Colum McCann - Songdogs

The old man sat in the seat behind them, amazed by America moving past. He kept his face glued to the window, fingered his cameras.

By the time they hit Boise, my mother was so dehydrated that not even Cici’s rouge could help her. They booked into a hotel room, stayed for thirty-six hours while Mam recovered. Cici hovered by the bed and talked about Delhart. He was a brown-bearded brute of a man with pellucid eyes. In particular she remembered his hands — huge boats with dirt under his fingernails. She had thought of those hands often after she went west to see the Pacific — they sometimes caressed her at night in her imagination. She had met him after a fire; he had come up to her lookout one evening and ended up spending the night, loving her, afterwards coughing up reams of smoky phlegm into the pillow.

From Boise they hitched a lift on the back of a pick-up truck and my mother began to feel better, the open air rushing over her, the fevers cooling down, a world settling itself in her stomach. Cici, sitting beside her, feet over the tailgate, stared out at the passing of Idaho: ‘Why don’t you guys come stay with me for a day or two? I’m not up in my tower until next week.’ During the night the pick-up sidled its way to the edge of the Tetons, up narrow switchbacked roads, through forests of fir trees, over huge passes where red-tailed hawks were gliding. They huddled together in the freezing cold, under blankets. Cici lit up a cigarette, twisted at the blade of grass on her finger.

Delhart met them in the morning outside a café in Jackson Hole. The ranger had a scar on his face the shape of a horse’s hoof. He kicked at imaginary pebbles. ‘I’ve something to tell you, Cici.’ He waved my parents off, took Cici’s hand and guided her towards a café with elk antlers on the wall, ordered coffee. Delhart told her that he’d met a Ute Indian woman, he’d been afraid to tell her in any letters. The woman was pregnant. He said they could adopt the child, raise it themselves. Cici leaned back in her chair, watched the sweat that came from Delhart’s brow, slowly, in drips down to his chin. ‘What is she? A goddamn postman or something? Pony goddamn Express?’ ‘What d’ya mean?’ said Delhart. The coffee landed very neatly on his green shirt. ‘You’re an asshole,’ Cici said, ‘don’t come near me.’ She stirred her coffee as Delhart left, looked at her hands as if they didn’t belong to her anymore.

That afternoon Cici, deciding that she wanted to visit her tower in the mountains, borrowed a truck and some keys from another ranger. While my father slept in a hotel at the outskirts of town, Cici and Mam drove down long, winding dirt roads together. Mam sat in beside her, leaning over, comforting her. ‘I’m all right,’ said Cici. ‘It don’t bother me none.’ The wind rushed through open windows, already threatening fire with its dryness.

Cici carried a jug of wine as they hiked up the five miles to the lookout tower, said nothing as she climbed, a long green stare from her. My mother trudged behind in a pale yellow dress, up the mountain, around frost-veined boulders, along dirt trails making narrow canyons in the light-shafting trees. They moved up towards the treeline, passed a few remaining snowbanks, stopped together to catch their breath as Cici burst into laughter. ‘I don’t give a shit about him, he’s an asshole.’ Cici was whistling to scare any bears that they might stumble upon. She stopped whistling when they hit the edge of some scree, no longer threatened, and slowly negotiated the boulders towards the summit.

It was an astounding place for Mam to see — snow on the northern faces of the mountains, the sweep of green underneath, eagles on the thermals, no dust for miles.

The tower, a small grey building, was perched on the top of the mountain like a bird ready to explode into flight. A lightning rod stuck up, an obscenity in the air. The rotten carcass of a baby deer lay not too far from a rusting water trough. The door of the tower creaked when they entered, and the air was heavy with must. They sat together, lotus-legged on the floor, wrapped in old mangy blankets, wine passing between them. No clouds in the sky to hold the heat in, they shivered in the cold. ‘I don’t give a shit,’ said Cici again. ‘I don’t give a shit about him, sometimes people just ain’t what they seem, you dream them up for yourself, then — shit, I don’t care.’

She was plucking at the long strands of hair that fell down over her face, rocking back and forth, her knees to her chest. Her eyes fixed on a spider web, insects caught within it. It moved slightly in the cold breeze that came through the open door. Cici rose and closed it, flicked at the web with her fingers. ‘I never gave a shit about him.’ The wine went down and later on, while Mam was sleeping, Cici’s body was a rhyme, a singular rhyme that slipped its way out of the tower, walked across some scattered rocks, down to the water trough, tripped her way to the edge, drunk, stumbling against the metal sides. She stared down into the water and, reeling with alcohol, chuckled.

She swept insect larvae from the surface of the water, kicked her shoes off, placed her socks neatly in them, laid her hands on either side of the trough, swung her body across and climbed in, felt the coldness through her legs, her spine, her hands, the water sloshing around the edges, some drops jumping out to the ground. She moved in the water, watched the creation of ripples, and then propped her feet and elbows on the edge, lay there, chuckled again — ‘I don’t give a shit’ — watched the night, the stars rioting away, the moon a heap in the west moving towards morning, felt the water weigh her clothes down, the larvae fondling her hair, some fireflies flicking luminescence from their bellies around her, and she laughed as she sat in the tub of rainwater, waiting to freeze to death.

Dawn had left some freckles in the sky and it could have been the most peaceful morning in the world when Mam woke up, indolent birds on the thermals and the insects busy at the ends of long grass stalks and the sun moving itself into yellowness beyond the edge of the lookout. She came out of the tower to yawn off a hangover and saw Cici’s body, arms and legs draped over the water trough, blue. ‘ ¡Carajo! ’ Cici’s face looked like it might have been prepared for a mass card. Her lips were set into something approximating a smile. The black hair flared out from the whiteness of the skin. The insect larvae had settled now and they clung to her legs, to her thighs. Mam reached in. The water was oily as it lapped up against the trough.

In Mexico she had once picked up the body of a dead bird, amazed at how light the bones were. She reached under Cici’s languid back. You are so light, she thought. Mam propped her hands under the shoulders and began to lift Cici out, the feet languishing behind in the trough, propped up on the edge. Mam tugged again. The feet fell, hard and lifeless, against the ground. She dragged Cici back to the tower. A small cut opened between the toes. Mam looked around the tower, frantic. No radio. She laid Cici down on the floor, took off the wet cothes, wrapped blankets around her cold cold body, put her fingers in under the blankets and rubbed her heart, where there was still a faint slow thumping. Her hands moved furiously, penitently. Mam took off her own clothes and covered Cici with them, put some socks on Cici’s feet. ‘Michael!’ The shout to my father echoed around the mountains. Nothing stirred. ‘ ¡Por Dios! ’ The carcass of the deer rolled up in her mind. She took Cici’s hands and placed her fingers in her mouth. For a long time she sucked on the fingers, until she saw the first stir, the head moving sideways a little. Come on. She fitted as many fingers as possible in her mouth, let the warm saliva roll over them, the nails with the calcium marks — when she was a child she had been told that calcium marks, when they rose to the top of the nails, were a sign that she would get a gift. With Mam’s tongue down by the lifeline of the hand, Cici moved again.