Border Songs (12 page)

As the story lingered, reporters scrambled over one another for fresh angles, casting the western end of the border as a farmer’s, retiree’s and outlaw’s paradise, or dredging up its rum-running days, and its historical ebb and flow of legal and illegal commerce. Papers ran fever charts showing recent spikes in bud seizures and alien captures, or highlighted the countries’ differences in immigration and drug laws. Old stories were rewritten with more hype, particularly on the study that identified fifty active terrorist groups in Canada. Editorialists, bloggers and cartoonists piled on as the outrage swelled. While Mexican farmhands faced a gauntlet of fences and agents and vigilantes, terrorists were driving across the unguarded northern border with trunks full of explosives! Congressmen were demanding more studies and greater investments in security. Not to be out-alarmed, Washington’s governor offered the state’s National Guard. And the same Minutemen exasperating BPs along the southern border vowed to help seal the north.

Meanwhile, sales of deadbolts and canned goods surged in the valley, hardware stores ran out of ammo and home alarms, mailbox flyers
suddenly touted security consultants and local paranoia mined the unknowable: How many other cars were hauling explosives through here? Dirk Hoffman offered his concise reader-board commentary:
CANADA EXPORTS DRUGS AND TERROR
.

North of the line, black-humor asides about U.S. tanks rolling north morphed into genuine fear after the President warned that any country housing “evildoers” would be treated as an enemy.

And just when Sophie thought people couldn’t possibly talk more about Brandon, the chatter tripled. Most of the stories were exaggerations or fabrications, such as the claim that he broke arrest records during his first month, or, even more apocryphal, that he had a Spider-Man-like knack for sensing or anticipating crimes, or had suffered a breakdown after the bomber bust that made him speak backwards or—as Alexandra Cole kept claiming—in tongues. And then there was his art. Apparently he was making peculiar sculptures of sorts on public and private lands when he wasn’t swinging Tarzan-style from trees to arrest smugglers, aliens and bombers.

Sophie told McAfferty to roll onto his back, then asked, “What do you make of Brandon?”

“The shit magnet? Great kid. Wouldn’t want to stand too close to him in a lightning storm, but a great kid. Took him for an oddball at first, but he’s even odder than the average duck we hire. Know what I’m saying? Rarely wears a gun, which is probably good, considering he might be the worst shot we’ve ever had. As a matter of fact, he can’t even type. Hunts and pecks like something out of a Bogart movie. Dionne does most of it for him. What’s worse is he’s as gullible as a twelve-year-old. He’ll bring people in and say, ‘They didn’t know what was in the bags,’ or ‘They didn’t know they needed a visa.’ It’s all we can do not to bust up. We figured he was lucky at first. I mean
amazingly
lucky—though I still don’t know what to make of his so-called bomber.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for starters, who’d risk a dog hit on dope if you’re carrying RDX? Dogs aren’t trained for both, and most are dope dogs, not bomb
dogs, so why risk hauling bud if your mission’s to blow something up? I’m just saying this guy, whoever he is, doesn’t strike me as any mastermind. But back to Brandon: It’s like he expects something to happen at every moment, no matter where he is or what he’s doing. And if he strolled through this room right now, I bet he could tell you almost everything that’s in it and exactly what you’re wearing and which of my bulging muscles you’re rubbing and what’s on the walls and the precise youthful hue of my skin. Most agents try not to see too much, know what I’m saying? Plus most of us have to puff up whatever courage we need. Brandon just
is
. And his eyes are really, really wide open. A sensor went off, okay, and he and Talley responded. Talley finds tracks and starts tearin’ off before Brandon tells him they’re old. Talley’s the veteran here. Can track as well as anybody. But the big rook points out a tiny spiderweb suspended directly above a boot print and says it took at least an hour to build. See what I’m saying? So yeah, he’s as strange as he is large and, yes, I worry about him getting killed. Next question?”

Sophie recorded her interviews and photographed her subjects. I’m just a nutty scrapbooker, she told some people. To others she hinted at some kind of oral history. The rumor soon spread that she had a publisher, that she was an accomplished author with multiple pseudonyms working on her quirky border-town version of
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
. What was actually true didn’t seem to matter. People lined up to gossip and gripe, to speculate and get rubbed, to confess their temptations and share their biggest worries.

