Cannonball

by Joseph McElroy

  Umo standing in front of him a minute later, “What’s he doing here?” my father said, arms hanging a little out from his body. Umo grinned, “What did you think, sir?” “That’s correct,” said my father. “I’m the one you ask.”

  So you could say I introduced them, two actual black-haired people, one large with a vast field of balance all around him sort of; one wiry, a nervous darter and preoccupied or concentrated strider or occasional staggerer thrown forward by something in him, his thoughts, as if he were his own weapon; Umo, mind you, without a really deeply valid driver’s license; Dad with his military haircut a relentless driver too. “You don’t swim in this Olympic pool without checking in with me.” “Zach brought me.” “He brought you?” “I was hoping to show you something, Coach.” “You showed me you are with my son, so what?” “I meant, show you—” “Meant.” “Correct.” “‘Correct,’ you say to me?” “What we could learn from each other.” “You and him? Everything he knows he learned from me.” “No, you and me, sir.” My father turned and gestured to Milt, who was standing up tall in the water, and to others who had approached.

  “You gonna sign up,” Umo said, looking me up and down, question or prophecy you couldn’t tell. My father in profile almost turned. “The music they were playing,” Umo burst out with that harsh laugh. My father gave us a look, blinking like he had something in his eye. “At the recruiters table in Old Town,” I said, and my father heard something in my voice. “Under the table,” Umo said. “You could hardly hear it,” I said; “it was ‘Stairway to Heaven’.” “You had to scratch your head to hear it,” Umo said, jovial. “Not Led Zeppelin,” I said, “some other band, I was surprised.” “You enlisting,” said Umo. “Not the Marines,” I said. My father shouted at someone sprinting a middle lane; it was shaved-head Oral with the enormous hands and he didn’t hear. Dad had forgotten us but, his back to us, his streamlined ears dishing his surroundings, breaking a stroke up into I can imagine what, his brain on all the time, I and on short acquaintance Umo saw him as he was, I believe—teachin’ you what you got to do for yourself sooner or later, not rely on coach tell you what to do, he was heard to say, I now think in spite of himself.

  He walked around the corner of the pool and yelled at Milt.

  I wanted to see what was going on over there, I said. “But enlist?” said Umo.

  “For God and country, to bring democracy to the heathen.”

  “You always saying…something; you always so…” the words or word he needed for me or didn’t know, I could guess, it came to me, probably. “Take a few real pictures,” I said then, as if I’d been thinking of it but I hadn’t been, and Umo knew I meant it. Why didn’t I correct the impression Umo might have given my father impossible as my father was?

  Umo was in the water. Then somehow he was in the far lane and up out of the water and got my father’s attention and he said something and my father slapped him hard in the ribs like walrus meat, they actually laughed, and my father had me in his peripheral vision, nothing special about that, it was something no one I ever met was better at, yet not look your way. Sure enough him and Umo—I don’t know, they were conversing on the far side of the pool when Coach’s cell as if it could hear to interrupt went, and he was irritated, sour, hard for a second; then agreeable to whoever it was suddenly, and laughed (more than he ever did) and frowned sideways at Umo for listening and Umo looked at me and nodded as if hopefully, like when he said whatever he said the first time at the outdoor pool. And then my dad looked at me and was done so quick he had obviously paid attention to what had been said at the other end and then he looked at his phone as if it was the odd thing and shut it, and said something to Umo that was not about swimming and said something else; and more than once now there was something Dad was about to do. Then at last he did it, looked over at me, back at Umo, listening to this water person as big as two Hawaiians, though Dad’s patience was to be reckoned not maybe in minutes but in space, and here not just laps—a listener now to the foreign visitor. You notice what you don’t get sometimes, and this knowing and not knowing wasn’t exactly what I had seen through the bus window, sergeant handing out literature to the middle-school kids and the kids looking at the literature but it brought it back. Umo was speaking to my father about, I was certain, me. I had brought Umo to the pool and introduced him, a bit of iron in my soul said.

