Cannonball

by Joseph McElroy

  Imagine my reaction (and that I kept it to myself, I told my sister) when my uncle had heard of Umo, whom they regarded, sight unseen, as an alien upstart whose underground reputation as a wrestler, whether we’re talking bastard Sumo or worse, not yet subsidized by commercial TV in La Jolla and Nueva Tijuana’s new Micro Casas on the east side and further south in Guerrero Negro, Las Palomas, and a town with an imported metal church near the Volcano of the Three Virgins, was at the approximate and “Baja” level of cockfighting and human sacrifice. What was rumor, where did it come from? My mother, in reply, looked at me as if I might as well drop dead (as she would look at Dad, who had been much struck with my uncle’s rumor though they had been discussing my aunt’s pistol like the old German model).

  A wish that it be so, I thought, in answer to my own question. Like faith, it came to me. Though nothing like why I might enlist. And far from why my father evidently had managed to resign from the Reserve. Why had I almost failed so long ago tenth-grade Math with my at least average brain, said my mother. Careless, I said. My sister, kneeling on the porch swing, hand on my shoulder, told me once that when I explained the hare and the tortoise riddle to her she had just gotten her period for the second time and she thought I was a math genius, but then “our two and my two make… I dunno,” was what it came down to. And that sister and brother no matter how close don’t talk like that.

  My father lacked faith in me, she told me like that. We were alone in her room, and she would have shut the door if she’d remembered. I watched her expressive mouth, which knew how to stay closed. It could fix the peculiarness of what she tended to say. Then maybe we held hands like “comrades.” We were in her room, the green glinting rock on her bureau, the penknife she would use to sharpen her drawing pencils. Blunt she was though not like Umo, then with a secret unsaid between us if only the future. It wasn’t that I should come out of retirement, she said, and dive; but…(did it matter? I thought).

  “Every day,” was all I said. My sister knew what I meant. Something I did. Or an aim. An action you just did, that was it. Was it inside the other major major things we were employed in? It was like what I would do in life and out of these little things I had with my sister. And what had she meant, almost soundless from the other side of the porch window, that he had “used” me? I understood her mouth, as when she read to me. Dad (she would say) always remembered my asking, Why a half gainer? What was being gained? Advance, retreat, I thought, and the best tactic was both at the same time.

  “Oh he speaks of you,” she said, as if I didn’t live there any more. “A Mr. Nosworthy tried to reach him and asked for you.” The caller had called her “dearest” (?). How did he get off doing that? And said they’d “done the best to get the best.” This Nosworthy was the Sacramento speechwriter now based in Washington. I know what Milt and my mother thought, and Liz, in her own casual, local way: that I would please my father. “They don’t want you to get a swelled head.” “Right,” I said. “Swelled head about what?” she said. “Right,” I said, “water on the brain.” What did he want. It was my father. My sister had faith in me and more, and she asked why I would go, and looked at me. “Maybe oil well fires, rivers, bridges, soldiers, children, desert roads, pontoon bridges,” I said. I told her maybe it was route-clearing I wanted to work on, memorizing the location of suspicious trash heaps, scoping garbage piles for buried shells, maybe that was all.

  I looked in vain for Umo these weeks running into early November—the war launched months ago without me—Umo gone for all I knew or anchoring a Mexican brigade to that desert front (though the intelligence we were getting you had to put through a strainer, as The Inventor was fond of saying). Why had the man Nosworthy asked for me? As far as I knew he had put my father in touch with the Olympic Committee. So my father lacked faith in me? We know things in the absence of evidence, a housing judge turned television chef and grief counselor was to say to me two years later on the eve of the Hearings, having read it somewhere. And that is faith.

