Songdogs

FRIDAY, god, i was good

Woke up late, feeling a bit nasty. All that Harp. Nectar of the dogs. He gave a laugh when he saw me, went to the cupboard and got out the whiskey.

‘For what ails ya,’ he said.

I took a quick shot and drank a few glasses of water. He upped himself from the table, said he was going to go down to catch his fish. But he must have run out of good flies, because he got out some bait from the very back of the freezer shelf — old shrimp of some sort in a plastic container. Boiled water in a saucepan and placed the tub in the hot water, stood over it, inhaling some of the steam, said it was good for cleaning out his head, that I should try it myself. Every now and then he pushed the container down in the water with his fingers, submerging it, licked at his fingers. They must have been burnt from the hot water, but it didn’t seem to faze him any. He plucked the plastic tub out, said he didn’t have time to wait for the shrimp to thaw, put some of it in his overcoat pocket. Stale shrimp won’t help the smell of him any, I thought, once it unfreezes in his pocket it’ll really stink him to high heaven. Illegal bait, too, but he said he didn’t care, a fish is a fish is a fish, especially if he catches that giant salmon of his.

Took myself off into town on the bike for a bit of breakfast in Gaffney’s hotel. Same old place, yellowing table doilies, ducks in flight on the wall, carpet curling up at the edges, the waft of brewing tea, farmers smoking cigarettes in the corners. Sat at the table nearest the door and read the back page of the Connaught Telegraph. Ordered up a big feed with extra sausages. The waitress knew me. Took me a while to remember, but I finally did — Maria from the convent school, cheekbones you could abseil, hair to the waist. I used to blow kisses at her when she walked past the handball alley.

She kept coming over to my table with bits and pieces — butter, marmalade, an extra spoon — until she finally asked me. I wasn’t in the mood for talking, pretended it wasn’t me, put on my best-dressed Wyoming drawl.

Still, nothing better than a few sausages and rashers for a hangover, and I felt like ninety afterwards. Left a pound coin for a tip and she came out running after me, hair flying, said we don’t accept tips in this part of the world. She said she knew it was me all along — the dark skin, I suppose — and smiled.

‘How long are you back for?’ she asked.

Told her about the visa and she said I was lucky, she’d give an arm and a leg to take off herself, she has a brother in Louisiana who shucks oysters, a sister in Washington State doing nursing in a home for geriatrics. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and fooled around with the buttons on my denim jacket. She asked about the old man, said he used to come in for breakfast every Saturday, she hasn’t seen him in a while.

‘Oh, he’s in flying form.’

‘That’s great news altogether.’

She was jangling coins in her apron pocket.

‘Well, I’ll be off,’ I said.

‘Fair enough so. Come in for breakfast on Monday before ya leave.’

‘I will.’

‘It’s on me.’

I walked back home by the riverbank, wheeling the bicycle. Had to detour by the factory, where they’ve raised the barbed wire another few feet in the air, the shouts of men amongst the squeals and the shit and the slurry. Sat down a couple of hundred yards from the factory, in the long grass. Had an urge to just get in and swim, even if the water was disgusting, black as berries, the slow roll of it through the rushes. Took off my t-shirt and trousers, hung them on the brambles of a bush, sat in my underwear, feet dangling in the water. A life of half-emergence. A consistency of acceptance. Enough of the old man’s disease, I thought. This contagion of days, teacups and nods. A vision of Maria rose up in me, a vertigo of lust and genuine longing. Should go back and sweep her off her feet, roll the coins from her apron in my fingers, do something ridiculously romantic for once, carry her off to the beach, ride palominos along the water’s edge, shove ogham stones in our pockets, ride out to sea.

Kowtowed over the riverbank, I decided that I would swim, went into it up to my knees, balanced myself on a few underwater stones, rocked back and forth, and was just about to dive in when I heard a rustle in the bushes near my clothes, maybe a rat or a bird. I got up on to the bank and shook the water from my toes, pulled on my things, walked along towards home, a factory horn ringing out behind me. The old man was there with the familiar routine, and a bitterness sped its way through me as I watched him casting. Something nestled in my stomach and gnawed at me. He lives his life now in the grip of some comfortable anaesthetic.

If I were to choose an anaesthetic myself, I’d probably do what Cici did — have some visions while I’m at it. When I met her, she looked like she could have been grandmother to a hill, but there was a lustful energy in her and the things she remembered. She was living near Castro Street, where all the finest dying in America was done — but Cici wasn’t dying, Cici was her own songdog, Cici was still howling in the creation of other days and places.

* * *

A summer of fires, that summer of 1956. They licked their way salaciously through the trees. Ran like lizards alongside ridges. Leaped their way over brown streambeds, languished for a while by new ditches and blackened the yellow hardhats that were left hanging on the branches of trees, tongued their way out towards the northern corners of the forest, were beaten back by Delhart and his rows of men, all of whose teeth became the shade of smoke. The fires settled down for a day, then whipped up again with a single cinder carried on the wind. At night the sky was lit up. The east was dappled with orange and the smoke took on different shades, pink and yellow and red, like so many different slices of skin, as if an aurora borealis had decided to stay for a while, to hang on that part of the world, propped up by the mountains, the low rivers, the generous orange violence.

