Migratory Animals (11 page)

Later, when he was too drunk to drive her home, she agreed to
stay the night if she could camp out downstairs. He gave her his blue insulated sleeping bag and then zipped himself up next to her in a cotton army-green one that had belonged to his father, enduring the hard floor in the sick hope she would turn to him for comfort. But Flannery slept spiraled in on herself the whole night.

“That one's called a ‘Royal Coachman.' That one's a ‘Peeper Popper,'” he said, pointing at the flies displayed on the wall. “A ‘Humpy Blue.' And . . . I can't remember the rest.”

“You never told me your grandmother was into fly-fishing.” She lifted her other hand into the air and pretended to catch the flits of sunlight that played on the wall.

“My grandfather fished; Abuela tied the flies. He didn't have the patience for it.” Santiago's father had rarely taken him to visit his abuelos at their small tin house on a Rio Grande tributary, where they fished and raised corn and cleaned houses at some of the ranches nearby, his grandmother frying up pieces of queso blanco at the stove and singing songs in Spanish that Santiago never had the chance to learn. Recently Santiago had begun to understand that his father was probably more embarrassed than he was estranged from his parents, critical of their dirt floors and lack of interest in learning English. His father thought their way of life, their poverty, might be contagious.

“Your grandparents were a team,” said Flannery, smiling. He loved her smile, how it transformed her otherwise ovoid face, giving it dips and contours, a more complicated landscape. This morning they didn't talk about Molly or his father, but he wanted to turn to her and say,
Well, you must stay now. How could you go back to Africa after this?

“Would you ever tie flies?” Santiago asked instead, rubbing her shoulder with his thumb.

“Give me a lover and a fulcrum, and I'll change the world.”

“Lever.” He turned inside his sleeping bag to look at her. She faced the ceiling and her small pink ears stuck out from her hair like seashells.

“Lover. Lover. Lover.” Her tone was hard when she said it. Each word a whip.

He thought of the first time he'd laid eyes on her. It was the Night of Decadence party, a bacchanal thrown by Marsh students each Halloween and known for its scandalously clad, drug-fueled dancing—an interesting proposition at a nerdy little engineering school. He saw her walking across the quad wearing nothing but a G-string and pasties, having convinced an art student to paint the rest of her body the white and black of a Halloween skeleton, so naked even her bones showed. She set up a row of tequila shots on the picnic table outside and said to Santiago, “I don't know about you. You look like trouble.”

In their sleeping bags on the floor of his fire station, Santiago could feel Flannery becoming restless. He said, “It's Saturday morning. Let's troll the garage sales.”

“I have to go into the lab.”

“Later.”

She bit her lip and shrugged. Santiago took it for “yes.”

By midmorning it was already hot, and Santi felt his underarms dampen, which he hated.

“A widow,” Flannery said, holding up a plastic turkey. “He was a hunter. He died years ago, but she's only now able to finally let go of all his stuff.”

“She cried into his clothes every night, but not because he was dead,” Santiago added, “but because she'd cheated on him for years with his twin brother and the guilt was too much.” There were
stacks of T-shirts and cargo shorts and flip-flops on a foldout table, science fiction paperbacks in a box beneath it. Incense and potpourri and accordion fans.

“And she couldn't tell anyone because the twin brother was the married mayor of Georgetown, until he left his wife of twenty years—not for her but for a stripper from the Yellow Rose . . .”

“. . . who was working her way through medical school . . .” He turned an orange-and-yellow hurricane lamp over in his hands.

During the summer when Flannery crashed with him in Boston, they'd spent weekends crisscrossing Cambridge looking for yard sales, stopping to flip through yellowed paperbacks, scratchy LPs, army fatigues, heavy clip-on earrings, scented Christmas candles, teacups with saucers, dolls with missing limbs, rusted wrenches, and big bunches of cloth flowers faded from too many days in the sun. Life's detritus. They did the commuter crossword puzzle over day-old glazed donuts, Flannery sometimes pretending she didn't know as many answers as she did just so Santiago wouldn't become too frustrated and throw the newspaper across the room. He knew this, and he let her. Three down: Sound that might indicate hunger. Mew. Thirty across: One with a growing hobby. Gentleman farmer. When the summer was gone, so was she, not even a mixed tape for him in the mail.

