Colum McCann - Songdogs

‘You okay?’

Mam’s face flicked up in the mirror again, meshed with the face of the woman behind her, so that it was all at once brown and white, smooth and pockmarked, full and emaciated.

Cici Henckle had a cigarette dangling from her lips, which the shattered mirror razored into five different parts. She bent my mother over the sink, a liquid sickness splattering her fingers. ‘You go ahead and get it all on up,’ said Cici, smoke billowing from her mouth. She was dressed completely in black, a turtleneck, an obsidian necklace, long skirt with tassels. Her hair was dark, too, lopsided and limp around her shoulders. Long hands held Mam up over the sink for half an hour. ‘You’re whiter’n a sheet,’ said Cici as she washed her hands and rubbed some rouge into Mam’s cheeks.

Mam said nothing. She was propped against the sink, accepting the rouge, watching the mirror settle itself down. Calcium marks ran like musical notes on Cici’s fingernails, moving around Mam’s cheeks. ‘Who’re you with?’ said Cici. Mam flicked her head towards the door of the bathroom.

Outside, my father was slumped in a chair, hat on. The magazine had told him that there’d been a mistake, they needed him in New York, they’d written to him in Mexico, the letter mustn’t have arrived. They gave him cash for the shots of the copper mines, told him to get on a bus across country.

‘Your girl here’s sick as a dog,’ said Cici, when they came out of the bathroom.

‘Come on, love,’ the old man said, ignoring Cici. ‘We have to go.’

Cici, nonplussed, guided Mam to the chair. She kept one arm wrapped around my mother’s waist, and with the other took out another cigarette, lit it, kicked my father’s outstretched feet as if it were all just one natural motion. ‘Say, lover boy, I said your girlfriend here is throwing up God knows how many years of food. And you’re sitting here doing sweet nothing. What sort of goddamn man are you anyway?’

‘We have to be somewhere,’ he said.

‘Where?’

‘New York.’ He said the words breathlessly, as if there were all sorts of camera bulbs erupting from his throat.

‘She’s about as fit for New York as that goddamn hat of yours. She needs to see herself a doctor or something. Get some rest.’

My father nodded, lit a cigarette. ‘She’s just a little seasick.’

‘Seasick my ass — this floor isn’t rolling, is it?’ Cici sat down, leaned towards Mam. ‘You can come to my place if you like. Nothing special, but I got an extra bed. Lover boy here’s welcome, too. Long as he doesn’t make you carry the suitcases.’

Cici’s apartment was in an old house on Dolores Street, not far from the Mission. Sickly white azaleas ranged along the wrought-iron railings, and scraps of graffiti welcomed them along the stairwell. The apartment was filthy. Suitcases were stuffed with clothes, and around them lay papers, ashtrays, bottles, half-eaten biscuits, lamps shorn of their shades. A newspaper photo of James Dean, a voluminous quiff of hair on his head, was propped against a wall, three candles beside it. Cici threw the picture a kiss. Mam’s head still spun as they laid her down in bed.

Cici didn’t have any clean towels available so she dipped a white sock in the sink and mopped Mam’s brow. Cici stayed there for almost two days, sitting by the bed in her black turtleneck, cigarettes tight between her teeth as if she was afraid that they might jump from her mouth and leave her. She was thin as a rib, older than Mam, about thirty. She talked to stay awake, wandered around the room, parted the curtain, pointed out trees, named cloud formations, chatted to Mam as evening stole shapes. A poet, Cici had gone to the magazine offices that afternoon to try to sell some work. She had written one book, which had sold one hundred copies, a small beige edition, the spine of which crackled and tore when opened. It was about a summer spent in a fire lookout in Wyoming. She had typed it on a ream of butcher’s paper while ensconced in the tower, waiting for fires. The paper had rolled incessantly through her typewriter, collecting in giant curls on the floor while a radio bucked behind her. When the book was printed she stayed in Wyoming for two years, trying to sell it, but only a ranger named Delhart paid attention, touting copies around under the seat of his green pick-up truck, amongst empty coffee cups. She had fallen for Delhart, lived with him in a cabin near the edge of the forest, but left him to come to San Francisco with a suitcase full of the beige books. She read the poems in jazz clubs. Men were strung out on Zen and amphetamines, small dharma dolls hanging from the buttons of their lumber shirts. They clapped their hands together at the feet of trumpeters whose bog-black skin glistened with sweat. Shrines of cigarette smoke rose around the bar. Cici’s only payment was a slurp from a jug of red wine, so she had taken a job as a singing waitress in a burlesque club for Asian men. Delhart wrote to her. His letters were full of bottlecaps which she kept in a row under the James Dean picture. Delhart also sent a blade of grass and told her to use it for a ring, quoting Whitman, ‘I believe a blade of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.’

