Songdogs

by Colum McCann

  I drift off from the group again and hear the leaping boy still screaming in delight by the fire hydrant.

  Not a lot is going on in Mam’s life. Sometimes, on a day off from the laundry, she goes into New York City on the subway and tries on red hats in the Fifth Avenue department stores, wanders around through acres of perfume and cosmetics and fineries. The ladies behind the counter soon realise she isn’t buying and leave her alone. She moves gracefully through the stores, fingering things, acquiring them for the briefest of moments, lays them down again, moves out into the street, where she walks through the traffic to sit in the rear of St Patrick’s Cathedral. In the silence she reincarnates herself – nothing too romantic, a grackle maybe. She settles down on a telegraph pole in her hometown, looks around. Swoops down and takes the host from the mestizo priest’s fingers. Takes off again into coloured winds. Revisits a house. Darts along dry streets. Strange to be a bird. Strange how hollow your bones become.

  And how curious it is that she hasn’t heard from Cici in so long. The last time Cici wrote, she was on a train heading west, slamming through flatlands. She scribbled from a boxcar, where light filtered through in slants, and a mad red-faced hobo shared Spam sandwiches with her. It was a short letter and Mam read it so often that she began to incant parts of it in her mind like a church prayer: I miss you very much, Juanita, keep smiling, it paints the world well, I will see you very soon. There is something about Cici that makes the world worth living. Mam thinks about her often – it’s not so much that she wants to kiss her again as just simply see her, reassure herself that Cici really existed, that there was a time of such splendid happiness, that there might be one again.

  Most of Mam’s other times are spent in quiet exactitude in her apartment, cleaning, arranging, putting things back in their proper places, meticulous, proud. When she talks she has the strangest lilt of half-Irish, half-Mexican accent. People seem to enjoy her company. She has stories to tell about chickens and a far-off country. And another world of fires and a tower. Yet the secret part of her – the photos in their bedroom – is well hidden from view, behind lace curtains on the third floor, where pigeons sometimes nestle at the windowsill. The only time that her husband seems to be truly at peace is when he’s taking those photos. They’re not obscene, not in any way. They make him content. It’s a small enough price for Mam to pay, and it’s an attention of sorts. He is still in love with her. He still makes a temple from her body – even though it’s much like a minaret now.

  She remains looking at her hands as I ghost my way through the photograph and try to say things to the people around her. They are busy with their bottles and their dreams of appliances, so I step back through the shot and up the street. For time immemorial, that boy will be leaping. And I will never know if the ball was caught. And the trout-faced woman will continue to stare.

  I move on down towards the end of the cul-de-sac, nod to my father as his fingers press on the shutter button, but he doesn’t nod back. I step out again, on to a black rim and into a night scene.

  It is 1960, and a few young men are dancing with my mother. There is a radio set up under a windowsill and an Elvis Presley song is swivelling from it. It is apparent in the euphoric movement of the young men’s hips that a new decade is just under way. They have the beginnings of copycat quiffs on their heads. A boy with a harelip purses his mouth, as if he might kiss the moon, my mother dancing just a few feet from him. The boy wears drainpipe trousers, a purple shirt, pomade in his hair, and he is twirling imaginary hula-hoops around his groin. She is clicking her fingers. All along the cul-de-sac, bunting is up for the election of a man whose portrait sits on virtually every wall, green, white, and orange ribbons hung underneath his chin like a colourful goatee – John F. Kennedy with his perfect teeth, vying on the walls with the Pope and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It must be a happy night for Mam, because her cheeks are flush with alcohol and her face is made-up, eyelashes curled, mascara carefully applied. Her eyes are open very wide and brown. Her thin body is in the middle of a twist, so that one shoulder is lower than the other and her chest nudges up against her blouse. I walk out there to go dancing. It’s hot and muggy, a humid night in late autumn. I twirl my hips, too. I move with abandon. She says to me: When are you going to get rid of that stupid earring, Conor? I take it out and give it to her, and she smiles.

