Fishing the Sloe-Black River (2 page)

“The only thing I know about the stars is that they come out at night,” he says. “My grandfather sometimes sat in a chair outside our house and compared them to my grandmother's teeth.”

I laugh and lean into him. He looks up at the sky.

“Teach me some more scientific wonders,” he says.

I babble about the notion that if we could travel faster than the speed of light we would get to a place we never really wanted to go before we even left. He looks at me quizzically, puts his fingers on my lips, walks me to the car and sits me down gently on the front seat, saying, “Your sister.”

He takes off his tie, wraps it around his head like a bandanna, feels for a moment for his gone ponytail, turns up the stereo, and we drive toward New York.

I had seen my sister one day in Dublin, outside the Dawson Lounge. I suppose her new convent clothes suited her well. Black to hide the thinness. Muttering prayers as she walked. The hair had grown thick on her hands, and her cheekbones were sculleried away in her head. I followed behind her, up around St. Stephen's Green and on down toward the Dail. She shuffled her feet slowly, never lifting them very high off the ground. She stopped at the gate of the Dail, where a group of homeless families sat protesting their destitution, flapping their arms like hummingbirds to keep themselves warm. It was Christmas Eve. She talked with a few of them for a moment, then took out a blanket and sat down among them. I looked from the other side of the street. It shocked me to see her laugh and to watch a small girl leap into her lap. I walked away, bought a loaf of bread, and threw it to the ducks in the Green. A boy in Doc Martens glared at me and I thought of the dancehall.

“None of these coins have our birthdates on them anymore,” I say as I search in my handbag for some money for a toll booth.

“I enjoyed that back there,” he says. “Hell of a lot better than being on a scaffold. Hey, you should have seen the face of the border patrol guy. Waved me through without batting an eyelid.”

“You think we just get older and then we fade away?”

“Look, Sheona, you know the saying.”

“What saying?”

“A woman is as old as she feels.” Then he chuckles. “And a man is as old as the woman he feels.”

“Very funny.”

“I'm only kidding,” he says.

“I'm sorry, Mike. I'm just nervous.”

I lean back in the seat and watch him. In the six years of notes he sent from prison there is one I remember the most. “I wouldn't mind dying in the desert with you, Sheona,” he had written. “We could both lick the dew off the rocks, then watch the sun and let it blind us. Dig a hole and piss in the soil. Put a tin can in the bottom of the hole. Cover it with a piece of plastic and weigh down the center with a rock. The sun'll evaporate the piss, purify it, let it gather in droplets on the plastic, where it'll run toward the center, then drop in the tin can, making water. After a day we can drink from each other's bodies. And then die well. Let the buzzards come down from the thermals. I hate being away from you. I am dead already.”

The day I received that letter, I thought of quitting my secretarial job in a glass tower down by Kavanagh's canals. I thought of going back to Mayo and striking a shovel into a boghole, seeping down into the water, breathing out the rest of my life through a hollow piece of reed grass. But I never quit my job and I never wrote back to him. The thought of that sort of death was way too beautiful.

My days in Dublin were derelict and ordinary. A flat on Appian Way near enough to Raglan Road, where my own dark hair weaved a snare. Thirteen years somehow slipped away, like they do, not even autumn foliage now, but mulched delicately into my skin. I watched unseen as a road sweeper in Temple Bar whistled like he had a bird in his throat. I began to notice cranes swinging across the skyline. Dublin had become cosmopolitan. A drug addict in a doorway on Leeson Street ferreted in his bowels for a small bag of cocaine. Young boys wore baseball hats. The canals carried fabulously colored litter. The postman asked me if I was lonely. I went to Torremolinos in 1985 and watched girls my age get knocked up in alleyways.

But I didn't miss the men. I bought saucepans, cooked beautiful food, wrote poems near a single bar electric heater. Once I even went out with a policeman from Donegal, but when he lifted my skirt I knocked his glasses off. At work, in a ribboned blouse, I was so unhappy that I couldn't even switch jobs. When making calls, I was always breaking my fingernails on the phone slots. I watched a harpist in the Concert Hall playing beautifully on nylon strings. In a moment of daring I tried to find my sister exactly two years to the day that I had seen her, huddled with the homeless in a Foxford blanket. “Sister Brigid,” I was told, “is spreading the word of God in Central America.” I didn't have the nerve to ask for the address. All I knew of Central America was dogs leaner than her.

