Colum McCann - Songdogs

‘How long are you back for?’ she asked.

Told her about the visa and she said I was lucky, she’d give an arm and a leg to take off herself, she has a brother in Louisiana who shucks oysters, a sister in Washington State doing nursing in a home for geriatrics. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and fooled around with the buttons on my denim jacket. She asked about the old man, said he used to come in for breakfast every Saturday, she hasn’t seen him in a while.

‘Oh, he’s in flying form.’

‘That’s great news altogether.’

She was jangling coins in her apron pocket.

‘Well, I’ll be off,’ I said.

‘Fair enough so. Come in for breakfast on Monday before ya leave.’

‘I will.’

‘It’s on me.’

I walked back home by the riverbank, wheeling the bicycle. Had to detour by the factory, where they’ve raised the barbed wire another few feet in the air, the shouts of men amongst the squeals and the shit and the slurry. Sat down a couple of hundred yards from the factory, in the long grass. Had an urge to just get in and swim, even if the water was disgusting, black as berries, the slow roll of it through the rushes. Took off my t-shirt and trousers, hung them on the brambles of a bush, sat in my underwear, feet dangling in the water. A life of half-emergence. A consistency of acceptance. Enough of the old man’s disease, I thought. This contagion of days, teacups and nods. A vision of Maria rose up in me, a vertigo of lust and genuine longing. Should go back and sweep her off her feet, roll the coins from her apron in my fingers, do something ridiculously romantic for once, carry her off to the beach, ride palominos along the water’s edge, shove ogham stones in our pockets, ride out to sea.

Kowtowed over the riverbank, I decided that I would swim, went into it up to my knees, balanced myself on a few underwater stones, rocked back and forth, and was just about to dive in when I heard a rustle in the bushes near my clothes, maybe a rat or a bird. I got up on to the bank and shook the water from my toes, pulled on my things, walked along towards home, a factory horn ringing out behind me. The old man was there with the familiar routine, and a bitterness sped its way through me as I watched him casting. Something nestled in my stomach and gnawed at me. He lives his life now in the grip of some comfortable anaesthetic.

If I were to choose an anaesthetic myself, I’d probably do what Cici did — have some visions while I’m at it. When I met her, she looked like she could have been grandmother to a hill, but there was a lustful energy in her and the things she remembered. She was living near Castro Street, where all the finest dying in America was done — but Cici wasn’t dying, Cici was her own songdog, Cici was still howling in the creation of other days and places.

* * *

A summer of fires, that summer of 1956. They licked their way salaciously through the trees. Ran like lizards alongside ridges. Leaped their way over brown streambeds, languished for a while by new ditches and blackened the yellow hardhats that were left hanging on the branches of trees, tongued their way out towards the northern corners of the forest, were beaten back by Delhart and his rows of men, all of whose teeth became the shade of smoke. The fires settled down for a day, then whipped up again with a single cinder carried on the wind. At night the sky was lit up. The east was dappled with orange and the smoke took on different shades, pink and yellow and red, like so many different slices of skin, as if an aurora borealis had decided to stay for a while, to hang on that part of the world, propped up by the mountains, the low rivers, the generous orange violence.

In the forests frightened animals broke for cover. The carcass of a Rocky Mountain elk was found near a fire break, its burnt jaw opened in blackness. An escaping grizzly was shot on the main street of a northern town, lumbering madly on the footpath when it was circled down into the sight of a rifle. After a dozen bullets it fell, letting out a huge desultory cry that was imitated by a madwoman who stood on the corner by a feed store. She screamed so loud that it was said that she tore her larynx to bits. My father was hanging around down by the café and his photo shows her with her arms upstretched towards heaven. Her cry must have echoed its way around the town’s Sunday-morning church services, as ‘Amen!’ after ‘Amen!’ rang around the pews and preachers searched in the Book of Revelations for words about fires and the blue-hot end of the world. Mouths opened up in hymn as army helicopters flew overhead with bags of water meant to douse distant flames.

Boys made hatbands from the dehydrated snakes — timber rattlers and hog-noses — found at the side of forbidden forest roads. They sliced the snakes open longways with their fathers’ penknives, skinned them, wore them around their heads as a ritual that signified their stance at the cusp of manhood — another fire about to break. Rocks cracked open in the extraordinary heat. Firs brittled down to stumps. A box of lost bullets exploded near the edge of the forest, the echoed thump of them flushing men from their houses. At night, prayers were remembered by bedsides, and wives tenderly kissed their husbands’ foreheads as they went out the door, yellow jackets hung in the crook of their hands, leather belts carved with their initials around their waists, husband and wife stretching out from one another on an expanding waistline.

An old rancher down by the creekbed refused to leave his stockman’s cabin and went up like a Buddhist — the body was taken out on a makeshift stretcher, the flesh of the hands melted into the stomach where he had folded them in anticipation. His grey hair had vanished. The burnt man’s funeral was postponed for two mornings as sirens sounded out, summoning men to other fires. When it eventually took place, tired men leaned their heads forward on pews and wept secretly into Sunday handkerchiefs. For the wake, jugs of lemonade were laid on white picnic tables in the brown grass outside the church, and children played with buckets of water, splashed each other. A pall hung over the town. Women leaned against wireless radios to see if the fires had made national news. Buzzards rose and wandered in the alpine air, flapping continuously — sometimes the sky was black with them, descending like so many priests to a Eucharist below.

My father hung around with Delhart and the firefighters. He told them that he was on commission from a New York magazine — in fact, he’d been fired before he had a chance to begin. On the phone they said that they had hired another man. ‘Right-y-o,’ he said, his throat dry. He got drunk in a town bar that day, drowning both sorrow and a slight elation at the freedom of it all. The young barman, with lemon-coloured hair, had made a special drink for the firefighters, The Bloody Blazer, with a touch of tabasco in it. I can imagine the old man, sitting at the bar counter, taking it down in big gulps, bitter at the thought of losing his chance because his wife happened to like this place, wanted to stay. The drinks, I’m sure, stung the back of his throat, rocked through his belly. He sat with the other men around the bar as they coughed up into bandanas, ditch diggers on an afternoon off, fingers blistered from shovels. Hard men, they were democratically diligent at the buying of rounds. They must have regarded the old man as a foreigner at first — the early photos of them have a comical rigidity, you can almost feel the teeth clenching as they stare into the lens, their features just about recognisable in the windowlight from the bar, smudges of black obscuring their cheekbones.

Every morning the old man descended the mountain to where he kept a bicycle propped up against a fir tree, rode the seven miles to town with cameras strapped around him. The young boys in their snakeskin hats sometimes followed him and stuck out their bony chests when his lens moved towards them. After a while, the rangers and firefighters relaxed for his camera, regarded it with a mixture of off-handedness and anticipation. In solitary shots, he laid a white sheet at their feet, bounced the light up to give them harsh shadows on their faces, while they pretended they weren’t interested, hung their heads and rubbed ash-black hands together. They called him ‘Irish’ because that was what he still exuded — the retreating curls, the green eyes, the big shoulders moving under white shirts. He began to give himself over to that summer, my father, raging along with it all, catching the fires in their magnificence and brutality, even thanking Mam for her foresight in wanting to stay there — these were his best pictures, he was sure of it, they’d make him famous, he had no doubt.