Songdogs

by Colum McCann

  Cici apologised the next day, but my parents grew to enjoy those cold nights outside, where swarms of insects sang. The old man set up a small camp for them down near the treeline, fashioned an elevated platform from some pine poles, frapped it with red twine. Only when the lightning was bad did they stay in the tower. A small stepladder led up to a five-foot-high platform that creaked when they walked upon it. Mam climbed down in the mornings, isolated the sounds, gulped them down, let the air rush over her body. Some photos were taken when the sun came up, my mother unclothed once more, but more subtle, more precise around the edges than the ones from Mexico. There was one of her simply lying in a rope hammock, her body meshed into a series of diamonds where the ropes were tied, one knee raised slightly in the air to cover herself, a bandana tied around her hair; another of her pulling on a pair of forest-ranger trousers which my father had borrowed from Delhart, with her surprised by the camera, breasts exposed, mouth in the shape of a lemon; and one sitting in a blouse and underwear, propped up against a tree, eating a sandwich, watching the weather, gazing around as if there wasn’t a fire for miles.

  Cici told me that, from a distance, she watched some of those photos being taken, and she envied my mother the use of her love. At times, despite herself, Cici still thought of Delhart and his boat-hands, let them row her through blackened trees and things that roared up from the pieces of fizzling sap.

  * * *

  Got to thinking about Cici again today while the old man was chasing his fish down there.

  In San Francisco she was ensconced in a flat near Castro Street, on the third floor. I walked up the stairs, nervous, the backpack pulling against my shoulders. The walls of the apartment building were freshly painted, and a kid in short pants was sniffing at them. The sound of a distant piano rolled through the apartments. A cactus plant had been overturned in the hallway, bits of rock strewn around it. I sidestepped the pebbles, knocked on her door, introduced myself. She let me in, past a mountain of junk letters at her feet, as if she had known me all her life.

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘Dialed information,’ I said.

  ‘Why didn’t you call?’

  ‘I didn’t know if you’d want to see me.’

  ‘Oh, God, of course I would,’ she laughed, ushering me in further, silver bracelets jangling on her wrist.

  I looked around. A mirror on the wall wasn’t generous to her. Her hair was quartzite-grey, flecks in it, her face the same colour. I dropped my backpack on the floor. Doodles ran along the margins of a newspaper, happy faces in a row down the page, in red ink. Some macaroni was caked on the inside of a saucepan left lying on the floor.

  ‘I brought you some flowers.’

  ‘Aren’t you just lovely?’

  ‘Do you have a vase?’

  She didn’t reply. She looked at the ceiling: ‘How’s your mother?’

  ‘She’s fine.’

  ‘Oh lovely, lovely, lovely.’

  ‘Have you heard from her?’ I asked.

  She looked at me curiously. ‘No.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Say, that’s a heavy bag you’ve got there.’

  ‘Been travelling a while.’

  ‘Hey, why don’t you just stay here with me forever?’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Forever and an extra day.’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’ I nodded. ‘She never writes to you, no?’

  ‘Never. Haven’t seen a Christmas card in – oh…’ Her voice fell away. ‘I really don’t know how long.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Say, what’s your name again?’

  ‘Conor.’

  ‘Ah, yes, how could I forget that? You look just like her, you know.’

  The television set was covered with a sheet of white crêpe paper – Cici liked watching it with the sound turned down, a magical box producing a weird flare-out of colour. You could see the fibres in the paper and the fuzzy static lifting it away from the screen. She had taped the crêpe paper to the top of the television set so that if she wanted to watch something on television she could just lift the paper up.

