Cannonball

by Joseph McElroy

  “Where’d he go?” “He’s over there,” Liz said (like, why?); she kissed my shoulder, I felt her; “now he’s gone.” “No he’s not.” A passing lap swimmer kicked a toe hard against the back of my hand and caught the nerve that runs clear up the arm and over the shoulder. “Independent,” Liz said, sort of out of sight out of mind. “He wants…,” I began.

  Liz palmed my chest and kissed me there, as she often did to remind me, as if I’d had surgery there. Which maybe I had, as my sister had said late that terrible night when I was sore as hell whatever she meant. My idea I almost—(Liz was talking to me)—kept to myself. What would it mean to Liz—what not even Milt knew or my sister—that it was Mexico Umo had come to because it had been his grandfather’s dream? “Mexico!”

  Liz puckered up, she made a beautiful face. “Why do we do that?” I said. “Other people’s dreams,” I said, in momentary possession of someone else’s private memory but only from outside—Liz would never to her credit just say, Yeah. “It’s not Mexico he wants,” said my girlfriend. I got a kiss on the shoulder. How’re you doing? was one of her thoughts said softly now standing hip-deep in my lane, afternoon tiny bubbles racing up from somewhere, her clear dreamy thigh, an escaped coil of hair at the seam of flesh and suit, whichever came first.

  If she wanted to know, though I wasn’t about to say, it had been two years ago and three days after the accident, standing in the water here with Liz, I felt again before I’d even known her, the Goldthread herbs I had crushed and boiled and quite secretly with my sister applied the terrible night in her room when the door was flung open upon us like a snapshot by our father though we were the flash, yet time after time in mere memory another place of that time I was in a sweat arguing about nothing with Milt at The Inventor’s, and to the third person nearby could it have sounded set off by some For Sale thing on a shelf?—I was injured—not just injured—ill, sick, I had realized at that moment or changed (how the word has changed, was it a war to make “ill” mean “wonderful”?)—and the angry track the accident had raised on my chest only days ago was mine alone. Milt had hold of the early west Bengali biplane, swooping it this way and that, the fuselage orange and crimson, the top wing pocked with tiny dark marks as of anti-aircraft bursts The Inventor had said were drawings of sea pencils in fact that thrive on the marine reefs to the south off Sri Lanka, the plane designed and built by an oceanographer from Calcutta and these very tweezers lying on the shelf were the ones used to place and glue the balsa struts. (“Let the tool do the work,” I said. Milt flicked his finger at a poster of a woman looking at you over her shoulder showing a beautiful ass and just visible the thong top of her underwear, it was odd but I didn’t know how much if any experience Milt had had). Brought back from a mysterious unannounced trip abroad of The Inventor’s months before, the plane model cost only twenty-five dollars, but who had that kind of money? It was Milt’s sixteenth birthday, not enough to make me agree with everything he said today. “You’ll get over it, you’ll dive,” he’d said. “Why should I get over it? I can hardly breathe.” The injury to my chest was mine, and The Inventor was puttering in the far room, listening. I heard Milt talking to himself or to the plane behind me, for then I was standing in front of The Inventor counting my money and put it back in my pocket and lifted my sweatshirt to show him. “They said I was lucky.” “It needs to heal, then you will be better than never you knew,” he said.

  “Than ever?”

  The right words will do more had been nonetheless what The Inventor had said when I told him what had happened and that I couldn’t breathe, and when he laughed learnedly, sketchy, even forlorn, and asked how it had happened, the full twist that came too close to the board, I couldn’t breathe again and he lowered his voice and he said that worrds had caused the hurt and would do more than the herb to fix it but try the herb, and it made me mad but it was scary, this very dark man—had he been at the pool when it happened? He had a total outsider’s hunch—that was it—or weird melting-pot foreign knowledge, yet no, it was some fine-line or species tenderness; for, well, words of criticism had greeted my injury, surfacing, half unconscious or barely conscious or obeying the angry seed he did say somewhere near the very place in me, my heart channels, that had borne abrasion, but how could he know what had been shouted at me—could he?—in mid-dive before the accident? Of course not.

