5
NORM HAD to wait until Jeanette got back from aqua aerobics to vent about the professor. And by the time he stomped inside, he found his wife clutching her chest and cooing as if soothing an imaginary infant. “Coca-Cola was originally green,” she whispered, then followed that with “Astronauts can’t whistle on the moon.”
The last time they’d made love her unfocused expression made him worry that nothing was registering. The sensation of multiple alarms ticking at different speeds left him dry-mouthed, a loose wire flickering in his chest. How long before her mind misplaced the yellowing image of him that had attracted her in the first place? Then what? Even with Brandon helping with the bills, he still didn’t know if he could finish the boat in time for Jeanette to remember anywhere they went on it, no matter how hard she exercised her mind memorizing strange facts or how optimistically she pumped herself full of ginkgo, choline, garlic, flaxseed oil and apple-cider vinegar.
Norm spent the rest of the day Wayne ruined worrying about his wife, his son and his cows, and dwelling on the rumor Sophie Winslow shared that Chas Landers found a duffel bag stuffed with $68,000 on the corner of his cranberry bog. Chas apparently assumed it was smuggling money, the masseuse told him, so he turned it over to the sheriff’s office. That’s right: Money fell from the sky, and Chas gave it to the county.
When Norm wasn’t moping about all that, he was lamenting his own miserable luck after finding four more cows with inflamed teats. Almost a third of his eighty-one Jerseys and Holsteins had it, according to the latest round of milk stats. Next month’s cell count would tell the whole story. Even with a closed herd, mastitis rarely spread this fast and was simple to treat. Iodine and more iodine. So what was going on? And exactly why had the last six calves aborted? Still, he resisted ringing his surly vet, given the expense and scolding that came with that. He led the four cows into the sick barn with the others, then reluctantly grabbed his sharpest blade and lopped five gangrenous teats he’d rubber-banded off the day before. That was another difference between him and the big boys. They didn’t bother numbing anything, just strolled up and whacked away like they were pruning trees. Norm was cleaning the knife when he heard the cattle trailer rattle up. Damn. He’d forgotten about the livestock auction. The entire day was wobbling off its axle.
Norm made sure Roony knew which two unproductive Jerseys to haul away, 29 and 71, then stepped out of sight of it all behind the barn for a smoke. Pushing sixty-three and still sneaking cigarettes. Copenhagen wasn’t killing him fast enough? He carefully positioned his body and clothes upwind, smoking arm extended, as if pointing out land through fog. Jeanette had troubles recalling some yesterdays, but her nose missed nothing. He inhaled deeper when the cows started their mournful bellowing. “It’s not that they know their cousins are gonna be butchered,” Brandon reassured him once, as if he’d recently chatted with them. “It’s just that they hate change.”
Norm faced Canada and glared at the glitzy hills east of Abbots-ford, where enormous windows twinkled like vertical swimming pools. Every third house was growing pot up there is what people told him. True or not, it fit into Norm’s growing sense of an upside-down economy. While he squeezed a living from sickly cows, Canadians made millions selling drugs and Seattle kids earned fortunes in Internet and wireless worlds Norm didn’t need or understand. Microsoft millionaires? Sounded like an Amway scam, yet he kept hearing about kids retiring in their thirties. Meanwhile, he didn’t have the slightest control over the cost of his product. When milk prices rose, the big boys expanded and prices fell while the cost of everything else went nuts. Property tax. Insurance. Farm equipment. Everything. Feed costs had almost doubled in the prior two years alone, but the cost of milk hadn’t changed much in decades and in fact was lower than it was in ’84, when over half the dairies in the valley lunged at the government buyout. Norm should have too. Nothing was more obvious than that now. Could have sold his herd at fourteen dollars per hundredweight, then converted his fields into raspberries, hired himself a few illegals and taken winters off—as long as he could bend his morality and patriotism around all that. But what pissed Norm off even more than dairies turning into berry farms was dairies turning into cul-de-sacs or toy ranches for the rich. And worst of all was when the rich left the barns and silos standing out of some do-gooder nostalgia for an America they never knew. Almost half the silos were no more genuine than the false storefronts in those back-road towns still sucking on the Old West titty. How long would it be before the valley’s dairy scene was nothing but the big boys and a few bedraggled family farms to amuse the tourists: Look! There’s Norm Vanderkool still milking cows on his bum knees.
