Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

  SANTIAGO

  Santiago ripped cedar boards with his circular saw, which he kept permanently plugged in on the still-torn-apart first floor, wood shavings and sawdust fanned out in waves. He itched for the day that his fire station would be, as he put it, “fully operational.” His own artistic Death Star. His dream was to arrive at work each morning by sliding down the metal fireman’s pole in a designer suit. Despite the fact that one of his uncles had been a talented carpenter in Brownsville when he was growing up, Santi hadn’t learned to work with his hands until shop class in high school. His father made sure they kept their distance from “la familia,” as he called it, with affectation; his idea of the American dream did not include a messy family dynamic dragging down his only child’s upward mobility. His father was a Mexican who didn’t much like Mexicans, and it was only later that Santi began to wonder what that might do to a person’s psyche. Maybe it was why his father never left the Valley himself. Or why, once Santiago did get an education (his father whispering the phrase “graduate school” over and over when he came to watch his hooding ceremony), the two of them had seemed at a greater and greater loss around each other.

  As Santiago worked, the din from the saw deafened the knocking at first, the subtle sonic emerging slowly, like the distant tapping of a woodpecker in a pecan tree outside, something out of the ordinary but that did not necessarily affect him. Then he thought, Wait. Wait a second. He turned off the machine and set it gently down. Someone was banging on the front door. Without allowing himself to rush or hurry, he walked forward, sweaty, covered in grime, calm.

  “Those glasses make you look smarter,” was the first thing she said, standing in the doorway, her tall body never having fully outgrown the gangliness of youth, wooden bracelets clattering down her wrists. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her breath smelled like hot wine.

  Santiago raised the Plexiglas carpenter’s visor he’d forgotten he was wearing. “Flan.”

  For a moment they stood looking at each other in the light of his porch lamp, and then he grabbed one of her bags, turned, and walked back inside. He wove his way through the first-floor construction, moving his body with lightness, as if the whole thing had been planned in advance. As if he’d known all along she was coming.

  Santiago motioned for Flan to walk ahead of him up the stairs, his pulse quickening as he watched her. Not an amateur drunk, she treaded slowly up each step, deliberately. Flannery looked like a mess, but when he stared at her she blurred into the nineteen-year-old Flannery whom he’d first kissed on the concrete stairwell outside his dorm room, the twenty-three-year-old Flannery dancing on a bar in Matamoros wearing cowboy boots and fishnet hose, the twenty-seven-year-old Flannery who threw a White Russian in his face and laughed.

  She stopped at the top of the staircase and looked at him. “El Gaton . . .”

  “I know.” He nodded in agreement. “It’s full of hipsters now. Looks nothing like back in the day when we used to stop there for a beer . . .”

  “. . . when we walked the earth. And that Dairy Queen is gone, the . . .”

  “. . . most depressing DQ south of the Mason-Dixon. It closed three yeas ago.”

  “I wonder what happened to that guy who worked there. The one always crying into your Blizzard as he made it.”

  “Breeze. Always a Butterfinger Breeze.”

  “Right.”

  Santiago’s bedroom furniture consisted of a mattress on box springs, two laundry hampers, and a low dresser of painted metal. He watched as this prodigal, beautiful creature shrugged off her backpack, dragging her gaze over his collection of Jesuses lined up along the dresser. Dashboard Jesus with built-in magnet conferred “blessings”; Thumbs-Up Jesus signaled the affirmative; Zombie Jesus stared emptily; another plastic Jesus wore a gimme cap emblazoned with the letters W.W.I.D.; a “Daily Bread” toaster stood ready to toast bread with the image of Jesus’s face; Clapping Dashboard Jesus rotted in its box labeled “Enlightenment on a Spring”; and the Happy Birthday Jesus Tree-Topper doubled as a motion sensor, sounding a tinny alarm as they passed by. Flannery nodded and said, “Nice.” She said it like she’d forgotten that she was with him when he bought his first one. Maybe she had.

  “Let me show you around.”

