Cannonball

by Joseph McElroy

  She says in the dark, I can understand. You can what? I said. So go to war, you do your job, we’ll do ours—words, music, I know she said. And I have a navy in the west.

  Follow me? I got past the abandoned bathhouse which had served the pool of the hotel which had become the stock exchange, and there around the corner waiting for me (at this hour, when I had no business being out, the quick little woman from the Wisconsin Reserve brigade would ball me out in the morning, who had “found something” in my cropped shot of the Reservist arm-wrestling the mercenary in the beret) appeared not the skinny, hungry soldier with glasses who had “recognized” one of the crew filming GIs listening to music, but the black guy near him as smart as if he was in some disguise, who had joked about…—the headphones he tapped or music nation coming out of them, whatever—he was waiting for me now and shook his head like you never learn.

  I said, “The film crew? Someone familiar?” reminding him. He shook again, “Police?” he doubted me almost. Hey he was the one with the side arm, I said. “Asked you before but you didn’t hear, man,” he said begrudging his grin happy-paranoid recalling the afternoon or Bad Company for all I knew.

  “Sorry ‘bout that. The Asian kid?” “You looking for him?” “If he’s the one.” “Plenty a them.” “That’s what you said this afternoon. And the guy you knew?” “He’s with one.” “With an Asian—the guy you know?” “Knew.” “You don’t know him now?” He shook his head, something bad, “Real big,” he changed the subject. “The Asian kid,” I said. “I thought he knew me, how he looked at me.” “The guy you used to know? The film crew guy? You knew him…?” “Down around Kut, down there.” Yes, I had heard. Kut? It was terrible, I said. “Took me for somebody else.” “Your film crew guy?” “No, the Asian kid. I thought he knew me, how he looked at me.” “Why would he know you?” “Right.” “What did he do?” “He should watch out who he works with, the other guy’s wanted.” “Real big?” I persisted—“was he like, a teenager?” I said. “Asian kid? Lotta teens. Look at me, I’m older now. No kid left out. They knew about me when I was in ninth grade, nobody told the school withhold my file, no kid left unrecruited, like a track scholarship. You coming from Kut?” “That’s it,” I said. “How about that.” I hung with my questions, there was a problem. “The film crew guy you knew is a civilian…” “Not then.” “Shows up with the Asian—” “—and not now,” my soldier decides to add. “Thought he knew you?” “Nine hundred dollar cab ride with equipment, I heard, like as far as from here to Cleveland.” “Cleveland?” “Brooklyn to Cleveland, sorry. Hey yeah they had a driver, Syrian cop moonlighting, he sat in front with him, the kid, bigger’n…—” My soldier, rewinding, had heard something.

  “‘Did I have a sister?’” he said.

  “The Asian kid?”

  “I said sure.” My soldier snapped his wrist. He heard something. “War child, war child” was what he said—like a not great song—“and ‘was my sister my brother?’”

  “Said that,” I said.

  “Right. You could hear worse.”

  “It’s my friend,” I said. Soldier snapped his wrist, pumped his thumb. “You going back to Kut?” “How did you know,” I joked. “Said he was getting married to his brother’s sister, he better watch who he works with, they looking for the other guy.” “Who, the guy you used to know?” “Unfinished business,” said the soldier clairvoyantly, and was gone, calling back to my “San Diego?” “Naw, Kut”—as if he had been deserted—burning his presence into some act to come that was mine; still taller turning a corner, he had heard me and was gone before I asked if the other guy was his friend. I was left with my thoughts and with tomorrow.

  One of Umo’s film crew, then, was a serviceman, I thought, though not now was a second thought, but why? Not a civilian now either, come to think of it. Still in the service but. What was he, this known man who might be using as an assistant a very young Asian, and there were three of them and maybe a fourth, a driver (maybe not).

  I heard shots clear as kindling branches snapping, and I was certain that it was about my informant that they clustered like deerflies to sting his blood. When would they come after me? The whirr of bicycles in the dark and that double ring of one handlebar bell answering itself, and a third in some code unmistakable to one acquainted with the dark in these no longer bicycled streets curfewed five and a half hours nightly even for women in labor who had to get to the hospital. Locals lacking good radios fired their rifles to let each other know where they were when they patrolled the palm groves and here in town. Someone was coming for me in the morning.