Wayne Rousseau confided his: Madeline.

L
ISTENING TO
the French station, watching herself speed, Madeline drove Zero Ave. knowing she should have taken the back roads with a hatchback full of pot. She passed hundreds of greenhouses and miles of raspberry fields before cutting through new pinot, merlot and chardonnay vineyards. Every third car on the other side of the ditch was a green-and-white SUV, but the groggy BPs never glanced over. Beyond them, the valley still looked awash, and if she squinted it turned into a massive bay, the farmhouses and barns anchored freighters, the vehicles and sheds leisure boats.

She jotted mental notes on the popular foot-smuggling routes Toby had marked. He was right. Even with doubled patrols, it took an idiot to get caught. She wove through queues of exasperated drivers at the Pacific and Peace Arch crossings and rolled west away from the border toward White Rock, where steep, narrow streets turned into toboggan runs in the winter and tall houses jockeyed for peephole views of the bay.

Parking at the marina, she watched a lanky couple necking against a phone booth, cigarettes dangling behind their heads. The northwesterly breeze looked perfect, but she was an hour early and considered rolling a joint to relax before recalling Toby’s rules. She marveled uneasily at his growing influence. He’d said she needed to move out of her apartment here, promising to find her a better place closer to him. Could she say no to this man, no matter what the request? She rolled and smoked a pinner after convincing herself anything this skinny
didn’t count, then strode into the silver twilight and the briny reek of exposed flats. From this angle, the United States looked barely discovered, with only a towering resort hotel and a smattering of lights visible on the fringe of a grand forest.

White Rock’s bayside strip of bars, restaurants, ice cream parlors and boutiques served as B.C.’s Riviera in July and August. In the offseason, it attracted an older set, like the graybeards Madeline found crammed into an oval alcove in Trudeau’s beneath photos of the Beatles cavorting, Sinatra in a gangster hat and a shirtless, defiant Jim Morrison. Their conversation was too intense for anyone to notice Wayne’s daughter order a margarita or to hear the bored bartender tell her the “gang of four” had expanded to the “gang of eight” over the past couple weeks and that the old boys were drinking twice as much as usual. She duck-flapped fingers and faked a yawn that turned real.

Madeline couldn’t see more than the back of her father’s head but could tell by his honking voice that he was flying on at least three vodka martinis. She eavesdropped on the laments about Vancouver’s traffic, the lack of hockey and the idiocy of the premier. Halfway through her second margarita, she realized she was listening for Sophie. The masseuse had obviously briefed her father on the trunk bomber, because right from the start he knew more than the papers about the type and amount of explosives, the feud between the BP and the FBI, how Brandon had, at the time, been driving home from the saloon in his own truck after celebrating his first pot bust—which Fisher told her cost Toby & Co. almost 300 K.

She’d saved the two messages Brandon left her, semicoherent rants about how he should have ten-three’d, how he was drunk and didn’t like to drink anyway, how impossible the paperwork was, how he’d talked backwards for the first time in years, then asking if she wanted to see his new dog and if she knew when Danny was coming back or—her favorite—how long “commas” usually lasted. His panicky voice triggered an old reflex to soothe him, though she couldn’t even bring herself to dial his number. She’d avoided him ever since Danny C wasn’t around to make his oddities so entertaining and endearing. He was the
one she wanted to talk to, but after laughing over Brandon’s fluky heroics they’d have to catch up, and that conversation was predictable.

How’s med school? she’d ask.

Hard.
Very
hard. Still working at the nursery?

Uh-huh.

So, have you been looking out for Brandon?

Madeline sipped her cocktail and tuned in to her father’s powwow.

“We could hold them off for, what, ten minutes?” his pal Lenny Ribes asked.

“Maybe twenty.”

The men eyed the darkening bay as if checking for aircraft carriers or Marines crashing the beach.

“Whaddaya think England would do?”

“We’ve seen what she’ll do,” Wayne barked. “An enemy of the superpower’s an enemy of hers. Ever since W W Two, the Brits have embraced their role as the junior partner in charge of European propaganda. They’ve mastered the double-talk of sucking up while feigning independence.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Anybody else want more salsa?”

“Yeah, but it’s never gonna happen. You think their conservatives want to add a fifty-first state as populous as California and as liberal as Vermont?”