  “Later. Not in the mood for brushed bronze hardware quite yet.”

  “Yeah?” he asked, with faux concern. It was just like her to march in from Africa with such self-righteousness—as though he and Harry hadn’t had to close their shop downtown. As though their college friend Steven’s farm wasn’t going broke and Brandon’s funding at the Climate Institute wasn’t evaporating and half the people they knew weren’t laid off and stuck in homes worth a third of what they had been. “This is a new America, sweetheart. Recessed lighting and brushed bronze hardware are all we have left.”

  She reached out and patted his head, as if to say it was all right, and then sat on the edge of his bed and looked at him, eyes glassy. “I could eat anything. Anything at all.”

  Santiago was proudest of the kitchen with its metal counters and deep sinks, pots and pans hanging from hooks on the ceiling. He decided on puttanesca sauce because it would be fast—tomatoes, onion, garlic, olives, and red pepper flakes sautéed quickly over high heat. He thought about the way Flannery used to chop garlic, hunching over the project, taking forever, but managing to slice each clove in three directions such that it fell apart into perfect, tiny squares. Garlic bricks for the faerie people, she would say.

  Santiago didn’t try to process what was happening, as though thinking too much might ruin it, focusing instead on the movement of his knife as he chopped. He took leftover penne from the fridge and dumped it into the sauce. By the time he walked back into the bedroom, Flannery was facedown, her clothes still on, passed out. Sighing, he sat beside her and ate the pasta by himself. It could have used a little more salt.

  Balancing the plate in one hand, he used the other to pull off Flan’s shoes and socks. He had to jerk hard, and this woke her a little. She groaned and turned over. Her eyes fluttered open, unfocused. She poked at his arm and whispered, “Hey. Have you noticed anything weird about my sister lately?”

  “Weirder than usual?” he said through a full mouth.

  “She picked me up at the airport.” Flannery curled into herself like a snail. “She’s starting to fall apart. Like my mom. Watch her closely. She loses control of her body . . .”

  Santiago sat on edge of the bed, the plate of pasta like a stone in his hands. He didn’t move. Flannery passed back out.

  Downstairs, Santiago took off his carpenter’s visor to rub his eyes, then put it back on. His shoulder throbbed, but he began again, sanding down the corners of the cedar with fast, repetitive strokes. Wearing himself out. Working his mind through Flannery’s words.

  At first he’d considered calling Brandon, but to say what? Hey, buddy, is your wife coming down with an incurable disease, by chance? No. Flannery was drunk. Flannery didn’t know what she was talking about. She hadn’t been here in forever.

  Santiago comforted himself with the miracle of Flannery’s presence in his bed. They’d been together on-and-off-again over the years. But not lately. Not since she’d moved to Nigeria, years ago now, avoiding being alone with him whenever she came back on her trips that seemed to last mere hours.

  On only one visit did she stay out late at the West Annie Icehouse after the others left, but not so she might go home with him. It was Christmas Eve, and a few of their friends had met at the old bar with its outdoor picnic tables where they could smoke while drinking ice-cold cans of Pearl and escape, for a few hours, the suffocation of family.

  “It’s been a long transition into friendship,” Flannery had said, twisting her hair into a knot, “but we finally seem to have done it.”

  “Does that mean we can’t get naked anymore?” He’d been too proud to reveal the sting.

  “There are downsides to everything.” She hugged him gently from behind before
wrapping her neck in a gauzy scarf and walking away.

  What had changed? What had brought her to his fire station? Santiago didn’t want the reason to be Molly, because he loved Molly; they all did. But also, selfishly, this wasn’t how he wanted to get Flannery back. He wanted her to come back to him out of love. Because she’d finally realized they belonged together.

  In the middle of the night, Santiago could no longer keep moving. He unplugged his saw, went upstairs, spread his body out on the polished concrete floor of the entryway, and drifted off into restless half sleep. Through somnolent gauze, he saw his menagerie of bobble-headed Christs, moving in a kind of dance around Flannery’s body on his bed, spinning and toggling, and Santiago had the sense they were protecting her or working on her, moving Flannery to remember what was important.

