18
THERE 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.
AFTER 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.”
Brandon was helping him stack buds photogenically in the back of his rig when Talley pulled a crisp newspaper from the cab and handed it to him. “Brought you something. Seen this?”
It wasn’t the same woman Brandon had stored in his head. She was turning toward the camera with the ambushed surprise you see in Hollywood tabloids, her sprung eyes making her features even more dramatic. The photo was such a close-up that you could make out her individual hairs below the Seattle Weekly masthead and above the headline STUCK IN LIMBO HELL. “The Border Patrol calls her the Princess from Nowhere,” Brandon read, read it again, then stumbled into the next sentence.
“Heard some Seattle comic held that up last night and went, ‘Talk about the perfect date!’” Talley said, slipping into a stage voice. “‘No small talk. No past. No baggage. And we want to build fences to keep these women out?’”
Brandon read on, but the story wasn’t actually about her. It was about how some illegals were put in a detention center, given blue jumpsuits and issued numbers; the princess was 908, just like Pearl was 39. Most of them, it said, would wait in cells for months, even years—if the government didn’t know where to send them—before they ever got a hearing.
“You hear your bomber woke up?”
Brandon shook his head numbly, suddenly so queasy he had to sit down in the dirt. Rain started falling, abruptly and aggressively, as if the heavens were getting in on it, if a little late, trying to raise the river and help the smugglers float their weed.
“They say he’s fine, but I guess they kind of f*cked up on identifying him.”
Brandon looked up into the rain. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said.”
“Well, who is he?”
“F*ck if I know.” Talley pulled on a hooded jacket. “Gonna give me a hand with these buds here?”