer’s headline at the 7-Eleven his first thought was that maybe everyone was getting it, like some sort of bizarre virus. He bought the paper and read as much of the article as he could bear.

“Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair,” she whispered now to their son. “The earth’s temperature rises slightly during a full moon.”

“Good job,” he said, without opening his eyes.

Norm spread a light blanket across Brandon’s legs. “Gotta go …,” he began, stating the obvious, then reluctantly stepped into the chill, late for his cows. He saw Sophie’s kitchen light was still on. There’d be nothing he could tell her by sunup that she wouldn’t already know. He looked across the ditch. The professor’s lights were on too.

W
AYNE
R
OUSSEAU
was mumbling through another all-nighter. He’d progressed right through the tedious trials—although skipping over hundreds of failures, which seemed fair considering he didn’t have a staff—before finally discovering the remarkable resistance he could get from horseshoe-shaped carbon-coated filaments. And then, for the past two days, he’d wrestled with bad vacuum seals and imperfect carbonization, which resulted in sputtering light or broken glass. His sleep amounted to short couch naps, and he no longer played music. In fact,
he wore earplugs to better simulate Edison’s hearing. He also smoked more cannabis than usual to feed the delusions and stay in character.

He clipped a perfectly baked and carbonized cotton filament into the tube, pumped out the oxygen and slowly lowered the switch. A bright yellow-white light filled his basement. Wayne squinted at the bulb as if it were an eclipse, waiting for it to flicker, shatter or both. And waited. Several minutes passed, then another ten without the slightest flickering. Think of it! The exact same bulb Edison burned for 550 hours in December 1879! The first bright steady light that wouldn’t waver in wind! A practical lamp that could change the experience of night! And not just for the rich—for the masses!

The epic significance of his accomplishment swelled inside Wayne until he hopped around the brilliant bulb shouting and whooping his throat raw as if he’d discovered fire.

A
FTER BRANDON’S
bust it rained all day every day, mercifully at first, then violently, punishing the land and turning streams into rivers, puddles into ponds, marshes into lakes. For ten days the valley woke and retired to the roar of a deluge manufactured by the Pacific rain factory. The relentless downpour added to the sense of siege by trapping people indoors, but there was no getting away from it. The moisture seeped through walls and dampened bedding, clothes and the pores of your skin as water overflowed on both sides of the ditch, swamping stretches of Boundary and Zero where BPs and Mounties hydroplaned along in record numbers, squinting at a landscape blurred beyond recognition.

The entire border, after closing for twenty-seven hours, remained in paranoid mode. Commuters with NEXUS passes were no longer waved through, and most southbound drivers were interrogated as if all thirty million Canadians had suddenly become suspects. Cars were randomly searched, their undersides scrutinized with mirrors on poles. And haggard Customs agents found mother lodes of Cuban cigars, fake IDs, untaxed cigarettes, weapons—brass knuckles, swords and grenades—and bins of counterfeit Rolexes, eagle feathers and a never-ending cache of undeclared fruits and alcohol. The unspoken message as you crept toward the booths? Expect to get grilled. Grannies were asked if they carried mace in their purses. Children were questioned about their parents. Arabs were strip-searched, especially if they had accents.

When Customs claimed it had detained several “people of interest” at the Blaine and Lynden crossings, the anxiety escalated. Local BPs went to twelve-hour shifts, and Patera was assured that a dozen incoming transfers were being processed.

The media struggled with this vague and confusing story. The few juicy particulars were repeated endlessly: A trunk full of RDX, described as a relatively stable cousin of nitroglycerin. Three pounds of B.C. bud found stapled behind door panels. The suspected dope-toting terrorist still hadn’t been identified. There was no photo, no name and no information released about him other than that multiple IDs were found in the vehicle—stolen in Vancouver—along with a map of Seattle Center and the Space Needle. The mystery of his identity, according to the FBI, was compounded by the fact that he remained in a coma of sorts. Beyond that, the FBI would not discuss its probe until it was done. However,
The Seattle Times
asserted several days later that the FBI was ninety percent certain the unconscious suspect was Shareef Hasan Omar. Reputed to be a twenty-nine-year-old Algerian jihad trainer, he was suspected of recruiting in Toronto under multiple aliases, including one found on a fake passport inside the crumpled Pontiac.

Patera had kept Brandon’s identity hidden from the media. Part of it, he told Sophie, was that he had no idea what Brandon might say; the other part was those credit-stealing
Feebs
demanded complete control of the story. But his name leaked anyway, and reporters bombarded the Vanderkools’ answering machine, pleading or wheedling for return calls. The pursuit fizzled once the AP ran his sophomore class photo, which looked like a mug shot, alongside comments from his art teacher that Brandon possessed a “unique vision,” which amused locals and inspired this headline:
SPACE NEEDLE BOMBER FOILED BY ROOKIE AGENT’S 6TH SENSE
.

Just as the coverage started to cool, another suspected Algerian terrorist, this one armed with two handguns, was caught bushwhacking across the border into Vermont’s Kingdom County. Suddenly, for the first time anyone could recall, Americans were talking about the
world’s longest undefended border as if it were some government gaffe as ridiculous as the Pentagon blowing $2,315 on a toilet seat or the Agriculture Department bankrolling cow-fart studies at Washington State University.

Television crews fanned out to illustrate just how unguarded these 4,200 miles actually were, and
border
seemed like too big a noun for what they found. Most of the boundary was less momentous than a state line, less delineated than the average cul-de-sac. There weren’t any fences, and many formal crossings were guarded after dark by nothing more than traffic cones. The border looked like a timid line drawn in pencil, especially west of Minnesota where it no longer followed the contours of rivers, mountains or lakes but simply traced the invisible arc of the 49th parallel out to the Pacific. People pulled out maps and globes and pondered the portion of the dotted line that turned into the ditch that was now in the news, a ditch like you’d see anywhere.