Migratory Animals (25 page)

Santiago could feel Harry's presence in the other room, still working on the Marfa cube, rotating the images with his mouse, scrolling through specs. Sometimes Harry said things under his breath to which Santiago didn't know how to respond, things like, “This is what it must feel like to design a piece of sky.” And, “The problem with the desert is that it's not square.”

Santiago was trying to earn extra cash and exposure for the firm by entering design contests like the one he was working on now in the bathroom. The City of Houston wanted images for a campaign to advertise its sprawling, polluted metropolis as a still-thriving business hub, claiming to be in search of something edgy and innovative, not just the regular Tourism Board claptrap. Santiago doubted that, but figured it was worth a shot.

Contemplating which images to submit, he clicked through digital photographs taken recently on a cloudy day at the Houston Ship Channel—before his camera was almost confiscated by security guards suspicious he might be scouting the dredged waterway for a future terrorist attack. The photographs were close-ups of the stacks and stacks of shipping crates assembled on the docks like enormous Legos. Square after square of ribbed color—blue, red, yellow, orange. A series of industrial Mondrians.

Santiago ignored his phone vibrating against the particleboard, a call from one of his two tías who were fighting over him, each trying to convince the orphan nephew to visit her for Christmas next month. One lived in Brownsville, the other in El Paso. One would drag him to spend the evening at the candle-lighting ceremony at Our Lady of Guadalupe; the other would get drunk on wine coolers and talk about her childhood until she went to bed weeping. His current plan was to open another credit card account, buy them both fancy smartphones as Christmas gifts and not make an actual appearance at either place. Though Flannery was still playing the distant workaholic, Santiago secretly held out hope of securing an invitation to Abilene for the holidays.

Like most children, Santiago had loved Christmas growing up. His mother ran off before Santiago turned a year old—she was a
güera
who'd worked as a waitress in the restaurant where his father was a line cook. They were young and the pregnancy unexpected. After she left, they didn't hear from her again until a letter arrived ten years later informing them she'd died in a motorcycle crash outside Albuquerque, leaving Santiago $478.60.

So Christmas had always been just him and his father, who worked most of Santi's life as a Brownsville city bus driver, eventually moving up into middle management a few years before retirement. Whenever his father had to drive on Christmas Eve, Santiago
would ride the bus with him all day long, sitting proudly in the jump seat, and after the shift was over, his father would drive them to look at Christmas lights in the wealthy, historic neighborhoods. The houses, with circle drives and big picture windows, put on elaborate displays of fake snow and tacky plastic nativities and mechanical elves moving hammers up and down in Santa's workshop.

It never really snowed in South Texas (or what locals called the Valley), but to Santiago, these displays of bedazzled trees and fake wintry scenes were better—more magical somehow—than the real thing. Even as a small boy, he understood that reality rarely lived up to fantasy. His father had known this, too, and ultimately that truth weighed him down until he could no longer wriggle out from under it. Santiago preferred to say old age and the boredom of retirement were what precipitated his father's car accident, but he knew it was probably more than that. He knew it was bigger than the word
loneliness
made it sound.

Santiago was learning that it was almost lonelier having Flannery back in town, physically nearby and yet not within easy grasp. He was afraid to spook her and restrained himself from picking up the phone each night before bed. But in another sense, Santiago was technically less alone now than he'd been since living at Dryden fifteen years ago—Harry and the boys staying at the fire station meant voices and scampering feet followed him everywhere—which was why he wasn't particularly surprised by the loud thump that suddenly reverberated against his office/bathroom door. Santiago leaned forward to turn the door handle, and Jake and Ian fell forward into the cramped room, their matching bowl haircuts making them unequivocal brothers. They smelled slightly sour.

“What's up?”

“Dad sent us to find you,” said Jake, smiling goofily. “The washing machine's not working.”

“Yeah, I forgot to tell him, it's on the fritz again.” He sighed and closed his laptop. Everything was on the fritz again. Life was on the fritz.

