Migratory Animals (29 page)

As Santiago readied the knife, she stopped him. “Let me,” she said. It was not what she wanted to do, but what she should do—Flannery was beginning to understand the difference. “I caught him. I'll kill him.”

He showed her where to cut so as to make the end as quick as possible, and she gulped air and squeezed his pocketknife like it might jump or wriggle loose from her hand. As Flannery slid the blade in behind its eyes, she noticed the glint of blue iridescence that ran up each side of the speckled fish. She killed it. A pang went through her chest. Her mother. Molly. One day, her father and Kunle and Santi and Brandon and Alyce and Harry and Steven. One day, herself.

She looked straight ahead as Santiago took her photograph holding the brown trout by the mouth. From now on, she hoped she could
do what was right for her sister and her friends. And if she couldn't make her home with Kunle in Nigeria, she could at least spend her life as a distant caretaker of the Sahel. She would bring Kunle and his family snow in the desert; if it could be done, she would do it. Looking at the camera as the shutter clicked, she wondered what to do with Santiago. Set him free or keep him? He was such a painful sweetness. A different kind of home. One way or the other, he might still be saved.

I
n the kitchen, mixing himself a strong drink, Santiago thought about the winter break when he and Flannery took off with Alyce and Harry in Harry's Jeep, like two old married couples, listening to Lightnin' Hopkins cassettes, passing around fists of Twizzlers, rotating drivers each pit stop. Camping in Big Bend National Park, the four of them had been surprised by a freak snowstorm that blew in overnight and made the trails along the ridge icy and dangerous. That red and brown mesa landscape of far west Texas was usually dry and sunny even in cold January, and so they hadn't been prepared with snowshoes or spikes for their boots.

“Find a dead branch to use as a walking stick. Stay close. If you feel yourself slipping, crouch low,” said Harry as they finished packing up their gear. “And try not to take anyone else with you if you fall.”

“That's comforting,” said Flannery. “Isn't there another way back?” Santiago was the only one who knew she was afraid of heights, of standing near the edges of roofs or even balconies.

“Not if we want to get back to where we parked the Jeep,” replied Alyce. “Harry's exaggerating. It won't be that bad.”

Santiago silently positioned himself behind Flan as they started out on the trail and, when it became a steep drop on their right, he held her exposed shoulder with one hand and placed his right boot to the outside of hers. They stepped forward in sync, like a child dancing
with her father by standing on his feet. Desert lizards scurried across the whiteness in search of cover.

“Anybody else want a Leg Opener?” Santiago stepped into the “living room”—an open area on the second floor of the fire station—clinking the ice in his peach-colored glass of brandy and butterscotch Schnapps, the last crepuscular light fading outside the fire station's industrial windowpanes.

“Sure. And then I'll take a reach-around,” said Brandon, who'd recently cut his hair so the curls now sat tightly coiled next to his scalp.

“I'm sticking with my martini.” Steven didn't look away from the football pregame.

The televised picture was projected onto a white wall. Santiago and Steven sat like bookends on the worn leather sofa, Brandon sprawled in the imitation Eames chair. Santiago held a kitchen timer that went
tick, tick, tick
in the background. He was perfectly buzzed. He was thinking about not thinking about Flannery.

Last week, when he dropped her off at her apartment from the airport, she told him, “I need to take care of some things.” Santiago nodded, hoping these “things” had to do with breaking free of her commitments in Nigeria and preparing to make a life here with him. They'd made love, which must have meant something. But as the days passed without a phone call, the more nervous and fucked he became.

The timer went off, and Santiago slid into the kitchen to check on the fish. The red snapper still looked translucent in the middle, so he left it in for another minute while he cut the cornbread into squares, put the roasted asparagus on a serving dish, and tasted the pineapple and habañero sauce to make sure it didn't need more salt. This
efficient and well-prepared meal made Santiago feel that everything else in the world could be faked. He and Flan would be fine.

“Come and get it.” He slid the filets out of the oven.

