Songdogs

by Colum McCann

  ‘Making flies?’ I shouted down.

  He whipped his head around, shifted the chair.

  ‘Up here,’ I said, sticking my head through the hole in the roof.

  ‘Christ, you’ll be the death of me yet. Where, in the name of Jaysus, are ya?’ I whistled and he looked up.

  ‘Who d’ya think ya are – Michel-fucken-angelo?’

  ‘You’re making flies?’

  ‘Dressing flies,’ he corrected.

  ‘When did ya start that?’

  ‘Ah, years ago.’

  ‘Really?’

  I’ve never seen him do that before – when he first started fishing he bought all his flies from a tackle shop in town, came back with dozens of them in his hat. I watched as he rubbed his hands up and down his bare arms.

  ‘You’re not cold?’

  ‘Not a bit. I could do this in an icestorm. Love it altogether.’

  ‘Should put something over that vest,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, go away out of that.’

  He turned the seat again, tightened the vice down on the hook, and rearranged the material in front of him, meticulously. Looked up at me once more, removed his glasses, and went to work. Took out some purple floss, rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, began trying to wind it along the shank of the hook. But his fingers were shaking – like hummingbird wings about to lift – and he kept dropping the thread, lifting it again, staring at it. He placed his trembling hand down on the table, glared at it, maybe telling it to stop, then suddenly thumped the back of his hand with his other fist. It stopped and he chuckled to himself. He finally got the thread started around the hook and the shakes in his hand seemed to quit altogether and there was a quiet content there, an acceptance of the slowness of time and the art of making a fly so simple that it would cause a fish to want it, something naturally belligerent and real, something that would whizz through the air with two pairs of wings and maybe three sets of eyes, something with an incoherent longing for motion. He began humming and looked happy – pissing on doom in his own peculiar way. I reached across the barn roof for the metal sheet, placed it over the hole, hammered it in, descended the ladder, went to the house and got him a shirt and his overcoat – he would have frozen down there otherwise, the length of time I knew it was going to take him to make that fly, with all its colours, all its trapped motion.

  * * *

  Bus stations are among the saddest places in America. Everyone looking for a way out. Slinking around. Looking for lost children. Keeping eyes glued on nothing in particular, waiting for life to happen.

  In San Francisco a young girl howled about Jesus. Her arm was long with a string of watches. She said she was waiting for the Second Coming. A boy beside her hustled to carry suitcases and bags. He had a sign around his neck that said: ‘HIV Positive’. A man in a Rasta hat tried to sell me a leaflet for the deaf. He played out some sign language in the air, wrote on a piece of paper, scribbling that I could use the leaflet for commercial breaks between the books I was reading. I bought it, and he thumped me playfully on the shoulder, said he wasn’t deaf at all, went sauntering off. I shoved the leaflet down into my backpack and it was only then I noticed that Cici had put the bear’s-claw bong in the top compartment, under my jeans. I went to the bus-station bathroom and washed the last of the resin out, just in case my bags got searched.

  It was a two-day trip to Wyoming. A road-rattle through high deserts and mountains, on interstates with giant rest areas, and stopovers in cities with grey afternoons hanging above them. When I finally got to Jackson Hole I found myself walking around in a stupor until I got to the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar. I negotiated some dope from a man in a black stetson, went down to the Snake River, filled the bear’s-claw pipe, got a little stoned.

  In the morning, when I woke, two blue herons burst their way over the banks of the river, wings flapping hard enough to break a man’s arm. Washed my face in the meltwater rush brought down from the mountains by late summer.

  I went back down to the bus depot and looked around again. My parents had been there over thirty-five years before. Cici had told me about it. I reconstructed the scene in my head. Mam had stood, nervously, cheekbones daubed with rouge, her lips coloured with a delicate red, a crimson scarf languid at her neck. She feared the moment when the bus would belch out smoke from its exhaust. Cici waited beside her, laid a hand on Mam’s forearm, ran a fingernail through some fluffy arm hair. Mam put her head on Cici’s shoulder and stared down the road, out the length of the town and beyond, into the late fifties, the unsure distance of the future. She let the crimson scarf fall down around her shoulders.