  The next morning, Santiago went to the lumberyard. Flannery was still safe in the sleep of the dead and, in his feverish work the previous night, he’d run out of cedar planks. He needed more; he needed something to do with his hands.

  Santiago drove past the defunct power plant by the river, morning sun throwing a glare on its loud murals in support of La Raza. This part of town, with its turquoise stucco and Catholic lawn art, reminded Santiago of parts of South Texas, where he grew up.

  Fine Lumber and Plywood was in a scrappy neighborhood where every front yard possessed a vicious mutt behind a chain-link fence, and a man at the end of the block sold tamales out of his pickup. Santiago usually bought one pork tamale, one chorizo and onion. The man would reach into his Styrofoam cooler for the tamales, hot and doughy and wrapped in cornhusks, and Santiago would munch on them as he browsed wood. Today, however, his stomach sparked with nervous energy, and he didn’t stop.

  At the lumberyard, he climbed from his used MINI Cooper and walked toward the glorified tin barn. In moments like these Santi wished he still owned his old truck; it was emasculating to have his lumber delivered. Nobody won but British engineering. Santi suspected the workers sneered at his tiny car, despite his carefully chosen bumper sticker advertising the immortal words of Davy Crocket: You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.

  The prices at Fine Lumber and Plywood may not have been better than those at chain home improvement stores, but the selection was, and the place wasn’t crowded with dazed DIYers. Rough-handed men in Wranglers and carpenter pants pushed trolleys of wood across the concrete warehouse floor, a Saturday morning supermarket for tough guys.

  Inspecting a stack of aromatic planks of cedar, he saw that what was left was shitty, the dregs. Maybe he could get a deal on them. Santiago was using the cedar to build a closet in what would become the fire station’s master bathroom. Santiago had bought the decommissioned fire station (and MINI Cooper) after his father had died two years earlier—right before the recession forced Santiago and Harry to give up their office on South Congress (and their cute assistant with her severe jet-black bob and tribal tattoos). So the current plan was for Santi to turn the second floor of the fire station into his living space and the first floor into their office and storefront. He was dipping into the firm’s rainy-day fund to finish the project, already over budget. But, he figured, what better advertisement for an architecture firm than a knockout industrial remodel?

  As he picked up another wooden plank to look for defects, Santiago’s phone vibrated. It was Dalia, a woman he’d been dating for a few months. She was warm and slinky and young, barely twenty-three, and they’d met at a hip-hop concert when she passed him a joint. He let it ring. He’d have to break things off with her soon. In the past, Santiago might have strung Dalia along while he waited to see what happened with Flannery. But that wasn’t a risk he was willing to take anymore.

  “These are the ones I want,” a woman’s voice behind Santiago announced. He turned to look at the woman standing in front of the cubby filled with zebrawood, a golden heartwood rippling with streaks of black. “These are kick-ass.”

  “And the most expensive wood here,” said the man beside her. Santiago couldn’t decide if he was her husband or her contractor.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because you like it so much.” The man shrugged. “The reason anything rare and beautiful costs more.”

  As the couple wandered off, Santiago shifted on his feet, staring blankly at the yards and yards of regulation-cut timber. Santiago thought about how every single plank in the warehouse would become part of buildings housing human lives. Lives like his and like Flannery’s. His eyes scrolled over the words written on the wall in chalk: Poplar, Pecan, White Oak, African Mahogany, Cypress, Spanish Cedar, Cherry, Alder, Fir. It was a poetry all its own, and Santiago smiled, deciding he would buy the cedar and the zebrawood, damn the cost. Just because he wanted to. Just because it wasn’t what his father would have done. Just because it was beautiful and full of possibility.

  MOLLY

  Later, Molly would say she began to suspect something was wrong with her on the Friday that cutbacks were announced at work.

