Songdogs

SATURDAY, a burst of blue herons

Went to town — smell of sea salt still in my hair — and bought my train ticket to Dublin, got him some haemorrhoid cream in the chemist. He was embarrassed by it when I gave it to him, retreated his way up the stairs, humming a bit of a tune.

‘You have to sing every now and then,’ he said to me from the top of the stairs, ‘it’s the only way of pissing on doom.’

He waved the little tube of cream in the air.

I laughed and went out to the barn, started nailing down a few of the stray aluminium sheets that have popped through the rivets over the years. The barn’s in terrible shape, looks a bit like my cabin. Won’t last another winter. Used the ladder to climb up on the roof. I was there an hour or so, switching a couple of the metal sheets, turning down the jagged ends, putting in new rivets. Some of the beams were a little soft and woodwormed, the nails sank right into them. The sky was the colour of old jeans and I sat back to watch a ziggurat of geese make their way through it. They flew over the house and my eyes followed them. Leaning against the ladder, I caught sight of the postman’s van driving along the lane, Jimmy Kiernan from school at the wheel. He parked his van, rang on the doorbell. Trash metal blasted from a ghetto-blaster on the passenger seat. I could have called out to him, over the music, but Kiernan was one of the last people I’d have wanted to speak to, and I just let him ring away.

Kiernan had a bit of a paunch and his silver lightning-rod earring caught the light, his pasty-white skin like the flabby underbelly of a herring. He banged on the front door.

The curtains at the old man’s window were open and I saw him walk across in his vest and open the window latch, lean his head out.

‘Package,’ said Kiernan.

‘What’s that bloody racket down there?’ the old man shouted down.

‘Package!’

‘That’s grand, leave it there.’

‘Ya have to sign for it.’

‘Sign it yourself.’

‘Jaysus!’ said Kiernan, leaving the small brown parcel on the doorstep. He wheeled around and I’m sure he must have seen me, but I leaned further into the ladder and looked riverwise, laughing to myself at the old man’s stubbornness. Kiernan stood for a moment, clicking his fingers, climbed into his green van, and left with his arm propped up on the open window, the music fading off.

My father came out, still in his string vest, carrying a wooden tray. The cat came up and rubbed against his calves, but he leaned down and pushed her away gently. He sat on the doorstep, put the box on his lap, opened the package. There were a few small things inside, plastic packages that looked like dimebags, others like matchboxes. He took them out deliberately and placed them in the wooden tray, put the invoice in his pocket, knocked the empty cardboard box with his hand, rolling it against the drainpipe. He took a bare fish-hook out, put it between his lips — maybe remembering his Mexican fishing days with Gabriel — and walked across the yard to the barn with the barb of the hook sticking out of his mouth.

I had one of the metal sheets off the barn, could see down below — an old lawnmower, shovels, a turf-cutter that has never been used, a few potato sacks. He shuffled into the barn and dragged a seat across to a counter that he must have built when I was away. Motes of dust settled down around the barn as he sat, some of them flicking upwards to be caught in the shafts of sunlight coming through the roof. He left his hat on the far corner of the table, took the hook from his mouth, reached down and petted the cat. Placed the hook in a vice grips on the edge of the table and, like a surgeon, began arranging things in front of him.

‘Making flies?’ I shouted down.

He whipped his head around, shifted the chair.

‘Up here,’ I said, sticking my head through the hole in the roof.

‘Christ, you’ll be the death of me yet. Where, in the name of Jaysus, are ya?’ I whistled and he looked up.

‘Who d’ya think ya are — Michel-fucken-angelo?’

‘You’re making flies?’

‘Dressing flies,’ he corrected.

‘When did ya start that?’

‘Ah, years ago.’

‘Really?’

I’ve never seen him do that before — when he first started fishing he bought all his flies from a tackle shop in town, came back with dozens of them in his hat. I watched as he rubbed his hands up and down his bare arms.

‘You’re not cold?’

‘Not a bit. I could do this in an icestorm. Love it altogether.’

‘Should put something over that vest,’ I said.

‘Ah, go away out of that.’

He turned the seat again, tightened the vice down on the hook, and rearranged the material in front of him, meticulously. Looked up at me once more, removed his glasses, and went to work. Took out some purple floss, rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, began trying to wind it along the shank of the hook. But his fingers were shaking — like hummingbird wings about to lift — and he kept dropping the thread, lifting it again, staring at it. He placed his trembling hand down on the table, glared at it, maybe telling it to stop, then suddenly thumped the back of his hand with his other fist. It stopped and he chuckled to himself. He finally got the thread started around the hook and the shakes in his hand seemed to quit altogether and there was a quiet content there, an acceptance of the slowness of time and the art of making a fly so simple that it would cause a fish to want it, something naturally belligerent and real, something that would whizz through the air with two pairs of wings and maybe three sets of eyes, something with an incoherent longing for motion. He began humming and looked happy — pissing on doom in his own peculiar way. I reached across the barn roof for the metal sheet, placed it over the hole, hammered it in, descended the ladder, went to the house and got him a shirt and his overcoat — he would have frozen down there otherwise, the length of time I knew it was going to take him to make that fly, with all its colours, all its trapped motion.

* * *

Bus stations are among the saddest places in America. Everyone looking for a way out. Slinking around. Looking for lost children. Keeping eyes glued on nothing in particular, waiting for life to happen.