“Santi,” said Flannery. “It's boiling. One more, then let's head back.” They were only on their second yard. With the app Santiago downloaded on his phone, it was much easier to find garage sales than it had been back in Boston, when they'd had to go aimlessly looking for homemade signs with Marks-A-Lot arrows.

“Right,” he said. Flannery always did what she wanted. “We should get something for Molly.” He looked around. “What about one of those weird, splotchy hand-dyed scarves?”

“Is she still obsessed with scarves?” asked Flannery, grinning at him. “I love that you remembered that.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

Instinctively, Santiago reached a hand into the messenger bag he always carried slung across his chest, feeling into its depths for the 1950s Dashboard Jesus and fingering the plastic hand that shaped a blessing. He and Flannery had bought it at a garage sale almost a decade ago now. Santiago didn't really believe in these things, in relics or even in Jesus, but something had moved him to slip it into the bag that morning, a talisman in his quest to woo Flannery back, a link to their past before Nigeria got in the way. His father may have let the good life pass him by, but Santiago was not going to make that mistake.

Now was the time, he thought. “Flannery, look at me.” He spun her around to face him. “You need to call your sister.” Part of him felt guilty for using Molly in this way, but he believed what he said was also true. Molly needed Flannery; she always had.

She shrugged him off.

“You will regret it, Flan, if you don't do this right. I'm telling you.”

She looked up at him, and her eyes were slightly altered, moony. He was getting through. Then, she half smiled and looked off in that way that meant the conversation was over.

There was so much else he wanted to say. He wanted to remind her about how she'd stayed up all night at Dryden House helping him finish a model due the next day, sitting hip to hip with him at the kitchen table, painstakingly gluing into position bits of balsa wood and Styrofoam as well as the little plastic figures he included to give it scale, like a bride and groom atop the cake; and how when her mother died senior year, for two weeks straight he played nothing
but My Bloody Valentine—her favorite sad band—during his 2:00
A
.
M
.–6:00
A
.
M
. shift at the college radio station. It had been his way of holding her hand, of serenading her grief.

As they walked along, side by side, together, handling goods they had no intention of buying, Flannery turned to Santiago, her mouth open as though she were releasing moths captured inside. Then, he heard the Pavement riff he'd programmed into her cell phone the night before. Her phone was ringing.

She closed her mouth and looked down at the screen. “It's Kunle.” And the moment was broken.

As Flannery walked away, Santiago tried not to notice how her face relaxed when she talked to this stranger on the other side of the world. He took his own phone out of his pocket. He had one missed call from a client, Kit Hobbes. As he hit the dial button, Santiago allowed himself to hope the man was calling to give them the green light on his vacation home design job.

“Kit Hobbes. How's life treating you?” he said, trying to sound like Harry did when he talked to big clients. Santi wandered back to his car and got inside to escape the ambient chatter of other yard-sale shoppers.

“A problem, I'm afraid.” Kit was an executive for a local organic juice company. Harry and Santi had designed a small home for him that cantilevered over Town Lake on the still-underdeveloped east side of town. They'd only landed the job in the first place because Kit knew Harry's parents in Houston, but he liked their design and promised them more work.

Listening, Santiago cringed as Kit explained that all the insanely expensive copper fittings on the deck were starting to green and crumble at lake level. “I just don't think it's going to hold up.”

The copper had been Santiago's idea—it looked stunning—and
that meant he'd have to be the one to fix it, too. It would take a bite out of their account to coat everything with iron.

“I'll have our contractor out there to look at it next week.” Santiago tried not to let his voice tremble, to remember that he owned a design firm and knew what he was doing. “And while I have you on the phone, have you thought any more about the Marfa house addition? We have some time opening up and would love to get started.”

