Songdogs

WEDNESDAY, grand morning for the dogs

Cooked breakfast for him this morning, but he didn’t want any. He said that ‘sunnyside up’ is an American notion and that I’ve developed a bit of an accent to go along with my cooking.

He just sat with that lazy inertia in his eyes and peddled the eggs around on the plate with his fork, leaving a trail of grease. Every now and then he touched the fork against his teeth. His lips moved as if chewing something, the lower one reaching out over the top. They made a dry sort of smacking sound, settled down to nothing again. He steered his finger through the grease and wiped it on the sleeve of his blue workshirt, stared at me for no particular reason. Told me that half the town have their green cards or their English dole numbers by now. Nothing but old men left. All the sons and daughters coming home for Christmas, elongating their words and dropping haitches all over the place. He said he was surprised there wasn’t a row of haitches and ‘gee-whizzes’ between here and Shannon Airport.

We were silent for a long time until two stray dogs came barking through the outside yard. A black and white collie and a golden labrador with a red collar. They wheeled around down by the barn, chasing each other in tight circles, tails wagging. The old man rose up and shuffled over to the window, clacked his lips again, leaned against the frame, rolled the curtain between his thumb and forefinger, watched them. The collie cornered the labrador over by where the darkroom used to be — a burnt-out shell now — and danced ritually around her for a while, climbed up.

The old man chuckled, rubbed his hands along the curtains, and turned away from the window while they continued their bout.

‘Grand morning for the dogs anyway,’ he said.

We laughed, but his was a strange laugh that didn’t last very long. He sort of threw the chuckle out into the air and immediately swallowed it back down his saggy throat. He ambled into the pantry and got all his equipment together while the yelping rose up from outside, chopping through the dawn. Asked him did he want some company for the day but he shook his head, no. He said it’s much better fishing when things are quiet, it doesn’t disturb the big fish, they have acute hearing, they can sense a person for miles, it all has to do with wave vibrations and the motion of sound, salmon are particularly sensitive. I knew he was bullshitting, but I decided to leave him be. Down he went to the river, shouting at the dogs to clear off as he walked.

He gave a slow push to the green gate with his foot, climbed over the stile with difficulty. He has worn a path through the fuchsia bushes to the bank. The path was muddy in the middle from last night’s drizzle, and he had to straddle it at first, one foot at either side of the puddle. Then he just gave up and slopped his way drowsily through the muck, wiped his boots on the long grass. He set up his equipment and started casting away, settled himself down into the grey caisson of his loneliness. The dogs went off down the lane, stopping for another yelp of lust down by the bend, where the big potholes are.

* * *

The old man hung around Madrid in confusion until, in the summer of 1939, a soldier from Mexico — a Communist with only two fingers left on his right hand — beckoned him to another continent. Other wars had erupted all over Europe and the soldier said he knew of a place in the Chihuahuan desert where a man could get away from it all, sit and get drunk and lay a hat over his face and dream and run a full set of fingers over a bottle or a guitar or a horse or a beautiful woman.

My father wasn’t interested in horses or guitars, but the soldier carried a picture of his sister on the inside of his uniform. He held it delicately between his two fingers like a cherished cigarette, a photo of a young woman, no more than seventeen years old, in a billowy white linen skirt, flour on her hands. The photo was a good and sufficient reason for my father to latch on an impulse and go. And there’d been enough dying. He wanted to forget about Manley. Leave Europe to its bags of butchery and bones, to its internecine slaughter. He filled his rucksack with film, swapped his cameras for another Leica, a newer model, and offered the soldier a large amount of money for the shot of his sister. The photo had already grown yellow around the edges, but the soldier wouldn’t part with it. Instead, my father took a picture of the Mexican holding the picture. They were in a market area on the southern Spanish coast, vegetables arrayed about them, the soldier standing, small and wiry, with a wrinkled face that was not unlike an old vegetable patch itself. When he smiled, he showed very bad gums and the darkest of teeth.

The Mexican and my father took a ship that was returning to the green neck of the world with a cargo of rotten bananas. The shipment had been refused at the Spanish port, owing to a vendetta. The captain dumped the bananas not far out to sea — my father said that they fell like absurd black fish into the clear water. On deck, he and the soldier played poker and dreamed bilious dreams, fought with other passengers, threw cigarette butts into the wake behind them, watched them fizzle out in the air, charged the sailors for portraits taken down in the engine room, making a little bit of money together. The Mexican walked around on deck, staring at the photo of his sister, promising my father great things: a house on the edge of the Rio Grande, a grove of tamarisk trees, twelve very healthy chickens, a motorbike that wouldn’t sputter.

He lost the soldier in a dockside crowd in Veracruz when the boat pulled into the Gulf of Mexico.

A Friday afternoon, the day of some festival, and people shoved gigantic bottles into my father’s hands as he roared out for his friend over the heads of the crowd. Fish were being cooked over fires, women in shawls guided donkeys, a fashionable car beeped its way through the market, where parrots and snakes were on sale. Fights and songs were full of mescal. He searched for two days but there was no sign of the soldier. So he walked through the town and out along the coastline paths. Walking was holy — it cleared the mind. He wandered northwards, through small towns full of fishing boats and people bent over nets. They took him into their homes, bedded him down for the night, fed him frijole beans, woke him with coffee, ground corn on metate stones for the going. At other times men spat at his feet — to some of them he was nothing more than a gringo fool, a fuereño in a derisory hat. But I can imagine him sauntering through the sun-yellow streets, wiry and broad-stepped, stains on the underside of his shirt, his money still pinned into his waistband, the brim of the hat casting a multitude of shadows on his face, thin red streaks of tiredness in the whites of his eyes, chatting to women in his broken Spanish, gesturing to men, drinking, cavorting, constantly struck by the rivers of moments that were carrying him along, slamming him from one bank to the other, ferrying his way ferociously to no particular place.

He took photos as he moved his way up and down the country, along the eastern coast — a prostitute in a blond wig, leaning out of a window; a boy playing soccer alone in a laneway; a man on a boat dumping a dead child, covered in lime, into the sea; men in cotton trousers; boys in the rain flinging stones up at birds; political slogans on the walls; a pig slaughtered at the rear of a church; a woman in an adelita dress moving very precisely under a parasol. Colour seemed to exist in his black and white shots, as if it had somehow seeped itself into the shade and the shadows of his work, so that years later — when I sat in the attic — I could almost tell that the parasol was yellow, it had that feel about it to me. His photos spoke to me that way. Many other things were yellow in my ideas of Mexico at the time — the leaves of plants, the leftovers of malaria, the sun pouring down jonquil over the land.

He spent a couple of seasons with fishermen close to Tampico, living in a palm-fronted hut down near the water. One of the men, Gabriel, inhabited his photographs. On the far side of his sixties, with a patch of hair on the front of his forehead, Gabriel tucked bait in his mouth to keep it warm. Worms, or sometimes even maggots, were held between his gum and lip, causing the lower lip to bulge out. It was as if he carried an extra tongue with him, jutting out over a cleft in his chin. Even when he was fishing with nets or lobster pots Gabriel kept the bait in his mouth. It was a trick he had learned as a child — warm bait, he claimed, made for a better catch. He would lean over the side of his boat and let some foul-looking spit volley out over the water.

He taught my father about nets and reels, hooks and flies, carried a note in his pocket that read, in Spanish: ‘If you want to be happy for an hour, get drunk; if you want to be happy for a day, kill a pig; if you want to be happy for a week, get married; if you want to be happy for a lifetime, go fishing.’

Gabriel had developed an aversion to land. His legs wobbled when he walked on dry soil, so he stayed in his boat most of the time, feet propped over the edge of the deck, taking his worms from an old tobacco can, shoving them down in the pouch of his mouth. He visited his wife in town occasionally, preferring to sleep with her in a hammock because of its rocking motion. Gabriel and his wife had eight children together. Gabriel had called his youngest son ‘Jesus’ with the idea that he would one day walk on water. But Jesus had walked elsewhere, along with other sons and daughters, leaving Gabriel with nobody to take to sea — his wife got seasick in the bath.

