Migratory Animals (26 page)

Santiago watched as his friend began rolling forward, one Converse sneaker balancing on the gritty, gray board; the look on his face said that he intended to teach these young punks a thing or two. Harry rolled faster and then tried to catch an aerial over the lip of the bowl, a simple backside air, before the board began to slide out from under him, abandoning his feet. Harry went flying through the air, tumbling down the side of the bowl into the bottom, an audible crunch as his shoulder landed first. One of the kids behind him said, “You know, mister, you should really wear a helmet,” and it was all Santiago could do to keep from laughing. But it was sad, too, to be confronted with the fact that there was no going back.

Eventually, Harry came downstairs, meandering around the open space stacked with saws and planks. Santiago watched him, trying to decipher how a man lives without his limbs. How a person keeps walking when so much of what he must have thought integral to the function of his body, to his life, suddenly disappears.

“Harry, there's something I've been meaning to tell you.” Santiago swallowed, gearing himself up to confess about the Marfa project. “It's about the firm.”

“Do you think Alyce will get better?” Harry stared into space. “Do you think she'll let me move back in soon?”

“Harry, listen to me.”

“I really don't want to talk about work right now.”

Santiago stood still, staring at his best friend, unsure of how to proceed.

“Let's order a giant pizza,” said Harry suddenly, as if it was the greatest idea of all time. “On me.”

Santiago sighed and wished he could say yes.

“I'm going out. I have a date.” Santiago saw the look of naked panic on his friend's face and knew he should cancel, knew Harry needed company tonight. But it was Flannery. She was always so busy; it was increasingly rare that she agreed to see him, much less asked to see him. “You'll be okay?”

“Of course,” said Harry, halfheartedly. “Who's the unlucky lady?”

“Someone I met at the coffee shop. She's old enough to vote but not to drink at bars.”

“You are such a prick.”

Santiago looked Harry in the eyes. “I know.”

Flannery smiled and kissed him sweetly on the cheek, standing over him at one of the picnic tables in front of an Airstream trailer called Pig Vicious, her hands swallowed by the sleeves of a yellow sweater, baggy and too long for the current fashion, her braid caught up in the collar.

Though she didn't nudge him or put her hand on his thigh, she did slide in close beside him on the bench. People might assume they were together. It was possible.

The place was BYOB and he poured Vinho Verde into plastic cups.

“Order me the pork belly slider, will you?” Her dimples hollowed.

It was already getting dark, the place illuminated by colored lights strung over the small field of tables. As he stood in line to order at the trailer, he looked back at Flannery and her face was a carnival of red-and-blue-lit freckles.

They talked about the news, about nothing. She asked him how business was going, and he shook his hand to indicate so-so.

“Wallpaper design.” He took a bite of cheese grits. “I'm working on this whole gnarly retro thing to sell to those idiots in charge of the Governor's Mansion restoration.”

“You qualified for that?”

“Like, am I board certified in wallpaper? Architects are the top of the design food chain. We do it all, baby.” Architects were notorious for this kind of ego—claiming the ability to landscape, decorate interiors, anything—and sometimes Santiago liked to perform to type.

“Have they showed any interest?”

“Kind of,” he said. There was no way he was going to confess the real state of affairs, which was that the Governor's Mansion people never even called him back. Women were not attracted to failure.

“Has Brandon told you?” she asked.

“Told me what?”

“About the silo? My project has veered off in an entirely different direction. It's crazy. He and I are collaborating now.” From her bag, she took a thin scroll of paper, which she unrolled, smoothing it along the table. It was a blueprint of sorts, a long sheet of graph paper covered in a pencil drawing of some sort of medieval tower, the top of which was filled with sharp-toothed circular gears and what looked like a system of pulleys.

“Oh.”

