14
LISTENING TO the French station, watching herself speed, Madeline drove Zero Ave. knowing she should have taken the back roads with a hatchback full of pot. She passed hundreds of greenhouses and miles of raspberry fields before cutting through new pinot, merlot and chardonnay vineyards. Every third car on the other side of the ditch was a green-and-white SUV, but the groggy BPs never glanced over. Beyond them, the valley still looked awash, and if she squinted it turned into a massive bay, the farmhouses and barns anchored freighters, the vehicles and sheds leisure boats.
She jotted mental notes on the popular foot-smuggling routes Toby had marked. He was right. Even with doubled patrols, it took an idiot to get caught. She wove through queues of exasperated drivers at the Pacific and Peace Arch crossings and rolled west away from the border toward White Rock, where steep, narrow streets turned into toboggan runs in the winter and tall houses jockeyed for peephole views of the bay.
Parking at the marina, she watched a lanky couple necking against a phone booth, cigarettes dangling behind their heads. The northwesterly breeze looked perfect, but she was an hour early and considered rolling a joint to relax before recalling Toby’s rules. She marveled uneasily at his growing influence. He’d said she needed to move out of her apartment here, promising to find her a better place closer to him. Could she say no to this man, no matter what the request? She rolled and smoked a pinner after convincing herself anything this skinny didn’t count, then strode into the silver twilight and the briny reek of exposed flats. From this angle, the United States looked barely discovered, with only a towering resort hotel and a smattering of lights visible on the fringe of a grand forest.
White Rock’s bayside strip of bars, restaurants, ice cream parlors and boutiques served as B.C.’s Riviera in July and August. In the offseason, it attracted an older set, like the graybeards Madeline found crammed into an oval alcove in Trudeau’s beneath photos of the Beatles cavorting, Sinatra in a gangster hat and a shirtless, defiant Jim Morrison. Their conversation was too intense for anyone to notice Wayne’s daughter order a margarita or to hear the bored bartender tell her the “gang of four” had expanded to the “gang of eight” over the past couple weeks and that the old boys were drinking twice as much as usual. She duck-flapped fingers and faked a yawn that turned real.
Madeline couldn’t see more than the back of her father’s head but could tell by his honking voice that he was flying on at least three vodka martinis. She eavesdropped on the laments about Vancouver’s traffic, the lack of hockey and the idiocy of the premier. Halfway through her second margarita, she realized she was listening for Sophie. The masseuse had obviously briefed her father on the trunk bomber, because right from the start he knew more than the papers about the type and amount of explosives, the feud between the BP and the FBI, how Brandon had, at the time, been driving home from the saloon in his own truck after celebrating his first pot bust—which Fisher told her cost Toby & Co. almost 300 K.
She’d saved the two messages Brandon left her, semicoherent rants about how he should have ten-three’d, how he was drunk and didn’t like to drink anyway, how impossible the paperwork was, how he’d talked backwards for the first time in years, then asking if she wanted to see his new dog and if she knew when Danny was coming back or—her favorite—how long “commas” usually lasted. His panicky voice triggered an old reflex to soothe him, though she couldn’t even bring herself to dial his number. She’d avoided him ever since Danny C wasn’t around to make his oddities so entertaining and endearing. He was the one she wanted to talk to, but after laughing over Brandon’s fluky heroics they’d have to catch up, and that conversation was predictable.
How’s med school? she’d ask.
Hard. Very hard. Still working at the nursery?
Uh-huh.
So, have you been looking out for Brandon?
Madeline sipped her cocktail and tuned in to her father’s powwow.
“We could hold them off for, what, ten minutes?” his pal Lenny Ribes asked.
“Maybe twenty.”
The men eyed the darkening bay as if checking for aircraft carriers or Marines crashing the beach.
“Whaddaya think England would do?”
“We’ve seen what she’ll do,” Wayne barked. “An enemy of the superpower’s an enemy of hers. Ever since W W Two, the Brits have embraced their role as the junior partner in charge of European propaganda. They’ve mastered the double-talk of sucking up while feigning independence.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Anybody else want more salsa?”
“Yeah, but it’s never gonna happen. You think their conservatives want to add a fifty-first state as populous as California and as liberal as Vermont?”
“This place used to give us as much salsa as we could handle.”
“Who the hell’s this bomber, anyway?” asked an owl-faced man Madeline didn’t recognize. “Seriously doubt he’s a flag-wavin’ Canadian. It’s not like we’ve got lifelong citizens runnin’ over the border to blow things up, is it?”
“Well, we’re a staging area, as they call it,” Lenny said, lunging for the wine.
“And that’s our fault?” Wayne said. “Can we help it if they piss off everybody so much people start lining up in our yard to throw turds in theirs?”
“Yeah, it kind of is,” Lenny countered. “We let anybody in. And by the time their lies are sorted, it’s a little late to ask ’em to get the hell out. They’re already here—or there.” He nodded south.
“Gather the guy’s an Arab.”
“Thanks, Rocco. That helps a lot.”
“Well, they say he’s Muslim, right?”
“If he’s still in that convenient coma,” Wayne pointed out, “and if there’s a bunch of fake IDs on him, how do we know whether he’s a Muslim or a Baptist, a Jew or an atheist? Muslim blood a different shade of red, Rocco? Or is it the beard that gives him away? Does my lousy beard make me a Muslim?”
“Maybe.”
“Personally,” Wayne said, “I doubt the guy exists.”
“They invented him?”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“I think that’s obvious.”
“What’s obv—”
“This better blow over by the time that casino opens,” Rocco interjected. “That’s all I gotta say. Otherwise the lines are gonna—”
“Truth is,” Lenny interrupted, “without the U.S. we’d be as irrelevant as seagull shit.”
