Border Songs (20 page)

“Chief?”

“Yes, Mr. McAfferty.”

“Could these warnings be any more vague?”

Patera attempted to grin. “We all wish they were more specific, but the fact is we have to be prepared for everything from armed terrorists and smugglers to an attack on the food supply.”

Brandon couldn’t believe what he was watching: his father—at a distance, but clearly his father—limping out to their silver mailbox, glancing around, then opening the box and apparently trying to fit his head inside it.

“Has our so-called Space Needle bomber woken up yet?” McAfferty asked.

“Yes, I’m told he has,” the chief said briskly. “But I’m not sure
of his faculties at this point, nor where the FBI stands with its investigation.”

Brandon tuned out the murmurs and watched his father thumb through the mail, then stick his arm in the box again.

“So is he that Algerian the FBI claimed he was?” McAfferty pressed.

“I don’t believe so, but I can’t say much beyond that.” Patera pointed at the screens. “As you all also know, we are increasingly considered the front line of the drug war, so …”

Brandon jerked upright when the bored tech, awaiting further instructions, zoomed Charlie 7 in until the man practically filled the screen.
Dad smokes?
He angrily flicked his cigarette, as if he’d read Brandon’s mind, then threw the mail on the ground and karate-chopped the air with his left hand while hopping around on his good leg.

“B.C. bud has become so lucrative it’s attracting people who don’t fit any profile,” Patera warned. “Grandmas in RVs are potential smugglers. Everyone’s a suspect. So we need to make the risks greater than the rewards, understand? And not just for smugglers, but also for local accomplices.”

Before Brandon could figure out how to point out his dad’s seizure-in-progress, a car rolled up and an erect lady and a little man popped out to help. Suddenly his father was himself again, bending stiffly at the waist to scoop up the mail and talking with his free hand. The camera angle widened until not one of them could have been recognized or identified.

“So we’ve got to ramp up to meet these challenges, just like we always do. Nothing has changed. But please realize that not only are we watching
everyone
, everyone’s watching
us
. Continue what you’re doing, but use these cameras to your advantage. I thank you all in advance for your ongoing vigilance.”

Brandon was shuffling out of the station, feeling drained and as out of place as ever, when McAfferty broke into another impression. “Don’t ever change, Dionne! Understand? That’s not to say that the
right kind of change can’t be just what the doctor ordered, but I’m talking about a completely
different
kind of change. A
changeless
change!”

She wasn’t laughing. “I thought this was gonna be a safe, quiet place to raise my daughter.”

“It’s the same place you thought it was,” McAfferty said. “Bad shit has always passed through here, but now we’re watching so closely that we see way more of it. You can’t blame the colon for the shit, is what I’m saying.” Then he waved Brandon over to his rig, where he pulled out two large color photos. “Don’t ask me why, but intel’s wondering if you can ID this woman.”

The first picture was a low-angle shot of a beefy, curly-haired man in shorts, his right hand on the back of a slender woman, her face angled away. Brandon focused on the man’s brutal forearms, carnivorous jaw, dimpled chin and meaty lips. But what alarmed him was her captive expression, her tight lips, her strained posture twisting her spine away from his touch. She didn’t look like herself, but she didn’t look like anyone else either. “Who’s that guy with Madeline?”

“So you do know her,” McAfferty said. “Easy to underestimate a plain-looking broad, ain’t it?”

“If you saw her laughing, you wouldn’t say that.”

“Huh?”

“Plain.”

McAfferty studied the picture again. “Whatever you say.” He shuffled the photos. “Here she is with her boyfriend again.”

Brandon felt his face heat up. They were both smiling this time, though not at the camera. She still didn’t look happy. “Who is he?”

“Tobias C. Foster.” McAfferty flicked the man’s forehead with a fingernail. “World-class douche who’s in with the Angels and arrogant as a senator. Trolls the border like he owns it.”

“Where is this?”

“Looks like a party to me. Date’s in the corner there.”

“How’d we get these?”

“What, you worried about her privacy? Evidently the Mounties finally turned somebody.”

“What am I supposed to do about it?”

