Songdogs

by Colum McCann

  Miguel had a puffy face that pillowed itself into silence. He must have known all along – it was as if he was trying to stall me – but the house had been replaced by a clinic that was run by a young man from Italy, a rainbow of freckles across his cheeks, his hair shiny and black around his ears. He had knocked the house down, darkroom and all, and built the clinic, a low white affair, where he gave his services free of charge. I looked through the gate and foot-scuffled at stones. Miguel ran a hand across the top of his brow, where beads of sweat had settled.

  A row of scraggly kids waited with their mothers outside the house, where the chickens used to peck. The Italian was wrapping a white bandage around a teenage girl’s leg and he was humming some tune, maybe something about his own mountains far away. He saw me, with the backpack huge on my shoulders, and beckoned me over with a tug of his head. ‘Come,’ said Miguel, taking my arm, ‘meet Antonio.’ But I didn’t want to meet Antonio. I didn’t want to meet anyone. Little Rolando was screaming at the top of his voice. Miguel slapped him on the bare legs and he stopped. We went back along the road, great silence between us.

  ‘Did she ever come back?’ I asked later, in his house.

  ‘She no return,’ said Miguel emphatically.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘You ask many questions,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay. You will have una cabita? She come again no.’

  His wife, Paloma, prepared glasses of rum and Coca-Cola for us. Maps hung on the walls. They dotted the hallway, light coming on them from a fancy glass chandelier. Miguel had grown artistically. Now he made faces from contour maps – geological and ordinance surveys with eyes from history staring out of them. All sorts of Mexican revolutionaries were drawn within the valleys and the troughs, the towns sometimes used for eyes, hills for hair, the rivers for arms. He located Riley for me, a tiny figure drawn from the contours of a hanging valley. His head was leaning against the knee of Santa Anna who was slumped beneath the shoulders of Emiliano Zapata. The strange thing was that Miguel didn’t have to distort the lines – he had stayed true to the contours and the faces were fluid within them. He made a good living from it, sold them to galleries all over the country. Someone had commissioned a portrait of Salinas. Miguel was working on it. He said his art had nothing to do with his politics, but the face of Salinas looked chubby and wobbly, and it seemed as if there was an American eagle on his shoulder with television sets for eyes.

  The drink was served in cut glasses with gold around the rims. I sat and sipped. The day’s heat pushed us down. Paloma held her glass with her little finger extended daintily. An emerald ring bobbed on it. Her fingers caressed the air as she spoke. She sounded as if she’d been sucking on helium.

  ‘You stay?’

  They offered me a bed on their porch, mosquito screen all around so that it made something of an outdoor room, an old army cot with the cleanest of sheets standing in the corner, a Bible on a bedside table, candles in silver holders beside it.

  But I moved on – wanted to be on my own – and booked myself into a hotel down near the courthouse, in the old part of town.

  The hotel stonework was arthritic. Bits of it crumpled down into the street. The hallway carpet had cigarette marks on it. Soap operas rang out from neighbouring rooms. In the back of the hotel there was a pool of water in a blue tarp that hung above the patio. The mosquitoes gathered in the tarp as if in communion. At dusk they would enter my room, even through the smoke of a mosquito coil. I swatted them with a towel, leaving marks on the wall, along with thousands of others from previous tenants. Even the ceiling was splattered, a collage of red spots. A cleaning lady came in early one morning, when I was sleeping late. Hipheavy in her uniform. She looked up at the wall, counting the fresh stains. ‘Te la pasaste matando moscos anoche, verdad?’ she said to me. You spent the whole night killing mosquitoes, true? A fat brown finger wagged in the air and she laughed. She came over to my bed and ruffled my hair, ran her fingers along my cheek, and for a moment I thought she was going to climb in beside me. Instead she dipped her cloth in a bucket and wiped a few of the marks on the wall away, said she’d be back later to make the bed. I went down the corridor to the broken urinal down the hall, where the water was constantly flushing, wet my bandana in the sink and came back to the room to wipe the spots off, but fell asleep in the heat instead.