  In my room I checked cassettes, battery pack, head, a card in a metal frame attached to the cam that I wrote sequence numbers down on if I had the time; unstrapped my watch and set the alarm. And later couldn’t tell if I’d really slept, for in my uncertainty a test would be, Had I dreamt? when the dream this night was just another waking memory and getting up I found a memento on a table and took it back to bed in the dark before I fell asleep toward dawn thinking who they would have the right to arrest back home these days if they wanted. My family?

  Milt had snapped up Umo’s ID, fingers like a bird. Umo went for him, not the ID, lifted him up over his head. Cheeky shrieked for the four-bulb ceiling light fixture over the dining table and for the shepherd’s pie and roasted birds and a jar of candied ginger and all the food was there on her table and Umo spun Milt like a plank, some poor pro wrestler who didn’t get the joke, and Umo nearly falling down laughing his laugh making to lay Milt in Cheeky’s thin and veined arms (for I measured with a shock or the beginning of some thought the two years since I’d seen her, by her thinness, who’s light as a crust of fire ash, yet also her desire to tell me something—Umo’s abandonment of her on his arrival in Vera Cruz, but—), instead laid Milt on the “ancient rug” I’d heard of, a gift from The Inventor, who quickly scribbled in his book a note to himself I assumed—and I needed to ask about a book in his store he wouldn’t let me look at (and I thought I gave that surprise envelope to Dad and didn’t know what was in it) but Cheeky was saying to me and a chain-smoking little kid gobbling lox-in-a-blanket and the last three buffalo corn dogs and cheese nachos strewn on the table that Umo came in handy at times. (Umo was…telling him something, Em said. He was? I said in the dark—Pretty vigorously… Mmhmm…that you would be OK. He’s wild, he’ll never desert you, we’re all family but what’s that law they like to forget? It wasn’t whether the war was right, he was telling Milt and you, it was that you were doing something in it.) The war, Milt said. Absolutely, said Umo. I’m just going as a… I began (but did not say, picture taker). See you there, said Umo. He was a little different.

  My sister, half asleep, I knew was exposed really to me in all her attention, covers thrown back typically. When I gave up at last and got up, wondering at a fine length of light under the door from the hall, I found an amber glint on her chest of drawers and the little bookcase. “Look, that ol’ geode.” Next to the old useless “mouth organ” harmonica her grandfather, a farmer we never visited, had sent her, this geode rock the size of an orange—half, in fact (better than a whole, you can see the inside, once upon a time a cavity in a rock vein, like a mold filled up then with crystalline minerals projecting toward the center). And she had dug it up, this craggy sphere in space, and my father had cracked it in two (I must have been eleven) to see the amber, sea-cactus green, violet, yellow icy forms, a mountain six inches across, and worth something.

  Take it, she murmured half-dreaming I thought. I ran my fingers over the little bookcase begun in the garage and finished by me for better or worse, the screws countersunk by my father who had left the bookcase unsanded and unfinished one whole winter almost. But, ’member Wiley’s Well? my sister murmured.

  I did. The geode beds. The campground. They called it “primitive” and it was. My sister made a sound, awake. Brought in our own firewood and toilet paper, she said softly. The feet near her door weren’t heard again, th
ough the thin line penciled under the door of light dim from the far end of the second-floor hall didn’t cease, and in the near-dark I went and stepped down hard on my keys in the pocket of my pants, sat down on the bed, thought again, found my sister’s arm under my neck when I stretched out as if I had never gotten up. “One step forward, one back,” she said comfortably. We always went halves, she said, you and me. The three of us in that tent, I said into her hair, and somewhere near there we dug up the geode. Not exactly, I said. No, never exactly, she said. You and I, I said.

  Yes.

  And Dad, she said… Yes, read the survey map for us with a vertical distance of forty feet between the lines—Yes, when it was almost too dark to see by the fire. And the contours made fingerprints, I said; she turned her face to me. Whorled. Mmhmm. Whorled. Did she speak or did I?

  Elevation.

  Saddle. That’s the hourglass. The dip between two rising—Mmhmm—elevation lines.

  Gray for privately owned. Brought our own firewood, water… The haves and the have-nots, he said. Yeah what did he mean?

