45
BRANDON WAS PINNED in a corner behind two Lynden ladies he vaguely recognized, both chattering simultaneously about the “quite unusual” photos and paintings on the walls and desperately trying to drag him into their conversation.
He’d never known how to react to this sort of attention. Ever since kindergarten, he’d heard his work called unusual and bizarre or, worse, weird. No response beyond a shrug or a blank stare had ever come to him. It never seemed like the sort of thing you talked about. Besides, Danny Crawford always said that the less artists said the better.
“What makes you create these things?” asked the one with the pastry flakes clinging to her lipstick.
“Yes, what compels you?” pressed the one with the goiter.
They might as well have asked him why he breathed. After hesitating, that was the question he answered. “Because I need to,” he mumbled. “And because I want to.” He stared down at the ladies until their heavy eyelashes fluttered like hummingbird wings trying to lift them off the floor.
Brandon hadn’t foreseen any of this when Sophie casually asked if she could show some of his work at a “little gathering.” It sounded as if a few of his canvases would be mixed with other art and a few people would eat cheese and crackers and glance at it. Instead it was only his stuff. On every wall. Even in the bathroom. Twenty-three recent paintings and more than fifty photographs of his outdoor work. Several sequences showed him building cones in the river and on the flats, or his thorn-stitched structures getting ripped apart by the currents, or the rainbows he created by swinging a club off the water. There were shots of many columns on riverbanks, in trees and ravines. Then still more action photos of him, from up close and afar, throwing sticks into the sky or hanging see-through tapestries of leaves that he’d completely forgotten about. The paintings included clusters of foreign faces—more expressions, really, than faces—and others of bird flocks, the largest canvas being a silver ball of flashing dunlins, as well as his most recent—a three-panel portrait of Madeline, the first nearly photographic in its precision, the second more abstract, her face flushed with anxiety, and the third, almost surreal, of her pink-tongued laughter.
Luckily, almost nobody—except these puzzled elderly women—was paying much attention to the art, beyond the most easily understood paintings in the entrance, including one of his mother sprawled in dandelions and another of a lineup of cattle wearing the faces of his father, Dirk Hoffman, Cleve Erickson, Raymond Lankhaar, Roony Meurs and other local dairymen with features too small to make out.
For the most part people were talking and laughing, not seeing. And as the house filled and the volume climbed, most of the giddy chatter was about blackjack, craps and slots, about how much money people were going to win or lose, what Katrina Montfort had heard about the decor and the buffet, everyone gorging all the while on Sophie’s free liquor.
Brandon’s mother passed through the door in a sequined top and so much makeup that he almost didn’t recognize her. She looked hesitant, though her smile bloomed once she recognized people. She hugged Sophie, then Alexandra Cole, then anyone within reach, embracing some of them twice. He started toward her in case she needed him, but felt blocked by the sea of expectant faces. The room was filling fast, and he reminded himself to try not to watch and listen to everything at once.
He’d agreed to come only after Sophie told him Madeline might show. Having talked to her so persuasively so many times in his mind, it kept jolting him to remember that he hadn’t actually spoken to her since he’d called about the tunnel. When he finally asked her father about her, he said she’d be back pretty soon and left the rest dangling. Now he wished Sophie hadn’t mentioned her at all, so he wouldn’t have spent so much time searching for a strand of words so simple that he wouldn’t trip over them—such as, Something that amazing can’t be considered a mistake. Yet by itself, that seemed even worse than saying nothing. So he worked on combinations of ideas that incorporated an apology, though he couldn’t pinpoint what he’d done wrong. He wished he’d heard Danny Crawford apologize more often so he’d know what a great one sounded like.
He found McAfferty in the kitchen, mid-story with Dionne and Canfield. “This was a two-day wedding. Two days! And it was one of those weddings that’s so small it’s too intimate, know what I’m saying? Especially when you don’t know anybody, which I didn’t. And this congregation didn’t split along traditional bride-and-groom lines, okay? The two camps here were crossworders and gays.” He topped off everyone’s champagne glass and glanced at Brandon. “What’s up, Picasso? So I wake up and stumble into this way-too-intimate lodge on this way-too-special wedding day, and there I am, a hungover, hetero noncrossworder with no place to hang. Know what I’m saying? The gays are all chatty lovebirds on the couches. And the thoughtful brainiacs are at the breakfast table obsessing about thirty-seven down.”
“So what’d you do?”
“That’s the point, Candy. What do you think I did?”
“I would’ve hung out with the crossworders,” Dionne said.
“We know that, but what’d I do?”
“You lucked out and guessed thirty-seven down,” Canfield said, “and the crossworders adopted you.”
McAfferty scowled and turned to Brandon.
“You talked the gays into Bloody Marys,” Brandon said, “and had a good time.”
McAfferty beamed at Dionne. “Didn’t I just tell you the kid’s a misunderstood genius?”
Brandon was studying how McAfferty’s hand nonchalantly cupped Dionne’s waist when a bearded man who stood no taller than his sternum burst into their circle, apologized extravagantly for interrupting and introduced himself as the dean of something. He told Brandon that he absolutely had to speak with him at his earliest convenience, then excused himself just as profusely and waddled off.
