Border Songs (21 page)

N
ORM FLIPPED
on the French station for his cows, though he doubted, regardless of what Brandon claimed, that this music relaxed them any better than country or classical. Insomnia had lightened Norm’s worries because he couldn’t keep his mind on a single fear long enough to generate genuine desperation. He’d played the freak rainfall alibi with the EPA lady, claiming his lagoon possibly had overflowed during the deluge. This wasn’t true, but was plausible enough to make her hesitate, which bought him another month of monitoring that might include aerial photography. She left him with a straight-faced warning that if her agency concluded his manure pond was leaking into the creek he’d have to patch it or build a new one or face fines up to twenty-five grand a day. He’d muttered his solemn acknowledgment, though it was hard not to giggle, his mind calculating that $175,000 a week meant $700,000 a month and $8.4 million a year.

By the time Dirk Hoffman called mid-morning, firecrackers were already jolting the valley. Norm expected, once again, to be bullied into whatever Independence Day bluster his neighbor was pushing—a tractor parade, a hundred-dollar donation to the VFW or another invite to one of those parties where Dirk and Tom Dunbar dressed up like Founding Fathers to recite the Declaration. Instead, he was blindsided by Dirk’s observation that he hadn’t realized his tax dollars were paying Brandon to build forts on the beach, until he’d seen the paper. Norm yeah-yeahed through the accusation as he rifled through the
mail for the weekly, flipping pages one-handed until he found the “photo of the week” on the next to last page.
Christ
. Dirk, tired of waiting for a reaction, shifted into bully mode. Would Norm care to join him and Big Tom in digging trenches along Boundary Road to stop the damn drive-thrus?

“Love to, but I can’t,” he said, his humiliation rising the longer he looked at the photo of Brandon, in uniform, standing by a chin-high column of driftwood. No headline or words accompanied the picture, as if it either defied explanation or didn’t need any. When would the insults stop? Stremler assailed his cow care, the EPA doubted his honesty, the newspaper mocked his son and now his patriotism was being questioned. “I’ve got some calving ahead of me this afternoon,” he lied.

“Can’t those cows reproduce without you, Norm?”

Too worn out to work, too strung out to sleep, he wrote Jeanette a note and found himself in the boat barn for the first time in weeks, the drills, hammers, Sawzall, epoxy and varnish scattered exactly where he’d left them. He dusted off his rationalizations for the project, the most amusing of which was that it might give him honor. He picked up the bronze prop, feeling its heft, marveling once again at how the three blades retracted like wings on diving birds. He’d purchased it at his delusional pinnacle, thinking that if he used the best materials—$982 for a propeller!—he’d end up with a masterpiece. Now the fancy prop—a fixed three-blade at half the cost was more than adequate for any nonracer—felt like proof of his foolishness.

The bare hull sat inside the thirty-by-fifty-foot barn like a ship in a bottle, with barely enough room for scaffolding. The dark, curved fiberglass shell had been intimidating at first, as if it were some massive black Buddha to worship, not hammer, glue and screw. But eventually he’d found a rhythm. The farm was stable those first several years when he’d committed two to four hours a day to her. His mentors were Chapelle and Steward, whose books taught him how to turn plywood, fiberglass, epoxy and teak into decks, cabins and bunks. Those days he
woke up proud and excited about his secret—talking about it might jinx it—that something magnificent was emerging, this eleven-ton jewel inside his shabby barn.

He gawked at the glossy hull from several angles, his thoughts merely fragments and splinters of larger worries and embarrassments until he settled on his latest vision of Sophie’s good-neighbor special. He reached up and slid his hands along the aft of the hull, caressing the flawless gelcoat, his mind going dizzy and pornographic, closing his eyes as his palms slid over the stern.

“Hey!”

Startled to the point of gasping, he stepped back and watched Jeanette examine the hull herself, holding her arms behind her like a polite waitress. His belly told him she was
finally
grasping just how selfish and delusional it all was. Then she turned and said, “I forgot how gorgeous she is.”

He coughed mid-swallow.

“Even unfinished. Really, Norm, I know you worry about how long it’s taking, and what your parents would’ve said, but none of that matters. Your mother never liked the way I prayed, remember?” She closed on him, her hands still behind her back, and he smelled the Samsara she used to wear to distract him. “How could there possibly be a wrong way to pray?”