Every Sunday, Gabriel brought my father out on the boat instead of going to mass. While church bells rang, my father left his hut and went down to the dock and out to sea. The old Mexican would kneel in between two small shrines he had erected on either side of the rowlocks. Wooden saints were nailed into the boards. They hovered above the blue, pellucid sea. Gabriel said prayers while the boat bobbed out on the ocean, maintaining that on Sundays his shrimp nets were fuller than ever. My father saw him every day, but there weren’t as many photos of Gabriel as he would have liked — film was becoming scarce. Gabriel was almost like a father to him. They filled a void in one another. Gabriel wanted to teach my father ballads, but he soon found out that he had a voice not unlike the ravens that came down to feed on discarded fish heads. So the old Mexican insisted that he just listen, not sing. Raucous tunes rolled from Gabriel, songs that he made up as he went along, eyes cast to the sea. He sang of other days when he was able to dive to great depths and take up precious things from the ocean floor, of traditions, of curious motions that arose from waves. The two of them rowed together through bays and inlets, season piling into season, my father’s face reddening at first, then darkening in the reflected sunlight, his accent improving as he learned Spanish from Gabriel, who rolled his vowels around the parasites in his mouth.

Gabriel’s wife came down to dockside with plates of food, the plates covered with an old cloth to keep them warm. She brought only enough for her husband to eat and seldom even gave a nod to the gringo with the cameras. Sometimes she hung around to listen to the mournful sound of her husband’s four-stringed guitar.

My father knew then that it was time to head on but before he did, a strange thing happened. A group of landcrabs made their way up from the shore to invade the shacks of the seafront. They scuttled in unison, a barrage of them, almost in formation, clambering over stones, a wash of movable eyes. Gabriel was on land at the time, the bait between his gum and lip. The sea had threatened storms, and he was out mending nets on a pier and securing his boat when the invasion happened. He ran home, towards his wife, but found himself surrounded by the creatures. In the photograph Gabriel is perched on a fencepost, much like a bird, scared, looking down, staring at the crabs as they go past, his lip jutting out, letting gobs of maggoty brown spit down upon them. His shabby jacket hangs around him. An old black glazed sombrero with a large brim and steeple crown sits precariously on his head. A perplexed look on his face. The crabs look bizarre and out of place, a bit like my old man, moving crabways through people’s lives, bound to incongruity.

When he got back to his hut, my father found that the place had been ransacked. He suspected Gabriel’s wife, but couldn’t prove a thing. The rucksack, a few clothes, and the Foxford blankets were all missing. He felt it lucky that he always kept his cameras and money with him — but there was a portent in the robbery. Gabriel walked out of town with him, and a few miles beyond — a big sacrifice for a man with an epileptic tenor in his legs — offering my father the shell of a landcrab as a memento. The crab had slithered up and died on Gabriel’s porch. My father hung the shell from his new rucksack and continued north, along the seaboard, towns thinning out, the Sierra Madres looming.

At night the old man slept with his equipment in much the same way that he might have slept with a woman, coveting his cameras, everything curled in around him, the film in a special bag, even the tripod ensconced at his feet, a little piece of string tied around it and hooked to a big toe. He still had enough money left to go where he wanted, but he kept it tucked in his waistband in case of emergency. He moved inland, took a job painting fences for a rich rancher in the grasslands, sleeping in a horse barn with ten vaqueros. The other men played poker at night. Eight long months, keeping to himself, sulking around the corral, making enough to move along once more. Working on the fences, hammering a tamping bar into the ground, he often thought of the Mexican soldier’s sister. The photo had burned itself like magnesium into his mind. Every now and then he woke up and saw two dreamlike fingers beckoning him. He would go and find the girl. He wandered all the way north, towards the Texas border, hitching occasional lifts across the mountains from small grey trucks. Sometimes men told him about a massive war that had erupted on the other side of the world, rumours of skinny women walking barefoot into gas chambers, rows and rows of them pale as Easter lilies, small mines bobbing on the Pacific, an eruption of barbed wire in a halo around Europe — but all of that was an eternity away, he couldn’t fathom how men could continue their lust for dying after the agonies of Spain. He was treading the middle line between drifter and coward, I suppose. He could have gone to Europe to photograph or fight, but instead he continued his peregrinations, heading westward, away from the smell of the sea, wind in the vast emptiness, all the way through the mountains, across Coahuila, to the eastern side of the Chihuahuan desert.

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.

* * *

He came back from the river for lunch and didn’t eat a single thing, again. Told him that he’s just going to fade away.

‘Jaysus, now there’s an idea,’ he said.

He walked out to the grey-stone firepit to burn the rubbish, carrying one Spar bag, full to the brim with bread crusts and tea bags and hardly anything else. He says it’s two weeks’ worth of rubbish. He has this curious bend to him as he walks, looks hugely lopsided. The wind was raving and he had his collar pulled up around his neck. I went outside to help him, but he was already at the pit, dumping the bags out, the crusts falling, thick brown shafts into the ash. I came up behind him.

‘Can I give ya a hand?’

He turned to me: ‘What are ya doing out without a coat on, for fucksake? You’ll catch your bloody death.’

I reached down to pick up the red petrol can at the side of the firepit and unscrewed the top, but he took it from me. ‘Right now, I can do it on my own.’ He sprinkled petrol over the rubbish, took out an old army Zippo from his pocket, hunkered down, lit the top of a long piece of straw, held it out. The fire whooshed up momentarily, a sucking updraft, died down.

‘Go on so, I’m grand,’ he said, looking down at the flames as if he might stand there for days, incalculably patient.

No point in pissing him off, so I ambled back to the house, put the kettle on, and watched from the living room, where he had another fire lit. His photos of Mam in Mexico are still around, although they look tired now, a binge of them around the room. The painting job that we once did has faded.

I dragged a chair to the window, propped my elbows on the big high armrests, watching him in the farmyard. When he was done with the burning he turned to come back from the pit, and still the whole of his body was leaning over, walking at an angle, paying some sort of homage to the ground. He shuffled back along the little muddy trail, stopped and scratched at his head, then moved his fingers curiously along his right cheek as if trying to ruddy it, walked over to the wheelbarrow. For a moment he took hold of the handles and lifted it. He shoved the wheelbarrow forward a couple of feet as if it were an empty flying seat at some carnival, but it ground itself down into a hole in the middle of the yard, let out a few sparks, stopped. Scrunched up his lips and let out a glob of spit from the side of his mouth. Took his glasses off, had a look at his watch, wound it, glanced back at the house. I gave him a wave but he didn’t respond, even with the glasses back on. Perhaps the light was glinting on the window, but I was sure he couldn’t see me — most likely his eyes are on their way, too. Bodies fall like rain at that age — drops collide into one another.

His mouth was drawn downwards across the falling. He looks closer to his nineties than he does to his seventies.

He stopped for a moment and lit up — it’s not me who’ll catch my death at all. In the living room, even with the waft of peat, it smelled musty and dank, the tobacco having sunk into the wood. I took all the ashtrays out to the bin and dumped them, cleaned them with a rag. Got them shiny and black. Maybe this way he’ll see how much he smokes — used to be he only took a few drags from each one, put it out, but now they’re all smoked down to the quick, dark around the filters. They’ll whisk him away before he knows it, sucked up on the ember updraft of himself. I’ve heard it’s more difficult than going cold turkey. Not long after leaving Ireland, I met an Algerian in one of the cheap hotels on Bedford Street in London. He was trying to kick cocaine. He had set up a dartboard in his next-door room to occupy himself. But one afternoon he sold the dartboard for a line of coke that he did in the public toilets in Victoria Station. Even paid his tenpence to get in and snort it. Afterwards he had nothing left and he locked himself away in the room, where I could hear him scratching at the walls, shouting for another line of coke and a cigarette.

Those days of mine in London were long and grey. Eighteen years old, having just left home. In a train station, in black drainpipe trousers and a shirt of tentative blue, I pondered my dual heritage, the Irish in me, the Mexican. An explosion of blood made the shape of a flower around my nose, where I had failed to make a place for a small silver stud. I had wanted to announce my manhood with a nose-ring. An old landlady brought me to a bathroom to put Dettol on the side of my face where the blood had strayed, saying: ‘You hacked your bloody face, son, what in the world are ya doing?’ And me thinking it could have been my own mother tentatively dabbing a cotton ball against my nose. I moved through London as if wounded, working on building sites where they changed my name to Paddy. A plethora of paddies in knitted hats and construction belts moving their way around scaffolding. I checked in and out of small rooms all over the city. Walked around with a skin of doubt — dark, but with a field of freckles across the cheekbones. A childish voice inside me asking: ‘Who the hell are you anyway?’ In bookshops on Charing Cross Road I looked at guidebooks to Mexico, wondering if my mother might step out from the pages and appear to me, maybe a sarape around her, maybe standing under a clothesline, fluttering her thinness out towards the Chihuahuan desert. In those bookshops — with the smell of words, the promise of existing in another place, the feet moving by me as I sat lotus-legged on the floor, the clerks staring me down from the register — I decided that I would make my trip to my mother’s country, find her, make her exist for me again.

