Migratory Animals (18 page)

“Tell me about the palm-wine drunkard,” demanded Flannery playfully, yawning, hovering on the verge of sleep. International phone cards were so cheap that Kunle liked to stay on the phone while she fell asleep; he said he listened to the rocking of her breath for long minutes before hanging up.

“You know it better than I do now.”

“Pretty please.”

And so he began: “One day the palm-wine drunkard was drinking a jug of wine, when someone came running to tell him his tapper had fallen to his death from the top of a palm tree. The palm-wine drunkard decided he must travel to Dead Town in order to bring him back home. . . .”

I
can crush some pancakes,” said Harry, “but that's it.”

“Which is exactly why I invited you.” Santiago punched a button on his keychain to unlock the car. They were on their way to a cooking class at the organic fortress known as Foodie Farm. “To make me look good by comparison.”

Distracted, Santiago narrowly missed running over the heap of construction tools in the corner of the garage as they pulled out of the driveway. Santi was still in the process of renovating the fire station, but money was becoming a serious problem—one of the many reasons he couldn't refuse Harry when he'd called a month earlier to say, “You know how we just gave up our downtown office and decided to work out of the fire station even though it isn't exactly done yet? Well, how would you feel if the boys and I crashed there with you for a few, I don't know . . . let's say weeks?” Harry and Alyce's house in town was rented until next June, and anyway, he said he wanted the boys to think of this as a vacation. Boys' camp at Uncle Santi's.

Santiago was still stunned by Harry and Alyce's separation. (Harry called it “a break,” but Santi could hear the fear in his voice.) Harry had been the first person Santi met during freshman orientation back in college, and over the years he'd come to think of Alyce as a charming extension of his old friend. Santi loved Alyce, but when Harry called that day, it felt more like getting the news
that your best friend has become paralyzed from the waist down. He would never admit this to Alyce, of course, that she'd never truly existed for him as a separate entity.

Santiago had wondered why Harry wanted to stay at the fire station rather than with Brandon who, because of Molly's defection to the ranch, had a house all to himself that wasn't in the midst of renovations. But it soon became clear: Brandon was a wreck. He moped and cried and occasionally went on a rage. Santiago wasn't sure how much of Brandon's behavior could be attributed to his wife's diagnosis and how much to her absence. The last time Santi had gone over to keep his friend company, a pleasant evening with a couple of beers on the back porch talking local politics turned into Brandon, veins popping from his neck, pretending the fence was Molly's father.

“Can't believe I listened to him!” Brandon chucked two beer bottles, one after the other, at the wooden pickets, shattering brown glass in an unimpressive blast radius. Santiago stood, mouth open.

Just as quickly as the anger appeared, though, it subsided, Brandon shaking his head sadly and saying, “Shit, man. I'll clean this up. Go on home.” Everywhere Santi looked, things were falling apart.

He would have agreed to take Harry in anyway, of course, but a roommate helping with the monthly mortgage payment didn't hurt. The firm was technically already paying for half the renovations since the first floor would eventually become the office, but the firm's account was no longer in the black, unbeknownst to Harry. Santiago had cleaned it out fixing the water-damaged copper in Kit Hobbes's lake house, and then in secret, he'd applied for a small-business loan to keep things afloat. The fact that money for the Marfa project, which Harry had been working on for months, was not going to materialize meant no foreseeable injections of cash.

“Steven and Brandon are meeting us here?” Harry asked as they parked outside Austin's Foodie Farm, a wonder emporium of prosciutto,
persimmons, red seedless grapes, knuckled heirloom tomatoes, Brussels sprouts on the stalk, microbrews, ornamental gourds, free-range lamb—a veritable smorgasbord of all things haute and edible.

“Just Brandon. Steven's boycotting because they won't buy his beets.” Santiago zipped up a black hoodie over his tight-fitting Iggy Pop T-shirt.

He had charged to his credit card the expensive tickets for this afternoon cooking class put on by Sarah Bird, one of his favorite celebrity chefs, because he thought it would be a good bonding experience for his best friends, both suddenly cut loose from their domestic units and looking desperately to him. A role reversal that made him very uncomfortable.