  The old man was there, too, his back to them. He was shoving luggage in the bottom of the bus, arguing with the driver. There was some oil in the luggage well and he wanted the driver to clean it up. ‘Ain’t my job, mister.’ My father threw his arms up in the air, opened his suitcase and took out a pair of underpants, mopped the oil. He thought about burning the underwear, a totem to the summer, decided against it. He didn’t want to get kicked off the bus. The driver let out a huff, climbed behind the steering wheel, beeped the horn. An announcement was made over a loudspeaker. Cici took Mam’s face in her hands and they kissed each other, flush on the lips. My father was busy at the luggage well. ‘Good luck,’ Cici whispered in my Mam’s ear. They were hugging. Red lipstick was smudged on Cici’s upper lip.

  Behind them my old man shouted: ‘If ya don’t get your arse in gear, we’ll miss the fucken bus, woman!’

  Cici ran her fingers along Mam’s face. They kissed again – on the cheek this time – and then my parents were gone. The old man was drumming his fingers on the seat in front of him, a jazz beat. He didn’t look back as the bus took off. He said ‘yeah’ over and over again in a slow saxophone way. It was as if New York clubs already existed in his throat. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ He kept on drumming and he didn’t give a second thought to it, the leaping tears on my Mam’s face as the driver crunched through the gears and down another road, another long road in the roll of themselves, leading them to New York.

  I moved away from the vision, walked through Jackson Hole. There were tourists in abundance. A gunfight was being re-enacted as theatre down near the market, little red eyes of video cameras blinking around it. In the distance, trees ran on one another’s backs all the way up the mountains. Birds sang out, marking their territory. I knew the search for Mam had become hopeless and, besides, I would soon run out of money. I found a cabin to rent on the road near the Snake River. Weedy and tumbledown, a few wild cats perched on orange crates in the yard, parts of an old windmill, an engine block on which wood had once been chopped. At the back of the cabin I wore a trail in the grass, all the way to the water’s edge. It was so high above sea level that satellites could be seen making paths, clusters of stars shuttling and winking, and once an eclipse which gave the moon an incredible penumbra.

  I forged a Social Security number and found a job cleaning swimming pools, diatomaceous clay under my nails, leaves lifted out from filters, blue-ribbed vacuums used after shocking pools with chlorine. In the winter the ski lifts made caterpillar-shapes up the slopes and I sold tickets. More than three years were spent like this, patching my cabin, fixing water pipes, climbing hills, walking, rafting rivers, watching birthdays pass, still wondering about Mam.

  Kutch turned out to be my neighbour. Short black hair and a face that could have come from a gargoyle, full of stitches and welts – he had once been involved in a dam-bombing accident. He and Eliza lived in an abandoned railway carriage. For a living they fashioned benches out of fallen logs and sold them to trendy stores in Cheyenne. Mother and son together, I envied them their closeness. Eliza worked on the benches, chiselling, carving, long brown fingers moving softly over wood. Kutch learned from her, imitated her patterns. Sometimes they went out driving and chopped down billboards together, spiked trees, destroyed bulldozers, left red fists on them. Red fists abounded. Even on the fire tower – which Kutch
showed me that first autumn – they had painted a mural. Boysenberry red, the thumbnail intricate and dark, the wrist sidling off into an arm, lofting its way over the trees and the mountains, thrusting up amongst the circling hawks. Beneath it the words, in a black oval sweep: ‘No Compromise in the Defense of Mother Earth.’

  I sometimes drove Kutch and Eliza around in their pickup as they did their eco-guerrilla stunts. I never did anything myself, never drew any fists or poured sugar in any tank, paralysed by my own inaction.

  They chopped down a row of billboards in Utah, a long line of advertisements with a ridiculous painting of a penguin on them, miles and miles of inanities that scarred the land. I sat waiting in the driver’s seat, parked on the verge, and we got chased by an unmarked car, a red light flashing on its roof. Eliza and Kutch jumped in the back bed of the truck, the acetylene torch still flaring, and I sped off. Through the rear sliding window, Eliza put her brown wrinkled hand on my upper arm and squeezed tight until we drew away safely, in the dark. When we got back to Wyoming she kissed me on the forehead and said I was welcome anytime to come live with them in their railway carriage, that they had a spare room. But I liked my solitude. I’ve always liked my solitude.