In San Francisco a young girl howled about Jesus. Her arm was long with a string of watches. She said she was waiting for the Second Coming. A boy beside her hustled to carry suitcases and bags. He had a sign around his neck that said: ‘HIV Positive’. A man in a Rasta hat tried to sell me a leaflet for the deaf. He played out some sign language in the air, wrote on a piece of paper, scribbling that I could use the leaflet for commercial breaks between the books I was reading. I bought it, and he thumped me playfully on the shoulder, said he wasn’t deaf at all, went sauntering off. I shoved the leaflet down into my backpack and it was only then I noticed that Cici had put the bear’s-claw bong in the top compartment, under my jeans. I went to the bus-station bathroom and washed the last of the resin out, just in case my bags got searched.

It was a two-day trip to Wyoming. A road-rattle through high deserts and mountains, on interstates with giant rest areas, and stopovers in cities with grey afternoons hanging above them. When I finally got to Jackson Hole I found myself walking around in a stupor until I got to the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar. I negotiated some dope from a man in a black stetson, went down to the Snake River, filled the bear’s-claw pipe, got a little stoned.

In the morning, when I woke, two blue herons burst their way over the banks of the river, wings flapping hard enough to break a man’s arm. Washed my face in the meltwater rush brought down from the mountains by late summer.

I went back down to the bus depot and looked around again. My parents had been there over thirty-five years before. Cici had told me about it. I reconstructed the scene in my head. Mam had stood, nervously, cheekbones daubed with rouge, her lips coloured with a delicate red, a crimson scarf languid at her neck. She feared the moment when the bus would belch out smoke from its exhaust. Cici waited beside her, laid a hand on Mam’s forearm, ran a fingernail through some fluffy arm hair. Mam put her head on Cici’s shoulder and stared down the road, out the length of the town and beyond, into the late fifties, the unsure distance of the future. She let the crimson scarf fall down around her shoulders.

The old man was there, too, his back to them. He was shoving luggage in the bottom of the bus, arguing with the driver. There was some oil in the luggage well and he wanted the driver to clean it up. ‘Ain’t my job, mister.’ My father threw his arms up in the air, opened his suitcase and took out a pair of underpants, mopped the oil. He thought about burning the underwear, a totem to the summer, decided against it. He didn’t want to get kicked off the bus. The driver let out a huff, climbed behind the steering wheel, beeped the horn. An announcement was made over a loudspeaker. Cici took Mam’s face in her hands and they kissed each other, flush on the lips. My father was busy at the luggage well. ‘Good luck,’ Cici whispered in my Mam’s ear. They were hugging. Red lipstick was smudged on Cici’s upper lip.

Behind them my old man shouted: ‘If ya don’t get your arse in gear, we’ll miss the fucken bus, woman!’

Cici ran her fingers along Mam’s face. They kissed again — on the cheek this time — and then my parents were gone. The old man was drumming his fingers on the seat in front of him, a jazz beat. He didn’t look back as the bus took off. He said ‘yeah’ over and over again in a slow saxophone way. It was as if New York clubs already existed in his throat. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ He kept on drumming and he didn’t give a second thought to it, the leaping tears on my Mam’s face as the driver crunched through the gears and down another road, another long road in the roll of themselves, leading them to New York.

I moved away from the vision, walked through Jackson Hole. There were tourists in abundance. A gunfight was being re-enacted as theatre down near the market, little red eyes of video cameras blinking around it. In the distance, trees ran on one another’s backs all the way up the mountains. Birds sang out, marking their territory. I knew the search for Mam had become hopeless and, besides, I would soon run out of money. I found a cabin to rent on the road near the Snake River. Weedy and tumbledown, a few wild cats perched on orange crates in the yard, parts of an old windmill, an engine block on which wood had once been chopped. At the back of the cabin I wore a trail in the grass, all the way to the water’s edge. It was so high above sea level that satellites could be seen making paths, clusters of stars shuttling and winking, and once an eclipse which gave the moon an incredible penumbra.

I forged a Social Security number and found a job cleaning swimming pools, diatomaceous clay under my nails, leaves lifted out from filters, blue-ribbed vacuums used after shocking pools with chlorine. In the winter the ski lifts made caterpillar-shapes up the slopes and I sold tickets. More than three years were spent like this, patching my cabin, fixing water pipes, climbing hills, walking, rafting rivers, watching birthdays pass, still wondering about Mam.

Kutch turned out to be my neighbour. Short black hair and a face that could have come from a gargoyle, full of stitches and welts — he had once been involved in a dam-bombing accident. He and Eliza lived in an abandoned railway carriage. For a living they fashioned benches out of fallen logs and sold them to trendy stores in Cheyenne. Mother and son together, I envied them their closeness. Eliza worked on the benches, chiselling, carving, long brown fingers moving softly over wood. Kutch learned from her, imitated her patterns. Sometimes they went out driving and chopped down billboards together, spiked trees, destroyed bulldozers, left red fists on them. Red fists abounded. Even on the fire tower — which Kutch showed me that first autumn — they had painted a mural. Boysenberry red, the thumbnail intricate and dark, the wrist sidling off into an arm, lofting its way over the trees and the mountains, thrusting up amongst the circling hawks. Beneath it the words, in a black oval sweep: ‘No Compromise in the Defense of Mother Earth.’

I sometimes drove Kutch and Eliza around in their pickup as they did their eco-guerrilla stunts. I never did anything myself, never drew any fists or poured sugar in any tank, paralysed by my own inaction.

They chopped down a row of billboards in Utah, a long line of advertisements with a ridiculous painting of a penguin on them, miles and miles of inanities that scarred the land. I sat waiting in the driver’s seat, parked on the verge, and we got chased by an unmarked car, a red light flashing on its roof. Eliza and Kutch jumped in the back bed of the truck, the acetylene torch still flaring, and I sped off. Through the rear sliding window, Eliza put her brown wrinkled hand on my upper arm and squeezed tight until we drew away safely, in the dark. When we got back to Wyoming she kissed me on the forehead and said I was welcome anytime to come live with them in their railway carriage, that they had a spare room. But I liked my solitude. I’ve always liked my solitude.