The two other men walked into the kitchen and served themselves. Brandon shook his head and said, “No queso or guacamole? Nothing fried?,” at which point Santiago made a move to take his plate away. “Not complaining. Just saying.”

“How else are we going to keep our figures?” asked Santiago.

As the opening commentary became the first quarter, more mixed drinks made their way around the room, into glasses and through parted lips. Their typical debauch.

“Hey! Illegal formation!” yelled Santiago when the whistle blew.

Steven raised his eyebrows and squinted at the projection.

“That was an intentional grounding if I ever saw one,” Santi continued, an asparagus spear hanging from his fork. “What we need now is a good old-fashioned Statue of Liberty. No, a full-court press.”

“You said you wanted to watch the game with us.” Brandon did not look amused.

“I spent all afternoon googling sports. Can't you tell?” Santiago erupted into giggles. “As a Latino, I'm contractually obligated to prefer fútbol.”

“Where are the children? Obviously Jake and Ian need a real adult around here to teach them a true appreciation of the national sport of Texas.”

“I would do it,” said Santiago, “but my bike is in the basement of the Alamo.”

“Where is Harry, though, really?” asked Steven. “Wasn't he supposed to be here?”

“He texted that he was running late. Must have been traffic on his
way back from dropping the boys at the ranch.” Santiago tried to concentrate on the game, bodies dressed up like marshmallow men rolling around silently on the ground, wrestling for possession.

“This is a travesty.” But to prove Brandon wrong, the fortunes on the screen suddenly turned. A roar rose from the speakers. The Cowboys made an interception and scored a touchdown.

“How about dessert,” suggested Santi. “Rice pudding with cherry juice and pistachios.”

“Of course you did.” Steven stood up and slapped his belly.

It was during a commercial break that the inevitable finally happened. Santi was pissing in the bathroom when he heard a noise outside the door, the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. After flushing his brand-new high-efficiency low-flow toilet and walking back into the living room, Santiago found himself facing the strangely intense gazes of three men: Harry flanked by a worried-looking Brandon and Steven. Harry's face was puffed up, as though from a bad allergic reaction.

“You are a fucking asshole” was the first thing out of Harry's mouth, and suddenly Santi understood. Harry wasn't late because he was dropping off the boys, he was late because he'd been to the bank. Harry had finally learned about the money, or the lack thereof.

Santiago nodded his head, figuring it was probably better not to speak.

The first punch did not feel as expected. It didn't stun or tingle. Things didn't suddenly go mute, nor did his surroundings begin to move in slow motion, the mouths of his friends stretching into grotesque O's. The moment Harry's fist connected to the cheekbone, it just hurt like hell. Santiago's right hand went to the wall behind him for support while his other one automatically shot up, but not in time to block the second blow. Jab, cross, hook. His father had
taught him that, too. After the third punch, Santiago fell down to his knees.

By this time Steven and Brandon were shouting and pulling Harry back by the shoulders. Everything became incredibly loud, Brandon and Steven yammering over each other, trying to figure out what was going on. Santiago hoped he looked stoic and apathetic from his position on the floor as Harry stared him down, ignoring the men grabbing and pulling at him from the back, arms loose by his sides. He knew Santiago wouldn't fight back. And he didn't.

“How could you? You screwed us. You totally screwed us,” Harry was saying, at which point Steven and Brandon stopped talking, loosened their grips, listening. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

Santiago had no answer. Would anybody believe that he hadn't allowed himself to imagine this far ahead? Hadn't allowed himself to consider that things might not work out for him, after all his struggles to get out of the Valley? Hadn't he gone to the right schools, met the right people, worked hard? His tongue tasted like copper.

Santiago tried to stand just as another punch was thrown. And finally, things did begin to slow down. Wafts of sound floated above him. Santiago was hurting. Pathways of hurt flowed out from his face, through his head and torso and limbs, to places that hadn't even been touched, a domino effect, the train tracks of his nervous system stinging and crying out for some sort of relief. He had failed.

