Border Songs (15 page)

He was peeling off the glove when she turned back around, looking
pasty as a clown. “Know how you said to let you know if I saw a cow down out back?” she panted. “Yeah, well …”

Norm galloped outside toward the medicine shed before she finished. He had four swollen cows in the field, and badly needed a healthy calf and a productive mother. They were good producers out there, too, all of them. Great producers, actually. And if the mother had already calved, the calf needed her right now.

He grabbed a bag of CMPK, then ambled—knee grinding, groin tightening—to his battered pickup. Sophie jogged alongside, babbling about how she’d been eating cereal when she noticed a cow struggling on the ground. He climbed inside and she did too, rearranging old Copenhagen lids with her clogs on the rusted-out flooring. Even now he was distracted by her smells, her wet hair, her peach-colored pants that fell just above the raised goose bumps on her tapered calves. His truck rounded her house with a mild squeal, then whined out Northwood to the entrance to his back ten. After a quick scan, Norm groaned.

“What?”

“It’s the Holstein.” He grimaced. “She’s a great producer. A great, great producer. And …” The image of both 83 and her calf already dead or dying shut him up.

It didn’t occur to her to open the gate, so he lunged around the hood, unwrapped the chain from the post and pushed the gate inward, then scrambled back behind the wheel without glancing at her. He stepped on it, the four cylinders squealing until he shifted out of neutral and lurched forward, rattling across the cattle guard. When he tired of high-centering on the rutted road, he braked abruptly. Sophie’s pretty wet head swung toward the dash. He grabbed a coil of rope from the back and hobbled ahead.

He was relieved to see a wet calf the size of a Great Dane wobbling near the fallen Holstein, waiting for its critical first feeding. But the mother was spread on her side as if staked to the earth, moaning, head lolling, belly bloated well beyond any pregnancy bulge. Norm looked into her crazed eyes and felt behind her ears for a fever. “What’s wrong, girl?”

He slipped a harness over her head, dug his rubber boots into the mud and grass and yanked her thick neck back toward her hind legs in hopes of coaxing the twelve-hundred-pound beast to her feet. She snorted miserably. He tried again and then gave up, gasping.

“She have twins?”

He’d almost forgotten Sophie—barefoot now, at a safe distance, clogs in hand, her face cadaverous, a camcorder hanging at her side, the red light on, filming.

“You see another one?” Norm glanced wildly about.

“Well …” She pointed hesitantly at the four-foot oval of pooled slime behind the Holstein’s hind legs.

“Afterbirth,” he grumbled. “Now put that damn thing down and hold on to the end of this.”

He watched Sophie hesitantly wrap her lotioned hands around the rope and realized that asking her to help was ridiculous, but it was too late. He tugged until his wrists, shoulders and back hurt almost as much as his knee. The cow groaned again. Sophie slipped and shrieked, then straightened, seemingly too scared to tug on a goddamn rope. Norm couldn’t compose himself. There were no more appearances he could muster, not with a calf stumbling around and its mother fading to black. Sophie was seeing him stripped and peeled, his calamity her drama. He wanted to shout questions at her:
What are you really doing here? Where’d you get your money? Are you writing a goddamn book? Did you murder your ex?

Instead, he jabbed his Swiss Army blade into the Holstein’s top rear leg. She jumped, and so did Sophie. Then he stuck the blade into the bottom leg and, getting no response, stabbed harder. Sophie yelped, but the cow didn’t even flinch. He grabbed the CMPK, straddled her neck and pulled a needle from a vest pocket, feeling along her neck for her jugular and squeezing it until a vein the size of a garden hose bulged on the surface. A swift hammer stroke sank the needle, a red geyser misting his face.

“Hope blood doesn’t bother you,” he told Sophie. Actually, he hoped it did. He shoved the needle deeper, fastened a drip line to it and held the bag above the cow’s head.

“What’s that in there?” Sophie asked sheepishly, filming again.

“Calcium, mostly,” he shouted over his own anxiety. “If I give it to her too fast it’ll give her a heart attack, but, see, I can feel her heartbeat through my butt here.” He paused until he felt it again. “So when it skips or hurries—like it just did—I pinch the drip line here and slow the flow.”