  Remember (he said) what you have always known, the vein you can’t see running through the wound, and he handed me an envelope with something in it—the Goldthread—and then another that seemed empty though sealed and I knew Milt was in the other room trying to hear us and I had a grand total of twenty-six fifty in my pocket along with my keys knowing what Milt wanted for his birthday and I had a plunging feeling then hearing the jingle of the till ringing up the sale and knew that sometimes he should grow up, though, and that on the bus he wouldn’t be satisfied with loving the plane and would have to know what was in my envelopes but would have to settle for just one of them.

  4 in return for what

  Independent, Liz called Umo, sounding more a woman than I had heard her. She hauled herself lightly out of the pool. Water streamed down her thighs, no stopping it, and she fingered downward the butt line of her swimsuit. Why travel when we lived in a city like this? was one of her thoughts, I knew. How’re you doing? was another, said softly with no slant even now standing in my lane.

  But had Umo grown up? And so fast. Had he? And illegal, for crying out tears! He gave to the bereft old sun-grained California drifter at the bus stop a couple of bills. Where did the dollars come from? What they call a silent offering at church, where pastor and sheep are not silent about, in our city, begging if you’re able to work, which my aunt years ago now called a sin of sloth (an animal I knew from a picture) but Milt’s minister father a violation of the very idea of brotherly love, according to someone with whom my mother agreed without knowing who it was and I passed all this on to Umo one day on a city bus. In his great frame and flesh unveined and smooth among its folds a declaration, a friendly force, a citizen of the world on the move. Mexico, anyway. Though maybe no place, and illegal, though maybe a place itself can acquire that status.

  My idea had been to bring Umo to East Hill. Make a splash with the coach, his search for regional or even national attention. It might not cross my dad’s mind that we were after it together, whatever it was. Yet in some more interesting thought that I hadn’t learned to follow up, I was soon to be in another “it” with my surprising and sometimes embarrassing sister, who had described unforgettably Umo’s entry into the water one summer night in 2002. I beside her shot on film or tried to his dive but she just as she’d been interrupted passing on to me a weird family yet neighborhood question Corona’s Italian wife Bea had put to her as they had biked home the night before through rain divided and gathered and caressed by trees now tonight saw him pull off a two-and-a-half at a public pool under the lights that went out totally for a moment, a breaker fluke that went unexplained, as he left the board plunging us if not my camera into nowhere and came back to reveal him just passing the crest of the as yet undisclosed dive now crunched into tuck—as I became aware of the old woman of a year ago with the spotted skin and the veins materialized now as if by the power glitch itself beside me seeming to say hello with a word: for Umo’s dive was so busy a somersaulting that when he just came out of it he’s someone unaware of you headed somewhere else gone forever, my sister said, or executed, it came to me she had murmured to herself or me, I thought if anything a sucked-downward tongue or perfect loss. Which like my sister’s own, night-inspired remarks I recall, but, hoping for her success at least in life (for she dreamed of supporting herself while attending college far away “somewheres” if they would let her go), I’m struck by her thought that Dad was looking to get out of the Reserve “if we weren’t careful,” for Corona’s long-legged wife narrowly avoiding a bike collision with a parked car’s door opening had asked last night if it was true he had managed t
o swing it already, a friend of her husband’s told her. And my sister told me she had asked of Bea, “In return for what?” Yet what stayed with me wasn’t Dad finessing the Reserve, if it was even true, but the seeming slowness of the dive (caught by sheer luck in my snapshot on the back of which one day I found a few printed words of my sister’s), and so I recalled for months my sister’s I thought unanswered retort bicycling behind Bea, “In return for WHAT?”

  That palace dive answers her nine thousand miles and counting months and months later though what had I for answer wrecked at the brink of a now wartime palace pool, too slow to get the micro out for a still, though v-c recorded from the hip? For a spy without knowing it, of what wretched use am I it comes to me like my body itself during the later Hearings? And he this once upon a time huge figure yet not quite of fun, a gigantic kid you could trifle with not at all at your peril, unless privately in your heart and his; a promise at the edge of my neighborhoods so unforgettable I couldn’t always hang with it, like my sister’s word for his entry, “farewell” (then “frequent farewell,” this being my sister)—he was an untouchable diver I only later far away at my own paid picture-taking understood—too late?—and had been a sort of friend before even the cannonball beginning. For what else could I make of the word Cheeky (her name) said to me at the moment of the breaker going by the old woman in blue jeans and the Australian hat, who perhaps a year and a half before had taken the snapshot of Umo on the gangway in Vera Cruz with his enlarged hand out in welcome or arrest?

