Border Songs (2 page)

From Brandon’s vantage, he was simply airborne long enough to watch himself in flight, and he’d experienced enough similar out-of-body sensations to chalk them up to his
gift
. Regardless, he saw himself from above, his arms flung out like albatross wings until they collapsed around the runaways in a flying hug as he used their brittle bodies to break his landing. He heard a noise like a snapping wishbone before Dionne shouted his name. Her powerful light swung through snowflakes the size of chicken feathers, blinding him, his breathless apologies interrupted by the murderous screech of a barn owl.
Thirty-one
.

M
ADELINE ROUSSEAU
was getting her feet stroked by an American smuggler named Monty when Brandon Vanderkool called.

The date with the bud runner had begun spontaneously enough with her being flattered by his appreciation of her Himalayan blue poppies. After he raved about her black tulips she’d hesitantly agreed to a drink after she helped close the nursery.
One drink
. He even warned her during her third margarita that he had a bit of a foot fetish.

“Yeah?” she’d asked. “How bad?”

“Well, I don’t collect heels or anything, but I guess I’m somewhat of a voyeur.”

“Then why’re you interested in me?” She considered her feet her most exotic feature—half-moon arches and slender, shapely toes of ascending length. Still, she wanted to hear it.

A blush rose above his swashbuckling mustache. “Your personality, of course,” he said, without glancing down at the sailing sandals she wore year-round. “But your arches are sublime.”

She found it oddly endearing, how he peeped at women’s shoes and held his breath when a waitress clomped by in spiked boots. Though he smelled like coconuts and sounded harmless, she knew she should have walked out once he admitted he’d been steered to her by Fisher, the same unreliable pothead she was waiting to hear from.

But by then her night had already swerved out of control. Rather than driving all the way to her White Rock apartment, she impulsively let Monty follow her to the moldy little guesthouse on her father’s
property across the ditch from the American border. Her regrets were in full bloom by the time he kneeled reverentially at the end of the futon and started massaging her feet with large, powerful hands. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but this is too weird and I …” She was searching for the words that could free her feet when her cell broke into song and startled him into loosening his grip.

She was expecting a call about when she’d get paid, but not this soon. Had something already gone wrong? Fisher had assured her countless times how amazingly risk-free it all was. Yet in just three weeks she’d gone from reluctantly helping cultivate to waiting on money to indulging some smuggler who might be twice her age. Monty suddenly looked too old to run through raspberry fields with hockey bags full of what Fisher called product. She swung her feet free, plucked her phone from her vest and answered it.

“Madeline? This is Brandon, Brandon Vanderkool.”

As if he needed a last name.

People talked about Brandon the way they discussed earthquakes, eclipses and other phenomena. His size, his “art” and the bizarre things he said and did had always generated chatter about Super Freak or Big Bird or whatever they were calling him at the time. After one January blizzard, he built a wall of what everyone gradually understood weren’t snowmen but snow
penguins
. Another morning, he stood in his grassy driveway off Boundary Road and flapped his arms for twenty minutes with the rising sun at his back, puzzled drivers slowing down to see if he was all right. He didn’t move his feet until the sun slid high enough to melt the frost everywhere around him except in his shadow, leaving behind a frost angel that clung to the grass several minutes after he strode off to the barn.

“Madeline?”

“Whaddaya need?” she asked. How’d he get her number? She pictured a tiny phone lost in his fingers, pinned against his massive ear, his body accordioned in a car or towering outside, his uneven grin torn between amusement and amazement, his free hand—the size of a first baseman’s glove—air-sculpting whatever he was trying to say.

“We just caught some illegals hopping the border and running through the Crawfords’ farm. Middle Easterners, maybe. Real small. Could be Iranians. No ID, strange accents. I don’t know. Definitely not Mexicans or Koreans. Maybe Filipinos? Real small. Eyes like black olives.”

She listened to his familiar halting rhythm, surprised he was this coherent. She’d initially dismissed her father’s news flash about Brandon joining the patrol as yet another joke about Americans. “Guess who they’ve got guarding the country now?” But that was before she’d received Brandon’s jumbled letter from the academy in which he rattled on about birds and constellations in the New Mexico sky.

She filled her lungs but her voice still squeaked. “So why’re you calling me?” She glanced at Monty sulking on the futon and wondered why Brandon hadn’t responded. Had the connection died? “Are you calling on behalf of the Border Patrol?” she asked slowly and watched Monty’s bloodshots widen. How old was he, anyway? Forty? Forty-five? She pointed at the door.