  My father’s faith was flooded with evidence, and could seem little more than his Olympic ambition. He had paid his dues and had a payoff coming. Or this the speechwriter who put words in the mouth of Chairmen, Governor, even lately Press Secretaries and, I understood, a Vice President assured him. I knew where my father stood: on training, on swimming (what he would say about their work I could tell teammates in ten seconds), “putting it all together,” chain of command, athlete’s paid expenses, free trade (about which I had learned a thing or two from Umo), Congressional committee hot air, taking the Fifth, will, driver courtesy, his brother-in-law’s videocamming and couch-bound spectator Sumo, and so on—so much I knew of him.

  My sister knew me. She was moved, I could tell, that I’d asked our dad where really this country that he loved was—here, there. She had stopped practicing “Für Elise” and we were on the stairs and she made a sound almost like a laugh and at the top gripped my arm hard, the same fingers that had just been playing the piano: “I have no life but this,” she said. Brought me into her room to show me the floor, magazines spilling out of bookcase stacks, Halloween costume catalogues, mail-order out-of-dates, bike trek, worldwide directory of swimming coaches our family sort of was in, me and my dad she said and had once read the entry to me, some of it, a pine incense lingering from yesterday in the room. “Contentment’s suburb,” I know she said.

  Catalogues and all had been stacked on the bottom shelf of her bookcase and she was going to throw some out; but she shut the door and, eye contact with me, shook her head (I knew, at what I’d said to Dad), my little sister, I’m deafened by my ears thumping and I’m two years older, fifteen going on sixteen, and what could I hear?—had she changed her mind about the stack on the floor? Up close a tiny bit taller than she’d been, darkest curly hair in a let-it-grow phase all over the place, and she laid one arm around my neck, cheek upon cheek as if we were dancing (and was saying something), I know, and I heard it out loud—“…to lead it here”—but then forehead to forehead, nose to nose as we sometimes did giggling years ago when we were eight and six, seven and five, but she turned her cheek I think so her nose was alongside mine and we kissed. Or I kissed her. Not hard either; to get it done. I held her hand, fingers in fingers but someone would be told someday—

  as when we camped years ago at Coon Hollow three to the tent near the river and held hands across Dad’s sleeping-bag feet at the other end of the tent and even rested them on his ankles and she whispered how funny his bony nose stuck up and we saw outside the tent, I realized, to, we thought, animals nearby and to the sky, even all that could happen, and we heard a train, and she remembered a train poem Mrs. Stame had also given her class that I had mentioned.

  And I sensed now in her room she had opened her eyes, this very slightly chapped kiss, seconds long, was all there was to it, a smell of wool and concentration I knew again, but I had to give her another if she was doing research getting ready to be kissed by her fourteen-year-old “boyfriend,” and how could she remain that strange to me that my genes kicked in? It was almost the same kiss with a blindness to it, a thought, or privileged, hot, casual, and the door handle jarred the quiet, the door flung open upon her curtained room, yet she held with her lips for just a moment my lower lip, my mouth, for one more breath of time, infinitely small, eyes half open, that held, sealed, covered the thought, and my hand moved from her back into the back pocket of her jeans, and I knew she grasped what had happened to me though she hadn’t seen me except once or twice through the shower curtain since I was eleven maybe, and my father in the doorway I realized bore a striking resemblance (only as a type) to my sister except that for a moment of extreme and helpless courtesy he didn’t know what to do, nothing much to criticize—well I don’t know about that!—and we didn’t say a word; just couldn’t feel bad.

  And he saw some catalogue or magazine I guess at his feet and said, “What a mess.” And I thought I would like to tell The Inventor what she had said at the t
op of the stairs.

  I was a diver then, I had a birthday. I needed to speak. One night my sister had—this would be right for the Hearings I now see—I gather it all together but it’s too good for them, Competition is only the beginning of it… My little sister had one night a kind of old-time sleep-over in my room and we compared experiences of looking into the future and touched each other, and then I said what I wanted up against her arm on me and it didn’t seem like much because it wasn’t clear and she made me laugh about it, that diving, especially the approach and in the soles of my feet, had gotten to be like payment for something. “Two steps forward, one back,” my sister lying on her elbow said. The light from the street was bothering her, she said; I failed to volunteer to pull the curtains over the shade, and she got up and left. She had me. What came after or what came before—both and neither in my mind. For a moment I was older. Umo often about things asked what happened after. My sister even when she was younger what came before.