In the forests frightened animals broke for cover. The carcass of a Rocky Mountain elk was found near a fire break, its burnt jaw opened in blackness. An escaping grizzly was shot on the main street of a northern town, lumbering madly on the footpath when it was circled down into the sight of a rifle. After a dozen bullets it fell, letting out a huge desultory cry that was imitated by a madwoman who stood on the corner by a feed store. She screamed so loud that it was said that she tore her larynx to bits. My father was hanging around down by the café and his photo shows her with her arms upstretched towards heaven. Her cry must have echoed its way around the town’s Sunday-morning church services, as ‘Amen!’ after ‘Amen!’ rang around the pews and preachers searched in the Book of Revelations for words about fires and the blue-hot end of the world. Mouths opened up in hymn as army helicopters flew overhead with bags of water meant to douse distant flames.

Boys made hatbands from the dehydrated snakes — timber rattlers and hog-noses — found at the side of forbidden forest roads. They sliced the snakes open longways with their fathers’ penknives, skinned them, wore them around their heads as a ritual that signified their stance at the cusp of manhood — another fire about to break. Rocks cracked open in the extraordinary heat. Firs brittled down to stumps. A box of lost bullets exploded near the edge of the forest, the echoed thump of them flushing men from their houses. At night, prayers were remembered by bedsides, and wives tenderly kissed their husbands’ foreheads as they went out the door, yellow jackets hung in the crook of their hands, leather belts carved with their initials around their waists, husband and wife stretching out from one another on an expanding waistline.

An old rancher down by the creekbed refused to leave his stockman’s cabin and went up like a Buddhist — the body was taken out on a makeshift stretcher, the flesh of the hands melted into the stomach where he had folded them in anticipation. His grey hair had vanished. The burnt man’s funeral was postponed for two mornings as sirens sounded out, summoning men to other fires. When it eventually took place, tired men leaned their heads forward on pews and wept secretly into Sunday handkerchiefs. For the wake, jugs of lemonade were laid on white picnic tables in the brown grass outside the church, and children played with buckets of water, splashed each other. A pall hung over the town. Women leaned against wireless radios to see if the fires had made national news. Buzzards rose and wandered in the alpine air, flapping continuously — sometimes the sky was black with them, descending like so many priests to a Eucharist below.

My father hung around with Delhart and the firefighters. He told them that he was on commission from a New York magazine — in fact, he’d been fired before he had a chance to begin. On the phone they said that they had hired another man. ‘Right-y-o,’ he said, his throat dry. He got drunk in a town bar that day, drowning both sorrow and a slight elation at the freedom of it all. The young barman, with lemon-coloured hair, had made a special drink for the firefighters, The Bloody Blazer, with a touch of tabasco in it. I can imagine the old man, sitting at the bar counter, taking it down in big gulps, bitter at the thought of losing his chance because his wife happened to like this place, wanted to stay. The drinks, I’m sure, stung the back of his throat, rocked through his belly. He sat with the other men around the bar as they coughed up into bandanas, ditch diggers on an afternoon off, fingers blistered from shovels. Hard men, they were democratically diligent at the buying of rounds. They must have regarded the old man as a foreigner at first — the early photos of them have a comical rigidity, you can almost feel the teeth clenching as they stare into the lens, their features just about recognisable in the windowlight from the bar, smudges of black obscuring their cheekbones.

Every morning the old man descended the mountain to where he kept a bicycle propped up against a fir tree, rode the seven miles to town with cameras strapped around him. The young boys in their snakeskin hats sometimes followed him and stuck out their bony chests when his lens moved towards them. After a while, the rangers and firefighters relaxed for his camera, regarded it with a mixture of off-handedness and anticipation. In solitary shots, he laid a white sheet at their feet, bounced the light up to give them harsh shadows on their faces, while they pretended they weren’t interested, hung their heads and rubbed ash-black hands together. They called him ‘Irish’ because that was what he still exuded — the retreating curls, the green eyes, the big shoulders moving under white shirts. He began to give himself over to that summer, my father, raging along with it all, catching the fires in their magnificence and brutality, even thanking Mam for her foresight in wanting to stay there — these were his best pictures, he was sure of it, they’d make him famous, he had no doubt.

Delhart was the only one who never wanted a photo taken. His face was not unlike the shovels of the ditch diggers — long and brown and weathered and too well used. Delhart hated cameras, had hated them ever since the Depression, when a photographer had gone through his town. He had been very young, and the photographer had gotten him to take off his shirt and show his distended belly. Delhart’s mother had ripped the photo to bits when it came out in a book years later, bought up all the copies she could find, burned them in a wood stove.

‘You can see around ya with your eyes, can’t ya?’ said Delhart. ‘No sense in using that thing.’

My father simply nodded, said nothing.

Delhart moved like a war general around the fires — the movement may have kept his mind off his problems. Whisperings abounded that he had gotten the Indian girl pregnant. Someone had seen him digging a fire ditch at the back of her house to protect her, but nobody brought it up, it was a sensitive issue, a ranger with a native American girl. Little was known about her because she never spoke to anybody, but there were rumours, and the rumours grew with her silence. Her speechlessness was attributed to having had her tongue cut out at a reservation in Utah, in punishment for her doing the same to a dozen magpies. Or her father had been a medicine man who had mistakenly caused her voicebox to burst with a potion. Or she had eaten the bones of squirrels and they had stuck in her throat. It was said that her name was Eliza. Her eyes were dark and hollowed, like someone who had suffered, but there was a beautifully fluid quality to her movements, as she hoed the soil in the back of her cabin. Some said she was a prostitute, but when men went to pay her a visit, she took a shotgun from behind the door and silently threatened them with it.

