Border Songs (16 page)

“How much?”

That’s when Patera rolled out a number half again as large as the one he’d shared with Sophie. While “fifteen million” echoed
through the crowd, he evangelized about other surveillance options, including tethered blimps and unmanned drones and even a virtual fence made up of ground-based radars that could all serve as “force multipliers.”

“As you well know, most of the bud is run by organized crime. And there’s also evidence that terrorist cells in Canada are getting into the business to raise money, which of course means the war on drugs has, in fact, become the war on terror. And yes, sometimes, with a combination of teamwork and luck, we get a twofer like we did last month when we caught a suspected bomb-carrying, bud-smuggling terrorist.” He talked right over a mumbled question. “This has become the border of choice for almost anybody trying to sneak into our country. During the past two months alone, we’ve caught illegals from Algeria, Bosnia, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Iran, Iraq and Mexico—yes, we increasingly catch Mexicans flying to Vancouver on Japan Airlines and walking across here because it’s so much safer. Plus, there’s Morocco, Pakistan, Romania, Sri Lanka and … I’m missing one.” He winced, feigning concentration. “Oh yes,
Nowhere
. We caught two people from Nowhere.”

Patera nodded while the politicians scrambled to catch up, but his clever little parable about the Prince and Princess from Nowhere was interrupted by a sudden drizzle and Wayne Rousseau scampering up to the Canadian edge of the ditch under a red umbrella.

“Greetings!” he called.

Sophie zoomed in on the exhausted professor, then panned as Patera’s distracted audience prepared to meet a real Canadian despite the rain and the muddy ditch between them.

“As the interim spokesman for the great nation of Canada, I ask you to please not let my good friend Chief Patera persuade you that you need to throw more agents at this border or pay for intrusive cameras or whatever other placebos he’s hawking.”

There were chuckles and smirks in Patera’s direction while the scrawny Canadian lit his homemade cigarette beneath his umbrella. The wind was drifting the wrong direction, so all they could do was
whisper uncertainly, their nostrils twitching, sensing this might be the story from their border tour.

“Meet Wayne Rousseau,” Patera announced, “retired UBC history professor, known for his frequent—”

“Political science!” Wayne corrected. “I taught poli-sci.”

“—and colorful condemnations of the United States,” Patera concluded grimly. “We’re in the middle of something here, Professor, so if you’d please—”

“Anybody care for a puff?” Wayne asked jovially. “Come on.” He hinged forward, readjusted his footing, extending his arm, smoke curling, eyes bulging, grin quivering. “Meet your enemy.”

After a flurry of clumsy jokes and questions, Patera mustered a mumbling explanation of Canada’s medical marijuana laws.

But Wayne didn’t stop talking. “Jefferson and Washington grew this stuff. I mean, seriously, how can you get more American than that? Yet despite the wisdom of your founding fathers, you all keep climbing over each other to—”

“I must correct you on that point, sir,” bellowed a stout Michigan congresswoman. “Washington and Jefferson did grow hemp, as did many colonists. However, the hemp they grew wasn’t smoked, nor was its psychoactive potential known at the time.”

Her colleagues shared grins and winks. Something else to recount: Miss Piss ’n’ Vinegar sparring with one of Canada’s pothead intellectuals.

Before anyone could praise her command or bluster, Wayne shouted, “Marijuana’s medicinal and psychoactive properties have been known since ten thousand
B.C
.!” He shrugged. “Didn’t you people learn anything from Prohibition? Oh, that’s right. I forgot superpowers don’t study history.
You spread freedom.”
He shifted into a folksier drawl. “‘Americans have freedom of expression and freedom of conscience and the prudence to never use either.’”

“Who are you misquoting now?” Michigan wanted to know.

“Twain.” Smoke leaked from Wayne’s lips. “Your very own Mark Twain, madam.”

“Mr. Twain,” she snapped, “never even graduated from elementary school. And no offense, Professor, but I personally don’t find your country’s peculiar brand of socialist monarchy worth emulating.”

While Patera retreated toward Sophie’s driveway, wheeling his hands like a coach calling for a huddle, Tennessee wondered aloud whether the retired professor was the ideal spokesman for Canadians. But Wayne’s audience lingered until he flicked his roach into the wind and everyone stopped to watch it bounce off his umbrella. Then they began their retreat, exchanging glances and smirks. “Yeah, you all go back now!” he taunted. “You’ve been standing in Canada illegally this entire time anyway.”