“From what I can tell,” McAfferty offered, “you’re a big hit with old ladies and midgets.”
“You’re all midgets,” Brandon said, scanning the barrel-bodied throng again for an agile tomboy with chestnut hair, his ears straining all the laughter for one laugh in particular. “How many days you got left?” he asked.
“A hundred and twenty-two,” McAfferty said. “Thanks for asking. Who’d have thought I’d outlast the chief?”
“Don’t count on it,” Dionne said.
As part of the Blaine reorganization, Patera was supposedly getting transferred to the Baton Rouge sector, which bordered, as McAfferty noted, on absolutely nothing. But Congress had put all personnel changes on hold after a new GAO report concluded that for many miles, no delineation whatsoever remained of the U.S.-Canadian border. Much of the overgrown seam would need to be resurveyed again, not only to police the line, but also just to know where it was. This sounded all the more ominous after a House committee released a portion of a jihad training manual that advised terrorists to enter the belly of the beast through Canada. With this news arriving near the end of an election season, incumbents and particularly desperate challengers from northern states were demanding an immediate and renewed commitment to border security.
Sophie grabbed Brandon and introduced him to her “bunko gang,” six effusive, middle-aged women who stood there drinking, tittering and gawking at him, their eyes shining with liquor.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Ask him.”
A woman with a laugh like a power tool wondered if there was “any chance in hell” he could build a form on her property. When he looked puzzled, she added, “I’d pay you, of course.” Then she pointed at a photograph of a slate cone he’d built.
“You have slate on your property?” he asked.
“Pardon?” she said.
“What kind of rock have you got?”
“I don’t know”—she looked to the others for help—“that we have any. But of course, we could bring in whatever you need.”
“Kinda needs to already be there.”
“What?”
He shrugged.
They waited.
Talking was a letdown after the day he’d had. That morning he’d counted thirty-two species, including skinny oystercatchers, black-bellied plovers, western sandpipers and Pacific loons fresh from the north. The valley felt alive again. The night before he’d driven out to the old Sumas Customs House before sunset and waited thirty-five minutes before a lone Vaux’s swift swooped into view. After that slender bird disappeared into one of the two bulky chimneys, there was a pause before another dozen dove into the hole, followed by hundreds more, foraging the twilight for insects on their downward spiral, several hundred swifts forming a tall funnel that swirled into the same chimney like a genie returning to its bottle.
ONCE NORM and Madeline arrived, the house was already crammed with people excusing themselves back and forth to the makeshift bar where Morris Crawford was pouring doubles and flattering everyone. It took Norm five minutes to find Jeanette, who pulled him over to a wall to show him photos of what looked like a bare-chested man covered in leaves from his hips up. Norm turned tropical red as he slowly recognized the subject, then turned and instantly spotted his son above the crowd, surrounded by a clot of ladies in the far corner. The throng of excessively cheerful people between them was spiked with people to be avoided: Professor Rousseau, Shit-to-Power, Raymond Lankhaar and—good God!—Agent McAfferty
“It’s all Brandon!” Jeanette gushed, as if some phenomenon was taking place that he hadn’t processed yet.
He glimpsed Madeline caught in a scrum of laughter in the doorway. Then he was practically mobbed himself, as if they’d confused him with someone else, their squealing voices ringing in his ears. Even Wayne grabbed him to smirklessly congratulate him on his son’s show, gesturing grandly with the hand that wasn’t attached to a cane. Norm overheated in the attention, his vision blurring, a palpable desire rising to escape back to the barn, where he could look at his boat alone and anew through the lens of Madeline’s confidence.
BRANDON’S EYES floated past her twice before he recognized her. Her hair was shinier and curled around her face, her skin darker, her posture straighter in a long-sleeved blouse and new jeans. He watched her tap his mother on the shoulder and suddenly the two of them were hugging, rocking side to side like they’d just won something. Then he saw Sophie pull Madeline to the trio of paintings he’d made of her. He blocked out the questions from the ladies below as she covered her eyes with both hands as if the images were too awful to bear straight on. He glanced down and asked the Canadian lady to please repeat her question, then looked back and lost Madeline altogether as more voices lobbied for his attention.
“Please, Brandon, would you explain this.”
He turned to the painting in question. It was like staring at his blood under a microscope and being asked, Well?
Another lady with thinning hair impatiently muttered that art is definitely in the eye of the beholder, but that frankly she didn’t get it. “I’m sorry, but most of this looks like child’s play to me.”
He watched his mom lead his blushing father to a painting of her catching written words with her hands, and to another of him patting Pearl’s distinctively patterned brown-and-white head. Even across the room, Brandon could see his face clench toward a sob. Then he looked everywhere for Madeline again, feeling claustrophobic, new words churning in his head. He saw a shadow flicker across the room, and another, and a series of fluttering images, ducking low enough to see the forked tails out the window. The ladies, with their backs to him, were discussing blackjack strategy now, so he crept to the sliding door and quietly slipped into a twilight that looked digitally enhanced.