Norm could hear the clock ticking but dairy farming was every day, twice a day, until you die or sell, which left little time to rethink much of it. And if you were stupid enough to pass on the buyout and simultaneously attempt to build a thirty-eight-foot double-ended ocean-worthy sloop, well …
He strolled the western perimeter of his property, absently noting where the fence needed the most mending, futilely trying to picture his son chasing aliens into the Crawfords’ back twenty. Does imagination fade with age to the point where you’re eventually reduced to only what you can actually see? Norm squatted as low as he could to get a different view of his land, reluctantly admitting to himself that he was looking for sacks of cash.
Sixty-eight thousand dollars! How does anyone leave, drop or misplace that much money? The mast and boom, unassembled, would cost six thou. Three tons of lead would still run him a grand if he melted it down himself. The sails could soak up another ten. And he was out at least eight for an engine, even if he went with a two-cylinder Yanmar instead of the four-cylinder Volvo he wanted.
The boat had already swallowed eleven years. Eleven. Why hadn’t anyone warned him about wasting what time remained on a project he’d never finish? He was thirty-five short, probably forty. And that left the cabin rough. Homey, isn’t she, Jeanette? He glanced around his darkening farm. Could he blame Washington Mutual for balking at a loan? Who wanted to gamble on a snake-bit dairy? His eyes settled on the boat barn. A monument to his ego? No. To his incompetence? Probably. To his insanity? Definitely.
Norm lit another Winston and shuffled back toward the barns, sucking it down so fast he burned himself. He knew he’d have to raise Professor Rousseau’s lecture with Brandon, though he could already picture his puzzled response. The patrol, of course, was Norm’s idea. It was high time Brandon learned how to interact and have a life beyond the farm, even if he continued to live in the basement with his dogs. Sure, his rent checks would help with the bills, but Chief Patera had convinced him that the patrol could pop Brandon’s bubble. Hell, he’d said, the kid’s in his twenties and still searching for something in the moment that nobody else sees, which sounded as accurate as any diagnosis Norm had heard. What he hadn’t expected was for Brandon to look like such an easy target, and wondered again if he’d pulled strings for his son or for himself.
Norm had put on thirteen pounds since Brandon took the Greyhound—there was no talking him into flying—to the academy. Thirteen pounds, Brandon’s birth weight. They’d tried for almost five years before a somber doc pointed at an ultrasound of Jeanette’s pinched tubes. They were filling out adoption forms when she missed her second period and her belly ballooned before their eyes. Gotta be twins, right? Norm had twins on his mother’s side, and Jeanette’s sister had identical boys, but the doc heard just one heart. Then came the whopper C-section.
Norm knew women obsessed over babies, yet in Jeanette’s case it never passed. He came to see his son as an intruder sent to drive his wife crazy. She dismissed his speculation that Brandon’s early peculiarities were side effects of spoiling. And she resisted efforts to diagnose him, withholding information from doctors such as the fact that he didn’t speak clearly until he was three. Still, one pediatrician suggested Brandon’s mannerisms and obsessive tendencies pointed toward mild autism, which meant he’d likely struggle with school, friendships and intimacy. Jeanette suggested the doctor was an idiot and demanded another. By second grade, it became alarmingly clear that Brandon couldn’t read, that he was guessing and thought everyone else was too. Norm remembered Jeanette writing a sentence: The boy made a bird out of clay and put a fish in its bill. When Brandon read it aloud it came out: “The boy made a bed out of clay and pet a frog in its bill.”
Jeanette patiently tutored him on the sounds of letters and drilled him on the tricky in-between words—was, saw, is, as—he kept tripping over until she concluded that the harder he concentrated, the worse it got. Meanwhile, birds came easily, and Jeanette fed his fascination as if both their lives depended on it. He memorized Birds of Puget Sound before he turned ten. Your son has a gift, Jeanette told him, for birding by ear and for mimicking their voices. Terrific. It never struck Norm as anything to boast about. You should hear my son’s duck call! Next came his bird-rescue phase—he turned half the basement into a bird ER—and then his bird-art binge. He wouldn’t paint from photos, preferring instead to paint from memory—usually in-flight smudges of color and motion with a floating beak, an oddly detailed wing and a yellow eye in there somewhere. By his early teens he had a body that could jack a Honda onto two wheels, yet all he seemingly wanted to do with it was play with the cows, build strange forts and paint more birds.