Delhart said nothing about either Cici or the Indian girl, but the old man had seen a copy of Cici’s book under the driver’s seat of Delhart’s truck, the beige-coloured spine cracked, all sorts of recent sootprints on the pages. He figured that Delhart was still in love with Cici and that things would eventually work out, but kept his musings to himself.

Cici brushed the thought of Delhart aside, and developed a vague and manic sparkle in her eyes. She and Mam leaned into the radio, pinpointing co-ordinates on giant brown maps, looked out over the fires, reported them to rangers below. ‘Shit, girls, you’re lucky, it’s a madhouse down here.’ The lookout and the mountain stayed intact. Smoky skies drifted by. The heavy wooden door creaked and groaned. Boiling water on their small stove, my mother swore that she could hear the bubbles bouncing off one another. It took ages to boil at that high altitude. Her own breathing came back to her in soft, regular patterns. While Cici wrote her poems, Mam went walking outside. The days stretched out on elastic, time passing with the rhythm of silence. And the silence collapsed into itself — a falling pebble on the scree, a cicada beating the plates of its abdomen, a call on the radio, a deer nudging up to the salt block down near the treeline, an insect moving in the outhouse, all of it became part of the quietness. Even the pine needles down in the forest broke with a brittle roar when she stepped upon them. The outhouse rustled with spiders, and when lime or ashes were thrown down to stifle the smell, flies rose up from the bottom.

In the tower an immaculately clean horse’s skull was nailed on the wall, looking down over an iron cooking stove, one chair, a table, a bed, a few cupboards, a rucksack frame. Other lookouts from previous years had scrawled graffiti on the walls. For a joke a spiralling staircase was nicknamed ‘Yeats’ after the gyre of his poems. Cici wrote a letter of his name on every second step. She laughed that she climbed Yeats every morning, rattled him, swept him clean, descended him with her binoculars in hand, perched on him and read, ran her hand along his banisters, stood in the middle of the ‘A’ and made her pronouncements to the world.

Cici and Mam took in the relative humidity of the world, the maximum and minimum temperatures, the quickness of the wind, the speed of the clouds, the upkick of dust, the possibility of more blazes, radioed them back to the headquarters. The distance of a storm was measured by counting the seconds between lightning and the receipt of the thunder blast. And it was up those stairs, surrounded by reams of graffiti, that Cici wrote her poems, reading them from the staircase when she was finished. Mam enjoyed her friend’s wild rantings, the sounds thrown out around the tower, laid her head on Cici’s shoulder, listened.

At first all three of them slept on the same floor, like a row of coloured biscuits in their sleeping bags. But Cici went crazy over her writing one night — she hadn’t put a word down in three days and she stalked around the tower, ripping up pieces of paper and throwing them around. ‘What the hell are you guys here for, anyway? Get away! Get out of here!’ My parents took their sleeping bags outside and heard the faint echo of high-pitched rants from within the tower. Every now and then Mam went up to make sure there wasn’t another episode like the water trough. She still half-expected to see Cici dangling from a rope above a kicked chair, the manic sparkle having its own darkness.

Cici apologised the next day, but my parents grew to enjoy those cold nights outside, where swarms of insects sang. The old man set up a small camp for them down near the treeline, fashioned an elevated platform from some pine poles, frapped it with red twine. Only when the lightning was bad did they stay in the tower. A small stepladder led up to a five-foot-high platform that creaked when they walked upon it. Mam climbed down in the mornings, isolated the sounds, gulped them down, let the air rush over her body. Some photos were taken when the sun came up, my mother unclothed once more, but more subtle, more precise around the edges than the ones from Mexico. There was one of her simply lying in a rope hammock, her body meshed into a series of diamonds where the ropes were tied, one knee raised slightly in the air to cover herself, a bandana tied around her hair; another of her pulling on a pair of forest-ranger trousers which my father had borrowed from Delhart, with her surprised by the camera, breasts exposed, mouth in the shape of a lemon; and one sitting in a blouse and underwear, propped up against a tree, eating a sandwich, watching the weather, gazing around as if there wasn’t a fire for miles.

Cici told me that, from a distance, she watched some of those photos being taken, and she envied my mother the use of her love. At times, despite herself, Cici still thought of Delhart and his boat-hands, let them row her through blackened trees and things that roared up from the pieces of fizzling sap.

* * *

Got to thinking about Cici again today while the old man was chasing his fish down there.

In San Francisco she was ensconced in a flat near Castro Street, on the third floor. I walked up the stairs, nervous, the backpack pulling against my shoulders. The walls of the apartment building were freshly painted, and a kid in short pants was sniffing at them. The sound of a distant piano rolled through the apartments. A cactus plant had been overturned in the hallway, bits of rock strewn around it. I sidestepped the pebbles, knocked on her door, introduced myself. She let me in, past a mountain of junk letters at her feet, as if she had known me all her life.

‘How did you find me?’

‘Dialed information,’ I said.

‘Why didn’t you call?’

‘I didn’t know if you’d want to see me.’