  We heard familiar, heel-hard feet softly seem to pass, cease, pass outside my sister’s door, heel, ball of the foot barely sticking to the pine boards.

  And the white, she said. That was for rock outcrops he said. Right, he did. Open lands, I think; yes, too open for—

  Hiding (whispered, giggling)… For hiding a platoon on a single acre it said (I added),…from—Mmm, from planes flying over—a memory in both minds, both heads, mouths. A trek, he called it. You’re right. The River. The Colorado. Yes, a half hour for each mile of dotted lines for trails unless you’re climbing and then… He slept between us. (Horse trail, foot trail. Mmhmm.) You and I facing the opposite way from him, talking across (she giggles)…his…shins, his…sleeping-bag feet, ‘n we added up the mileage of each stop our father had made: from the gas station to Blythe, from trading post to the Wiley Well turnoff, from the turnoff south to the dirt road past the state prison, from there to Coon Hollow Campground, from there back to Wiley Well—It’s Wileez. Until…

  We were thinking of another time we’d been talking in bed and God that time when I came out into the hall in my underwear to go to my room, he was standing in the bathroom doorway the light off behind him, and you just knew he was angry as hell. Did she remember? What in particular? she retorts, her tongue softly clicking the syllables. “It was the night before the accident.”

  “I remember the night of,” she said, to be a little difficult.

  Was he outside her door now this night of the enlistment party—and, now, a second, secret one? She was mine. The mystery of a son’s enlistment uncanny on his night when he might just have had a hand in it, the Specialist package, the Army phoning. (An agreement, yes between me and my friend Umo. That I’d enlist. But the agreement went beyond it.) While here, on my sister’s dresser, remotely aglint with amber promise, a subterranean mine pocket was what the geode looked like, its own light focused from the threshold’s edge.

  …till he told us to shut up and go to sleep—and we touched across his sleeping-bag feet, and my little sister whispered, Poor man, and we snickered like paper tearing in the stillness between the beginning breakers of his breathing and held hands more or less all night—and we planted the other half of the “orange” when we moved out in the morning and he said, What’re you two—…? “That’s right, I remember, he didn’t finish. Oh did he open the—” “One step forward, I bought my first incense sticks at the trading post,” the dark intelligent curls falling forward, the face above me, hips, knees, “how couldn’t you go way beyond diving?” was what this poetic person, imagining a drive far greater than competitive, her elbows either side of my neck, had said to me the night of my enlistment party, which was continuing into the depths of all I could fathom—“my unpretentious carpenter,” was what she said, and whether Dad had opened The Inventor’s envelope I’d given him for his birthday remained unknown I thought, where it belonged for a while, though again she said when I left that I had been to the better party until I had come home and this became the best party of all.

  Events some of them public only at the Competition Hearings months later: the mere trip from billet to palace e-mailed after I got home to my sister ending with the little Specialist from Wisconsin, my chauffeur, “Out you go,” and then something through the closed glass of the passenger-side window her lips like a smooch brought together in a word, “chose,” I felt sure. Yet my sister had to know what came before that, and so on, message “after” message, clear back to my driver picking me up while once for two weeks I got my sister’s mail in reverse order through the Army systems. But I was to learn what I knew already, that they would wish to silence truth by exposing privacy, whoever, one night after I had sent all the stages of the brief trip billet to palace reported like effect followed by cause to my impatient sister (impatient for what? what happened just before and before that), e-mailed me the lot from a merely numbered e-address as if I would want to have it for the record when it was from my beloved wit: though like prophecy shared in a book I carried with me as with its donor my sister then going by the name of “Em” I enlarge upon my memory of the disastrous day, its degree of difficulty, second-guessing my understanding of my father, but no. Run it backwards, I’m here.

  My escort coming at 0800. Would I hear my watch alarm? Did I get the function right, the numbers?—one two three four five six seven, if the alarm Set didn’t get away into Time itself. I tumbled back into my narrow bed, leaving my little book on the floor and taking my sister’s words with me, the geode in my hand, crystals projecting out of time—in love—reversing a dive I once took in one piece—the issue wide open of who would want that War Child soldier I’d just talked to dead in the street. Not that he’d spilled anything of importance to me, not certainly identified the video crew-member whom (Affirmative) he did know—the soldier who was and wasn’t a soldier, and is anyone blameless (as the book and the actor too says)? Nor had Umo been identified, but.