  How long had they all known me even two weeks before Thanksgiving when I all but ran into Umo, how could I not have seen him stepping down out of the Heartmobile?—and it was as if we knew each other pretty well even then. It was my birthday, I’d bought one of The Inventor’s special envelopes and, recalling the potency of an earlier one, I’d been quite absorbed in whether or not to open it and I’d wound up downtown across from the Coaster train station. But now Umo must stop at the recruiters table, flag-deco clipboard, pamphlets of the future spread out where music stampeded blindly somewhere under the table and the two Marines speechless behind grim smiling teeth; Umo asking if this would get him citizenship. You could take him for seventeen. An unusual person maybe. Was it experience? He would need to lose some pounds, said the corporal, not really answering Umo’s question. “Shed some weight,” said the sergeant. Umo pointed under the table at the pint-size speaker. “That’s what they gonna listen to over there.” Later I grasped the quality Umo gave to his speech when he opened his mouth—or it could feel like it was coming true anyhow and I was on home ground but it made me mad. “Over there?” said the sergeant, alarmed. “Rock,” said the corporal “It’s not going to be ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’” I said. “Not on a daily basis,” said the sergeant frowning, smiling, pushing a piece of paper toward me. “Help ’em shoot straight,” said the corporal. “He’s with you guys, though,” I said. “All the way,” the corporal said. “A peacemaker,” I said. “Hey, He was a Marine,” said corporal.

  I asked him what would happen and he said it wasn’t up to him but we were always ready. “Who’s a Marine?” said Umo so quick always though never what you would call quick (though I wished he would pick these guys up and throw them like endover-end grenades into the middle of the lake, a dumb thought of mine that brought with it Jesus out on the water for the day—prepared was what he was—marine Jesus had come to me). “Well, Jesus,” I said, “he’s our C.O.” “C.O.?” “C.E.O.,” I added.

  “CEO?” What did Umo miss? Not much in my voice. “He gives us a hundred and ten percent,” I said. The Marines stared. What made me unreal, these words? Why would any kid need to enlist? My foresight weighed me in, shutting me down. The sergeant, extremely low-body-fat, looked over his shoulder at three kids behind him. (“They high school?” he said.)

  “He had something going for him,” I said. “Those fishermen just left their nets and followed him. Talk about miracles.” “Secret weapon,” I remember Umo said.

  It was my birthday sort of self-anointed, though I kept it to myself when I said I would take him to the East Lake club to a practice. Umo looked at his watch. He understood I now think as much as I, or anyway he was seriously touched, but was ready. “CEO?” I said. Chief Executive Officer, though the Jesus may have lost him. “I like to see what we talk about.” That meant, we talked. I got us onto the East Lake bus. I saw something out the bus window. The three (I was pretty sure) middle-schoolers were collecting literature from the recruiters and it looked like ballpoints to sign their names with to and to keep. I was taking Umo over to East Hill to have a look at a practice and get his feet wet. “About Jesus,” I began again—“It is not what we believe,” Umo said. “—some say he was proactive,” I said, “that was the thing about him, getting things done on all fronts.” “That is your business,” I recall Umo said. “You get it,” I said, “and if you don’t get it yourself you can’t tell someone else.”

  “So what are you doing?” Umo laughed like he might not agree, and the bus driver had us in his mirror. I was sorry for Umo and it came out wrong. I said my sister would agree with Umo. It was my birthday, I said. “Hey, your birthday, what’s up?” “East Hill.” “What else?” Well, my sister was cooking dinner.

  I feared I had invited Umo but he said, East Hill, good. Or did he think we lived there? “Your sister,” he said, and nodded with enthusiasm or formality. I was sorry for him maybe.

  Did I have a look on my face? Jesus had meant business, I said, he had capitalized on what he had going for him, he had a job to do, I said. Umo gave me a look. Not did I believe all that, but. I let my face not say to him Yes or No, I think.

