Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

  “I hate getting old. It’s so much harder to get the energy to do things like leave the house.”

  She asked Flannery if she was familiar with any of the Welsh writers.

  “Just Dylan Thomas. ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’”

  “It’s funny,” she’d replied. “My husband quoted that line to me recently, telling me I needed to fight harder. But Dylan Thomas died in his thirties in a pile of filth. So what does a young man really know about all this?” She pointed at her hands and feet swollen with arthritis. Flannery thought: She has not aged gracefully, but she has survived.

  During the years she lived down the road from Mrs. Tonukari, Flannery was young enough to think: I am not like her. And she was old enough to doubt whether that was entirely true. The country had taken something out of Mrs. T, like the flesh of an avocado spooned from its skin. How did a young, intrepid Welsh woman, someone who put on avant-garde plays and was willing to turn her life upside down for a handsome Nigerian, manage to live here so long and still be so afraid most of the time?

  But now, from the other side of the world, Flannery realized she had been worried about the wrong things. Fear wasn’t the biggest danger after all. Believing you really belonged there was.

  She remembered one humid, overcast rainy-season afternoon when she tried to catch a bus to downtown and was accosted by beggars. In the States, they would probably be considered black. But, there, the immigrants from the country of Niger or Nigeriens—the second “e” delineating them from Nigerians—were sometimes referred to as “her people” because of their honey-colored skin. “Look, your people are calling to you,” Flannery’s companions would sometimes say as they walked out of the main gate of the university, out of its comparative placidity and order, its concrete drainage systems and pruned tropical plants, and into the teeming activity of Adamanta with its danfos zigzagging off the road just long enough for a few passengers to slip on, its market stalls selling vegetables and pirated DVDs, and its shopping complex housing dimly lit cybercafés, small Pentecostal churches and pharmacies whose shelves were often bare besides a few boxes of Panadol and stacks of oversized greeting cards the height and width of a billboard.

  But that day the Nigeriens, “her people,” ragged and dirty children with hair curling into loose locks, grabbed tightly to Flannery’s arms and wrists and put fingers to their mouths, speaking without having to say anything: feed me, give me money, see my need. They targeted her more vigorously than they did others, and she was pretty sure it wasn’t because they thought of her as “their people” but because her pale skin and hair signified something more important.

  She shouldn’t give them anything. She knew that. It encouraged dependence; it solved nothing; they should be in school; you couldn’t just throw money at a problem and expect it to disappear. But.

  It was hard to take the individual case—these small children clinging with such ferocity—and judge it impartially on a global scale. They were still children. They were still hungry. She still had naira bills in her bag whose absence she would hardly notice. And, really, that’s why they targeted her; why, when she shook them off, they just continued to reattach themselves, multiplying; why their faces contorted into such horrible, such studied, such melodramatic expressions of despair: they sensed her indecision. They smelled her pity, and it gave them hope.

  As she sat inside the rapidly filling danfo, a man grabbed the door with one hand while tossing crinkled naira to one of the beggars with his other. She looked at him as he squeezed into the last seat. Noticing her gaze, he said in English, “I can’t imagine how bad things must be in their country if so many of them come to this godforsaken place for a better life.” He half smiled. And the danfo kept moving.

  Flannery and Santiago’s flight didn’t leave Utah until evening, so the next morning Santiago took her fishing on the Provo River. The river was fast and clear and wild. Herons touched down and took off from the surrounding wetland. Canada geese honked at them overhead on their way south for the winter.

  Flannery slipped while casting, and her booted foot slid into the water, so frigid she immediately sat down on a rock to recover from the shock. Santi, wearing a wool-lined corduroy jacket, looked at home fly-fishing, swinging the gossamer line beautifully over the water, gently landing the tiny black-and-red fly on the surface of the river before the line hit. Flannery had never been fishing before, so she stuck with a rod and spinner, a green plastic minnow she named Iggy. As they stood on the rocky banks, surrounded by wintry white sunlight reaching through the trees like fingers, she remembered the hand-tied fishing flies Santiago’s grandmother used to make, the ones he had in the display case in the fire station.

