Migrators

by Ike Hamill

  Buster shook his head. He blew a silent burp over his shoulder.

  “I don’t suppose one of you healthy young men would care to fetch me a refill,” Buster said. He held his mug up.

  “I’ll get it,” Alan said. His knees popped as he stood from the couch. He didn’t feel particularly healthy or young, but he was starting to suspect that in comparison to Buster, he might as well be an Olympian. Alan took the mug from Buster’s big swollen fingers. He found the doorway to the kitchen.

  The light switch had a metal lever and clicked when Alan pushed it up. Little lights came on behind wooden valances over the windows. It was a cozy effect, but not particularly illuminating. The shades drawn tight over the glass didn’t help. To the right of the sink, the illuminated switch of the coffee maker drew Alan’s eye. The brown liquid in the bottom of the pot was thick with sediment and the lid of the machine was open. Alan saw the secret to Buster’s strong coffee. Instead of using a filter, Buster used a cone made out of a double layer of window screen. Alan poured the coffee and left a decent amount of room in the mug for whiskey.

  It didn’t steam. The side of the mug wasn’t even warm. Alan put the mug in a little white microwave and set it for one minute.

  The kitchen was packed with stuff. On top of the fridge, the old man had seven boxes of cereal lined up. It was the generic equivalent of some high-fiber brand. Every inch of counter space was filled with a box, or jar, or appliance. On the underside of the cabinets, hooks held even rows of unmatched mugs. The big green one in front said “KISS ME, I’M IRISH!” in shouting white letters. Alan leaned forward to look at blue boxes of pasta packed between the microwave and the toaster. They were all in a perfect line and a little piece of string held them all in place. Alan plucked at the string and it snapped back. He imagined the kitchen was like a ship’s galley, built for rocking and swaying without dumping food all over the floor. He wondered why.

  The microwave finished with a little ding. Alan opened the door. Now it was steaming.

  He took the mug back to the old man and set it down on the coffee table first. He opened the whiskey and began pouring. Buster’s eyes watched the procedure and he motioned for Alan to continue. When the liquid was near the brim of the cup, Buster signaled Alan to stop pouring. He reached out and took the mug with both hands, warming them on the burning sides of the cup.

  “Where was I?” Buster asked.

  “You made Gordie tell,” Bob said. It was the same prompt he’d used several minutes earlier.

  “Yes we did,” Buster said. He took a careful sip of the steaming coffee. “We ganged up and he spilled the beans. But, as I mentioned, it seemed like he wanted to. When he was done with the story, Paul made the decision. He said, ‘We’re going to work through October, but we’re going to take precautions. Gordie—no trapping or fishing in the lake until November. You can work the fields and out back. Buster—no hunting. Your only job is to stake out that shoreline. Gordie will show you where. You see any weird things, you run and tell us all. I’ll work the north woodlot. Skip and Hubie, you stay inside as much as you can. Hooker—you can do what you want. I don’t think Gordie’s phantoms are interested in gardens.’ I think Paul’s orders hit me the hardest. Everyone else got to go back to work, but I just had to watch. They didn’t have to think about those migrators all day, but it’s all I had to think about. Every leaf that fell looked like a spook to me. I sat out near the shore of that lake for a week, and I grew tired. It’s like those flies in October. They know the end is coming and they’re slowing down, so they swarm on anything that stands still. As bad as those flies were, the day they went away was worse.”

  “They swarmed to the migrators, didn’t they,” Bob said. “That’s what we saw.”

  “Yup,” Buster said. “When one of them stops to rest, that’s when you smell it. The flies flock to that smell. I saw the cloud of them on the other side of the lake. I didn’t go fetch any of my brothers. I figured that I’d find a fish or some other animal with its skin gone, like Gordie said. I thought I’d find sign that the migrators had already been through. I pinched Gordie’s little raft and poled my way across the lake the best I could. Out there in the marsh on the other bank of the lake, I saw that black phantom. It was covered with flies.

