39
GOOD NEWS usually comes in person, bad news in the mail. That’s why it stunned Norm to get a letter from the EPA lady telling him that after a month of testing and two photo flyovers they’d determined that his lagoon wasn’t contaminating the creek. He had to read it twice to make sure that’s what it said, then again, slowly, to revel in its conclusion. Everything was couched in stingy language about ongoing monitoring and future potential penalties, but strip all that aside and the score was Norm, 1; U.S. government, 0.
And this came when he was already on a roll. Three healthy new calves and he was down to an almost routine dozen cases of mastitis, only three of which appeared to be staph. And with the settlement Lankhaar’s attorney had already scared out of the Everson farmer’s insurers, Norm was due to ultimately receive twice what he could have gotten at auction for those eight cows—even if one was Pearl. Now he was just waiting for the first of three $12,000 checks to clear: enough to buy some two-year-olds and maybe—yes, maybe!—the mast and rigging from that guy in Anacortes and—who knows?—possibly start shopping for a twenty-five-horse Yanmar. Everything was lining up in the good column. Jeanette seemed to be tracking better. And despite the ongoing waves of embarrassment at the Border Patrol, Brandon was not only still alive but also still employed and helping with the bills. Even milk prices had shot up twenty-three percent.
So when this BP with obnoxious sideburns and an oversized mustache swung by that afternoon to ask in a somber voice to please accompany him to HQ, Norm’s mind couldn’t catch up. When it finally did, his first thought was that Brandon’s luck had run out. As Jeanette had shouted the night after he caught that guy with all the guns, “How many lives do you think he has?” And now this dour agent. “Brandon?” Norm said hesitantly.
Agent McAfferty seemed to understand. “He’s fine. This has to do with you, Mr. Vanderkool. The chief would like to talk to you.”
“Have him call me,” Norm said, relieved and slightly confused. “I’ve got—”
“You need to come to the station, sir.”
Sir? He studied the portly agent, reading the name tag again, his anger rising.
“Please,” McAfferty continued, gesturing such that Norm thought he was about to grab his hand.
He flinched, his nerves suddenly afire, then reluctantly stepped outside. “I’ll meet you there,” he grumbled, feeling for his keys in the wrong pocket.
“Think you’d better come with me, sir.”
He sighed, looked back at the house, then limped out to the idling green-and-white, his knee grinding on cue. Without thinking, he glanced down Boundary to see Sophie pretending to trim a hedge and then, reluctantly, across the ditch to where Professor Smokestack stood on his deck in checkered shorts, his legs as thin and pale as bones.
The station seemed practically abandoned compared to the last time he’d shown up, just two agents in the bullpen and a skinny supervisor plunking away at a computer with his back to the door. Norm followed McAfferty into the hall, then noticed that the man sitting in the holding pen looked familiar, even from behind.
“Luther?”
McAfferty stopped when he realized Norm was dawdling, and started wheeling his arm like an impatient traffic cop.
The man wouldn’t turn to face Norm and in fact leaned farther away. Luther Stevens, the former high-school principal? The man Norm once feared Jeanette had fallen for?
“This way, sir,” McAfferty said, then walked him brusquely down the hall.
Patera looked like he’d aged a decade since Norm last saw him. He didn’t stick his hand out like some gift as he usually did, and instead grabbed Norm’s shoulder as if to steady him.
“The hell’s going on?” Norm asked. “What’s Luther doing in—”
“Come on back.”
Patera led him into another room, where that SOB McAfferty and some wooden-faced poser named Rawlins pulled up chairs. Their boss talked in sweeping phrases about how, as Norm no doubt knew, the patrol had been dealing with quite a few delicate situations lately, and that the last thing they wanted to do was jump the gun. He glanced at Rawlins, checking to make sure his wording was right. “But we’ve still got a job to do here, see. And, well, Agent Canfield caught three illegals cutting through your property last night.”