Eliza showed me how to work on benches, told me old legends as we worked. With a chisel I carved out intricate patterns in fallen trees, her tales swirling around me. She made tea, and we listened to old flute music — it seemed to lift the cabin into the air. I sometimes stared at her for a long time as she worked, beads at her neck, furrows of concentration in her brow. She returned the look, silently.

I was out walking in the late-winter snow when I found the two dead coyotes hung on the fencepost. I stared for a while, then hurried back and got Eliza and Kutch. They pulled on their coats as they walked down the trail after me. Eliza clipped the coyotes down from where they hung. Carted the bodies back to her cabin. She took their teeth out and made some bracelets — one set of teeth was old and gnawed down, the other young and sharp. Afterwards she and Kutch brought the stiff bodies up to the forest, laid them out on the ground, left them there to manure themselves back into America. Eliza told me the old legend about the birth of the universe, the yammering-in of the world. I trudged home under the blanket-black night, the snow reflecting off the ground, went back to my cabin, took out my photo album, flicked through it. It had become a habit of mine, looking at the album.

I would rise from my chair, step out the door, look at the Wyoming sky, the thump of creation, and then I’d take another step forward on to the edge of the porch, and I would walk my way slowly into old photographs.

* * *

The first of them is a street, a Bronx tenement street, hermetically sealed at the end of the 1950s. The street loops itself into a red-brick cul-de-sac. At the end of the road there’s a commotion. It’s a summer’s day and boys are wearing bathing togs and running back and forth through a geyser of water erupting from a broken fire hydrant. Their hair is very short, their bodies scrawny and white. One teenager, with a few tufts of hair in bloom on his chest, is in the middle of a huge leap through the water, arms held out wide, his fingers spread, a roar on his lips, eyebrows arched, rack of ribs exposed. The girls aren’t allowed to put on bathing suits — this is a Catholic street — but some of them run through the water anyway, in long dresses which cling to their thighs. Along the side of the street a football is in mid-motion, heading towards a girl who looks shocked. A woman with a face like a trout peers from beyond the edge of the spray.

In the far background of the photograph a group of men and women are gathered on the steps outside a house. Only by walking into the photograph, going beyond the rim and up very close, can you make out their faces. They are Irish immigrants. Their clothes and expressions tell you that. Flat hats and grey trousers held up with suspenders. Some of them are sharing cigarettes, laughing, breaking out a melodeon, peeling labels off bottles that come from jacket pockets. They are fetching Galway and Dublin and Leitrim and Donegal from the bottom end of these bottles — and toasts are being made, or have been made. A toast to new arrivals who come hugging their suitcases with ash-wood hurleys strapped on the side. A toast to strange billboards that flash out new neon signs over the Bronx. A toast to a boxer who puts away journeymen heavyweights. A toast to the fire hydrant and the leaping boy. And maybe a toast to the big grey figure of Eisenhower, who will soon put a big chunk of metal up high in the air.

They have no names when I walk up to meet them, these immigrants. But I know their jobs — a list which, when converted to spittle at the edge of a tongue, could fill a keg — mechanics, maids, doormen, waitresses, line cooks, roofers, plumbers, garbage men, dishwashers, furnace foreman, doughnut maker in the morning, security guard at night, pint-puller, scrap buyer, dogcatcher, junk seller, shoeshiner, secretary, policeman who doesn’t ticket his own, fireman with a sprig of plastic shamrock in his helmet, landscaper, taxi driver, peddler, telephonist. They are watching their children play in the water. ‘He’s a wild one, that same fella.’ ‘Wouldn’t she break your heart?’ ‘Look at the head of hair on him.’ The men remember a time when they were boys. They made footballs from the bladders of pigs, but the shape of footballs has changed in this country, no longer round. Their sons often come home in colourful high-school jackets and it’s a strange language that they speak, quarterbacks and sackings. The men are wondering whether the ball, in its mid-flight twirl, will be caught. The women watch their daughters down by the fire hydrant and worry about how high their skirts are being lifted. The new leather shoes might get damp and unshape themselves. One mother is worried that the ball is heading towards her daughter, and maybe a joke rises up in her mind that her daughter is so clumsy that she hasn’t even caught the measles yet, how could she catch anything else?

Mam is wedged in between two rather fat women. Her blouse is white and opened down to the fourth button so that a man in a flat hat above her is leaning over, trying to peep down into the cleavage. It might be a bit bony for his taste. She has lost a lot of weight in the Bronx. She has a tendency to sit at the dinner table and push the food around on her plate, the fork clanging tinnily. Her arms are cartilaginous. A hip-bone juts from the dress. Her neck is a brown stalk of rhubarb with its long striations. The dark hair is pulled back, ribboned in red. She is on the bottom stoop with her hands placed carefully in her lap, one over the other. They are hands that have been doing laundry all day. She works with a family from Tipperary who still keep the letters ‘CHINESE LAUNDRY’ over the door, inspiring jokes about the slanty eyes and yellow skin of the Irish rednecks. Mam’s eyes are drawn down to her hands. Long and water-wrinkled, they have been scrubbing for many hours. Remnants of white washing powder under the nails. The tops of the fingers are puffy and the skin is loose from so much water. It is strange the patterns that are made in her hands. The fingerprint lines seem to become much more prominent, so that the rings at the top of each finger are bigger to the eye. Maps on her fingers. Far away, a boy named Miguel could lodge dirt in the fingernails and make a work of art from it. Mexican earth, the good earth.