A crackling delay continued on Brandon’s end as if she’d stumped him or lost the call. Then he mumbled the words he wanted to say before repeating them at normal volume, fast and breathy. “Thought they were aminals at first. Chased them down in Crawfords’ field. Got banged up pretty good. The woman is in St. Pete’s. A woman. Didn’t even know she was a woman until it was kinda too late. And the guy running with her came back because she was slipping. He saw me coming and still came back. You believe that? The woman was dressed like a genie. Or a princess. Told her how sorry I was, but she didn’t know what I was saying. Hold on.”

Brandon stranded her with static as the door clicked shut behind Monty. She stared at her blushing feet, her toes as pink as baby mice. Why was Brandon telling her all this?

“Madeline?”

“Yeah?”

“Called your father. Got no answer. So maybe he’s out. But the lights are on. Called again. I think they crossed down the street from
him. Why would anyone try to cross in the snow—I mean, leaving tracks and all?”

Madeline glanced out the steamed window toward her father’s illuminated house. “Maybe,” she heard herself say, “that’s what they
thought
you’d think.” She rubbed her foot with a towel, recalculating how much she’d drunk and ordering herself to focus.

“Know something?” Brandon said. “I think the most interesting people I’ll meet these days will be criminals—or people about to become criminals.”

The mini-fridge hummed a higher note. She had no idea what to say. Where was he headed? Did he know something?

“Ahhh,” Brandon said. “Well, I hate to—”

Her cell beeped twice, then the battery died. Shit! What was he going to say?
What
did he hate? And why’d he really call?

She ran some water and frantically rinsed, soaped and toweled each foot. Should she ring Fisher on her dad’s phone and tell him the BP called, or was it just Brandon being Brandon? This kept happening nowadays. She’d plan on
one
cocktail or
half
a joint, then fall into these time warps. How did Brandon get her cell number anyway? They hadn’t been close since she was fourteen or fifteen, and they weren’t
that
close then. How close did anybody get to him? She stepped outside and hurried toward her father’s house along Zero Ave., disoriented by the blackness, skating across snow as slick as frosting.

She scanned the dark southern landscape for patrol lights or any signs that something had truly happened, but saw only house and barn lights. Was Mr. V still building that boat? She felt the wind shift across her face. “Can sailing be taught?” he’d asked her so earnestly years ago, as if her answer might provide the password to the afterlife. She’d wanted to tell him,
Yes, of course
, but there was something about him that wouldn’t let her fudge it. “Either you’re good at it or you’re not.”

That was back when the ditch was just a ditch, the Vanderkools just peculiar American neighbors and Brandon just an oversized kid who could watch barn swallows for hours and tell you which bird made which nest and which egg and which song. A year younger than
she was, he towered above her like an adult once he turned eleven. And when he got nervous or excited his words came out wrong. Spluttering, Danny Crawford called it. Occasionally, in memorable gusts, he even spoke backwards. “Fair being not are you!” The first thought when people heard him derail?
Retarded
.

Her father was sprawled on the love seat next to a half liter of port and two roaches with Glenn Gould’s piano clinking on repeat like the mutterings of a disturbed genius. The latest
Maclean’s
—
GREATEST INVENTIONS OF THE YEAR
—covered his shallow chest, his bifocals balanced mid-nose, his neck bent at an angle that would only make him crabbier. Early pass-outs were common now that there wasn’t any hockey to stay up for. From what Madeline could tell, the strike was realigning Canadian life. Couples were getting reacquainted, talking more, screwing more, divorcing more. A nation of men were rediscovering hobbies and remodeling kitchens or, in her father’s case, smoking pot and piddling with inventions. Or, to be precise,
reinventions
.

He’d started the reinvention kick and the cannabis binge—she wasn’t sure which came first—soon after being diagnosed and retiring a year early. And he’d taken to them both with a startling fervor. Professor Wayne Rousseau, the irreverent quote master, had been reduced to a daily toker who spent his waking hours reinventing gunpowder, the compass, the steam engine and who knew what else.

