Cannonball

by Joseph McElroy

  A miracle that wound up where it was heading, my dad actually said to a son known for saying blunt stupid things or embracing untenable positions or posing questions.

  Mysterious, I accept him, managing somehow to excuse himself outlandishly from the Reserve without ever undermining our morale by letting us in on it though how I got my job is also an interesting question I asked myself at his birthday dinner before I left. Though felt one chance already gone replaced by another coming.

  How to find the right person even more than question to ask proved my training no less than hearing for myself and knowing a few people before they vanished, a chaplain at Fort Meade, a sergeant behind the wheel of a car in foreign streets. An office, a captain.

  An ochre city not at peace or war outside the window, a parking lot it was well to keep an eye on from time to time, this captain paging gingerly through dozens of prints of what I did best, careful not to touch more than a corner lest some damp contagion reach the thumb and fingertips of his left hand. A captain who traded words with you as if he had some hunch. That the work—the photos, the work now strewn across a desk—claimed some privilege quite other than a camera’s light. That my sister once after some months when I had scarcely heard for all her attention to me had wanted to know what had been said just before a certain shot was taken—something said in words—wound my slack tighter too.

  My father would have liked three white-pyjama’d suspects framed by the open back of a dedicated personnel carrier so they seemed to be on a tilted TV screen. Two Yamaha wheelies spinning off a ramp, I could just hear them, one biker blindfolded. “Jump pay,” I said. Two headless kids caught squatting still upright beside an irrigation ditch at Tal Afar. (Non-renewable resources, I muttered.) A one-legged Indirect Fire Specialist with big tits going in for a lay-up hopping as she bounces the basketball, which is also caught in the air (“Woman MOS,” I said; captain, “No such thing.”) Two left severed ears on the shelf of a bookcase. A Dang Freres ice cream Humvee unloading the day after their Defense contract got canceled when they were discovered to be a French Catholic firm. Seen from the window of an armored vehicle returning for the fourth time I was told to the same village, indigenous trainees fieldhockeying a ball around with their Kalashnikovs on a leveled playing field. An old man in a green beret watching fire skating across a river.

  “Famous at HQ,” said my captain, and telling me that his former North African wife had complained that all this was much more like her part of the world, that particular wartime than all the other wars they were comparing this to. In his look something asking for words looked at the open window and turned to look up at me from what I suddenly understood were these unwanted pieces of something or other, weird as the camera itself, though not more surprising than the war. “You have a fan here, from a Reserve brigade, Wisconsin, likes your approach.” He looked at the open window. Music ongoing but “Stairway to Heaven,” a light in the voice straining to stay alive in the guitars and bass I hadn’t heard before.

  I could have shared this with the captain and the only hearsay-news news that Umo had a job with a low-budget guy documenting music mostly Metal that American GIs were into over here, but I knew no more than that the cop had told The Inventor who told Milt who told my sister whom he lusted after. You can be psychically connected to a person like this captain even with almost nothing in common. He answered a phone. I heard him say, “They want heads on a plate.”

  Hanging up, he said, “You’ve got some radar.” Well you had to shoot quick, I said. Right, he said; that kid with his mouth open. See three things at once, have faith in your eye, I said, plotting where I was standing, hoping for I didn’t know what. Kut again. Shoulda seen what was going on on the floor. (My sister had needed to know what happened just before this shot—her trademark question. What trade am I putting her in?)

  “Those do-rag graybeards arm-wrestling…” said captain.

  “Kut; down at—” I started to tell the captain what he thought he knew already. “—Triple Canopy guy—” he said. (Two guys with a bit of someone under the table, then one reaching for my camera.)

  “—Kut,” I finished; “well, the security outfit—but he’s got the Special Forces patch—and the other one was a friend of my dad’s, a total coincidence.” “We know him,” the captain said; “Reservist.” “That’s correct, a powerlifter, a salesman—shoulda seen what was going on on the floor,” I said, the photographed, the unphotographed; but what had captain revealed? “Piece work, you get used to,” said the captain. “Who’s we?” I said. “I liked the crane hoisting the billboard into place,” he said, the way people say they liked something and don’t say why.

