Border Songs Read Online Free PDF Page B

when he was nine. Until then he’d assumed everyone did.
    He picked up the binoculars, afraid the tug would scare them off. Buffleheads,
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. Common loons,
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. And horned grebes,
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.
    “See, that’s what I’m talking about,” Dionne said. “Not many agents would’ve even thought to take a closer look at that tug. Who knows what you’re gonna see, right? And if you don’t look, you won’t see. That makes life a whole lot easier now, doesn’t it?”
    She directed him back into Blaine to the Border Brew drive-thru where he heard a European starling mimic a cell-phone ring,
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. “All that shit aside, most of these guys are brave and smart,” she said. “And you’re lucky to have ’em on your side—even the roadies.”
    Brandon started to ask questions as they rolled off with Dionne’s triple Americano, but she talked right over him. The same thing happened at the academy, others rattling endlessly about golf, girls or cars, but whenever he started talking they eyeballed him as if he’d recited some obscure passage in a foreign tongue. And if nobody pointed out his misspeaks—such as
angel
for
angle, awesome
for
assume, aminal
for
animal
—he wouldn’t notice until the giggling started.
    His goal with Dionne was to keep his comments and questions as brief as possible. Danny Crawford taught him years ago to set an internal alarm that sounded whenever he heard only his voice for more than a couple minutes straight, and to watch for twitching eyebrows and curling lips that signaled he was talking too much or making no sense.
    “Iranians are screamers,” Dionne was telling him. “‘I’ll be killed if I go bock to Eron!’ Oh yeah? Well, it says here that you went back in the spring? ‘That was chust do see my family!’ And Koreans show up in huge groups of women stinking like kimchi and looking like prostitutes because they are. We get shitloads of Korean hookers.”
    “What about Russians?”
    “Some of the most violent people you’ll ever see. There’s nothing you can do that better professionals than you haven’t already done to them back in Russia. They don’t bother to lie, just tell you to fuck off to your face.”
    They glided east over the H Street hill through a tunnel of alders and firs and real estate signs pitching new subdivisions— RIGHT ON THE BORDER! —until the landscape broke into undulating pastures where glacial ice had rounded the hills into green and gold dunes before everything fell into a valley as flat as a pool table. Brandon felt familiar relief as the scenery opened up and they cut through the soothing geometry of farmlands toward Lynden.
    The sector was responsible for the thirty-mile stretch between the mountains and the sea, and the agents were free to patrol all of the terrain and the smattering of towns within twenty miles of the line. Lynden, the largest of these burgs, sat just five miles south of the border, yet seemingly considered itself closer to Holland than Canada, toutingits Dutch roots with everything from windmills to an annual Dutch Days festival. The other towns were smaller and simpler, clinging to their fading cowboy, ranching or family-farm credentials.
    Brandon turned north on the Guide Meridian, the valley’s main north-south drag, then wound toward the border through dairies and berry fields drained by large ruler-straight ditches deep enough to kayak through. He tuned out Dionne’s complaints when they got stuck behind a tractor pulling a dump wagon and watched the kitelike glide of a juvenile eagle,
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, the loopy trajectory of a northern shrike,
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, and the menacing hover of an American kestrel,
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. He scanned the sky for flocks of incoming songbirds. He’d heard of as many as a thousand exhausted barn swallows arriving at once from Panama or wherever they’d wintered. It had always dazzled him, the notion that boys near the equator considered his swallows theirs. The same acrobatic birds that made