  “This is so much better than fishing in the catfish tanks back home.” Santiago grinned.

  “Say that again after I catch something.” A fish jumping in the rapids taunted her.

  A group of serious-looking fishermen with a guide from a sports store in town walked by on the path behind them, crunching the brown grass, going downriver to find their own spot.

  Santiago made a cast and then said, “I want you to move in with me. When Harry moves out.”

  Flannery’s body stiffened, unnerved by the statement. She conjured an image of the two of them sitting across from each other at a dining room table. They were eating meat loaf.

  But Flan didn’t respond because, just then, her line tugged, and her throat loosened, letting out a shriek of surprise. Santiago scrambled over with the net and told her to keep reeling it in, but not too fast—best to tire it out some. The cold steel water roiled about the struggling animal, the line tight and quivering. When the fish emerged from the water, Santiago declared it a fourteen-inch brown trout and scooped the head with the net while grabbing the tail. Her hook had caught the poor fish in one gill, which meant it couldn’t be released. Couldn’t be saved.

  But even as she watched him secure the first fish she’d ever caught—unhooking it and flipping out his pocketknife—in the back of her mind she was still thinking about his offer. To say yes would be the final betrayal of Kunle. To say no would be a betrayal of her sister, her own flesh. Santiago squatted beside her on the river, and she loved him in a different way than she loved Kunle: in that way you love your fumbling past and your brave and careless youth.

  Looking at the dying fish, she thought about the graduation trip she and Alyce took during college to watch songbirds during their big migration through Cyprus on their way to breeding grounds in northern Europe. It had been Alyce’s idea, of course. They dressed in Windbreakers, carrying binoculars and backpacks filled with beer. When they discovered rampant illegal poaching—long perching sticks covered in sticky lime used to ensnare shrikes, warblers, blackcaps, golden orioles—Alyce insisted on ditching their plans to get drunk and watch birds for volunteering with a group that snuck around disabling traps. They spent the next two days with a gaggle of ex-pat Germans and Brits tramping through private orchards and public parks, trying to save the ones still alive, caught by tail feathers or a beak or the tip of a wing. Some were too far gone by the time they were found and mercy was administered with a quick twist. Flannery never volunteered for this task, but Alyce agreed to do it once. Later she said she had pretended to be opening the lid off a jar of salsa.

  As Santiago readied the knife, she stopped him. “Let me,” she said. It was not what she wanted to do, but what she should do—Flannery was beginning to understand the difference. “I caught him. I’ll kill him.”

  He showed her where to cut so as to make the end as quick as possible, and she gulped air and squeezed his pocketknife like it might jump or wriggle loose from her hand. As Flannery slid the blade in behind its eyes, she noticed the glint of blue iridescence that ran up each side of the speckled fish. She killed it. A pang went through her chest. Her mother. Molly. One day, her father and Kunle and Santi and Brandon and Alyce and Harry and Steven. One day, herself.

  She looked straight ahead a
s Santiago took her photograph holding the brown trout by the mouth. From now on, she hoped she could do what was right for her sister and her friends. And if she couldn’t make her home with Kunle in Nigeria, she could at least spend her life as a distant caretaker of the Sahel. She would bring Kunle and his family snow in the desert; if it could be done, she would do it. Looking at the camera as the shutter clicked, she wondered what to do with Santiago. Set him free or keep him? He was such a painful sweetness. A different kind of home. One way or the other, he might still be saved.

  SANTIAGO

  In the kitchen, mixing himself a strong drink, Santiago thought about the winter break when he and Flannery took off with Alyce and Harry in Harry’s Jeep, like two old married couples, listening to Lightnin’ Hopkins cassettes, passing around fists of Twizzlers, rotating drivers each pit stop. Camping in Big Bend National Park, the four of them had been surprised by a freak snowstorm that blew in overnight and made the trails along the ridge icy and dangerous. That red and brown mesa landscape of far west Texas was usually dry and sunny even in cold January, and so they hadn’t been prepared with snowshoes or spikes for their boots.