And now I wonder what the old man remembers about her these days. Maybe nothing. Maybe silence has cured him of memory. Maybe there’s an absolute vacuum in the anathema of age.

The kettle gave out a high whistle from the kitchen. When I went outside to tell him that the tea was ready he had his back to me — ‘tea’s growing cold!’ — but he didn’t hear me at all, his shadow sliding away from the wheelbarrow, lengthening across the yard, folding against the aluminum siding of the barn. He looked fairly content as he shuffled over to the side door and bent down, started feeding something to the cat. The cat was running around and around his feet like something possessed. He reached out every now and then and grabbed it by the tail, lit himself a cigarette which chugged away from his mouth. A drizzle came down upon him from some rat-grey clouds.

I went up behind him and touched him on the shoulder and he whipped around, startled. It was as if he had forgotten I was there. The cigarette dropped from his mouth.

‘Tea’s ready,’ I said.

‘Ya put me heart in me mouth.’

‘I looked for some biscuits but I couldn’t find any.’

‘Haven’t had a biscuit in a while.’

‘I’ll go shopping tomorrow.’

‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Sounds like a bargain to me.’

He bent down to try to pick the cigarette up from the ground but his fingers couldn’t quite get it. I reached for it, but his boot crunched it first, ploughed it into the ground.

‘I need some smokes too, Conor.’

‘No you don’t.’

‘Come off it, now. Don’t be doing that to me.’

‘What?’

‘I love the odd smoke,’ he said.

We were quiet for a while, then he rubbed his hands together: ‘You’re getting like Mrs McCarthy for crissake.’

I reached my hands down into my pockets, felt the breeze lisp its way into me: ‘Well, come on so, the tea’ll be fit to dance on.’

‘Just a minute,’ he said, catching the cat’s tail. ‘This little bastard’s hungrier than any I’ve seen before.’

* * *

The town was thin. Dogs and cats were bony. Burros exposed brown racks of ribs as they nudged in along ancient paths. On dusty streets clothes were hung from windows, taking siestas in the sun — the clothes were sparse and worn, bits at the elbows rubbed away, knees vanished or threadbare. Even the vultures that rode the thermals above were lean. They made spirals in the air, their wings beating sparsely against the heat, looking down on the gauntness beneath them, comic black kites with red-raw beaks. Boys aimed up at the vultures with slingshots, tried to keep them in the air, exhaust them. But they flew on, generation giving way to generation, leanness to leanness.

A priest, a mestizo with a face like a poppyseed roll, came once a week, late on Sundays, to celebrate mass. He moved his way through the town on a bicycle, from one church to the other, all sorts of confessions ringing in his ears. Hungover men in shirtsleeves pulled back as the bicycle moved along. Music spilling out from old jukeboxes in the bars died down in reverence. My father took a photo of the priest once, his black cassock raised high in the air as he negotiated an open sewer behind one of the bars, exposing some very dark legs and thin ankles, moving delicately over the river of urine, lips pursed, nose scrunched. Something about the clergy always moved him to expose the pathetic. He delighted in the shot of altar boys getting drunk on mass wine, hair upshooting on their heads, red dribbles down the front of their vestments. But he got in a fierce amount of trouble one morning, just after dawn, when he snapped my grandmother as she prepared to go to church. She was wearing only her undergarments, a corset that could have come from another century, lace zigzagging across it, breasts stuffed into it like a sausage roll, a patina of age upon it. She was stealing out on to the porch to get her Sunday dress, which was drying in the sun. ‘Pig!’ she shouted at him, ‘Go back to your pigpen!’ She was a tiny woman, four feet tall, with a voice that could raise generations of the dead. It boomed from deep inside her bosom-burdened body. ‘Go back and eat slop!’ She threw a bottle at him, narrowly missing his camera. Later, as she moved her way down the road to mass, he tried to apologise, pulling off his hat as he ran beside her, but she spat on the ground in front of him and tilted her own hat on her head. ‘Pig!’

Four weeks later she agreed to talk to him again — but only after he swore that he would go to mass for the rest of his life, every Sunday, without a shadow of a doubt. She lived a life sustained by faith and rosary beads. My mother stood in the corner of the kitchen and giggled when she heard the promise. She was nineteen years old at the time and still given to giggles. She called him ‘Obispo Michael’ — Bishop Michael — after that and gave him a scapular to remind him of his words. He wore it irreverently, walking around with his shirt off in the house, the scapular moving back and forth over turrets of dark chest hair. But he was forced to go to mass every Sunday, up along the street, past the poolhall, and over the small aqueduct that conveyed water from the river. He couldn’t slouch at the back of the church, he was dragged to the front pew with my grandmother, who was so delighted by the outcome that she gave him her favourite set of rosary beads, a black pair that he was embarrassed by when he fished in pockets to look for change. They were made of obsidian and caught the light in a peculiar way.

My grandmother lived with them in the adobe house on the outskirts of town. Her own husband had died ten years before, left dumped in an old oil barrel, his throat cut after a vicious fight. She took up his pastime of skinning rabbits — using the knife as if avenging the death. Every time a baby was born in town she presented the parents with a rabbit’s foot preserved in a jar. The charm was supposed to be especially good in staving off cholera. Only one boy hadn’t been given a rabbit’s foot — his father was suspected of the murder, though nothing could be proved — and my grandmother was looked upon with a mixture of awe and suspicion when the boy died of diarrhoea and muscle cramps in the middle of his second summer. After that, when a woman in town got pregnant, they hurried over to see her, bearing gifts and making oblique references to good-luck charms.

When no rabbits were available for butchering, my grandmother sat on the front porch and simply swiped a knife through the air, back and forth, endlessly, her body swaying with her. The buzzards moved above in their scavenging circles.

One morning, when she was out walking, she flung a stone at a passing cottontail, near a mesquite tree, caught it in the head, stunned it temporarily, hobbled over on a walking stick to finish it off, but tripped in a pothole and broke her leg. ‘I wish I’d gotten that creature,’ she told the doctor, ‘I’d have died happy then.’ What disturbed her the most was that the cottontail had been left to the black birds, the carcass swooped down upon quickly — there wasn’t even a skin to be found. The doctor laid her up in bed for months but others brought her rabbits to skin. Propped up by pillows, she laid old grain sacks around her to contain the blood and hides. The Virgin of Guadalupe stared from the bedside table. When my grandmother was finished she laid her head back on the pillow and muttered a melody of strange prayers to the small white statue. She insisted on wearing a big straw hat, even in bed.

My grandmother tried to get Mam to learn how to skin rabbits, learn the skill, preserve the tradition, but my mother wasn’t interested.

Geraniums grew up from old paint pots that were hung from the porch of the house. A cow skull, decorated merrily with colours, was hung near the front door in front of the rusty fly screen. On top of the roof was a weather-vane that never moved anymore, simply pointed east, even in the strongest of winds. My father climbed on the roof and tried to get it to move — Mam had asked him to fix it so she could watch the direction of her winds — but it wouldn’t budge. During the wedding a drunk had climbed up on the roof and played the guitar for them, but he fell and landed sideways on the vertical spindle, cutting himself and leaving a nasty scar on his ribcage. His wife said that the cut never healed, that he still felt the breeze roll through the wound and that my father — by virtue of being a gringo — should pay him some compensation. Seeing the man outside the town bar, my mother pointed to his ribcage: ‘Which way’s the wind blowing today, Benito?’ The man reared up his leg and let out a giant fart, to the delight of some men squatting on the ground. ‘I think it’s heading south,’ she simply said, as she turned and walked away. That night she left a plate of beans outside the man’s house — it was fair compensation, she said, and the only compensation he would get.

When she walked around the town the local boys still flung big glances at her. Maybe they thought that the man in the big brown hat was some sort of wicked apparition, that one morning they’d all wake up and he’d be gone as easily and as mysteriously as he had come.

But they saw her settling into her new life, bit by bit. Her hair grew out. She began growing vegetables near the porch — tying herself to the soil. It was rough and bitter work, kneeling down in patterned dresses, mangy dogs scrabbling around the fence, dirt so hard that it ripped out the underneath of her fingernails. She gave the job a tolerable accent with a little tequila, sipped from large bottles as she worked on her hands and knees. When dust was kicked up in her face she spat it out on the ground. Still, she was raven-haired and beautiful. Men still found profligacy rising up in their groins. They sat on porches opposite the house, waiting for her to stand up from her work so the sunlight could filter through the thin dress, give an outline of a round breast, a long leg, a back arched with her hands on the lower buttocks to loosen and stretch herself. Somebody took to dropping off chocolate on the doorstep late at night, wrapped in big cubes of ice to keep it from melting. Dishes of pollo en mole and flowers appeared with oblique handwritten notes. She ate the chocolate and the chicken dish and shoved the flowers in vases, didn’t search the admirer out, she wasn’t bothered, she was happy. Secretly she wondered if it was my father who was leaving the presents on the doorstep.