“You just did it. Beyond that, hell if I know. She doesn’t have a record, and the fact they needed your ID says they don’t know shit. It’s all part of this new international kumbaya we got goin’. You know, sharing, collaborating, circle jerkin’. Gather they heard you grew up next door or something, and seeing as how you’re the new James Bond they probably hope she’ll tell you where all the weed’s coming across—not that the Canucks’ll do jack about it. Just talk to her if you get the chance—not officially, for God’s sake. You know, get caught up on when you two used to play doctor.”

It was all Brandon could do to resist blurting that she wouldn’t even return his calls. “She’s real nice.”

McAfferty smiled his mustache straight. “I’ll pass along that too. Yes, it’s Miss Rousseau, and she’s a sweetheart with a beautiful laugh.”

H
E SPENT
the warm afternoon trolling Blaine’s simple grid for anyone who didn’t belong, illegals slipping into idling cars or mules trying to blend into a city so small it was hard for strangers to loiter convincingly no matter how disinterested they seemed. Clothes air-dried over railings on the forlorn apartments abutting Zero Ave., where three young men were smoking in the shade and trying not to look spooked when Brandon wheeled into the lot. A block away, a shirtless red-haired boy with a fishing rod stepped out of an abandoned school bus into an overgrown yard. He gawked but didn’t return Brandon’s wave, then began casting into the dandelions.

Within minutes he was cruising spiffier cul-de-sacs, past happy children in bright shirts riding pricey bicycles on hosed sidewalks. He pulled over, opened his cell phone, scrolled down and stared at Madeline’s number as if it were some code he needed to crack. Danny Crawford would just dial her and the right words would pop out, but what would they be? He pulled out McAfferty’s photos again. It looked to him like she was in danger.

He hated the claustrophobia of the Blaine beat, the lack of open
space, the recurring sensation that he was hassling or scaring people. He breathed deeper after rolling across the railroad tracks onto the pier, with the windows down, taking in the low-tide stink of diesel and clam spit. The BP shared responsibility for policing border waters with the Coast Guard and Customs, but owned just one leaky Bayliner. That was something else the chief was working on, McAfferty told him, a navy to go along with his two-chopper air force, his growing army and his Big Brother cams.

Brandon swept the harbor with binoculars, finding only year-round cormorants, hybrid gulls and a few mourning doves. Birds always were scarce when the heat rose, though he couldn’t remember it ever being this bad by late June. He was scanning the tidal flats, desperate for a sandpiper or godwit, when he noticed, midway out, a large tangle of marooned driftwood. He spent several minutes surveying the midsized logs, branches and what looked like curved planks, then reluctantly drove back into town.

He feared he’d missed something important when he saw the overflow of BPs and Blaine Police at the Chevron, but so far as he could tell the only thing going on was a bloated city cop soliciting compliments on how much weight he’d lost. “You guys are killing me. Had to go down a shirt size here, in case you haven’t noticed. Where’s the love?”

Brandon lingered in the laughter with his lopsided smirk, then slipped away unnoticed to ask the breast-feeding barista a question: “If you had an old friend who wanted to see you, but didn’t want you to think it was a big deal, what would you want him to say?” He took in her nearly invisible mustache, her askew eyes, her raspberry tongue flicking the chapped corners of thin lips.

“Lunch,” she said. “Nothing intimidating about that. Dinner’s a date. Lunch is more like, ‘What ya been up to?’ But you can’t just call up and ask her out for lunch. That would sound like a date—and a boring one.” Before he could ask her to explain, her baby started warbling and she waved in her next customer.

Now strolling through Peace Arch, Brandon tried practicing chitchat
with strangers, though everyone he approached acted annoyed. He asked a backpacking drifter what stood out from his travels, hoping for an exotic image. “Nothing, brother. Nothing” was all he got. The only people willing to talk were the aspiring derelicts who’d chime, “Hey, big man,” as if they were pals because he hadn’t busted them yet. But he couldn’t sustain those conversations either, even if he parroted Dionne’s effortless queries about where they’d had lunch or if they’d seen a decent flick lately.

He sat at the picnic table closest to the jungle gym and watched couples sprawled on blankets in the grass, chatting, touching, smooching or reclining in each other’s armpits, baring their smooth stomachs to the gentle sun. He finally dialed Madeline and froze after the beep. “It’s me,” he said finally. “Brandon Vanderkool again. You will call me…. Okay?” Another pause. “Bye.”

