Migrators (2 page)

As he took his shots, something up the hill banged, sending the bird back to flight.

Alan sighed. He reviewed his last shots. He saw three pictures of a yellow blur.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Alan turned. What was up that hill? He picked his way across to the other side of the dam, miraculously keeping his feet dry, and beat his way through the grass up the far bank. These woods weren’t orderly rows of planted pines, they were the twisted intertwined work of unchecked nature. Alan fought his way through a patch of raspberry bushes and closely-packed alders.
 

Bang. Bang. Buzz.
 

Alan cocked his head. The last thing sounded like an air compressor that you might use for a nail gun. The hill was getting steeper. Alan paused and looked left and right. He saw daylight to his left. He headed towards it.

Through some scraggly, thorny bushes, Alan emerged onto a path. He saw a sign. It read, “Kingston Snowmobile Club.” Below the words were a picture of an ATV with a line through the machine.
 

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

Alan walked up the path for a bit and then as it curved left, he picked his way through a more manageable forest of respectable trees.
 

Bang.

The sound was close. Alan dropped to a crouch and turned slowly. He held his camera near his face. He felt like a lion cub, play-hunting by chasing his father’s tail, but it was better than taking a blurry picture of a yellow bird. Alan crept towards the source of the noise.
 

Movement caught his eye and Alan froze. He got down on his knees and lowered himself to his belly for the second time that day. He hid his face behind the camera and scanned up the hill through his lens.
 

He found his quarry.

It was a man—gray hair at his temples, thoughtful dark frames on his glasses. He wore a blue felt shirt rolled up to the elbows over a white t-shirt. He wore clean blue jeans and hiking boots. He carried a nail gun tethered with a red hose.
 

Bang.

The man fired a nail into the underside of his deck.
 

Bang. Bang.

Alan snapped a couple of photos of the carpenter as the man climbed down from his ladder and moved it over. The man picked up another short piece of wood and climbed back up.

Bang.

Alan got photos of the man, his deck, and the house. He pointed his lens to the sky and slinked backwards, staying low until he got to a tree. Alan used the tree for cover as he stood and backed away slowly.

Bang. Bang.

The farther he got from the tree, the less it shielded him from the house. Alan edged around the side. The carpenter held his nail gun at his side and turned Alan’s direction. Alan froze. The carpenter raised a hand to shield his eyes from the sun and peered right at Alan’s position. The man began to climb down the ladder.

Alan turned and ran.

He reached the path and tucked his camera under his arm as he barreled down the hill. The trail ended at the edge of the beaver pond. Alan turned left and tried to keep his speed as he tromped through the tall grass at the edge of the pond. He had to reach the dam before he could cross and get back to his own property. Out here, he felt exposed.

Alan reached the dam with only a little mud splashed up his pants. He sprinted across the top of the dam, staying light on his toes and willing himself across. He had a big smile on his face as he reached the other side. He pulled at the low branches as he jumped over a muddy patch on his way back to the snowmobile trail.
 

The trail was right there, only a few steps away, when his foot came down in the wrong spot. His shoe disappeared down into a black muddy hole. The mud made a slurping noise as it sucked the shoe from his foot. Alan looked down at his sock, half-pulled from his foot and soaked through. He began to giggle.

With his camera capped and zipped into the bag, he hung it from a branch as he plunged a hand into the cold mud. He found his shoe. The ground didn’t want to let it go. Alan laughed out loud as he liberated his shoe from the ground. It was covered in thick black slime.
 

He groaned as he slipped his foot back into the cold shoe. Before heading down the path, he looked back over his shoulder. The man with the blue shirt and professor glasses was standing on the opposite bank of the pond. Alan waved and smiled. He grabbed his camera bag and ran back towards his house.

X • X • X • X • X

By the time he got home, Alan’s lungs ached every time he took in a deep breath. He ran right past the farm truck—he didn’t want to get the inside all muddy. In the dooryard, they had a little pump hooked up to an old well. The water wasn’t good for drinking, but it was good enough to hose off his muddy pants and shoes. Alan stripped down in the dooryard as he got cleaned up.
 

