Colum McCann - Songdogs

He improvised a white shirt hung on a branch to keep the heat from beating down on him, looking as if he were surrendering to the land, white sleeves fluttering amid lecheguilla plants and sagebrush and miles of mesquite, kicking his way along endless arroyos, saluting the footprints of grasshopper rats and desert foxes. Nobody lived in that vast red country. Sunsets fell through the western sky, the colour of blood through a fistful of water. Grass grew through the skulls of dead animals, rattlesnakes lay coiled under rocks. He taught himself survival on those long walks — learned to listen for the rumble in the mountains that suggested a flash flood, figured out how to set a trap for a small animal for dinner, caught lizards between his fingers, built teepee fires with dead mesquite. In the morning he rose early and sucked on pebbles to extract whatever dew or moisture had come down the night before. Sometimes he could whisk the dew off blades of long desert grass with his fingers. If things got bad he sliced open a cactus with his knife and tried to suck out its residual moisture. During the hottest time of the day he rested and made water for himself. He would dig a small hole in the ground, piss into it, place a can in the hole and cover it with a piece of plastic. He weighted the plastic in the middle with a small stone, and left it for the sun to evaporate the moisture, which would gather, then drop down, slowly, drip by drip, into the can.

He was intoxicated by it all, this drinking of himself, this wandering, the beard that began to crawl on his cheeks. At night in the desert it got viciously cold, and he hid himself behind rocks or in natural shelters, lit small fires, sometimes walked a little in the night, watching Polaris, the polestar, and flapping his arms to stave off the cold. He spent a week near a streambed, straining water through his handkerchief, watching the rhythms of the country around him, rimrock, valleys, fossils. Once a wolf padded across his path, stopped and stared at him, cocked its head and trotted away.

In the high desert country he eventually found himself in a town three days walk from the border. Low houses were caressed by big swells of dust that billowed through narrow twisting streets. Cottonwoods and tamarisks ranged along the riverfront, a feeder off the Rio Grande. Up from the trees the town gathered along dry brown roads, into a plaza, then out again. A couple of large houses lined the outer streets, but the rest were mostly adobe shacks, interrupted by a Catholic church, shops, a couple of bars, and a town hall. At the edge of the town barefoot kids threw pebbles around him, in a large circle. He ended up resting against a low fence, smoking a cigarette, hat down over his eyes, the sun sluicing its way through the sky, when he saw a young girl gandering around at the back of an old house, followed by a bouquet of older boys. She looked nothing like the soldier’s sister. Her hair was cropped short and a small scar lay under her eye from a fight. She had bruises and cuts on her legs, a linen skirt that was hitched up high above her knees, a length of horse halter used as a belt, tied with an expert sailor’s knot.

She pursed her lips provocatively for his camera, her blouse open flirtatiously, her head thrown sideways like a film actress. Her mother screamed at him from the porch of her house, where she stood in the shadows, skinning a rabbit.

‘Don’t you ever set your eyes on my daughter again, understand?’ she said in Spanish.

The knife went skillfully from the neck of the rabbit all the way down to the crotch, and she hung the carcass upside-down on a clothesline. He nodded, stuck his hat on his head and walked on, having a shave in a silty irrigation ditch. Next morning, he beckoned the girl as she came outside. She moved for his camera and put her arms behind her head, unashamed by the beginnings of armpit hair.

My father pitched camp near the irrigation ditch. Later that week the young girl invented some fabulous lie about how my father was related to John Riley, an Irishman who had commanded the San Patricio Battalion in the Mexican War. My father was hailed as an incarnate revolutionary, though he had never heard of Riley before. He put a red necktie over a white t-shirt to go to the house. The girl’s mother wore a fresh apron and greeted him at the door, wiping flour off her hands, covering her chest with a forearm, waving him in with a sweep of the other hand. My old man was allowed to sit near the head of the table, a newly embroidered serviette folded at his place setting. Laughter rang out around the small adobe house when a cooked rabbit was laid in the centre of the table and the mother stuck a knife into its belly, where it vibrated for a moment. Fresh maize tortillas were laid out in front of him, with large amounts of beans. Drink was slurped from the necks of dark earthenware jars. Songs were swapped and more lies told. My father assured the mother, in his broken Spanish, that Riley had been born in his own household in Ireland, generations ago, the birth enabled by some enigmatic great-grandmother who plucked magic potions from flowers, the birth made fluid by pulp from dandelions.

