Migratory Animals (3 page)

Flannery closed her eyes. She was shocked, and the most shocking thing was not even this confrontation with the first signs of disease in her sister. It was the realization that, somewhere deep down in the cracks and fissures of her brain, Flannery had known this could happen. But not now. Not this soon.
Wahala
, she thought. Big trouble. She tried to suppress the image of her mother attempting to spoon soup into her own mouth and then throwing the bowl across the room when she couldn't keep her hand from shaking.

Flannery felt a sharp pressure on her back and realized it was Molly's palm beating up and down because Flannery was coughing a little on the sandwich. She blinked hard and spat the mess back into her plate. She inhaled a rough breath.

“You're a tough cookie,” said Molly.

“Went . . . down the wrong pipe.”

Flannery stared as her sister began eating, and it was like something playing across a television without sound. The way Molly slid a ridged potato chip into her avocado sandwich “to give it more texture,” giggling and eating and talking at the same time. How did her sister do that? What was she even saying? It was all Flannery could do to bob her chin up and down, hoping this was the correct response to whatever was being asked, head swimming in recriminations:

Had Flannery really imagined Africa would make their mother's death and all its implications go away? You didn't just blink your eyes, move across the world, and expect the darkness you left behind to disappear. Blink, blink: Flan thought of their mother in her last years, eyes darting one way and another. The inability to maintain eye contact was a symptom of Huntington's disease, but it had always seemed to Flannery like a reluctance to face things.

“You will? Excellent. I know you're moving into that rental, but they'll last in sacks for a while until you get settled. We'll pull them out of the ground in a few months.”

Flannery felt the urge to run. She didn't want to be there anymore. She didn't want to look at her sister or talk to her or even think of her.

“Are you listening to me? Mom's iris bulbs have finally split. I'm thinning out the extras this year.”

Flannery didn't know how to say she wouldn't be staying long enough to plant their mother's irises here. “I don't know.” And then, as though it explained everything, she said one word: “Africa.” And yet, despite this pronouncement, her future in the rutted streets threaded with concrete squares and wooden stalls, filled with smells of grilled meat and exhaust, where Flannery had bargained over goods for the last five years, began to glimmer and smear in unreality. Panic set in.

Molly betrayed her hurt feelings with a shrug. She said she had to get back to work but would drop Flan off at the house so she could take a nap.

“I must have forgotten to tell you. I feel horrible,” said Flannery, looking away from the steady beam of her sister's gaze. Her baby sister. “I'm staying with a friend tonight. From graduate school. She's teaching at the university now, and I promised . . . a great big
house . . . I figured it would be easier. . . .” As she spoke, unsure whether she was making any sense, Flannery stared at the sad, overturned remainder of her chicken and pesto on whole wheat—mangled and falling apart. It was enough to make her want to throw up.

Flannery dragged herself and her luggage (stuffed with cheap gifts, or what a Nigerian friend of hers called “DCC”—Developing Country Crap) down the sidewalk. A row of brick storefronts advertised antiques and used music and funky art painted on recycled wood. Across the street, peach-colored roses threaded through the metal fence surrounding the mental hospital. Trundling along, Flannery passed a corner telephone pole inexplicably encased in a colorful knitted fabric. Yarn graffiti. In Nigeria the Yoruba believed intersections were liminal spaces, thresholds where humans and spirits and ancestors overlapped, and they often left offerings like this at crossroads. Flannery touched the strange handmade fabric and remembered how her mother looked before the illness, knitting and sewing costumes for one of her plays at the community theater, sharp pins sticking from her mouth like weapons and black lace piled in the bowl of her lap.

Flannery eventually found the bar she remembered fondly from her time as an undergrad at Marsh College, a small, nerdy engineering university situated in the neighborhood nearby. The dive bar, which had been frequented by grad students drinking Lone Star and people looking to get in bar fights with grad students drinking Lone Star, was directly above the Burger Tex, and you had to climb up a fire escape to get there. As she dragged her suitcase through the entrance, Flannery saw that El Gaton was a much hipper place now, with walls covered in hundreds of wine bottles sticking out of severe, modern racks. Real wine sounded good. So good. The only
wine they drank in Nigeria was sweet palm wine or imported “sangria” from a box.

Soon after she walked inside, El Gaton began filling up with happy-hour patrons, carefree and young, disposable income fattening their wallets, while Flannery ordered a glass of white and then another and then another, occasionally looking around, pretending to be meeting someone. As she drank, she tried not to think about her sister but to focus on her real purpose here—to complete research that would allow her to return to Nigeria. To Kunle, the man she would marry. To the place where they sat outside in red plastic chairs and ate the best melt-your-face-off fish pepper soup, kids stopping to ask, “Are you here on an adventure?” (because white people in movies were always going to Africa on adventures) as she laughed at them and said, “How did you know?”

