by Colum McCann
From the kitchen window I watched the wind roll through the long grasses at the edge of the laneway, the blades bent, supplicants to the river.
The marmalade cat seems awful fond of him – she was rubbing her spine against the back of his calves after he fed her the fish head. She’s a stray, he said, wandered in a month ago after another one died, came up to him and started purring. He doesn’t seem to have a name for her, just calls her Cat. Picked her up from the floor and started stroking her with a long, hard, heavy roll of his hand, as if that might stop the trembling of his own fingers. She was looking for more food, meowing away. ‘Aren’t ya full yet, Cat?’ All of a sudden he looked up from her, eyes reduced to dark wrinkled slivers, and said: ‘They come and go these days like you wouldn’t believe.’
I followed him as he lumbered up the stairs, the floorboards creaking away. ‘Goodnight so. Ya did a grand job on the floor.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Tomorrow’ll be a fine one.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Red sky at night.’
‘It wasn’t too red.’
‘Ah, it was a bit red anyway,’ he said, scrubbing his glasses on his shirt.
‘I’ll get some more cleaning done tomorrow.’
‘Don’t be doing that, for crissake.’
‘What?’
‘You’re like an oul’ woman, cleaning. A bit of dust never did anyone any harm.’
‘I suppose.’
‘It’ll be a perfect day for fishing,’ he said.
‘Perfect.’
‘Conor?’ he said, on the landing. ‘When are ya off up to Dublin?’
‘Next week. Getting rid of me already?’
‘Just asking,’ he said angrily. ‘Listen up a second.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I want to know something.’
‘Fire away.’
‘Why didn’t ya write?’
‘Ah, ya know me and letters.’
‘No, that’s the thing, I don’t know you and letters.’
‘Ah, I’m just not very good at it.’
He nodded and used a hand against the wall to guide himself along the landing: ‘I thought you’d have written.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘Well, I am.’
‘I believe ya,’ he grunted, his back to me.
I found a mosquito coil tonight, shattered into little green bits at the bottom of my backpack. Those mosquitoes in Mexico were always ecstatic in the hot, hot air. Waiting. Hovering. Moving away from the smoke under the ceiling fan. It was truly vicious, that heat, but in an odd way I liked it. When I arrived in San Francisco it was the coolness of it all that assaulted me. The immigration officer in the airport looked at the Mexican stamp in my passport. ‘Hope you didn’t catch the clap,’ he said with a grin, waving me through with a sweep of the hand after stamping a six-month stay in my passport.
THURSDAY
a deep need for miracles
Brutally romantic, of course, but he has kept every single one of Mam’s dresses. They hang in a riot of colours amongst a dozen mothball bags. The cupboard was open in his room this morning when I looked in before going downstairs. Hems spilled on the floor, edges that were unsewn over the years, continually dropped another inch, always lengthening, until even her skirts covered her calves. The sleeve of an old adelita dress stuck out. Some blouses. A dressing gown hung with one shoulder on a hanger. Her sarapes neatly folded on the shelf beside some coiled belts. I stared at the old man asleep in the bed, the marmalade cat on the pillow beside him. His hat was perched on the bedside table, beside a full bottle of Bushmills. There was a bit of a smell in the room – he has bad gas these days. Finds it hard to control. Let one go at the kitchen table last night.
‘Oops!’ he said. ‘Barking spider around here somewhere!’
But I could tell he was embarrassed by the smell – even got a bit of a flush in his cheeks as he walked upstairs to his bed. But at least he sleeps. When Mam was here there were nights she would get out of bed – she was sleeping in the room at the end of the landing at that stage – and sometimes she would go down to work on her stone walls, those black bags collecting under her eyes.
* * *
It was the first time Mam had seen the northwestern part of Mexico, and the Model A negotiated narrow roads that often ended in dry floodbeds. They drove over cracked platelets of mud, past weedgrown churches, through long sweeps of prairie where whitewashed haciendas rose up and flared out against the grasses. In the mornings the towns were alive under spectacular red reefs of cloud, migrating flocks moving through them, and once a single white crane seemed to follow them for miles, noisily flapping in the air, until the bird veered off and joined a mate. Mam looked backwards over the car-seat – she wanted to feel the rhythms of her land before they went to El Norte.