  “Advertising—”

  “—honey?”

  “Saudi honey,” I said. The captain grinned. (One of three billboard shots where I tried to catch that noose-hole of opportunity, the Occupation said to be over but the privatizers’ “laboratory” with several months to go till we had our Constitution, I told my sister and would tell the Competition Hearings.)

  “You enlisted…,” the captain said curiously. An agreement, I said, but to do what? I asked myself again out loud, always somehow knowing it was in my gentleman’s agreement it came to me with Umo. “Let’s have some more tank-and-flag shots,” my captain said, and wondering exactly what he meant I told him for months I had wondered how much friendly fire I survived. Going where I was told, you know. Was I prepared or being?

  Onward—like targeting what I couldn’t put my finger on. Days, weeks late my sister had e-mailed love and a misspelling and so glad and sorry of my new friend at Specialist school who had vanished into a building one day we were jogging on the Base but wasn’t their a door left ajar? No, he had appeared to be untraceable, I’d replied, though I gave up at first. Older, a Chaplain training for combat photography who, to his peril, might know more than his calling. Underwater photography he had thought he was headed for but they had other plans. “Maybe he went on a retreat,” my sister thought, maybe because I was at Fort Meade for those few weeks and she recalled that “retreat” was how Dad termed his eight civilian days spent there, when I had mentioned to her this chaplain at Meade who thanked me for a thought that I personally thought had been his, about finding your real job in another one you’d been pushed into. My sister who even if what she sees isn’t yet sees much—that our father once called too much nothing.

  I dug up the present.

  “Sympathy for the Devil” banging out of someone’s CD near the window, I felt my captain wanted me to speak. That field of cukes and tomatoes in the photo could be anywhere. And landlocked green winter wheat along a seam of a river, the Mesopotamian plain nice but kinda flat for a photo, I said, the checkpoint bridge just outside the frame, two guys lying on the ground I couldn’t take. Right, said captain, you’ve a fan right here in the office, Specialist from Wisconsin. Right, I said, let the chips—” “Something else for you now.” “—fall…”—we nodded, where they may unsaid. “You’ve got to face the music,” the captain said, as if I did have to. “Your father now. He was in Vietnam. Or…?” “No. His friend…” I began.

  For why had the captain said it like that, instead of, Anybody in your family in…? Or Was your father in? Or—for it was almost as if—I couldn’t say it in words, as I told this captain a thing or two about my father’s friend who was one of the few guys he would listen to for long. The captain agreed silently. “And he was right,” I said. Captain nodded. This exception an older friend in Wisconsin, with a binder full of plastic-sleeved posed-corpse snaps who hunted whitetail deer with legendary skill owing he said to what he had learned along the Cua Viet River in the early 70s. The stealth needed to survive serving in a so-called Studies and Observation Group, to say nothing of his old M-1951 flak vest in case he was shot at by another numbskull out in the woods—too hot to wear in the jungle in the old days, comfortable in hunting season now: so now he would stalk a doe and buck by wading a stream never lifting his feet out of the w
ater—deer didn’t associate streams and humans, if you wanted to know. On the ground he adopted a high crawl—hands and knees in waist-high cover, in low you went on your belly like deer scraping under a fence.