“What’re we even talking about here?”
“That’s our identity,” Lenny said. “We’re not the U.S. That’s who we are.”
“Not this again,” Wayne grumbled.
“Am I wrong? Without them would we look so rational, polite and beautiful?”
The old men stared at one another.
“Seriously,” Lenny continued, his voice rising to the challenge. “We’re the rebound boyfriend after the hostile divorce. Women love us because we’re not the violent, self-absorbed jerks they just dumped.”
“Have some more wine, Lenny.”
Wayne’s agitated eyes then lifted and traversed the room before settling on the most unexpected of gifts. And in the moment before she felt his glance, he noticed how she slouched over her cocktail like a burdened woman twice her age straining against some invisible hand.
THE BORDER PATROL had installed a new night watch near Peace Arch in case anyone tried to traipse across the invisible line splitting the mud-flats and slaloming through the islands. But drowsy Rick Talley didn’t notice the black Geary 18 gliding southbound across the bay, nor its captain in her black wetsuit, nor the jib she raised and filled with no more noise than a tossed bedsheet. And nobody except a rotund man pacing a gravelly shore just south of Semiahmoo Spit noticed the brief flutters when the sails fell forty minutes later.
Toby had bigger sailboats in mind than her dad’s old plywood flattie, but she’d assured him the boat was built for beaching and she could pop eighty pounds across the bay without having to dock anywhere or needing another boat to greet her. But what if she got up on the flats and the man holding the intermittent white light in one hand held a gun in the other?
Fighting off the urge to flee while he was still too far up the beach to catch her, she towed the boat close enough to ground it. He was built like an umpire and introduced himself in such boisterous fashion Madeline immediately forgot his name. She unclipped the large foul-weather sacks from the mast and handed him one.
He took his time and shined his piercing light up and down her wetsuit, lingering on her crotch. “Cuter than the average mule, aren’t ya?” He stuck the light in his mouth so he could hold the bag with one hand and fondle the pouches with the other.
Her eyes adjusted well enough to make out a thick fleshy face beneath a dark leather beanie.
“You haven’t even told me your name, darling.”
Her throat was too tight to tell him to shut up or hurry.
A short laugh caught in his throat and ended in a noisy spit. “The great Toby sent me a mute? Give me the other one.”
She did, and he finally cracked open his money bag against his belly, forcing her to lean into his reek of armpits and burger grease. Seeing what looked like six plastic-wrapped bricks of U.S. hundreds, just like Toby said there’d be, she squeezed one to pretend she knew what she was doing. He held on to the bag when she started to pull it away, then let it go so she stumbled backwards, which triggered more laughter and spitting. She clipped the money to the mast and shoved the boat toward deeper water.
“Isn’t that boat too big for a little thing like you?”
Once the water cleared her knees, she flopped her torso onto the stern and belly-crawled into the cockpit.
“What if the wind dies?”
She fanned the rudder to propel her out far enough to drop part of the centerboard, but a headwind rose up, knocked the boat sideways and shoved her back toward him.
“Can I help?” He started wading. “Need a hand, my sweet muffin?”
When she yanked on the main halyard, the wind grabbed the sail before it was halfway up and knocked the boat sideways again, back toward shore. Shit-shit-shit! She had to drop some board, but when she did it struck mud and the hull lurched onto its side, then popped loose again. Now he was shining his obnoxious light on her body and wading faster toward her. She shifted her weight leeward until she felt the sail tug well enough to ease the bow windward. After another ten yards of moving mostly sideways, she dropped more board and felt the boat track, then yanked the rest of the main up, dropped the entire center-board and fell back with a sigh that sounded like a sob, her hand trembling on the tiller. She heard clapping but didn’t look back.
Once free of the squirrelly land gusts, the wind steadied and her panic cooled toward blank exhaustion. She popped the jib, knowing she’d have to point higher or tack twice across the swath of bay where they’d dumped her mother, which brought back all the sweaty questions she’d never asked. If there were four in the tram when the cable snapped, how come her father and the other couple suffered only bruises and whiplash? Why was her mother cremated? How did they know those ashes were actually hers? And why weren’t they stored in some quiet place where they could visit the woman who squealed on water-park rides and dressed up as a fortune-teller at her daughters’ birthday parties and crawled into bed to snuggle even after they hit their teens? In the end, she looked like dried soup flung overboard no matter what fancy words her father blubbered before the boom swung silently across the cockpit. Nicole took it personally, of course. But even Madeline wasn’t sure whether it was karma, a freak wind shift or her own volition that sent the wooden boom into her sister’s mouth.
Madeline vowed again that she’d take her cut and get out—did she need any more evidence that she didn’t have the nerves for this?—yet even while berating herself she couldn’t ignore the sizzle that came with $240,000 strapped to the mast, $2,400 of which Toby said she could keep. Minutes later, as the wind shifted and allowed her to tack five degrees higher, she revised her pledge and cantilevered all but her shins beyond the rail, arching her spine and neck until her head was just inches off invisible waves, the main sheet in one glove, the tiller in the other, her eyes on the sky. Two more weeks. Four of her six ops hit their harvest dates by the first of the month. Two more weeks.
Then what? She’d climb aboard a southbound plane. Costa Rica, maybe Rio.
Soon she was simply sailing, not scolding or doubting or daydreaming, just sailing. A victorylike giddiness filled her as she crossed into Canadian waters toward the marina’s steady green lamp. She heard herself mumbling, in part a celebration, in part a pleading, as she coasted toward the docks, sails flapping and falling, her mind skipping to images she still couldn’t file: her father trying to save himself with reinventions, Brandon chasing smugglers and bombers, the oddly irresistible Sophie Winslow connecting the dots with neither judgment nor bias.