‘Oh, God, of course I would,’ she laughed, ushering me in further, silver bracelets jangling on her wrist.

I looked around. A mirror on the wall wasn’t generous to her. Her hair was quartzite-grey, flecks in it, her face the same colour. I dropped my backpack on the floor. Doodles ran along the margins of a newspaper, happy faces in a row down the page, in red ink. Some macaroni was caked on the inside of a saucepan left lying on the floor.

‘I brought you some flowers.’

‘Aren’t you just lovely?’

‘Do you have a vase?’

She didn’t reply. She looked at the ceiling: ‘How’s your mother?’

‘She’s fine.’

‘Oh lovely, lovely, lovely.’

‘Have you heard from her?’ I asked.

She looked at me curiously. ‘No.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Say, that’s a heavy bag you’ve got there.’

‘Been travelling a while.’

‘Hey, why don’t you just stay here with me forever?’

‘Pardon me?’

‘Forever and an extra day.’

‘Yeah, okay.’ I nodded. ‘She never writes to you, no?’

‘Never. Haven’t seen a Christmas card in — oh…’ Her voice fell away. ‘I really don’t know how long.’

‘I see.’

‘Say, what’s your name again?’

‘Conor.’

‘Ah, yes, how could I forget that? You look just like her, you know.’

The television set was covered with a sheet of white crêpe paper — Cici liked watching it with the sound turned down, a magical box producing a weird flare-out of colour. You could see the fibres in the paper and the fuzzy static lifting it away from the screen. She had taped the crêpe paper to the top of the television set so that if she wanted to watch something on television she could just lift the paper up.

She moved over to the sofa, stretched out, lay back and laughed, a loud cackle that rang its way around the apartment, the shelves lined with amulets, a strange foot-long marijuana bong on the coffee table, the mantelpiece full of candles, a few paintings on the wall, some O’Keefe prints, a Warhol imitation. She wore a white nightdress, hair tumbling down to her shoulders. She might as well have stepped off the stage of a Tennessee Williams play. It seemed that she had scattered herself all over the country for years, came back to Castro Street, where people flowed in and out of her apartment. She entertained them with syllogisms. Women swanned in, and she chattered with them about how to keep your gums, your fingernails, your virginity — maybe all three at once. She told stories of beat writers who had taken all three from her. Hollow-faced men knocked on the door, looking to talk about how their body cells were being destroyed, beaten down. They brought her flowers — her place was a riot of flowers. Cici rattled on about movement and politics, about stasis and love, about the romantic muckheap of the sixties, about men who’d gone down in Vietnam — ‘occidental death,’ she called it. She was a shaman of sorts, a holy rage lived in her. And she always prefaced her stories with a single phrase, ‘Lord, I remember.’

That first night, when her apartment was quiet, Cici’s face dropped when I told her what had actually happened with Mam.

‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘I had no idea.’

She rolled her eyes sadly and jabbed in under her fingernails with a toothpick when I asked her again: ‘No, no, I haven’t heard a single thing, imagine that. She just left?’

‘Upped and left,’ I said. ‘Without so much as a note.’

‘Where did she go?’

I shook my head.

‘Did you try Mexico?’

‘Of course.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing.’

She went to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of vodka and some ice cubes, poured two glasses, stared at the wall.

‘Tell me about the fires, Cici.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘I just want to know.’

‘Why?’

‘She used to talk about them. My old man, too.’

‘Ah yes, your father. How is your father?’

‘Haven’t seen him in a while. He’s home in Mayo.’

She pursed her lips and shrugged.

I sipped at the vodka. ‘So tell me about the fires.’

‘Oh, everyone around here talks about old times,’ she said. ‘Day in, day out, I talk about old times.’

I nodded.

‘I mean, that’s all anybody ever talks about. What it was like back twenty, thirty, a million years ago.’ She moved a little on the sofa. ‘You know what I think?’ she said. ‘I think memory is three-quarters imagination.’

I sat back.

‘And all the rest is pure lies,’ she said.

‘Yes, yeah, I know what you mean.’ I mashed my hands together.

I knew what she meant, yet she sang to me like a wren, on and on, memories of startling lucidity, incidents pouring from her, a threnody of nostalgia, nightdress billowing in the breeze from a fan. And Cici remembered that look on my mother’s face, in the broken mirror — ‘Lord, I remember’ — as if it had happened just yesterday.

A smile hung permanently at the edge of her mouth. At any moment I expected some sort of clap to sound out around the theatre of herself, and she’d draw her hand to her lips and cock her head sideways and say, chuckling, to an enraptured audience: ‘God, I was good.’ Then she might look up again from the rim of her nightdress, questioning: ‘Wasn’t I?’

I saw her late that first evening, moving a needle around her legs. The tracks stood out on the inside of her thighs, which I suppose were one of the few hidden places left she could inject. I stirred in my bed, on the floor. She caught my eye. The needle flickered momentarily.

‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Did we put sugar in the flower water?’

The needle sunk in.

‘I always forget about the sugar in the water,’ she said.

She pushed the top of the needle.

‘Are you all right, dear?’ she said to me.

‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ I sat on the floor, curled my feet into my stomach. ‘Why do you do that?’

‘Makes the flowers last longer.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘That.’