It was a quiet trip, except for the crunch of three jackrabbits under the wheels of the car along a dirt road in Sonora. Mam wanted to chop off the paws of the rabbits at the side of the road – some tribute to her mother – but the old man drove biliously on, disturbed by the rattling gearwhine of the car. Besides, Mam already had a jar full of rabbit’s feet with her, and as they moved westward she affixed a half-dozen of them around the rim of his hat. It looked ridiculous – the way they pattered around his head – but my father bent to Mam’s superstition, put the hat on while he drove. In the vast expanses they haggled with gaunt garage owners over petrol prices. Children in ragged shirts stared as the car threw out smoke. Riders pulled their horses over into ditches. The horsemen sometimes carried rifles, and my father slowed as he went past, guffaws rising at the sight of his hat. He drove with fingers drumming heavily on the wheel, impatient with places, little traces of sweat beginning in the furrows of his brow.
Years later, in our Vauxhall Viva, which we drove around Mayo, an old Mexican paw and a St Christopher medal hung from the stem of the mirror. At times the paw would swing, animated, bashing itself against the windscreen, and Mam watched it as if it might break its way through the glass for her, bring her back to those moments in her country. When we were left alone in the car together, Mam and I, she would hug herself into heavy sweaters, tell me bits and pieces about that trip to America in 1956, how they abandoned the car and never saw it again.
They made it all the way to a coastline dock near Tijuana when steam suddenly flocked up from the engine. They must have looked a sight, the old man waving his hat over the open bonnet, my mother blowing her breath from her lip up to the fringe of her hair, trying to figure out what weather might be blowing in, what colours she might create. As the dockside darkened, my father wanted to tape the hosepipe together, but they had no tape. He crawled in underneath the engine, pounding the underside of the Model A with his fist. Mam began tearing a strip from the bottom of her dress to see if that might work. It was a white hem, she later told me, a single inch of cotton. She recalled it so vividly that it must have haunted her – it was one of the last things she remembered doing in Mexico, her foot propped on the bumper, knee bent, ripping her dress to try to fix the car that was taking her from her homeland.
As she was tearing the dress, a stranger with raven-coloured hair wandered up – the captain of a cruise ship that had docked nearby for emergency repairs. The captain offered them free passage to San Francisco. Some of his crew had disappeared into drunkenness in the tight alleyways of Tijuana, swallowed down into bottles of mescal. In return, he said, my father could bartend and my mother could waitress. The old man crawled out from underneath the car, shook the captain’s hand, flung the car keys away along the dock.
They sailed the rest of the way to America. Umbrella drinks were served by waiters in white shirts. Jazz notes copulated madly in the air, bits of Al Jolson songs mashing against Billie Holiday numbers. The yawning head of a pig was laid out for supper the first night, a red apple in its mouth. My father stood behind the bar in a black bowtie, hair slicked back, revealing the be
ginning of two small indentations of baldness on his crown. He invented cocktails, shook them with drama. Mam was unable to work, sick the whole time, retching over the side of the boat. She stayed in her cabin while dinner was served. A grey wind blew off the sea for her, the boat combing its way over the waves for a day and a half. Occasionally there was sunshine, but most of the time dolorous clouds drifted with them. When they got near the port in San Francisco, Mam brushed her hair with an old comb and decked herself out in a strawberry dress and a wide-brimmed hat. As she leaned against the railing, the ship jolted against the pier, rocked her sideways, and she lost her stomach again.
My father lumbered heavy suitcases down the gangway. ‘Great day for a wander,’ he told Mam, people flowing past them, ‘great day for a wander.’
