THE ONE DANCE SONG THAT CAN MAKE ME BREAK DOWN AND CRY

NO SMILES. No phone. No spark plugs. He peered out over the dusty compound at the sandy-purple mountains in the distance and nursed a watery coffee in his hand. He felt lonely. This kind of melancholy came over him from time to time, but was often quite sweet, savorable. Usually you could break it at any point by stopping in some place, getting into a conversation with barmen, garage attendants, kids. Playing a jukebox or a game of pool – and it usually worked. The last two days had been different, though.

The news niggled at him on and off as he travelled, like flimsy remnants of nightmare sneaking momentarily into the waking hours of the dreamer. Occasionally it struck at him from the inside, like a tiny explosion within the space under his ribs, unbearable for a moment and then dissipating with no after-effects. Mostly he just didn’t feel as if it was real at all. Maybe it was the sunshine, or the isolation of the open spaces that anaesthetised him. The addiction spell of the highway’s white lines, no sound other than the bike’s song.

He’d ridden south from Colorado, through aspen-clad mountains to Coyote on roads so gusty they teased the bike into a scary, curvaceous dance. Then the slopes fell away into aridity as he came down into the Navajo Nation.

He’d run out of change back at Lagunitas, and he knew that he should have called his sister back, but hadn’t, and now apparently there was no phone. What did he need to know, anyway? There was only one thing to know and the details hardly mattered. It echoed in his head now briefly, the hollow clanking sound of the coins disappearing down the machine, Deirdre’s voice sounding unfamiliar over the bad connection, forgetting to tell him until the very end of the call, when it all came tumbling down the line in a panic. “Sorry, Darragh, I meant to tell you before . . . shit, it’s been two months, you see . . . they brought her back from Greece. Sorry . . . sorry . . .” Clank, clank, clank. “Please deposit three dollars for the next minute.” Click, buzz. The only sound then was a squawky bird cutting across the cloudless desert sky.

He felt dried up, untouched by it. Or rather, he didn’t know how he felt. To take his mind off the whole thing, in these past two days he’d been taken over by a troubled unease that had nothing to do with Jenny, or anything really. The stony faces he had encountered since crossing the border into the Navajo Nation – they bothered him. It wasn’t that they were openly hostile mostly, but it was just that the bullshit was gone. All along the way it had been “have a nice day.” “Sir.” Billboards that undermined the intelligence, fast food that threatened the intestines. An easy veneer of blinding friendliness and clean, efficient service with a smile. Maybe he just needed some of that at the moment.

He had a sense of karmic justice – why the hell should the Navajo smile at him? Not that he’d personally been involved, like, but you couldn’t look straight into the jet-black eyes and not get the message. It was a subtle understanding carefully folded in with their silence. He felt somehow as if the sky-blessed spires of rock that towered over the motorbike as he threaded his way west spoke for the sullen faces. Betrayal, they thundered. Theft, slaughter, betrayal. Greed, rape, genocide, betrayal.

In Taos, he’d got wasted with two heads in a bar where the Sheriff had caught him in the toilet and warned him not to get the locals drunk. He’d told the badge to fuck off. Edward and Tom and himself all ended up on an adobe roof in the old pueblo later, freezing their asses off under the stars and swapping stories about the Spanish and the English, Cortez and Cromwell. The Transcendental Post-Colonial Whinge: both our people suffered, guys – robbery, persecution and exploitation. There’d been fraternal commiserations and large-scale speculation about cultural identity and ethnic pride. They’d all had a great, moon-howling time. But try and pull that one on the Navajo, he thought, and they’d probably tell you how many of Custer’s outfit were Irish, or ask you where Eddie Murphy got his name.

He finished the coffee and bundled everything up under the bungee chords – the spark plugs could wait until this evening. The autumn air was crisp and clear and the russet crags contrasted brilliantly against the turquoise as he looked up.

Greece. What the fuck had she been doing in Greece? Deirdre hadn’t time to say how it happened, and anyway, he had a fair idea. Jenny could always hitch a ride with any amount of her charms: the Bambi eyes, the laugh. They were always the first thing to cause trouble, too. He remembered them once being unstudied, spontaneous, the legs gangly, the eyes crudely daubed with black the first Christmas her mother ever let her out to midnight mass. She’d caused an uproar in the church that night, after the priest said “Lamb of God,” when she emitted a loud “mbaaa.” Funny-Jenny. Brazen, voracious, life-owes-me Jenny.