‘Oh.’ She looked at the needle, twirled it in her fingers. ‘It’s just a little something.’ The sofa gathered her in and she sat back, eyes closed, sat up suddenly, looked at me: ‘Did you know that Morpheus was the god of dreams?’

She had finagled a permanent supply from a local doctor in return for four first-edition books by minor beat poets. She wasn’t addicted, she said, just an occasional habit that she’d developed recently. She sat on the side of the sofa, leaned across to me. ‘No more stupid poems,’ she said, ‘I don’t do stupid poems anymore, poetry isn’t worth a damn. I’d much rather sit here and talk. There’s a grace in doing nothing, don’t you think?’

There was a roll of butcher’s paper in the corner of her flat, but no typewriter around. At times she picked up the bong from the table and twirled it in her fingers. It was draped with a bear’s claw. Somehow Cici ended up with it after it had been confiscated from another tower by a forest ranger in the sixties. She had given up dope, stuck entirely to morphine, but she had a few dime bags hidden in the bottom of her underwear drawer. The grass was old and dried-out, but I smoked some of it anyway, letting the bear’s claw scratch my lips, letting her world drip around me.

I stayed with Cici for three weeks. She took to calling me ‘babe.’ At times she was frantic with energy, moving up and down the apartment, opening the door, letting people in. Sometimes she moved to the balcony and conducted conversations with people down on the street, dropping words from on high. The traffic roared and men linked hands, waved up at her, wrapped into each other. A woman was pulled along by a wolfhound, her anaemic overcoat flapping behind her. Sirens rang out, the street in full throat. The barbershop pole swirled in red and white and blue — a sign outside mentioned clean razors for a shave. A man with a sandwich board advertised the street as Sodom and Gomorrah — he was like Moses out there, a sea of people parting around him, a pillar of salt.

One evening, when Cici was sleeping, I stepped out on to the fire escape. A man on the opposite side of the street was standing on his balcony, gyrating his heavy hips, singing malevolently into a hairbrush. He saw me, but he didn’t flinch, kept on singing. He was middle-aged and wore a necktie, but no shirt. A few words from old Cole Porter songs filtered across, over the traffic. He sang with an ineffable longing, the hairbrush moving like a swinging trapeze around his lips. Sometimes he twirled the brush around in his fingers, picked clumps of hair from around the teeth. Cici stepped out on the fire escape with me, put her hand on my shoulder.

‘Babe,’ she said.

She stood beside me and sang ‘You’re the Top’ with the man, a doppelgänger of voices, out of synch with each other, drifting over the traffic. She winked at the man, who tucked the hairbrush in his back pocket and smiled, put her arm around my waist, guided me back inside, put some hot milk on the stove to help us sleep. In the morning a skin had developed over the milk, which hadn’t been touched. Cici scooped it off with a spoon. ‘You’re the top,’ she said, laughing, as the skin of the milk was thrown down into the drain.

It was a vibrant and eclectic place, and Cici fitted in perfectly, a living cornice, among the bits of white bricks, pieces of old wood, crumbling cement around her. In the afternoons she was thankful to have someone who would cook. I made a stir-fry and concocted a chocolate dessert which she left sitting on her plate. ‘It just looks too nice to eat,’ she said, ‘don’t you think so, babe?’ With her fork she made another happy face in the chocolate pudding. Behind her the crêpe paper was swimming in colour. She tried desperately to remember my name every day, but couldn’t, yet she recalled things that had happened years ago as if they had just occurred, an irrepressible want to live them again, a misery that she never would, a pilgrimage into desire. Cici no longer saw me as a visitor. She left the door of the bathroom open when she went to the toilet. The nightdress hitched up on her legs when she sat on the sofa. I turned my back when she got out her needles, filled the bowl of the bear’s-claw pipe, floated away.

The Haight, she said, had been momentary, sexual, magical to her. The mid-sixties — a decade after the Wyoming fires — had seen her swinging her hair around, strung out on LSD, bracelets around her neck, hard skin on the bottoms of her bare feet. I went down there to check it out, stood on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, found myself swamped in old bearded men begging for money, and a fresh sourdough smell hovering through the air. Its re-creation was its sadness — ponytails, nose-rings, compact discs, expensive beads, a shirt with a peace sign drawn into the badge of a Mercedes-Benz.

In the park a juggler threw oranges. She was wearing a short tank top, and every now and then would push her hand across her breast, to wipe away sweat. She noticed the small tricolour I had sewn on the outside pocket of my daypack. ‘Advertising,’ she joked, ‘everyone loves the Irish.’ She was from Galway, but not a trace of accent was left. We walked to City Lights bookstore and I looked for Cici’s poems among the rows of beat poets, but they weren’t there, and we went on to a bar, played pool — she juggled Guinness bottles in the air. ‘I’m a tosser,’ she said, and all of a sudden the Irish accent was back. ‘Ah go on, give us a goozer.’ She leaned into me, kissed me, and I put my arms around her, but then she whispered that I looked like someone she’d once known. I left, hailed a cab.

I sat back and watched San Francisco move by. The whole world was looking for someone who was gone.

Night birds flew over Castro and, down the sidestreet, Cici was awake under them.

‘I like Frisco,’ I said to her, still a bit drunk.

‘Oh, don’t call it Frisco, babe, only tourists call it Frisco, call it, let me see, call it the whitewhite city.’

‘Okay.’

‘I met someone tonight.’