Mam looked down, through her fever, saw the blade of grass on Cici’s finger, encased with tape now, the journey work towards humus.

‘You know,’ Cici told her, ‘you two should come with me back to Wyoming. Not much of a detour.’

She wandered out to the living room where my father was sprawled on the couch. He had a tendency to smack his lips together while he slept. ‘Looks like he’s eating his dreams,’ Cici laughed when she came back in, hovering over Mam: ‘So, how about it? Wyoming?’

‘I would like,’ said Mam.

But later the old man shook his head, looked out the window of the apartment, said they were in a vicious hurry.

‘Why you don’t wait, Michael?’ Mam asked. ‘Why don’t you wait for a day and we will go then? I need some time to get feeling better.’

I can imagine him nodding, pulling his overcoat around him, going out to find a phone, calling the magazine in New York and telling them he was unavoidably delayed. For the next two days he stayed out of the apartment during afternoons, while Mam and Cici talked. Walked down by the water and threw smoke rings out over the bay, the collar of his coat turned up even though it was the beginning of summer. Foghorns keened in. Hell-divers swooped down from loaded clouds above the Golden Gate. He swung off the edges of cable cars, camera poised. When he got back to the apartment the two women were there, in yellow rubber gloves, laughing, the apartment clean, the suitcases packed, and a stack of forgotten books in the corner.

They took a bus across a huge slice of America, where interstates weren’t even built yet. The roads were long and black and shimmery, sometimes interrupted by wandering cows, or herds of antelope kicking across the tarmac, bounding fences. On the journey Mam was sick again. The bus was stopped every fifty miles, and Cici held my mother as she vomited behind the wheel well. She put her coat around my mother’s shoulders, took dry bread out of her rucksack, fed it to her, mopped her brow when Mam began to suffer from another fever. The bus travelled slowly. California stretched itself into a dry desolation; Nevada reared up with sagebrush and juniper; a few wild horses moved in unison through the high desert. Before they got to the Idaho border, the bus almost hit a boy with a dirty white bandage on his thumb. The boy had fallen asleep at the side of the road while hitch-hiking.

‘Goddamn it, son,’ said the bus driver, who stopped and woke him.

The boy had short yellow hair up in wheatfield rows on his head. It turned out that he was on his way to San Francisco, and Cici gave him a crisp new five-dollar bill and two addresses that he wrote in ink on the side of his burlap sack. Some years later, in the sixties — or so Cici told me — she met the boy again at a party, when they were both strung out on LSD. The yellow hair was longer by then, and the boy gave her back the five-dollar bill — he had soaked it in lysergic acid. They ate the bill together over the course of the next three days. Two months later his body was found washed up on the southern end of Half Moon Bay Beach in California. Cici saw it as a peculiarity of her life that faces and moments kept coming back to haunt her — when I met her she told me that she was amazed at how much that bus journey still moved within her, all the people she met, the things she saw, she could recall it all, the bandages on the boy’s thumb, the rattle of the bus engine, the white cloth in her fingers, rubbing its way delicately over Mam’s brow.