Border Songs (6 page)

“So how many of you would’ve done what Chas Landers did?” Sophie asked as the gamblers switched tables and prepared to roll for fours.

“Cranberry Chas? What’d that old fart do?”

Sophie told them, then waited for the disbelief and questions to settle. “Don’t know exactly when he found it, but I do know he gave it to a deputy early this morning. Offered it first to the Border Patrol, who sent him to the sheriff’s office.”

Gasps and murmurs were followed by quips about brain-cell-killing pesticides. But beneath the tittering, Sophie sensed a new fantasy emerging in which clumsy smugglers drop or even plant sacks of cash on your property. Every month she sensed more excitement, as if the ever-escalating smuggling made everybody feel younger.

“Didn’t Chas roll his tractor and bonk his head a few years back?” Katrina asked.

“A cousin of mine,” Sophie said, “hit his head skiing and lost all his inhibitions. It damaged his frontal lobes, and he didn’t know what was appropriate anymore. He started walking around the neighborhood with his pants off, in an obvious state of arousal.”

“I live near Chas,” Katrina said, “and I think I would’ve noticed if he’d strolled by with an erection.”

“The money technically belongs to the county,” Sophie explained. “Same as dope to them, so I guess he did the right thing.” Chief Patera had told her earlier, though, while she loosened his left hip, that smugglers typically carry $40,000 bricks, which meant “dumbass” Landers probably had twelve grand in a drawer—or perhaps fifty-two.

“Don’t think he’s the only one finding money these days,” Alexandra offered. “There’s plenty of locals depositing stacks of hundreds.” She wiggled her eyebrows amid cries for names before reminding them of her bank’s confidentiality pledge, which she’d later break for Sophie.

Madeline casually asked whether the stakes could be doubled for the fives and received nothing but laughter.

Sophie found another opening while topping glasses at Madeline’s table. “Saw your father get into it with Norm Vanderkool out at the ditch this morning.”

“That’s how they get their exercise, isn’t it?” Madeline said, eyes on her dice.

Alexandra blurted a recollection of Wayne countering Norm’s
RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS
bumper sticker with his own
RIGHT TO ARM BEARS
.

“Seems they were arguing about Brandon this time,” Sophie said, then repeated what Dionne had told her about arriving at the Craw-fords’ field in time to witness Brandon’s flying tackle.

“He’s always been a freak of nature,” Katrina said. “Once saw him climb out of his father’s truck to help a night crawler across the road.”

“A worm?”

“Is there any other kind of night crawler?”

Alexandra did her best impression of Brandon’s snorting laugh. “Gotta admit he’s kinda handsome though, in an overgrown, innocent kinda way.” Then she broke into an off-key rendition of “Super Freak,” growling, “the kind you don’t bring home to mo-therrr …”

Sophie waited for a lull, then recounted Dionne’s full rendition of
how he’d chased five illegals into her arms, and how the nationality of the injured couple remained a mystery. “They put them on the phone with AT&T translators and passed the call around, but nobody could place their accent. Can you imagine?”

She was mentioning that the woman Brandon caught had been wearing clothes made of silk and lamé when Madeline volunteered, “He called me.”

“Who?” Sophie asked, sensing that Madeline was drunker than she looked.

“Brandon.”

“Last night?”

“Uh-huh. He wanted to know if we’d seen anything. Needed to talk, I think.”

Sophie waited out the commentary. “So that was it?”

“Said the most interesting people he meets these days are criminals.”

“Out of the blue?”

Madeline smiled. “Completely.”

“He is the strangest,” Alexandra began over the rising gabble. “I mean, have any of you actually—”

“Speaking of strange,” Danielle interjected, saliva whistling in the corners of her mouth, “I hear you had a date with some foot-sucker, Madeline.”

Madeline’s head fell, and Sophie leaned forward as if to catch it. “Dessert anyone?”

She then glided toward the kitchen, blocking out the chatter and reimagining Brandon’s tiny, nameless couple flying into Vancouver, and waiting a few anxious days until some overpriced stranger they couldn’t understand coaxed them across the ditch.
Is this America?
The air, soil and trees looked and smelled the same.
Are we really in America?
And then—YES!—to be in the land of liberty for all of three electrifying minutes before getting chased and crushed by the largest, most unusual agent in the history of the U.S. Border Patrol.

