Free Border Songs by Jim Lynch

When there’s no BP within fifteen minutes of our location, we go. It used to be as simple as waiting till midnight, but the sector has eighty-two BPs now and night shifts too. So you gotta know the agents, which isn’t easy because a third of them are new. Still, I could spot most of ’em out of uniform from thirty yards, and I’ve memorized the sounds of their rigs, and I know where they like to park and how they burn time—which ones spit seeds, which ones smoke, which ones play the deterrence game, which ones do their best to see absolutely nothing. I’ve done well, but I’m not in it for the money. It doesn’t work like that. You’ve got to feel it here.” He patted his chest with an open palm and sucked air through his little teeth. “The way I look at it, I’m delivering a medicinal herb to a neighbor who desperately needs it.”
    She smothered a laugh.
    Toby studied her face, as if measuring it for a mask. “We need more capable people willing to hump it across the water, because that’s the safest route.”
    “Yeah?” She glanced at Fisher.
    “I’m willing to pay extra for skilled people willing to deliver by boat, especially by sailboat.”
    She caught Fisher grinning, his eyes glittering.
    “Understand you sail,” Toby ventured.
    “No,” she said.
    Toby slow-eyed Fisher, who instantly reddened.
    “I race,” she said. “There’s a difference. So, what do you know,” she couldn’t resist asking, “about that new agent who tackled those illegals just over the border a week ago?”
    Toby hesitated. “The big guy?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Well, I’m told he spends a lot of time in the woods, but do I know his name? Is that what you’re asking? I know he’s been in the sector since—”
    “Brandon,” Madeline interrupted as several ducks started squawking.
    “That’s his name?” Toby leaned toward her, his eyeballs straining.
    “Brandon Vanderkool. Got homeschooled his last few years of high school and somehow passed the GED. Helped out on his dad’s dairy until last fall. We used to play together, seeing as how our folks lived across from each other back when nobody cared about the border.”
    Toby stretched his neck, tugging gently on his curls. “You used to play with him?”
    “You could call it that.”
    “He’s huge. Much of an athlete?”
    “Could hit a baseball a hundred meters but didn’t know his right from his left, so occasionally he’d run straight to third base instead of first.”
    Fisher laughed. “What else?”
    “He carries flies and spiders out of his house in his hands.”
    “A Buddhist?” Toby asked. “No.”
    “A gentle giant?” Fisher asked. “You could say that. An artist too.” “Yeah? What kind?”
    She grinned. “Paints, sculpts, all sorts of things.” “Is he any good? What’s it like?”
    Madeline blushed, suddenly uneasy about volunteering so much information about Brandon. “It’s hard to describe.”

9
    T HE ROBIN sang first, even before the Moffats’ rooster, followed by eight other species politely waiting for their sunrise solos while Brandon sorted mating songs from territorial songs—
handsome-and-available, handsome-and-available
versus
this-is-mine, this-is-mine
—until a song sparrow embarrassed them all with three different renditions of his manic ballad.
    A jolt of spring had followed the surprise snowstorm and stunned the valley all over again as trees, bushes and grasses strained to greet the long-lost sun and horses, goats, cows and deer browsed drying fields amid sudden insect hatches and incoming throngs of skinny, jet-legged birds from the south.
    Brandon didn’t have to work until late afternoon, so he rattled east in his father’s junker pickup after daybreak to see as many birds as possible. He heard a black-headed grosbeak,
twelve
, in the alders near the massive foundation of the new casino, then turned off Halverstick onto Holmquist and pulled over at its high point. From there he set up his Bushnell