She played the three blinking messages without rousing him. “Mr. Rousseau? This is Brandon calling. Vanderkool. I mean I’m with the Border Patrol now and …” He rattled on disjointedly until he got cut off. Then a woman’s soothing voice: “Wayne, it’s Sophie. Call me if you want to hear about Brandon’s big bust.” Of course, that’s who gave Brandon her number, the mysterious masseuse. The third call was Brandon repeating himself until he got muzzled mid-sentence. Madeline regretted being so curt with him. He needed someone to calm him down, and she hadn’t even asked if he was all right. She glanced out the window, half-expecting to see him in the fields, yet saw only her own spooked reflection in the glass. She stared again at her father, his arms akimbo as if overacting his death. He’d always looked smaller and less
imposing when he wasn’t talking, but MS added a boyish vulnerability. And his death—maybe tomorrow, maybe in five years and seventeen days—nonetheless loomed. She nudged him awake, noticing the familiar odors of sour laundry, cheap wine and expensive pot. After he blinked and smacked his lips, she casually mentioned Brandon’s calls and waited for his gears to catch.

He pushed his glasses higher on his nose and began clawing his thin beard. “This isn’t their jurisdiction.” Then a pause. “Does Nicole know?” Of course his first reaction would be outrage, his second to wonder what her older sister would make of it. “If the Border Patrol thinks it can run investigations on both sides of the border …,” he began, settling into lecture mode.

Should she slip away and call Fisher? She realized she didn’t even know if Fisher was his first or last name. Meanwhile, the window was so large and the living room so bright that she felt like a target.

“When’d he call? Exactly when did that fucking giraffe call?” Her father looked around wildly, started to rise, then fell back with a wince, rubbing the right side of his neck with blackened fingers. “What’d he want? What’d he say? You didn’t tell him anything, did you?”

“What could I possibly tell him?” Madeline said slowly, hoping she’d only have to say it once. She dimmed the lights and shut the blinds, trying to puff herself up to match his anger. But she’d always been amused that college students so earnestly studied the morality lines her father laid down, not realizing how often he lifted those lines and dropped them wherever he pleased. She poured him some seltzer on ice and gathered his pills. After watering the coleus, poinsettias and philodendron, all she truly wanted to do was tell somebody about her encounter with the foot man, someone who could sympathize and laugh and keep a secret that strange.

W
AYNE ROUSSEAU
rose long before dawn to reinvent the light-bulb.

Working in his basement by gas lanterns and candlelight—it would’ve been a farce otherwise—he fussed for hours with spiral threads of platinum, titanium, nickel and copper until he’d singed every finger on his right hand. Nothing stayed illuminated for more than eleven seconds before flickering or exploding.

Over the prior week Wayne had tried Edison’s first eighty-four filaments, sticking to the arduous chronology of cutting, securing, electrifying and unlatching each material and combination thereof inside a replica vacuum tube he’d ordered from an oddball company in Montreal. Having completed less than a tenth of Edison’s trials, he already felt defeated and empty. Now he strapped tungsten inside the tube, sealed it, hooked it up to the battery and lowered the switch. The bulb lit briefly, flickered, then exploded. Wayne ripped off his goggles and began sweeping the floor.

Edison and his lab boys tried twelve hundred materials—including beard hair, playing cards and fishing line—before discovering a reliable filament. Twelve hundred. The more Wayne inhabited Edison, the more he wondered how a man cultivates a stubborn streak so pronounced that it transforms a daily barrage of failures into stimulants.

Edison was thirty-two when he perfected the lightbulb. Thirty-fucking-two. Half Wayne’s age. Studying the dueling portraits of the man—the visionary wizard who lit up the modern world and the
credit-hogging prick of incomparable dimensions—Wayne increasingly leaned toward the latter. No single man could have invented the music and motion-picture industries, the pull-cord doll and more than a thousand other breakthroughs. But how long would everything have taken without Edison? That was the question. Yank this prick out of history and the oddsmakers who studied that sort of thing swore the electrical revolution would have taken another generation and the recording industry probably longer. All this from an uneducated, nearly deaf dropout who wasn’t sophisticated enough to realize that the things he imagined and demanded of himself and his underlings were not
possible
. And perhaps this was exactly the DNA, a quintessentially American prickishness, that all the giants possessed, whether Edison or Ford or Gates. They all turned less brilliant and more peculiar the closer you looked, didn’t they? And maybe it wasn’t just the Americans—most of the world’s innovators were colossal bullies who shoved society forward. That was all Wayne was squeezing from his morning exercise. No enlightenment, no glory, no revelation. Just the metallic, back-of-the-tongue aftertaste of the impatient prick. He crossed tungsten off the list, fatigue blowing through him. Fucking Edison.