Norm felt short of breath.
“And under questioning, well, you see, one of them said, well, he said the landowner—in this case, you, Norm—were—”
“Getting paid for their safe passage,” McAfferty interjected impatiently. “Said he understood that you—he knew your name, Mr. Vanderkool—were getting compensated to the tune of ten grand a month.”
“No. That’s …” Norm felt another swoon coming on, and the sound went out of the room. He wiggled his jaw, futilely trying to pop his ears, then shut his eyes and waited, realizing that he was just nineteen months younger than his father was when he stroked out.
“Norm?”
“I never agreed to any—”
“That’s what we assumed,” Patera said, glaring at McAfferty, “but this situation is particularly delicate, because one of the illegals in custody is someone we deported years ago by mistake, someone we later learned was the right-hand man to Ahmad Saeed Jaballah.”
“I didn’t…. The who?”
“Jaballah recruits out of Montreal for the Egyptian al jihad. They call him al Kanadi, or ‘the Canadian’ in Arabic. So, as a courtesy to you, Norm, before this likely becomes an FBI matter … See, there’s also the unsettling matter of a sudden spike in your checking account.” “You’re looking at my—”
“Pretty standard these days, Norm, in a case like this where—” He started giggling, feeling so dizzy that it took him a few beats to collect himself.
IN THE DAYS after his inquisition, Norm thought he noticed stares and double takes, but he hadn’t been out enough to know what people thought or knew or heard. He’d avoided venturing into public, except in passing, until now.
Even after his explanation about the settlement payments on the bad feed, the SOB wouldn’t let it be. He’d straddled a chair backwards and asked him point-blank if he’d ever been approached by anyone offering to buy access through his property.
Norm hesitated. He couldn’t coax himself to actually say no, but he somehow managed to shake his head. He wasn’t under oath, right? And if he hadn’t been paid, what the hell was the issue?
“Mr. Vanderkool, are you telling us that you’ve never once been solicited by anyone trying to run drugs or illegals through your farm?”
Norm blinked faster. If he said, “Well, yeah,” he’d be admitting he’d lied. But if he mumbled, “No, absolutely not,” he’d have lied twice. Patera seemed to encourage the evasion, nodding along with his quarter-truths and even telling McAfferty, “Enough already,” as if his own judgment were on trial too.
“Nothing about receiving payments on the twenty-third of the month?” the SOB persisted, his mustache twitching like a lie detector. “Is that what you’re saying? Nothing along those lines at all from some friendly young buck calling himself Andrew or Michael or William?”
Norm’s heart galloped. Stalling, staring at the agent, daring him to continue, he finally muttered, “Imagine every living soul along Boundary Road has heard that bullshit.” He took a series of shallow breaths. “But this hustler, this kid, never said for what, and I, of course, never agreed to anything. Quite the opposite.”
Suddenly Patera wasn’t reeling the SOB back anymore, and all the oxygen left the room as Norm recounted the entire affair with the kid on his porch and how he saw him again in church and all the confusing nodding that had ensued. By the end of it, his clothes were soaked and the BPs stepped out for a discussion.
Being driven home by the insufferable agent in surly silence, he lowered his window to breathe and to dilute his stink, wishing like hell they were driving faster, at least the speed limit.
“You surprise me, sir,” McAfferty finally said, turning off North-wood onto Boundary, exchanging an intimate little index-finger wave with Sophie Winslow and creeping slower and slower toward Norm’s house. “I would have expected the father of Brandon Vanderkool to be considerably more candid.”
Norm’s attempted laugh came off as a grunt. “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he said without glancing at him. “My expectations usually miss the mark too.”
The new publicity-shy BP didn’t put out a release about catching a suspected terrorist. What got out traveled by word of mouth alone. And Norm saw the rumor twinkling in Sophie’s eyes—“Please come talk”—and in Wayne Rousseau’s urgent wave over and in the glances he got at the Chevron the one time he’d risked fueling in Lynden. He’d skipped church too.