Amid this embarrassment and defeat and physical humiliation, Santiago remembered: Beating sun. Prickly weeds. Sweat dripping down his neck. He was in high school and his father punished him for coming home drunk and passing out on the kitchen floor by making him mow the yard, hungover in the one-hundred-degree Brownsville heat. Santiago mowed the words
LIFE IS PAIN
in big letters in the front lawn before slowly erasing them as he pushed the
machine over prickly weeds in the beating sun, oblivious to the fact that one day this wouldn't be the worst thing his father did to him. That one day the worst thing would be imagining how the seat belt felt locked in tight around his father's torso as the car plunged into a ravine, no bobble-headed Dashboard Jesus to wink and nod along with him as they flew.

“Somebody around here has to start telling the truth,” Harry was saying to the other guys and Santi wanted to respond,
Why in the world does anybody need to do that?
And as he watched his friends, now bickering among themselves—Harry whose wife didn't love him and Brandon whose wife was dying and Steven whose farm was going bankrupt—Santiago had the realization that this wasn't all about him. Some type of pain ran like a thread between all of them.

He closed his eyes, retreating once again into the memory of the winter camping trip. The morning of the snowstorm, burrowed away from the cold in the sleeping bags they'd zipped together, Santiago had sensed sunrise through closed eyelids, floating half suspended in dream matter until Flannery touched the tip of her cold, freckled nose to his.

O
n the day before Thanksgiving, Molly borrowed Alyce's truck to drive into town. The low-water crossing was covered by six inches of water, enough to make them nervous about splash damage to the engine of Molly's low-riding compact, but there was no indication of the impending flood.

Molly had an appointment at a women's clinic in town. Only visibly pregnant because she was otherwise so thin, she wore a gray hooded sweatshirt, bushy brown hair sticking out from the hood like a lion's mane. Alyce noticed she hadn't bothered to make herself breakfast.

“And you want to go by yourself?” asked Alyce again, fishing for the spare keys in one of Harry's messenger bags.

“No worries.”

“Someone's got to pick you up after. They require it, don't they?”

“They want me to stay overnight—in case of any complications with my HD.”

Before Molly turned to leave, Alyce reached out and touched Molly's forehead with the tips of her fingers, like a blessing.

Each morning Alyce felt slightly less groggy than the one before, Molly having made progress in coaxing Alyce toward the circadian rhythm of the mainstream world. The tightness in Alyce's chest was loosening, and most of her breaths now arrived without effort. Alyce
was wary, though, because she knew the change was temporary. The molasses would be back. Maybe next week. Maybe later today.

The tapestry was making good progress, and Alyce anticipated working through Thanksgiving Day—Harry and the boys would be at his parents' in Houston, and it had been decided she would remain at the ranch. Everyone agreed with the arrangement (except the boys, who, like most children, had no choice). She would see them when they returned, and strangely, she was almost looking forward to the way their voices rang too loudly through the air, the way they stumbled through the house like drunks.

With Molly gone, Alyce sat back down at her loom, placing the soft pads of her bare feet on the wooden pedals, picking up the shuttle with her left hand, rolling her neck and starting where she'd left off, with Harry. He was the last figure before she wove herself. It had been easy to choose the colors for her husband—light blues and dark browns—but she was still experimenting with his form. She took a deep breath and began:

You've probably wondered how your father and I met. What happened the moment we laid eyes on each other.

Well, first I have to tell you that Flannery and I were known freshman year as the “Party Girls.” At a nerdy engineering college, it didn't exactly take much partying to get that reputation, but let's just say we tried to live up to our moniker, rushing home from class to study so we could make it to the campus pub by ten. I'd actually prefer if you boys experiment with pot instead—much safer as long as you don't just buy it off the street from some methhead who's cutting it with oven cleaner or whatever. I mean, you still have to be smart.

Anyway, at Marsh it wasn't unusual for there to be a keg somewhere on the weekends. One night, Flan and I were at a party across the quad. It was lame, a bunch of ChemEs sitting around not talking to one another, but we didn't want to leave because then where would we find free beer? So
Flan came up with the idea for us to steal the beer and take it back to our dorm. The keg was in the bathroom, only about half full, and so we just carried it out through the other bedroom suite and down the stairs.