Welcome to America, whoever you are.

N
ORM WATCHED
his son lope up the stairs three in a bound, still resembling a giant Boy Scout in that silly uniform, ducking beneath the beam and looking so alive and powerful that if he inhaled too deeply everyone else in the room might pass out.

As usual, he seemed to see everything in a glance, his eyes sweeping from the ice on his father’s knee to his mother hunched over stacks of photos on the sun-faded couch that her husband had promised to replace years ago. She’d written the names of friends and relatives on the back so she could flip through the prints like flash cards. From what Norm could tell, this exercise only complicated matters; the images were so meshed with memories it was like separating salt from sugar. At what click of the second hand, he wondered, would those names become meaningless jumbles of letters?

Until the past eight months—yes, it began when Brandon went away to the academy—she’d been their memory, their crossword whiz, their
Jeopardy!
champ. Norm had never read much except
Hoard’s Dairyman
while she inhaled everything from
The Economist
to Darwin’s original essays to
National Geographic Kids
—a holdover from Brandon’s childhood—and armed herself with believe-it-or-not facts she nimbly recycled into conversations. Now these tidbits were part of her daily memory exercises and came out like meteors, if they came at all. “When you’re one in a million in China,” she’d told him recently, “there are still fourteen hundred people as good as you.”

The dinner table was covered with clashing flavors and odors,
braised lamb chops, red potatoes, spinach salad and a cod chowder made with coconut milk. Meals had become adventures. Nothing tasted the same twice anymore, and Jeanette was always adding some miracle food like kimchi, roasted garlic or pickled beets on the side too, as if her memory slump, as she called it, was just one healthy meal away from ending. But at least tonight she hadn’t botched another recipe she’d known by heart.

As usual, he’d almost finished before she got started, and he spent the rest of the dinner picking through his salad, sipping the lone Pabst he allowed himself and watching Brandon plow through a second and third serving. Norm stopped nibbling on the rabbit food once he realized the dressing was pure vinegar, then studied Brandon’s smooth face. “You all right? Lookin’ kind of pale.”

“Me?”

“Who else?”

“It’s March,” Brandon said, not looking up from the precise teamwork of his knife and fork. “Don’t we all look pale?”

“You know what I mean. How do you—”

“What?” Brandon asked, still eating, avoiding eye contact.

“I’m getting my fillings pulled.” Jeanette smiled. “And no, Norm, I don’t know, or care, how much it’ll cost.”

He waited. “Where’d that come from?”

“Every time you bite into something a little bit of mercury gas squeezes out of your fillings.” She hissed through her teeth.

“I see,” Norm said, gambling the issue would pass if he didn’t contest it. It was impossible to concentrate. He desperately wanted to tell them about the mastitis outbreak. That was the word he’d been flogging himself with for the past hour,
outbreak
, but Brandon would overreact and demand that he call in the doc even though nine out of ten times these things cleared themselves up no matter what you paid the vet.

“What’s the problem?” Brandon asked, as if Norm had been thinking aloud. “Need some help?”

“You’ve got a job. If I need somebody, I’ll call Roony”

“We could go out after dinner,” Brandon offered. “Something happens, they’ll call.”

“Thanks, but I got her.”

His son cocked his head, then shrugged his eyebrows and dished himself more lamb before pointing his fork at his mother. “Saw a hundred and twenty trumpeters leaving today. Least I assume they were leaving.”

“Saw a snowy owl on the Moffats’ fence,” she replied.

Brandon looked to his father, then back to Jeanette. “Another one?” he asked hopefully.

She looked past him, her eyes going glassy in her broad Scottish face.

It would be so much more just, Norm thought, if he were the one losing it—a blessing, actually. No memory meant no regrets and no cover-ups. “Think you already told him ’bout that one, Jen.”

She refocused and threw Norm a clearheaded smile that made him blush. “Don’t I listen to your stories no matter how many times you tell them?”

He nodded, exhaling, then asked if they’d heard about Chas Landers finding all that cash in his field. Jeanette’s eyes sparkled, but Brandon didn’t seem to care. Money had never interested him, which Norm saw as further proof of his botched parenting. “So how’d it feel last night?” he finally asked.