“Look. You and Harry are great kids. Talented. But that's not going to happen,” said Kit as Santiago's brain began to shut down, the voice on the phone sounding farther and farther away. “Our retirement took a hit in the market like everybody's. Maybe in a few years we'll revisit that project, okay?”

Santiago watched Flannery pace the side of the house, laughing and tossing her hair as she talked on the phone. The owners of the yard-sale house were parked in lawn chairs in the shade of the one pecan tree, staring at the customers as if they were thieves.

As he sat in the car, waiting for Flannery, his phone rang again, vibrating against his lap. It was Harry calling this time, probably to check up on things at “the office.” Santiago didn't pick up the phone. Not because of the copper mishap—that wasn't good, but it wasn't the end of the world. But because Harry had spent months now working on Kit Hobbes's Marfa house, inspired by the Donald Judd boxes that dotted the West Texas desert. Santiago thought he'd sold Hobbes on the idea when they talked about it last winter, but they hadn't actually inked a deal, which was what Santiago had implied to Harry. Harry was always bringing in projects with his Houston connections, and Santiago had only wanted to do his part. To show that he could make business happen with his talent. Hadn't that always been the dream?

Maybe they could sell the design to someone else, he thought. Santiago watched as Flannery moved toward his car, her phone now hanging dead in her hand. But who else would want to buy the design for a two-room cube in the desert? With one hand, he reached across the car to open her door; with the other Santiago felt again for his plastic Jesus, praying for many things in the only way he knew how.

W
hen Kunle called her at the yard sale, Flannery felt relief. Anything to take her mind off Molly. Anything to bring back Nigeria.

“Did you get it?” she said before hello.

“Once again, robbed of the Nobel Prize by those bastards in Stockholm.”

She snorted. “Did you get the tourist visa?”

“No.”

Flannery sucked in her breath.

“They rescheduled the consulate interview for next week.” He couldn't hide the disappointment in his voice. “Rotimi's kids are driving me mad—Prosper actually took a piss on me in the middle of the night, poor kid.”

Kunle was staying with his brother's family in Lagos, where real estate prices were so high that Rotimi's family had to squeeze into a two-bedroom flat, which meant Kunle was sleeping on a king-size mattress with the children (Praise, Promise, Precious, and Prosper) while he waited for the visa interview. Unlike other megacities, Lagos didn't have satellite slums: the whole place was dilapidated and mired in extreme poverty—or at least that's what Flannery had read in
The New Yorker
. But living in Nigeria one eventually learned to make subtle distinctions between decrepitudes, to consider factors such as the density of trash along the road, how many people were
asleep on benches among the market stalls, if any paint had been used on buildings. In areas of town that at first seemed indistinguishable from others, one began to intuit the presence of elite compounds and neighborhoods hidden behind locked gates and cinder-block walls spiked with broken glass.

“And you? How far?” Kunle asked in Nigerian slang. “Have they found your bike?”

“Ha. Even our police don't give a shit about a stolen bicycle in the hood.”

“
Abeg
, move somewhere safer, baby.”

Flannery's new apartment was a nondescript one-bedroom east of I-35. As much as she liked the idea of dirt-cheap rent and a quick bus commute to the Climate Institute, passing storefronts hawking bright pink piñatas and pulled pork sandwiches, she felt guilty living on the east side, another overeducated Caucasian bringing gentrification and an eventual hike in property taxes. But it was a good thing she'd taken the place—Kunle had a job teaching biology at a public university, but the government hadn't paid faculty salaries in months because of another budget shortfall.

“Your flat sounds like a dump,” he continued, pressing the issue. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine him standing next to her in his blue soccer jersey and ironed khakis. “You haven't been there a month, and your bike's already been pinched. It suffers you more than Nigeria.” He seemed to have forgotten she decided on a bike rather than the used hatchback she'd been eyeing (much harder to steal) because his father had come down with spinal meningitis, needing weeks of treatment in the hospital, which had siphoned both their savings.