  “I was smart enough not to touch it, but I studied it for awhile. It was like half-man and half-fish, except for one part. One part of the thing resembled the undercarriage of Paul’s draft horse, if you catch my meaning.”

  Buster gave a wink to Alan.

  “I suffered through the stink so I could memorize as much detail as I could. I wanted to give a full accounting to my brothers. Just before dinner, we gathered on the east side of the barn—near the little headstone—to discuss. I told them what I’d seen. Hooker didn’t believe a word of it, but Skip told him to hush. Paul wanted to keep working until something more happened, but Gordie just about blew his top. Gordie said, ‘They’re here, Paul. We best hole up until they move on. We’ll be lucky if they don’t hunt us down just because we talked about them.’ That’s when the brothers split. Me and Skip sided with Gordie. Paul, Hooker, and Hubie thought that as long as we didn’t mess with the migrators directly that they probably wouldn’t bother us.

  “Paul was wrong. He was the first to pay the price, too. A few days later, he went out to the shed where he kept Mack, his big Perchie draft horse that hauled the logs. What was left of Mack wasn’t much good for hauling anymore. Somehow he was still alive, and he was crazy. The big fella was down on his side, flopping and fighting. Somewhere around his shoulder and flank is where the flesh ended. Below that, where his big feathered legs used to be filled out with thick muscle, there were just bones and tendons. The bones were white and pink and they flopped around as poor old Mack twisted in the straw of his stall. The things took his face. Everything from the eyes down to the teeth was just bleached white skull. His tongue was still in there and the insides of his gums, but the outside was gone. It looked almost like he’d been dipped in acid and then pulled back out. At the time I thought I’d never see anything that terrible as long as I lived.”

  “At the time?” Bob asked. He wiped his bottom lip.

  “I was wrong,” Buster said. “Never been more wrong, I think.”

  “So without any flesh below the torso, and its face eaten off, this horse was still alive?”

  “Yup, and there wasn’t a drop of blood in the straw to show for it. Not for long though,” Buster said. “I put a bullet through his skull and then he bled plenty. Hubie used one of his machines to dig a plot in the hay field and the six of us dragged that horse’s body back to that hole. Hubie was crying the whole time it took to bury old Mack. I never thought he cared much for that horse, but he was the only one who cried.

  “Paul said, ‘That’s the end of it. We’ll never talk of them again.’ Gordie wanted to know if we should keep working. Paul said we should. He said, ‘We paid our price, why shouldn’t we?’ You probably figured already—he was wrong. I kept watch. I didn’t see any more swarms of flies, or black mermen out in the weeds. Everyone just kept their mouth shut and kept on working. Dad never asked us why we were working in October. By then I’m not sure he knew what month it was. He spent most of his time with his buddies. Us brothers kept the house going and Mom was quiet as ever. Paul bought a broken skidder from Dickie Bowman and Hubie fixed it up. Paul used that skidder to drag the trees in place of Mack.”

  “What’s a skidder?” Alan asked.

  “It’s like a big tractor you use to drag things,” Bob said. He looked at Buster for confirmation. Buster nodded.

  Buster continued. “Halloween was still a couple days away when I woke up in the middle of the night. It must have been a Saturday night because we’d had beans for supper. You could barely get a wink of sleep on a Saturday night. We had four boys in that one little room and the stink would put you out. I woke up and saw that Hooker was gone. Now I wasn’t even old enough to shave at this point, but I could
track a field mouse down a stretch of asphalt road if I had to. I had a sense for tracking. I went out to the privy and I saw that Hooker had gone down the path towards the shore. I wasn’t wearing anything but nightgown, but it was a warm night so I ran down the path after him. I had a bad feeling. I saw him in the moonlight. He was bare naked and looked white as a ghost.

  “The leaves were kicking up in the wind—wet leaves, the kind that stick to your legs. As I got closer to Hooker, I noticed he wasn’t moving right. His arms were sticking out to the sides and his back was pointing straight up. His head was bobbing up and down with every step, and his legs jerked up and set down. If you attached strings to his limbs and then jerked him down the path, that’s what he would look like. I caught up to him and grabbed his arm. I told him to get back to the house. I said his name right in his ear. His eyes were closed.

