Colum McCann - Songdogs

A bell sounded on the hour. A man in an ice-cream van was singing. It was time to go. That’s what he was singing: It is time to go. I heard it clearly: It is time for you to go, there’s nothing here.

In the room I tried to sleep after lighting a mosquito coil. The smoke drifted up to the fan, the ash in a gyre to the centre of the coil. Music vaulted up from the street. It was the ice-cream man singing again: It is way past the time for you to go.

I took one last look, waited for a face to appear around a corner, grey hair, arched eyebrows, flecked eyes. All I found was the boy with the violin, but he sounded strangely strangled that day and hardly sang at all. Only a few pesos in his violin case. He shrugged his shoulders when I dropped some more money in and hurried away. Miguel came with me to the bus station on a Friday morning when thermometers in gardens were edging their way dangerously upwards.

‘Good luck,’ he said.

He shook my hand lightly. Great damp ovals rolled from the underarm of his shirt. When the bus left, the driver whistled a tune, the same tune, all the way to Monterrey, as if a gramophone needle was stuck in his lavish Adam’s apple. We changed drivers and plunged south towards Mexico City. After a while I sat in the middle of the bus, where the impact from the ruts in the road was gentler. The windows were fully open, a yawn that let the created wind through. We rattled along in darkness, through the desert, and small towns on the edge of spectacular canyons, and into vast city suburbs. I caught a glimpse of a circus setting up its tents, a girl riding around on a unicycle, feathers leaping from her hair, her breasts spilling out from a tank top. I wanted to reach for her, touch her, see if she was real, but the bus hammered on.

At the station in Mexico City I walked with my head down — the floor was spidered with moving sandals. I had noticed them before, young foreigners in plastic Teva sandals, their Lonely Planets hugged to their chests, enviously eyeing the size of backpacks that others were carrying. I walked out into the city, a leapfrog of skyscrapers, smog, granite-grey sky, white pigeons pecking under archways. I wandered in a daze, still waiting for Mam to pop her head around some corner, hail me with a wave. My flight to San Francisco wouldn’t leave until the next day, but I knew it was a brutishly stupid notion anyway, this searching for her. On a crowded street I saw a newspaper being trampled underfoot, and I suddenly remembered it was my birthday, my twentieth. I bought a bottle of tequila and sat in the corner of the airport, sipping furtively. Sounds rang out. Buzzers, intercoms, machines. It struck me then that I knew the sound of airport metal detectors better than the shrill call of coyotes I had heard so much about from my parents.

Years later, in America, I was told that Navajo Indians believed coyotes ushered in the Big Bang of the world with their song, stood on the rim of nothingness, before time, shoved their pointed muzzles in the air, and howled the world into existence at their feet. The Indians called them songdogs. The universe was etched with their howls, sound merging into sound, the beginning of all other songs. Long ago, when they told me their stories about Mexico, Mam and Dad, I believed they were true. And I suppose I still do. They were my songdogs — my mother by the washing line, my father flailing his way against the current. They tried very hard to tell me how much they had been in love with one another, how good life had been, that coyotes really did exist and sing in the universe of themselves on their wedding day. And maybe they did. Maybe there was a tremendous howl that reached its way all across the desert. But the past is a place that is full of energy and imagination. In remembering, we can distil the memory down. We can manage our universe by stuffing it into the original quark, the point of burstingness.

It’s the lethargy of the present that terrifies us all. The slowness, the mundanity, the sheer plod of each day. Like my endless hours spent strolling through Mexico. And my father’s constant casting these days. His own little songdog noise of a fishing line whisking its way through the air.

* * *

When the old man came back to the house he surprised me. ‘Sorry,’ I said, leaning the mop up against the door, ‘I was miles away.’ He nodded, rubbed his fingers along his scalp. He was amazed at the floor. It didn’t shine, but if he drops the fork again, it won’t get quite so dirty. ‘Not a peep from the big one today,’ he said, as he hung up his coat on the peg inside the door, a blade of grass stuck to the side of the sleeve. He opened his lunchbox with a dramatic gesture of the hand, a sweep to the ceiling. I was gobsmacked to see a small trout in the box, maybe a one-pounder. Some fish in the river, after all. I told him that it mightn’t be too healthy, all that fertiliser and shit dumped by the farmers and the meat factory, but he raised his eyes to the ceiling.

‘Get a grip,’ he said to me, ‘you and all the other greenies. The river’s clean as a fucken whistle.’

He gutted the fish with the long kitchen knife, hooked his finger in to pull out the guts, ran it under the tapwater, made himself a nice fillet. I told him I wasn’t eating any but he said he didn’t give a damn, he’d cook it anyway. He prepared it in the skillet and took his place at the table, ate quickly, lit himself a cigarette.

‘So what did ya do all day?’

‘I told you, I cleaned the floor.’

‘Oh.’ He rose up to flip on the radio, decided against it, leaned against the sink, put out the smoke on the wall of his teacup: ‘I mean, after that, what did you do after that?’

‘It took all day.’

‘It’s nice and skiddy anyway,’ he said, taking one stockinged foot out of his slippers and gliding it along the tiles. ‘I hope I don’t fall and break me neck.’

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.’