‘That’s nice, just don’t fall in love.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Oh go ahead, for crying out loud.’

‘Go ahead what?’

‘Fall in love, lose your heels, fall in love with a million of them.’ She rubbed her eyeballs. ‘And let me tell you something — all at once is best.’

‘Fair enough.’

All at once in love with a million women from the whitewhite city — it could have been Cici’s epitaph.

A man came and collected two months of bills. He shoved his foot in the door to keep it open, waving the bills in our faces, threatening court action. I paid the bills for Cici. She was astounded: ‘Don’t do that, babe, oh God, you don’t have to do that.’ It wasn’t charity, I just wanted to lose something of myself in that room. It was pathetic, but money was all I could think of. Guilt assailed me — Cici was exhausted, I had dredged up things in her that maybe would have been better forgotten. In the deli I stocked up on food and wine. I cooked up a meal of beans and tacos, and we drank a little white wine, toasted my mother. Cici said, simply: ‘To Juanita.’

A taxi beeped for me underneath the apartment next morning. I could just about hear it above the noise.

‘You really can stay if you want to.’

‘I’m on my way to fall in love with a million women.’

‘What a great idea, take me with you.’

‘Okay, come on.’

She laughed and shook her head.

‘See you,’ I said.

I kissed her on the cheek.

She drew herself back, pouted comically, wrinkles puckering into her cheeks, pointed at her lips, pursed them again. We laughed. She held the back of my hair, and ran one hand along my back as our lips touched. I wanted to kiss her again, but didn’t.

‘Where to now?’ she asked, letting go of my hair.

‘I have a bus ticket to Wyoming.’

‘Say hello to it for me.’

‘Can I call it Wyoming?’

‘You can call it whatever you like, babe.’

‘Okay.’

‘And say hello to Juanita when you see her. Tell her she owes me a letter.’

The taxi took me past the whiteness of San Francisco. Cici’s face came with me, all cratered. She had promised me that she would give up the morphine but just before I left I saw her, ferreting down her thighs with another small needle, looking for a place without a bruise. ‘Just one more,’ she said, chuckling, the euphoria already washing its way over her. ‘You know, babe, you have to go slow with these things.’

* * *

One morning, when dawn had finished its rumour, and the old man was gone for the day, she and Mam were languishing together down near the camp.

Mam wore a magenta dress that buttoned at the front. The row of white buttons ran all the way to the hem. Her brown legs emerged, twigs. She was lying back in the grass, shielding her eyes from the sun. Cici was beside her, her head propped on her hand. ‘It’ll rain one of these days,’ said Cici. She moved slightly, in a disguise of nonchalance. The shadow over my mother’s eyes lengthened infinitesimally. Cici held a blade of grass between the gap in her front teeth. An insect landed on Mam’s stomach, and Cici moved to brush it away. Her hand hovered over Mam’s body for a moment, fell slowly and laid itself on her belly. Nothing was said. The insect flew off. The shadow was held. Cici’s fingers made little circles around one of the buttons. Traced the outlines. Only the very tip of her fingers touched their way inside the gap between the buttons, moved against Mam’s skin. It was a tiny demesne of stomach that Cici wandered over with her fingertips, and maybe my mother moved her head in some sort of ecstasy, maybe her black hair scrunched itself into the ground, maybe her back arched itself up to make a bridge of air beneath her, maybe she waited for the fingers to explore further, maybe she thought there would never be any rain, but Cici pulled her hand away and began to laugh.

She rose and went bounding away to the tower. Mam found her later, enmeshed in maps, talking on the radio to one of the rangers. The two of them held hands for a moment as a voice hacked through the radio: ‘Have you two gone barmy up there yet?’

They went back down to the water trough, and Mam slipped in, wearing the magenta dress, to see how it felt. The water wasn’t cold anymore. They had swept the larvae from the surface. She slapped the water out around her with her hands, put her head fully under, came up with her hair tangled. Cici sat down beside her at the edge of the trough and scribbled in a notebook — doodles and squiggles that later formed a lyric. It was a fabulous moment, Mam and Cici together — or so Cici told me — letting the sky drift past, saying nothing. Later the dress was hung out on the line to billow. My mother went back down to the camp and made some sandwiches for my father’s dinner.

When the old man came back that night, I’m sure they climbed the stepladder and lay down to sleep, as usual, arms reaching around one another. An owl maybe hooting in the trees, dropping balls of hairy scat on to the world, like a gift.

Delhart’s baby came the next week.

The ranger and my father had been sitting in the bar, their clothes smothered with the smell of smoke, when Eliza came in. She was in her early twenties, but strands of white already flicked through her hair, falling out of its braids. She had a face that looked like it had been fashioned from some brown bank of soil. Her dress was wet where the water had broken, but she carried herself well. The barman moved from behind the counter to swat her away as if she were a fly, but Delhart rose and moved to Eliza. She clenched her teeth, all wild arms and acrimony: ‘I want you to see what it’s like,’ she said. Eliza folded over and clutched at her stomach. They were the first words that anyone had ever heard from her. Delhart pushed the bartender aside and took her into a backroom, hitched her dress around her waist.

The old man ran out to find the doctor, but he was off on another call — a boy had burnt the palm of his hand in a smouldering field while searching for snakes.

