3
WAYNE ROUSSEAU rose long before dawn to reinvent the light-bulb.
Working in his basement by gas lanterns and candlelight—it would’ve been a farce otherwise—he fussed for hours with spiral threads of platinum, titanium, nickel and copper until he’d singed every finger on his right hand. Nothing stayed illuminated for more than eleven seconds before flickering or exploding.
Over the prior week Wayne had tried Edison’s first eighty-four filaments, sticking to the arduous chronology of cutting, securing, electrifying and unlatching each material and combination thereof inside a replica vacuum tube he’d ordered from an oddball company in Montreal. Having completed less than a tenth of Edison’s trials, he already felt defeated and empty. Now he strapped tungsten inside the tube, sealed it, hooked it up to the battery and lowered the switch. The bulb lit briefly, flickered, then exploded. Wayne ripped off his goggles and began sweeping the floor.
Edison and his lab boys tried twelve hundred materials—including beard hair, playing cards and fishing line—before discovering a reliable filament. Twelve hundred. The more Wayne inhabited Edison, the more he wondered how a man cultivates a stubborn streak so pronounced that it transforms a daily barrage of failures into stimulants.
Edison was thirty-two when he perfected the lightbulb. Thirty-f*cking-two. Half Wayne’s age. Studying the dueling portraits of the man—the visionary wizard who lit up the modern world and the credit-hogging prick of incomparable dimensions—Wayne increasingly leaned toward the latter. No single man could have invented the music and motion-picture industries, the pull-cord doll and more than a thousand other breakthroughs. But how long would everything have taken without Edison? That was the question. Yank this prick out of history and the oddsmakers who studied that sort of thing swore the electrical revolution would have taken another generation and the recording industry probably longer. All this from an uneducated, nearly deaf dropout who wasn’t sophisticated enough to realize that the things he imagined and demanded of himself and his underlings were not possible. And perhaps this was exactly the DNA, a quintessentially American prickishness, that all the giants possessed, whether Edison or Ford or Gates. They all turned less brilliant and more peculiar the closer you looked, didn’t they? And maybe it wasn’t just the Americans—most of the world’s innovators were colossal bullies who shoved society forward. That was all Wayne was squeezing from his morning exercise. No enlightenment, no glory, no revelation. Just the metallic, back-of-the-tongue aftertaste of the impatient prick. He crossed tungsten off the list, fatigue blowing through him. F*cking Edison.
He hauled himself upstairs, a hot pain girdling his waist, into an alarmingly bright morning. He swallowed eleven pills, poached an egg, then flipped on the CBC in time to catch the back half of a report he knew would be retold on the half hour. The audacity! He knew exactly what to say if reporters called for comment. The paranoids were right! That’s what he’d tell them. And maybe he’d mention the unusual messages he’d received from the Vanderkool boy the night before. Perhaps the Mounties would find that interesting. It’s not a matter of when, he’d shout. They’re already here!
But why wasn’t his phone ringing? He bombarded the answering machines of friends at the college and The Vancouver Sun. He sent out thirteen e-mails and waited, hitting refresh every few seconds. No responses but a home-loan pitch and a credit-card con. He called Nicole, but his older daughter was with clients. It grew so quiet that the kitchen clock sounded boisterous. He ground espresso beans to hear himself doing something and swallowed two doubles. He played the repetitious news loud enough to make himself feel part of it, then slid across his slushy deck with half of yesterday’s joint, pain sparking across his face as if the bones and ligaments holding it together were strung too tight.
He patted pockets for his lighter until he heard the garden hose and reveled in the sight of Brandon Vanderkool’s father washing his enormous pickup once again, as if letting the big blue Ford stay dirty was as un-American as leaving the flag out overnight.
Norm looked bulkier than ever, almost a meter deep in the chest with a boulder head that reminded Wayne of those old Soviet leaders, all of which made the dairyman favor his left leg more than ever. Wayne descended his slick porch steps, one at a time, before shouting across the ditch.
NORM WASN’T CERTAIN what he’d heard other than his name, the word “Americans!” and some cussing alongside it. Knowing the likely mouth behind the noise, he ignored it, but the garbled yelling continued.