  Knowledge is power, it breeds respect, my father had told me driving home from practice—respect for deer, my father added of this friend with whom he went along once or twice a year but who did not hunt himself though fished for old ironsnout pike just to get them. It was that other war not properly finished that his friend recalled—“that he’s scared now that he wasn’t scared then: understand?” said my father wheeling a practically rightangle turn in front of a ghostly oncoming truck into our street, explaining because what was obvious if you have to ask can’t be explained to you but he was explaining in case—“And that he lost time once, time itself—do you understand, Zach?—” not understanding, himself, how I loved him for that “time” weirdness—“a dead gook lying face up in the river, minutes on end, he thought, underwater, and so he moved on” the way SOG trained for silently, but the VC must have held his breath, next thing my father’s friend heard something, dived behind a tree, VC winged him, the dead-in-the-water VC up and firing. “With what?” I said—“he stashed his rifle out of the water?” “With what, with what? For God’s sake, Zach, do you understand what I’m saying?” “A sound you said, Dad—what kind of sound?” “What kind of—!” My father was angered by questions he understood as a substitute for something else like silence or…competitive performance, I actually said now to the captain, feeling disloyal. “They were stupid questions but I asked them: Were flak vests designed to stop bullets?” “Stupid?” said the captain. “‘And you went hunting, Dad, even if you say you didn’t really, and I don’t have a big case for the deer if they want to hang around and get shot.’” The captain laughed. I said, “The stupid questions are the right ones sometimes.” “If you keep them to yourself,” the captain said. “Where I overshoot,” I said—“You still do, so watch it,” he said. It was like So long, which shouldn’t have bothered me.

  “Your work…” he said, he had been smoking too much—my “work” had gone largely unnoticed, I had thought, some not clear enough, the child with his mouth wide open on teeth and the taste buds only, it was for the files, not the international wires—“Tell me about it,” said the captain. “—for Intelligence (?).” “Your work is known,” the captain said then. DC came into my head, the War Memorial with all the names, Lincoln Memorial with his words in stone. Captain eyed his desk, as if I was leaving. My training at a base near DC had proved routine, a Chaplain training there to be a highly specialized photographer had asked me why I’d enlisted, and at once dismissing my thought with his, which I interrupted without hearing, they sparked new thoughts in me but what had he said about everyone doing their job?—he had vanished into a building, his heavy midsection supported by long, gangly legs that seemed out of another life, or he was to be cut in two, this deeply intelligent and humorous and divided man, not so divided after all, leaving me unsure if he meant what he said about the division of—

  I thought I was dismissed. The captain took in the window and the music running on. “Better not Forward any more pictures”—to personal correspondents, he meant. He was coughing fit to die. What did either of us have to offer? His voice gave off an animal-enough sound without inflection. It said I would take a couple days off starting at once to be ready for another assignment.

  “You will keep it to yourself.”

  Plenty of experience in that quarter. Keep…? (A weatherwoman I knew personally and had tried to know better had been told the same thing.)

  “Scroll Down. Operation Scroll Down.” He looked into my face as if I might know already, or something like that. A GI, earphones at the ready, sloped past between me and the window. I would be receiving my orders. It was quite an opportunity, captain said, pulling out a desk drawer as if it was one of the things he had. Some paperwork.

  Ready? I thought; what would I do? A hotel near the river had become the stock exchange, maybe it could get blown up along with the sewer (though be it noted that sewage privatization in the war zones had been put on hold, in the sense of retention rather than hands-on). “Your billet, you will keep its location to yourself.” My orders would identify me and what I did and announce my appearance in advance. My job, what was it again? Dividing the labor but how? The way you make jobs? The way you halve the distance endlessly?

  Could I use the laptop?

  “It’s down.” The captain put down his pen and clasped his hands. Looking at his hands, I missed Milt, who had not answered an e-mail I had sent on someone’s laptop down in Khawr. Was it my fault? I would try for a reaction at home when I thought of it.

  Opportunity was what I had come here for, I said. Yeah well, said the captain. Opportunity was ineetiative. Try to photograph that, I said. Come on, he said. Had he said too much and knew it and was resigned to something? Well, the assignment…was an “archaeological site,” said the captain, leaning forward in his chair, to at last say perhaps too much. Were there any left? I said. (Which side was I on? captain asked.) Babylon looted, I thought; thirty digs visited by profiteers I’d heard, what they took… A phone rang in the next office—and 8500 treasures, I thought, gone from museums alone kept in some moistly climate-controlled wing of memory like a cropped photo or a fact that would come in handy. The insurgents were living off stolen antiquities, I said. Which side was I on? captain said.

