Songdogs

by Colum McCann

  ‘I heard Mrs O’Leary’s not around anymore.’

  ‘Oh, she kicked the bucket a long time ago. Chock-full of whiskey, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘A grand way to go, I suppose,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Took four bottles down with her.’

  ‘Took what?’

  ‘Took four bottles down into the ground with her.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Bushmills.’ He smacked his lips together. ‘Someone went along to the graveyard one night and dug up the fucken coffin.’

  ‘You’re not serious.’

  ‘Some thirsty bastard,’ he said.

  He ran his fist across his mouth. ‘Talking of – is that tea ready yet?’

  He sat back and slowly, ritually, banged the bottom end of the packet against his palm, took the plastic wrapper off, turned one of the cigarettes upside-down. ‘For good luck,’ he said. I went upstairs and took a shower, got dressed. Came down and asked him if he was interested in going for a pint in O’Leary’s, but he just sort of laughed at me.

  ‘What would ya want to hang out with an old fella for?’

  I wasn’t about to start arguing. Enough of his self-pity. Before I left I went over to the fire, put on some peat, and ruffled it with the poker. He had some of his fishing flies placed on the stonework, to dry them out. He sat up and said that fishing flies were like good women – they should never be stored away while moist – and laughed away as if it was the funniest thing in the world.

  I left him sitting in the chair and went back out on the bike again into the boneblack night.

  When I came back from O’Leary’s, he’d collapsed in the chair. His fly was open like a wound and his hands were down by his crotch. His handkerchief was tucked into the nape of his neck. It was as if he’d been about to serve himself, then forgot. In the kitchen I could tell that he’d been pissing in the sink – he hadn’t rinsed it out and there were still two saucers there, one of them with little splotches of yellow on the side. Disgusting. The least he could have done was take out the saucers.

  Watched him as he dozed. He raised a hand to wipe something from his eye, maybe some sort of vision, a dream, an absurdity. But I can’t imagine him having dreams anymore. What would he summon up? Maybe something slow and soporific, moving itself into blackness, a slow waltz towards oblivion. Or might it be some secret of technicolour? Who knows? Perhaps life goes out as it once came in – down to the secular brilliance of a single hydrogen atom, imploding back on to itself, the emergence of a songdog on the rim of nothing. A fatuous idea really. Too many pints of Harp in me. Didn’t recognise anyone in O’Leary’s pub, not a single soul, maybe everyone has emigrated. Sat in the corner and flipped a few bar coasters up and down on the table. Plenty of old men in there though, moving their dentures up and down in their mouths, the oval dawns of yellow nicotine stains on their hands.

  FRIDAY

  god, i was good

  Woke up late, feeling a bit nasty. All that Harp. Nectar of the dogs. He gave a laugh when he saw me, went to the cupboard and got out the whiskey.

  ‘For what ails ya,’ he said.

  I took a quick shot and drank a few glasses of water. He upped himself from the table, said he was going to go down to catch his fish. But he must have run out of good flies, because he got out some bait from the very back of the freezer shelf – old shrimp of some sort in a plastic container. Boiled water in a saucepan and placed the tub in the hot water, stood over it, inhaling some of the steam, said it was good for cleaning out his head, that I should try it myself. Every now and then he pushed the container down in the water with his fingers, submerging it, licked at his fingers. They must have been burnt from the hot water, but it didn’t seem to faze him any. He plucked the plastic tub out, said he didn’t have time to wait for the shrimp to thaw, put some of it in his overcoat pocket. Stale shrimp won’t help the smell of him any, I thought, once it unfreezes in his pocket it’ll really stink him to high heaven. Illegal bait, too, but he said he didn’t care, a fish is a fish is a fish, especially if he catches that giant salmon of his.

  Took myself off into town on the bike for a bit of breakfast in Gaffney’s hotel. Same old place, yellowing table doilies, ducks in flight on the wall, carpet curling up at the edges, the waft of brewing tea, farmers smoking cigarettes in the corners. Sat at the table nearest the door and read the back page of the Connaught Telegraph. Ordered up a big feed with extra sausages. The waitress knew me. Took me a while to remember, but I finally did – Maria from the convent school, cheekbones you could abseil, hair to the waist. I used to blow kisses at her when she walked past the handball alley.