  Graffiti rolled in red on the courthouse walls. Policemen, chameleons in the shadows, flicked in and out between the scrawls. Old men sat outside the cantinas, gesturing. A labyrinth of laneways ran outwards towards a brand-new shopping centre. I pulled back the curtains and stuck my head out, felt a slight breeze. A young man sat on the hotel steps, a ghetto-blaster perched on his knees, heavy-metal music pumping out. Within the music, grackles in the trees exclaimed in high pitches, let their droppings down on to the streets. I kept a large knife handy in the side of my backpack, just in case. I had heard things about Mexico – foreigners robbed, dumped in prison, bellies stuffed with a steel blade, people fucked over into a roadside ditch, left to the turkey vultures who made those great hungry spirals above the world. I fingered the steel blade, put it in my waistband, decided against it, walked out into my parents’ old town.

  Nobody disturbed me. Maybe it was my dark skin and hair, inherited from Mam, but I don’t think so. The town was quiet among strangers and sunsets, and settlings of dust.

  A boy with a violin busked in a plaza full of red flowerpots and a bordello-sweep of litter. The song was raucous and stripped bare, a sound that could have belonged to a forest animal. An elderly woman and her husband – he was wasting away handsomely in a collarless shirt – came and stood beside me on the curb as I listened. The man took his wife’s arm in the crook of his and danced. She kept her hands tentative at the sleeve of his shirt, but they laughed as they went down off the curb and in between two parked pick-up trucks. His feet were slow, his body creaking. Holes opened and closed in the toes of his shoes, two brown sieves showing calloused toes. He put his head near his wife’s shoulder, smiled, moved his dentures up and down in his mouth. She reached up and touched her lips against the stubble on his cheek, kissed his ear, danced on. I tried to imagine my parents once doing the same dance, couldn’t.

  The boy with the violin extended the song for us, played it with a huge lustful energy, nodded slightly when I dropped a bill in his musical case. The elderly man saluted me with a bow as I went away, swooping his hat across his knees, and his wife smiled.

  The town was bigger than I had imagined. I wandered for days, through bars and cafés, bills coming crisply from my pockets, ordered up shots of tequila, tried to picture myself here forty years before, in a stetson and boots. But the simple truth of it was that I was leaning drunkenly against a bar counter, wearing a gold earring, red Doc Martens and a baseball hat turned backwards, in a town where I could hardly even understand what people were saying. It was only with enough tequila in my system that I could make sense of the stories my parents had told me, their endless incantation of memories. I sat in a bar chair, looked at a photo album I had brought with me, let my mind wander. Somewhere ‘Las Golondrinas’ had been sung. Outside was the hitching post where her image had been impaled – but there were no posts along by the courthouse any more. Earlier I had seen a row of grasshoppers impaled by shrikes on a length of barbed wire. The butcher-birds had been neat in their execution, the grasshoppers equidistant on the barbs, a strange wind blowing over them, one of Mam’s coloured gales. I stood and saluted the desert. Further out were the places where the coyotes had perhaps sung.

  I ambled with my head down, a foreign language swirling in calypsos all around me. Would she suddenly appear? Would she come down the street? Would someone recognise her in me? A smell of food hung on the air. I breathed it down, took it to my lungs. Salsa. A thick salsa smell. She had made that when she exiled herself in our Mayo kitchen, hunched over the stove.

  Breezing into the poolhall, I heard the
clinking of ivory balls fade as if the last few notes of a seedy hymn were sounding out. An ancient man with very strange lips stood in the corner of the hall, drinking a Coca-Cola. I wondered if it was José with the Sewn Lips. I tried to say something in Spanish, but he just guffawed loudly, propped his underarm on his pool cue, using it as a crutch, whistled to his friends, pointed at me. Blue smoke was making spiral galaxies over the pool tables. Someone spat. I turned and walked out, while a man in a red baseball hat came towards me, proffering an empty pool tray, as if I might leave my eyeballs there for them to shoot around. On the street a boy was selling bits of useless copper and strange-shaped rocks. He weighed them on a brass balance. I bought some obsidian, left it in the ashtray in my hotel room, lay on my bed, drew the curtains, put my hands behind my head, watched the fan as it whirled, fell asleep.