Another sign to the local men that she was no longer available came when she bought the chickens. They arrived one day in wooden crates, eight hens and a rooster. A chicken pen was put together from scrap wood. She named the chickens after people in town. The mayor was the fattest, with a huge fleshy chin wattle. It laid very few eggs. Many of the birds were named after men who went across the border to work on vast oil derricks and ranches in Texas, coming home with fistfuls of money. The part-time barber was a strange chicken, without a head comb, bald as could be. And the barber’s wife was a wild one who flew up in the air at the slightest of sounds.

There was also an odd rooster that never crowed in the morning. She called him José after a local character whose lips had been sewn together when he lost a bet in a bar. Even after the stitches were taken out José never said a word. He walked around silently with his ebony hair slicked back with cooking grease, his mouth in a sneer, the bottom lip peppered with scarholes. When he passed my parents’ house José stared at his namesake rooster with a great brown bitterness. One morning they found the bird strangled on the front doorstep with a note in Spanish that read: ‘Now we speak.’

My mother grew to adore the chickens in the same way that my grandmother adored rabbits. Two groups of them — one raised for eggs, the others for sale — and every now and then some were butchered and cooked. My grandmother did the butchering, deftly pressing her fingers on the point of a neck, cracking it. Mam watched the weather and tied the best times for egg-laying in with its vicissitudes. The colours of the wind had a lot to do with it. Her lazy black wind was a fitful time. The brown one, riverwise, carried nothing but problems, the river coming from somewhere foreign and unfathomable.

My grandmother laughed at her daughter’s curious superstition, wondered why she didn’t attribute the brown wind to Benito and his beans. ‘Are you my daughter at all?’ They sat out on the porch and talked to the chickens as they pecked at the ground, some strange sort of soap opera developing amongst them, particularly when breeding was going on. The new rooster was named ‘Obispo Michael’ after my father, who sometimes came out from his darkroom to watch the spectacle of breeding, tucking his hands into his waistcoat and rocking back and forth in pleasure. ‘That’s a fine method I have there, I must say,’ he said. My grandmother eyed him suspiciously and said something about Riley and the dry bullets of new revolutionaries — she was expecting a grandchild any day, but the only grandchild would be years coming, in another country, almost another universe.

While my mother tended to the animals the old man worked on his photographs. He borrowed a truck, used most of the remaining money on another week-long journey to buy supplies in San Antonio. At the back of the house he built a darkroom — he always claimed it was the finest of its kind in the northern hemisphere. In a place of great light — light that swept its way in a hard yellowness over the land — not a chink got through. He put double doors in. The second door bolted from the inside so that when he was developing the photos wouldn’t get ruined. He saturated himself in red light. Only my mother was allowed in. For a joke he hung above the door a chastity belt he had found in a rubbish dump. A sign in Spanish read: ‘No Entry Beyond This Point.’

Sometimes drunks came hammering at his door. They were fond of reaching up and tucking their empty bottles into the belt. The bottles clanged together like an odd doorbell, but he seldom answered. The coterie of drunks would hang around outside, mouths flapping away under thick black moustaches. They were often looking for money — any man who could afford to take photographs had to be rich. He didn’t have much to give, but he set up a row of hammocks for them outside the door of the darkroom. The men lounged there and shared precious cigarettes, speculated on the nature of his photos. They listened to the floating voices of my mother and grandmother as the chicken opera developed in the yard, Obispo Michael going hell for leather whenever he got the chance, a couple of delighted screams rising up when he went after the barber’s wife who, in real life, had a cleft palate and a tendency towards body odour.

One of the drunks, Rolando, used to stand by the front fence in his huarache sandals and roar them on, leaning over to clandestinely spit on the one named after the mayor. But when my father came out to watch the episodes, Rolando moved away, sneaked up behind him and either flicked my father’s ear or tweaked his nose, particularly if Obispo Michael was having a hectic day. After the first flicking, Rolando would stare into my father’s face, reach up and pull or flick again. But the tweaking stopped one afternoon when Rolando got drunker than ever before and touched a lit cigarette against a mole on my father’s forearm. My father recoiled, and with his elbow — he said it was accidental — caught Rolando in the mouth. The blow could have been harmless; only, Rolando had rotten gums. Teeth were spat out on the ground. Guilty, my father picked Rolando up from the ground while my grandmother went crazy on the front porch: ‘Animal!’ ‘Pig!’ ‘Leave Rolando alone!’ Rolando settled down in the dust, fingering his mouth. My father shooed my grandmother away, went walking to clear his head, bought a bottle of tequila for Rolando. They searched together on the ground for the teeth, one of which was never found. While they were searching, Rolando burnt my father’s mole with another three cigarettes and let gulps of laughter roll down into the neck of the bottle.

Still, slow times lay in that dry soil for the old man — dust billowed in the air when the rare car or pick-up truck went past on the potholed road on its way down to the petrol station, where gas was pumped by hand from an ancient American pump. When he was finished work he sometimes sat with Mam on the front steps, slurping bottles with the men, swatting mosquitoes, and staring at the vehicles, wondered where they were off to, dust settling back down around them. They put their arms around one another, and he told her of other places. They watched the sun sink its way southward on the horizon, month giving way to month, season giving way to season. It was strange for my father to stay so long in one place, and he wondered where the two of them should go next. Once or twice planes were seen in the sky over the Chihuahuan desert and the whole town stood, mesmerised. But still the dust settled on the ordinary. Night rose up on the banal. The days often merged into lethargy as they sat with one another, holding hands. Even the sight of a burro or a cart gave him the want for movement. It thumped within him, haunted him, as it always haunted him — and maybe still does.

* * *

Down beyond the barn a bored raven landed on the telegraph wire, and the old man watched it for the longest time as he stroked the cat. I thought about that wire and how a billion unknown voices might be running under the raven’s feet, moving through the long black body, through the shaggy throat feathers, scuttling along through hollow bones and stringy ligaments, all the way to the wedge-shaped tail sheening with black and purple, voices all the way to the core, to the heart. Those townspeople in Mexico could be voiced here in seconds, talking of its new cafés with their giant wine racks, Miguel’s chandeliers, its tarmacadamed streets, the screeching grackles, the lottery-ticket sellers, the abandoned cinema, the low adobe bars, the malicious heat. I can still feel it. All that heat. As I walked along those roads. In that colonial hotel room with the dancing ceiling fan other voices talked to me. When I went looking for their house there wasn’t a weather vane in sight. And Mam wasn’t there, not her, not her ghost, nor her image, hardly even her memory. And he was summoned up from only a couple of throats. The streets at dawn had a retinue of red, a typhoid rash over the morning. I walked along, under a grove of trees, under the sun, under a universe of curiosity and doubt, a telephone wire within myself, gurgling.

* * *

A boy in the town, Miguel, Rolando’s son, was fond of drawing maps, and the old man bought them from him, hung them on the walls of the house. They were copied from a school atlas, but his versions were full of fabulous and unusual colours. Miguel drew magenta oceans, white mountains, green rivers, purple roads, a red tongue of river, and sometimes he rubbed a little soil on the maps to give the countryside a brown tint. If you put your nose to the maps, you could smell the soil. The cities were shown with little pieces of metal that could rip the tips of your fingers if you ran your hands along them. My father moved the maps from wall to wall, switching them from the kitchen to the living room and back again so that he felt as if he were going somewhere. The year was 1949, and he was over the cusp of his thirties — if he couldn’t go in reality he would go in his imagination. At times he took my mother’s hand and led her all the way around the world within that small house, teaching her English as they went, so that she quickly acquired an Irish accent, the sound of it merging with her own native euphony. She would write new words down in a spiral-edged book, wondering when she might get a chance to use them. In truth she was a little frightened by it all, this possibility of going. Still in her twenties — the difference of nine years sometimes a ravine between them — she had never set foot outside her town. Even if she wanted to, there would be no moving anywhere for a while — my grandmother made sure of that.

‘You can leave when the sun comes up in the west,’ she said, heaving around under her chest. ‘And maybe even a few days after that.’