She told him about how they had come up with a model whereby rain clouds in West Africa could be stimulated to create rainfall via the injection of ice crystals. She said that in order to get funding and permission to test this theory under real conditions, they would need to demonstrate a sound “proof of principle.” They'd found a silo outside of town tall enough to conduct the experiments in, but they needed to get it temperature fitted and pimped out with a snow machine. She had an appointment to look at a used machine from a ski resort in Utah.

“Sounds complicated.” Santiago was becoming suspicious. Neither Flannery nor Brandon ever explained what they were working on in lab in so much detail to Santiago, whose only science credit in college was a course for nonmajors called Natural Disasters.

“And expensive,” she said.

Ah
, he thought, steeling himself. Here came the rub.

“I need a loan.”

“A loan.” He sighed.

“Not a personal loan, but from your firm. I'll pay you guys back with interest once the NSF picks up our grant.”

They were blinded for a moment by a pair of headlights, a car pulling out of the adjacent parking lot. “Where did you say you're going to buy the snow machine?”

“Utah. Park City. They just updated their equipment and are looking to sell some of their old snow machines.”

They'd finished the wine, and Santiago rolled the empty bottle back and forth across the picnic table, coalescing a plan. “I'll loan you the money if you let me go with you to Utah.”

She looked at him for a minute, and he could see a struggle. Why was she being so difficult? Why wouldn't she let him back inside? Years ago he remembered her saying—or had he been the one to say it to her?—that if true love came knocking on your door after ten
years asking you to move to Peru and start a llama farm, you said yes. No questions asked.

“It'll be fun. A vacation.” Santiago thought about his plastic Jesus. He thought about how prayers were so selfish and yet everyone prayed them anyway.

Flannery's smile was tight and her eyes a little desperate. “Deal.”

She began talking distractedly, and Santi only half listened, pulled between worry and excitement. “. . . Hopefully I can convince these guys to give us the machine for cheap. It's just a short-term solution, obviously. Most of the real work will come later, when we get permission to buy time on the NCAR's lab plane and actually take the project to West Africa. . . .”

Santiago had come to despise the word
Africa
; it made his stomach clench. But Santiago was resourceful, and he seized his chance. He knew he was using Molly, but she of all people would understand.

“West Africa?” he interrupted. “Really, Flan? You don't actually plan to leave your sister anytime soon?”

Flannery's face froze.

“I know what it's like.” He set his trap gently. “You don't get that time back.”

He leaned forward and touched her hand, only vaguely aware that he was twisting the truth. Because it hadn't been the same for him. He hadn't seen it coming at all.

Two years ago, his father was returning from a gun show in Dallas—one of his few hobbies was old shooters—and he'd stopped in Austin on the way back to spend the night with Santi. They watched a baseball game on TV and fell asleep early, nodding at each other before turning in. The next morning he and his father sat around drinking the strong coffee Santiago made in his French press.

“
M'ijito
,” said his father, thinner than he used to be, in Wranglers
and work boots. “I can't believe the Rangers choked again.
Están muertos.
”

“What else is new?”

What else is new? Those last moments with someone. An insignificant phrase that might otherwise immediately fade into memory. What else was new? Had Santiago inadvertently echoed his father's own fears and feelings? What else is there to live for? Who else is there to live for? What else is new?

His father asked for directions to someplace nearby where he could get the oil changed in his old beater. He hugged Santiago, one hand cupping his son's skull. Then, he left.

Santiago's father's car had shot off the side of a bridge on a small back highway on the way to Brownsville. It could have been an accident except that a rancher who witnessed it had seen him gun the car before it swerved at just the right angle to make it over the barrier.

The tías took care of the details. Everyone descended upon Tía Eugenia's house because it was the largest, bringing along with them enough food to feed the small army of mourners: enchiladas, beans and rice, fruit salad, thumbprint cookies, menudo, iceberg lettuce and tomatoes, chips and salsa, miniature burgers, tres leches, a cheese plate.

And after the Requiem Mass, sitting on a sofa in the living room, Tío Mike brought Santiago a plate, which he accepted passively, though he wasn't hungry.

