Border Songs Read Online Free PDF

Brandon finally asked, his eyes scanning trees and sky for something other than blackbirds and crows.
    “
R
etired
O
n
A
ctive
D
uty. When a roadie responds to a sensor, it’s always a deer. They see more deer than Jane Goodall saw monkeys.I’ve seen a dozen in the thirty months I’ve been here. Guys like McAfferty see a few every day. And if they actually have to chase somebody, they like nothing better than to be told to abort their pursuit. But that’s for them to sleep with, okay? It has nothing to do with you. Don’t let anybody ten-three you unless you have to. They’ll want to ten-three anything that might get messy, which means just about everything. You gotta learn to tell them
too late
.”
    They pulled into Peace Arch, where eighteen Canadian homes flanked the park’s northern rim with a view of every picnic, Girl Scout festival and international drug deal. Brandon recognized the blue swoop across a curtain of poplars before he heard the signature heckle of a Steller’s jay,
eleven
.
    The park rolled west toward the bay, past the massive toothlike arch looming in the green expanse like a misplaced monument from some Parisian boulevard. Canada seemingly cared more about appearances, the U.S. side ratty and unimaginative compared to the sculpted shrubs and greener grass on the northern half of this shared space where citizens of both countries could mingle without consequence or scrutiny—although that notion felt increasingly dated, as did the arch’s feel-good etchings that called the two countries “Children of a Common Mother” and “Brethren Dwelling Together in Unity.”
    “There are agents who haven’t made a bust the entire time they’ve been here,” Dionne said, and left that dangling.
    They crossed rusty tracks so shabby that Amtrak barely used them anymore toward the marina and the defunct canneries where the continent unceremoniously tumbled down a modest bluff through dormant blackberry vines into Semiahmoo Bay, which the tugging moon transformed daily into a vast acreage of gleaming flats that turned to quicksand the farther out you strolled, and where Dionne had caught five Korean hookers—two of them stuck—one Sunday night when she first arrived, and where Brandon noticed three chevrons of water birds escorting an exiting tug.
    “Some of these guys are just flat out nut jobs. You met Larabee yet? Had a couple disks fused and got hooked on painkillers, so he keepshaving what we call ‘OxyContin moments.’ When he saw me last Wednesday he
introduced
himself. Seen him almost daily for two and a half years and he acts like I just transferred in from San Diego. ‘Larabee, it’s me!’ ‘Ohhhh, Dionne. Yeah, you look different.’ Then we’ve got a couple gun freaks, which makes for great PR. Agent Talley shot a twelve-year-old Lab on Delta Line a week before you showed up. Didn’t yell ‘Sit!’ or ‘Stay!’ Just,
boom!
Shot Old Yeller in the head. ‘Greetings! We’re with the government!’ And three of our esteemed agents were arrested in the past year for getting hammered and assaulting somebody, usually their wives’ boyfriends. The standout of that bunch would have to be Buzzy Is there a better name for a fuckup? There were even odds in the Yuma Sector on whether he’d make it a month without getting arrested. Well, Buzzy made it a grand total of sixteen days before he hospitalized some dude with a chair. You gotta understand that half of these guys are bored shitless transplants who haven’t adjusted to patrolling up here. Down south you just react. Up here you have to think. The tracking is different. The soil, the weather, the scams, the drugs—everything’s different.” She smiled wide enough for him to notice a chipped incisor and five silver fillings. “But hey, you’re from here, and you’re plenty different too.”
    Brandon’s mother had been the first to help him understand just how different. “You think in pictures, don’t you?” she’d asked