That afternoon they went to an old tumbledown building near the Mission, to the offices of the magazine company which had written to my father. The old man had a meeting, and Mam disappeared to the bathroom. Combing her hair in a broken mirror, she must have been amazed at what the cracks did to her face, fracturing her eyes down to her nose, sending cheekbones into a landslide, displacing one ear upwards so that it almost floated above her head. Maybe she ran her brown fingers over the broken sections, reached to take the ear, watched it float away again, her body not belonging to her anymore, the rhythms of the boat journey still moving within it. Maybe she could smell her eyebrows giving off salt and her teeth full of gulls flickering away into flight from a pink deck. I can picture her mouth moving into a small black O, falling out again into lips drained of colour, the heaves of the imaginary waves carrying her face into further fractures as if it were a kaleidoscope, or a million people lending her a piece of their faces, meshing and unmeshing until it wasn’t her there at all, staring at herself. Perhaps one green eye, one brown, one azure, one red. Water splashed up and formed beads within the cracks, beads that held the same broken images, mirrors within mirrors. Reaching for the sink – propping herself up against it, the strawberry dress against the porcelain, her chest heaving – she felt a pair of arms wrap around her.
‘You okay?’
Mam’s face flicked up in the mirror again, meshed with the face of the woman behind her, so that it was all at once brown and white, smooth and pockmarked, full and emaciated.
Cici Henckle had a cigarette dangling from her lips, which the shattered mirror razored into five different parts. She bent my mother over the sink, a liquid sickness splattering her fingers. ‘You go ahead and get it all on up,’ said Cici, smoke billowing from her mouth. She was dressed completely in black, a turtleneck, an obsidian necklace, long skirt with tassels. Her hair was dark, too, lopsided and limp around her shoulders. Long hands held Mam up over the sink for half an hour. ‘You’re whiter’n a sheet,’ said Cici as she washed her hands and rubbed some rouge into Mam’s cheeks.
Mam said nothing. She was propped against the sink, accepting the rouge, watching the mirror settle itself down. Calcium marks ran like musical notes on Cici’s fingernails, moving around Mam’s cheeks. ‘Who’re you with?’ said Cici. Mam flicked her head towards the door of the bathroom.
Outside, my father was slumped in a chair, hat on. The magazine had told him that there’d been a mistake, they needed him in New York, they’d written to him in Mexico, the letter mustn’t have arrived. They gave him cash for the shots of the copper mines, told him to get on a bus across country.
‘Your girl here’s sick as a dog,’ said Cici, when they came out of the bathroom.
‘Come on, love,’ the old man said, ignoring Cici. ‘We have to go.’
Cici, nonplussed, guided Mam to the chair. She kept one arm wrapped around my mother’s waist, and with the other took out another cigarette, lit it, kicked my father’s outstretched feet as if it were all just one natural motion. ‘Say, lover boy, I said your girlfriend here is throwing up God knows how many years of food. And you’re sitting here doing sweet nothing. What sort of goddamn man are you anyway?’
‘We have to be somewhere,’ he said.
‘Where?’
‘New York.’ He said the words breathlessly, as if there were all sorts of camera bulbs erupting from his throat.
‘She’s about as fit for New York as that goddamn hat of yours. She needs to see herself a doctor or something. Get some rest.’
My father nodded, lit a cigarette. ‘She’s just a little seasick.’
‘Seasick my ass – this floor isn’t rolling, is it?’ Cici sat down, leaned towards Mam. ‘You can come to my place if you like. Nothing special, but I got an extra bed. Lover boy here’s welcome, too. Long as he doesn’t make you carry the suitcases.’
Cici’s apartment was in an old house on Dolores Street, not far from the Mission. Sickly white azaleas ranged along the wrought-iron railings, and scraps of graffiti welcomed them along the stairwell. The apartment was filthy. Suitcases were stuffed with clothes, and around them lay papers, ashtrays, bottles, half-eaten biscuits, lamps shorn of their shades. A newspaper photo of James Dean, a voluminous quiff of hair on his head, was propped against a wall, three candles beside it. Cici threw the picture a kiss. Mam’s head still spun as they laid her down in bed.