  That morning she’d arrived to a voice mail announcing the cancellation of the ocean desalination project. Molly managed the laboratory for Water Resources, two labs down from the Atmospheric Ice Lab where her husband, Brandon, worked, and she was one of the first employees to receive official information because she wrote and disseminated all the memos to her lab. She liked to revise the wording of what was passed down from on high to something a little more catchy: “‘STOP DOUCHING THE SEA,’ says administration. ‘Thank you for your attempts to play God by turning salt water fresh. Please focus your attentions elsewhere (or, if not yet tenured, consider a visit to the charmingly minimalist unemployment office at Twelfth and Lavaca).’” Molly kept waiting to get in trouble for these missives, but so far, nobody had said anything.

  She swiveled in her chair to grab the memo she’d sent to the printer and handed it to one of the few people in the lab below her in rank, Nathan, a lab tech with a linebacker’s build. “Copy this and put it in everyone’s box.”

  “Even yours?” he asked.

  She ignored the twitch of her hand. Too much coffee, she thought, and not enough sleep.

  Throughout the day, scientists, graduate students, and postdocs filtered through the big push doors of the lab, earbuds pumping music into their heads as they sat at their benches working, entertaining pipe dreams of scientific breakthroughs. Sometimes Molly wandered down the long open hallway to kiss her husband, whom she invariably found scribbling notes in some dark corner, holed up like a rat, face scrunched in concentration. His family had emigrated from Iraq before he was born, and his hair was a glossy black, skin the color of toasted almonds. But in the lab, Brandon transformed into an ethereal entity, a disembodied dance of synapses flitting around the room while Molly tried to keep up, feeling dulled and slow. Whenever she popped her head into his office, Brandon would stop and then explain, rapid-fire, in all its terrifying minutiae, whatever he was working on.

  “The short version,” Molly might say, sighing the sigh of the scientist’s spouse.

  He would look up at her and brush his hand along her hairline, flipping over her ponytail. “The short version? Hmmm.”

  On this particular day she was supposed to have lunch with her sister, but Flannery canceled, claiming to be stuck in HR. Brandon had worked it out so Flan could rent lab space and equipment to do her work here at the Climate Institute, and it was true that she probably faced a monstrous amount of paperwork. It was fine. Molly was an expert at concealing her disappointment.

  She ate a granola bar from the vending machine and then did inventory, going through drawers and closets, entering numbers into her spreadsheets, ordering centrifuge tubes, Petri dishes, syringe filters, beaker cups, Buchner funnels, amber vials, capillaries, spring pumps, PH meters, slides and pipettes, methyl ethyl ketone, potassium iodide, and benzocaine. Molly loved her job because she was naturally meticulous. She was certain she loved her job twice as much as Brandon and Flannery loved theirs, despite the fact they w
ere big-shot PhDs doing actual research. Molly had not even considered applying to graduate school, content to coast through college, ultimately falling into a bachelor’s of science and a career ordering materials, sterilizing dishes in big silver autoclave machines, preparing flasks of media, scanning scientists for radiation, organizing meetings, proofreading grant applications, and lording over the lab techs.

  Maybe it was growing up with a father whose ambitions had been so thwarted. A father who just couldn’t understand how he’d ended up an obscure novelist teaching too many courses at the community college, still hoping, even at age seventy, that one of his unpublished manuscripts (which had come to outnumber his published ones) was a breakthrough waiting to happen.

  Whatever the reason, Molly set her sights low. She liked waking up and knowing exactly what to expect from the day. And she liked there to be a sound track.

  “Whatcha got playing this week?” asked Sanjeet, who was working on a project to determine the effect of polluted rain on underground spring water in the Edwards Aquifer. He was one of the grad students Molly called “the perennials,” whose projects dragged on and on, delaying their commencement sometimes for years. Above his computer was tacked a piece of paper labeled THE PERIODIC TABLE OF AWESOMENESS with the boxes of chemical elements replaced by things like Christopher Walken, mullets, ray guns, and bounty hunters. The microscope at the station next to him had a loose connection and someone had posted a sign on its neck: PLEASE DO NOT MOVE ME. I AM A DELICATE FLOWER.