  I woke up, hungover, mosquitoes delighted around me.

  My shoes developed a tiny tear in the rim near my little toe. In my hotel room I glued them together. I took a long sniff at the tube of glue, brought it down deep into my chest, tried to get high – felt stupid and juvenile – threw the tube away, took a very cold shower, squatted down, let the water wail on my back, thought of fire trucks along the roads of another town a long way away.

  In the town library, records were stacked in boxes. I couldn’t understand them – the young woman behind the counter didn’t have time to help. She was handsome in an academic way, cropped hair, her blouse too big, small gold-rimmed spectacles. I wanted to ask her out, but swallowed my words. I saw her a few days later in the foyer of the hotel. She was sitting in an armchair, sipping on a drink, a large stick of celery mashing against her upper lip. She gave me a curt wave, turned away. I passed through the foyer, my daypack swinging off my shoulder. The warmth outside came in a blast. It was another man’s ordinary question that assaulted me: What am I doing here?

  I walked on, chatting to myself.

  Back in the park the two men were still playing chess. They remembered my parents. ‘He was crazy,’ they said to me in Spanish, ‘big and crazy, always with cameras. She was crazy, too, not as crazy as him.’ They said the house had lain empty for years after Mam and my father left. Nobody lived there until the Italian moved in with his clinic. The men stuffed the chess pieces in their pockets, walked with me to a graveyard. They pointed towards a wooden cross at the southern edge of the cemetery. I thanked them, and one of the men took my cheek between his thumb and forefinger and twisted until it almost hurt. ‘You are young,’ he said, ‘very young.’ He winked at me and opened a pouch that hung around his neck, took out a tooth. He said something about carrying the mouths of the dead around on his chest. I asked him to explain, but he just shook his head. I watched the men as they disappeared down the road, bent into their days, their games, their repetitions.

  My grandmother’s cross was white and simple. It stood to the side of a thousand others. The black lettering of her name had faded. I got on my knees and introduced myself to her.

  ‘Hi, I’m Conor. The sun came up in the west.’

  There were bedbugs in the hotel, and a string of bites, like red pearls, ran down my legs. For days and days I trudged around, the glue holding strong on my shoes. I hung out for an afternoon at an abandoned cinema, sat against the wall under a faded Kung Fu poster, under a black arch. I imagined films coming in tin cans, off the back of a filthy truck, boys in shorts waiting around, glorious under a hot sun, slicing the thick air with kicks and sideways arm-chops. A woman came and gave me a bottle of water. She had long skeletal hands: ‘Has de tener sed; toma.’ Here, you look thirsty. Her eyes were incandescent – did she know something? I tried to talk to her but she simply shrugged, a little perplexed, a little amused at my attempts at the language.

  A bell sounded on the hour. A man in an ice-cream van was singing. It was time to go. That’s what he was singing: It is time to go. I heard it clearly: It is time for you to go, there’s nothing here.

  In the room I tried to sleep after lighting a mosquito coil. The smoke drifted up to the fan, the ash in a gyre to the centre of the coil. Music vaulted up from the street. It was the ice-cream man singing again: It is way past the time for you to go.

  I took one last look, waited for a face to appear around a corner, grey hair, arched eyebrows, flecked eyes. All I found was the boy with the violin, but he sounded strangely strangled that day and hardly sang at all. Only a few pesos in his violin case. He shrugged his shoulders when I dropped some more money in and hurried away. Miguel came with me to the bus station on a Friday morning when thermometers in gardens were edging their way dangerously upwards.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said.