He hung up his shoes and carried the rest of his clothes in a dripping bundle to the washing machine. After a shower, he put away the rest of the laundry from the line. Clouds were starting to build in the west.
 

When he walked out back to get the truck, Alan was on high alert. He imagined the carpenter watching him from the woods as he turned around in the field and drove back towards the barn. By the time he put the truck away and started getting ready for dinner, he’d managed to forget about the man.

Alan pulled a steak from the freezer and set it to thaw on the counter. She shucked corn, snapped green beans, and mixed a batch of cookies. He was sweating as he waited for the oven to heat up. Alan looked at the clock for the twentieth time. It was 4:30—where was Joe?

He did the math again. Extended day ended at four, when the day shift at the woolen mill ended.

Out at four, fifteen-minute bus ride home, five minute walk from the place where the bus turned around, and it all added up to where-the-hell-was-Joe o’clock.

Alan shut off the oven and headed down the hall.

He stopped with his hand on lever of the screen door. Alan decided to give his son another twenty minutes before he went looking.

He crossed the hot kitchen and turned the oven back on. A few minutes later, it beeped to signal it was up to temperature. Alan put the cookies in and waited. He stood, looking out the window at the quiet yard as they cooked. The window over the sink looked across the driveway to a lonely maple tree that shaded a sundial. He wondered why anyone would put a sundial in the shade and then he noticed the handles on the concrete pad. It was the cap for the septic tank. All their waste would collect in some tank in the ground. Country living.

The timer went off. Alan pulled the cookies from the oven and set the trays down on the stovetop.
 

He dropped the third one when the screen door banged shut.

“Shit,” Alan whispered.

“Dad, you shouldn’t say that,” Joe said. He flopped his book bag down on a chair.

“Pretend you didn’t hear that,” Alan said

“Okay,” Joe said.

Alan used a spatula to scoop the floor cookies into the trash.

“Can I have one?” Joe asked. He sat at the kitchen table. “It’s hot in here.”

“You can have one after dinner. How was school?”

“It was okay. There are two other kids named Joe in my homeroom, so the teacher said she was going to call us by our last names. One of the kids wants to be Joey though. How come you never called me Joey?”

“That’s a kangaroo name,” Alan said. “We were afraid you’d hop everywhere.”

Joe laughed.

“Where’s mom?” Joe asked. He swung his feet beneath the table and squeaked his sneakers on the floor.

“Not home yet,” Alan said. “Didn’t you get out at four? Why did it take you so long to get home?”

Joe was unzipping his book bag. He pulled out a notebook and slapped it on the table.

“The bus dropped me off last,” he said.

Alan nodded. “Why is that?”

“I don’t know,” Joe said.

“You have any homework?”

“I did most of it in extended day. They give us time to do homework if we want. I just have to finish memorizing some vocabulary words, but there’s no test until the end of the week.”

“The end of the week is only the day after tomorrow,” Alan said.

“I know.”

Alan sat down at the table and picked up one of the books Joe had stacked there.
 

“Didn’t you learn algebra last year?”

“Some of it, but I think this book goes farther.”

“Maybe you should move up to eighth grade.”

“Dad, you promised. I already know kids in my grade and all the eighth graders are bigger than me.”

“Relax, relax,” Alan said. “I didn’t mean it.”

He set the book down. There were two private schools within twenty minutes. One was for boarders only, but the other allowed for day students. If they had money to burn next year, maybe they would have the conversation again. For now, public school was their only option. Buying the house from Liz’s cousins had boxed them in substantially.

“Did you meet any new kids?”

“Yeah, a couple,” Joe said. He was flipping through blank pages of his notebook. He found his way to a list of words spaced evenly down a page. “Do we have a dictionary?”

“Yeah, of course,” Alan said. He pushed away from the table and stood up. Down the hall, at the front of the house, the Colonel’s study was still populated with the old man’s books. Alan pulled a worn book from the shelf and turned as light flashed through the window. He expected to see the carpenter standing out there on the road. Instead, he saw his wife’s BMW turning into the driveway. Alan walked back towards the kitchen.

“Mom’s home,” Joe said as Alan set down the dictionary.