Miguel’s maps were a sign that my father’s feet were itching again. He even invited the young genius over to draw a few maps on the wall of his darkroom, but Rolando refused to let his son go. A chicken had been named after Rolando — he had been delighted at first, came over to the house every day, leaned over the fence, a grey crooked eyebrow dipping down, talked about how much uglier the mayor was. But then the rooster had seemed to take an overwhelming fondness for mounting and treading Rolando’s namesake, and Rolando was the butt of feral jokes, especially among the other drunks. ‘You’re walking funny today, Rolando.’ ‘Watch those feathers fly!’ ‘Have you room for another egg?’ He never came over to the house anymore, even after the hen was renamed. Young Miguel sneaked over to the darkroom after school, sat in and talked with my father, but he never managed to get the maps finished. He was trying to figure out a way to get a particular mound of soil to suspend itself in the air — it kept dropping down near the vats of chemicals, even when he made a shelf for the soil from tiny pieces of wood. One day when he came over he found a note tucked into the chastity belt above the door, ‘Sorry, Miguel, closed for a while.’

The old man took a job in a small copper mine far south of the town. Wanting to take photos of the mines, he left town with a truckload of men on Sunday mornings, wearing his dirty vest and his hat. With the help of a few men he smuggled cameras into the mines. At the end of the week he came home coughing up red spit, his vest showered with dirt. Copper coloured his skin. He and Mam locked themselves in the darkroom, working together, and sometimes they fell asleep, waking up the following day with a plate of my grandmother’s stew grown cold outside the door. The work consumed them both. Agonised faces came to life in the chemical baths, the whites of eyes appearing like coronas, dirt smeared on chins. Backbent by the work they had done and backbent into the future, the men leaned on picks as they sucked copper dust into their lungs. They stared with an anger of dispossession, their cheeks gaunt, a fury of poverty in discoloured lips. But he also captured them in the bars and the whorehouses, sometimes even at home with their children, happily kicking a soccer ball outside a shack. The miners took to him, hailed him when he came down the shafts, all of them helping carry the hidden equipment. But he came home bloodied one afternoon. He had lost a fight with a foreman after taking a photo of a dead boy being carried from the mines. The boy was no more than ten years old, the same age as Miguel. My father was hit with the long barrel of a gun. It left a small scar in the shape of a gondala on the right side of his temple. He tried a few times to go back, but the trigger of the same gun was cocked.

He went back to the house and the chickens, walked around the yard, muttering, scattering spit like seed. ‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers.’ Mam came out and ran her fingers over the scar, maybe kissed him there. They retreated to the darkroom to work on his photos. More plates of stew piled up outside the door.

After a time they sold two cameras and three dozen chickens in order to buy a clapped-out car so they could bring the eggs to neighbouring towns. My old man drummed his fist on the dashboard as the engine rattled, the panels held together with wire, the roof covered in birdshit from grackles. The car — a 1928 Model A — would fling him outwards once again. They began to save money, and the circle of their wandering moved gradually outwards. At first it was no further than a few miles, then it grew and grew, ripples reaching out, towards Jiménez, Delicias, Chihuahua and even south to Torreón. Once or twice they went all the way to Mexico City, a three-day drive, where they bought supplies of film, paper, trays, chemical fixer. I can imagine those shop clerks, with thin moustaches sliming on their lips, hair cut short, in very well ironed shirts, garters on their sleeves, giving the once-over to my father as he leaned over the counter, in clothes sometimes still faint with the smell of chickenshit.

On those nights in the city they went celebrating together — my mother told me that they were crazed and lovely evenings in the cafés and the bars, with the accordions and the guitars and the wine and the white tablecloths and the waiters and all the things that a fistful of money could bring. Those few evenings in Mexico City were pure colour to her memory — the way it rose out of its crater, the thick traffic, the rows of red-clay flowerpots, the grey sprawl, the streaked darkness of poverty, the men in blue coming out from the factories, the brown naked children outside shacks, the soldiers and police with giant loping strides underneath their hats, the lines of whores in flimsy clothes on narrow streets with eyes turned to dusklight, the hustling boys, the double-breasted suits, the smell of rotting fruit, the belch of steel — the jazz of it all — the vivid oppressive redness of a southern sky, the houses of the rich with pale blue swimming pools, the grasshoppers fried by an old woman in a market. My father took photos of Mam under bright streetlamps and flitting clouds, her eyes looking cocksure into the lens, hair thrown back like a horse’s tail. In one of the shots, down by the Palace of Fine Arts, I noticed that she carried flowers, white dog roses clutched between her fingers. On the long drive home she stayed awake in the passenger seat, passing bottles of Coke to the old man, a mesquite wind blowing through the open windows.

My grandmother had swapped some rabbits for a few bottles of wine, and she gave them to my parents in the hope that the drink would somehow spur on a grandchild. Ancient as the notion of love, my grandmother went to bed early, whispering fertility prayers. My parents drank. Mam had her own special mug — a clay one which she had cast herself years before, but the old man broke it one night in an argument, smashing it against the bathroom door when she said that he’d had too much to drink. For a while he slept outside and my grandmother was hysterical at his disappearance. It was viciously cold at night, with no clouds in the sky to hold the heat, and sometimes my father might have thought about walking forever, skimming over the arroyos and the cacti and the flowers that held water with a startling parsimony. There were plants that would bloom only once every hundred years. He went searching, but never found one of them in bloom. One evening he went wandering too far and got lost, found himself a small cave and lit a fire in it. The heat expanded the rock. A piece of it unlodged from the roof of the cave and fell down, hitting him on the shoulder. He improvised a sling with his shirt, wandered, lost. A local policeman found him — a search party had been sent out because of some bad news in town.

My grandmother had passed away. She had been sitting on the porch, waiting for his return, when her hat lifted off in a strong breeze, and she had fallen to the ground. The end of her cane had lodged itself in a gap in the porch steps, and she tripped face forward on to a sharp rock, slicing her forehead wide open, a gash the length of her eyes. It was said that a strange wind blew across her dead body, a circular whirl that carted the rabbit-foot hat around and around and around her corpse, as if in prayer, a rosary of upkicked dust.

My father found Mam at the edge of town, hysterical, with fists flailing at the sky — she thought that she had lost him too. At home, she tended to his arm and then sank into a deep long-skirted mourning for her mother. Nestling herself under the limbs of the house, she listened for church bells, watched the paint peel on green wooden chairs, remembered things. Rabbits and the way they were skinned. Curious poultices for cut knees when she was a child. The way a pudding was stirred. Blue azaleas embroidered around a pillow. In her family there was a tradition of a year’s grief after a loss, and Mam carried it to full term. My father was different — he had loved the old woman and her eccentricities, but she had been an anchor to the land, to stasis, to the unmoving moments. They were alone now, with no duty to my mother’s family left, so he suggested trips all over the world, strange exotic places the names of which she had only heard whispered in the movie theatre. My mother wouldn’t listen, pulling sable-dark clothes higher on her shoulders, refusing to move around Miguel’s maps until the mourning was finished.

It wasn’t until eighteen months later that she shed them in favour of some muted skirts, which led to colour once more, and then she began to listen to the whispers.

In early 1956 a special letter was delivered — half the town was gathered down by the post office while my father opened it. His shoulder still hadn’t recovered fully and he opened the envelope with one hand, using the nail of his little finger to reach in under the flap. It was from a magazine in San Francisco, courting him with the offer of a huge sum of money, or at least what seemed like a huge sum of money then. A weekly salary. Bylines. An explosion of his own name. It had come as a result of photos he had sent of the copper mines — he assured the townspeople that they too would be famous, their faces and thick arms would appear on news-stands in California. A party was held in his honour that night. Backs were slapped. Jugs were passed. Music coughed out around the town, and my father played the spoons — coins were dropped in his big brown hat for the going. Rolando stood up and sang ‘Las Golondrinas,’ a song of leaving, offering lodging to a lost swallow. My mother stood at the edge of that crowd with other women, watching, listening to the song. She might have wondered about the paucity of grief that my father showed for the departure, reeling his way around, singing. A wind without any definite colour must have gathered her in as she shoved her hands down deep into dress pockets.

Rolando brimmed with a toothless grin — he saw the gaps as some sort of autograph now and he chugged his way beside my father. A picture was taken of Rolando, his finger pointing at his mouth in pride, the other hand clenched in a fist, a hat askew on his head, his face a field of stubble.