A salesman has called earlier that evening, selling hand cream. She has bought a bottle of it. Salesmen are always calling at their door, at night. They have very short hair and perfect trouser creases and fabulous pitches in their voices — selling vacuum cleaners, knife sharpeners, wireless radios, kitchen tiles, kettles, ironing boards — and a lot of notes change fists. A great street for salesmen. People here talk a lot about new kitchen machinery. The lemon scent on her hands rises up to her nostrils, and she is glad that she bought it, although money is fairly tight these days. Money is like that flock of birds that arrived last night just as an old Hoagy Carmichael song jumped out of the radio. The birds arrived on the very first strain of ‘Ol’ Buttermilk Sky,’ flittered through it, left when the song ended. When they took off there were a lot of bird droppings on the ground outside the door. Money is like that flock of birds, Mam might think. You notice it when it’s not around. But if you have enough money you can get away, fly off, as many do.

Removal trucks sometimes arrive, and many jealous stares follow the lifting of the furniture, off to a street in a wealthy part of Brooklyn, or Queens, or Long Island, a road lined with trees and motor cars, where there might be a few Italians or Jews as well. Or even some of her own.

Mam is just about smiling as she looks down at her hands. It is not an unhappy smile, just a little lost on her face. Maybe she’s wondering what she’s doing here. Wondering what has led her to this. Wondering if life is manufactured by a sense of place, if happiness is dependent on soil, if it is an accident of circumstance that a woman is born in a certain country, and that the weather that gives birth to the soil also gives birth to the unfathomable intricacies of the heart. Wondering if there is a contagion to sadness. Or an entropy to love. Or maybe Mam isn’t thinking this way at all. Maybe she is wondering about the sheer banalities of her day, what she will cook for dinner, what end of the kitchen table she will do her ironing on, when she will get time to wash the white tablecloth, if she should put some aloe on her husband’s hands, hands that are now out of the photograph, pressing down on a button that will open a shutter.

The old man is hot-roofing these days because he cannot make enough money from his photographs for them to live on. He hates the job, but it’s all he can find. The Wyoming photographs come back from publishers with courteous notes, not even signed. Mam doesn’t like the idea of him being on a roof. Brutal work, carrying buckets of hot tar. She doesn’t like the man who runs the company either, Mangan, a sly-eyed man who drives around in an old Ford truck, ladders jutting from it. The company is called Koala-T Roofing Company, with a picture painted on the side, an impish koala holding a bucket. Mangan doesn’t pay very well and when my father comes home she has to scrape the globs of dried tar from his forearms. ‘Koala-T, me arse!’ he shouts. Sometimes he curses and slams his fists down on the table — ‘I want to take photos! Not do this shit! Do you understand me!’ and she must soothe him and sometimes get in front of his camera. She is wondering if perhaps he will take more photographs tonight and be happy for that. I stand in front of her and ask: Are ya happy, Mam? She doesn’t reply. But there is something in her that says: Well, yes, I am happy here, I suppose I’m happy, but I’d be happier elsewhere.

I drift off from the group again and hear the leaping boy still screaming in delight by the fire hydrant.

Not a lot is going on in Mam’s life. Sometimes, on a day off from the laundry, she goes into New York City on the subway and tries on red hats in the Fifth Avenue department stores, wanders around through acres of perfume and cosmetics and fineries. The ladies behind the counter soon realise she isn’t buying and leave her alone. She moves gracefully through the stores, fingering things, acquiring them for the briefest of moments, lays them down again, moves out into the street, where she walks through the traffic to sit in the rear of St Patrick’s Cathedral. In the silence she reincarnates herself — nothing too romantic, a grackle maybe. She settles down on a telegraph pole in her hometown, looks around. Swoops down and takes the host from the mestizo priest’s fingers. Takes off again into coloured winds. Revisits a house. Darts along dry streets. Strange to be a bird. Strange how hollow your bones become.

And how curious it is that she hasn’t heard from Cici in so long. The last time Cici wrote, she was on a train heading west, slamming through flatlands. She scribbled from a boxcar, where light filtered through in slants, and a mad red-faced hobo shared Spam sandwiches with her. It was a short letter and Mam read it so often that she began to incant parts of it in her mind like a church prayer: I miss you very much, Juanita, keep smiling, it paints the world well, I will see you very soon. There is something about Cici that makes the world worth living. Mam thinks about her often — it’s not so much that she wants to kiss her again as just simply see her, reassure herself that Cici really existed, that there was a time of such splendid happiness, that there might be one again.

Most of Mam’s other times are spent in quiet exactitude in her apartment, cleaning, arranging, putting things back in their proper places, meticulous, proud. When she talks she has the strangest lilt of half-Irish, half-Mexican accent. People seem to enjoy her company. She has stories to tell about chickens and a far-off country. And another world of fires and a tower. Yet the secret part of her — the photos in their bedroom — is well hidden from view, behind lace curtains on the third floor, where pigeons sometimes nestle at the windowsill. The only time that her husband seems to be truly at peace is when he’s taking those photos. They’re not obscene, not in any way. They make him content. It’s a small enough price for Mam to pay, and it’s an attention of sorts. He is still in love with her. He still makes a temple from her body — even though it’s much like a minaret now.

She remains looking at her hands as I ghost my way through the photograph and try to say things to the people around her. They are busy with their bottles and their dreams of appliances, so I step back through the shot and up the street. For time immemorial, that boy will be leaping. And I will never know if the ball was caught. And the trout-faced woman will continue to stare.