When my father returned, Eliza’s teeth crunched down on a very thick piece of cardboard. Beads of sweat were erupting from her brow. A smudge of blood stained Delhart’s arm, the baby already halfway into the world, guided now by four old women, who fretted and coaxed. ‘You men know nothing!’ My father went outside to wait, where the bartender smiled deliriously — news of the birth had spread and dozens of people had gathered in the bar, watching the grey snow on a television screen. A hum drifted around the bar, speculation about whether Delhart was the father at all. Some women were hoping the baby would look like him — they muttered that there were too many brown-skinned people in the town already.

When the baby boy was born he was dark under the blood, dark as Eliza’s neck, coal-coloured hair scattered on his head. One of the women asked Eliza what she would call him. ‘Kutch,’ she said, almost spitting the word out. It meant ‘dark one’ in her own language. Delhart carried the baby out into the bar, wrapped in towels, as if he were some sort of godsend, but Eliza called the ranger back, said she wanted him to have nothing to do with the baby, she would raise him on her own — if Delhart ever came to her cabin he would end up like the grizzly that had stumbled into town at the beginning of summer. In the background, word filtered from a radio that lightning had hit one of the northern ridges and that there might be new, even more ferocious fires the next day. There weren’t any more fires. Clouds came, and for the next week rain teased intermittently, the clouds sat above the mountains like strange horses. But they were spooked by the need and they shrugged and meandered on north towards Canada. From their lookout, Cici and Mam watched insects flicker around rocks, birds gather on trees, their southern flight imminent. Animals howled from a distance and at times Cici yammered back at them.

She had heard about Delhart’s baby and shrugged as if tossing off a blanket. ‘I still don’t give a shit.’ But her poetry was full of births — seeds bursting from pods, scattering on a Wyoming wind, a black bear in the forest, hysterical for her cubs, two golden eagles spiralling downwards while mating on the air. Rolls of paper gathered on the lookout floor. Mam made her cups of tea and sometimes they went walking, put their arms around one another’s waists, sang to keep the bears away. Cici taught her what she knew of weather patterns in the area, the names of certain clouds in English, the white filmy cirrus, stratus, the flat-based cumulus, the cumulonimbus which would, one day soon, pile precipitation down on them and finish their summer. Mam learned how to gauge the relative humidity. She sometimes chatted on the radio with the other operators.

‘This is gonna be my last summer here,’ said Cici, on one of their walks.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know, maybe go back to San Fran.’

My father came up the mountain, drunk, breathless. He’d decided he would publish a book of that summer’s photos, and said maybe he’d include a poem of Cici’s. Cici said nothing. That night he drank a jug of wine on his own, and in his imagination he was in New York City, where he wore a big black overcoat and a lopsided beret to a publishing party where the only fires were the ones under trays of hors-d’œuvres, keeping them warm. He got drunk late into the night, and read, for the first time, Cici’s poems. The old man never said a word about her poetry again — they were worlds apart, he and Cici. He razored the beard off his cheeks, ran a comb through his hair, looked down the mountain, wondered where he and Mam would go.

Young Miguel’s maps might have flashed through his mind. The smell of clay. All those jagged edges for cities.

They ended up waiting for the rain, all three of them together. In the evening they watched the fires flickering in the east, and in the morning they stood rooted to their shadows and watched the play of dark clouds across the valleys. From the top of the mountain, they could see all the way across to Idaho. My father took pictures of the tower, the radio, the cobweb in the corner, the aggregation of daddy longlegs that throbbed on the eastern side of the building, curious rhythmic pulsations that made them look like a single giant organism, as if they were warding off some predator. There were pictures of the water trough, the trees, their camp, his bicycle leaning against a tree. My mother packed their bags. They had no real idea where they might end up next, but they had to go somewhere, in a few months the whole of their summer would be covered in snow. They gazed at the clouds fattening in the sky, puffed up like so many swollen chests. Outrider billows blew across, promising squalls and cataracts and downpours. When the rain eventually came it was the hardest, purest, greyest, most beautiful rain any of them had ever felt in their lives. It whipped in massive sheets across the world that leaned towards autumn and caused the fires to smoulder and collected in rivulets and slammed against berries and dripped from trees and caused seeds to burst and melted the salt blocks and pocketed the brightness and puddled the dry, dry ground. All three of them stood outside the tower, and they let the rain drive itself refreshingly into their faces. Afterwards the clouds lightened and the air seemed clean enough up there to cause nose bleeds.

* * *

Mrs McCarthy came over with food for him this afternoon. Roast spuds and a big breast of chicken. Don’t know what drives her to bring the odd dinner to the old man — nobody else in town could care less. Some sort of Christian charity, I suppose. She was a bit surprised to see me, but she brightened up soon enough and asked me if I was going to mass on Sunday. Gave her a bit of a wink and told her I’d be there the following week, come rain, hail, or shine.

The old man surprised me when he stood up and took the plate from Mrs McCarthy, announced with a flourish of his hand: ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a farmer’s arse through a hedge!’

He sat in the big chair and the gravy tumbled down his chin. Later, Mrs McCarthy came back grinning and brought a plate for me too.

‘God bless ya,’ she said to me, looking around the kitchen, ‘I see you’ve done a spot of cleaning for him.’

