Border Songs

Some people blamed his oddities on his dyslexia, which was so severe that one giddy pediatrician called it a gift: While he might never learn how to spell or read better than the average fourth grader, he’d always see things the rest of us couldn’t.

But with thousands honking simultaneously it is a wildly different noise, like the tribal roar you hear in stadiums, yet even greater than that, beyond animalistic, more like an enormous avalanche or the howl of the earth itself, the high-pitched hum of the sphere, if you could actually hear it, hurtling through space at sixty-six thousand miles an hour. Brandon tilted back and joined in, honking along with the flock until it split into long loose Vs and the bedlam faded to an industrial squeal, then to an ambient wail as the skeins turned to threads before fading to blue.

Two Iranians lectured him in broken English about the Bill of Rights, followed by an indignant Sri Lankan couple who scolded him for ruining their honeymoon. Brandon stepped into the woods to pee later that night and nine Venezuelans surrendered. The shit-magnet razzing roared to new heights.

Was it even a Cutlass? He could tell trucks from cars and sedans from compacts, but beyond that he was guessing.

One of them would hurl a rock, then a few more. Suddenly it’s raining rocks. Ya with me? That’s their cover, see, because no matter how big a weapon you come out the door with, you still don’t want to catch a rock in the face. A sawed-off won’t stop a rock, follow?

The more Wayne inhabited Edison, the more he wondered how a man cultivates a stubborn streak so pronounced that it transforms a daily barrage of failures into stimulants.

Know something?” Brandon said. “I think the most interesting people I’ll meet these days will be criminals—or people about to become criminals.

Though Brandon claimed to be six-six, because that was all the height most people could fathom, he was actually a quarter inch over six-eight-and not a spindly six-eight either, but 232 pounds of meat and bone stacked vertically beneath a lop-sided smile and a defiant wedge of hair that gave him the appearance of an unfinished sculpture. His size always triggered unreasonable expectations.

Strangers, he remembered, can tell you how old you are without trying. The looks you get or don't get let you know exactly where you're at, where you're headed and where you can never go again.

He looked older, too, like a man sucking it up, wrestling with problems he had been trying to conceal. This Norm saw as progress