Colum McCann - Songdogs

‘Ah, I’m just not very good at it.’

He nodded and used a hand against the wall to guide himself along the landing: ‘I thought you’d have written.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘Well, I am.’

‘I believe ya,’ he grunted, his back to me.

I found a mosquito coil tonight, shattered into little green bits at the bottom of my backpack. Those mosquitoes in Mexico were always ecstatic in the hot, hot air. Waiting. Hovering. Moving away from the smoke under the ceiling fan. It was truly vicious, that heat, but in an odd way I liked it. When I arrived in San Francisco it was the coolness of it all that assaulted me. The immigration officer in the airport looked at the Mexican stamp in my passport. ‘Hope you didn’t catch the clap,’ he said with a grin, waving me through with a sweep of the hand after stamping a six-month stay in my passport.

Brutally romantic, of course, but he has kept every single one of Mam’s dresses. They hang in a riot of colours amongst a dozen mothball bags. The cupboard was open in his room this morning when I looked in before going downstairs. Hems spilled on the floor, edges that were unsewn over the years, continually dropped another inch, always lengthening, until even her skirts covered her calves. The sleeve of an old adelita dress stuck out. Some blouses. A dressing gown hung with one shoulder on a hanger. Her sarapes neatly folded on the shelf beside some coiled belts. I stared at the old man asleep in the bed, the marmalade cat on the pillow beside him. His hat was perched on the bedside table, beside a full bottle of Bushmills. There was a bit of a smell in the room — he has bad gas these days. Finds it hard to control. Let one go at the kitchen table last night.

‘Oops!’ he said. ‘Barking spider around here somewhere!’

But I could tell he was embarrassed by the smell — even got a bit of a flush in his cheeks as he walked upstairs to his bed. But at least he sleeps. When Mam was here there were nights she would get out of bed — she was sleeping in the room at the end of the landing at that stage — and sometimes she would go down to work on her stone walls, those black bags collecting under her eyes.

* * *

It was the first time Mam had seen the northwestern part of Mexico, and the Model A negotiated narrow roads that often ended in dry floodbeds. They drove over cracked platelets of mud, past weedgrown churches, through long sweeps of prairie where whitewashed haciendas rose up and flared out against the grasses. In the mornings the towns were alive under spectacular red reefs of cloud, migrating flocks moving through them, and once a single white crane seemed to follow them for miles, noisily flapping in the air, until the bird veered off and joined a mate. Mam looked backwards over the car-seat — she wanted to feel the rhythms of her land before they went to El Norte.

It was a quiet trip, except for the crunch of three jackrabbits under the wheels of the car along a dirt road in Sonora. Mam wanted to chop off the paws of the rabbits at the side of the road — some tribute to her mother — but the old man drove biliously on, disturbed by the rattling gearwhine of the car. Besides, Mam already had a jar full of rabbit’s feet with her, and as they moved westward she affixed a half-dozen of them around the rim of his hat. It looked ridiculous — the way they pattered around his head — but my father bent to Mam’s superstition, put the hat on while he drove. In the vast expanses they haggled with gaunt garage owners over petrol prices. Children in ragged shirts stared as the car threw out smoke. Riders pulled their horses over into ditches. The horsemen sometimes carried rifles, and my father slowed as he went past, guffaws rising at the sight of his hat. He drove with fingers drumming heavily on the wheel, impatient with places, little traces of sweat beginning in the furrows of his brow.

Years later, in our Vauxhall Viva, which we drove around Mayo, an old Mexican paw and a St Christopher medal hung from the stem of the mirror. At times the paw would swing, animated, bashing itself against the windscreen, and Mam watched it as if it might break its way through the glass for her, bring her back to those moments in her country. When we were left alone in the car together, Mam and I, she would hug herself into heavy sweaters, tell me bits and pieces about that trip to America in 1956, how they abandoned the car and never saw it again.

They made it all the way to a coastline dock near Tijuana when steam suddenly flocked up from the engine. They must have looked a sight, the old man waving his hat over the open bonnet, my mother blowing her breath from her lip up to the fringe of her hair, trying to figure out what weather might be blowing in, what colours she might create. As the dockside darkened, my father wanted to tape the hosepipe together, but they had no tape. He crawled in underneath the engine, pounding the underside of the Model A with his fist. Mam began tearing a strip from the bottom of her dress to see if that might work. It was a white hem, she later told me, a single inch of cotton. She recalled it so vividly that it must have haunted her — it was one of the last things she remembered doing in Mexico, her foot propped on the bumper, knee bent, ripping her dress to try to fix the car that was taking her from her homeland.

As she was tearing the dress, a stranger with raven-coloured hair wandered up — the captain of a cruise ship that had docked nearby for emergency repairs. The captain offered them free passage to San Francisco. Some of his crew had disappeared into drunkenness in the tight alleyways of Tijuana, swallowed down into bottles of mescal. In return, he said, my father could bartend and my mother could waitress. The old man crawled out from underneath the car, shook the captain’s hand, flung the car keys away along the dock.

They sailed the rest of the way to America. Umbrella drinks were served by waiters in white shirts. Jazz notes copulated madly in the air, bits of Al Jolson songs mashing against Billie Holiday numbers. The yawning head of a pig was laid out for supper the first night, a red apple in its mouth. My father stood behind the bar in a black bowtie, hair slicked back, revealing the beginning of two small indentations of baldness on his crown. He invented cocktails, shook them with drama. Mam was unable to work, sick the whole time, retching over the side of the boat. She stayed in her cabin while dinner was served. A grey wind blew off the sea for her, the boat combing its way over the waves for a day and a half. Occasionally there was sunshine, but most of the time dolorous clouds drifted with them. When they got near the port in San Francisco, Mam brushed her hair with an old comb and decked herself out in a strawberry dress and a wide-brimmed hat. As she leaned against the railing, the ship jolted against the pier, rocked her sideways, and she lost her stomach again.

My father lumbered heavy suitcases down the gangway. ‘Great day for a wander,’ he told Mam, people flowing past them, ‘great day for a wander.’

That afternoon they went to an old tumbledown building near the Mission, to the offices of the magazine company which had written to my father. The old man had a meeting, and Mam disappeared to the bathroom. Combing her hair in a broken mirror, she must have been amazed at what the cracks did to her face, fracturing her eyes down to her nose, sending cheekbones into a landslide, displacing one ear upwards so that it almost floated above her head. Maybe she ran her brown fingers over the broken sections, reached to take the ear, watched it float away again, her body not belonging to her anymore, the rhythms of the boat journey still moving within it. Maybe she could smell her eyebrows giving off salt and her teeth full of gulls flickering away into flight from a pink deck. I can picture her mouth moving into a small black O, falling out again into lips drained of colour, the heaves of the imaginary waves carrying her face into further fractures as if it were a kaleidoscope, or a million people lending her a piece of their faces, meshing and unmeshing until it wasn’t her there at all, staring at herself. Perhaps one green eye, one brown, one azure, one red. Water splashed up and formed beads within the cracks, beads that held the same broken images, mirrors within mirrors. Reaching for the sink — propping herself up against it, the strawberry dress against the porcelain, her chest heaving — she felt a pair of arms wrap around her.