She pulled a magnum of Brut and two slender glasses from behind her back, then dropped her chin and peered up at him from beneath dark eyebrows, looking so gentle and forgiving that he swayed toward unconsciousness.

An hour later, he leaned on an elbow above his wife. Her skin draped past her jawline but her expression, smile and whisper were all timeless.

She’d picked him. That was the incomprehensible part. Cornered him with a smile on a random bar-hopping night in Bellingham. And even back then he was talking about building a sailboat that could go anywhere. Just saying it made Norm like himself more. Even his killjoy
father called her a catch, despite her being a Volvo-driving, bra-less Bellingham environmentalist.

Norm blocked out Dirk Hoffman’s afternoon fireworks and tried to enjoy the splendor of his youthful wife. But against his will he slipped ahead ten years to a vista from which he was looking back on this sliver of time, already wistful for now.

B
RANDON TRIED
to ignore the red cloth flapping beneath a fish truck as his least favorite day of the year crackled and thumped toward dusk. It could have blown off the road and wrapped around the axle, right? But now that he’d seen it … He reluctantly put his rig in drive and passed a VW pop-top, a produce van with
Playboy
mudflaps and a Ryder truck until he was tailgating the fish wagon.

His goal for this holiday shift had been to hide out near the Sumas border crossing and avoid talking to anyone. He didn’t want to hear any more gripes or jokes about the border cams or the beefed-up patrols or
that thing
he’d made out on the beach. The flatterers and suck-ups, as Dionne called them, were just as annoying, buttering him with praise then sharing suspicions that were none of his business. Milt Van Luven pointed out how plenty of half-assed farmers suddenly could afford new tractors—“not to name names,” which he then did. Almost everyone, it seemed, was turning into a griper, a gossip or a suspect. Even Madeline.

Before Brandon’s beach art hit the paper, Patera had called him in for a confusing chat about being more careful about how he passed his time. “You need to find things to do in the vehicle. People are watching you, understand? They’ve seen you strolling around graveyards in uniform. What am I supposed to tell ’em?”

“Owls like cemeteries,” Brandon said.

The chief exhaled through his nose. “Find things to do inside your vehicle. Listen to ball games.”

“I don’t like sports.”

“What about crosswords?”

“I’m dyslexic.”

“Spend more time in your vehicle.”

Brandon stared at the flapping red cloth, which definitely wasn’t signaling an oversized load. He called Sumas Customs and was transferred to the truck window, then got cut off. He didn’t redial. It was almost certainly nothing, but now he had to check it out. Yet to do that he had to flip on his obnoxious lights and stroll up to the truck while the driver studied him in the side mirror.

People routinely went pop-eyed on him, so he didn’t think much of the sweat bubbles on the man’s forehead when he stopped behind the driver’s window, at the don’t-get-shot angle he’d been taught, playing his part and forcing the bulky man to twist his ruddy neck. “Can I see some identification, please?”

“What’s the problem?” the driver whined. “I just went through all this.”

“Where you going?” Brandon asked, following Dionne’s advice to always ignore a suspect’s questions.

The man snapped that he was headed to a couple grocery stores in Bellingham, that it was bad enough having to work on the Fourth without getting hassled.

Recognizing something in his pout, Brandon read the name on the license again—Gregory Olin Dawson—and pulled up the image of a slender, effortless golf star who was nicknamed “God” and sauntered the halls like a man in slippers, talking to girls with big teeth. “You went to Lynden High.”

“That’s right!” The sulk turned to jubilation. “And you’re Brandon, aren’t you? Couple years behind me?”

“Until I was homeschooled.” Brandon handed the license back, wishing he hadn’t pulled God over and dreading what was left of this conversation.

“Well, hey, good for you!” Dawson said.

“How do you mean?”

“Getting on with the Border Patrol and all. That is so cool.
Good for you.”

Brandon considered the tone, the words, the coffee-stained smile. “Would you let me show you something?” he asked, back on script.

“What’s that?” Dawson grimaced again, mouth-breathing. “Got a truck full of salmon here, and I’m already running behind.”