“You can feel her heart through your butt?” Sophie asked incredulously, tiptoeing around the front of the cow as if it were a dragon. “What’s wrong with her?”

Any number of things, starting with a broken leg and milk fever. She was obviously full of air, and that alone could kill her if she didn’t belch. And she may have hemorrhaged. She was worth twenty-five hundred, easy. And that’s all he shared with Sophie: “Twenty-five hundred bucks!”

He looked up in time to watch the calf drop in the field, then wobble back onto its feet. Norm groaned and sped the drip up again. After two thirds of the bag had been drained into her, she stopped moaning and stirred. Norm pulled the needle and stepped away as she tried to maneuver her hind legs beneath her. He told Sophie to yank on the rope while he shoved from the backside. She set the camcorder back down, then fell over twice.
Welcome to dairy farming, m’lady
. The Holstein finally had three legs under her. Norm shoved hard on her hip, coaxing her to adjust the leg that hadn’t responded to the blade; it twitched finally, and with his grunting help she rose, the placenta falling from her and bursting open with a loud slosh of fluid that splashed up to his knees.

He heard a gagging noise but didn’t turn to Sophie. His eyes were locked on the dazed cow, sturdier with each stride toward her stumbling calf, the rake of her rear and backbone as perfectly right-angled as any Holstein he’d ever bred. She licked her calf’s umbilical cord, removing the newborn scent as fast as she could. Norm’s mouth tasted metallic, but his gut loosened and he felt a sleepy gratitude as it occurred to him that both the mother and calf would be dying if Sophie hadn’t come running.

He looked over when she groaned again, hands on her thighs and facing away as he took in her athletic backside. She wiped her mouth and tried to smile before staggering away. Norm sensed her recoil, her full-body revulsion. He glanced at his trembling hands, blood pooled and dried in the knuckle creases. What words could possibly make her stay? He suddenly wanted to tell her about the bribe he’d been offered that morning, slowing the story down whenever it got juicy, seducing her with the details. He started toward her as the old Chevy puttered into view with little Roony beaming out the window as if this were the grandest of days. Behind him came the clanging of the casino going up. Though Norm hadn’t noticed it until right then, it sounded louder than ever, as if the tribe were racing to finish before some pious mob put a stop to it. He turned again to Sophie, who was farther away now and looking battered and bowlegged, as if she were the one who’d just given birth.

W
AYNE WROTE
through the night, his handwriting getting larger and sloppier the more exhausted and excited he got—reading, writing and rewriting until he crafted the last few pages from memory and the final crescendo of words felt like his own. “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us,” he scribbled with throbbing fingers. “It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning—”

He climbed the stairs, buzzing with the beauty and wisdom of his prose until he glimpsed his reflection and remembered how little he resembled a twenty-eight-year-old F. Scott. He cracked the refrigerator, saw nothing but condiments and Bombay Sapphire—Fitzgerald was a gin man—and then searched for his medicine, feeling less and less like a daring young author.

Over the last few days, that little book had often struck Wayne as the most exquisite novel ever written. At other times it felt like an over-hyped novella about irrational love. Was it truly the great novel about American aspiration and self-reinvention? Or a melodramatic yarn about an eccentric’s relentless obsession for a woman he couldn’t have? What was so singular about that? How many men, he wondered, saw Sophie Winslow as the green light at the end of their dock? Maybe that was it, the commonality of Gatsby’s misguided quest capturing whatever irrational dreams we all harbor. Clearly, F Scott knew he was
writing a masterpiece; his letters proved it. He’d be dead before the critics and the masses concurred, but he knew. And perhaps such faith is essential for greatness. For several flickering moments that morning Wayne had felt the language thrumming through him. Now, though, it was gone. He lifted every newspaper and couch pillow twice before finding the half gram of skunk crushed beneath the next book on his reading list,
Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud
.

He botched the first joint watching the Vanderkool boy drive his battered truck, erratically as ever, along Boundary Road, slowing to study something in the ditch before turning south on Assink. Wayne couldn’t come to terms with the sudden fanfare. America loved a hero, any hero. But a kid who looked at you like he was trying to make a Picasso out of your face? Whose paintings gave you that same
good-for-you
sensation you got watching the Special Olympics? You might as well call every cloud, tree or wave a work of art. Every tweet, flutter and fart.