  Eliza showed me how to work on benches, told me old legends as we worked. With a chisel I carved out intricate patterns in fallen trees, her tales swirling around me. She made tea, and we listened to old flute music – it seemed to lift the cabin into the air. I sometimes stared at her for a long time as she worked, beads at her neck, furrows of concentration in her brow. She returned the look, silently.

  I was out walking in the late-winter snow when I found the two dead coyotes hung on the fencepost. I stared for a while, then hurried back and got Eliza and Kutch. They pulled on their coats as they walked down the trail after me. Eliza clipped the coyotes down from where they hung. Carted the bodies back to her cabin. She took their teeth out and made some bracelets – one set of teeth was old and gnawed down, the other young and sharp. Afterwards she and Kutch brought the stiff bodies up to the forest, laid them out on the ground, left them there to manure themselves back into America. Eliza told me the old legend about the birth of the universe, the yammering-in of the world. I trudged home under the blanket-black night, the snow reflecting off the ground, went back to my cabin, took out my photo album, flicked through it. It had become a habit of mine, looking at the album.

  I would rise from my chair, step out the door, look at the Wyoming sky, the thump of creation, and then I’d take another step forward on to the edge of the porch, and I would walk my way slowly into old photographs.

  * * *

  The first of them is a street, a Bronx tenement street, hermetically sealed at the end of the 1950s. The street loops itself into a red-brick cul-de-sac. At the end of the road there’s a commotion. It’s a summer’s day and boys are wearing bathing togs and running back and forth through a geyser of water erupting from a broken fire hydrant. Their hair is very short, their bodies scrawny and white. One teenager, with a few tufts of hair in bloom on his chest, is in the middle of a huge leap through the water, arms held out wide, his fingers spread, a roar on his lips, eyebrows arched, rack of ribs exposed. The girls aren’t allowed to put on bathing suits – this is a Catholic street – but some of them run through the water anyway, in long dresses which cling to their thighs. Along the side of the street a football is in mid-motion, heading towards a girl who looks shocked. A woman with a face like a trout peers from beyond the edge of the spray.

  In the far background of the photograph a group of men and women are gathered on the steps outside a house. Only by walking into the photograph, going beyond the rim and up very close, can you make out their faces. They are Irish immigrants. Their clothes and expressions tell you that. Flat hats and grey trousers held up with suspenders. Some of them are sharing cigarettes, laughing, breaking out a melodeon, peeling labels off bottles that come from jacket pockets. They are fetching Galway and Dublin and Leitrim and Donegal from the bottom end of these bottles – and toasts are being made, or have been made. A toast to new arrivals who come hugging their suitcases with ash-wood hurleys strapped on the side. A toast to strange billboards that flash out new neon signs over the Bronx. A toast to a boxer who puts away journeymen heavyweights. A toast to the fire hydrant and the leaping boy. And maybe a toast to the big grey figure of Eisenhower, who will soon put a big chunk of metal up high in the air.

  They have no names when I walk up to meet them, these immigrants. But I know their jobs – a list which, when converted to spittle at the edge of a tongue, could fill a keg – mechanics, maids, doormen, waitresses, line cooks, roofers, plumbers, garbage men, dishwashers, furnace foreman, doughnut maker in the morning, security guard at night, pint-puller, scrap buyer, dogcatcher, junk seller, shoeshiner, secretary, policeman who doesn’t ticket his own, fireman with a sprig of plastic shamrock in his helmet, landscaper, taxi driver, peddler, telephonist. They are watching their children play in the water. ‘He’s a wild one, that same fella.’ ‘Wouldn’t she break your heart?’ ‘Look at the head of hair on him.’ The men remember a time when they were boys. They made footballs from the bladders of pigs, but the shape of footballs has changed in this country, no longer round. Their sons often come home in colourful high-school jackets and it’s a strange language that they speak, quarterbacks and sackings. The men are wondering whether the ball, in its mid-flight twirl, will be caught. The women watch their daughters down by the fire hydrant and worry about how high their skirts are being lifted. The new leather shoes might get damp and unshape themselves. One mother is worried that the ball is heading towards her daughter, and maybe a joke rises up in her mind that her daughter is so clumsy that she hasn’t even caught the measles yet, how could she catch anything else?