Before leaving the small, square yard, Santiago knocked ice from the branches of his nandina bushes so they wouldn't bow permanently beneath the weight of the freak November storm. A rusted metal walker nestled beneath the withered tomato plants in his neighbor's hibernating vegetable garden.

“Do we have to walk?” asked Jake, swallowed in a puffy coat.

“You need to burn off some energy.” Harry arranged the mesh bags of dirty clothes into a pair of backpacks. “Think of it as an adventure.”

Across the street, a man sat on his porch's blue recycling bin, playing the guitar. Three women, plump and pretty and wrapped in scarves of peach and lace, ears sporting large bangles and mouths filled with gold teeth, pushed baby strollers down the street, speaking to one another in a lilting Arabic.

As Santiago, Harry, and the boys turned the corner, making their way toward the Laundromat on the less savory edge of downtown where gentrification had yet to reach, they passed a group of toddlers from the preschool down the block. A middle-aged woman held a red rope attached to each of their little wrists—she had them leashed together like a dog walker out with her mutts and was trying to steer the kids in a direction, any direction.

Jake and Ian walked gingerly along the curb as though it were a balance beam, one foot in front of the other. “Look at me, look at me,” said Ian.

“All little kids can do that,” said Jake, disdainfully.

A bell chimed the top of the hour as they passed a man so fat his elbow bones were barely dots standing at the bus stop holding
a take-out sack from a place that served Chicken and Waffles. A button on his coat read
WHY
,
YES
,
I AM A ROCKET SCIENTIST
.

The Laundromat was crowded, but Santiago and Harry managed to find two washers next to each other, one for darks, one for whites.

“How do these things work exactly?” Harry was only partly joking.

Shaking his head, Santiago grabbed the Ziploc full of quarters from Harry's hand and put them in the machine, punching buttons for temperature and cycle time.

“Let me tell you a secret, boys.” Santiago leaned down. “Your father is what we call a sheltered, high-society pansy ass. Repeat after me.”

“Uncle Santi said ASS.”

“
No mames, güey
,” replied Harry, grabbing his youngest and covering his ears with his hands too late for it to matter.

“
Cállate, gringo.
”

“Quite right,” said Harry, in a smug way that annoyed Santiago.

While Santiago made fun of Harry's privileged upbringing, it was part of what made them good business partners: Harry could slide into that languid sense of entitlement that put wealthy clients at ease while Santiago, with his androgynous appearance and posture of cocky indifference, contributed their firm's edgy aesthetic.

As much as the two friends were alike in their taste for clean, modern (expensive) design, Santiago knew what it was like for those things to be out of reach, which was why he'd always felt a little closer to Brandon back in college. Once, when Brandon's mother called Dryden House to speak with him, Santiago had attempted to say an Arabic greeting Brandon had taught him, but there was only a stunned and awkward silence from the other end. Santiago realized then that he and Brandon were the same—they'd made it to where they were not through financial resources or family background but through hard-won cultural fluency and personal reinvention.

They all liked to joke about how the ethnics and the honkies had automatically gravitated toward each other that first day as the four of them moved luggage into their assigned dorm suite freshman year; Santiago and Brandon choosing one cramped bedroom with beds bunked above desks, Harry and Steven the other, the two rooms connected by a small living space with a bathroom off to the side. In less than a week, the four of them were sneaking into the college basement where endless switch boxes lined the wall, egging on Brandon until he figured out a way to remove the filters on the cable system so that the entire dorm received the Playboy channel. Their biggest problem in those days was having a lighter but no cigarette, a cigarette but no lighter.

This serendipitous assignation of the fates, this random administrative decision to place the four of them together, was probably the only reason they'd become close friends. They were different in so many ways, and yet the accrual of those days and years gave them the intimacy of brothers, an intimacy Santiago only afterward realized was almost impossible to develop later in the surface world of adult friendships.