  He shook my hand lightly. Great damp ovals rolled from the underarm of his shirt. When the bus left, the driver whistled a tune, the same tune, all the way to Monterrey, as if a gramophone needle was stuck in his lavish Adam’s apple. We changed drivers and plunged south towards Mexico City. After a while I sat in the middle of the bus, where the impact from the ruts in the road was gentler. The windows were fully open, a yawn that let the created wind through. We rattled along in darkness, through the desert, and small towns on the edge of spectacular canyons, and into vast city suburbs. I caught a glimpse of a circus setting up its tents, a girl riding around on a unicycle, feathers leaping from her hair, her breasts spilling out from a tank top. I wanted to reach for her, touch her, see if she was real, but the bus hammered on.

  At the station in Mexico City I walked with my head down – the floor was spidered with moving sandals. I had noticed them before, young foreigners in plastic Teva sandals, their Lonely Planets hugged to their chests, enviously eyeing the size of backpacks that others were carrying. I walked out into the city, a leapfrog of skyscrapers, smog, granite-grey sky, white pigeons pecking under archways. I wandered in a daze, still waiting for Mam to pop her head around some corner, hail me with a wave. My flight to San Francisco wouldn’t leave until the next day, but I knew it was a brutishly stupid notion anyway, this searching for her. On a crowded street I saw a newspaper being trampled underfoot, and I suddenly remembered it was my birthday, my twentieth. I bought a bottle of tequila and sat in the corner of the airport, sipping furtively. Sounds rang out. Buzzers, intercoms, machines. It struck me then that I knew the sound of airport metal detectors better than the shrill call of coyotes I had heard so much about from my parents.

  Years later, in America, I was told that Navajo Indians believed coyotes ushered in the Big Bang of the world with their song, stood on the rim of nothingness, before time, shoved their pointed muzzles in the air, and howled the world into existence at their feet. The Indians called them songdogs. The universe was etched with their howls, sound merging into sound, the beginning of all other songs. Long ago, when they told me their stories about Mexico, Mam and Dad, I believed they were true. And I suppose I still do. They were my songdogs – my mother by the washing line, my father flailing his way against the current. They tried very hard to tell me how much they had been in love with one another, how good life had been, that coyotes really did exist and sing in the universe of themselves on their wedding day. And maybe they did. Maybe there was a tremendous howl that reached its way all across the desert. But the past is a place that is full of energy and imagination. In remembering, we can distil the memory down. We can manage our universe by stuffing it into the original quark, the point of burstingness.

  It’s the lethargy of the present that terrifies us all. The slowness, the mundanity, the sheer plod of each day. Like my endless hours spent strolling through Mexico. And my father’s constant casting these days. His own little songdog noise of a fishing line whisking its way through the air.

  * * *

  When the old man came back to the house he surprised me. ‘Sorry,’ I said, leaning the mop up against the door, ‘I was miles away.’ He nodded, rubbed his fingers along his scalp. He was amazed at the floor. It didn’t shine, but if he drops the fork again, it won’t get quite so dirty. ‘Not a peep
from the big one today,’ he said, as he hung up his coat on the peg inside the door, a blade of grass stuck to the side of the sleeve. He opened his lunchbox with a dramatic gesture of the hand, a sweep to the ceiling. I was gobsmacked to see a small trout in the box, maybe a one-pounder. Some fish in the river, after all. I told him that it mightn’t be too healthy, all that fertiliser and shit dumped by the farmers and the meat factory, but he raised his eyes to the ceiling.

  ‘Get a grip,’ he said to me, ‘you and all the other greenies. The river’s clean as a fucken whistle.’

  He gutted the fish with the long kitchen knife, hooked his finger in to pull out the guts, ran it under the tapwater, made himself a nice fillet. I told him I wasn’t eating any but he said he didn’t give a damn, he’d cook it anyway. He prepared it in the skillet and took his place at the table, ate quickly, lit himself a cigarette.

  ‘So what did ya do all day?’

  ‘I told you, I cleaned the floor.’

  ‘Oh.’ He rose up to flip on the radio, decided against it, leaned against the sink, put out the smoke on the wall of his teacup: ‘I mean, after that, what did you do after that?’

  ‘It took all day.’

  ‘It’s nice and skiddy anyway,’ he said, taking one stockinged foot out of his slippers and gliding it along the tiles. ‘I hope I don’t fall and break me neck.’