  “Find a dead branch to use as a walking stick. Stay close. If you feel yourself slipping, crouch low,” said Harry as they finished packing up their gear. “And try not to take anyone else with you if you fall.”

  “That’s comforting,” said Flannery. “Isn’t there another way back?” Santiago was the only one who knew she was afraid of heights, of standing near the edges of roofs or even balconies.

  “Not if we want to get back to where we parked the Jeep,” replied Alyce. “Harry’s exaggerating. It won’t be that bad.”

  Santiago silently positioned himself behind Flan as they started out on the trail and, when it became a steep drop on their right, he held her exposed shoulder with one hand and placed his right boot to the outside of hers. They stepped forward in sync, like a child dancing with her father by standing on his feet. Desert lizards scurried across the whiteness in search of cover.

  “Anybody else want a Leg Opener?” Santiago stepped into the “living room”—an open area on the second floor of the fire station—clinking the ice in his peach-colored glass of brandy and butterscotch Schnapps, the last crepuscular light fading outside the fire station’s industrial windowpanes.

  “Sure. And then I’ll take a reach-around,” said Brandon, who’d recently cut his hair so the curls now sat tightly coiled next to his scalp.

  “I’m sticking with my martini.” Steven didn’t look away from the football pregame.

  The televised picture was projected onto a white wall. Santiago and Steven sat like bookends on the worn leather sofa, Brandon sprawled in the imitation Eames chair. Santiago held a kitchen timer that went tick, tick, tick in the background. He was perfectly buzzed. He was thinking about not thinking about Flannery.

  Last week, when he dropped her off at her apartment from the airport, she told him, “I need to take care of some things.” Santiago nodded, hoping these “things” had to do with breaking free of her commitments in Nigeria and preparing to make a life here with him. They’d made love, which must have meant something. But as the days passed without a phone call, the more nervous and fucked he became.

  The timer went off, and Santiago slid into the kitchen to check on the fish. The red snapper still looked translucent in the middle, so he left it in for another minute while he cut the cornbread into squares, put the roasted asparagus on a serving dish, and tasted the pineapple and habañero sauce to make sure it didn’t need more salt. This efficient and well-prepared meal made Santiago feel that everything else in the world could be faked. He and Flan would be fine.

  “Come and get it.” He slid the filets out of the oven.

  The two other men walked into the kitchen and served themselves. Brandon shook his head and said, “No queso or guacamole? Nothing fried?,” at which point Santiago made a move to take his plate away. “Not complaining. Just saying.”

  “How else are we going to keep our figures?” asked Santiago.

  As the opening commentary became the first quarter, more mixed drinks made their way around the room, into glasses and through parted lips. Their typical debauch.

  “Hey! Illegal formation!” yelled Santiago when the whistle blew.

  Steven raised his eyebrows and squinted at the projection.

  “That was an intentional grounding if I ever saw one,” Santi continued, an asparagus spear hanging from his fork. “What we need now is a good old-fashioned Statue of Liberty. No, a full-court press.”

  “You said you wanted to watch the game with us.” Brandon did not look amused.

  “I spent all afternoon googling sports. Can’t you tell?” Santiago erupted into giggles. “As a Latino, I’m contractually obligated to prefer fútbol.”

  “Where are the children? Obviously Jake and Ian need a real adult around here to teach them a true appreciation of the national sport of Texas.”

  “I would do it,” said Santiago, “but my bike is in the basement of the Alamo.”

  “Where is Harry, though, really?” asked Steven. “Wasn’t he supposed to be here?”

  “He texted that he was running late. Must have been traffic on his way back from dropping the boys at the ranch.” Santiago tried to concentrate on the game, bodies dressed up like marshmallow men rolling around silently on the ground, wrestling for possession.