  8 board-shy

  One day Umo’s employer was on jury duty and we swam at the high school, where diving off the one board you had to look out for swimmers. I tried to give an idea of how my father’s corporal punishment views had evolved over the years to Umo—Tell me about it, he laughed (his knack with the language)—You? I said—you’re too big to… To shoot? Behind the legendary Honda mower a rattan rod still stood in a corner of our garage. More talk than much else, abandoned in my case when I was ten following a trip to Mexico, CP (it sounds like resuscitation) couldn’t be quite eye-for-an-eye-enough administered, not measurable to the offence, hence—

  Umo put his hand over his heart to speak—

  Though “Fairness not the Issue,” another quaint or really sound principle with my father, I said, like Competitive Instinct. And “fancy-minded,” I recalled from my sister’s room him calling me, when he looked down at the Coaches Directory and other catalogues strewn on the floor and that was all he said that terrible and innocent time and I said Even Jesus’s family thought he was nuts out in the street when…and I’m glad Dad didn’t hear the joke, who might be a secret nonbeliever, worse.

  Umo rubbed his chest. What happened? He meant the accident. I had hit the board. “Don’t want to do that.” Thanks, Umo. “Two dives, one crash.” “Two at once?” my friend asks—possible for him. “Half gainer too far out; twist too close.” “A full twist,” Umo said, “you scrape chest.” I did not tell him the whole truth, only what was to be seen. Two dives. Two different dives. Like a meet. But practicing the half gainer (?)—coach screaming at me.

  It is a great idea, that dive, that forward back dive, looking upward and back like a backstroker, so free and exposed if you don’t have to wrench yourself over and back, the great arch still as inertia with a potential for surprise in it, dive within a dive, wheel in a wheel. Wheel? said Umo. When did he scream at you? A half gainer too far out, my feet going over a little on entry; several half gainers, and coach hollering too far OUT, what did I think I was a figurehead? Figurehead? Of an old-time ship ploughing ahead. A woman! “Yeah, too far OUT!” I raised my voice. “Too far out?” said Umo. Well, that’s putting it politely. And in the middle of the dive.

  “So you came in closer with half gainer.”

  “No I thought if I’m too far out, I’ll try a twist, and I did, because even if degree of diff doesn’t get you much points, a full twist, that’s…”

  “You never see me do one all by itself. With best will in world,” he added, and I heard myself.

  Not all by itself, but Umo, the bend, the stretch, arm folded across you then the twist unfolding it. So this time I went up off the board so high I had an hour up there to play with and this time straight up off the board to show him.

  “You father.”

  I had all the time and it was like I didn’t stop rising—“That’s right!”—And the turn was like a roll in space, finished with him, I wished my sister could have been there—“Right!”—No, wrong, Umo, wrong, wrong. She took care of me that night.

  “Too straight, but your arch.”

  It might have saved—

  “Absolutely—your wrist, your head—”

  My face because—

  “Your arms are still wide enough to—”

  To clear the board so I would have my face, my chin, head—

  “You bring your hands together, they break your fall, you hit the bod.”

  My arch cleared me all but…

  “Ah! Make bod shorter.”

  “No. Change him. Lengthen his fuse.”

  “Lengthen his fuse, that’s good. He shout?” (Umo will not ask further.)

  “Yeah. Something. At the top. I yanked it.”

  Umo rubbed his chest because at the public pool with Liz that other night he had noticed the galactic tread mark still raised on mine, now fading though poisonous under stress. What happened after, he wants to know. He doesn’t ask what exactly was shouted midair during gainer, during twist, not the whole truth because equal truths substituted are just what he is practiced at. Not that I press him on his travels. Diving didn’t get him here. Swimming he had even escaped, I guessed from a mention of the athletic authorities in a city quickly named, it sounded like “Taiwan” or “Tuwain” but it wasn’t, it was -yuan, perhaps. Alone in the mountains, helping animals haul a wagon, swimming a lake in the dark, fat as a hibernating mouse, spotting the eyes of a tigress following him along the shore, until he reached a network of waterways, rivers, some made, invented, to give you new things to remember to survive.