“I'm trolling for free samples first,” said Harry, hands tucked in the pockets of his khakis as they stepped out from under the misty, slate-gray October sky and into the warm artificial light flooding giant crates of mushrooms with exotic Japanese-sounding names.

Santiago followed him to a transparent plastic pod holding cubes of cantaloupe. “No time for handouts, gypsy. We need to nab spots up close to Ms. Bird.”

“Ah, yes,” replied Harry in an exaggerated tone, stroking his chin. “So we can more clearly view the subtleties of her technique.”

“The subtleties of that ass, playboy.” Santiago took the toothpick stabbed with cantaloupe from Harry's outstretched hand and put it in his mouth.

As they made their way up the stairs to the demo kitchens, Santiago stopped two steps above Harry, took a deep breath, and looked back at his friend. “I've been meaning to talk to you. About the Marfa house.”

Harry held out a hand to stop his words. “I know.” Harry stepped up so that they stood on the same level. “I'm sorry I've been so slow
finishing it. Thanks for understanding.” Harry slid past him and continued up the stairs. Santiago bit his tongue and followed.

“You're going to cut your fingers off chopping like that,” said Brandon, as Harry fumbled awkwardly with the fennel bulb they were instructed to dice and caramelize as a crust for the pork tenderloin.

“Leave me alone,” said Harry, frustrated, “or I'm going to chop your fingers off.”

The cooking studio was arranged like a high school chemistry lab, each oblong station accommodating four students. Brandon, Santi, and Harry had been assigned a station with Ben, a chubby man of about fifty wearing a sweater embroidered with an outlandish winter scene featuring a reindeer sticking out its tongue to catch falling snowflakes and a clumsy snowman fumbling with a corncob pipe that looked more like an amorphous turd.

“Look here, Harry,” whispered Santiago, “if you just chop the whole thing in half and put it cut side down, it won't slide all over the place. And maybe tuck your fingertips under so the knuckles face the knife.”

Harry stared at Santiago blankly.

“What I like about cooking,” said Ben, insinuating himself into the conversation, “is that it's an art. Gotta find your own way of doing things, man.”

Across the station, Brandon rolled his eyes.

“Always start with whole spices,” said Sarah Bird at the front of the room. Looking at the tilted ceiling mirror, they could see the inside of Bird's frying pan filled with whole coriander, cumin, peppercorns, and star anise. “When you toast them, you're not looking for a color change but for the aroma to open up. If you overcook, they become bitter.”

As they worked, Brandon leaned into Harry and Santiago. “The
irises are gone. Molly dug them up and took them away.” Molly had become a ghost about whom they spoke in whispers.

“Why'd she do that?” asked Santiago, her name like a tender spot on his body.

But instead of answering, Brandon turned to Harry. “Have you talked to Alyce? What are they doing out at the ranch?”

Harry didn't say anything right away, still mutilating his fennel. “I honestly don't know.”

Santiago tried to tune out their pain as he julienned a Belgian endive into strips for what the chef was calling “salad nests.” Working with food was one of Santiago's few respites. The beautiful alchemy of collecting items that were nothing special on their own, then combining them in a measured and intricate dance to create something magical, or at least edible, was similar to what he did as a designer, except that the result of cooking was immediate. Food didn't take years to come to fruition. Food wasn't expected to last. Santiago recalled the summer when Flannery convinced him to give her cooking lessons, and they made pans of enchiladas or whole baked fish every weekend, inviting friends over like a normal couple who hosted dinner parties for other normal couples. Food was a great domesticator.

Brandon's cell phone vibrated its way across the metal counter toward Santiago, who couldn't help but see the caller: Flannery. As though she knew his thoughts. It took all his willpower not to snatch it up and answer himself. He turned toward his cutting board so that Brandon wouldn't realize he was eavesdropping.

After a long silence, Brandon whispered, “Flan, forget about that. . . . Even if you could make it work, it's just stealing moisture from one region and giving to another. I'm not sure it's even ethical.” After a moment he continued, saying, “I don't have time right now. Come to my office on Thursday.”