But the greatest pictures were not the ones of the copper mines, or of the people in the town. They were the ones of Mam’s body. My father had taken them in their bedroom. She was nude, not flagrantly so, but her stomach was smooth and dark, it held no creases, her legs curved softly, white sheets exposed small tufts of hair. Some of the shots were hazy beneath mosquito nets, so they took on a Victorian attitude of lounge and lust, as if being peeped at through a curtain, black and white photos that never even suggested colour, a cheek propped up on a hand, the body a streambed running down from it, cavorting through bedsheets and a canyon of desire, once or twice a suggestion of quiet lechery, a tongue held out against a lip, fingers in a V around a dark nipple, a sideways shot of her by the washbasin with her hand bellied on brown, fingers spread out; a hazy portrait of her wearing panties and stepping into a long white dress, hitching up her chest into it, the eyebrows raised in an attitude of impishness. When I first saw them — years ago now — they made me sick to the stomach. I hardly even realised it was her at first, and unlike the ones of the women in Spain, I never again looked at them in the attic, never found myself part of them. I knew what they had done to her and I couldn’t understand why she had let them be taken.

She almost seemed to leaf her way into the lens, a brooding silence of body, an acceptance of danger, an ability to become anything that he wanted her to become — and never once the feeling that she didn’t want to do it. The photos revealed a peculiar fascination with a beauty mark on her lower right hip. Even now I shudder to imagine her with her head thrown back in laughter, in some dark room sealed to mosquitoes and Peeping Toms, light reflected off a cheap umbrella, licking her lips at the camera, her dress in a formless puddle at her feet, while outside white hydrangeas closed their petals in a row underneath a woodwormed window.

Just before they left town, José with the Sewn Lip broke into my father’s darkroom and found some of the prints, somewhat underexposed. He ran around screaming — he finally got his voice back, the people said — flinging the photos of my mother around the town courtyard like so many pieces of confetti. A picture of her was found — impaled on a hitching post — down by the courthouse steps, and the joke was that there was a new candidate around for mayor. But the poppyseed priest wasn’t happy, and the women in town weren’t happy, and although the drunks and the men in the poolhall were delighted, they all pretended that they weren’t happy either, so my parents left next morning, very early, before the café was open, before truculent rumours jumped out from the white-shuttered windows and the thick walls. They didn’t have a lot to leave behind — a few wooden chairs, a couple of hair clips, the red geraniums, vats of photographic chemicals, a few chickens pecking at the ground as they cranked the front of their car, poultry feathers flying up from the back seat, dirt filtering off the wired-up runningboard as they drove, birdshit still patterned on the roof.

* * *

He dribbled egg down the front of his chin this evening at dinner. I made sure they weren’t ‘sunnyside up’, cooked them on both sides so he’d eat them. The yoke was still soft inside, and it streamed down amongst the stubble. Wiped it off with the edge of his sleeve. He says the tops of his fingers are a little bit numb. Every now and then he pinched his thumb against his forefinger to bring them back to life. The fork slid through them anyway, and it took him an age to push back his chair and pick it up from the floor. A clump of dust and hair stuck to it. ‘Not too hungry,’ he said to me, putting the fork back on the plate beside the eggs. He looked down at the slick of yellow drying on his sleeve. ‘I’ll suck it out later.’ Then he cracked the edge of his lips in a smile. At least his mind is still there, churning away in the skinhouse. He sat back in the chair and lit a cigarette, smoke rising up to the ceiling. But his fingers were jittery around his mouth, all sorts of liver spots moving in a blur. He sat in silence and gave me one of his old winks. Left his cigarette in the ashtray to burn all the way down to the filter again.

The kitchen seemed to have been sunk in formaldehyde, laid down in some vast tub of years. The black and white linoleum was as cold as ever, the copper pots hung on the same nails, and even the wall was still streaked above the stove from the time Mam set the pan on fire. A jamjar — one from the sixties with a picture of a golliwog on the front and mould flowering on the inside — sat in the cupboard above the sink. ‘How about we open a museum?’ He nodded and smiled, although I’m not even sure he heard what I said. I walked around the kitchen. The black skillet all sloppy with grease. The jar of flour. Mam’s woollen cosy with embroidered trees all out of proportion, the upper limbs fatter than the trunk, a sewn picture maybe reminiscent of her world, always about to topple. The teacups with all sorts of stains near the rims. One or two tins of cat food. A slab of bread and a box of tea in the pantry. A couple of slices of Michelstown in the fridge. I moved them around on the shelves to make the pantry look fuller, but it didn’t matter. It’s no wonder he is so thin. I suppose he just eats bits and pieces, although he told me that Mrs McCarthy brings him dinner some days.

I set about cleaning the place when he went down to hunt out his big salmon. ‘Going to catch that bastard, tonight,’ he said. Off he went with the rods on his shoulder after he fluffed out his flies in a stream of steam from the kettle, rejuvenating the hair and feather dressings.

Some spiders were living in the mop when I got it from the cupboard. Took it outside and ran it under the spigot. They scuttled away. Strange to feel the drizzle settle on my hair. The wind blew it in from the bog as I rinsed out the bucket. That’s a smell that has always lived inside me — the pungent black earth all slashed through with turf-cutters, although I could smell the factory belching out its slaughter, too. It left a scent of offal in the air, fanning out over the land.

It was when the factory came that the old man and I stopped our swimming in the river, our dawn race against the current. One morning we were out there shivering on the bank — I was eleven years old — when bits of offal from slaughtered cows starting floating down past us, blotches of blood in the water, stringy ligaments and guts spinning away on the surface. They came in spurts, a punctured vein on the river. The old man stared at it and ran his fingers along his body, walked away from the river, disgusted. Mam collected some pieces in a bucket and went up to the factory and dumped them on the factory floor. We never went swimming anymore after that. Mam got up in the early mornings and walked down to the water’s edge by herself, sat and watched the pieces flow by. She was silver-haired by then and I suppose much of the bitterness had settled in.

But they’ve cleaned up their act these days, and I don’t see any scum on the river, although the gates have slowed the water down to its pathetic trickle.

I saw a few men in their blue uniforms moving down past the end of the laneway on their bicyles, back from the meat factory. I went and got one of the old man’s cameras with a zoom lens to get a closer look, couldn’t make out any of the faces. They were trudging along. A few kids were out playing, too. Every now and then their heads bobbed up above the hedge. Four boys came down along our laneway and stopped to pick up conkers from under the chestnut tree. They were all fighting with each other, fooling around, throwing big punches that missed. From the distance one of them looked like Miguel’s son — hair in a black ramble on his head. I moved away from the window into the kitchen, put some washing-up liquid in the bucket, swirled it around with the handle of a wooden spoon, started cleaning the floor while the evening rolled on. Otherwise this place’ll be swimming in filth and he’ll just wade through it for the rest of his days. Swirl the mop in a circular motion. Let it glide through your hands.

* * *

That was a hot summer morning, four years ago, walking with Miguel through the town, looking for their old house. I was nineteen years old, just arrived from London, stupid with hope.

Miguel’s son — another Rolando, named after his late grandfather — held on to Miguel’s hand like it was glued there. Little Rolando wore a sailor’s suit and scoured his finger up his nose. He was scared of all the strange words coming from us. I had only a smattering of Spanish, picked up from a phrase book I’d bought in London, and Miguel’s English was useless. We walked slowly down the street, in the gathering heat; through the market, where the ribs of pigs dangled in the air on hooks and men in overalls with splatters of blood cried out as if they themselves had just been butchered; past women with sun-dried faces as they sold bananas and apples and reams of boxed vegetables, impervious to the flies that were buzzing around them; out to the street where a lorry coughed fumes; beyond a giant white adobe house with roses growing in the courtyard, a hipheavy woman out watering red and white geraniums; past a café advertising tamales; alongside some slum houses, a dog slinking through dustbins; the sun flailing down as we skirted the edges of a dry-soiled park where two old men played chess. Children were out on bicyles — they were raggedy but there were no open sewers for them to negotiate. The town had changed from the one Mam and my father told me about. Underneath the Mexican flag in the plaza the Star-Spangled Banner fluttered. A boulevard in town had been renamed to welcome American business.

Miguel had a puffy face that pillowed itself into silence. He must have known all along — it was as if he was trying to stall me — but the house had been replaced by a clinic that was run by a young man from Italy, a rainbow of freckles across his cheeks, his hair shiny and black around his ears. He had knocked the house down, darkroom and all, and built the clinic, a low white affair, where he gave his services free of charge. I looked through the gate and foot-scuffled at stones. Miguel ran a hand across the top of his brow, where beads of sweat had settled.

A row of scraggly kids waited with their mothers outside the house, where the chickens used to peck. The Italian was wrapping a white bandage around a teenage girl’s leg and he was humming some tune, maybe something about his own mountains far away. He saw me, with the backpack huge on my shoulders, and beckoned me over with a tug of his head. ‘Come,’ said Miguel, taking my arm, ‘meet Antonio.’ But I didn’t want to meet Antonio. I didn’t want to meet anyone. Little Rolando was screaming at the top of his voice. Miguel slapped him on the bare legs and he stopped. We went back along the road, great silence between us.

