Years later, in America, I was told that Navajo Indians believed coyotes ushered in the Big Bang of the world with their song, stood on the rim of nothingness, before time, shoved their pointed muzzles in the air, and howled the world into existence at their feet. The Indians called them songdogs. The universe was etched with their howls, sound merging into sound, the beginning of all other songs. Long ago, when they told me their stories about Mexico, Mam and Dad, I believed they were true. And I suppose I still do. They were my songdogs — my mother by the washing line, my father flailing his way against the current. They tried very hard to tell me how much they had been in love with one another, how good life had been, that coyotes really did exist and sing in the universe of themselves on their wedding day. And maybe they did. Maybe there was a tremendous howl that reached its way all across the desert. But the past is a place that is full of energy and imagination. In remembering, we can distil the memory down. We can manage our universe by stuffing it into the original quark, the point of burstingness.
It’s the lethargy of the present that terrifies us all. The slowness, the mundanity, the sheer plod of each day. Like my endless hours spent strolling through Mexico. And my father’s constant casting these days. His own little songdog noise of a fishing line whisking its way through the air.
* * *
When the old man came back to the house he surprised me. ‘Sorry,’ I said, leaning the mop up against the door, ‘I was miles away.’ He nodded, rubbed his fingers along his scalp. He was amazed at the floor. It didn’t shine, but if he drops the fork again, it won’t get quite so dirty. ‘Not a peep from the big one today,’ he said, as he hung up his coat on the peg inside the door, a blade of grass stuck to the side of the sleeve. He opened his lunchbox with a dramatic gesture of the hand, a sweep to the ceiling. I was gobsmacked to see a small trout in the box, maybe a one-pounder. Some fish in the river, after all. I told him that it mightn’t be too healthy, all that fertiliser and shit dumped by the farmers and the meat factory, but he raised his eyes to the ceiling.
‘Get a grip,’ he said to me, ‘you and all the other greenies. The river’s clean as a fucken whistle.’
He gutted the fish with the long kitchen knife, hooked his finger in to pull out the guts, ran it under the tapwater, made himself a nice fillet. I told him I wasn’t eating any but he said he didn’t give a damn, he’d cook it anyway. He prepared it in the skillet and took his place at the table, ate quickly, lit himself a cigarette.
‘So what did ya do all day?’
‘I told you, I cleaned the floor.’
‘Oh.’ He rose up to flip on the radio, decided against it, leaned against the sink, put out the smoke on the wall of his teacup: ‘I mean, after that, what did you do after that?’
‘It took all day.’
‘It’s nice and skiddy anyway,’ he said, taking one stockinged foot out of his slippers and gliding it along the tiles. ‘I hope I don’t fall and break me neck.’
From the kitchen window I watched the wind roll through the long grasses at the edge of the laneway, the blades bent, supplicants to the river.
The marmalade cat seems awful fond of him — she was rubbing her spine against the back of his calves after he fed her the fish head. She’s a stray, he said, wandered in a month ago after another one died, came up to him and started purring. He doesn’t seem to have a name for her, just calls her Cat. Picked her up from the floor and started stroking her with a long, hard, heavy roll of his hand, as if that might stop the trembling of his own fingers. She was looking for more food, meowing away. ‘Aren’t ya full yet, Cat?’ All of a sudden he looked up from her, eyes reduced to dark wrinkled slivers, and said: ‘They come and go these days like you wouldn’t believe.’
I followed him as he lumbered up the stairs, the floorboards creaking away. ‘Goodnight so. Ya did a grand job on the floor.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Tomorrow’ll be a fine one.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Red sky at night.’
‘It wasn’t too red.’
‘Ah, it was a bit red anyway,’ he said, scrubbing his glasses on his shirt.
‘I’ll get some more cleaning done tomorrow.’
‘Don’t be doing that, for crissake.’
‘What?’
‘You’re like an oul’ woman, cleaning. A bit of dust never did anyone any harm.’
‘I suppose.’
‘It’ll be a perfect day for fishing,’ he said.
‘Perfect.’
‘Conor?’ he said, on the landing. ‘When are ya off up to Dublin?’
‘Next week. Getting rid of me already?’
‘Just asking,’ he said angrily. ‘Listen up a second.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I want to know something.’
‘Fire away.’
‘Why didn’t ya write?’
‘Ah, ya know me and letters.’
‘No, that’s the thing, I don’t know you and letters.’
‘Ah, I’m just not very good at it.’
He nodded and used a hand against the wall to guide himself along the landing: ‘I thought you’d have written.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘Well, I am.’
‘I believe ya,’ he grunted, his back to me.
I found a mosquito coil tonight, shattered into little green bits at the bottom of my backpack. Those mosquitoes in Mexico were always ecstatic in the hot, hot air. Waiting. Hovering. Moving away from the smoke under the ceiling fan. It was truly vicious, that heat, but in an odd way I liked it. When I arrived in San Francisco it was the coolness of it all that assaulted me. The immigration officer in the airport looked at the Mexican stamp in my passport. ‘Hope you didn’t catch the clap,’ he said with a grin, waving me through with a sweep of the hand after stamping a six-month stay in my passport.
THURSDAY, a deep need for miracles
Brutally romantic, of course, but he has kept every single one of Mam’s dresses. They hang in a riot of colours amongst a dozen mothball bags. The cupboard was open in his room this morning when I looked in before going downstairs. Hems spilled on the floor, edges that were unsewn over the years, continually dropped another inch, always lengthening, until even her skirts covered her calves. The sleeve of an old adelita dress stuck out. Some blouses. A dressing gown hung with one shoulder on a hanger. Her sarapes neatly folded on the shelf beside some coiled belts. I stared at the old man asleep in the bed, the marmalade cat on the pillow beside him. His hat was perched on the bedside table, beside a full bottle of Bushmills. There was a bit of a smell in the room — he has bad gas these days. Finds it hard to control. Let one go at the kitchen table last night.
‘Oops!’ he said. ‘Barking spider around here somewhere!’
But I could tell he was embarrassed by the smell — even got a bit of a flush in his cheeks as he walked upstairs to his bed. But at least he sleeps. When Mam was here there were nights she would get out of bed — she was sleeping in the room at the end of the landing at that stage — and sometimes she would go down to work on her stone walls, those black bags collecting under her eyes.