I move on down towards the end of the cul-de-sac, nod to my father as his fingers press on the shutter button, but he doesn’t nod back. I step out again, on to a black rim and into a night scene.

It is 1960, and a few young men are dancing with my mother. There is a radio set up under a windowsill and an Elvis Presley song is swivelling from it. It is apparent in the euphoric movement of the young men’s hips that a new decade is just under way. They have the beginnings of copycat quiffs on their heads. A boy with a harelip purses his mouth, as if he might kiss the moon, my mother dancing just a few feet from him. The boy wears drainpipe trousers, a purple shirt, pomade in his hair, and he is twirling imaginary hula-hoops around his groin. She is clicking her fingers. All along the cul-de-sac, bunting is up for the election of a man whose portrait sits on virtually every wall, green, white, and orange ribbons hung underneath his chin like a colourful goatee — John F. Kennedy with his perfect teeth, vying on the walls with the Pope and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It must be a happy night for Mam, because her cheeks are flush with alcohol and her face is made-up, eyelashes curled, mascara carefully applied. Her eyes are open very wide and brown. Her thin body is in the middle of a twist, so that one shoulder is lower than the other and her chest nudges up against her blouse. I walk out there to go dancing. It’s hot and muggy, a humid night in late autumn. I twirl my hips, too. I move with abandon. She says to me: When are you going to get rid of that stupid earring, Conor? I take it out and give it to her, and she smiles.

I ask and she says that nothing much has changed. The laundry has grown bigger and new employees have been taken on. Other girls doing the scrubbing now. My father is still on the roofs, and the tar docks itself under his fingers. His forty-second birthday was spent above the Bronx — jokes being made about Marilyn Monroe and those who like it hot. Cici has written to her, raving about marijuana, but she hasn’t visited yet. Cici would like it here, out moving in the night, with moths flaring around under lamplights, dancers in a bouquet around a radio, the grind of hips, the swivel of words. It’s her sort of place — except Cici might be aware that there’s even newer music on its way, runnelling along over the continent, newer ideas, newer dances. Mam has a bead of sweat on her brow. Maybe she will wait for it to negotiate its way down her face to where she can tongue it. Or maybe not. Maybe she will wipe it off with a quick flick of the hand. Or maybe it will stay there eternally, a bead of sweat to say: I was dancing once, when I was thirty-three years old, and I didn’t have a care in the world.

Outside the photograph, my father is slickly dressed in a white shirt that smells of barsmoke. His dark tie is open and the long end of it reaches past his waist. Hair is quite thin now, furrows of it across his scalp. He is glad to watch his wife dance. He is afraid that life is becoming staid, he doesn’t like the roofs. There are days when he goes searching for other jobs, something in a press syndicate, or a newspaper, but all he ever gets are a few freelance shifts. He just wants to take his photographs, but there’s not much opportunity for that. The world rotates on an axis of what-ifs? What if we were somewhere else? What if we sauntered off and just didn’t come back?

But, for now, he enjoys the music coming from the radio. The men on the roofs sometimes sing Presley, their favourite being ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’

While he stands to take this particular photograph his foot is tapping, but he has to stop so as not to jolt the camera. A million light cells have just burst from the flash. I walk through them, packets of light swarming around me, and out the other side, back into the nineties, where the sun is going down over the Teton mountains. I cannot help this wandering backwards. It is my own peculiar curse.

Their apartment has a bedroom and a living room — but it is in this bedroom that all the living is done. I feel queasy about stepping into this private domain, a voyeur, a Peeping Tom. The room is painted mauve. It is two years on. Mam is in a white summer dress and she is lying on a chaise-longue that they’ve rescued from the rubbish. The chaise has carved feet that curve and bend and give it elegance, but the material is ripped and tatty, bits of stuffing come out from it. She lies, as if on a throne. The dress is purposefully off the shoulder. It falls down and exposes the top half of a dark nipple. The shot is loaded with more sexuality than almost any of the others — something to do with its casualness. Despite the skinniness, she looks good. Her feet are stretched in front of her and it seems like she is contemplating her toes. She is chewing on the end of a pen and a sheet of paper is propped up on her stomach. I imagine that she is writing to Cici. I step over to see what she is saying on the page: I miss the fires. Don’t you? The last letter that Mam received was very strange — Cici had been exalting marijuana, going into rhapsodies about acid. What does marijuana make you feel like? Mam might be writing. I have heard it makes you sick, true? The end of the pen is so well chewed that it looks as if she simply sinks her teeth into it, but in this photo she is kissing it, lost in thought, thick lips pursed upon it. She wears no jewellery, only her wedding ring. Her body sweeps away from her in the photograph, along the chaise-longue, a sheet of paper flying in the breeze.

He likes the pose, my father, he is enjoying the capture of it. He is up on the balls of his toes, shouting, Perfect! Perfect! Hold it right there! He is fresh from a shower and feels good about the world. This will be one of the best shots. He sweeps his fingers over his balding scalp and shouts, Hold it! Maybe he will put on a gallery exhibition in an avant-garde place, he thinks, show her to the world. Fifteen years of Mam — in Mexico, in Wyoming, in New York. He is very excited about the idea, which will never come to fruition. But for now he is happy with the vision of it.