  5 cutting rhizomes

  My term paper that had some science in it I should hope, my sister kept in a scrapbook, a lipsticked impression marking the first page.

  Dad went away more, and came home. What had I done while he was gone? he asked. Learned to speak Spanish. That all? I needed to take control of my time, my father said. Break it down. I do, I said. And I read some of this. (I held up a paperback classic that my sister had gotten out of the library.). Old stuff, my father said. Ancient, Dad. Yeah, why would you read that—or him for that matter (as if you could “rue the day,” as he liked to say, that I read a few pages of some Roman on the way things are). Talked to the Daily Transcript, I said. They should start you on headlines, you can’t write a straight sentence. Mrs. Browning never realized what she had, said my sister, writing in a homework notebook at the dining room table wearing dark glasses for some reason, drawing and writing. Mrs. Browning would have given him B minus for a complete thought, said my dad, all he needed to do was—

  Talked to Marine Lab, I said. About? said Dad A job. You what? said Dad. Phoned U. Hawaii. Pre-Business. You call that a—?

  I said Pre, Dad.

  And Pre-Med advice, I added, from a personal trainer who got a callback interview with the Chargers. With your Chem—get real. Talked to the Coast Guard, Dad. Coast Guard! (The retired bosun’s mate down at the boatyard who did not vote had taken me out in his retired USCG 38-foot picket boat, and hanging next to the binnacle were his old running spikes that had been bronzed by his high school in memory of a hard-to-believe-if-you-looked-at-him-now State Championship 880, worth a snapshot.) There’s a war on, my father said. There is? said my sister.

  “Elizabeth…,” my father said. He used her given name (with almost a weird and distant respect) though she had dropped it years ago even at her age. In favor, first, of “E” and later of “Em,” or “M” (for the “m” in “family,” she said), though E-Z, I heard occasionally during the summer like a toll pass or, with my first initial, some married name of ours, was the Z a nod back to her given name, and had E to begin with just set her apart from my girlfriend Liz, though it began before Liz’s time.

  Sometimes I gathered all this together and would think ahead, though it was already happening. “What are you wearing, pyjamas at this hour?” Dad said, but she was at work on her homework notebook. “Pyjama bottoms,” I said. We laughed, E and I.

  “The dog’s tail, you gotta cut it off in one chop they say,” my father said, hanging in there on the war and my occupational future, but family-mad. “They’ll have a mission statement,” said my sister. “I was saying,” my father continued as if from what had just been said, “if you could just finish a sentence, forget an idea.”

  “Well, they have to take this guy out,” I said, meaning the war. “Right. Nothing fancy about…” my father began but oddly didn’t finish. “That’s what I understand, keep things simple,” I said but at a slant probably. “You’re so—“my father began as the front door shook the house—“You don’t apologize,” he said, I believe of America. Business as usual about everything, I think I said. “Business as usual,” my mother called out, recyclable paper bags crackling with forethought, fresh home from the Presidio Farmer’s and her particular friend, the butcher, it came to me and to my sister catching my eye. My father muttered something. They’ll find it somewhere, I said. Find what? my father said. Their mission statement, I said. Where? he said curiously.

  Division of labor, I said. Someone had said—I stopped—Someone? my dad said—that the value of a fixed calling gave us a warrant for it. For what? The division of labor, I laugh
ed. Dad more than didn’t like the conversation. My job will be…(I thought a moment). You two, he said.

  “We’ll get it in writing,” I said. “A mission statement,” my sister said. “Setting out our way of life,” I said. “You people are never wrong but you don’t have a plan and you never will have,” my father said. “You people have a privileged life, time to give something back. In writing did you say?” I humored my dad, I said I didn’t want to be doing work with no point to it, Mrs. Browning had figured that out, though she didn’t know where I’d borrowed the guy endlessly pushing the stone from who knew the secrets of the gods. “Enough of that old stuff,” my father said. “You should know,” I said. My sister, on my side, said, “She thought Zach made it up, veins in the earth, and she didn’t like that.” But we couldn’t get a laugh out of Dad, who had never perhaps had the full experience of working in the dark. He was less a loose gun than…a loaded gun (E said). And where did they say that about cutting off the dog’s tail? she wanted to know. “Chile, of course,” a place my dad wanted to visit. Dad had been known to go camping alone when a mood came over him. My sister told her librarian friend things I said—she always answered me and it was she really who said the things. What did he mean You don’t apologize—you mean me or…? “You just don’t,” said my sister. That summer she was “EZ,” incorporating my first letter. (She played softball and had a great free uninhibited left-handed swing.) When did she seem to change her name? You didn’t know when exactly it would happen. It wasn’t advertised.