  Taxiing east across the desert hundreds of miles, three of them, four with driver, if they made it past Euphrates River corridor sweeps and past roadblocks on almost half the major roads. Entering perhaps this very city of riddled bridges (three closed of eight), expressway past the park, great mosque dome blue as a Virgin’s cloak, blue as a bird, a drained pool right here outside the stock exchange—all to tape GIs glued to their music tapes on the threshold of assaults that classic Rock for all its sound said No to, where Now’s neighborhood blasts us off into funkadelic ready-for-anything or unready commitment-is-the-name-of-it action plus just talking for the film crew, making do with the Occupation, living with whatever, with war, what we have to do, our way against theirs, two steps forward, fifty years back in, yo, whatever order, like why’d you enlist, Zach?—hey wait a sec, listen to this, an earphone offered.

  13 might as well want a dive back

  Patient, I had photographed the black soldier, clicked him into some lasting increment, my moment of hidden equilibrium it came to me, a photo in between. I begin then—tell you what happened just before and so on.

  7. “This is as far as I go,” she said, braking and shifting, and almost laying her hand on my leg, sunlight splitting the dried mud across the windshield from a roadside mortar early this morning, when somebody else had been driving this civilian wreck not a true substitute for a Humvee. What’re ya doin? she murmured, feeling me lean and then not. That guy in there by the fountain, I said. She wouldn’t know. I knew she wasn’t driving me through the great arched gateway. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Out you go,” she said. “I know that guy from somewhere.” She put the car in gear and touched me, put her finger on the back of my hand, Specialist from Wisconsin. “You know more than me. Don’t get shot, now, like that Bedouin who was born without eyes just standing by when they shot his cousin who went fishing for the Scrolls.” “But, a deserter were you saying, the film crew, a deserter—?” I said, stunned to hear “Scrolls.” “Yeah
. Out you go.” “This is the palace,” I said, the stone, the fractured minaret, chipped pillars, like my status suddenly in question. “One of them,” she said, her braid below the camouflage cap blond and dark-streaked, my driver and fan, my one-way ride: “This is what you’re here for.” “This is what we’re all here for.” “That’s all I know,” she said. “But you remembered…” (I was pushing.) “Ask the captain,” I said. “The captain,” she said (who liked her, protected her from E-5 “rapists,” but from himself too?). “I wish I knew what we were all here for,” she said for some reason. “I hear you,” I said, getting myself out, older I felt. “Spread the word.” She said something through the glass of the window that brought her lips together, the word “chose” I feel sure, beyond irony. I fingered the micro out the size of a quarter and got, I hoped, a shot of her in profile if I didn’t see her again, this fan of my crappy photographs with amazing info, who might have seen what had been cropped not by me from my shot of the arm-wrestlers in Kut, but I didn’t think so, she just knew, she had some kind of understanding; but I had to wonder what had become of Umo.

  6. Some documents had nearly surfaced at one of the wells networking a region to the west. A desert thief, or enemy, had fished out an eighteen-inch capsule (that was what my driver knew), had opened and tried to read the contents (ancient, what she’d heard—something about scribes and family think you’re crazy, and get you off the street, and Be a passerby), and this desert interloper been shot to death, and the documents had been rolled up, slid back in (that was all she knew), and sent on their way at this point of water acceleration identified by an Army engineer as a current, on the basis of what he had heard. That was what my driver knew. It was like fucking to hear this. She had nothing to do with Operation Scroll Down, she said; she kept it separate, just seeing that I got there. She was taking me a back way, no traffic lights, no stop signs, half the traffic lights were busted, you didn’t want to be at those intersections. That shot of the arm-wrestlers at Kut, well it, she said, moved me no end—what had you said to them? (Uncanny of her, her mouth, like she knew something of my connection to the weightlifter though he hadn’t recognized me from home.) We passed a power plant near a bridge that was open. Didn’t we pass a Nineveh Street? “You said something…” “Just as I snapped them. I have to meet someone there I think.” “You don’t know?” “Get there somewhere.” “Kut.”