  “Nothing happened to me until I tried to pull him back to the house. As soon as I tugged, I was thrown back by the wind. I went at him again, and this time the wind picked me up in a little cyclone. I spun around about fifty times, and it flung me a couple-dozen paces into the woods. I crashed into some scrubby bushes with my nightgown up over my head.”

  “You’re kidding,” Alan said.

  “What possible reason would I have to lie to you?” Buster asked.

  “Stories grow over time,” Alan said. “Sometimes—no offense—a story is warped to alleviate guilt.”

  “I’m sorry for what happened, but I’m not guilty. I didn’t call those phantoms down on our house.”

  “So what happened after you landed in the bush?” Bob asked.

  “It took me a minute to get my bearings. I was still dizzy when I spotted Hooker. He’d left the path and was jerking his way towards the water’s edge. Over at that spot, there was a bunch of rocks we used to lay on to dry off after swimming. Hooker walked over top of those rocks and then started down into the water. Like I said, it was a warm night, but the lake is cold in October. It should have woke him up. Even after the wind knocked me away, I still thought that maybe Hooker was just sleepwalking. But once I saw him going into that chilly water, I knew he was in deep trouble. That’s when he started screaming.

  “I ran to him and grabbed his arm when he was only knee-deep. I pulled and pulled, but the water had a grip on him. I looped my elbows under his armpits and I fell back, pulling him with me. I felt the ripping and tearing and knew I was making progress in pulling him away from whatever had ahold of his legs. He screamed so loud. Brothers would be running from the house any second. We collapsed back on that rock and I actually gave a little laugh. I laid him down and told him to hush up. His eyes were open. The first thing he did was push himself up and look down at his legs. I looked too. They were missing from the knee down. Well, missing the wrong word. We could see where they were. They were just bones, but they were still in the water. I had pulled him back so hard that I’d torn his legs off just below the kneecap. The bottom of his legs looked like Chinese noodles, strung out across the rock.”

  “That’s impossible,” Alan said.

  “Maybe you’re right,” Buster said. “I woke up a couple seconds later. I sat straight up in my bed and threw back my sheet. Everyone was quiet. For a second I wondered if I was still asleep. The whole vision was so strange that it made me question everything. I laid back down and tried to get to sleep. I couldn’t sleep though. Every time I thought I was going to drift off, something snapped me back. Something was nagging at me. I sat back up. It was Hooker—he looked wrong in his bed. I know it might seem funny, but if you grow up in the same room as someone else, you get to know what they look like when they’re asleep, and Hooker didn’t look right. I went over to tap him and ask him what was wrong.”

  Buster stopped. Alan recognized the look on Buster’s face. It was the look of someone who’s about to try to lift something heavy, and he’s bracing himself for the strain.

  “I was the one who screamed. I realized that the sounds coming out of my mouth were the same ones I’d heard Hooker making in my dream. Hubie got the lights on and they all saw it too. Only the insides of Hooker were under that sheet. You could see his skull and his eye sockets. You could see his tongue poking out through the gap where he’d lost a couple teeth in that fight with Stan Turner. You could see his neck bones and the pink gum that was squished between his vertebrae. Hubie pulled the whole sheet off of him and the horror was complete. His thigh bones ended in ragged strands of tendons and marrow. The bottoms of his legs were gone.

  “My parents came through the door. Paul and Skip came from their room. My father was stone. He said, ‘Go bury him next to your sister. We’ll never speak of this again.’”

  “What about the police?” Alan asked. “What did they say for the cause of death? Why didn’t they lock up your father and throw away the key?”

  “We didn’t call the police. We kept to ourselves. As far as I know, nobody ever asked about Hooker. Quid pro quo. My mom tried to take up the gardening that next spring, but she failed.”

  “Wait, that’s it? You didn’t try to find those migrators and kill them? They didn’t come back for the rest of you?” Alan asked.