He was allowed to stay in a small shed near the house, watching the stars through a hole the shape of an upside-down apple in the roof. He always remembered that the light from the rising moon first appeared in the bottom stem, then gradually filled the rest out, as if the hole were being peeled as it gathered light. He had a single wooden desk and a mattress stuffed with rabbit skins. But he still went walking in the desert. One week he wandered north and across the river to Texas to search for film — a long journey to Fort Stockton, walking again, hitching lifts. When he got back, the young girl stood flagrantly in front of his camera, thick red lips, jutting cheekbones, small snub of a nose, an array of colourful clothes drawn around her.

She wasn’t performing for the camera — she was performing for him. She never asked to see the prints. There wasn’t an ounce of vanity in her poses.

Early in the morning she would stand outside her house and hug herself into the weather, the peculiar patterns of clouds that scurried over the Mexican sky, winds that blew from a million different directions, carrying strange scents, sounds, squalls of rain, bits of dust. The wind had peculiarities that she made her own. When she was eleven years old she had given the wind different colours. A red wind carried desert dust, a brown one came riverwise, a grey one brought the scent of mesquite, a curious green one came one summer carrying swarms of locusts. Her favourite at the time was a black wind — a wind that did nothing at all, that didn’t exist, when the town turned black and torpid with its static heat. She always thought the wind would gather in a man for her — maybe that was why she fell in love with my father, I don’t know. She called him ‘ mi cielo, ’ my sky, and a lazy black wind blew through.

Perhaps she visited my father’s shack late at night, the weather temporarily forgotten, her blouse fully opened, her head cocked back under candlelight, the scar under her eye muted, the hole peeling with moonlight, I don’t know, I have never found out, but they were married a year later. She was eighteen, he was twenty-seven. It was the year that the war ended, puff-faced leaders leaning over a table to sign an uneasy peace, a plane drifting off from the western edge of Japan in the shadow of a mushroom cloud — but they had little idea what was happening in the world and were slightly aghast when they found out, months later, that their wedding was held on the exact same day that Buddhist monks were burning alive in orange robes and rope sandals in a city called Nagasaki.

On the morning of the wedding, two dozen rabbits were strung out on the washing line, like a row of very dark red lungs, penned up with giant clothes pegs, ready to be eaten at the feast. The photograph at the church shows them smiling. His hair is slicked back but a cowlick negotiates his eyebrows. Her feet point in opposite directions from under the hem of her white linen gown, crocheted flowers at the edges, her hair threaded and ribboned where it had begun to grow out, the dress tight to the forearm and puffy at the shoulders, her hands in fingerless lace gloves, resting on her hips as if she were already waiting for something wondrous to happen, another strange wind to blow in. A crowd of men hang around them uneasy in suits, jackets shiny at the elbows, one woman reaching up to the side of her husband’s face, maybe taking shaving soap from his ear, maybe brushing back a hair. They moved in a long procession from the church down to the house, my mother and father in front, an accordion ringing out, a trumpet, a guitar, children picking up coins that were flung behind the cavalcade, a particular burro leaving a healthy trail of manure along the way, small girls beside them, swinging the hems of their dresses, someone belting out a song from a window. A red breeze blew for my mother on her wedding day, tiny amounts of desert dust stinging her bare ankles. And they claimed that they heard a coyote singing in the distance, a magnificent howl that broke its way through the air. Endless dancing and fighting and loving and drinking were surely done that night, people in sweaty white open-necked shirts, kicking against the dry soil and brown skin of a land that, years later, swamped its heat over me.