We are off the highway now, looking for a New Hampshire petrol station. The sun in the east is bleeding into the darkness. Michael refuses to fill up at the garages that lick the big interstate. He prefers a smaller town. He's still the same man, now wearing his necklace of mountain lion teeth over an opennecked Oxford. Because I trust him, because he still believes in simpler, more honest things, I tell him about why I think Brigid is sick. I am very simple in my ideas of Central America. My information comes from newspapers. She is sick, I tell him, because she was heartbroken among the maguey plants. She is sick because there are soldiers on the outskirts of town who carry Kalashnikovs or AK-47's, hammering the barrels through the brick kilns that make the dough rise. She is sick because she saw things that she thought belonged only in Irish history. She is sick because she saw girls bonier than her and because there was no such thing as a miracle to be found. She is sick, she is in an infirmary convent on Long Island for nuns who have or have not done their jobs. Though really, honestly, I think she is sick because she knew I was watching when she flung her bread from a rock and I never said a word.

“You're too hard on yourself,” says Michael.

“I've been picking my way through a pillar of stone with a pin.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh come on, Michael, it's not as if we're twenty-one any more. All those years spat away.”

“It doesn't help to be bitter,” he says.

“Oh, and you're not bitter?”

“I've learned not to think about it.”

“That's worse than being bitter, Michael.”

“Come on,” he says, reaching across to take my hand. “You can't change the past.”

“No we can't,” I say. My hand is limp. “We can't, can we?”

Embarrassed at my anger, I tell him once again, for the umpteenth time over the last three days, about how I found out where she was. I decided, only a week ago, to go back and see my father. I brought him a carton of Major because I couldn't find Woodbines. I have no idea what stirred me to see him, except that one of the other secretaries in Dublin had talked all morning long about her pet collie dog throwing up over her favorite rug. She was actually weeping over it, more for the rug, I imagine, than for the dog. I walked out to the canal and sat watching boys diving in, breaking up the oily slime. Their recklessness astounded me. I went to Heuston station and took a train west.

He was dead, of course. The couple who had bought our old bungalow had three babies now. They said they had been with my father in a hospital in Galway when, in an oxygen tent, he asked for a nip of Bushmill's and a smoke. The doctors had told him that he would explode and he had said, “That's grand, give me a smoke, so.” The husband asked who I was even though he knew exactly who I was. I didn't want him to bring out nasturtiums or Easter lilies. I told him, in front of his wife, that I was a distant cousin. In a whisper, at the gate, he told me he had heard that Brigid was sick and was living now in a convent in the “Big Apple.” He stole a furtive kiss on my cheek. I wiped it off in disgust, went home to Dublin and made phone calls until I found Michael living in Quebec, a foreman at a building site.

“Michael, I need to get back in. I can get a flight from London into Canada, no hassle.”

“I'll pick you up at the airport in Montreal.”

“Are you married?” I asked.

“Are you kidding? Are you?”

“Are you kidding?” I laughed. “Will you take me there?”

“Yeah.”

It's one highway, 95, all the way, a torrent of petrol stations, neon signs, motels, fast-food spires. Michael talks of a different world beyond this, where in his boredom he watched the sun fall and rise and fall again. San Quentin had taught him about looking out windows. The day he got out, in a suit two sizes too big, he learned how to cartwheel again and ended up tearing the polyester knees. He took a bus to Yosemite and got a job as a guide. He took a motorbike, a “rice burner” he called it, from California to Gallup, New Mexico, where his mother and father pissed away a monthly government check into a dry creekbed at the back of their house. Michael slept in a shed full of Thunderbird bottles, a hole in the corrugated ceiling where he watched the stars, bitterly charting their roll across the sky. He followed them east. He climbed scaffolds to build New York City high-rises. Navaho and Mohawk climbers were in big demand for that type of job and the money was good.

Then there was a girl. She brought him to Quebec. They climbed frozen waterfalls in a northern forest. The girl was long gone, but the waterfalls weren't. Maybe, he says, when we get back to Quebec he'll put me in a harness and spiked boots and we'll go scaling. I finger my thighs and say perhaps.

Floods of neon rush by.

We stop in a diner and a trucker offers Michael ten dollars for the lion-tooth necklace. Michael tells him that it's a family heirloom and then, trying to make sure that I don't hear—me, in my red crocheted cardigan and gray skirt—the trucker offers him a bag full of pills. Michael still has that sort of face. It's been years since I've been wired, and I have a faint urge to drop some pills. But Michael thanks the trucker, says that he hasn't done speed in years and we drive away.