He messed up the second roll obsessing over Madeline. He’d never had the stomach to confront her directly. In fact, he’d almost encouraged her mischief because he was so delighted she wasn’t as proper and predictable as her sister. And after Marcelle died, he’d let Maddy do whatever made her happy in hopes she’d stick around. But he’d never pictured this reckless apathy. When he called Nicole for advice, she’d grunted and said you can’t help people who don’t want help. She had volunteered, though, that she and her mannequin husband would make an appearance at his sixty-fifth. Beneath the words, it sounded like a chore.

By the time he finally had a serviceable joint, he questioned whether he should smoke it. His pain was mild, and he wanted a clear head when he called Maddy. He tended to get more philosophical with each toke, until he crossed some line and turned ridiculous. It was the same thing with wine, and he’d always made a point of never writing op-eds or art reviews with more than two glasses in him. He had a
flame poised, his eyes on the Vanderkools’ dinghy full of blooming yellow tulips, when he heard voices up the street and remembered Sophie’s invitation.

W
HEN
T
ONY
P
ATERA
explained that congressmen were coming out for a briefing, she’d encouraged him, while oiling his arthritic toes, to do his show-and-tell in front of her house. Where better to make his case? But she was surprised he took her up on it, and even more astonished by the gallant mob that spilled out of BP vans in leather-soled shoes. Seeing as how there was nobody else to charm, the politicians all fussed over her, flattering and touching her. And when she brought out the camcorder, Sophie was greeted anew with warm smiles and improved postures.

She listened to Patera begin his spiel, stating the obvious as if it were revelatory. “Yes, this is, in fact, the border. Right here. And, yes, this two-foot ditch is actually one of the better barriers we have. A few hundred yards down the street”—he pointed toward the Cascades—“is where we now get drive-thrus on almost a nightly basis. All we have to guard our busy sector, ladies and gentlemen, is a small, dedicated crew of overworked agents and outdated motion sensors. So, as you can imagine, if we’re not already in the neighborhood when some smuggler or alien—or bomb-toting terrorist—crosses …” He shrugged. “We frankly can’t respond to more than half of the sensor alarms. That means we mostly catch the dumb ones, understand? Still, we’re on pace to apprehend twice as many illegals as we did last year, and we’ve seized over twenty thousand pounds of marijuana over the past twelve months, up fivefold from three years ago. However, we’re still probably intercepting less than five percent of what’s rolling through. Keep in mind that two thirds of Canada’s marijuana production is grown indoors in B.C.” He wagged a finger to the north. “Unfortunately, the Mounties don’t have the manpower and Canadian courts don’t have the will to do much about it.”

The politicians eyed their security expert for confirmation or skepticism,
but the grim little bureaucrat in the gray suit ignored their glances and didn’t veer from his melancholic pacing.

“When the Mounties do try to enforce,” Patera continued, adjusting his Eagle Scout tie clip, “seizures usually involve basement operations with about five hundred plants yielding several one-point-five-million-dollar harvests a year. So we’re talking real money. With ninety percent of their market down here, of course they get it across in every way imaginable. If they don’t want to risk sneaking it through the ports of entry, they jump this ditch here or run it through raspberries over there or put a car on each side, make sure we’re not around, then throw some hockey bags over, drive off and
poof
—gone before we can respond. Plus, they can paddle across the bay in kayaks, or use helicopters, snowmobiles and remote-controlled planes.”

“What about putting in concrete barriers like we have in front of the Capitol?” twanged a Tennessee congressman who later called the Canadian border
the Mexican problem squared
.

Grateful for the question, Patera smiled and paused for effect. “That was my first idea, and I’ll tell you what I was told: Every civil-liberties organization would start howling as soon as—”

“They’re gonna howl,” the congressman interrupted, “no matter what we do, aren’t they? If we made decisions based solely on who’s gonna complain—”

“What about cameras?” asked a politician Sophie recognized by his grimace.

Patera bunched his lips, as if the gravity of what he was about to share warranted a moment of silence. “Cameras,” he said. Then, after another flamboyant pause, “If we had about thirty cameras on fifty-foot poles at strategic locations, we’d have a level of deterrence I truly believe would be tantamount to tripling our force at a third the price.” He cleared his throat. “As some of you know, this subject has been studied before, but its time has come.”