“What?”

“You know what.”

Getting Brandon to talk was sometimes like starting a chainsaw in the spring; you never knew how long it would take to get him going or when he’d shut off. He had the FM voice of a man but the jumbled rhythm of a child that made people turn to Norm for translation. He’s got his own take on things, was all Norm could often offer. He now sucked the last drops of his Pabst, waiting out his son’s silence.

“Like when I’d hurt somebody by accident at recess,” Brandon finally said.

For a moment Norm thought that was it, but then came a torrent
of words, as if he were talking to the blind—Crawfords’ field unrolling like white shag, swirling snowflakes the size of chicken feathers, watching his own flying tackle
from above …
Norm hoped like hell he hadn’t shared that version with the chief or anyone else. His son’s face darkened with concentration as he described the injured “princess,” her cartoon-big eyes, her clever purple lips forming words nobody could understand. “All right,” Norm grunted, trying to rein him in without sounding impatient.

Brandon mimicked her birdlike accent. Birds, birds, birds. It was almost cute at first. “Birds are easy to talk to,” Brandon used to say, which had always embarrassed Norm, but at least then he was a child.

He forced himself to listen to his description of the black hair blooming from her head and her regal clothing. “All
right,”
he grumbled again, but it was obvious Brandon wouldn’t stop until he was finished.

Norm groaned, his thoughts funneling toward doom. What if the herd had contracted something deadlier than mastitis? He’d read in
Hoard’s
how seven huge British dairies had to slaughter every last cow. A few caught foot-and-mouth and six thousand animals had four-inch steel bolts plunged into their skulls. His chest tightened. He knew he should call Doc Stremler, but that involved a minimum of $300, a dozen told-ya-sos and at least one wisecrack about his boat. Stremler would lower his glasses, glare at Norm’s duct-tape-and-baling-wire repairs and tell him that he desperately needed some experienced help. Then he’d glance around and say things like, You want your cows chewing cud and feeling good about life. As if Norm had gotten into dairies on a lark. You want them laying down, Norm, not walking around on concrete. Cow joints weren’t designed for concrete, you understand?

Brandon was still talking, but his words were starting to swerve. “After she gets out of the hospital, they’ll take both of them to this center detention where they’ll stay in Tacoma till they can figure out where they should go. Chief said sometimes stay people there for months, even years, before—”

“I had a dream,” Jeanette interrupted, “in which I woke up and
nobody understood anything I said. Not a word. That was all in the same dream, the dreaming and the waking. At least I think it was. Was that last night?”

“You were doing your job,” Norm said.

“Nightmares are my job?” Jeanette said hesitantly.

Norm shook his head. “Brandon was.”

“They’re Brandon’s job?”

Norm wanted to tell his son that everyone kept telling him what a terrific job he’d done, but he knew that if he started into that he couldn’t resist asking why he’d left his gun and flashlight in the car with the engine running, knowing that, as usual, the end result would sound like an ass-chewing. Plus, there was the matter of his taking ten times longer than normal to file a report jammed with so many misspellings and absurd time estimates that Patera wondered aloud how Brandon ever passed the academy. Still, Norm couldn’t avoid everything. “Gather you talked to the professor.”

Brandon looked up, curious. “Madeline. I talked to Madeline.”

Norm scratched his scalp. “You talked to her father too, right?”

“Nope.”

The sanctimonious bastard.

“Left a couple messages,” Brandon noted.

“But you
did
talk to Madeline?”

“Didn’t I just say that?”

“What’d she say?”

Brandon shrugged and squinted.

“You don’t have any authority,” Norm said, more officiously than he’d intended, “to question Wayne or any other Canadian.”

Brandon looked to his mother and then back at Norm, as if gauging how much trouble he was in. “Was just,” he whispered, “asking …”

Norm was about to explain that intent didn’t matter when his wife said, “The only first lady to carry a gun was Eleanor Roosevelt.”

Brandon tried to smile, but Norm could tell he’d shut the boy down.

“Ostriches are looking for water when they stick their heads in the sand,” she continued. “And all polar bears are left-handed.”

“Me too,” Brandon whispered, reaching for the jug of raw milk.