As he and Harry and Harry's sons sat on the row of sticky, blue plastic chairs lined up against the glass storefront, they watched the clothes spinning in the front-loading washers, transfixed. Santiago imagined himself sitting there with Flannery, who in college used to put underwear on her head and imitate Carmen Miranda while they waited in the basement laundry room for their clothes to dry, and escaping this strange new bachelor family, which reminded him too much of the hours spent growing up in a place just like this, his father barking at the owner of the Laundromat to turn down the television so Santiago could concentrate on his homework.

A rangy man stood directly in front of them folding his T-shirts. He wore a belt of spikes, his right arm sleeved in pentagram tattoos
and a Harry Potter paperback sticking from his back pocket. On the television hanging from the ceiling, Maury Povich was doing a show on women who had lost lots of weight. Everyone in the Laundromat seemed to be yawning, one after the other, like the wave at a baseball game.

The boys squirmed around but seemed mostly content coloring in the picture books Harry had brought for them. At one point, Santiago took some cheese and crackers out of his messenger bag and put them out on the folding table, next to the crayons.

As Ian tried to put a slice of cheddar onto his cracker, the cheese broke into two pieces. He said he didn't want it anymore, pushing the yellow bits onto his father.

“Eat the cheese, son,” said Harry, who in the weeks they'd been at the fire station hadn't once complained about having to take care of the kids by himself. “It tastes the same.”

The boy refused. Santiago tried to imagine what the kid thought had changed about the piece of cheddar. It was broken.

“Man up,” said Harry.

Ian looked down at his feet. Joy and despair seemed to rain down on him so quickly, thought Santiago, changing every feature of his puttylike face into the expression of his innermost emotions. Children were annoying, but by God, they were transparent. Looking at Harry's youngest boy, Santiago remembered how proud and self-important he'd felt, how respected, when his father would say, “
Dueño. Señor.
My boy is smart, an intellectual. He needs to read his textbooks in quiet.
Por favor
, turn the sound down.”

“Little man understands the importance of structure and aesthetics,” said Santiago, intervening, trading his own cracker/cheese construction for Ian's marred one. “Perfectionism is undervalued in this world.”

Ian's face transformed back into a grin and, for the first time, Santiago
saw the glimmer of a person existing inside the child. A real human being shaped by those nearby. The thought warmed him.

Later that afternoon, Alyce arrived to pick up the boys at the fire station. Harry had told Santi that morning she was going to take them back to the ranch for the weekend, his voice flat and eerily neutral.

She arrived fifteen minutes late in baggy blue jeans and a floppy hat. Santiago watched the boys hug her excitedly, Ian vining his entire body through her legs, and he was struck by the way they both looked up at their mother with a certain wide-eyed reticence, like they were in the presence of a beautiful specimen of a different species.

“How's Harry?” She waited by the front door while the boys went to the bathroom once more before the drive.

“I can get him.”

“Can't you tell me?”

“He's managing. He misses you.”

“Think so?”

“What do you care? Ask him yourself.” Santiago felt sorry for her, but why should he make it easy? Harry deserved better. Alyce smiled sadly and reached out to touch the back of Santiago's hand before ushering her boys out the door. Santiago felt a small pain in the wake of their leaving.

The couple had decided to give each other space, so Harry remained upstairs in the kitchen during the handoff. Santiago imagined him standing there, his hands on the smooth metal counter, suspended in a web of silence and hurt. Giving Harry that moment without witness, Santiago stayed where he was, thoughts returning to what had happened at the park earlier in the week. They'd taken the boys to play on the swings, but Harry's attention was immediately drawn to the adjacent skate park, saying how it had been years
since he'd skated but that he used to be pretty good, spending hours doing aerials on the wooden ramp he and his childhood buddies constructed off to one side of the driveway.

Inside the skate park, a land of swirling concrete curlicues, there were three boys no older than fifteen, skating down into the bowl to gain momentum and then ascending up the transition, then the vert, performing tentative grinds and unremarkable 50/50s. They wore helmets and knee pads in color-coordinated patterns, which would have been unthinkably uncool back in Harry and Santi's day. Suddenly Harry was hopping the fence and borrowing one of the boards.