41
HE STROLLED through the dairy, picking up after Roony again—a bucket knocked over here, an empty juice bottle there, a bright jug of bleach and a pair of torn yellow rubber gloves dangling near the parlor exit, which helped explain why some cows had hesitated when he shooed them out that morning. He took a bright silver ladder out back and spray-painted it gray, then rearranged the pallets near the parlor’s entrance so the northeasterlies wouldn’t make them want to turn around and put their butts into the wind, which complicated everything.
He hopped on the Super Slicer and cut bales, then pulled a trailerful past the feed trough. He noticed 73’s swollen left eye and absently started checking the others, finding limps he hadn’t spotted in 17 and 69. It was getting harder to keep weight on some older ones, particularly 11 and 28. He strode around back to bottle-feed the youngest calf.
Dionne, McAfferty and the rest had tried to talk him out of it, yammering about all his wasted training and talent, his knack for the work, his gift. And Patera had initially refused to accept his resignation, insisting he take a week’s paid vacation to think it through. But the chief had eventually relented, in part because he was told to relieve or transfer another fifteen agents by December. Besides, it was obvious that Brandon’s father needed more recovery time.
He talked well enough and seemed the same physically, yet he looked strangely becalmed. He took his time eating, dressing and listening. When he did step outside, he shuffled through the dairy like an old man reminiscing. There was no argument from Norm when Brandon took over and left him with just the books. He routinely overslept and retreated after breakfast to his boat barn, where he hadn’t spent so much time since the gleaming hull had arrived on a flatbed and a small mob of doubters watched to see if it would fit inside.
When Brandon had called to tell Madeline about his father’s stroke, she apparently hadn’t checked caller ID because she groaned at the sound of his voice. He was so surprised she’d picked up that he hadn’t known what to say, then she started lecturing him—again—about what a mistake it had been. But now it wasn’t just a mistake, it was a “huge mistake.” Perhaps his all-time favorite hour had been reduced to a gigantic error. “We’re totally different people!” Then gentler, but still raspy and foreign: “I was so messed up. Please just forget about it.”
As if memories were optional. All he’d managed to blurt before she hung up? “I can’t not forget.”
He spent hours auditioning combinations of words that could change her mind before finally coming up with the perfect response to her comment about how different they were. He’d tell her his mother’s story about the moose that fell in love with a cow named Jessica in Vermont and courted her for seventy-six days. A moose and a cow! Seventy-six days! Complications arose once he pictured Madeline asking what happened next. He tried writing everything down, hoping his words would look more persuasive on paper. Maybe he could read them to her over the phone. But the longer he rewrote and rehearsed, the more garbled the words seemed. He forced himself to give it a break when he realized he was rocking so fast that his neck was swinging.
Luckily, he could lose himself in the rhythm of the dairy. He’d switched out all the bedding, regraded the barn alleys and changed the metal tracks on two sliding doors to a quieter plastic. He’d cleaned the vacuum controller and convinced his father to buy better semen. And today he intended to take advantage of a dry, windless lull to spray the fields without stinking up the valley. He could see his breath that morning, and the leaves were turning so fast they fit into his notion that everything was rushing by.
When he wasn’t working on the dairy, he poured himself into his paintings and forms. His rock cones, knotweed structures, leaf mosaics and oil paintings kept surprising him. Sophie often tagged along, snapping and filming with such an odd intensity that it sometimes felt incomplete when she wasn’t there, setting up her tripod or adjusting her video camera.
After a grumpy new feed truck driver rattled up and filled the silo, Brandon shed his rubber boots and bib and stepped out of the barn beneath a quiet, birdless sky. He piled the dogs into the front seat and headed to town to get more tetracycline and ampicillin, studying the loopy telephone lines along the ditch where his mother swore barn swallows had assembled by the thousands one September. If they’d already left, why hadn’t the seabirds arrived yet? What if all the brants, wigeons, scoters, buffleheads, mergansers and trumpeters decided to forgo the exhausting flight and winter up north? Then what?
He was surprised to see the feed truck again, parked just a few blocks down Boundary in the primitive dirt and grass driveway leading to Dirk Hoffman’s roadside outbuilding on the northern fringe of his L-shaped property. The massive rig was parked so hastily that its last three feet were cantilevered sloppily into the oncoming lane. Puttering past, Brandon noticed that the rear of the truck was listing more to the left than the slope warranted.
“He have a flat?” he asked the dogs, their ears lifting. He pulled over and climbed out, the dogs clawing after him and flopping out his side. He shut the door, then crossed Boundary to have a look at the left-rear duo of deflated Goodyears. The driver was shouting inside his cab, probably yelling into a phone at somebody, Brandon figured, about those tires. He strode up to the cab, picturing the size of the jack this job would take, the dogs behind him in a single file from smallest to largest.
The man’s window was open, and Brandon’s head filled it without him having to step on the foot rail. “Got a flat?”
The driver was so alarmed he dropped his phone, then frantically groped around near his feet as a small voice whined through it. “Hold on a sec!” he growled, smothering the phone against his chest. “Having a row with the wife. Ya mind?”
His tone was hostile enough to start Leo yapping, which got Maggie going and Clyde too, halfheartedly. Brandon backed up, silenced all three with a wave, then strode back to the rear wheels again with Leo still acting like they’d treed a raccoon. On closer inspection, the tires didn’t appear deflated so much as sunken to their rims, though the soil looked dry and solid. He circled the truck as the driver’s griping rose into a wail. “Well, that’s what credit-card companies do!” The other twenty tires sat plump and firm atop the sun-baked earth.
Brandon glanced across Boundary and Zero. Was she there? With the curtains drawn and no cars in sight, the Damant house seemed abandoned, as it had since the cheerful couple left for a retirement home a year ago. The forgettable barn, slightly back and to the left, looked as unused as ever.
It wasn’t until the feed man hopped down on his foot rail to ask, with his arms flailing, what the hell he was doing that Brandon’s eyes followed the narrow dirt road leading from the rear of Dirk’s outbuilding through the maze of leased raspberry fields toward Pangborn Road. When he glanced back across the ditch at the Damant barn and then down at the sunken wheels, he pictured it all at once.
The question was, who should he call first?