  She moved over to the sofa, stretched out, lay back and laughed, a loud cackle that rang its way around the apartment, the shelves lined with amulets, a strange foot-long marijuana bong on the coffee table, the mantelpiece full of candles, a few paintings on the wall, some O’Keefe prints, a Warhol imitation. She wore a white nightdress, hair tumbling down to her shoulders. She might as well have stepped off the stage of a Tennessee Williams play. It seemed that she had scattered herself all over the country for years, came back to Castro Street, where people flowed in and out of her apartment. She entertained them with syllogisms. Women swanned in, and she chattered with them about how to keep your gums, your fingernails, your virginity – maybe all three at once. She told stories of beat writers who had taken all three from her. Hollow-faced men knocked on the door, looking to talk about how their body cells were being destroyed, beaten down. They brought her flowers – her place was a riot of flowers. Cici rattled on about movement and politics, about stasis and love, about the romantic muckheap of the sixties, about men who’d gone down in Vietnam – ‘occidental death,’ she called it. She was a shaman of sorts, a holy rage lived in her. And she always prefaced her stories with a single phrase, ‘Lord, I remember.’

  That first night, when her apartment was quiet, Cici’s face dropped when I told her what had actually happened with Mam.

  ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘I had no idea.’

  She rolled her eyes sadly and jabbed in under her fingernails with a toothpick when I asked her again: ‘No, no, I haven’t heard a single thing, imagine that. She just left?’

  ‘Upped and left,’ I said. ‘Without so much as a note.’

  ‘Where did she go?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Did you try Mexico?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She went to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of vodka and some ice cubes, poured two glasses, stared at the wall.

  ‘Tell me about the fires, Cici.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘I just want to know.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She used to talk about them. My old man, too.’

  ‘Ah yes, your father. How is your father?’

  ‘Haven’t seen him in a while. He’s home in Mayo.’

  She pursed her lips and shrugged.

  I sipped at the vodka. ‘So tell me about the fires.’

  ‘Oh, everyone around here talks about old times,’ she said. ‘Day in, day out, I talk about old times.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I mean, that’s all anybody ever talks about. What it was like back twenty, thirty, a million years ago.’ She moved a little on the sofa. ‘You know what I think?’ she said. ‘I think memory is three-quarters imagination.’

  I sat back.

  ‘And all the rest is pure lies,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, yeah, I know what you mean.’ I mashed my hands together.

  I knew what she meant, yet she sang to me like a wren, on and on, memories of startling lucidity, incidents pouring from her, a threnody of nostalgia, nightdress billowing in the breeze from a fan. And Cici remembered that look on my mother’s face, in the broken mirror – ‘Lord, I remember’ – as if it had happened just yesterday.

  A smile hung permanently at the edge of her mouth. At any moment I expected some sort of clap to sound out around the theatre of herself, and she’d draw her hand to her lips and cock her head sideways and say, chuckling, to an enraptured audience: ‘God, I was good.’ Then she might look up again from the rim of her nightdress, questioning: ‘Wasn’t I?’

  I saw her late that first evening, moving a needle around her legs. The tracks stood out on the inside of her thighs, which I suppose were one of the few hidden places left she could inject. I stirred in my bed, on the floor. She caught my eye. The needle flickered momentarily.

 
‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Did we put sugar in the flower water?’

  The needle sunk in.

  ‘I always forget about the sugar in the water,’ she said.

  She pushed the top of the needle.

  ‘Are you all right, dear?’ she said to me.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ I sat on the floor, curled my feet into my stomach. ‘Why do you do that?’

  ‘Makes the flowers last longer.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘That.’

  ‘Oh.’ She looked at the needle, twirled it in her fingers. ‘It’s just a little something.’ The sofa gathered her in and she sat back, eyes closed, sat up suddenly, looked at me: ‘Did you know that Morpheus was the god of dreams?’

  She had finagled a permanent supply from a local doctor in return for four first-edition books by minor beat poets. She wasn’t addicted, she said, just an occasional habit that she’d developed recently. She sat on the side of the sofa, leaned across to me. ‘No more stupid poems,’ she said, ‘I don’t do stupid poems anymore, poetry isn’t worth a damn. I’d much rather sit here and talk. There’s a grace in doing nothing, don’t you think?’