  I ask and she says that nothing much has changed. The laundry has grown bigger and new employees have been taken on. Other girls doing the scrubbing now. My father is still on the roofs, and the tar docks itself under his fingers. His forty-second birthday was spent above the Bronx – jokes being made about Marilyn Monroe and those who like it hot. Cici has written to her, raving about marijuana, but she hasn’t visited yet. Cici would like it here, out moving in the night, with moths flaring around under lamplights, dancers in a bouquet around a radio, the grind of hips, the swivel of words. It’s her sort of place – except Cici might be aware that there’s even newer music on its way, runnelling along over the continent, newer ideas, newer dances. Mam has a bead of sweat on her brow. Maybe she will wait for it to negotiate its way down her face to where she can tongue it. Or maybe not. Maybe she will wipe it off with a quick flick of the hand. Or maybe it will stay there eternally, a bead of sweat to say: I was dancing once, when I was thirty-three years old, and I didn’t have a care in the world.

  Outside the photograph, my father is slickly dressed in a white shirt that smells of barsmoke. His dark tie is open and the long end of it reaches past his waist. Hair is quite thin now, furrows of it across his scalp. He is glad to watch his wife dance. He is afraid that life is becoming staid, he doesn’t like the roofs. There are days when he goes searching for other jobs, something in a press syndicate, or a newspaper, but all he ever gets are a few freelance shifts. He just wants to take his photographs, but there’s not much opportunity for that. The world rotates on an axis of what-ifs? What if we were somewhere else? What if we sauntered off and just didn’t come back?

  But, for now, he enjoys the music coming from the radio. The men on the roofs sometimes sing Presley, their favourite being ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’

  While he stands to take this particular photograph his foot is tapping, but he has to stop so as not to jolt the camera. A million light cells have just burst from the flash. I walk through them, packets of light swarming around me, and out the other side, back into the nineties, where the sun is going down over the Teton mountains. I cannot help this wandering backwards. It is my own peculiar curse.

  Their apartment has a bedroom and a living room – but it is in this bedroom that all the living is done. I feel queasy about stepping into this private domain, a voyeur, a Peeping Tom. The room is painted mauve. It is two years on. Mam is in a white summer dress and she is lying on a chaise-longue that they’ve rescued from the rubbish. The chaise has carved feet that curve and bend and give it elegance, but the material is ripped and tatty, bits of stuffing come out from it. She lies, as if on a throne. The dress is purposefully off the shoulder. It falls down and exposes the top half of a dark nipple. The shot is loaded with more sexuality than almost any of the others – something to do with its casualness. Despite the skinniness, she looks good. Her feet are stretched in front of her and it seems like she is contemplating her toes. She is chewing on the end of a pen and a sheet of paper is propped up on her stomach. I imagine that she is writing to Cici. I step over to see what she is saying on the page: I miss the fires. Don’t you? The last letter that Mam received was very strange – Cici had been exalting marijuana, going into rhapsodies about acid. What does marijuana make you feel like? Mam might be writing. I have heard it makes you sick, true? The end of the pen is so well chewed that it looks as if she simply sinks her teeth into it, but in this photo she is kissing it, lost in thought, thick lips pursed upon it. She wears no jewellery, only her wedding ring. Her body sweeps away from her in the photograph, along the chaise-longue, a sheet of paper flying in the breeze.

  He
likes the pose, my father, he is enjoying the capture of it. He is up on the balls of his toes, shouting, Perfect! Perfect! Hold it right there! He is fresh from a shower and feels good about the world. This will be one of the best shots. He sweeps his fingers over his balding scalp and shouts, Hold it! Maybe he will put on a gallery exhibition in an avant-garde place, he thinks, show her to the world. Fifteen years of Mam – in Mexico, in Wyoming, in New York. He is very excited about the idea, which will never come to fruition. But for now he is happy with the vision of it.