  “This is a travesty.” But to prove Brandon wrong, the fortunes on the screen suddenly turned. A roar rose from the speakers. The Cowboys made an interception and scored a touchdown.

  “How about dessert,” suggested Santi. “Rice pudding with cherry juice and pistachios.”

  “Of course you did.” Steven stood up and slapped his belly.

  It was during a commercial break that the inevitable finally happened. Santi was pissing in the bathroom when he heard a noise outside the door, the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. After flushing his brand-new high-efficiency low-flow toilet and walking back into the living room, Santiago found himself facing the strangely intense gazes of three men: Harry flanked by a worried-looking Brandon and Steven. Harry’s face was puffed up, as though from a bad allergic reaction.

  “You are a fucking asshole” was the first thing out of Harry’s mouth, and suddenly Santi understood. Harry wasn’t late because he was dropping off the boys, he was late because he’d been to the bank. Harry had finally learned about the money, or the lack thereof.

  Santiago nodded his head, figuring it was probably better not to speak.

  The first punch did not feel as expected. It didn’t stun or tingle. Things didn’t suddenly go mute, nor did his surroundings begin to move in slow motion, the mouths of his friends stretching into grotesque O’s. The moment Harry’s fist connected to the cheekbone, it just hurt like hell. Santiago’s right hand went to the wall behind him for support while his other one automatically shot up, but not in time to block the second blow. Jab, cross, hook. His father had taught him that, too. After the third punch, Santiago fell down to his knees.

  By this time Steven and Brandon were shouting and pulling Harry back by the shoulders. Everything became incredibly loud, Brandon and Steven yammering over each other, trying to figure out what was going on. Santiago hoped he looked stoic and apathetic from his position on the floor as Harry stared him down, ignoring the men grabbing and pulling at him from the back, arms loose by his sides. He knew Santiago wouldn’t fight back. And he didn’t.

  “How could you? You screwed us. You totally screwed us,” Harry was saying, at which point Steven and Brandon stopped talking, loosened their grips, listening. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  Santiago had no answer. Would anybody believe that he hadn’t allowed himself to imagine this far ahead? Hadn’t allowed himself to consider that things might not work out for him, after all his struggles to get out of the Valley? Hadn’t he gone to the right schools, met the right people, worked hard? His tongue tasted
like copper.

  Santiago tried to stand just as another punch was thrown. And finally, things did begin to slow down. Wafts of sound floated above him. Santiago was hurting. Pathways of hurt flowed out from his face, through his head and torso and limbs, to places that hadn’t even been touched, a domino effect, the train tracks of his nervous system stinging and crying out for some sort of relief. He had failed.

  Amid this embarrassment and defeat and physical humiliation, Santiago remembered: Beating sun. Prickly weeds. Sweat dripping down his neck. He was in high school and his father punished him for coming home drunk and passing out on the kitchen floor by making him mow the yard, hungover in the one-hundred-degree Brownsville heat. Santiago mowed the words LIFE IS PAIN in big letters in the front lawn before slowly erasing them as he pushed the machine over prickly weeds in the beating sun, oblivious to the fact that one day this wouldn’t be the worst thing his father did to him. That one day the worst thing would be imagining how the seat belt felt locked in tight around his father’s torso as the car plunged into a ravine, no bobble-headed Dashboard Jesus to wink and nod along with him as they flew.

  “Somebody around here has to start telling the truth,” Harry was saying to the other guys and Santi wanted to respond, Why in the world does anybody need to do that? And as he watched his friends, now bickering among themselves—Harry whose wife didn’t love him and Brandon whose wife was dying and Steven whose farm was going bankrupt—Santiago had the realization that this wasn’t all about him. Some type of pain ran like a thread between all of them.

  He closed his eyes, retreating once again into the memory of the winter camping trip. The morning of the snowstorm, burrowed away from the cold in the sleeping bags they’d zipped together, Santiago had sensed sunrise through closed eyelids, floating half suspended in dream matter until Flannery touched the tip of her cold, freckled nose to his.