5. “To make sure you get where you’re goin’ this morning,” she said. But she knew me, I felt. They had their plans, she said, and their plans would not change her way of… Right, I said, you’re—There was a swimming pool in the basement, that was all she knew. You’re who you are, I said; now the man who…last night… She didn’t know his name, that’s all she knew. “Black,” I said. A bicyclist in an old flak vest raced us, looked in my window, my driver swerved and hit him almost—no, did—she was a helluva driver, it spoke for itself, she said there weren’t any bicyclists any more. “Your right fender.” “Armored vehicle, one of ours, friendly heap.” She could fix anything, transmission, rings, long as they didn’t blow her up. A dog was barking. One dog can make all the difference, she said, she’d seen a dog chewing on a foot. “Now, the black guy…” Found down by the river near the stock exchange, that was all she knew. But this deserter…(?) We’ll get you there, she muttered. You’re important, she said, for a Reservist. She looked over at me. It…she began…
4. They could think I came in handy if they wanted, it didn’t change my way of doing things, I said, which sounded grand and I was stretching it probably. She knew what I meant, she got mad sometimes, she said…. All these people wanted me here I sometimes thought, I said, and in spite of it, I’d chosen to be, y’know? I could tell that she did. “Wanted you here?” She stopped herself. “They want you to see what they want you to see,” she said then. All she knew? She took it seriously. In my travels had I ever been to Wisconsin? she asked. Never, unfortunately, I said. Never, never. She sort of laughed, said she’d only been to Florida with her family and it was the wrong part and the wrong time of year—swerving over to make a right, and at the far end was the stadium where something had happened. “You’re a photographer.” “That all you know?” I said. We made a pretty hilarious left, they were letting civilian traffic onto the July 14th Bridge, she said, about the traffic. I saw no bridge. What was it I’d said before I shot that picture? she said.
3. Well, what was it she had found in the Kut photo? I said, she’d said she—. Well…it was the Reservist. What about him? Well, his eye was like a wild horse, and he’s not walleyed.
I said, That wasn’t all. Well, he’d just been distracted, said my driver, pushing me. Well, there was a—There was someone under the table, wasn’t there? said my driver, pushing me. A local woman out of the frame, under the table tied up, I said. Was that it? my driver asked. Not entirely tied up, I said—well, something had just been said, I said. By…? The Reservist whose rifle had been ridiculed. But by you? Yes, I asked if they had seen an Asian kid with a film crew? We’ll get you there; I have a problem with time, you know. I always get there early. Well, that could be hazardous. Tomorrow even more, she said; lot of activity Fridays—no, I thought somebody was doing something to the guy with the eyes under the table, said my driver—If we could just rerun it, I said, wanting some time with her.
2. “Who you hang out with, eh?” I said. “That’s all I know,” she said. “A deserter who comes back on a civilian job—that’s a skid, that’s one for the movies,” she said. “He came back to his unit?” “His unit!” “Who was hanging out with him?” “Working with him, that’s all I know.” “The soldier killed last night?” “He wasn’t working with him.” “A deserter who came back for some job of his own and someone was working with him?” We were going the back way, my driver said, and she had called me a Reservist. Was this why the captain had assigned her to me? I said and I felt she got my meaning better than I did. “I think a friend of mine was doing sound. They ran up a $900 tab in a taxi coming across from I don’t know where, three of them and a driver I guess.” “Two of them and a driver, until they got to…” A rattle of fire from behind us, she looked over her shoulder, she reached to explore my bicep with the back of her hand. “Hang out with a target…,” she said, and left her point unfinished.
1. It was the little Specialist from Wisconsin my driver at eight in the morning at the wheel of an olive-drab-repainted though beat-up though sort of camouflaged and evolved Chevy Suburban like what local Guard troops used that should have been recalled new a dozen years ago, appropriated now from some local civilian arm you figured, no Humvee for me, no mine-resistant vehicle and she said we would hurry up so I could wait at the other end and get set up. Let’s not get beyond ourselves, I said, recalling my sister’s way of—That was some photo, my driver said. I got in and we were gone before I could haul the door shut that was down to the bare metal. I took a look at her and she had the kind of nice looks that she would turn and check you out while she was driving or knew you. “Last night,” I said, and stared at the windshield. “Last night was someone else’s turn,” she said. I looked at her leaning forward at the wheel, small but compact. I asked what about the soldier. “We lost a man. That’s all I know. You hang out with a target, you’re one.”