Michigan turned and pointed at the concrete pylon on the far side of the ditch.

“The border’s at forty-nine degrees, correct?” Wayne shouted, then lobbed a pocket-sized GPS across the ditch.

Michigan stepped forward and snared it angrily. She squinted at the screen, wiped it with her sleeve and squinted again, three colleagues crowding her. “I’ll be damned,” she muttered, glancing again at the border pylon.

“What’s it say, madam?” Wayne mugged for Sophie’s camera, then broke into a lecture she’d heard twice before about the border being an arbitrary line agreed upon in 1846 by politicians in London and Washington, D.C., and how finding and defining the 49th parallel soon turned into a comic competition. Charged with divvying up the overgrown West, dueling teams of ill-equipped astronomers and surveyors felled trees as wide as houses and stacked cairns every twenty miles or so. Biased sextant readings resulted in multiple-choice borders, with incoming settlers discovering an American, a Canadian and a compromise in-between. In the early 1900s, intrepid border teams headed out on a Monty Python-like quest to find the original rock piles and establish permanent monuments along a still imprecise line that nature erases every few years anyway.

“And now it’s your turn,” Wayne shouted to the suddenly attentive
politicians. “You all are the latest act in the ongoing comedy
to see what can be done, by God
, about securing this nonsensical border you know so little about.”

The discussion that then broke out looked like it gave Patera a toothache.

T
HERE WERE
too many cows on their feet. The scant and soggy beddings should have been replaced weeks ago, and manure was stacked in random gnat-swarmed piles. The parlor was a mess, too, with cow agitators everywhere.

Brandon stooped through the narrow passages, looking for what was injuring their right flanks, something sharp enough to bruise but not puncture. He noticed plenty of limps, too, that the cows weren’t able to hide. And all that was before he went into the sick barn, which was where his father found him petting 89.

“What’re you doing out here?” Norm demanded.

“You didn’t call the doc, did you?” Brandon asked, without looking at him.

Norm hesitated. “What’s he gonna say besides
iodine, iodine, iodine?”

Brandon unshuttered two windows. Gnats and dust motes twirled in the trapezoids of light spreading across the floor.

“What’re you
doing?
”

He opened a third window, and the barn brightened evenly. “How many got it?” he asked, dropping to a knee to examine 43’s inflamed udder.

“Thought we had an agreement.” Norm sighed. “A dozen or so.”

“So what are the others doing in here?”

“Precautionary.”

Brandon inspected more infected udders. “It’s normal mastitis?”

“That’s right.”

“You back-flushing the—”

“Thought we had an agreement,” Norm repeated.

“We did.” Brandon looked away. “You were gonna take care of the cows.”

“This isn’t your concern for now, son.”

“What do the tank numbers look like?”

“What did I just say?”

Brandon heard a chain jingling on the latch to the insemination box, strode over and tied it off on itself. “Where are all the calves?”

“Where they always are.”

Brandon removed the rubber stop from a rarely used gate and secured it to the bare latch of the barn’s busiest one. “I only saw three out there.”

“That’s right.”

“Have some abortions?”

“A few.”

“Quite a few? Lepto?”

Norm nodded. “Looks like.”

Brandon glanced around for signs of rodents. “You vaccinating them before they’re freshening?”

Norm nodded again, almost imperceptibly, as if his head were getting too heavy to move. “You saw the Holstein calf, didn’t ya? She’s as healthy as they come.”

Brandon climbed a stepladder to shift the slant of a barn lamp, then tucked the ladder out of sight.

“Think I’m not concerned enough?” Norm asked. “That I’m not adequately alarmed?”

The question didn’t register with Brandon, other than that it was loud enough to agitate the cows. He once felt a calf’s heart rate double at the ring of his father’s cell phone. “You’re feeding calves milk from the sick cows, aren’t you?”

Norm’s jaw loosened and his palms flipped upward.

“Can tell by how the Jerseys are walking that they’ve got bacteria in their joints.”

“So I’m not concerned enough,” Norm said flatly. “Is that it?”