  There was a roll of butcher’s paper in the corner of her flat, but no typewriter around. At times she picked up the bong from the table and twirled it in her fingers. It was draped with a bear’s claw. Somehow Cici ended up with it after it had been confiscated from another tower by a forest ranger in the sixties. She had given up dope, stuck entirely to morphine, but she had a few dime bags hidden in the bottom of her underwear drawer. The grass was old and dried-out, but I smoked some of it anyway, letting the bear’s claw scratch my lips, letting her world drip around me.

  I stayed with Cici for three weeks. She took to calling me ‘babe.’ At times she was frantic with energy, moving up and down the apartment, opening the door, letting people in. Sometimes she moved to the balcony and conducted conversations with people down on the street, dropping words from on high. The traffic roared and men linked hands, waved up at her, wrapped into each other. A woman was pulled along by a wolfhound, her anaemic overcoat flapping behind her. Sirens rang out, the street in full throat. The barbershop pole swirled in red and white and blue – a sign outside mentioned clean razors for a shave. A man with a sandwich board advertised the street as Sodom and Gomorrah – he was like Moses out there, a sea of people parting around him, a pillar of salt.

  One evening, when Cici was sleeping, I stepped out on to the fire escape. A man on the opposite side of the street was standing on his balcony, gyrating his heavy hips, singing malevolently into a hairbrush. He saw me, but he didn’t flinch, kept on singing. He was middle-aged and wore a necktie, but no shirt. A few words from old Cole Porter songs filtered across, over the traffic. He sang with an ineffable longing, the hairbrush moving like a swinging trapeze around his lips. Sometimes he twirled the brush around in his fingers, picked clumps of hair from around the teeth. Cici stepped out on the fire escape with me, put her hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Babe,’ she said.

  She stood beside me and sang ‘You’re the Top’ with the man, a doppelgänger of voices, out of synch with each other, drifting over the traffic. She winked at the man, who tucked the hairbrush in his back pocket and smiled, put her arm around my waist, guided me back inside, put some hot milk on the stove to help us sleep. In the morning a skin had developed over the milk, which hadn’t been touched. Cici scooped it off with a spoon. ‘You’re the top,’ she said, laughing, as the skin of the milk was thrown down into the drain.

  It was a vibrant and eclectic place, and Cici fitted in perfectly, a living cornice, among the bits of white bricks, pieces of old wood, crumbling cement around her. In the afternoons she was thankful to have someone who would cook. I made a stir-fry and concocted a chocolate dessert which she left sitting on her plate. ‘It just looks too nice to eat,’ she said, ‘don’t you think so, babe?’ With her fork she made another happy face in the chocolate pudding. Behind her the crêpe paper was swimming in colour. She tried desperately to remember my name every day, but couldn’t, yet she recalled things that had happened years ago as if they had just occurred, an irrepressible want to live them again, a misery that she never would, a pilgrimage into desire. Cici no longer saw me as a visitor. She left the door of the bathroom open when she went to the toilet. The nightdress hitched up on her legs when she sat on the sofa. I turned my back when she got out her needles, filled the bowl of the bear’s-claw pipe, floated away.

  The Haight, she said, had been momentary, sexual, magical to her. The mid-sixties – a decade after the Wyoming fires – had seen her swinging her hair around, strung out on LSD, bracelets around her neck, hard skin on the bottoms of her bare feet. I went down there to check it out, stood on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, found myself swamped in old bearded men begging for money, and a fresh sourdough smell hovering through the air. Its re-creation was its sadness – ponytails, nose-rings, compact discs, expensive beads, a shirt with a peace sign drawn into the badge of a Mercedes-Benz.

  In the park a juggler threw oranges. She was wearing a short tank top, and every now and then would push her hand across her breast, to wipe away sweat. She noticed the small tricolour I had sewn on the outside pocket of my daypack. ‘Advertising,’ she joked, ‘everyone loves the Irish.’ She was from Galway, but not a trace of accent was left. We walked to City Lights bookstore and I looked for Cici’s poems among the rows of beat poets, but they weren’t there, and we went on to a bar, played pool – she juggled Guinness bottles in the air. ‘I’m a tosser,’ she said, and all of a sudden the Irish accent was back. ‘Ah go on, give us a goozer.’ She leaned into me, kissed me, and I put my arms around her, but then she whispered that I looked like someone she’d once known. I left, hailed a cab.