Duke’s Steakhouse was the first real test, so he struggled to look better than he felt. It was Jeanette’s idea to go out, and Brandon had jumped on it. What could he do, demand that she cook?
She wore a festive floral scarf and a smile to match as she excitedly told Brandon about some fossils found just east of Mount Baker. She’d taken the second memory test that afternoon and come home invigorated, confident she’d redeemed herself. Even her teeth glimmered, as if all the health food and exercise was not only healing her but peeling back the years.
Meanwhile, Norm felt about 109, just cut him open and count the rings. He did his best impression of amiable attentiveness, despite sweat crawling high enough to sting his freshly shaved neck. Neither Brandon nor Jeanette grasped what he’d endured at the station, dismissing it as yet another amusing mix-up in a long parade of them. But Brandon was harder to read than usual. A powerful melancholy had seemingly settled inside him over the past several days that, for once, he couldn’t shake off by morning. He looked older, too, like a man sucking it up, wrestling with problems he was trying to conceal. This Norm saw as progress.
Morris Crawford strolled over before the meal arrived, looking like Sam Shepard in a plaid shirt rolled to mid-forearms and long jeans so perfectly cut and faded that they looked formal.
Norm rose to greet the popular raspberry man, his head swimming slightly. Something about him had always created an intense desire not to be one-upped.
“So how’s the yacht comin’, Captain?”
Norm had heard Crawford spin the same question dozens of times, yet he’d never been able to ascertain exactly where it fell between admiration and amusement.
“Beautifully,” Jeanette said before he could respond. “We’re thinking about entering one of those around-the-world races next year.”
His rush of gratitude was so complete that he didn’t know what to add as Crawford casually clasped Jeanette’s left hand, then shook his and addressed Brandon through a smile. “Danny was just asking about you. Said to say hey if I saw you, so ‘Hey’”
“When’s he coming back?” Brandon asked, as he did every time he saw the man.
“Maybe Christmas?” Crawford replied hopefully. “We’ll see. Meanwhile, could you do us all a favor and tell that patrol of yours that they’ve got more important things to do than harass your old man?”
There it was, laid out just like a grinning congressman would’ve, acknowledging that he knew yet placing it in the most flattering light. Norm’s mind was so jammed he didn’t hear Brandon’s response, but by the quiver in Crawford’s forehead he could tell it hadn’t made any sense. Then the raspberry mogul was off, flattering a waitress with a parade wave and sauntering down the steps as if he owned them.
Norm had skipped lunch and still couldn’t muster enough appetite to dent his sirloin before he saw—oh, please, no—Dale Mesick pointing him out to his suspiciously well-preserved wife and plodding over. The true test: almost everyone else offered one face to yours and another to your back, but Shit-to-Power had only one face.
“Hey, Norman,” he said, his peroxide doll a step and a half behind, her tongue fussing with spinach caught in her bright teeth. “Good to see you and the family, my friend. Y’all remember Melanie?”
Norm tried to fold his napkin next to his plate, but either the cloth was too starched or his fingers couldn’t finesse it, so he rose to greet head-on whatever he was up against.
“What’s this B.S. anyway?” the stubby bastard demanded, far louder than was necessary. “First we hear Doc Stremler’s running dope, then it’s some big-shot terrorist paying a fortune to cross your farm?”
Norm hadn’t got a third of the way up before his bad knee locked. His other foot, pawing the carpet for leverage and traction, for some reason found neither. When he tried to make fun of himself nothing came out, as if he were suffering an odd power outage that would pass if he just let it. Before the full swoon hit and the chandelier spun, before he toppled backwards and lost consciousness, he experienced a passing fantasy—simple enough to realize, if he’d had time to whisper his request—that Brandon would cradle him like a child, one arm behind his neck, the other beneath his knees, and quietly carry him from the sweltering restaurant into the cooling night.