‘Did she ever come back?’ I asked later, in his house.

‘She no return,’ said Miguel emphatically.

‘Are you sure?’

‘You ask many questions,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay. You will have una cabita? She come again no.’

His wife, Paloma, prepared glasses of rum and Coca-Cola for us. Maps hung on the walls. They dotted the hallway, light coming on them from a fancy glass chandelier. Miguel had grown artistically. Now he made faces from contour maps — geological and ordinance surveys with eyes from history staring out of them. All sorts of Mexican revolutionaries were drawn within the valleys and the troughs, the towns sometimes used for eyes, hills for hair, the rivers for arms. He located Riley for me, a tiny figure drawn from the contours of a hanging valley. His head was leaning against the knee of Santa Anna who was slumped beneath the shoulders of Emiliano Zapata. The strange thing was that Miguel didn’t have to distort the lines — he had stayed true to the contours and the faces were fluid within them. He made a good living from it, sold them to galleries all over the country. Someone had commissioned a portrait of Salinas. Miguel was working on it. He said his art had nothing to do with his politics, but the face of Salinas looked chubby and wobbly, and it seemed as if there was an American eagle on his shoulder with television sets for eyes.

The drink was served in cut glasses with gold around the rims. I sat and sipped. The day’s heat pushed us down. Paloma held her glass with her little finger extended daintily. An emerald ring bobbed on it. Her fingers caressed the air as she spoke. She sounded as if she’d been sucking on helium.

‘You stay?’

They offered me a bed on their porch, mosquito screen all around so that it made something of an outdoor room, an old army cot with the cleanest of sheets standing in the corner, a Bible on a bedside table, candles in silver holders beside it.

But I moved on — wanted to be on my own — and booked myself into a hotel down near the courthouse, in the old part of town.

The hotel stonework was arthritic. Bits of it crumpled down into the street. The hallway carpet had cigarette marks on it. Soap operas rang out from neighbouring rooms. In the back of the hotel there was a pool of water in a blue tarp that hung above the patio. The mosquitoes gathered in the tarp as if in communion. At dusk they would enter my room, even through the smoke of a mosquito coil. I swatted them with a towel, leaving marks on the wall, along with thousands of others from previous tenants. Even the ceiling was splattered, a collage of red spots. A cleaning lady came in early one morning, when I was sleeping late. Hipheavy in her uniform. She looked up at the wall, counting the fresh stains. ‘Te la pasaste matando moscos anoche, verdad?’ she said to me. You spent the whole night killing mosquitoes, true? A fat brown finger wagged in the air and she laughed. She came over to my bed and ruffled my hair, ran her fingers along my cheek, and for a moment I thought she was going to climb in beside me. Instead she dipped her cloth in a bucket and wiped a few of the marks on the wall away, said she’d be back later to make the bed. I went down the corridor to the broken urinal down the hall, where the water was constantly flushing, wet my bandana in the sink and came back to the room to wipe the spots off, but fell asleep in the heat instead.

Graffiti rolled in red on the courthouse walls. Policemen, chameleons in the shadows, flicked in and out between the scrawls. Old men sat outside the cantinas, gesturing. A labyrinth of laneways ran outwards towards a brand-new shopping centre. I pulled back the curtains and stuck my head out, felt a slight breeze. A young man sat on the hotel steps, a ghetto-blaster perched on his knees, heavy-metal music pumping out. Within the music, grackles in the trees exclaimed in high pitches, let their droppings down on to the streets. I kept a large knife handy in the side of my backpack, just in case. I had heard things about Mexico — foreigners robbed, dumped in prison, bellies stuffed with a steel blade, people fucked over into a roadside ditch, left to the turkey vultures who made those great hungry spirals above the world. I fingered the steel blade, put it in my waistband, decided against it, walked out into my parents’ old town.

Nobody disturbed me. Maybe it was my dark skin and hair, inherited from Mam, but I don’t think so. The town was quiet among strangers and sunsets, and settlings of dust.

A boy with a violin busked in a plaza full of red flowerpots and a bordello-sweep of litter. The song was raucous and stripped bare, a sound that could have belonged to a forest animal. An elderly woman and her husband — he was wasting away handsomely in a collarless shirt — came and stood beside me on the curb as I listened. The man took his wife’s arm in the crook of his and danced. She kept her hands tentative at the sleeve of his shirt, but they laughed as they went down off the curb and in between two parked pick-up trucks. His feet were slow, his body creaking. Holes opened and closed in the toes of his shoes, two brown sieves showing calloused toes. He put his head near his wife’s shoulder, smiled, moved his dentures up and down in his mouth. She reached up and touched her lips against the stubble on his cheek, kissed his ear, danced on. I tried to imagine my parents once doing the same dance, couldn’t.

The boy with the violin extended the song for us, played it with a huge lustful energy, nodded slightly when I dropped a bill in his musical case. The elderly man saluted me with a bow as I went away, swooping his hat across his knees, and his wife smiled.

The town was bigger than I had imagined. I wandered for days, through bars and cafés, bills coming crisply from my pockets, ordered up shots of tequila, tried to picture myself here forty years before, in a stetson and boots. But the simple truth of it was that I was leaning drunkenly against a bar counter, wearing a gold earring, red Doc Martens and a baseball hat turned backwards, in a town where I could hardly even understand what people were saying. It was only with enough tequila in my system that I could make sense of the stories my parents had told me, their endless incantation of memories. I sat in a bar chair, looked at a photo album I had brought with me, let my mind wander. Somewhere ‘Las Golondrinas’ had been sung. Outside was the hitching post where her image had been impaled — but there were no posts along by the courthouse any more. Earlier I had seen a row of grasshoppers impaled by shrikes on a length of barbed wire. The butcher-birds had been neat in their execution, the grasshoppers equidistant on the barbs, a strange wind blowing over them, one of Mam’s coloured gales. I stood and saluted the desert. Further out were the places where the coyotes had perhaps sung.

I ambled with my head down, a foreign language swirling in calypsos all around me. Would she suddenly appear? Would she come down the street? Would someone recognise her in me? A smell of food hung on the air. I breathed it down, took it to my lungs. Salsa. A thick salsa smell. She had made that when she exiled herself in our Mayo kitchen, hunched over the stove.

Breezing into the poolhall, I heard the clinking of ivory balls fade as if the last few notes of a seedy hymn were sounding out. An ancient man with very strange lips stood in the corner of the hall, drinking a Coca-Cola. I wondered if it was José with the Sewn Lips. I tried to say something in Spanish, but he just guffawed loudly, propped his underarm on his pool cue, using it as a crutch, whistled to his friends, pointed at me. Blue smoke was making spiral galaxies over the pool tables. Someone spat. I turned and walked out, while a man in a red baseball hat came towards me, proffering an empty pool tray, as if I might leave my eyeballs there for them to shoot around. On the street a boy was selling bits of useless copper and strange-shaped rocks. He weighed them on a brass balance. I bought some obsidian, left it in the ashtray in my hotel room, lay on my bed, drew the curtains, put my hands behind my head, watched the fan as it whirled, fell asleep.

I woke up, hungover, mosquitoes delighted around me.

My shoes developed a tiny tear in the rim near my little toe. In my hotel room I glued them together. I took a long sniff at the tube of glue, brought it down deep into my chest, tried to get high — felt stupid and juvenile — threw the tube away, took a very cold shower, squatted down, let the water wail on my back, thought of fire trucks along the roads of another town a long way away.

In the town library, records were stacked in boxes. I couldn’t understand them — the young woman behind the counter didn’t have time to help. She was handsome in an academic way, cropped hair, her blouse too big, small gold-rimmed spectacles. I wanted to ask her out, but swallowed my words. I saw her a few days later in the foyer of the hotel. She was sitting in an armchair, sipping on a drink, a large stick of celery mashing against her upper lip. She gave me a curt wave, turned away. I passed through the foyer, my daypack swinging off my shoulder. The warmth outside came in a blast. It was another man’s ordinary question that assaulted me: What am I doing here?

I walked on, chatting to myself.

Back in the park the two men were still playing chess. They remembered my parents. ‘He was crazy,’ they said to me in Spanish, ‘big and crazy, always with cameras. She was crazy, too, not as crazy as him.’ They said the house had lain empty for years after Mam and my father left. Nobody lived there until the Italian moved in with his clinic. The men stuffed the chess pieces in their pockets, walked with me to a graveyard. They pointed towards a wooden cross at the southern edge of the cemetery. I thanked them, and one of the men took my cheek between his thumb and forefinger and twisted until it almost hurt. ‘You are young,’ he said, ‘very young.’ He winked at me and opened a pouch that hung around his neck, took out a tooth. He said something about carrying the mouths of the dead around on his chest. I asked him to explain, but he just shook his head. I watched the men as they disappeared down the road, bent into their days, their games, their repetitions.