Cici didn’t have any clean towels available so she dipped a white sock in the sink and mopped Mam’s brow. Cici stayed there for almost two days, sitting by the bed in her black turtleneck, cigarettes tight between her teeth as if she was afraid that they might jump from her mouth and leave her. She was thin as a rib, older than Mam, about thirty. She talked to stay awake, wandered around the room, parted the curtain, pointed out trees, named cloud formations, chatted to Mam as evening stole shapes. A poet, Cici had gone to the magazine offices that afternoon to try to sell some work. She had written one book, which had sold one hundred copies, a small beige edition, the spine of which crackled and tore when opened. It was about a summer spent in a fire lookout in Wyoming. She had typed it on a ream of butcher’s paper while ensconced in the tower, waiting for fires. The paper had rolled incessantly through her typewriter, collecting in giant curls on the floor while a radio bucked behind her. When the book was printed she stayed in Wyoming for two years, trying to sell it, but only a ranger named Delhart paid attention, touting copies around under the seat of his green pick-up truck, amongst empty coffee cups. She had fallen for Delhart, lived with him in a cabin near the edge of the forest, but left him to come to San Francisco with a suitcase full of the beige books. She read the poems in jazz clubs. Men were strung out on Zen and amphetamines, small dharma dolls hanging from the buttons of their lumber shirts. They clapped their hands together at the feet of trumpeters whose bog-black skin glistened with sweat. Shrines of cigarette smoke rose around the bar. Cici’s only payment was a slurp from a jug of red wine, so she had taken a job as a singing waitress in a burlesque club for Asian men. Delhart wrote to her. His letters were full of bottlecaps which she kept in a row under the James Dean picture. Delhart also sent a blade of grass and told her to use it for a ring, quoting Whitman, ‘I believe a blade of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.’
Mam looked down, through her fever, saw the blade of grass on Cici’s finger, encased with tape now, the journey work towards humus.
‘You know,’ Cici told her, ‘you two should come with me back to Wyoming. Not much of a detour.’
She wandered out to the living room where my father was sprawled on the couch. He had a tendency to smack his lips together while he slept. ‘Looks like he’s eating his dreams,’ Cici laughed when she came back in, hovering over Mam: ‘So, how about it? Wyoming?’
‘I would like,’ said Mam.
But later the old man shook his head, looked out the window of the apartment, said they were in a vicious hurry.
‘Why you don’t wait, Michael?’ Mam asked. ‘Why don’t you wait for a day and we will go then? I need some time to get feeling better.’
I can imagine him nodding, pulling his overcoat around him, going out to find a phone, calling the magazine in N
ew York and telling them he was unavoidably delayed. For the next two days he stayed out of the apartment during afternoons, while Mam and Cici talked. Walked down by the water and threw smoke rings out over the bay, the collar of his coat turned up even though it was the beginning of summer. Foghorns keened in. Hell-divers swooped down from loaded clouds above the Golden Gate. He swung off the edges of cable cars, camera poised. When he got back to the apartment the two women were there, in yellow rubber gloves, laughing, the apartment clean, the suitcases packed, and a stack of forgotten books in the corner.
They took a bus across a huge slice of America, where interstates weren’t even built yet. The roads were long and black and shimmery, sometimes interrupted by wandering cows, or herds of antelope kicking across the tarmac, bounding fences. On the journey Mam was sick again. The bus was stopped every fifty miles, and Cici held my mother as she vomited behind the wheel well. She put her coat around my mother’s shoulders, took dry bread out of her rucksack, fed it to her, mopped her brow when Mam began to suffer from another fever. The bus travelled slowly. California stretched itself into a dry desolation; Nevada reared up with sagebrush and juniper; a few wild horses moved in unison through the high desert. Before they got to the Idaho border, the bus almost hit a boy with a dirty white bandage on his thumb. The boy had fallen asleep at the side of the road while hitch-hiking.
‘Goddamn it, son,’ said the bus driver, who stopped and woke him.
The boy had short yellow hair up in wheatfield rows on his head. It turned out that he was on his way to San Francisco, and Cici gave him a crisp new five-dollar bill and two addresses that he wrote in ink on the side of his burlap sack. Some years later, in the sixties – or so Cici told me – she met the boy again at a party, when they were both strung out on LSD. The yellow hair was longer by then, and the boy gave her back the five-dollar bill – he had soaked it in lysergic acid. They ate the bill together over the course of the next three days. Two months later his body was found washed up on the southern end of Half Moon Bay Beach in California. Cici saw it as a peculiarity of her life that faces and moments kept coming back to haunt her – when I met her she told me that she was amazed at how much that bus journey still moved within her, all the people she met, the things she saw, she could recall it all, the bandages on the boy’s thumb, the rattle of the bus engine, the white cloth in her fingers, rubbing its way delicately over Mam’s brow.