Colum McCann - Songdogs

I forged a Social Security number and found a job cleaning swimming pools, diatomaceous clay under my nails, leaves lifted out from filters, blue-ribbed vacuums used after shocking pools with chlorine. In the winter the ski lifts made caterpillar-shapes up the slopes and I sold tickets. More than three years were spent like this, patching my cabin, fixing water pipes, climbing hills, walking, rafting rivers, watching birthdays pass, still wondering about Mam.

Kutch turned out to be my neighbour. Short black hair and a face that could have come from a gargoyle, full of stitches and welts — he had once been involved in a dam-bombing accident. He and Eliza lived in an abandoned railway carriage. For a living they fashioned benches out of fallen logs and sold them to trendy stores in Cheyenne. Mother and son together, I envied them their closeness. Eliza worked on the benches, chiselling, carving, long brown fingers moving softly over wood. Kutch learned from her, imitated her patterns. Sometimes they went out driving and chopped down billboards together, spiked trees, destroyed bulldozers, left red fists on them. Red fists abounded. Even on the fire tower — which Kutch showed me that first autumn — they had painted a mural. Boysenberry red, the thumbnail intricate and dark, the wrist sidling off into an arm, lofting its way over the trees and the mountains, thrusting up amongst the circling hawks. Beneath it the words, in a black oval sweep: ‘No Compromise in the Defense of Mother Earth.’

I sometimes drove Kutch and Eliza around in their pickup as they did their eco-guerrilla stunts. I never did anything myself, never drew any fists or poured sugar in any tank, paralysed by my own inaction.

They chopped down a row of billboards in Utah, a long line of advertisements with a ridiculous painting of a penguin on them, miles and miles of inanities that scarred the land. I sat waiting in the driver’s seat, parked on the verge, and we got chased by an unmarked car, a red light flashing on its roof. Eliza and Kutch jumped in the back bed of the truck, the acetylene torch still flaring, and I sped off. Through the rear sliding window, Eliza put her brown wrinkled hand on my upper arm and squeezed tight until we drew away safely, in the dark. When we got back to Wyoming she kissed me on the forehead and said I was welcome anytime to come live with them in their railway carriage, that they had a spare room. But I liked my solitude. I’ve always liked my solitude.

Eliza showed me how to work on benches, told me old legends as we worked. With a chisel I carved out intricate patterns in fallen trees, her tales swirling around me. She made tea, and we listened to old flute music — it seemed to lift the cabin into the air. I sometimes stared at her for a long time as she worked, beads at her neck, furrows of concentration in her brow. She returned the look, silently.

I was out walking in the late-winter snow when I found the two dead coyotes hung on the fencepost. I stared for a while, then hurried back and got Eliza and Kutch. They pulled on their coats as they walked down the trail after me. Eliza clipped the coyotes down from where they hung. Carted the bodies back to her cabin. She took their teeth out and made some bracelets — one set of teeth was old and gnawed down, the other young and sharp. Afterwards she and Kutch brought the stiff bodies up to the forest, laid them out on the ground, left them there to manure themselves back into America. Eliza told me the old legend about the birth of the universe, the yammering-in of the world. I trudged home under the blanket-black night, the snow reflecting off the ground, went back to my cabin, took out my photo album, flicked through it. It had become a habit of mine, looking at the album.

I would rise from my chair, step out the door, look at the Wyoming sky, the thump of creation, and then I’d take another step forward on to the edge of the porch, and I would walk my way slowly into old photographs.

* * *

The first of them is a street, a Bronx tenement street, hermetically sealed at the end of the 1950s. The street loops itself into a red-brick cul-de-sac. At the end of the road there’s a commotion. It’s a summer’s day and boys are wearing bathing togs and running back and forth through a geyser of water erupting from a broken fire hydrant. Their hair is very short, their bodies scrawny and white. One teenager, with a few tufts of hair in bloom on his chest, is in the middle of a huge leap through the water, arms held out wide, his fingers spread, a roar on his lips, eyebrows arched, rack of ribs exposed. The girls aren’t allowed to put on bathing suits — this is a Catholic street — but some of them run through the water anyway, in long dresses which cling to their thighs. Along the side of the street a football is in mid-motion, heading towards a girl who looks shocked. A woman with a face like a trout peers from beyond the edge of the spray.

In the far background of the photograph a group of men and women are gathered on the steps outside a house. Only by walking into the photograph, going beyond the rim and up very close, can you make out their faces. They are Irish immigrants. Their clothes and expressions tell you that. Flat hats and grey trousers held up with suspenders. Some of them are sharing cigarettes, laughing, breaking out a melodeon, peeling labels off bottles that come from jacket pockets. They are fetching Galway and Dublin and Leitrim and Donegal from the bottom end of these bottles — and toasts are being made, or have been made. A toast to new arrivals who come hugging their suitcases with ash-wood hurleys strapped on the side. A toast to strange billboards that flash out new neon signs over the Bronx. A toast to a boxer who puts away journeymen heavyweights. A toast to the fire hydrant and the leaping boy. And maybe a toast to the big grey figure of Eisenhower, who will soon put a big chunk of metal up high in the air.

They have no names when I walk up to meet them, these immigrants. But I know their jobs — a list which, when converted to spittle at the edge of a tongue, could fill a keg — mechanics, maids, doormen, waitresses, line cooks, roofers, plumbers, garbage men, dishwashers, furnace foreman, doughnut maker in the morning, security guard at night, pint-puller, scrap buyer, dogcatcher, junk seller, shoeshiner, secretary, policeman who doesn’t ticket his own, fireman with a sprig of plastic shamrock in his helmet, landscaper, taxi driver, peddler, telephonist. They are watching their children play in the water. ‘He’s a wild one, that same fella.’ ‘Wouldn’t she break your heart?’ ‘Look at the head of hair on him.’ The men remember a time when they were boys. They made footballs from the bladders of pigs, but the shape of footballs has changed in this country, no longer round. Their sons often come home in colourful high-school jackets and it’s a strange language that they speak, quarterbacks and sackings. The men are wondering whether the ball, in its mid-flight twirl, will be caught. The women watch their daughters down by the fire hydrant and worry about how high their skirts are being lifted. The new leather shoes might get damp and unshape themselves. One mother is worried that the ball is heading towards her daughter, and maybe a joke rises up in her mind that her daughter is so clumsy that she hasn’t even caught the measles yet, how could she catch anything else?

Mam is wedged in between two rather fat women. Her blouse is white and opened down to the fourth button so that a man in a flat hat above her is leaning over, trying to peep down into the cleavage. It might be a bit bony for his taste. She has lost a lot of weight in the Bronx. She has a tendency to sit at the dinner table and push the food around on her plate, the fork clanging tinnily. Her arms are cartilaginous. A hip-bone juts from the dress. Her neck is a brown stalk of rhubarb with its long striations. The dark hair is pulled back, ribboned in red. She is on the bottom stoop with her hands placed carefully in her lap, one over the other. They are hands that have been doing laundry all day. She works with a family from Tipperary who still keep the letters ‘CHINESE LAUNDRY’ over the door, inspiring jokes about the slanty eyes and yellow skin of the Irish rednecks. Mam’s eyes are drawn down to her hands. Long and water-wrinkled, they have been scrubbing for many hours. Remnants of white washing powder under the nails. The tops of the fingers are puffy and the skin is loose from so much water. It is strange the patterns that are made in her hands. The fingerprint lines seem to become much more prominent, so that the rings at the top of each finger are bigger to the eye. Maps on her fingers. Far away, a boy named Miguel could lodge dirt in the fingernails and make a work of art from it. Mexican earth, the good earth.