  “You so…” Umo, pausing to not find the word, was momentarily older. He knew it was something to not quite find the word you wanted. He was learning. Even kids, I said wryly, should enlist with Jesus, that’s what he said, “come unto me,” as I recalled. It was almost new to me, what I found myself saying, as if my sister and I were up in her room kidding around and talking in our private little family way a job within a job and treating each other right.

  “I’m so…so what?” I said, wondering again what was the secret weapon.

  “So plenty,” Umo said, and laughed, and the bus driver had us in his mirror. And listen, the old cowboy Umo’d given a dollar to (he hitched his thumb) that’s not begging. He was doing his job. “Two dollars,” I said. We sort of laughed. “You knew about East Lake and my father,” I said. “Yeh, I don’t say I know someone already when I meet them. They don’t like it.” That was right, I said, thinking my sister would have something great to say and then I imagined she got on our bus, her hair tied back, just before the doors unfolded shut; and I smelt the aqueous echoing of the pool we were traveling to, and felt an elbow lifting out of the water we hadn’t arrived at yet and someone’s arm reaching. Umo was looking past me, which he didn’t do, but not out the window at the girls with little backpacks, but somewhere; and I remembered the envelope I had given The Inventor ten dollars for for my discounted birthday.

  Umo, maybe he wasn’t used to the city by bus, a system the envy of L.A. He was a trucker, with or without a license, a kid also. On the spur of the moment deciding to mention The Inventor by his surname, I said he knew all these languages. Had Umo known him long? The bus came to a stop and Umo looked around him and I thought he would get off. We were getting near our stop and Umo was looking out for it like he knew where it was. Inventor knew many languages, I said, that’s what we called him, The Inventor. Umo said, Oh yeah. He was paying attention to me somehow.

  “Urdu for one (which really says it all),” I said, a bait Umo didn’t take (and who was to say The Inventor was Pakistani because he knew Pakistani jokes?)—“and because of Urdu some Middle Eastern. And French.” Had Umo known The Inventor long? Yes: long time—and Parsee he knows, I said, distracted. (But how long could he have known him? I thought.) “And he knows Hindi, some of those Indian languages—Dravidian, I think.” I didn’
t know what I was talking about, I said.

  “That’s right,” Umo laughed. He was looking out the bus window, somehow occupying only his one seat. He said, “You don’t know if you do or you don’t. But you do, if you can find out.” We had a strange chuckle about that, I thought. What kind of birthday present was this, my bringing him to East Lake, when it was my birthday? I had to open the envelope purchased from The Inventor but had to wait. It was all taking a long time today.

  “You like you sister?”

  Surprised by the question (feeling still the door and what it had brought), “We do a lot together,” I said.

  “And Father?”

  Soon we were there. At the threshold of the locker room I went looking for towels. I heard Umo shout like an overjoyed kid. Where was he? He was changed ahead of me. I hadn’t thought about a swimsuit for him; he must have had it on. Where was he? I had brought him to show my father, but Umo might have been the one enlisting me in the activities of the pool. Yet it was practice time yet discipline is doing what you really want, isn’t it? An eight-lane 50-meter pool, a regular palace sometimes almost too big for us. Umo jumped in, arms over head, sinking like a ship you might have thought very slowly and drawing the water to him with scarcely a ripple, and it was magnetic. He had found a lost domain.

  Before anyone could get acquainted he swam a sample medley, freestyle and so easy backstroke up like he’s on a current, easy breast and volcanic butterfly back, and in the middle my father as if he hadn’t noticed from the moment this broad, great-bellied figure had come out of the shower in his camo bikini, yelled, “Get him out of the water” and turned back to following a swimmer along the far side. He was yakking like a crow to “SHAPE it,” it was Milt, and my dad could shout so the sound didn’t spread but struck like a karate chop upon a stack of pine squares. The water echoes through me, the tile, the volume of the water and the air above it swaying also, a future I would have to do something about, an invader among us. Some people had given our city this club and subsidized it, maintained it, whatever, the pool and the two-board-and-platform diving well, people my father had once told me he knew and didn’t know.