My grandmother’s cross was white and simple. It stood to the side of a thousand others. The black lettering of her name had faded. I got on my knees and introduced myself to her.

‘Hi, I’m Conor. The sun came up in the west.’

There were bedbugs in the hotel, and a string of bites, like red pearls, ran down my legs. For days and days I trudged around, the glue holding strong on my shoes. I hung out for an afternoon at an abandoned cinema, sat against the wall under a faded Kung Fu poster, under a black arch. I imagined films coming in tin cans, off the back of a filthy truck, boys in shorts waiting around, glorious under a hot sun, slicing the thick air with kicks and sideways arm-chops. A woman came and gave me a bottle of water. She had long skeletal hands: ‘Has de tener sed; toma.’ Here, you look thirsty. Her eyes were incandescent — did she know something? I tried to talk to her but she simply shrugged, a little perplexed, a little amused at my attempts at the language.

A bell sounded on the hour. A man in an ice-cream van was singing. It was time to go. That’s what he was singing: It is time to go. I heard it clearly: It is time for you to go, there’s nothing here.

In the room I tried to sleep after lighting a mosquito coil. The smoke drifted up to the fan, the ash in a gyre to the centre of the coil. Music vaulted up from the street. It was the ice-cream man singing again: It is way past the time for you to go.

I took one last look, waited for a face to appear around a corner, grey hair, arched eyebrows, flecked eyes. All I found was the boy with the violin, but he sounded strangely strangled that day and hardly sang at all. Only a few pesos in his violin case. He shrugged his shoulders when I dropped some more money in and hurried away. Miguel came with me to the bus station on a Friday morning when thermometers in gardens were edging their way dangerously upwards.

‘Good luck,’ he said.

He shook my hand lightly. Great damp ovals rolled from the underarm of his shirt. When the bus left, the driver whistled a tune, the same tune, all the way to Monterrey, as if a gramophone needle was stuck in his lavish Adam’s apple. We changed drivers and plunged south towards Mexico City. After a while I sat in the middle of the bus, where the impact from the ruts in the road was gentler. The windows were fully open, a yawn that let the created wind through. We rattled along in darkness, through the desert, and small towns on the edge of spectacular canyons, and into vast city suburbs. I caught a glimpse of a circus setting up its tents, a girl riding around on a unicycle, feathers leaping from her hair, her breasts spilling out from a tank top. I wanted to reach for her, touch her, see if she was real, but the bus hammered on.

At the station in Mexico City I walked with my head down — the floor was spidered with moving sandals. I had noticed them before, young foreigners in plastic Teva sandals, their Lonely Planets hugged to their chests, enviously eyeing the size of backpacks that others were carrying. I walked out into the city, a leapfrog of skyscrapers, smog, granite-grey sky, white pigeons pecking under archways. I wandered in a daze, still waiting for Mam to pop her head around some corner, hail me with a wave. My flight to San Francisco wouldn’t leave until the next day, but I knew it was a brutishly stupid notion anyway, this searching for her. On a crowded street I saw a newspaper being trampled underfoot, and I suddenly remembered it was my birthday, my twentieth. I bought a bottle of tequila and sat in the corner of the airport, sipping furtively. Sounds rang out. Buzzers, intercoms, machines. It struck me then that I knew the sound of airport metal detectors better than the shrill call of coyotes I had heard so much about from my parents.

Years later, in America, I was told that Navajo Indians believed coyotes ushered in the Big Bang of the world with their song, stood on the rim of nothingness, before time, shoved their pointed muzzles in the air, and howled the world into existence at their feet. The Indians called them songdogs. The universe was etched with their howls, sound merging into sound, the beginning of all other songs. Long ago, when they told me their stories about Mexico, Mam and Dad, I believed they were true. And I suppose I still do. They were my songdogs — my mother by the washing line, my father flailing his way against the current. They tried very hard to tell me how much they had been in love with one another, how good life had been, that coyotes really did exist and sing in the universe of themselves on their wedding day. And maybe they did. Maybe there was a tremendous howl that reached its way all across the desert. But the past is a place that is full of energy and imagination. In remembering, we can distil the memory down. We can manage our universe by stuffing it into the original quark, the point of burstingness.

It’s the lethargy of the present that terrifies us all. The slowness, the mundanity, the sheer plod of each day. Like my endless hours spent strolling through Mexico. And my father’s constant casting these days. His own little songdog noise of a fishing line whisking its way through the air.

* * *

When the old man came back to the house he surprised me. ‘Sorry,’ I said, leaning the mop up against the door, ‘I was miles away.’ He nodded, rubbed his fingers along his scalp. He was amazed at the floor. It didn’t shine, but if he drops the fork again, it won’t get quite so dirty. ‘Not a peep from the big one today,’ he said, as he hung up his coat on the peg inside the door, a blade of grass stuck to the side of the sleeve. He opened his lunchbox with a dramatic gesture of the hand, a sweep to the ceiling. I was gobsmacked to see a small trout in the box, maybe a one-pounder. Some fish in the river, after all. I told him that it mightn’t be too healthy, all that fertiliser and shit dumped by the farmers and the meat factory, but he raised his eyes to the ceiling.

‘Get a grip,’ he said to me, ‘you and all the other greenies. The river’s clean as a fucken whistle.’

He gutted the fish with the long kitchen knife, hooked his finger in to pull out the guts, ran it under the tapwater, made himself a nice fillet. I told him I wasn’t eating any but he said he didn’t give a damn, he’d cook it anyway. He prepared it in the skillet and took his place at the table, ate quickly, lit himself a cigarette.

‘So what did ya do all day?’

‘I told you, I cleaned the floor.’

‘Oh.’ He rose up to flip on the radio, decided against it, leaned against the sink, put out the smoke on the wall of his teacup: ‘I mean, after that, what did you do after that?’

‘It took all day.’

‘It’s nice and skiddy anyway,’ he said, taking one stockinged foot out of his slippers and gliding it along the tiles. ‘I hope I don’t fall and break me neck.’

From the kitchen window I watched the wind roll through the long grasses at the edge of the laneway, the blades bent, supplicants to the river.

The marmalade cat seems awful fond of him — she was rubbing her spine against the back of his calves after he fed her the fish head. She’s a stray, he said, wandered in a month ago after another one died, came up to him and started purring. He doesn’t seem to have a name for her, just calls her Cat. Picked her up from the floor and started stroking her with a long, hard, heavy roll of his hand, as if that might stop the trembling of his own fingers. She was looking for more food, meowing away. ‘Aren’t ya full yet, Cat?’ All of a sudden he looked up from her, eyes reduced to dark wrinkled slivers, and said: ‘They come and go these days like you wouldn’t believe.’

I followed him as he lumbered up the stairs, the floorboards creaking away. ‘Goodnight so. Ya did a grand job on the floor.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Tomorrow’ll be a fine one.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Red sky at night.’

‘It wasn’t too red.’

‘Ah, it was a bit red anyway,’ he said, scrubbing his glasses on his shirt.

‘I’ll get some more cleaning done tomorrow.’

‘Don’t be doing that, for crissake.’

‘What?’

‘You’re like an oul’ woman, cleaning. A bit of dust never did anyone any harm.’

‘I suppose.’

‘It’ll be a perfect day for fishing,’ he said.

‘Perfect.’

‘Conor?’ he said, on the landing. ‘When are ya off up to Dublin?’

‘Next week. Getting rid of me already?’

‘Just asking,’ he said angrily. ‘Listen up a second.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I want to know something.’

‘Fire away.’

‘Why didn’t ya write?’

‘Ah, ya know me and letters.’

‘No, that’s the thing, I don’t know you and letters.’

‘Ah, I’m just not very good at it.’

He nodded and used a hand against the wall to guide himself along the landing: ‘I thought you’d have written.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘Well, I am.’

‘I believe ya,’ he grunted, his back to me.

I found a mosquito coil tonight, shattered into little green bits at the bottom of my backpack. Those mosquitoes in Mexico were always ecstatic in the hot, hot air. Waiting. Hovering. Moving away from the smoke under the ceiling fan. It was truly vicious, that heat, but in an odd way I liked it. When I arrived in San Francisco it was the coolness of it all that assaulted me. The immigration officer in the airport looked at the Mexican stamp in my passport. ‘Hope you didn’t catch the clap,’ he said with a grin, waving me through with a sweep of the hand after stamping a six-month stay in my passport.