Her lips are kissing the end of the pen, and she’s glad that her husband isn’t throwing a fit and that there is something quite smooth and secretive to the grey light that is filtering its way through the curtains, the rays seeming to bend as they hit a dusty mirror. She won’t remain in this apartment for ever, she thinks, but at least it isn’t too bad. The cream is still working on her hands. It has given them a certain softness. There is a small amount of money in the bank. Things she had never dreamed of — toasters and televisions — have begun to fill the empty spaces in the apartment. Even some Spanish speakers have come to the street now, from near the Atacama Desert in Chile. She spends time with them, looks after their baby. There are still some days when my father whispers that he will bring her home to Mexico. She is sitting back, relaxed, writing her letter, and I leave her there, in that peculiar peace, my father shouting, Here we go, Juanita! Yeah! Yeah!

I move away from them, out of their bedroom, and into a print given to me by Cici.

It is 1964. The camera must have been held out by Cici at the distance of an outstretched arm, because it is a lopsided close-up. It shows only their faces and the tops of their clothes, their cheeks touching against one another. Cici has hitch-hiked all the way across the country from San Francisco. She looks exhilarated, her pupils set high in the rims of her eyes. The acne crevices have been darkened in from her spell out on the open roads — in the nudist camps, the psychedelic buses, the growing lines of war protests, last year’s march to Washington, the hailing-to-the-sky of Martin Luther King.

The top of a bright t-shirt peeps out from the bottom edge. Mam’s hair is loose on her shoulders. Disembodied, I float in. The kitchen is full of sparkling pans. Some water boiling on the stove. The Rolling Stones on the radio. A familiar smell drifts up from the table where Mam and Cici are sitting. I am amazed to find myself staring at a joint, burning itself down in the ashtray. Cici has been smoking. Maybe my mother has, too, but I doubt it. A tumble of words from them — Cici asking Mam to join her for a while, even just for a holiday, that they’ll caress the road, maybe meet up with some Sonoran gypsies, eat peyote, go down over the border together.

‘Come with me, man,’ she says.

‘Why you call me “man”?’

‘Why not?’

The offer is tempting. This touching of hair, this touching of cheek, this apparition of Cici again in her life.

‘And Michael?’

‘What about him?’

The joint is held between lips and there is an uproar of laughter. Cici’s head is jerked towards the fridge, which up until an hour ago Mam had been proud of. But Cici has quoted a novelist talking about ‘dumb white machinery,’ and the fridge is not quite so magical to her anymore. Cici says that the dope has made her hungry, and again they laugh. There is a hand laid on a hand and the two of them look at the camera.

Cici says, ‘Cheese!’

But there is a secret behind all of this and, afterwards, when I extend the rim of the photograph and follow them into the living room, Mam tells her about it.

‘I am going to have a baby,’ Mam says eventually, smiling, ‘Michael and I are going to have baby.’

Cici tugs hard on the joint.

‘That’s lovely,’ she says, and suddenly a serpentine sweep of roads rises up in her mind, away from here. Her hands are shaking a little. ‘I’m very happy for you.’ She goes outside and sits on the step. Mam stays in the living room. The baby’s been there for three months. I can imagine her running her hands very lovingly over her stomach, talking to the child that hasn’t even begun to move within her yet, waiting for the faint soothing thump of life against the wall of her womb. When Cici comes inside, her face flushed, she finds Mam in the kitchen, making bread.

‘Come with me.’

‘Michael will be back soon.’

‘He can come, too, man.’

‘I told you, I am going to have a baby.’

‘You want a baby to grow up in this shit?’ Cici’s arms fly towards the window.

‘No.’

‘Then, come on.’

‘Later I will ask to Michael.’

‘Aww, man.’

Mam watches from the window as Cici leaves that afternoon, the photograph tucked in her pocket. Cici carries her belongings in a grey duffle bag. Mam moves from the window, and maybe she turns on the television set to watch a famous game show, or maybe she kneads more dough, or maybe she stares at her hair in the mirror, thinking it could be the last she will see of Cici.

The baby follows Cici’s example — comes far too late, leaves way too early. On an evening of torpor, Mam loses the child. The old man is coming back from the roofs. He carries an apple tart up the stairs of the apartment, the smell wafting around him. He is happy, for once, with his day’s work. When he opens the door she is lying in a pool of blood on the bathroom floor. He drops the apple tart. His feet slide in the blood. She is unconscious with her head slumped against the wall. He lifts her to her feet, whispering, Sweet Jesus, sweet Jesus. On the way down to the street a dark patch of red insinuates itself into the front of his shirt, where he carries her. He brings her to hospital, and the dead child propels them on to a year of misery. She comes home from the hospital, hand held to her belly. They don’t talk much. A lethargy hangs in the air. Some nights my father finds that she has disappeared from the apartment and he pulls on his belted overcoat to go searching, finds my mother down at the maternity ward of the hospital, staring in through the glass window at babies, with nurses trying to gently steer her away. She spends money on baby clothes. She carries a soother in her purse. Sometimes she is torn towards going to find Cici. Mam writes a letter to her friend: ‘Regretting is expensive, sometimes I wish I had gone with you.’

The old man stays on the roofs, but they both know that they will have to move on. And they do move on — towards the west of Ireland. He suggests that it will be a good place for Mam to recover, that there may still be some money left over in the bank, he can get a job easily there, he can take photographs, there is some land that was never sold. They can try again for a family. They will have a child, maybe two, maybe three — whatever she wants. After that, he says, they will make their home in Mexico.

‘Promise?’

‘I promise.’

‘Ireland is far.’

‘I know, love.’

‘We will be all right?’

‘Of course.’

‘And then we come back to Mexico?’

‘Of course.’

When they leave the street, the old man relishes the triumph of it. He sways his way down along the pavement with the suitcases in either hand. He has arranged for the taxi to meet them at the end of the street. There is more drama that way for the old man — walk the full length of the street.