“Grab the keys and step out for a sec,” Brandon said, as casually as he’d ever delivered the line.

Dawson slid reluctantly onto the street, looking twice his high-school weight, his khakis stuck to his thighs.

“You’ve got some cloth dragging under here,” Brandon told him, pointing.

“I do?” Dawson half-squatted to see for himself.

“I’ll get it for you.” Brandon dropped to the pavement, leaning on one hand, and saw the cloth was actually a dangling sleeve and above it was a plywood platform wedged below the axle. He craned his neck to watch Dawson’s restless sneakers, then yanked on the sleeve. Hearing gasps and whispers, he slapped the board hard, twice. “Everybody out.”

“Who the hell are they?” Dawson sputtered as Brandon brushed the dirt off his uniform and radioed it in. “I mean, really. Really! What the hell are they doing under there?”

Brandon asked him to stand behind the van on the shoulder, then helped four thin Chinese women emerge from their hot little shelf. They squabbled at a volume that could be heard for blocks, their noisy anguish focused on the flush-faced golfer.

Dawson started babbling even faster. “Seriously, I don’t have any idea who these people are. Not a clue! I drive the van, okay? That’s what I do. I don’t look underneath it, ya know? Can I call ya Brandon? I mean, why would I look under there, Brandon? Who would … I’ll be damned!”

Brandon handcuffed two women and cinched PlastiCuffs on the others. He didn’t know what to do with Dawson, who was rattling off
the details of his route and where and when these women might have snuck in there, stressing repeatedly that he’d never driven this particular van before. The longer he talked, the more believable he seemed, so Brandon tuned him out, flinching along with the percussion of nearby firecrackers until McAfferty rolled up, his spinning lights adding to the spectacle.

Mac listened to Dawson’s increasingly breathless alibi, grunted sympathetically, unhitched a pair of handcuffs and said in his most understanding tone that there’d be plenty of time to discuss everything at HQ.

The women continued shouting at God in Chinese as he ducked into McAfferty’s rig, their stretched faces, slit eyes, childlike bodies and odd vocal rhythms filling Brandon’s memory banks.

S
OPHIE POURED MORE WINE
. “Still worrying about Maddy?”

“Oh, Lord.”

“Have you always worried about her?”

“Ever since she declared war on normalcy.”

“When’d that start?”

“A year or two after her mother died. Her sister just got more cautious and selfish. Went into the
investment
business and married an anesthesiologist who makes me yawn whenever he walks through the door.”

Sophie emptied three envelopes full of photos onto the table. “And Madeline?”

“Opposite story. I don’t know, maybe she needed a mother more. But suddenly she got extreme about everything. Wouldn’t go sailing unless it was blowing thirty. Backpacking was too mundane, so she scaled cliffs with some longhair named Harley who drove a pickup with a sticker that said
LIVE TO CLIMB, CLIMB TO DIE
. She’s obviously drinking and drugging and has no interest in college or knowledge or anything. She’s still sweet, don’t get me wrong, but the people I see her with, they all look so extreme, and I find myself wondering what people like that do for sex.”

“Probably kiss each other very, very gently,” Sophie whispered, arranging the photos in neat rows.

Wayne started to say something, then caught himself and leaned forward. “What’s all this?”

“What do you think of ’em?”

“I have no idea what to think. What are they?”

“Pictures of Brandon Vanderkool’s work in chronological order.”

“What do you mean, his work?”

“Just that.”

“He did all—”

“It’s his temporary art.”

“Wha?”

She reached over to the side table for the weekly. “You heard about the nest he built on the flats, right?”

M
ADELINE FLOATED
on three tequila shots through crowded Peace Arch Park with Toby, Fisher, Marcus and the King.

She took in the whistling skyrockets, the fizzling sparklers and the colorful fireballs arcing from cannons or buzzing on the ground. She sprinted ahead when an errant glow-in-the-dark Frisbee spun into view, trying to catch it, laughing when she couldn’t.

In the month since the big party, she’d tended more grows than ever. The work kept getting easier, and the cash was pouring in faster than she could deposit it. Most days, her life felt exciting and daring. The catch was that Toby increasingly acted as if he owned her, especially now that he’d set her up just down the street from her father in the old Damant house. To which he had his own key.