  Time twisting, braiding, stumbling, for me to see my way out—time to leave. I put off going to see Wick, the teacher I trusted. My home had been escaping me. About this I didn’t tell my sister; or didn’t need to, it was so old and impenetrably understood, leaning toward her or she toward me, hands, no hands, who could tell the difference? “What you get might always seem less than you should but it’s fate,” she said of me, the stony gray light of her eyes warming mine but to see more than just the future.

  Which I’d espied just yesterday upon leaving The Inventor’s: the truck, clean of graffiti, parked up by the bungalow. Most of all, for it was she in her hat and skimpy sunsuit, the old woman picking weed-like greens by the porch whom my sister would have known from the pool.

  I hoped for success for my father. What exactly was it about life that was hell for him? He was serious as a person. What a coach he was, hoping to be tapped for Olympic trials. With his unique method yet willing to use whatever came to hand. He knew. And at a glance he could tell watching you in the water. “Wait, wait,” he shouted, your elbow too high, arm extended up, shoulder over too far, too high, stroke, reach, turn, and fingers (that’s right) more like a close grid than a diver’s sealed hand. Explain, if you could be bothered, what you thought you had been doing, and he’s with you—“That’s correct,” or, “No, that’s incorrect.” Another remark heard more than once after I gave up diving was, You don’t know how to compete. Did he think it was true? It wasn’t as if I was against the man, I told my sister. Just be prepared, she said—Semper paratus. He was flying far and near. Why? I read where the President himself had intercepted a letter authenticated as written by the insurgent Manadel Marouf-al-Saddam Booshawa prophesying that America would be made to run, as in Vietnam, when it was the big picture this terrorist feared. Well, I wasn’t the President yet.

  It was true enough of our seriously award-winning city that we had everything here, Liz thought. Why leave? Liz wasn’t interested in travel; an hour’s trip up to Oceanside on the Coaster to fish off the public pier with her aunt who was married to a veteran who worked at a big kind of men’s or bachelor’s club just behind the beach, and back by seven the same day, was it. Why go to war? Liz had taken Umo for Hawaiian. My sister said he wasn’t old enough, which contained some truth: they had been there so long before they became a state. Liz thought Umo’s accent Hawaiian the once they met. She was way off. Liz with a much older Navy pen pal in Ewa who conducted tours of a Pearl Harbor battleship. It was not she who brought Umo up, or when I did she had little to say but liked something about him. It was his body. He was a traveler, she said of his trips back and forth across the border.

  “Travel!” I exploded—Umo’d been halfway around the world, and it was pretty much on his own. It probably was, Liz said, he’s independent. “A wanderer,” I said, and felt it was a word, a better one, and, as I sometimes would backstroking, I had a thought that the one I really loved was my sister, and lap after lap, my dad was, what?—pretty distant, and Umo, fat, but not mainly fat, but huge, but a kid, which expanded my narrow world of family and all that, though then I thought, Was he really a wanderer?

  No surprises for Liz, even if Umo was twenty, which he wasn’t. China doesn’t let you travel just like that, I said. She said she wasn’t surprised even considering they had lots of people there. She seemed to take for granted what I told her of Umo, that is the circumstances noted or unmentioned that called forth his family (if any were left), his reports of them, even the gathering of these upon me tightened by my motive for (though I hadn’t announced it) enlisting: Umo’s mother taking him to see a leopard in a forest, her fear of water, her winters keeping sheep along the desert borderlands of the steppes before his part-Manchu father one spring delivering a porcelain pot made with his own hands, met her in a village and ran off with her and brought her home to his family’s astonishment if not horror. The woman followed the man for some reason of love.