Unfortunately, Norm’s driveway was within range of Wayne’s deck. Though the professor lived on the other side of Boundary Road, the ditch and Zero Ave., he was still Norm’s closest neighbor, if you could call him one. Used to be nothing but well-spaced farmhouses on both sides of the line until some Canadians sold border-front properties and a mini-suburb popped up with a view of Norm’s dairy. Ignore him, he told himself, but instead he reluctantly shut off the water and rocked stiff-kneed to his side of the ditch like a man on stilts, squinting into the silvery glare and feeling at a sluggish disadvantage, having been up since three thirty on one cup of coffee. “What’re you blaming us for today, Wayne?”
“You didn’t hear?” The professor lit a stubby hand-rolled cigarette with a surfboard-shaped lighter. “Of course not. Why pay attention when you’re always right? Well, your drug czar marched into Vancouver last night and told the owner of the Amsterdam Café that he runs a disgraceful business. That’s the exact word he used: disgraceful. It’s all over the CBC.”
“What should he have called it?” Norm drawled as casually as he could, suspecting this discussion was foreplay for more agitating topics.
“Still don’t get it, do ya?” Wayne cocked his head on a neck no bigger than Norm’s wrist, shuffling to his left to keep the sun in Norm’s eyes. “You act like our land is your land.”
He studied Wayne’s scratchy new beard. He’d had a Marxist goatee last week and was clean-shaven a month before that. Norm had hoped like hell the professor would move along once he’d retired, but here he was like some aging fugitive rotating through disguises. Nothing ever added up with Wayne Rousseau. Everybody heard about his wine parties—with fifty-dollar bottles on a teacher’s salary—and then came his greenhouse. Growing tomatoes, Wayne? He’d always been more of a challenge than Norm had signed up for. The Cuban and Iranian flags he flew on Sundays just to piss people off were mild irritants compared to the nuke he dropped two years ago. “The deaths of innocent Americans are the direct consequence of their government’s bloody foreign policy!” Instead of apologizing, the professor repeated it for every reporter who bothered to call, which led to Dirk Hoffman’s reader board—ROUSSEAU IS A TERRORIST—and Wayne’s retort, a flag that flapped for several gusty days before anyone identified it as representing Grenada.
“Imagine if a Canadian official, any official—our trade czar, our trash czar, our lost-pet czar, take your pick—barged across the border,” Wayne shouted, as if his audience far exceeded one drowsy American farmer, “and called any one of your business owners anything less than magnificent.”
“You said he called the business disgraceful, not the owners.”
“The f*ck’s the difference, Norm?” Thinning smoke swirled above the ditch between them. “I know you think it’s all pothead bullshit, but do you have any idea what I’d feel like most days without a half gram of this MC-9 Skunk Bud Number Three?”
Norm coughed. “That skunk doesn’t seem to be helping you much today. And do you have to smoke it out here?” Norm felt his steam rising, but sensed Wayne hadn’t started into whatever would truly rile him. “Does it have to be a performance?”
Wayne blew smoke through a yellow smile and leveled his swollen eyes on him. “How’s Jeanette?”
Norm wished he’d already retreated instead of standing there breathing illegal secondhand smoke wafting across a ditch he hadn’t crossed since Customs spotted an old DUI on his record and sent him back. He promptly vowed never to step foot in Canada again, though he’d grown up playing in it and drove tractors across it to help plow fields and, in the newlywed years, moseyed into Abbotsford on summer nights to get Jeanette her chocolate éclair, which she’d hold up like a half-eaten passport to get them waved back through. “She’s fine,” he finally volunteered, not sure what the professor knew about his wife.
Wayne nodded. “Best of luck with that.”
“Thanks,” Norm grunted, hating his reflexive manners. He knew he should ask about his health, but he’d never understood MS—sounded like some electrical problem—and had let it go for too long to ask about it now without sounding idiotic. Part of him suspected it was a scam to get high anyway, though if you looked hard at Wayne, and got past the youthful hair, the playful smirk, the disrespectful eyes and the commanding voice, you saw there wasn’t much left but an assembly of dry twigs easily snapped.
“Your cows getting any better?” Wayne probed.
“Not all of ’em.” Norm back-shuffled from the ditch, alarmed he knew anything about his ailing herd.