Flannery was a lightweight these days, and the alcohol quickly made her woozy and regretful. Where was she going to sleep tonight? She shouldn't have lied to Molly about having other plans, but Flannery just couldn't bear the thought of watching her sister all evening. She looked at her bar bill and thought,
Fuck. I could buy a goat for that.
She considered mentioning this to the bartender but decided against it, remembering how Mrs. Tonukari always said nobody on the other side actually wanted to hear anything real. Nigerians never asked about Mrs. T's life back in Wales, and her Welsh friends could never understand what she'd been doing all those years in Nigeria.

The man next to her worked the crossword puzzle in pen. Flannery asked to borrow his cell phone, which he handed to her without looking up. Pressing a finger into her other ear to block out the noise, she dialed Alyce's number, but when her best friend picked up, she sounded shrunken and distant, as though she were talking through a sack.

“Can I stay with you tonight?”

She was answered with muffled noises.

“Ground Control to Major Alyce.”

“Sorry . . . I'm distracted. Jake won't finish his green beans . . .”

“Call the gendarmes.” Flannery sighed and asked how Harry and the boys were, but Alyce didn't answer that question, either. Instead, she asked, “Are you drunk?”

“Stranger things have happened.”

“I thought you were staying with your sister.”

“I am, but she's busy with work. You know. I thought we could catch up.”

“One problem. I live on a ranch an hour from town now, remember? I can't leave the kids alone to pick you up, and a cab out here will cost a fortune.”

“Right.” Flannery had the feeling Alyce was trying to set boundaries, to protect her family. As if Flannery was going to come over with a bottle of bourbon and a batch of malaria for the boys.

“Hold on a sec.”

Flannery rolled her eyes. Unbelievable.

“Sorry, Flan. Ian's diving off the top bunk again. I'll call you later.”

There was a click before Flannery could remind Alyce she didn't have a cell number in the States yet. Alyce, who always had her back. Who had told the speed-addled cabdriver in Spain to pull over and made him sit in back while Alyce drove them through the dark empty streets toward their hostel. What had happened to that Alyce?

At the bar, another drink in hand, Flannery couldn't help herself from peeking at her neighbor's crossword. “Enya.”

“Excuse me?” He angled his thick neck toward her, and she noticed the Eastern-bloc-style cap perched in his lap.

“Forty-nine down. They love to use her. It's those vowels.”

“Yes.” He smiled weakly and wrote it in. Handsome and clean-cut in an old-fashioned way, she decided he looked like Phineas from
A Separate Peace,
or at least what she imagined Phineas would look like—something about his square jawbone and blond hair. Poor, perfect Phineas who fell from the tree or was pushed.

“Phineas,” she said. “Things were not always this way. For example, this bar used to be a dump.” She almost slipped from her stool but caught herself by grabbing his arm.

A group of women walked in from outside, laughing.

“My name is Ash,” he said, as the bartender plopped down a small plate in front of him, a slider with blue cheese dribbling down the side.

When she heard Ash's name, she thought of libraries and quiet, those last two letters forming a
shhhhh
. Don't disturb the other patrons. Don't wake up the sleeping baby. Ash.

“I need a place to crash. What do you think, Phineas-Ash? Do you have a sofa? In exchange, I could teach you a thing or two about crossword puzzles.” She knew this wasn't coming out exactly right, but she was sleep deprived and going through reverse culture shock; they were all going to die, but her little sister was going to beat them to it; her apartment wouldn't be ready for move-in until Monday; she felt sick. Flannery vaguely understood that these problems were not on equal levels of importance. Her heart fluttered insistently, trying to beat its way out from under the bones of her chest.

Ash's smile was strained, annoyed, and he lifted his hand to show her the band on his left ring finger. “Wherever you end up,” he said, “I hope you're not driving.”

By the time the taxi pulled up outside the door of the bar, Flannery could only think of one place she could go. She didn't know the address, but how hard could it be to find?

She waved away the cabbie when he tried to put her things in the trunk, heaving her giant rucksack beside her onto the vinyl seat.

“There's an old firehouse in Clarksville behind Jeffrey's. Do you know it?”

As the cab moved forward, warm air from a rolled-down window blowing across her face, Flannery closed her eyes and imagined being back in Adamanta, the streetlamps dark, no electricity coming from the passing buildings as they sped by on the back of an
okada
. Too late for the buses, so they'd flagged one of the passing motorbikes to take them home instead: Flan behind the driver; Kunle behind her. She remembered how his breath passed along her ear and the side of her face as she leaned back into him. His legs straddled hers, and his hands barely touched her torso as if held there not by muscle but by magnetism. It was joy and movement and freedom in a liminal space, invisible ghosts licking at their heels.

S
antiago 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.