He bolted from the table, furious with himself.
You will call me
. He heard a mother and her screeching toddler in the bathroom and saw two Mounties lazily smoking near the Canadian gardens. Beyond the arch, a line of southbound drivers gazed at him across the sloped greenery, his size pulling them in, some pointing him out as if they’d spotted a moose.

He couldn’t stand patrolling the park a moment longer. The only significant smuggler he’d ever caught sneaking across there was a man in a wrinkled suit trying to use a wedding party as cover. So Brandon strode at a determined diagonal past the weathered concrete arch, which needed grass seed along the worn patch where tourists stood to get photographed, and cut briskly through the jammed lanes without looking at the drivers, then hurdled the blackberry brambles down the small bluff to the flats.

Once he got his bearings he loped toward the storm debris beyond a dozen black-haired people, most of them shorter than swans, the smallest ones playing chicken with the waves, their black-and-white outfits flapping in the wind. Asians, probably Japanese or Chinese. He didn’t care if they were illegals carrying buds or nuclear devices, yet
one by one they stopped whatever they were doing and faced the enormous uniformed man jogging up, his massive boots sinking well above the soles.

Brandon waved and slouched, but it was no use. Whether tourists or illegals, foreigners always panicked at the sight of him. He pointed at the debris line behind them as they bunched together like swallows being chased by a falcon. After he slowed to a swift walk and offered his friendliest wave, one of the men raised his passport in surrender and started timidly toward him shouting, “Posspolt!”

Too anxious to smile, Brandon waved off the eager little man without slowing or changing direction. He heard confusion and relief in what sounded like Japanese, then blocked them out altogether as he took in the trove of surf-rounded logs the size of his legs, waterlogged boat planks, several head-sized boulders and tangles of snapped branches and boughs, as if a ship and several firs had been mauled, milled and spindled by the sea.

Almost everything would be floating again within an hour, so he quickly braced the heaviest, flattest logs with boulders and built a six-foot circular base on which he balanced more logs, filling any gaps with branches, and then stacked ship planks, their uniform flatness steadying the structure. Working faster now, the bigger waves closing in, he piled more logs, tucking and weaving branches and boughs vertically to tie them together, snapping them by hand and foot to get the sizes right, mixing ship planks with logs. There was plenty of driftwood to stack higher still, though on the water side he was already wading. Soon the tower was almost up to his shoulders, which were beginning to ache. When he next looked around, the Japanese were gathering driftwood at the lacy edge and handing the pieces to the
posspolt
man, who cradled them and waded above his knees to pass them to Brandon with an odd mix of urgency and gratitude.

Waves lapped against the base, the structure—now over six feet tall all the way around—was creaking but holding. A child got stuck in the mud, but there was no commotion beyond an efficient rescue Brandon was only dimly aware of. Then came a sharp cry, and he turned from
his project and focused on the tiny people below him on the flats. The man who’d helped him was bowing, then the others, even the women and children.

Suddenly his radio blared. “Two-zero-five? You read? Two-zero-five?” He looked at the wet radio on his hip, back down at the Japanese, then up high to picture what it all might look like from above. Meanwhile, cameras were clicking. “Two-zero-five!” the radio barked. “Do you read?” White people were snapping pictures, too, and where’d they come from? Two of them looked familiar, though it would be hours before he remembered their names were Buford and Marty.

Looking into the brightening sky, Brandon saw a stout black-and-white bird flapping toward him. Given its rounded, low-aspect wings, it was definitely an alcid, yet too hefty to be an auklet or a guillemot. As it passed overhead, he saw its dark belly and its long orange and yellow bill. A puffin—this far from the open sea? His mind flashed to images he’d seen, from above and below, male and female, mature and juvenile, breeding and nonbreeding, in the Peterson guide, Pyle’s guide and the
Field Guide to Birds of North America
. It definitely had the multicolored bill and bright orange legs, and as it banked back toward the bay, the blond hairlike pigtails on either side of its head swung into view. A tufted puffin! He pointed out this marvel, and the tickle in his throat morphed into a melodic humming.