  Mam is wedged in between two rather fat women. Her blouse is white and opened down to the fourth button so that a man in a flat hat above her is leaning over, trying to peep down into the cleavage. It might be a bit bony for his taste. She has lost a lot of weight in the Bronx. She has a tendency to sit at the dinner table and push the food around on her plate, the fork clanging tinnily. Her arms are cartilaginous. A hip-bone juts from the dress. Her neck is a brown stalk of rhubarb with its long striations. The dark hair is pulled back, ribboned in red. She is on the bottom stoop with her hands placed carefully in her lap, one over the other. They are hands that have been doing laundry all day. She works with a family from Tipperary who still keep the letters ‘CHINESE LAUNDRY’ over the door, inspiring jokes about the slanty eyes and yellow skin of the Irish rednecks. Mam’s eyes are drawn down to her hands. Long and water-wrinkled, they have been scrubbing for many hours. Remnants of white washing powder under the nails. The tops of the fingers are puffy and the skin is loose from so much water. It is strange the patterns that are made in her hands. The fingerprint lines seem to become much more prominent, so that the rings at the top of each finger are bigger to the eye. Maps on her fingers. Far away, a boy named Miguel could lodge dirt in the fingernails and make a work of art from it. Mexican earth, the good earth.

  A salesman has called earlier that evening, selling hand cream. She has bought a bottle of it. Salesmen are always calling at their door, at night. They have very short hair and perfect trouser creases and fabulous pitches in their voices – selling vacuum cleaners, knife sharpeners, wireless radios, kitchen tiles, kettles, ironing boards – and a lot of notes change fists. A great street for salesmen. People here talk a lot about new kitchen machinery. The lemon scent on her hands rises up to her nostrils, and she is glad that she bought it, although money is fairly tight these days. Money is like that flock of birds that arrived last night just as an old Hoagy Carmichael song jumped out of the radio. The birds arrived on the very first strain of ‘Ol’ Buttermilk Sky,’ flittered through it, left when the song ended. When they took off there were a lot of bird droppings on the ground outside the door. Money is like that flock of birds, Mam might think. You notice it when it’s not a
round. But if you have enough money you can get away, fly off, as many do.

  Removal trucks sometimes arrive, and many jealous stares follow the lifting of the furniture, off to a street in a wealthy part of Brooklyn, or Queens, or Long Island, a road lined with trees and motor cars, where there might be a few Italians or Jews as well. Or even some of her own.

  Mam is just about smiling as she looks down at her hands. It is not an unhappy smile, just a little lost on her face. Maybe she’s wondering what she’s doing here. Wondering what has led her to this. Wondering if life is manufactured by a sense of place, if happiness is dependent on soil, if it is an accident of circumstance that a woman is born in a certain country, and that the weather that gives birth to the soil also gives birth to the unfathomable intricacies of the heart. Wondering if there is a contagion to sadness. Or an entropy to love. Or maybe Mam isn’t thinking this way at all. Maybe she is wondering about the sheer banalities of her day, what she will cook for dinner, what end of the kitchen table she will do her ironing on, when she will get time to wash the white tablecloth, if she should put some aloe on her husband’s hands, hands that are now out of the photograph, pressing down on a button that will open a shutter.

  The old man is hot-roofing these days because he cannot make enough money from his photographs for them to live on. He hates the job, but it’s all he can find. The Wyoming photographs come back from publishers with courteous notes, not even signed. Mam doesn’t like the idea of him being on a roof. Brutal work, carrying buckets of hot tar. She doesn’t like the man who runs the company either, Mangan, a sly-eyed man who drives around in an old Ford truck, ladders jutting from it. The company is called Koala-T Roofing Company, with a picture painted on the side, an impish koala holding a bucket. Mangan doesn’t pay very well and when my father comes home she has to scrape the globs of dried tar from his forearms. ‘Koala-T, me arse!’ he shouts. Sometimes he curses and slams his fists down on the table – ‘I want to take photos! Not do this shit! Do you understand me!’ and she must soothe him and sometimes get in front of his camera. She is wondering if perhaps he will take more photographs tonight and be happy for that. I stand in front of her and ask: Are ya happy, Mam? She doesn’t reply. But there is something in her that says: Well, yes, I am happy here, I suppose I’m happy, but I’d be happier elsewhere.