“Isn't it nice your father left his affairs in such order?” Tío Mike, Eugenia's husband, was almost seventy, but his thick hair was only beginning to silver. “Not much inheritance maybe, but no outstanding payments, no back taxes. You might even make a little off the house when you sell it . . . pay off some of that school debt of yours.”

“I'm going to buy a fire station.”

“Your father was a responsible man. Without being given a lot of opportunities like you, he still managed to keep everything together. That's a rare quality.”

Santiago remembered being shocked at how a man who'd spent years berating Santiago's father for not being more involved in “la familia” could now claim his feelings were no more complicated than respect for his brother-in-law's frugality.

“Dad killed himself. I'd say the one thing he didn't do was keep everything together.”

Santiago's father had kept a little notebook in the glove compartment of every car he ever drove, logging gas mileage and pump prices. Long lists that gave the illusion of control. He made his son do it, too, when he got old enough to drive, and Santiago wanted to know: What did it get him? What did all that get him in the end?

In the summer, on his father's days off, they would slip into the nice lagoon-shaped pool in the gated community rather than go to the public pool downtown where his cousins went, his father saying, “What will they do? Throw us out? We could live in this neighborhood for all they know.” His father, trying to blend in, would lie on his back beside the water, though it wasn't like he needed a tan, while Santiago swam and dove off the high board, and by the time they left, his father's back would be pocked and indented from the pebbled patio. Like the moon. His father was a kind of moon. Steady, bright, swollen with all the answers if you just asked the right questions.

As Santiago drove Flannery home from Pig Vicious, her bike sticking awkwardly out of the trunk of his MINI Cooper, he wondered if his father would be proud of him.

Maybe it didn't matter, he thought. Maybe that wasn't the most important thing after all.

F
lannery sat on a small balcony outside a ski resort hotel room reading her mother's journal, which had arrived two weeks before without even a note from Molly. As Flannery read, hoping to decipher her sister's message in their mother's words, she glanced occasionally at the smattering of people going by on the ski lift framed by quaking white aspen trees on the opposite hillside. Many of the trees were bare already; others still held the fading sunshine-yellow leaves of late autumn, tinkling in the wind like earrings.

It was still technically the off-season. Skiing didn't start for another couple of weeks, and so the ski runs looked like shaved streaks in a full beard of grass. Lifts ran for scenic purposes and to transport people to trailheads for hiking, and some of the passengers noticed Flannery sitting below them and waved. One boy rode in a lift car by himself, lying facedown on his stomach, jacketed arms hanging and flopping as though they belonged to a dead body. Flannery smiled at him and pulled the thick white robe further around herself, sipping hot cocoa made from water mixed with a packet of brown powder. She wished she could live her entire life in a robe like this one—regular clothing was annoying, always a pinch from the waistband or the elastic of underwear. In Nigeria, she wore a colorful wrap around the house, tied in a knot above her breasts. During the season of harmattan—brutally hot, brutally dry—even Kunle
stripped off his sweat-soaked clothes when he came home, replacing them with a wrapper tied at the waist before taking a nap on the cheap foam mattress beneath the shroud of mosquito net.

Flannery had spent much of the last three days in the dark bowels of a warehouse next to the ski resort, learning how to work an aging, out-of-commission snow machine. The resort's “snowmaker,” a fifty-year-old man in starched overalls, showed her how to hook up the gun, shaped like a spotlight, to a water source and air compressor before programming the computer based on the temperature and humidity outside. The machine was getting too old to absorb the vast amounts of water and air pressure needed to “snow a slope,” as the man said. But Flannery didn't need a lot of snow. Flannery needed the right snow.

As she got more comfortable with the rickety, metal contraption, Flannery named it “the Super Eagle,” after Nigeria's soccer team. Seven thousand dollars was a lot of money, she knew, but worth it—more than worth it if it could demonstrate the viability of her project. She would take the machine home, and it would perch in the top of an empty silo in the Hill Country and make snow that fell at above-freezing temperatures.