  Her lips are kissing the end of the pen, and she’s glad that her husband isn’t throwing a fit and that there is something quite smooth and secretive to the grey light that is filtering its way through the curtains, the rays seeming to bend as they hit a dusty mirror. She won’t remain in this apartment for ever, she thinks, but at least it isn’t too bad. The cream is still working on her hands. It has given them a certain softness. There is a small amount of money in the bank. Things she had never dreamed of – toasters and televisions – have begun to fill the empty spaces in the apartment. Even some Spanish speakers have come to the street now, from near the Atacama Desert in Chile. She spends time with them, looks after their baby. There are still some days when my father whispers that he will bring her home to Mexico. She is sitting back, relaxed, writing her letter, and I leave her there, in that peculiar peace, my father shouting, Here we go, Juanita! Yeah! Yeah!

  I move away from them, out of their bedroom, and into a print given to me by Cici.

  It is 1964. The camera must have been held out by Cici at the distance of an outstretched arm, because it is a lopsided close-up. It shows only their faces and the tops of their clothes, their cheeks touching against one another. Cici has hitch-hiked all the way across the country from San Francisco. She looks exhilarated, her pupils set high in the rims of her eyes. The acne crevices have been darkened in from her spell out on the open roads – in the nudist camps, the psychedelic buses, the growing lines of war protests, last year’s march to Washington, the hailing-to-the-sky of Martin Luther King.

  The top of a bright t-shirt peeps out from the bottom edge. Mam’s hair is loose on her shoulders. Disembodied, I float in. The kitchen is full of sparkling pans. Some water boiling on the stove. The Rolling Stones on the radio. A familiar smell drifts up from the table where Mam and Cici are sitting. I am amazed to find myself staring at a joint, burning itself down in the ashtray. Cici has been smoking. Maybe my mother has, too, but I doubt it. A tumble of words from them – Cici asking Mam to join her for a while, even just for a holiday, that they’ll caress the road, maybe meet up with some Sonoran gypsies, eat peyote, go down over the border together.

  ‘Come with me, man,’ she says.

  ‘Why you call me “man”?’

  ‘Why not?’

  The offer is tempting. This touching of hair, this touching of cheek, this apparition of Cici again in her life.

  ‘And Michael?’

  ‘What about him?’

  The joint is held between lips and there is an uproar of laughter. Cici’s head is jerked towards the fridge, which up until an hour ago Mam had been proud of. But Cici has quoted a novelist talking about ‘dumb white machinery,’ and the fridge is not quite so magical to her anymore. Cici says that the dope has made her hungry, and again they laugh. There is a hand laid on a hand and the two of them look at the camera.

  Cici says, ‘Cheese!’

  But there is a secret behind all of this and, afterwards, when I extend the rim of the photograph and follow them into the living room, Mam tells her about it.

  ‘I am going to have a baby,’ Mam says eventually, smiling, ‘Michael and I are going to have baby.’

  Cici tugs hard on the joint.

  ‘That’s lovely,’ she says, and suddenly a serpentine sweep of roads rises up in her mind, away from here. Her hands are shaking a little. ‘I’m very happy for you.’ She goes outside and sits on the step. Mam stays in the living room. The baby’s been there for three months. I can imagine her running her hands very lovingly over her stomach, talking to the child that hasn’t even begun to move within her yet, waiting for the faint soothing thump of life against the wall of her womb. When Cici comes inside, her face flushed, she finds Mam in the kitchen, making bread.

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘Michael will be back soon.’

  ‘He can come, too, man.’

  ‘I told you, I am going to have a baby.’

  ‘You want a baby to grow up in this shit?’ Cici’s arms fly towards the window.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then, come on.’

  ‘Later I will ask to Michael.’

  ‘Aww, man.’

  Mam watches from the window as Cici leaves that afternoon, the photograph tucked in her pocket. Cici carries her belongings in a grey duffle bag. Mam moves from the window, and maybe she turns on the television set to watch a famous game show, or maybe she kneads more dough, or maybe she stares at her hair in the mirror, thinking it could be the last she will see of Cici.