He wears a grey tweed jacket in the airport, a white dog rose in the breast pocket, the hat devoid now of its rabbits’ feet. Mam has bought a brand-new strawberry dress. She is radiant on the airplane, a stewardess marvelling at her accent. They move onwards and backwards — always onwards and, for the first time backwards — to a place where some wisps of grey De Valera mist still hang, although it is the winter of 1966 and all over the country other mists are being dispersed. They have difficulty in Shannon because my mother doesn’t have a visa, but my father bribes the immigration official with a twenty-dollar bill. He is home free. He is walking gigantically again. A great swagger out through the airport, arms swinging, pushing the suitcases on a trolley with his foot. Mam beside him. They take a bus to Mayo. There’s some money left in the account, but no land, and they must take out a mortage to buy an old farmhouse — Guinness bottles among nettles in the garden, windows cracked in the shed, an old bathtub in the courtyard, wisteria growing upwards with the years. Mam settles down in much the same way as their new bathtub — a shiny anachronism. She is the dark-skinned one, the one the drunks in the town square call Senorita, the one who never cuts her hair even when it becomes long and brazenly silver. She wears a scarf over her head as she goes to mass in the red-brick church. Letters to Cici are returned, unopened. In America the war protests are in full flight, and Cici is rampant around the country with a flower on her cheek, elephant flares covering her sandals, hypodermic needles stuck blithely in her arm. But Mam knows nothing of this, and she waits for letters.

Mam lingers in the farmhouse, eyes to the bog, spending years this way, slow as Sundays, longing constantly for a child’s movement in her belly. I am to be born four years later, when she’s forty-two years old, and as a precautionary measure the doctors slice open her belly for a Caesarian section. The old man waits in the hospital corridors, gently tapping his heel on the floor, hat propped on his knee, bobbing.

* * *

An array of equipment neatly lined in front of him — silver tinsel, purple and golden floss, blue chatterer feathers, some yellow seal’s fur, a hot-orange hackle, tiny golden-pheasant feathers, some black thread, very black, riverblack. He pointed each one out to me, hand hovering over them. Most of it had arrived in the package this morning, from an angling shop in Dublin.

He told me that brighter flies work better in dark waters, that the salmon will rise at the sight of colours.

Curious thing, though, he said that salmon don’t eat when they’re in rivers, they’re just conditioned to respond — if you catch them they’ve nothing in their bellies. And when they leap it’s not out of any happiness, it’s just to move up fast water or to get rid of sea lice. But they’re clever bastards, he said — they know the real thing when they see it, and a badly made fly is about as good as a Hail Mary in an air raid.

I pulled up an old crate and sat down, the deep lengthy smell of him around me.

‘Ya don’t overdress it,’ he said, pointing at the hook, ‘otherwise it collects too much water. But a big fly means a big fish, it’s all about balance.’

He was having difficulty with a knot.

‘D’ya need some help there?’

‘Nah, I’m grand, I could do this with my eyes closed.’

He wound two small chatterer feathers back to back. ‘For the tail,’ he explained.

I noticed how much bigger his hands were than mine. They had stopped shaking and worked with precision. He reversed the hook in the vice and leaned down into it, sometimes with his glasses on, sometimes without, a bit frustrated. ‘Fucken hell’s bells,’ he said, ‘here,’ and he handed me a slim pair of scissors, got me to cut off some of the excess thread. ‘Get in here now, closer.’ I was surprised to see that he didn’t smoke at all.

He made the body of the insect, wound on a long slender feather, and then he worked on the throat and the wing, put some golden-pheasant feathers on each side. He stacked the hairs so they looked wing-like. ‘Ya give the fuckers as much life as possible,’ he said. I handed him the hackle pliers, the scissors, and the tweezers. He enumerated each one as we went along. He had a large darning needle stuck into a sherry-bottle cork for the bodkin. And a thimble made from an old lipstick container that must have belonged to Mam. Each time I handed him something he nodded up and down, wheezed, approximating a thanks. But the rest of the time his breathing was still and even, in full and splendid concentration at the making of the fly — it was turning out something like a miniature Indian headress, threads and feathers and tippets. I thought of Kutch and Eliza, maybe bringing one of the flies back to them as a present.

When he finished the first one he gave me a thumbs-up. ‘That’ll do,’ he said, ‘we’ll see if the bastard can resist this.’ He walked around the barn for a while, the coat on, strutting around, sniffing at the air, wiping his hands.

He hummed a tune, rubbing the air against his lips. Sometimes he stopped to place the feathers in his mouth, or asked me to wipe bits of glue from the fly, or catch a piece of waxed thread coming through a loop, pick up dropped pieces from the floor, clip and taper, wind some floss around the shank. He pursed his lips into the melody again, the rise and fall of it around us as he showed me a few little tricks, how to tie in the tinsel tags, merge the colours into one another, make the head of the fly with black thread. Time moved with the rhythm of an insect wing — it struck me how a second of an insect’s life might be a decade of ours, the whole world shattered into prisms of vision, the concentrate of living, the vitality of each instant — and the old man could have been creating both the brevity and length of time. The hum became immutable so that I forgot it was there, sunk down into soundlessness.

It was evening when he finally stood up, put the last fly in his hat, donned it, said, ‘I’m fucken starving, young fella, come on, let’s go.’

He put the other flies in the tray and closed the lid. We went up to the house and there were midges out — he used to be able to dress up a midge, he said, but they’re too small and difficult for him nowadays.