  Umo’s body was his mind during the weeks of his trip.

  He knows his friend’s quite “famous” coach said some things that are not put into evidence, and that is enough, although one day he will talk to Oral the big flippered fool and one night he will talk to Milt the long-armed because Milt was close enough to the diving well at East Lake to hear most of the words but to this day made little of them except Were they about the dives?—and then of course I didn’t go to the hospital.

  All this I needed now to speak of to Umo. New friend, maybe not close, he nodded about something, did not laugh. Foreigner, Competition, I was saying, my father… Umo nodded as if he had known about…what? “She took care of you after?” How he knew.

  And before.

  Before you got hurt?

  Well, we always talked.

  Oh.

  Remembered, saw ahead.

  Yes, yes.

  Loved each other.

  Oh.

  Umo? I had gone too far. Maybe not.

  He could see ahead too. His mother had shown him a leopard in the woods as a beautiful warning, she said, and he had read something in a book—he stopped and was private, and went on—had to get it translated, he said, something of what is expected of sons, you know? (Came out enigmatic, a barrier between us reached, thank God)—and only then understood his mother and could see ahead.

  His damn privacy, I was saying—isn’t it shyness that’s standoffishness? What was that? Umo asked. We call it shy but. (I wanted to ask what he had read in that book. My father private at least through absence.)

  We need you, Umo had said at the pool the day of the monster cannonball.

  My father had come back from Level-Playing-Field task force brainstorming about the future of No-Competitor-Left-Behind Competition at a retreat in Fort Meade, Maryland. A welcome had been read from the President to the effect that You have the intelligentsia with you always but me you won’t always have, my mother reported after Dad had come home and left again. For Fort Meade? I asked. She thought so. Fort Meade stayed with me until it came to me, as I later did not have to tell my sister, she told me. To me, though, our father betrayed no special acquaintance with what was going on in those days. I betrayed little curiosity. Dad was being consulted. He got wind of things early it seemed to me though I was slow to read the papers. His news about capital punishment—that scholars had evidence Jesus with his sharp-honed ploughshare had not consistently opposed it—in fact
appeared a month later in an obscure item Milt pointed out that ran in the Union supported by a quote not for attribution from someone well placed that there was nothing old-fashioned about Old Testament get-your-own-back grit. Like Christian business, always unfinished, even the Everybody Wins creed my dad had his doubts about. Had drive paid off for him? I didn’t know how to compete, he’d said of me at practice. Here comes nothing, I thought, at last, but that was it.

  And about this time, some months after high school graduation and shortly before I enlisted (where was I? what was I doing? I took the measure of my life marking time, noting that Milt’s times had been improving)—my father, a hand on the wheel, driving home from practice as if it were current events a kid hasn’t time to keep up on, yet confiding as it half came out some great event, seemed exercised about speculation in water as commodity bought and sold in certain large hauls, the coming thing. And when I wondered if it ought to be on the market when there wasn’t enough to go around, Dad retorted that from a farmer’s viewpoint it was hardly free (any more than freestyle swimming) or without commercial value, and when I said, doubtless with some measure of defensive irrelevance, that it was salt water inside us, wasn’t it? (like tears, and Jesus wept and what about…spit?, no, sorry Dad) he was suddenly speaking of the horizontal water wells never in olden times fully mapped by any single hand out among the oil fields of the Holy Land (how did he know?) and down toward the Gulf and up into the higher paths of the Euphrates (who had he been talking to?) somehow surviving rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs, you often heard initialed) and serious bombs. Oh they knew we were coming, the old wise guys and prophets in that part of the world, I happened to say.