  I sat back and watched San Francisco move by. The whole world was looking for someone who was gone.

  Night birds flew over Castro and, down the sidestreet, Cici was awake under them.

  ‘I like Frisco,’ I said to her, still a bit drunk.

  ‘Oh, don’t call it Frisco, babe, only tourists call it Frisco, call it, let me see, call it the whitewhite city.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I met someone tonight.’

  ‘That’s nice, just don’t fall in love.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Oh go ahead, for crying out loud.’

  ‘Go ahead what?’

  ‘Fall in love, lose your heels, fall in love with a million of them.’ She rubbed her eyeballs. ‘And let me tell you something – all at once is best.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  All at once in love with a million women from the whitewhite city – it could have been Cici’s epitaph.

  A man came and collected two months of bills. He shoved his foot in the door to keep it open, waving the bills in our faces, threatening court action. I paid the bills for Cici. She was astounded: ‘Don’t do that, babe, oh God, you don’t have to do that.’ It wasn’t charity, I just wanted to lose something of myself in that room. It was pathetic, but money was all I could think of. Guilt assailed me – Cici was exhausted, I had dredged up things in her that maybe would have been better forgotten. In the deli I stocked up on food and wine. I cooked up a meal of beans and tacos, and we drank a little white wine, toasted my mother. Cici said, simply: ‘To Juanita.’

  A taxi beeped for me underneath the apartment next morning. I could just about hear it above the noise.

  ‘You really can stay if you want to.’

  ‘I’m on my way to fall in love with a million women.’

  ‘What a great idea, take me with you.’

  ‘Okay, come on.’

  She laughed and shook her head.

  ‘See you,’ I said.

  I kissed her on the cheek.

  She drew herself back, pouted comically, wrinkles puckering into her cheeks, pointed at her lips, pursed them again. We laughed. She held the back of my hair, and ran one hand along my back as our lips touched. I wanted to kiss he
r again, but didn’t.

  ‘Where to now?’ she asked, letting go of my hair.

  ‘I have a bus ticket to Wyoming.’

  ‘Say hello to it for me.’

  ‘Can I call it Wyoming?’

  ‘You can call it whatever you like, babe.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And say hello to Juanita when you see her. Tell her she owes me a letter.’

  The taxi took me past the whiteness of San Francisco. Cici’s face came with me, all cratered. She had promised me that she would give up the morphine but just before I left I saw her, ferreting down her thighs with another small needle, looking for a place without a bruise. ‘Just one more,’ she said, chuckling, the euphoria already washing its way over her. ‘You know, babe, you have to go slow with these things.’

  * * *

  One morning, when dawn had finished its rumour, and the old man was gone for the day, she and Mam were languishing together down near the camp.

  Mam wore a magenta dress that buttoned at the front. The row of white buttons ran all the way to the hem. Her brown legs emerged, twigs. She was lying back in the grass, shielding her eyes from the sun. Cici was beside her, her head propped on her hand. ‘It’ll rain one of these days,’ said Cici. She moved slightly, in a disguise of nonchalance. The shadow over my mother’s eyes lengthened infinitesimally. Cici held a blade of grass between the gap in her front teeth. An insect landed on Mam’s stomach, and Cici moved to brush it away. Her hand hovered over Mam’s body for a moment, fell slowly and laid itself on her belly. Nothing was said. The insect flew off. The shadow was held. Cici’s fingers made little circles around one of the buttons. Traced the outlines. Only the very tip of her fingers touched their way inside the gap between the buttons, moved against Mam’s skin. It was a tiny demesne of stomach that Cici wandered over with her fingertips, and maybe my mother moved her head in some sort of ecstasy, maybe her black hair scrunched itself into the ground, maybe her back arched itself up to make a bridge of air beneath her, maybe she waited for the fingers to explore further, maybe she thought there would never be any rain, but Cici pulled her hand away and began to laugh.