“This place used to give us as much salsa as we could handle.”

“Who the hell’s this bomber, anyway?” asked an owl-faced man Madeline didn’t recognize. “Seriously doubt he’s a flag-wavin’ Canadian. It’s not like we’ve got lifelong citizens runnin’ over the border to blow things up, is it?”

“Well, we’re a staging area, as they call it,” Lenny said, lunging for the wine.

“And that’s our fault?” Wayne said. “Can we help it if they piss off everybody so much people start lining up in our yard to throw turds in theirs?”

“Yeah, it kind of is,” Lenny countered. “We let anybody in. And by
the time their lies are sorted, it’s a little late to ask ’em to get the hell out. They’re already here—or there.” He nodded south.

“Gather the guy’s an Arab.”

“Thanks, Rocco. That helps a lot.”

“Well, they say he’s Muslim, right?”

“If he’s still in that convenient coma,” Wayne pointed out, “and if there’s a bunch of fake IDs on him, how do we know whether he’s a Muslim or a Baptist, a Jew or an atheist? Muslim blood a different shade of red, Rocco? Or is it the beard that gives him away? Does my lousy beard make me a Muslim?”

“Maybe.”

“Personally,” Wayne said, “I doubt the guy exists.”

“They invented him?”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“I think that’s obvious.”

“What’s obv—”

“This better blow over by the time that casino opens,” Rocco interjected. “That’s all I gotta say. Otherwise the lines are gonna—”

“Truth is,” Lenny interrupted, “without the U.S. we’d be as irrelevant as seagull shit.”

“What’re we even talking about here?”

“That’s our identity,” Lenny said. “We’re
not
the U.S.
That’s
who we are.”

“Not this again,” Wayne grumbled.

“Am I wrong? Without them would we look so rational, polite and beautiful?”

The old men stared at one another.

“Seriously,” Lenny continued, his voice rising to the challenge. “We’re the rebound boyfriend after the hostile divorce. Women love us because we’re not the violent, self-absorbed jerks they just dumped.”

“Have some more wine, Lenny.”

Wayne’s agitated eyes then lifted and traversed the room before settling on the most unexpected of gifts. And in the moment before she
felt his glance, he noticed how she slouched over her cocktail like a burdened woman twice her age straining against some invisible hand.

T
HE
B
ORDER
P
ATROL
had installed a new night watch near Peace Arch in case anyone tried to traipse across the invisible line splitting the mud-flats and slaloming through the islands. But drowsy Rick Talley didn’t notice the black Geary 18 gliding southbound across the bay, nor its captain in her black wetsuit, nor the jib she raised and filled with no more noise than a tossed bedsheet. And nobody except a rotund man pacing a gravelly shore just south of Semiahmoo Spit noticed the brief flutters when the sails fell forty minutes later.

Toby had bigger sailboats in mind than her dad’s old plywood flattie, but she’d assured him the boat was built for beaching and she could pop eighty pounds across the bay without having to dock anywhere or needing another boat to greet her. But what if she got up on the flats and the man holding the intermittent white light in one hand held a gun in the other?

Fighting off the urge to flee while he was still too far up the beach to catch her, she towed the boat close enough to ground it. He was built like an umpire and introduced himself in such boisterous fashion Madeline immediately forgot his name. She unclipped the large foul-weather sacks from the mast and handed him one.

He took his time and shined his piercing light up and down her wetsuit, lingering on her crotch. “Cuter than the average mule, aren’t ya?” He stuck the light in his mouth so he could hold the bag with one hand and fondle the pouches with the other.

Her eyes adjusted well enough to make out a thick fleshy face beneath a dark leather beanie.

“You haven’t even told me your name, darling.”

Her throat was too tight to tell him to shut up or hurry.

A short laugh caught in his throat and ended in a noisy spit. “The great Toby sent me a mute? Give me the other one.”

She did, and he finally cracked open his money bag against his
belly, forcing her to lean into his reek of armpits and burger grease. Seeing what looked like six plastic-wrapped bricks of U.S. hundreds, just like Toby said there’d be, she squeezed one to pretend she knew what she was doing. He held on to the bag when she started to pull it away, then let it go so she stumbled backwards, which triggered more laughter and spitting. She clipped the money to the mast and shoved the boat toward deeper water.