Wayne winced. “Maybe you should lay off the antibiotics, huh? Kills off the good bacteria and messes with the stomach, isn’t that right?”
“They’re cows,” Norm said, not bothering to point out that mastitis is usually treated with antiseptics, not antibiotics. “Their stomachs are different.”
Wayne smirked through his exhale. “Can I ask you one question, my friend? Why do you think twenty million Americans smoke pot every year?”
“Think we’ve had this discussion before, Professor.” This lecture usually digressed into the irony of Holland’s progressive drug laws in light of the valley’s uptight Dutch immigrants, which left Norm feeling obliged to condemn or defend some flat old country he couldn’t care less about. Seemingly everyone but Norm had visited Amsterdam and returned to tell him about the hookers in the windows, to which he’d offer knowing grunts without admitting he’d never been there. Even the sight of the vowel-happy Dutch language made him uneasy. He felt the cobbled pavement beneath his left boot. Another step back and he could pivot on his good heel and go.
“What about the two million Americans who smoke it every day?” Wayne’s voice climbed steadily higher. “They belong in prison? Cannabis isn’t some wicked invention by socialists or Muslims or gays, Norm. It’s organic, for God’s sake. An or-gan-ic weed growing wild in every single one of your states. Washington and Jefferson grew it, okay? Washington and f*cking Jeff—”
“Like I said, seems like I’ve heard all this before.” Norm tried to exit on an agreeable tone. “I think it’s illegal down here for a reason, that’s all.”
“You’re right about that, and the reason is your leaders are cowards, your drug czar’s an audacious moron and most of you are not only homophobic and xenophobic but euphoriaphobic too.”
“I see.” Norm sighed, folding his arms across his chest, rolling his hands into fists. He saw three birds settle on the telephone line above Wayne’s head and stared at them, willing them to shit. “Sorry if we make you feel uncomfortable about your habit, Wayne, but—”
“Medicine. Understand the word? And it’s legal—up here—when a doctor, like mine, prescribes it. It’s med-i-cine. Can I ask you a—”
“It’s more than that.” Norm heard himself start to pant. “It’s your new economy, isn’t it?”
Face darkening, Wayne sucked hard on his shrinking joint and pointed toward Norm’s back barn. “How’s that monument to your ego coming along in there, anyhow?”
Norm was surprised his voice remained steady. “Ain’t a barn big enough to build one to suit yours.” He turned and shuffled away from the ditch, mumble-cursing himself for losing his temper, his throbbing knee adding to the ruckus inside him. The hell with Wayne Rousseau and his half-cocked—
“You people used it in cough syrup until you saw the Mexicans having so much fun with it!” Wayne shouted.
Norm popped two sticks of Big Red into his mouth to give his jaw something besides teeth to grind before glancing up the street and seeing Sophie Winslow in her yard. Of course. Now the professor had an audience.
“I see where your son’s protecting the United States from us dangerous Canadians these days,” Wayne yelled, louder still. “Called me twice last night while on duty. So I suggest you inform him,” he continued, his voice still climbing, “that he best get a better understanding of his jurisdiction or someone like me is gonna sue the holy hell out of the U.S. f*cking Border Patrol.”
Norm turned and glared, pulverizing his gum, its fake cinnamon overwhelming his taste buds, then marched back to the ditch and glared down at him. “Don’t talk to me about my son,” he said, barely louder than the trickling snowmelt.
“Just offering some neighborly advice,” Wayne replied in his emcee voice. “Just trying, as always, to help you see the big picture.”
Norm set his feet wider to weather a swoon until the scenery swung back into focus, brighter than ever. Glittering patches of melting snow. Twinkling greenhouses. Fields rising into dark trees. The rest of Canada lurking over the hill. Norm looked down at the shimmering ditch between them, then at the tiny, smirking professor. The big picture? How big do you really wanna go? His wife was losing her mind. His son was in danger. A third of his herd was too sick to milk. And his sailboat was a pipe dream.
Wayne sucked hard on the final half inch of the joint, smothered a cough, then flicked the last of his roach into the silvery light. The two men watched it ride a gust and arc surprisingly high, a fading spark twirling over the ditch from one country into another.