He went fishing until nightfall, six hours of ferocious stupidity, for nothing this time, not a bite. It was cold when he came in and went up to his bedroom, said he didn’t want to fall asleep in the chair, it’s giving him a backache, there’s a draft coming through the window. I made him a hot whiskey, lots of sugar, but no cloves in the cupboard. Brought the whiskey up on the old silver tray, draped a white towel over my arm for a joke, swished my way through the door, shouting ‘Room Service!’ and he was squatted down, by the dressing table, naked, bent over a handheld mirror, examining something on his backside. His legs came down, spindle-like. There was a small chain of blood on the inside of his buttocks, dried there. He was staring at it and he had a washcloth in his hand, about to wipe the blood away.

‘Oh Jesus, sorry,’ I said, backing towards the door, and he rose up, some pleistocene beast, grunted, lunged towards the door, stopped for a moment, perplexed by himself, one hand gripped on the frame, peering around it.

‘What do you want?’

‘Nothing, nothing.’

‘Get the hell out of here,’ he said, bringing his trousers up from around his ankles.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Go on now and get the fuck out of here.’

‘Are ya all right?’

‘I’m marvellous.’

‘I was only —’

‘There’s a door to knock on, isn’t there, man?’

‘I wanted to surprise —’

‘Well, ya did that.’ He walked back through the room — it was almost comic the way his feet moved in the dropped trousers. He cupped his hands around himself even though his back was turned. ‘Ya surprised me all right,’ he said. ‘Now leave me alone.’

‘What’s wrong with ya? Are ya sick?’

He looked at me, squinted: ‘I’ve a nose bleed in me arse, what d’ya think is wrong with me, for crissake?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Ah, go away, son, for Jaysus sake.’

I placed the tray at the bottom of the door, went downstairs, grabbed my jacket, sat on the outside stoop, stared at the agitated Mayo sky, clouds skidding along across the gibbous moon. The marmalade cat came up and crooked herself in the inside of my knee and I stroked her. The wind whipped across the yard, the wheelbarrow by the barn rocked a little from side to side, even the river might have been moving. Some ashes flew out of the firepit. I heard the old man rumbling in the kitchen, bashing around in the cupboards, and after a while the high whistle of the kettle broke through. I pushed open the bottom of the door and went inside. The button of his trousers was still open at the top. He was staring at the fire stain on the wall, some hot whiskey in his hand. But he had forgotten the metal spoon and a crack had formed down the edge of the glass, the whiskey streaming out on to his fingers. He stood there as if he didn’t feel it.

‘I thought I better tell ya,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘It’s only the grapes of wrath.’

‘What?’

‘The grapes of wrath.’

‘Steinbeck?’

‘Haemorrhoids,’ he said.

He kept staring at the fire stain on the wall and I didn’t know whether to laugh or not.

‘Must be Mrs Mc’s food,’ I said.

But he acted as if he didn’t hear me and just stood there, licking his finger for some reason and smearing it against the fire stain on the wall, turned around and put his arm on my shoulder, rubbed along it, quite tenderly.

‘I want to be on my own for a while, Conor.’

I gave him his space. Walked down the full length of the river, the banks widening, a few ox-bow lakes created by its meander, all the way along the reedy edge towards the graves of the Protestant ladies, cleared away some of the gravestone weeds, hunkered down, looked out towards the river as it emptied slowly into the sea. There were lights out on the ocean, boats bobbing away in the rough water, bits of phosphorescence on the waves. Enough nothingness, I said to myself. Enough of this half-emergence. I scrambled down to the beach, hopped around on the sand for a moment, took off my clothes, stepped to the edge of the water, waded slowly up to my thighs, dove in, came up laughing and freezing, and I swam for fifteen minutes until it felt warm, suspended myself in the float, let big waves carry me in, caught glimpses of a satellite in the tremendous shrinking of the night, felt strangely light in the holiness of silence as the water lapped over me — the light hitting my eyes might have come from a star long imploded — big salty crests of water pulling me down and shoving me upwards, throwing me about, exhilarated in the darkness. Nothing wrong with being romantic, I said to the sky. To hell with the curse on sentimentality. I felt alive at last and the long grasses were bowing on the shore and the wind brought an invigorating chill and the moon sprayed out light and I thought I heard two old women laughing along with me, raising white parasols to the sky to stop the raindrops, and saw the vision of one of the women, Loyola, appearing along through the waves saying: Don’t be so hard on him, he’s about to die, and I said, No he’s not, no he isn’t, it’s only the grapes of wrath, and laughed maniacally to myself at the ridiculousness of it all, went on swimming, saying hallelujah to the stars, rave on, rage on, flapping my arms, roaring stupidities at the night, thinking he’s a cantankerous old bastard, my father, always has been, always will be, submerged myself once more, seawater stinging my eyes, came up chuckling, swam around the shoreline, let waves carry me in. Clambering out of the sea, I ran along the beach to get warm, my hand cupped over myself until the wind picked up stronger, and it got so cold that I could hardly see and my teeth began chattering and I dressed hurriedly, hopping on the sand, and ran my way along the riverbank towards home, making paths and swaths through the rushes, knocking them backwards with my hands, and they bent for a moment, then rebounded. Back in the house, I pulled a blanket around myself, shivered in the kitchen. He had left the bottle of whiskey on the table for me, and I drank two glasses in his honour and said to myself, shivering: I might even miss the old bastard when I leave, although I doubt it.