By late evening the next day, we snarl into the New York City traffic and head down toward the Village. Michael's eyes are creased and tired. The car is littered with coffee cups and the smell of cigarettes lingers in our clothes. The city is much like any other to me now, a clog of people and cars. It seems appropriate that there is no room for us in the Chelsea Hotel, no more Dylan, no more Behan, no more Cohen remembering us well. Old songs flow through me as we drive away. We stay with a friend of Michael's on Bleecker Street. I have brought two nightdresses in my suitcase. My greatest daring is that I don't wear either of them. Michael and his friend curl on the ends of the sofa. I sleep in a bed, scared of the sheets. Four red-beaked hawks in badges grunting down from the thermals by a gentle creek in sequoia sunlight. A bouquet of boys shimmy in from the bogs in brown tweed hats and pants tucked in with silver bicycle clips. My father lights a carton of cigarettes and burns in a plastic tent. A nun runs around with dough rising up in her belly. My wrists pinned to pine needles, no light wind to carry me away. Blood running down the backs of his thighs. The talons of a robin carrying off flowers. I toss and turn in sweat that gathers in folds and it is not until Michael comes over and kisses my eyelids that I find sleep.

On the drive out to Long Island I buy a bunch of daffodils from a street vendor. He tells me that daffodils mean marriage. I tell him that they're for a nun. He tugs at his hat. “You never know, hon,” he says, “you never know these days.”

Michael still gropes for the back of his hair as he drives, and every now and then he squeezes my forearm and says it'll be all right. The expressway is a vomit of cars but gradually, as we move, the traffic thins out and the pace quickens. Occasional flecks of snow get tossed away by the windshield wipers. I curl into a shell and listen to the sound of what might be waves. I am older now. I have no right to be afraid. I think about plucking the petals from the flowers, one by one. We drive toward the ocean. Far off I can see gulls arguing over the waves.

The convent at Bluepoint looks like a school. There seems to be little holy about the place except for the statue of Our Lady on the front lawn, a coat of snow on her shoulders. We park the car and I ask Michael to wait. From under his shirt collar I flick out the necklace of teeth and, for the first time since I've seen him, kiss him flush on the lips. “Go on,” he says, “don't be getting soppy on me now. And don't stay too long. Those waterfalls in Quebec melt very quickly.”

He turns the radio up full blast and I walk toward the front entrance. Hold. Buckle. Swallow. The words of a poet who should have known: “What I do is me. For that I came.” I rasp my fingers along the wood but it takes a long time for the heavy door to swing open.

“Yes dear?” says the old nun. She is Irish too, her face creased into dun and purple lines.

“I'd like to see Brigid O'Dwyer.”

She looks at me, scans my face. “No visitors, I'm sorry,” she says. “Sister Brigid needs just a wee bit of peace and quiet.” She begins to close the door, smiling gently at me.

“Is mise a dhreifeur,” I stutter. I am her sister.

The door opens again and she looks at me, askance.

“Bhfuil tú cinnte?” Are you sure?

“Sea,” I laugh. “Táim cinnte.” Yes, I'm sure.

“Cad a bhfuil uait?” she asks. What do you want?

“I want to see her. Sé do thoil é. Please.”

She stares at me for a long time. “Tar isteach. Come in, girl.” She takes the daffodils and touches my cheek. “You have her eyes.”

I move into the corridor where some other old nuns gather like moss, asking questions. “She's very sick,” says one. “She won't be seeing anyone.” The nun who met me at the door shuffles away. There are flowers by the doorway, paintings on the walls, a smell of potpourri, a quality of whiteness flooding all the colors. I sit in a steel chair with my knees nailed together, my hands in my lap, watching their faces, hearing the somber chatter, not responding. A statue of the Madonna stares at me. I am a teenager now in a brown convent skirt. It is winter. After camogie, in the school showers, one or two of the nuns stand around and watch my classmates and me as we wash the dirt off our legs. They see bruises on my inner thigh and then they tell me about Magdalene. I ride away from the school gates. I flagrantly pedal my bicycle with my skirt up high. I see her there, on the rock, sucking her finger, making a cross of reeds, the emblem of the saint for whom she was named. My father puts some peat on the fire. That's grand, give me a smoke, so.