Colum McCann: Fishing the Sloe-Black River

I want to find out who is under the bedsheets. “Talk to me.” She rolls away and turns her back to me. I stand and look around the room. It all comes down to a lump in the bed. An empty chamber pot. Some full-bloom chrysanthemums by the window. A white plate with a smear of jam. A dead archbishop on the outside, looking in.

“Just a single word,” I say. “Just give me a single word.”

Some voices float in from the white corridor. Frantic, I move to a set of drawers and a cupboard to look at the bits and pieces that go to make up Brigid now. I pull the drawers out and dump the contents on the floor. I cannot understand the mosaic. A bible. Some neatly folded blouses. Long underwear. A bundle of letters in an elastic band. Lots of hairpins. Stamps gleaned from the Book of Kells. Letters. I do not want to read them. A painting of a man sowing seeds, by a child’s hand. A photograph of our mother and father, from a long time ago, standing together by Nelson’s Pillar, him with a cigar, her with netting hanging down from her hat. A copy of a newspaper from a recent election. A Mayan doll. Lotus-legged on the floor, I am disappointed with the clutter of somebody else’s life. I haven’t found what I’m looking for.

I shuffle to the end of the bed and lift the sheets. Her feet are blue and very cold to the touch. I rub them slowly at first. I remember when we were children, very young, before all that, and we had held buttercups to each other’s chins on the edges of brown fields. I want her feet to tell me that she remembers. As I massage I think I see her lean her head sideways and smile, though I’m not sure. I don’t know why, but I want to take her feet in my mouth. I want to, but it seems obscene, so I don’t. “Up a lazy river with a robin song, it’s a lazy, lazy river, we can float along, blue skies up above, everyone’s in love, up a lazy river with me.” She mumbles when I lean over her face and kiss her. There is spittle on her chin and she is horribly ruined.

I walk to the window. Far off, in the parking lot, I can see Michael, head slumped forward on the steering wheel, sleeping. Two nuns look at him through the passenger window, curious, a cup of tea and some scones in their hands. I watch him too, wondering about the last few days. There’s an old feeling within me that’s new now. Those teeth around his neck. I want a bicycle again. Sequoia seedlings in the basket. I want to ride through a flurry of puddles to a place where a waterfall is frozen. I will stay here for now. I know that. But when she recovers, I will go to Quebec and climb.

But there is something I need first. I smile, go away from the window, lean towards Brigid, and whisper: “Where, Sister, did you put those yellow socks of mine anyway?”

The only older men I know are the ones who rise early to work. They fish the ocean for sea trout and haddock, flaring out their boats from the wharf before the sun, coming back by mid-morning with huge white plastic barrels full of fish, ready for us to gut. They draw hard on unfiltered cigarettes and have big hands that run through mottled beards. Even the younger ones look old, the hair thinning, the eyes seaward. You can see them move, slow and gull-like, back to their boats when their catch has been weighed, stomping around in a mess of nets and ropes. They don’t talk to the fishgutters. They hand us a sort of disdain, a quiet disregard, I believe, for the thinness of our forearms.

I think of them always in the mornings, when the light comes in through my curtains. The light is like an old fisherman in a yellow rain-slicked coat, come to look at Enrique and me, wrapped in our bedsheets.

It’s a strange light that comes this morning, older, thickerwristed, pushing its way through the gap and lying, with its smotes of dust, on the headboard. Goddamn it, aren’t you two just the salt of the earth? Enrique is curled into himself, the curve of his back full against the spindle of his legs. His hair is all about his face. Stubbled hairs in a riot on his chin. His eyes have collected black bags, and his white T-shirt still has smatterings of spaghetti sauce from yesterday’s lunch. I move to brush my lips against his cheek. Enrique stirs a little, and I notice a little necklace of blood spots on the pillow where he has been coughing. Get up out of bed, you lazy shits. I smooth Enrique’s brow where the sweat has gathered, even in sleep.

I climb naked out of bed, swinging my feet down into my slippers. The floor is cold and I step carefully. Last night I smashed the blackberry jamjar that used to hold our money. The glass splayed in bright splinters all around the room. I move over to the window, and Enrique murmurs into the pillow. The curtains make the sound of crackling ice. The ghosts of old fishermen can tumble in here in droves now if they want, spit their epithets all around the room. What the hell sort of mess is this? You’re late for work, Paddy-boy. No foghorns going off this morning. Gut the fish along the side, asshole.

Our window looks out to a steep hill of parked cars. This morning they are bumper to bumper. Drivers have turned their steering wheels sideways so their vehicles won’t roll down the hill and fling themselves toward the sea. Two weeks ago Enrique and I sold our car for $2,700 to a man with lemon-colored hair, and all the money is gone already. Bags of medicine and a little bit of cocaine. I put our last line on his belly last night, but he was sweating so hard that it was almost impossible to snort it.

I look up the road toward the deli. The white light in the street is slouching on the buildings, spilling over the ironwork railings. What I like most about the street is that people put flower pots in their windows, a colorful daub of Mediterranean greens and reds. Doors are painted in a medley of shades. Curtains get thrown open early in the mornings. There’s a cat on the third floor across the street, jet black with a dappled blue bandanna. It is forever cocking its head sideways and yawning in the window. Sometimes I bring home some sea trout and leave it on the doorstep of the house for the owner.

I cover myself with my hand and step out through the French doors. A chill wind is coming up from the waterfront, carrying the smell of salt water and fresh sourdough. Already some of the fishermen will have unloaded their catch and Paulie’s fingers will be frantic in his hair. Where’s O’Meara this morning? they’ll say to him. Has he found himself a gerbil? The other fishgutters will be cursing over slabs of fillets. Their plastic gloves will be covered in blood. Strings of fishgut will have fallen on their boots. That bastard’s always late anyway.

I should pull on my old jeans and whistle for a taxi, or hop on the trolley, or ride the bicycle through the hills, down to the warehouse, but the light this morning is curiously heavy, indolent, slow, and I feel like staying.

Enrique is coughing in the bedroom behind me, spitting into the pillow. It sounds like the rasp of the seals along the coastline cliffs farther up the California shore. His skin is sallow and tight around his jaw. The way he thrashes around in the bed reminds me of a baby corncrake I once took home after an oil slick in my hometown near Bantry Bay, continually battering its blackened wings against the cage to get out.

He should wake soon, and perhaps today he’ll feel well enough to sit up, read a novel or a magazine. I bend down and pick up the large pieces of shattered glass from the floor. There’s a long scar on the wall where I threw the jamjar. That was smart, O’Meara, wasn’t it? I find two quarters and a few dimes scattered among the glass. There’s an Irish five-penny piece on the floor too, an anachronism, a memory.