  She kept coming over to my table with bits and pieces – butter, marmalade, an extra spoon – until she finally asked me. I wasn’t in the mood for talking, pretended it wasn’t me, put on my best-dressed Wyoming drawl.

  Still, nothing better than a few sausages and rashers for a hangover, and I felt like ninety afterwards. Left a pound coin for a tip and she came out running after me, hair flying, said we don’t accept tips in this part of the world. She said she knew it was me all along – the dark skin, I suppose – and smiled.

  ‘How long are you back for?’ she asked.

  Told her about the visa and she said I was lucky, she’d give an arm and a leg to take off herself, she has a brother in Louisiana who shucks oysters, a sister in Washington State doing nursing in a home for geriatrics. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and fooled around with the buttons on my denim jacket. She asked about the old man, said he used to come in for breakfast every Saturday, she hasn’t seen him in a while.

  ‘Oh, he’s in flying form.’

  ‘That’s great news altogether.’

  She was jangling coins in her apron pocket.

  ‘Well, I’ll be off,’ I said.

  ‘Fair enough so. Come in for breakfast on Monday before ya leave.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘It’s on me.’

  I walked back home by the riverbank, wheeling the bicycle. Had to detour by the factory, where they’ve raised the barbed wire another few feet in the air, the shouts of men amongst the squeals and the shit and the slurry. Sat down a couple of hundred yards from the factory, in the long grass. Had an urge to just get in and swim, even if the water was disgusting, black as berries, the slow roll of it through the rushes. Took off my t-shirt and trousers, hung them on the brambles of a bush, sat in my underwear, feet dangling in the water. A life of half-emergence. A consistency of acceptance. Enough of the old man’s disease, I thought. This contagion of days, teacups and nods. A vision of Maria rose up in me, a vertigo of lust and genuine longing. Should go back and sweep her off her feet, roll the coins from her apron in my fingers, do something ridiculously romantic for once, carry her off to the beach, ride palominos along the water’s edge, shove ogham stones in our pockets, ride out to sea.

  Kowtowed over the riverbank, I decided that I would swim, went into it up to my knees, balanced myself on a few underwater stones, rocked back and forth, and was just about to dive in when I heard a rustle in the bushes near my clothes, maybe a rat or a bird. I got up on to the bank and shook the water from my toes, pulled on my things, walked along towards home, a factory horn ringing out behind me. The old man was there with the familiar routine, and a bitterness sped its way through me as I watched him casting. Something nestled in my stomach and gnawed at me. He lives his life now in the grip of some comfortable anaesthetic.

  If I were to choose an anaesthetic myself, I’d probably do what Cici did – have some visions while I’m at it. When I met her, she looked like she could have been grandmother to a hill, but there was a lustful energy in her and the things she remembered. She was living near Castro Street, where all the finest dying in America was done – but Cici wasn’t dying, Cici was her own songdog, Cici was still howling in the creation of other days and places.

  * * *

  A s
ummer of fires, that summer of 1956. They licked their way salaciously through the trees. Ran like lizards alongside ridges. Leaped their way over brown streambeds, languished for a while by new ditches and blackened the yellow hardhats that were left hanging on the branches of trees, tongued their way out towards the northern corners of the forest, were beaten back by Delhart and his rows of men, all of whose teeth became the shade of smoke. The fires settled down for a day, then whipped up again with a single cinder carried on the wind. At night the sky was lit up. The east was dappled with orange and the smoke took on different shades, pink and yellow and red, like so many different slices of skin, as if an aurora borealis had decided to stay for a while, to hang on that part of the world, propped up by the mountains, the low rivers, the generous orange violence.

  In the forests frightened animals broke for cover. The carcass of a Rocky Mountain elk was found near a fire break, its burnt jaw opened in blackness. An escaping grizzly was shot on the main street of a northern town, lumbering madly on the footpath when it was circled down into the sight of a rifle. After a dozen bullets it fell, letting out a huge desultory cry that was imitated by a madwoman who stood on the corner by a feed store. She screamed so loud that it was said that she tore her larynx to bits. My father was hanging around down by the café and his photo shows her with her arms upstretched towards heaven. Her cry must have echoed its way around the town’s Sunday-morning church services, as ‘Amen!’ after ‘Amen!’ rang around the pews and preachers searched in the Book of Revelations for words about fires and the blue-hot end of the world. Mouths opened up in hymn as army helicopters flew overhead with bags of water meant to douse distant flames.