They’d gone to Greece once, the summer in between his first and second year. That was after the dreaded Hamburg stint . . . slave-labour in the rubber factory, sleeping in what Sean Arnston called “The Sheds.” “Ah man, it was the sheds . . .” Working beside sad Turkish men condemned for life, while all he could think of was Jenny, and getting out of The Sheds with enough cash to take her to a Mediterranean Island. He did. She told him he smelled like a condom. She pampered him and spent his money for three days, then pulled the most outrageous Traveller’s Checks scam without warning, nearly giving him a heart attack.

After a couple of hours back on the bike, the most bizarre thing began to happen. Gradually, as he drove on towards Shiprock, the road became more and more jammed with cars. He was eventually surrounded by vehicles pushing and chugging, music blaring, with kids and dogs in the back and Mammas and Daddies in the front seats. On both sides of the road, broad expanses of open wilderness yawned at the sky, while he found himself forced to chug along the outskirts of the rush, which already formed two crowded lanes on the narrow road. Darragh squinted at the glittering coil of vehicles winding all the way ahead like a drunken rattlesnake.

He was in major trouble now, as the blazing afternoon temperature forced the engine to overheat. The stop/start nature of his progress was made worse by the fouled sparks, the fuel mix having been affected by the high altitude in the mountains. He was a fool to have forgotten spare plugs. He’d stop and let it cool off in Shiprock. But what the hell was all the traffic doing, in the middle of nowhere? He pulled in beside a red pick-up with a bunch of young lads inside, in flying form.

“What’s the story, fellas? Party huh?”

“It’s the fair, man. Have a beer . . .”

He was kind of blown away by this, considering the strict local laws on alcohol, but needed no further persuasion, pulling off his helmet and snapping open the can.

Shiprock: a mutant Galleon frozen to stone in a sandy ocean, erupted like a commandment out of the plain in the distance. By the time the convoy got into the town itself it was getting dark. He’d had a fair few beers out of the Indian lads’ cooler by now, but he unfortunately lost them as they turned off into a temporary car park along the way. On his left as he came into the town, a large float was crowded with a born-again Christian Native American rap group, chicka-boom-booming on about Jesus saving, with some token Indian drums overwhelmed by a hollow synth beat – man, Jesus would have to love it.

He parked the bike across the street from the fair enclosure, with its huge black and white banner draped over the entrance, “60th Navajo Nation Fair.” The cacophony of sounds hit him in haphazard chorus as he cut the engine, and he smiled in amazement as he heard the loudspeakers describe the rodeo inside, the floodlights of the stadium lighting up the sky. Rockets shot up in the air intermittently and kids ran around sporting sparklers and day-glo necklaces. Madonna blared from one end of the ground and from the other – some of childhood’s real magic: a fairground organ.

Inside, he wandered around taking in rush after rush of visual onslaught: horses, steer, dogs, carousels, rides, rifle ranges. Pyramids of people clambering up on the fences around the central enclosure to see the young guys belting out into the ring to challenge death in a primal test for worth. Some were winning, some were being carted off in the ambulances that hovered on the South side of the arena. Very beautiful, small faces full of wonder, older kids hopping on rides and consuming dubious looking hot dogs and sweetmeats. Ancient, gnarled characters with skin like the old fishermen in Connemara, the same eyes squinting out at the night with the triumph of seventy-odd years in the wind and sun and rock behind them.

He was chatting away to people now, making the rounds of the stands. At one point he spotted a wide-brimmed hat with a splendid turquoise and silver band, and his first thought was to buy it immediately for Jenny. His second thought was how he couldn’t buy it for Jenny, because Jenny was dead. Again, the brief, terrifying explosion. She’d always loved hats. He bought it anyway. “And Darragh wears a jacket from Toner’s Leathers, and a jaunty felt hat to complete his Marlboro Man ensemble . . .”

Nearby, two little guys were waiting to go on a ride. At the entrance, there was a bar four feet from the ground with a sign reading, “If you don’t reach this line, you don’t ride!” The bar was way over one little fella’s head, and he was raising blue bloody murder. The kids’ Granny was falling around laughing, and she voiced a loud comment that set everybody in the crowd off, including the child, delighted at the attention. Darragh grinned like an idiot. The old lady had spoken in a language he’d never heard before. Looking around carefully, he realised he was the only non-Native American in the entire place.