  “That was it. We didn’t work in October and we never spoke of it again. As soon as Paul saved up enough money, he got married and then moved out. He used to travel north in October and November and work on a tree farm up there. Skip started his business and he would always take his vacation that month. Hubie moved south. My parents died when the house burned down in seventy-six. I’m the last of them, not counting kids and grandkids that is.”

  Bob was counting brothers on his fingers. “What about Gordie?” he asked.

  “He went wild,” Buster said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sometime after Paul moved out, Gordie started spending more and more of his time outdoors. He would only come in for supper, and then Mom would kick him out because he always smelled. Eventually, he stopped coming for meals. He would still fish and trap, and we’d find his kills on the back porch. He’d leave them there like a proud cat. Sometimes Mom would cook them, sometimes she’d just throw them in the garbage. For a few years, Gordie would come back for October and re-domesticate. Then, after awhile, he stopped. Shortly after my parents died, he turned up dead.”

  “Migrators?” Bob asked.

  “No,” Buster said. He chuckled and shook his head. “They found him dead by the side of the road—down near the corner of the Mill Road and the Crank Road. He was just off in the bushes with a knife in his heart. It was stuck between his ribs. Sheriff figured that Gordie had come across a still or poachers and they’d killed him to protect a secret. I don’t know what killed him, but it wasn’t migrators.”

  Alan shook his head. “If you really believed all this, you wouldn’t be telling us about them now. You would be afraid that they’re going to track you here. I mean, it’s October twenty-first for god’s sake.”

  Buster just nodded.

  “Thank you for the whiskey,” Buster said. “Now you know my weakness, feel free to come by any time.”

  “Thank you for the story,” Bob said. He rose and leaned forward to shake Buster’s hand. Buster gave each of their outstretched hands a quick squeeze with a couple of his fingers. He didn’t bother to put down the feet of the recliner.

  “Close it tight behind you,” Buster said. “The latch is tricky.”

  X • X • X • X • X

  “They love their stories around here,” Alan said when he was pulling back out onto the road.

  “Yeah,” Bob said.

  “Oh shit, we forgot to tell him about the nest.”

  “He would have mentioned it if he knew anything, don’t you think?”

  “You want to get another bottle of whiskey and go back in a couple of weeks? We can ask him why he still has his skin.”

  “If he makes it that long,” Bob said. “He had enough Zofran bottles lined up on his sink to stock a pharmacy.”

  “What’s th
at?”

  “It’s an anti-nausea drug for people undergoing chemo.”

  “They say it runs in the family,” Alan said. “His brother had stomach cancer, or something.”

  “That could be it then,” Bob said.

  “He ought to write a novel before he cashes in,” Alan said. “He has quite the imagination.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Ghosts

  OCTOBER 22

  “BIG JOE,” Alan said as Joe walked into the kitchen. Joe smiled a little, but didn’t slow. He walked his bag over to the chair next to the door and then returned to his seat at the kitchen table. “You ready for a special breakfast?”

  “Sure,” Joe said.

  “That’s about an oatmeal level of enthusiasm, Joe. What I have for you here is blueberry pancakes. Can I get a blueberry pancake answer from you?”

  “Sure!” Joe said again, this time with a forced smile.

  “That will have to be good enough,” Alan said. He put a plate in front of Joe. He spotted a genuine smile cross Joe’s face as his son looked down at the food. Alan grabbed his own plate and sat in the chair next to Joe. He jumped up a second later to reach for the fridge door. Alan returned with the syrup. “This will give you just enough sugar buzz to cruise into lunch. Then you’re on your own. What did you guys decide on for Halloween costumes?”

  “I’m not telling,” Joe said. “Mom said it’s bad luck when you know beforehand what our costumes will be. She said they turn out better when you’re surprised.”

  “You see,” Alan said, pointing his fork at his son, “this is why your mother makes a good lawyer. She’s able to convince you that somehow there’s a causal connection between the strength of your costume and my knowledge of said costume. Think about it, why would those two things be connected?”