A dozen barn swallows had gathered on the telephone and power lines looping from Sophie’s house to Northwood. Another dozen were approaching from far north of the ditch, then an incoming cloud—multiple clouds, actually—that broke up as they neared the three lines, the birds spinning like ice skaters or stunt pilots before lining up side by side and carrying on in high, grating voices that sounded like glass marbles rubbing against one another. He tacked toward their temporary roost at a forty-five degree angle, the din of Sophie’s party fading beneath the excited banter of the assembling acrobats. As the sagging lines filled up, they created the illusion that the weight of all these little birds was pulling the telephone poles toward each other and that the swallows were about to be launched from this flexed slingshot.
SOPHIE ASKED Alexandra Cole to give her two-finger whistle to get everyone’s attention. “I’d like to make a quick announcement and introduce a special guest,” she said, which created so much simultaneous chatter that Alexandra had to whistle again. “Brandon,” Sophie shouted. “Where are you?” A voice rose above the murmur. “Think he stepped outside.” “Well, good,” Sophie said over the laughter, “because I’m breaking a promise here. I told him I wouldn’t draw undue attention to his work, but I simply can’t resist. I wanted you all to get a chance to see some of it, and I hope that some of you find it as stunning as I do.” The chatter and laughter rose up and people crowded the walls with cocktails, most of them squinting at the art for the first time. “Listen!” she pleaded. “I took the liberty of inviting a far better judge of such matters, Dr. Matthew Egan, the respected dean of Fine Arts at Western Washington University. Dr. Egan?”
For most people the little man was just a voice. “Young Mr. Vanderkool’s art, I believe, reflects perhaps as well as any art I’ve seen, the American psyche in the twenty-first century,” he said, to rising snickers. “I’m very serious,” he added while several conversations resumed. “His fixation with nests, for example, obviously expresses a grave concern with security.”
More giggles skittered across the room, but every painting and photo was getting examined now. “And the nests are crumbling,” someone blurted with mock gravity.
“His work with leaves,” the dean continued, “shows he’s obviously been influenced by the great Andy Goldsworthy, but Mr. Vanderkool’s quilts look more like flags, susceptible to the slightest breeze.” His voice rose confidently above the crowd noise. “And what to make of these paintings of startled smugglers and illegal immigrants?” He pointed at a portrait of the Princess of Nowhere. “Again, his focus appears to be the instant before collapse—or surrender. I haven’t had the pleasure of conversing with the artist, but it’s obvious to me, given the variety of people and birds he paints, that he celebrates all living things. Or consider his self-portrait,” he demanded. “Clearly, the leaves are feathers and …”
The laughter and raspberries rose, drowning him out with conversations about the casino and football and weather and an Oktoberfest celebration in Bellingham. Wayne Rousseau, however, was just warming up, holding court in his corner as people leaned in to hear him disagree with the dean and suggest that in fact Brandon’s art was all about turning order into disorder and chaos into a plausible pattern, the subtext being how temporary everything is. A shrinking bevy of ladies tried to follow his subsequent pronouncements about how dyslexic geniuses were often viewed as oddballs in their own time, about the latest movements in landscape art, about da Vinci’s obsession with flight, about how van Gogh’s very last painting was—
“Oh, my God!” Alexandra Cole shrieked, gawking out the window. “What is he doing with those birds?”
HE ESTIMATED there were fourteen hundred shoulder to shoulder on the lines, with dozens more in the air entertaining the others and still more congregating. He was standing perfectly still, slightly west of the raucous flock yet close enough to make out their long, midnight-blue wings and cinnamon breasts. Several incoming birds whirled near his head before swooping up to the black lines. It became a game, with swallow after swallow seeing how close it could come to his head, his hips, his bowed and extended arms, circling and dipping, finally swirling back to the lines. Their voices rose to a crescendo and were instantly lost in a mad, simultaneous flutter of wings, as if gunfire had launched them airborne in a swarm that extended, then collapsed as it veered southeast across the valley toward the treed hillsides below Mount Baker’s stone flanks.
He watched them fade over the golden fields into a hazy mob before disappearing into the blue-black sky itself. He felt so much a part of them that it half-startled him to look down and find himself still there, left behind, alone and buzzing like a tuning fork. He took a breath, shuffled his feet and heard the party behind him, sounding too close. He decided to go find Madeline before he lost the nerve or the words. But when he turned he saw that everyone had already spilled into Sophie’s yard and the street, all of them seemingly staring at him. He glanced around behind him, to see if there was anything else they could be looking at, but there wasn’t. Turning back, he spotted his sequined mother leaning against his father. He saw Sophie filming, then heard and saw McAfferty and Dionne clapping, with others joining in. But it took him a few beats to realize that the lone figure striding toward him was Madeline Rousseau, her arms extended from her sides the way they did when she was telling you something that amazed her, or the way they did when she was about to give someone a hug so big that it required an elaborate windup.
He apparently wouldn’t need to summon the perfect magical sequence of words after all. He wouldn’t have to say anything. If he just stood still and waited, she’d walk right into him.