  Liz didn’t think that happened in China. She was hardly someone you’d say you couldn’t keep up with, yet I would listen always.

  Was it indifference in her to something? It didn’t seem so, moist, her eyes weighty as bees on the hunt or mysteriously bright, everything instinctively regulated, tender, infinitely slow her touch, the cocoa-mat-imprinted troughs of scar upon my chest less angry than a while ago. What did she think of me beyond love? She didn’t like my father. She had even told him so one night, and everyone laughed. Liz had dropped in for a piece of my mother’s Thursday chocolate mud. She had an evil look in her eye, my mother said—though that was next morning. She liked Liz. Which said it all, my sister said, with that slant of hers. Which you can’t explain to people who don’t understand it, any more than I could achieve anything by sharing with Liz all the sometimes mysterious encounters with The Inventor and his store of work. (I loved her, but.) A drawing sketch he had brought back long ago for a dam porous enough that it wouldn’t destroy downstream silt. His new type of oven made of local earth and porous stone encouraging interconnecting ovens, easing the division of labor and multiplying the product a hundredfold (like a thought of mine dreamed up for a Global paper); his ice-skating rink shrine of Five Triangles for the Descendant (Which “descendant”? “Thomas.” “Which rink?” “Oh far away in China, somewhere like that.” “‘Thomas’?” “Forget I ever said it,” The Inventor guided me to another object. A Thomas in China? I murmured, persisting. “Very ancient,” said The Inventor. “You know Chinese?” I asked. Inventor acted modest; he had once had to translate a page of English into Chinese.)

  It must have been when I was still diving, because one of our every other Saturdays or Sundays the Inventor’s door was locked and nobody home. Milt pounded on the door a little too long and rapped with the knocker so it sounded up and down the deserted street. We went away, it was like the future—was that it? Milt and I had an argument, I forget what about. In fact, a rich customer who worked for the City had paid to send The Inventor on a trip to bring back the Bengali plane but then did not buy it. Other goods he brought back—from Bangalore—included an antique pinhole camera found on an island in one of those garden lakes; the camera had been used to draw a huge bull as well as a great droog, that subtle topographical eminence, a fortified hill, and the camera was said to even contain the subject matter it had been used to help the artist to draw. It was less than two weeks The Inventor was gone, it was when I was still diving because he changed the subject to that, when I asked
where he had gone; because I had only been to Mexico, and only Baja with my dad and when I told my sister, who was up in her room and had never been to The Inventor’s, she said, “He went to find his wife.” “What would he need with a wife?” I said, and she, “Don’t ask me.” “What would you say if I did?” “He brought her back because—” “He did?” “—because a temple would have been too big to bring, and we build them here,” my sister said, her head now on my shoulder, for I knew we were on the same plane whether I understood her perfectly or not.

  He did bring her back?

  First I’d heard. Maybe I didn’t know him in that way, or rather, he me. Not his house either, apart from the main floor…

  Quite a while ago, it seems, some Indian gadgets and models you could find in The Inventor’s stock if you looked to outdate fission or poison weaponry—these would have seemed the material side of concepts contained often in his familial backroom envelopes like facts a spy might pass on to outwit war itself if one could only tell the idea to invent the invention. (Were there spies who didn’t know it?) So that when I felt Umo hear me say something that would help him prosper, I felt myself unknowingly a part of a real job or even war effort, yet kept from a danger that would help me. I asked what goods my friend Umo had trucked north for The Inventor from Mexico, who, not the least surprised that I knew Umo, pointed to minute Christmas mangers made by convicts out of nuts, and an ancient Chinese (though Mexican-made) tool for cutting rhizomes from the Goldthread plant, imitation antique knives—had there been three blind women traveling in the back of that truck as we heard? If so why were they not apprehended? As if what you didn’t see would not trouble you.