Brandon noticed half of the sick cows staring in the same direction. The slightest shift in texture, color or noise could spook them; something as simple as this bale wrap flapping halfway across the barn could drive them nuts. “Could I see your knife?”

“Well, I’m plenty concerned,” Norm told him. “And I’ve got a few other concerns too, in case you haven’t noticed.”

Brandon cut off the loose plastic, wadded it into a ball, then folded the knife, handed it back and looked away from the deepening creases in his father’s splotched forehead. “Either you call Stremler or I will,” he said, surprising himself.

Norm took a deep breath as if gathering a shout. “I’ll call him,” he whispered. Then, after a pause, “We need to talk about your mother.”

Brandon blushed. “Her mind’s just in a slump,” he said, repeating Jeanette’s favorite theory.

“She couldn’t even remember where she parked yesterday, Brandon. Walked around for an hour before she finally called.”

“Menopause alone,” Brandon said, rolling out another of his mother’s lines, “can make women foggy.”

“Not like this. I think we should get her to talk to somebody about it. We need to know what’s going on.”

“Some doctor putting a label on her won’t help. Memory’s a muscle, and she’s exercising it every way she can.”

“Well, I just think we need to encourage—”

“She doesn’t have Alzheimer’s,” Brandon half-shouted, then strode to the near wall, snatched Norm’s new red Darigold hat from its nail, flung it out of sight and marched from the barn.

A
FTER DINNER
, he drove out past Dirk Hoffman’s reader board—
SPEAK ENGLISH
—and cruised East Badger Road before rolling up
Garrison to where the Sumas River curled around three oaks and dairymen dumped stillborns for roosting eagles.

He hadn’t more than spun by since he’d returned from the academy, and he’d never seen so many bald eagles there, almost a dozen per tree, fixed to limbs and stoic as gargoyles. He watched them perch, fly and land, chatting in high, delicate voices better suited for pigeons. Their ramshackle nests were the size of satellite dishes, as if designed to look even larger than they were. What did a bald eagle have to fear? Try to find self-doubt in those pale yellow eyes that can discern a snow goose’s limp from a couple miles away.

Brandon set up the birding scope he now carried everywhere, which Dionne touted as further evidence of his commitment to the job. He studied how amazingly comfortable the couples were with each other, then zoomed in on the largest female, her head a thousand miniature white feathers above a shimmering black vest and a bleached tail. She pushed off into effortless flight across the field and along the river before returning to the same exact perch, gripping it with talons as sharp as X-Acto knives.

When his gaze finally wandered, he noticed cottonwood seeds floating around his head like weightless snowflakes, then the snags, stumps, deadheads and boxy bales drifting down the muddy Sumas. The hay, with its bright orange twine, looked so fresh he figured it must have tumbled off a flatbed that morning, but he couldn’t think of a bridge or even a farm upriver likely to lose bales to high water. He wished he hadn’t spotted them in the first place because he soon counted six more. No telling how many he’d already missed.

The hay was followed by three conspicuously clean logs lacking the slimy green-black sheen they accumulate after a week in water. He glanced up at the eagles, reluctantly back at the river, then climbed inside his rig and drove down to the Lindsay Road bridge, where the water widened and shoaled amid stones the size of softballs. He parked and baby-stepped out on the slick rocks, slip-sliding to his knees in the central flow, to retrieve stranded or drifting bales. The weight of the
first one felt about right, seeing how it was wet, but he felt plastic beneath the outer layer of hay.

He heaved seven bales onto the bank—at least one must have beached higher up—and ripped one open. Packed in thick plastic were compact buds the size of his thumb. He stalled for a moment, mumbling to himself before climbing the bank for a better view. Nobody was in sight, either in a car or on foot, and nothing but fields beneath the darkening clouds. Yet he knew people were despairing somewhere, the only glitch in their plan being that he’d decided to check out the eagles after dinner. “Got buds,” he reluctantly murmured into his Motorola.

By the time Agent Talley joined him, his mouth full of sunflower seeds, Brandon had found two more corked logs—Rick called them “coffins”—and the missing bale, too. After inspecting a bag of buds, Talley started photographing everything. “Chief wants to e-mail pictures to some congressman tonight. He’s absolutely loving this shit. You wouldn’t believe how jacked up he was when you called this in.”