I cooked some spaghetti and sauce. ‘Do I look bloody Italian?’ he said, but he ate it with relish, talked about flies, an assembly line of chatter coming from him. Told me that some old guy in Donegal a hundred years ago was the first to make colourful ones, butterflies, made himself a fortune doing it too. He used to put feathers in donkey piss so they wouldn’t lose their dye. Could tie them with one hand behind his back. Someone even brought him over to London to lecture on them. There was genius in making colours for dark water. My father rattled on, intermittently stopping for a cough or to blow his nose, the words flowing from him again. At one stage, over pasta falling from his fork, he pointed at me sternly: ‘Tell ya what though, the only mark of a good fly is when ya catch something. That’s the long and short of it. Ya can make pretty ones until the cows come home, but if ya don’t catch you’re just taking a lash in the wind.’

After the food we had a few cups of tea and his hands started a little bit of the tremens. Went up to the room, said he’d fish the big one tomorrow.

When I followed him up he was trying to tie himself another fly in bed, but he needed the vice, and he just laid the wooden tray down at the edge of the mattress.

The flowery sheets were drawn around him. He started hacking up into an old handkerchief, which he folded very precisely after each spit into it. Turned it over and rubbed along it with his fingers as if he were enclosing a very important letter. Mucus oozed out the side at one stage, and he opened the hanky and re-folded it, twirling up the edges. He seemed fettered in by the room, turning his eyes to both walls, the ceiling, and back to the walls again, which seem to have buckled under the weight of the house. I sat by the bed.

‘Did ya hear that?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘There was a knock on the door.’

‘No there wasn’t.’

‘Go down and see who’s at the bloody door,’ he said. ‘Maybe the postman again.’

‘At this hour?’

I went over to the window and lifted it, stuck my head out.

‘Nobody there.’

‘I could have sworn I heard someone,’ he said.

‘Nobody.’

‘Maybe it’s Mrs McCarthy,’ he said.

‘No, nobody.’

‘Go on down and check, for fucksake.’

A smell filled the room and I knew straight away why he had been trying to send me downstairs. The smell suffocated its way through the air, blocking out everything, the acridness of his breath, the unbathed effluvium of his body. He had some matches by his bed and he rolled over and struck one, coughed on it to blow it out, but I knew what he was doing, and even after the sulphur filtered off, the odour remained, hovered, mocked him with its pungency.

‘Leave me alone,’ he said suddenly.

He lay back in the bed with an almost theatrical gesture of labour, but I told him that I just wanted to sit there for a while. He gave a quick flick of his head as if bothered by a real insect this time, reached across, flipped on his bedside radio. It gave out a steady diet of foreign wars and dying. He cursed and turned it off, leaned into his handkerchief, brought up another ream. His forehead was wrinkled in pain, and he put his hand on mine and said, ‘Conor.’

I said: ‘Yeah, Dad?’

It’s the first time in years I’ve called him Dad, but he didn’t seem to notice.

‘That was a grand time, dressing the flies.’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

He shifted his body in bed and asked me for a smoke.

‘Don’t think you should.’

‘Look, I’m all right, okay? Haven’t had one all day. That’s a record.’

‘They’re killing ya.’

He coughed again: ‘Wonderful. Let them kill me so. They’re over there by the bedside table.’

I reached across but the packet was empty. He told me there were some downstairs, under the sink, he hides a few packets away for emergencies. Said to make sure to get the ones that were fresh, some of them had been down there since time immemorial and might crackle to the touch. I don’t know why, but I went down and got a packet, they were tucked way in at the back of the cupboard. When I came back upstairs he had propped himself up against the pillows — ‘Lovely, oh lovely, now you’re talking’ — and I turned one upside-down in the packet, the way he does for luck, handed him one. He never smokes with the wedding-ring hand, always keeps it in the right one, perched between his fingers.

‘Sure, a puff now and then does nobody any harm.’

I waited until he had finished, in case he fell asleep and brought the house down with him, another fire, another echo. He pushed himself back against the bed and I heard him letting go again, but I pretended nothing had happened.

‘I’ll get Doctor Moloney out tomorrow morning,’ I said.

‘You will not.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s Sunday tomorrow and, besides, I won’t have anyone shoving anything up me rectum.’

I laughed.

‘What’s so funny?’ he asked.

‘Oh, nothing really.’

‘I heard they do that in San Francisco these days,’ he said.

I was a little startled and thought for a moment of Cici in her whitewhite city. ‘Do what?’ I said.

‘Shove strange things up beyond.’

‘What d’ya mean?’

‘Gerbils and the like.’

He chugged on the cigarette. ‘They said it on the TV. I was up at all hours one night, watching.’

‘You watch TV these days?’

He took a moment to reply, held his hand to his temple, scratched the bald spot. ‘Times have changed.’

‘You used to hate it.’

‘Every now and then in the winter.’ He scrunched up his eyebrows.

‘How about a glass of hot whiskey to make you sleep?’

‘Nah,’ he said, ‘I’m content with this,’ dropping the ash into the cup of his hand, then letting it fall out on the floor.

I stubbed the butt end out for him and, just before he lay over to sleep, he sat up and leaned his head against my shoulder. I moved in closer to him, put my hand at the back of his head. When he pulled back from my shoulder there was a little bit of phlegm on my t-shirt. I didn’t want to move, but he saw it and, using the handkerchief, he started to wipe if off.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he said, ‘ah, Jesus.’

He rolled over to the far side of the bed, pretending he was sleeping. I picked up the wooden tray with all the flies in it, worked away at one of my own for an hour or so, trying to wind some thread on the shank, but couldn’t find the knack, kept dropping the damn thing. It seemed impossible, so finely tuned and delicate. I looked at the flies he had made during the day. They lay there in waiting, ready to burst into flight, and I took two small chatterer wings and flipped them together between my fingers as he dozed off.