  The baby follows Cici’s example – comes far too late, leaves way too early. On an evening of torpor, Mam loses the child. The old man is coming back from the roofs. He carries an apple tart up the stairs of the apartment, the smell wafting around him. He is happy, for once, with his day’s work. When he opens the door she is lying in a pool of blood on the bathroom floor. He drops the apple tart. His feet slide in the blood. She is unconscious with her head slumped against the wall. He lifts her to her feet, whispering, Sweet Jesus, sweet Jesus. On the way down to the street a dark patch of red insinuates itself into the front of his shirt, where he carries her. He brings her to hospital, and the dead child propels them on to a year of misery. She comes home from the hospital, hand held to her belly. They don’t talk much. A lethargy hangs in the air. Some nights my father finds that she has disappeared from the apartment and he pulls on his belted overcoat to go searching, finds my mother down at the maternity ward of the hospital, staring in through the glass window at babies, with nurses trying to gently steer her away. She spends money on baby clothes. She carries a soother in her purse. Sometimes she is torn towards going to find Cici. Mam writes a letter to her friend: ‘Regretting is expensive, sometimes I wish I had gone with you.’

  The old man stays on the roofs, but they both know that they will have to move on. And they do move on – towards the west of Ireland. He suggests that it will be a good place for Mam to recover, that there may still be some money left over in the bank, he can get a job easily there, he can take photographs, there is some land that was never sold. They can try again for a family. They will have a child, maybe two, maybe three – whatever she wants. After that, he says, they will make their home in Mexico.

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Ireland is far.’

  ‘I know, love.’

  ‘We will be all right?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And then we come back to Mexico?’

  ‘Of course.’

  When they leave the street, the old man relishes the triumph of it. He sways his way down along the pavement with the suitcases in either hand. He has arranged for the taxi to meet them at the end of the street. There is more drama that way for the old man – walk the full length of the street.

  He wears a grey tweed jacket in the airport, a white dog rose in the breast pocket, the hat devoid now of its rabbits’ feet. Mam has bought a brand-new strawberry dress. She is radiant on the airplane, a stewardess marvelling at her accent. They move onwards and backwards – always onwards and, for the first time backwards – to a place where some wisps of grey De Valera mist still hang, although it is the winter of 1966 and all over the country other mists are being dispersed. They have difficulty in Shannon because my mother doesn’t have a visa, but my father bribes the immigration official with a twenty-dollar bill. He is home free. He is walking gigantically again. A great swagger out through the airport, arms swinging, p
ushing the suitcases on a trolley with his foot. Mam beside him. They take a bus to Mayo. There’s some money left in the account, but no land, and they must take out a mortage to buy an old farmhouse – Guinness bottles among nettles in the garden, windows cracked in the shed, an old bathtub in the courtyard, wisteria growing upwards with the years. Mam settles down in much the same way as their new bathtub – a shiny anachronism. She is the dark-skinned one, the one the drunks in the town square call Senorita, the one who never cuts her hair even when it becomes long and brazenly silver. She wears a scarf over her head as she goes to mass in the red-brick church. Letters to Cici are returned, unopened. In America the war protests are in full flight, and Cici is rampant around the country with a flower on her cheek, elephant flares covering her sandals, hypodermic needles stuck blithely in her arm. But Mam knows nothing of this, and she waits for letters.

  Mam lingers in the farmhouse, eyes to the bog, spending years this way, slow as Sundays, longing constantly for a child’s movement in her belly. I am to be born four years later, when she’s forty-two years old, and as a precautionary measure the doctors slice open her belly for a Caesarian section. The old man waits in the hospital corridors, gently tapping his heel on the floor, hat propped on his knee, bobbing.

  * * *

  An array of equipment neatly lined in front of him – silver tinsel, purple and golden floss, blue chatterer feathers, some yellow seal’s fur, a hot-orange hackle, tiny golden-pheasant feathers, some black thread, very black, riverblack. He pointed each one out to me, hand hovering over them. Most of it had arrived in the package this morning, from an angling shop in Dublin.