Colum McCann: Fishing the Sloe-Black River

A muffle of voices. I curl myself even deeper into a ball and press my face against the cold metal. If the border patrol asks to examine his luggage, I am gone again, history come full circle. But I hear the sound of a hand slapping twice on the roof of the car, a grind of gears, a jolt forward, and within moments we are in America, the country, as someone once said, that God gave to Cain. A few minutes down the road I hear Michael whoop and roar and laugh.

“Greetings,” he shouts, “from the sebaceous glands. I’m sweating like a bear. I’ll have you out of there in no time, Sheona.”

His voice sounds smothered and my toes are frozen.

On an August night in 1978 I clocked off my job as a singing waitress in a bar down on Geary Street. Wearing an old wedding dress I had bought in a pawn shop, hair let loose, yellow socks on — they were always my trademark — I got into our old Ford pickup with the purple hubcaps and drove up the coast. Michael was spending the weekend in a cabin somewhere north of Mendocino, helping bring in a crop of California’s best. Across the bridge where the hell-divers swooped, into Sausalito, around by Mount Tamalpais, where I flung a few cigarette butts to the wind for the ghosts of Jack Kerouac and John Muir, and up along the coast, the sun rose like a dirty red aspirin over the sea. I kept steady to the white lines, those on the dashboard and those on the road. The morning had cracked well when I turned up the Russian River and followed the directions Michael had written on the back of a dollar bill.

The cabin was up a drunken mountain road. Cats leaped among parts of old motorbikes, straggles of orange crates, pieces of a windmill. Tatters of wild berries hung on bushes, and sunlight streamed in shafts between the sequoias. Michael and his friends met me with guns slung down at their waists. There had been no guns in Mayo, just schoolgirl rumors of an IRA man who lived in a boghole about a mile from Brigid’s rock. They scared me, the guns. I asked Michael to tuck his away. Late that evening, when all the others had gone with a truckload of dope, I asked him if we could spend a moment together. I wanted to get away from the guns. I didn’t get away from them for long, though. Four hours later, naked on the side of a creek, I was quoting Kavanagh for some reason, my own love banks green and rampant with leaves, when I looked up beyond Michael’s shoulder at four cops, guns cocked, laughing. They forced Michael to bend over and shoved a tree branch up his anus. They tried to take me, these new hawks, and eventually they did. Four in a row. This time with my eyes closed, hands to the ground and nothing to watch me from my fingerhouse.

Five days later, taking the simple way out — a lean, young lawyer in a white fedora had begun to take an interest in my case — they deported me for not having a green card. Past the Beniano Bufano Peace statue — the mosaic face of all races — at San Francisco International, handcuffed, they escorted me to JFK on to an Aer Lingus Boeing 747. I flung my beads down the toilet.

Michael lifts me from the boot. He swirls me around in his arms, in the middle of a Maine dirt road. It is pitch black but I can almost smell the lakes and the fir trees, the clean snow that nestles upon branches. A winter Orion thrusts his sword after Taurus in the sky. “That could be a ghost,” I whisper to Michael, and he stops his dance. “I mean, the light hitting our eyes from those stars left millions of years ago. It just might be that the thing is a ghost, already imploded. A supernova.”

“The only thing I know about the stars is that they come out at night,” he says. “My grandfather sometimes sat in a chair outside our house and compared them to my grandmother’s teeth.”

I laugh and lean into him. He looks up at the sky.

“Teach me some more scientific wonders,” he says.

I babble about the notion that if we could travel faster than the speed of light we would get to a place we never really wanted to go before we even left. He looks at me quizzically, puts his fingers on my lips, walks me to the car and sits me down gently on the front seat, saying, “Your sister.”

He takes off his tie, wraps it around his head like a bandanna, feels for a moment for his gone ponytail, turns up the stereo, and we drive toward New York.

I had seen my sister one day in Dublin, outside the Dawson Lounge. I suppose her new convent clothes suited her well. Black to hide the thinness. Muttering prayers as she walked. The hair had grown thick on her hands, and her cheekbones were sculleried away in her head. I followed behind her, up around St. Stephen’s Green and on down toward the Dail. She shuffled her feet slowly, never lifting them very high off the ground. She stopped at the gate of the Dail, where a group of homeless families sat protesting their destitution, flapping their arms like hummingbirds to keep themselves warm. It was Christmas Eve. She talked with a few of them for a moment, then took out a blanket and sat down among them. I looked from the other side of the street. It shocked me to see her laugh and to watch a small girl leap into her lap. I walked away, bought a loaf of bread, and threw it to the ducks in the Green. A boy in Doc Martens glared at me and I thought of the dancehall.

“None of these coins have our birthdates on them anymore,” I say as I search in my handbag for some money for a toll booth.

“I enjoyed that back there,” he says. “Hell of a lot better than being on a scaffold. Hey, you should have seen the face of the border patrol guy. Waved me through without batting an eyelid.”

“You think we just get older and then we fade away?”

“Look, Sheona, you know the saying.”

“What saying?”

“A woman is as old as she feels.” Then he chuckles. “And a man is as old as the woman he feels.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m only kidding,” he says.

“I’m sorry, Mike. I’m just nervous.”

I lean back in the seat and watch him. In the six years of notes he sent from prison there is one I remember the most. “I wouldn’t mind dying in the desert with you, Sheona,” he had written. “We could both lick the dew off the rocks, then watch the sun and let it blind us. Dig a hole and piss in the soil. Put a tin can in the bottom of the hole. Cover it with a piece of plastic and weigh down the center with a rock. The sun’ll evaporate the piss, purify it, let it gather in droplets on the plastic, where it’ll run toward the center, then drop in the tin can, making water. After a day we can drink from each other’s bodies. And then die well. Let the buzzards come down from the thermals. I hate being away from you. I am dead already.”

The day I received that letter, I thought of quitting my secretarial job in a glass tower down by Kavanagh’s canals. I thought of going back to Mayo and striking a shovel into a boghole, seeping down into the water, breathing out the rest of my life through a hollow piece of reed grass. But I never quit my job and I never wrote back to him. The thought of that sort of death was way too beautiful.

My days in Dublin were derelict and ordinary. A flat on Appian Way near enough to Raglan Road, where my own dark hair weaved a snare. Thirteen years somehow slipped away, like they do, not even autumn foliage now, but mulched delicately into my skin. I watched unseen as a road sweeper in Temple Bar whistled like he had a bird in his throat. I began to notice cranes swinging across the skyline. Dublin had become cosmopolitan. A drug addict in a doorway on Leeson Street ferreted in his bowels for a small bag of cocaine. Young boys wore baseball hats. The canals carried fabulously colored litter. The postman asked me if I was lonely. I went to Torremolinos in 1985 and watched girls my age get knocked up in alleyways.