  (Had I let Umo go? Those locomotives—the numbers an eight-year-old fat boy wrote down when they passed near where he lived for a while in Shenmu until he was reported.)

  The side of the most living and truthful, this history, I think I replied to the captain, so he put his hand on the phone and took it off, searched for a cigarette: “We’re a family here,” he said, “and I’ll see that your thoughts are passed on to those whom they may concern. They’re certainly inspiring.” What they inspired in him I couldn’t tell. Anyway, my assignment…that was all he knew. I said there must be a laptop somewhere if I could borrow it for a quick e-. “Try that one,” said captain of the one that was down. “And stay away from any elevators in this city. You were on a swimming team?” he said. “Diver, did I hear? “Once. Got injured,” I said. “Didn’t keep you out of our clutches.” We thought about it.

  Someone arriving at a site—I wondered if they were phasing me out. Dignitary? Scientist? A precarious archaeological operation, I thought, involving…“a weapon” (the captain had reached, I believe to this day through me, a need to speak the word)—“a weapon,” he concluded staring into my face as a whole, and I saluted for some reason, hearing quick steps at the door but the person didn’t come in—a woman, I felt, from the captain’s staring at his coffee mug and eyeing the ceiling.

  11 words in the dark

  One step back, two steps forward, my sister had said one night in my room, shortly before I’d not volunteered to get up and pull the curtain, the light was bothering her; but No, she said really only a few minutes later, twenty minutes, twenty-five, of picking up my loud old clock and chucking it into the steel-mesh waste basket and leaving it there with its loud, old-fashioned marking-time weight—one step forward two steps back but it’s the two back that give you—it was the doorway of her room late the night of the supposedly aborted sleepover, and it was me in the doorway of her room, a scent of what I’d been told was jasmine that her mother had given her strong in all directions. “Yes,” she said.

  A premonition I would hardly have told the captain how Umo the morning I went for my enlistment physical laughed that harsh Chinese laugh to learn that my dad had managed to resign from the Reserve but had kept it to himself. First glad for my father, Umo then coolly enraged they wouldn’t let him go in with me. Finding that my father had finessed the Reserve I saw that it had been precisely at a moment when, from his Club sponsors, all intimations pictured him as a person who knew what was going on. You don’t apologize.

  I had two pretty goo
d books with me, the captain saw the angle of one digging at the canvas equipment bag but not camera equipment, and when I was leaving he touched the bag for that reason. Books, I said, one from my sister, one from me to myself. Your sister, he said.

  Slightly fire damaged, their contents nearly intact, I read them because “experience,” whatever Dad meant, “isn’t the only best teacher”; or reading is, too, it had come to me and is the best of someone else’s all boiled down though one of these was long. Though one short but seemed long. Read it through only when I got home. Ancient but mentioning desert missiles that pass by the guilty and kill the blameless. Feathers that fall no more slowly than cannonballs, death not to be feared though the author didn’t persuade me. (Was there a photo missing from the captain’s batch of mine?)

  The hotel had become also the stock exchange. There had been a pool near the hotel, and there were doors marked Changing Rooms from which it would have been a short run to the waters of the Tigris. There seemed to be no time during the slow three-and-a-half days I waited for the go-ahead, knowing only that I was going somewhere in the neighborhood, and it was my job.

  A chance acquaintance, sitting in a street tea parlor under the sunshade canvas of a mail-order lean-to tent, had an e-mail for me from my sister. Umo was with a crew filming American GI’s listening to Rock and talking about it. He was somewhere over here. Umo an export? What China has to offer Mexico in exchange for business Mexico has been relieved of. “What an old roly-poly” Umo was, according to my sister’s e-mail, and she was “so tired” of the California sun she was moving East. My reply: Like Dad almost. Hers: He don’ care what ah do—Apply yourself—Mom buying me clothes every minute—don’t know why, but do.