Strolling back to his sickly cows, Norm tried to comfort himself with the fact that the big boys would’ve long since slaughtered half his burger cows and put Pearl down a decade and nine calves ago. They demanded eighty pounds of milk per cow per day, whereas Norm asked his for forty or fifty. Pearl gave sixty, and never spent a day in the sick barn. She was so old and remarkable that Norm made an exception he regretted and let Brandon name her.
Truth was, for the most part Brandon was great with cows, particularly at noticing things Norm and most dairymen missed—the beginnings of swollen joints, split hooves or eye infections, and the potentially agitating shifts in lighting, texture, colors or sounds. The problem was he crossed the lines. Always had his hands on them, especially when comforting mothers who’d just had their calves taken away. He even got down on the ground and let them lick his head and neck with their long, rough tongues—something Norm desperately hoped nobody else ever saw. Plus, how long could he watch his enormous son crouch beneath cows? Milkers should ideally be five feet, like Roony, not pushing seven.
Norm heard voices ringing from Sophie’s house and pictured clinking crystal, bubbled drinks, cream-filled sweets and sensual odors. She entertained so often it was as if she were running for something. Norm increasingly felt like the only man in the valley who hadn’t gone for a massage. Her clients, based on the succession of cars behind her hedge, included Blaine’s deputy mayor, Lynden’s assistant city manager, First American’s veep, the head of the BP and many, many others.
It amazed Norm how little he knew about her, even though they’d talked at least weekly since she inexplicably moved into the house she’d inherited from her aunt. A week later she’d placed an ad in the weeklies: Give your body the gift it craves. It felt like a brothel had moved in next door.
But it was more than that. She read him like a relative who’d heard about him for years. Without warning, she asked if he was worried about running out of time. No explanation, just the question, as if his fears were stenciled across his forehead. Then more questions, as if what he said mattered, as if she were interviewing Moses.
Norm heard dozens of rumors about her. She rocked preemies at the hospital, led aqua aerobics classes at the YWCA and ran current-events discussion groups at retirement homes in Abbotsford, which was probably what sparked the speculation that she was a Canadian spy. And she was definitely either independently wealthy or selling more than massages. How else could a single masseuse afford such an extravagant home renovation? She was a former stewardess. No, a dental hygienist. She came from eastern money, right? Actually, a horse farm in Indiana. Or was it Austin? She had an accent, but it wasn’t exactly southern. Chief Patera insisted she’d been divorced at least twice and attempted suicide at least once, but it sounded like he was guessing. Others claimed she was a widow whose husband died suspiciously. And getting clear answers from her was impossible. She’d moved around a lot, and had some relationships end poorly. When she did offer something specific, it was oddly personal.
“I had an unusual mother. When I was thirteen, I invited three friends over for the first slumber party I was ever allowed. Cleaned the whole house myself and filled the basement with balloons. I was so excited it was hard to breathe, and I had asthma, so I was hitting the inhaler. My mom was yelling at me to calm down, and my dad was yelling at her to quit yelling at me. Well, none of my friends showed up. They all forgot about it. That’s what they said, anyway. I couldn’t stop crying, which led to more yelling. So my mother left the house and brought me home a cake that had a miniature gravestone in the middle of it.”
Usually, however, Sophie simply redirected Norm’s questions. And when she leveled her gentle green eyes on you, it was like your favorite sister asking you to please respect the privacy of her diary. Then she’d whisper a question, pull you closer, cock her chin and make you want to spill whatever guts you had left.
Did her massages have happy endings? Norm wondered. Of course they did. He heard a crane in the distance stacking steel girders at the corner of Northwood and Halverstick. Yes, a brothel next door and—coming soon!—a Las Vegas-style casino a mile down the street. What would life feel like if it were built around pleasure and temptation? What would it feel like to not second-guess yourself at three fifteen every morning? Something beyond Sophie’s sympathetic eyes made him want to tell her everything and, worse, anything. Maybe it was as simple as those shapely lips, which he’d seen elicit whatever the moment called for—arousal, compassion, confession. Or perhaps she sensed he was that easy to split, like a roast so ready you could carve it with a fork.
Norm heard more women laughing freely, as they often did when men weren’t around, and pondered again whether Sophie passed along what he told her. People blew through her house all day long getting what their bodies craved. Did she share his words?
He kicked lumps of snow walking back to the barn, hoping for the thud of cash, delaying thoughts about his sick cows as long as possible, wincing at laughter that reminded him of ducks.
Of course she did.