Colum McCann - Songdogs

My father came out, still in his string vest, carrying a wooden tray. The cat came up and rubbed against his calves, but he leaned down and pushed her away gently. He sat on the doorstep, put the box on his lap, opened the package. There were a few small things inside, plastic packages that looked like dimebags, others like matchboxes. He took them out deliberately and placed them in the wooden tray, put the invoice in his pocket, knocked the empty cardboard box with his hand, rolling it against the drainpipe. He took a bare fish-hook out, put it between his lips — maybe remembering his Mexican fishing days with Gabriel — and walked across the yard to the barn with the barb of the hook sticking out of his mouth.

I had one of the metal sheets off the barn, could see down below — an old lawnmower, shovels, a turf-cutter that has never been used, a few potato sacks. He shuffled into the barn and dragged a seat across to a counter that he must have built when I was away. Motes of dust settled down around the barn as he sat, some of them flicking upwards to be caught in the shafts of sunlight coming through the roof. He left his hat on the far corner of the table, took the hook from his mouth, reached down and petted the cat. Placed the hook in a vice grips on the edge of the table and, like a surgeon, began arranging things in front of him.

‘Making flies?’ I shouted down.

He whipped his head around, shifted the chair.

‘Up here,’ I said, sticking my head through the hole in the roof.

‘Christ, you’ll be the death of me yet. Where, in the name of Jaysus, are ya?’ I whistled and he looked up.

‘Who d’ya think ya are — Michel-fucken-angelo?’

‘You’re making flies?’

‘Dressing flies,’ he corrected.

‘When did ya start that?’

‘Ah, years ago.’

‘Really?’

I’ve never seen him do that before — when he first started fishing he bought all his flies from a tackle shop in town, came back with dozens of them in his hat. I watched as he rubbed his hands up and down his bare arms.

‘You’re not cold?’

‘Not a bit. I could do this in an icestorm. Love it altogether.’

‘Should put something over that vest,’ I said.

‘Ah, go away out of that.’

He turned the seat again, tightened the vice down on the hook, and rearranged the material in front of him, meticulously. Looked up at me once more, removed his glasses, and went to work. Took out some purple floss, rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, began trying to wind it along the shank of the hook. But his fingers were shaking — like hummingbird wings about to lift — and he kept dropping the thread, lifting it again, staring at it. He placed his trembling hand down on the table, glared at it, maybe telling it to stop, then suddenly thumped the back of his hand with his other fist. It stopped and he chuckled to himself. He finally got the thread started around the hook and the shakes in his hand seemed to quit altogether and there was a quiet content there, an acceptance of the slowness of time and the art of making a fly so simple that it would cause a fish to want it, something naturally belligerent and real, something that would whizz through the air with two pairs of wings and maybe three sets of eyes, something with an incoherent longing for motion. He began humming and looked happy — pissing on doom in his own peculiar way. I reached across the barn roof for the metal sheet, placed it over the hole, hammered it in, descended the ladder, went to the house and got him a shirt and his overcoat — he would have frozen down there otherwise, the length of time I knew it was going to take him to make that fly, with all its colours, all its trapped motion.

* * *

Bus stations are among the saddest places in America. Everyone looking for a way out. Slinking around. Looking for lost children. Keeping eyes glued on nothing in particular, waiting for life to happen.

In San Francisco a young girl howled about Jesus. Her arm was long with a string of watches. She said she was waiting for the Second Coming. A boy beside her hustled to carry suitcases and bags. He had a sign around his neck that said: ‘HIV Positive’. A man in a Rasta hat tried to sell me a leaflet for the deaf. He played out some sign language in the air, wrote on a piece of paper, scribbling that I could use the leaflet for commercial breaks between the books I was reading. I bought it, and he thumped me playfully on the shoulder, said he wasn’t deaf at all, went sauntering off. I shoved the leaflet down into my backpack and it was only then I noticed that Cici had put the bear’s-claw bong in the top compartment, under my jeans. I went to the bus-station bathroom and washed the last of the resin out, just in case my bags got searched.

It was a two-day trip to Wyoming. A road-rattle through high deserts and mountains, on interstates with giant rest areas, and stopovers in cities with grey afternoons hanging above them. When I finally got to Jackson Hole I found myself walking around in a stupor until I got to the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar. I negotiated some dope from a man in a black stetson, went down to the Snake River, filled the bear’s-claw pipe, got a little stoned.

In the morning, when I woke, two blue herons burst their way over the banks of the river, wings flapping hard enough to break a man’s arm. Washed my face in the meltwater rush brought down from the mountains by late summer.

I went back down to the bus depot and looked around again. My parents had been there over thirty-five years before. Cici had told me about it. I reconstructed the scene in my head. Mam had stood, nervously, cheekbones daubed with rouge, her lips coloured with a delicate red, a crimson scarf languid at her neck. She feared the moment when the bus would belch out smoke from its exhaust. Cici waited beside her, laid a hand on Mam’s forearm, ran a fingernail through some fluffy arm hair. Mam put her head on Cici’s shoulder and stared down the road, out the length of the town and beyond, into the late fifties, the unsure distance of the future. She let the crimson scarf fall down around her shoulders.

The old man was there, too, his back to them. He was shoving luggage in the bottom of the bus, arguing with the driver. There was some oil in the luggage well and he wanted the driver to clean it up. ‘Ain’t my job, mister.’ My father threw his arms up in the air, opened his suitcase and took out a pair of underpants, mopped the oil. He thought about burning the underwear, a totem to the summer, decided against it. He didn’t want to get kicked off the bus. The driver let out a huff, climbed behind the steering wheel, beeped the horn. An announcement was made over a loudspeaker. Cici took Mam’s face in her hands and they kissed each other, flush on the lips. My father was busy at the luggage well. ‘Good luck,’ Cici whispered in my Mam’s ear. They were hugging. Red lipstick was smudged on Cici’s upper lip.

Behind them my old man shouted: ‘If ya don’t get your arse in gear, we’ll miss the fucken bus, woman!’

Cici ran her fingers along Mam’s face. They kissed again — on the cheek this time — and then my parents were gone. The old man was drumming his fingers on the seat in front of him, a jazz beat. He didn’t look back as the bus took off. He said ‘yeah’ over and over again in a slow saxophone way. It was as if New York clubs already existed in his throat. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ He kept on drumming and he didn’t give a second thought to it, the leaping tears on my Mam’s face as the driver crunched through the gears and down another road, another long road in the roll of themselves, leading them to New York.

I moved away from the vision, walked through Jackson Hole. There were tourists in abundance. A gunfight was being re-enacted as theatre down near the market, little red eyes of video cameras blinking around it. In the distance, trees ran on one another’s backs all the way up the mountains. Birds sang out, marking their territory. I knew the search for Mam had become hopeless and, besides, I would soon run out of money. I found a cabin to rent on the road near the Snake River. Weedy and tumbledown, a few wild cats perched on orange crates in the yard, parts of an old windmill, an engine block on which wood had once been chopped. At the back of the cabin I wore a trail in the grass, all the way to the water’s edge. It was so high above sea level that satellites could be seen making paths, clusters of stars shuttling and winking, and once an eclipse which gave the moon an incredible penumbra.