  Boys made hatbands from the dehydrated snakes – timber rattlers and hog-noses – found at the side of forbidden forest roads. They sliced the snakes open longways with their fathers’ penknives, skinned them, wore them around their heads as a ritual that signified their stance at the cusp of manhood – another fire about to break. Rocks cracked open in the extraordinary heat. Firs brittled down to stumps. A box of lost bullets exploded near the edge of the forest, the echoed thump of them flushing men from their houses. At night, prayers were remembered by bedsides, and wives tenderly kissed their husbands’ foreheads as they went out the door, yellow jackets hung in the crook of their hands, leather belts carved with their initials around their waists, husband and wife stretching out from one another on an expanding waistline.

  An old rancher down by the creekbed refused to leave his stockman’s cabin and went up like a Buddhist – the body was taken out on a makeshift stretcher, the flesh of the hands melted into the stomach where he had folded them in anticipation. His grey hair had vanished. The burnt man’s funeral was postponed for two mornings as sirens sounded out, summoning men to other fires. When it eventually took place, tired men leaned their heads forward on pews and wept secretly into Sunday handkerchiefs. For the wake, jugs of lemonade were laid on white picnic tables in the brown grass outside the church, and children played with buckets of water, splashed each other. A pall hung over the town. Women leaned against wireless radios to see if the fires had made national news. Buzzards rose and wandered in the alpine air, flapping continuously – sometimes the sky was black with them, descending like so many priests to a Eucharist below.

  My father hung around with Delhart and the firefighters. He told them that he was on commission from a New York magazine – in fact, he’d been fired before he had a chance to begin. On the phone they said that they had hired another man. ‘Right-y-o,’ he said, his throat dry. He got drunk in a town bar that day, drowning both sorrow and a slight elation at the freedom of it all. The young barman, with lemon-coloured hair, had made a special drink for the firefighters, The Bloody Blazer, with a touch of tabasco in it. I can imagine the old man, sitting at the bar counter, taking it down in big gulps, bitter at the thought of losing his chance because his wife happened to like this place, wanted to stay. The drinks, I’m sure, stung the back of his throat, rocked through his belly. He sat with the other men around the bar as they coughed up into bandanas, ditch diggers on an afternoon off, fingers blistered from shovels. Hard men, they were democratically diligent at the buying of rounds. They must have regarded the old man as a foreigner at first – the early photos of them have a comical rigidity, you can almost feel the teeth clenching as they stare into the lens, their features just about recognisable in the windowlight from the bar, smudges of black obscuring their cheekbones.

  Every morning the old man descended the mountain to where he kept a bicycle propped up against a fir tree, rode the seven miles to town with cameras strapped around him. The young boys in their snakeskin hats sometimes followed him and stuck out their bony chests when his lens moved towards them. After a while, the rangers and firefighters relaxed for his camera, regarded it with a mixture of off-handedness and anticipation. In solitary shots, he laid a white sheet at their feet, bounced the light up to give them harsh shadows on their faces, while they pretended they weren’t interested, hung their heads and rubbed ash-black hands together. They called him ‘Irish’ because that was what he still exuded – the retreating curls, the green eyes, the big shoulders moving under white shirts. He began to give himself over to that summer, my father, raging along with it all, catching the fires in their magnificence and brutality, even thanking Mam for her foresight in wanting to stay there – these were his best pictures, he was sure of it, they’d make him famous, he had no doubt.

  Delhart was the only one who never wanted a photo taken. His face was not unlike the shovels of the ditch diggers – long and brown and weathered and too well used. Delhart hated cameras, had hated them ever since the Depression, when a photographer had gone through his town. He had been very young, and the photographer had gotten him to take off his shirt and show his distended belly. Delhart’s mother had ripped the photo to bits when it came out in a book years later, bought up all the copies she could find, burned them in a wood stove.