And I’m five thousand miles from my home he sang to himself, visualising the overhead shot: a slow zoom in on the Gael as he cops that this is a private party. Wide shot: man in unlikely hat crosses the fairground, concluding he must continue along his lonely way, on his faithful steed, Kawasaki.

As he passed by a rifle range stand, Darragh’s head and shoulders unexpectedly crashed into a large wooden sign which had been leaning precariously against a fence. Topple, crash. Bollix. Momentary blurred focus – thinks: Thank God he’d just bought the jayzis hat. There was a small commotion as four or five kids lifted the board up off him. The rifle range guy was out like a flash, and then there he was, being fussed over by a crowd of fascinated faces, illuminated purple and green in the flashing lights of a carousel. He felt a large bump forming on his left temple, but luckily, he wasn’t badly hurt. Now he really felt like a spare prick at a hoor’s wedding.

The rifle-range guy, a wired-up kid with a long ponytail and a Guns N’ Roses tee-shirt, shooed everybody away and brought him into what appeared to be a small office trailer. An elderly woman handed a home-made ice pack in the door, and Darragh put it to his head. He was okay, but the lonely thing had hit him again, worse this time in the confusion of the blow. The fairground sounds began to fall away from him scarily, the voices around him diminished into the distance and it was a minute before he could discern exactly what was up. Oh, no. Please. Outside, playing out all over the fairground, through the loudspeakers – the one dance song that could make him break down . . .

Bloody song. God, he hadn’t heard it for years. It welled out into the garbled night, engulfing him like a gas, overcoming him before he had a chance, bursting open some kind of memory bank full of images and smells and fears way too far back. He tried to concentrate on what the rifle range guy was saying, but the song won over.

The sweetness of the lead crept up slowly over the bass, and the emotive vocals whispered awhile before soaring somehow, out through his own choked throat, mysteriously forcing his eyes to blister and his fists to clench.

They played it all the time that summer. She was supposed to be off getting sorted out, except that she didn’t. She alighted off the plane from Amsterdam instead in a state of semi-catatonia, five and a half stone, and completely mute. Nobody ever found out exactly what happened.

“Man! You okay, fella?” The rifle guy was quite taken aback at the sight of this big motorcycle dude crumbling like a child in the middle of his office. “Are you really hurt?”

“Ah, shit, look I’m sorry . . . somebody died is all . . .”

“Aw, shit. Okay, guy. Eh, I’ll be back in a minute.”

Jesus. Every house on the road was coming back to him. Every tree he passed every evening, crossing the dual carriage-way on the way over to the hospital, walkman-smothered ears, heart in stasis. The sheer anguish of that dreaded walk, the hesitation in front of the modern, smoked glass doors of the place. White uniformed penguins, skin coloured nylons on them and smelling of Dettol. The gaunt, absent people wandering by, barely camouflaging their hauntings under pale pink fluffy dressings gowns or Dunnes Stores men’s bath robes, new for the occasion and ill-worn.

God, that song. It stayed at the top for weeks, and every damn station played it endlessly. It wasn’t even a love song, it was a song of obsession, of torment, of betrayal. The singer wound up into such a state of despair it wasn’t funny, and yet every young-one went around the estate singing it like an anthem. And in the end, it got him as well. He had forgotten this song.

Jenny: helpless-Jenny, half there, half submerged somewhere deep in whatever her own haunting happened to be – one he never really understood. Pale, quivering claws fumbling with the 20 Major, gentle-Jenny whispers that commenced cryptic sentences only to cut short half way, darting her eyes wildly off into the air, as if the culminating words had escaped out of her on the exhaled smoke. Him trying to hold back, nodding and smiling like the stupid fuck he was.

He had forgotten how the song drowned his helplessness in its pathos, how the echoing strings soothed his bewilderment, how the guitar tapestry somehow rounded out her skeletal features, the vocal tremor strengthened her voice, the bass line softened the shoulder blades that nearly cut a hole through his palm as he kissed her goodbye each evening.

Without warning, the kid came thumping back into the trailer and slipped a half bottle of Wild Turkey under his hand, conspiratorially. “Don’t let anyone see that, okay? I gotta get back out to the stand . . .” He breezed off again, this time closing the door behind him, easing the last bars of the song out of his head into the compound outside.