After Brandon hung up, Santiago forced himself to wait a whole thirty seconds before he began probing. It was a delicate skill: investigating and gathering evidence without seeming to do so. Like taking photos with the antique Yashica Mat-124 G that he used to check out from the photography lab at Marsh. He shot Flannery unaware, which was easy with the Yashica because one looked down into the top of the rectangular camera and out of several lenses that opened on the sides. It was impossible for anyone other than the photographer to know at what, or whom, the camera was aimed. Flannery eating cereal. Flannery washing dishes. Flannery walking by a parking garage. Flannery's freckles, emerging like blurs, like raindrops on the lens.

“How are things at the lab?”

“Well. I have an article on ionic snowflakes that's almost ready to submit.”

“Ionic snowflakes. That's right. Why again?”

“You don't care.”

“I care!”

“If you look at snow under lab controls, you can understand the conditions that make different types of snow and ice in the wild.”

“Right. Excellent,” Santiago said, nodding, feigning interest. “And why is that useful?”

“There's no clear practical application yet.” Brandon leaned over the blue fire of his pan. They were supposed to flambé the last of the sherry liquid because “it wasn't the flavor profile they wanted to emphasize.”

“I see.”

“Santi, as has become painfully clear to me, science is fucking slow. Progress is never linear, and there are more setbacks than breakthroughs.”

Santiago ignored this comment for now—certainly they'd all been
disappointed with how their ambitions had played out—and, instead, went in for the kill: “See Flannery much in the lab?”

“Yes.” Brandon was not making this easy.

“Think she's serious about the Nigerian? About going back there?”

“I'm not going to encourage this line of inquiry.”

Santiago cocked his head. “It's great to get unsolicited advice from someone who spends all day growing snowflakes with no clear practical application.”

Brandon shrugged.

“We use kosher salt,” said the chef, dumping some into a pot for the braised red cabbage while simultaneously using her other hand to lay out seared pork medallions onto a tray, “because the crystals dissolve more rapidly. If you raise your hand high as you do it, you make a bigger mess but you also get a more uniform seasoning.”

Their station partner Ben, waving his hand like an imbecile, interrupted the chef to ask if at home one could substitute sour cream for the crème fraîche. The chef said it would be like substituting Cheez Whiz for Gruyère. A minute later, he piped up again, asking where they were supposed to find duck fat. “Well, expensive places,” said the chef patiently.

Santiago could see Brandon's growing impatience, so he motioned for the assistant, a very thin Asian man, who was pouring red wine into glasses off to the side.

“Whatever you're going to do, please don't,” said Harry, already embarrassed over an episode yet to occur. Santiago ignored him.

“I know this is unorthodox,” Santiago said to the man, stone-faced and wearing a long black apron, “but could I go ahead and get my complimentary glass now? I need the waft of wine while I cook. And so do my friends here.”

“I like the way you think,” said Ben, assuming Santiago had
meant to include him in this illicit happy hour. “My ex's father was a big alcoholic, so she didn't want us to have anything in the house, you know. She thought it was genetic. But I always kept a bottle hidden in my toolbox—you can bet she never looked in there. Now I can stock a whole bar if I want to. . . .”

“You know what, sir.” Brandon carefully put down his chef's knife. “That winter sweater you're rocking, that looks like it was knit by a blind person—well, those snowflakes have eight points, which is impossible. Ice crystals are hexagonal prisms. That means six sides. Your sweater is a fraud.”

There was a moment of silence.

“You're probably right.” Ben brushed the shaggy gray hair out of his eyes with the inside of his elbow. “My ex-wife always said I had no taste. I bought this at the secondhand store because I thought it looked sharp.”

“Just ignore the sweater Gestapo, Ben,” said Santiago. “My friend here has no sense of style, but me, I'm an architect. And I think it's charming and recherché.”

“It's perpetrating a lie,” said Brandon.

Harry looked up for the first time. “You act like you're the only person getting fucked around here, terrorizing old Ben about his sweater.” Harry snatched a bottle of wine from the steward and poured himself an absurdly large glass of red. “Well, you're not. I get kicked out of the ranch so that your wife—who should be with you, am I right?—could live there in my place. I fucking love that, B. I fucking love that, you spoiled shit.”