  ‘You can see around ya with your eyes, can’t ya?’ said Delhart. ‘No sense in using that thing.’

  My father simply nodded, said nothing.

  Delhart moved like a war general around the fires – the movement may have kept his mind off his problems. Whisperings abounded that he had gotten the Indian girl pregnant. Someone had seen him digging a fire ditch at the back of her house to protect her, but nobody brought it up, it was a sensitive issue, a ranger with a native American girl. Little was known about her because she never spoke to anybody, but there were rumours, and the rumours grew with her silence. Her speechlessness was attributed to having had her tongue cut out at a reservation in Utah, in punishment for her doing the same to a dozen magpies. Or her father had been a medicine man who had mistakenly caused her voicebox to burst with a potion. Or she had eaten the bones of squirrels and they had stuck in her throat. It was said that her name was Eliza. Her eyes were dark and hollowed, like someone who had suffered, but there was a beautifully fluid quality to her movements, as she hoed the soil in the back of her cabin. Some said she was a prostitute, but when men went to pay her a visit, she took a shotgun from behind the door and silently threatened them with it.

  Delhart said nothing about either Cici or the Indian girl, but the old man had seen a copy of Cici’s book under the driver’s seat of Delhart’s truck, the beige-coloured spine cracked, all sorts of recent sootprints on the pages. He figured that Delhart was still in love with Cici and that things would eventually work out, but kept his musings to himself.

  Cici brushed the thought of Delhart aside, and developed a vague and manic sparkle in her eyes. She and Mam leaned into the radio, pinpointing co-ordinates on giant brown maps, looked out over the fires, reported them to rangers below. ‘Shit, girls, you’re lucky, it’s a madhouse down here.’ The lookout and the mountain stayed intact. Smoky skies drifted by. The heavy wooden door creaked and groaned. Boiling water on their small stove, my mother swore that she could hear the bubbles bouncing off one another. I
t took ages to boil at that high altitude. Her own breathing came back to her in soft, regular patterns. While Cici wrote her poems, Mam went walking outside. The days stretched out on elastic, time passing with the rhythm of silence. And the silence collapsed into itself – a falling pebble on the scree, a cicada beating the plates of its abdomen, a call on the radio, a deer nudging up to the salt block down near the treeline, an insect moving in the outhouse, all of it became part of the quietness. Even the pine needles down in the forest broke with a brittle roar when she stepped upon them. The outhouse rustled with spiders, and when lime or ashes were thrown down to stifle the smell, flies rose up from the bottom.

  In the tower an immaculately clean horse’s skull was nailed on the wall, looking down over an iron cooking stove, one chair, a table, a bed, a few cupboards, a rucksack frame. Other lookouts from previous years had scrawled graffiti on the walls. For a joke a spiralling staircase was nicknamed ‘Yeats’ after the gyre of his poems. Cici wrote a letter of his name on every second step. She laughed that she climbed Yeats every morning, rattled him, swept him clean, descended him with her binoculars in hand, perched on him and read, ran her hand along his banisters, stood in the middle of the ‘A’ and made her pronouncements to the world.

  Cici and Mam took in the relative humidity of the world, the maximum and minimum temperatures, the quickness of the wind, the speed of the clouds, the upkick of dust, the possibility of more blazes, radioed them back to the headquarters. The distance of a storm was measured by counting the seconds between lightning and the receipt of the thunder blast. And it was up those stairs, surrounded by reams of graffiti, that Cici wrote her poems, reading them from the staircase when she was finished. Mam enjoyed her friend’s wild rantings, the sounds thrown out around the tower, laid her head on Cici’s shoulder, listened.

  At first all three of them slept on the same floor, like a row of coloured biscuits in their sleeping bags. But Cici went crazy over her writing one night – she hadn’t put a word down in three days and she stalked around the tower, ripping up pieces of paper and throwing them around. ‘What the hell are you guys here for, anyway? Get away! Get out of here!’ My parents took their sleeping bags outside and heard the faint echo of high-pitched rants from within the tower. Every now and then Mam went up to make sure there wasn’t another episode like the water trough. She still half-expected to see Cici dangling from a rope above a kicked chair, the manic sparkle having its own darkness.