“Please don’t go, Darragh,” she had begged him. “I’m just really afraid. They’ve taken everything out of my head, and I kind of think like, there’s nothing left . . .” He couldn’t leave her now, please. She was going to get sorted out, she’d be grand soon. This time it would work out, promise. Another promise to break. Another time to wait. Darragh had given everything away down the years that he’d had to give: bailed her out, set her up, loved her, bothered her, been cheated by her. At some point he’d persuaded himself she was a masochistic figment of his sexual imagination, and he was sticking to that. This time she was in the kind of state where he couldn’t help her. He wasn’t going to help her.

He’d picked up his bag at the reception and stalked straight outside to get the 46A, down to the boat, thinking of her as it pulled away from the quay. How many times had he thought of her since the, please don’t go.

She’d been grand before long, you see, that was the problem. Then he was sorry. Two Christmases later, he ran into her perched on a stool in The Palace with some film guy from London. She had her mini pulled up around her thighs like a schoolgirl and she was sniggering at him. Her bitterness, hiding within each sweet nod, each cutesy move on the stool, each flick of the aubergine hair, lashed out at him furiously between the smiles and the slags. So she was back in form, apparently. She was grand, and there was only one minor problem: the look lurking deep underneath the lashes, that she couldn’t manage to hide, that said simply: “I can’t take too much more of this.”

The song echoed from the back of Darragh’s brain in continual replay. The Fender distortion, the orchestral touches, the drum folding in half way like a coked-up heartbeat. The way the singer’s repeated phrases hurtled the whole thing into total release before winding down into a ghostly duet of guitar and percussion, into silence. It was a dark blue song, it was a terrible song. Funny, as he thought it over, it never said what happened in the end. In the end, what had he expected anyway? That was probably it. He’d only expected. That one of these Christmases he’d go home and she’d be there, sorted out. Grand. He’d expected the usual reunion, only this time she’d be ready to do it for keeps. He’d expected one Christmas he’d have something put by, there’d be a decent job somewhere . . . he’d expected too fuckin’ much.

He drained the bottle. The battered heater in the corner crackled as a piece of chipboard fell from the ceiling and fried on one of the hot orange bars. Christ, had that really been too much ever to ask for? He couldn’t figure out what was so difficult about it, didn’t other people do it? Maybe not Jenny. Maybe not him.

As he opened the door, a wave of ecstatic sound and brilliant flashing lights attacked him. He nodded his thanks at the rifle-range guys as he headed back to the bike. The nearest town he could see on the map that looked like it might have a motel was about forty miles off, twenty out of his way. Maybe there’d be something at that crossroads. Or maybe he could camp.

Pulling out of the town, he leaned over and accelerated, taking a curve in a far too exaggerated fashion, skidding on the gravel and provoking some hoots of encouragement from a gang of kids at the edge of the car park. Sweeping back up to vertical again on the straight of the road, by the time his heart had stopped pounding he was surrounded by cold darkness and out of range of the fairground commotion.

So Jenny had been flown home in a box, right. Dead-Jenny: it seemed as surreal and savage as the ancient bleakness around him. The fair had tumbled up his brain into a mash, and he was still quite drunk as he spotted the gas station at Teec Nos Pos, materialising like a UFO on the crossroads in the distance. Fuck weak coffee, he thought. And camping. And spark plugs. If he just kept driving, he could make Monument Valley for the dawn.

The night was as black as hell, now – without song. It was seriously creepy, but he kind of wallowed in it. He accelerated to spite the cold, and he kept accelerating to spite himself, ignoring the neon needle as it pushed around the blurred speedometer. The moving patch of ground illuminated in the headlight hurtled crazily towards him; everything was soaring, only the remote sky was still. In the onslaught of the elements, he began to imagine himself losing touch with the bike. The air was lifting him, rocketing all around his body until he was flying in a high-speed, air-borne limbo, until he was a nothing, a mere speck in the vastness, merging gradually with the engine’s mantra-howl.

• Helena Mulkerns has been contributing to Hot Press for the past ten years, living and working in Paris, Dublin and New York. She has also written for The Irish Times, the Irish Echo, and Rolling Stone among other publications. Her first fiction was published in the Sunday Tribune. One of her stories, ‘The Suitcase’, was selected for Ireland In Exile, a collection of short stories edited by Dermot Bolger and published by New Island Books in the autumn of 1993.