6
AN HOUR LATER, Sophie Winslow’s living room windows were still vibrating with laughter from her party. Alexandra’s rapid-fire cackle—hack-hack-hack!—sounded like an animal trying to scare predators off. Danielle and Katrina were drinking more aggressively than usual, lipstick gleaming, consonants softening as they bullied the others to play faster, fasder, fasda. The only two who weren’t already somewhat belligerent were Ellen—who kept saying “That’s so funny” without smiling so as not to deepen laugh lines—and Wayne Rousseau’s younger daughter, Madeline, which made sense. Everyone had at least twenty years on her and she was the lone rookie, filling in for one of three Canadians who helped give Sophie the dozen players needed to keep her international bunco game alive for a sixth straight month.
Danielle yakked about the upswing in Americans lining up for cheap Lipitor, Zoloft and Prozac at her Abbotsford pharmacy while Sophie waded through the gathering, inhaling the chatter. A new overpriced subdivision popping up north of Lynden. A fired middle-school teacher suddenly driving an Escalade. A stone mansion being built on a bankrupt dairy by a former rock star.
Sophie’s game plan was simple: Assemble the best-connected gossips she could find—bankers, nurses, pharmacists and others—and engage them in mindless gambling, then add liquor, and type it all up later.
Danielle asked if anyone else had heard the rumors about the linguistically gifted Abbotsford prostitute who could fake it in four languages, which led Alexandra to fake one in German—“Ja, ja! Das ist sehrrrr guuuut!”—and another in breathy French: “Out, out! Magnifique!”
“That’s so funny,” Ellen insisted as Alexandra popped eardrums with her machine-gun laugh. Madeline remained as contained as a house cat. The more everyone drank, the younger she looked: teenager thin, finger-combed bangs, mischievous eyes. It didn’t take long to explain the game to her. The women took turns rolling three dice at three different tables. First they rolled for ones, then they switched partners and tables and rolled for twos, and so on. They scored points every time the right dice popped up; three of the right kind was a bunco. The regulars were eyeballing Madeline not just because she exuded youth, but also because her dice seemed to be listening to her. She rolled two buncos in the first three rounds.
“So how many of you would’ve done what Chas Landers did?” Sophie asked as the gamblers switched tables and prepared to roll for fours.
“Cranberry Chas? What’d that old fart do?”
Sophie told them, then waited for the disbelief and questions to settle. “Don’t know exactly when he found it, but I do know he gave it to a deputy early this morning. Offered it first to the Border Patrol, who sent him to the sheriff’s office.”
Gasps and murmurs were followed by quips about brain-cell-killing pesticides. But beneath the tittering, Sophie sensed a new fantasy emerging in which clumsy smugglers drop or even plant sacks of cash on your property. Every month she sensed more excitement, as if the ever-escalating smuggling made everybody feel younger.
“Didn’t Chas roll his tractor and bonk his head a few years back?” Katrina asked.
“A cousin of mine,” Sophie said, “hit his head skiing and lost all his inhibitions. It damaged his frontal lobes, and he didn’t know what was appropriate anymore. He started walking around the neighborhood with his pants off, in an obvious state of arousal.”
“I live near Chas,” Katrina said, “and I think I would’ve noticed if he’d strolled by with an erection.”
“The money technically belongs to the county,” Sophie explained. “Same as dope to them, so I guess he did the right thing.” Chief Patera had told her earlier, though, while she loosened his left hip, that smugglers typically carry $40,000 bricks, which meant “dumbass” Landers probably had twelve grand in a drawer—or perhaps fifty-two.
“Don’t think he’s the only one finding money these days,” Alexandra offered. “There’s plenty of locals depositing stacks of hundreds.” She wiggled her eyebrows amid cries for names before reminding them of her bank’s confidentiality pledge, which she’d later break for Sophie.
Madeline casually asked whether the stakes could be doubled for the fives and received nothing but laughter.
Sophie found another opening while topping glasses at Madeline’s table. “Saw your father get into it with Norm Vanderkool out at the ditch this morning.”
“That’s how they get their exercise, isn’t it?” Madeline said, eyes on her dice.
Alexandra blurted a recollection of Wayne countering Norm’s RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS bumper sticker with his own RIGHT TO ARM BEARS.
“Seems they were arguing about Brandon this time,” Sophie said, then repeated what Dionne had told her about arriving at the Craw-fords’ field in time to witness Brandon’s flying tackle.
“He’s always been a freak of nature,” Katrina said. “Once saw him climb out of his father’s truck to help a night crawler across the road.”
“A worm?”
“Is there any other kind of night crawler?”
Alexandra did her best impression of Brandon’s snorting laugh. “Gotta admit he’s kinda handsome though, in an overgrown, innocent kinda way.” Then she broke into an off-key rendition of “Super Freak,” growling, “the kind you don’t bring home to mo-therrr …”
Sophie waited for a lull, then recounted Dionne’s full rendition of how he’d chased five illegals into her arms, and how the nationality of the injured couple remained a mystery. “They put them on the phone with AT&T translators and passed the call around, but nobody could place their accent. Can you imagine?”
She was mentioning that the woman Brandon caught had been wearing clothes made of silk and lamé when Madeline volunteered, “He called me.”
“Who?” Sophie asked, sensing that Madeline was drunker than she looked.
“Brandon.”
“Last night?”
“Uh-huh. He wanted to know if we’d seen anything. Needed to talk, I think.”
Sophie waited out the commentary. “So that was it?”
“Said the most interesting people he meets these days are criminals.”
“Out of the blue?”
Madeline smiled. “Completely.”
“He is the strangest,” Alexandra began over the rising gabble. “I mean, have any of you actually—”
“Speaking of strange,” Danielle interjected, saliva whistling in the corners of her mouth, “I hear you had a date with some foot-sucker, Madeline.”
Madeline’s head fell, and Sophie leaned forward as if to catch it. “Dessert anyone?”
She then glided toward the kitchen, blocking out the chatter and reimagining Brandon’s tiny, nameless couple flying into Vancouver, and waiting a few anxious days until some overpriced stranger they couldn’t understand coaxed them across the ditch. Is this America? The air, soil and trees looked and smelled the same. Are we really in America? And then—YES!—to be in the land of liberty for all of three electrifying minutes before getting chased and crushed by the largest, most unusual agent in the history of the U.S. Border Patrol.
Welcome to America, whoever you are.