Alan watched through the window as his wife pulled up to the barn. The building was huge—there was space for five cars and a boat in there—but it seemed strange to watch such a modern machine pulling into the old red structure.

A few seconds later, Liz emerged from the barn. She held her briefcase in one hand and her phone in the other. She paused in the middle of the drive while she talked on the phone. Her face was all business. Alan couldn’t hear what she was saying, but she was clearly still in lawyer mode.
 

Liz took the phone from her ear, stabbed the screen with her thumb, and turned towards the shed door. The shed ran all the way from the house to the barn, but Liz always walked through the driveway. She said there were too many spiders in the far end of the shed. Alan heard the screen door groan and then slam shut as Liz came up the hall. Joe was flipping through the musty old dictionary.

The woman who came through the door to the kitchen had a totally different demeanor than the lawyer who had been arguing to the phone out in the driveway. That was one of the things that Alan loved most about his wife. No matter how much of a hard-ass her career made her in the real world, when she was with her husband and son, she was as sweet as a spring breeze.

Alan smiled and Liz beamed back.

“Hi, beautiful,” Alan said.

“Hey, handsome,” Liz said. She set down her bag and jacket and bounded towards Alan. He caught her in his arms and twirled her in the space between the cabinets and the refrigerator.

They smiled into each other’s eyes and then brought their lips together in the middle for a quick noisy kiss.
 

“Gross,” Joe said without looking up from his homework.

Alan set Liz gently back to her feet.

“What’s wrong with this one? He doesn’t hug anymore now that he’s a seventh grader?” Liz asked.
 

“He didn’t hug me either,” Alan said as Liz crossed the floor to their son.

She grabbed Joe around the back of his shoulders and squeezed him tight while laying her face against his. Liz took the seat next to Joe and picked up his math book. Alan turned his attention to wrapping each ear of corn in its own sheet of wax paper.

“It smells so good in here. What’s for dinner?” Liz asked.

“Corn, green beans, and you guys are having veggie burgers,” Alan said. “Cookies are for dessert.”

“You know what the Colonel used to say about string beans?” Liz asked Joe.

“All string, no beans,” Joe said. He was copying a definition from the dictionary to his list of vocabulary words. He didn’t look up to deliver the line.

“I guess I’ve told you that one before?” Liz.

“No,” Joe said. “I just guessed.”

Alan smiled—his son had inherited his mom’s dry wit.

“You did?” Liz asked. She grabbed Joe’s hand in both of hers. “Oh my, do you know what this means?”

“What?” Joe asked. He tried to look annoyed, but Alan saw the smile creeping in around the corners of his son’s mouth.

“It means you’re psychic, Joe,” Liz said. She pushed a blond strand of hair behind her ear. “This is a huge responsibility. You have the amazing ability to psychically guess your dead great-grandfather’s favorite expressions. You’re going to be famous all over the world.”

“Come on, mom,” Joe said. He couldn’t hide his grin anymore. “I’m trying to do homework.”

As she stood up, Liz cupped Joe’s chin and gave him a kiss on the forehead.

“I’m off to change. Don’t you boys start dinner without me.” Liz collected her bag and jacket and headed down the hall.

Alan finished his preparations for the corn and put the ears in the microwave.
 

“I’m going to go warm up the grill,” Alan said to Joe. He picked up the little metal tray that held the steak and the veggie burgers. He was careful to tilt the tray so the blood from his thawing meat didn’t trickle down to the burger side.

“It’s a little early, isn’t it?” Joe asked.

“I’m hungry. Aren’t you?”

“I guess. I’ll be out in a minute. I only have a little more to do.”

Alan backed into the screen door and opened it with his elbow. Across their little dooryard and the driveway, the Colonel had paved a small parking area. Two guests could park there side by side, but they never did. Anyone who came to visit always seemed to pull directly in front of the barn, blocking the cars parked inside.

Just past the driveway, the Colonel had built a little screened-in patio dubbed, “The Cook House.” It was just the right size for a picnic table, two folding chairs, and a grill. Alan liked to sit out here in the evenings. The screens did a good job at keeping out the bugs and you could experience the house without feeling encompassed within it. He sat the tray on the counter next to the grill and took a seat. Joe was right—it was too early to cook.