“What he told me I already figured out,” I said, knowing what she meant—not you but someone else because of you—yet I understood more than I figured she could know—that Umo was here somewhere and with the wrong people; “but that soldier,” I went on, needing to know, unlike this fine woman who kept saying that was all she knew with each new thing she yielded up, “the film crew guy that he recognized as a deserter wouldn’t be after him; a buddy?” I could feel my driver’s contempt coming at me and, in my ignorant neck and eyelids, almost a longtime affection in this woman. She leaned back and raised her chin. “That was some picture.” Down in Kut? Yes, that was…pretty wild. (She was thinking about her day ahead and me, I believe.) The arm-wrestlers? What was it she had found in it? I asked; the captain said you—
“The captain, the captain,” she dropped one hand into her lap as if we had stopped—for she was a rebel in there somewhere—“it’s the others,” she said. “The finish line keeps moving,” she said. “And then there’s the fobbits, the ones who never get off the base. Well you know, you’re a Reservist the captain said.”
I wish I had those words back, my mother said, having told my brother it didn’t matter what he did with his life, long as he liked it. Back? What her spouse would not say after demolishing the cub reporter from the paper who could have done him some good or a loan officer, been abrupt even with the man he cultivated known as Storm (once, by his Christian name Nosworthy in my hearing in those days, and once since), the speechwriter frequently on the phone trolling for input. Don’t bring him into it, my father said over the phone, my sister said, and told me I was meant. She could tell from his face hanging up that he had gone too far and intimate momentarily with his daughter if he could have embraced her nature—how had he received the Coaches Directory with the data about him plus a little comment? But words Dad wanted back? Maybe just the time they took up. Both he and my mother, as if for her, time was family, in the way of beginnings, yet then she came to understand there was my sister and I.
Might as well want a dive back, what degree of difficulty to do it in reverse?
History spilled in front of others at the party by Milt—words he evidently knew by heart that had once upon a time distracted me in the middle of a dive but when I asked if he knew what they meant he could not say. And Umo the same night who said that he would marry my sister, she could read faces, I asked why she would have any interest in him and he could not say. Milt was after her but she said how could she go out with a guy whose father’s eyebrows converged diagonally like that?—there was something else there. Yet never could I offend Liz whatever I said, who was after me to get back into diving who’s so seemingly alive up close you close your eyes. Those steps along the board alone and decided, the hop to land on two feet, back straight up and down, legs bending with the board, or, if a back dive of some variety, the private step and balancing pivot so different from the swimmer’s lap turn. There, though, a dive, too, like your sea lion reaching its aquarium wall and heading elsewhere. Come to think—because I did, about to pass down among the depths of the palace—I myself would slo
w-motion a dive in reverse on occasion from a few feet above the entry water back up to the midair peak where things changed and took shape—with my eleventh-grade “relativity” teacher we fondly called him, assistant swimming coach at the high school, Wick, who thought of many things often at once, I learned, doctored once with his math—but more likely redo it from the beginning in my head or some regrettable remark to Umo who in an expansive mood might associate himself with me as if I were someone and when I left that night I presented with the old, once opened, once resealed birthday envelope I had purchased from The Inventor for the same price as the World’s Fair catalogue I’d passed on to my sister, who was interested in Tarzan and bayou snakes—“a tighter breathing… Zero at the bone,” and in an e-mail that anybody could read said our mother had “salvaged” The Inventor’s envelope I’d given to Dad.
Distant music, Palestinian pop. And here was the disused fountain and the man with the nose was gone, as I turned from the departing car, and facing me in his absence through its open gateway the dull and dangerous palace, official, pale, and square. Loitering personnel cued from me got inside in a hurry—not only uniformed, for it came to me with their scuffing steps and scattered fire rattling somewhere and an explosion and then one closer—and mortars—as I made my way to the pillared steps, microcam in shirt pocket—that my driver meant by “others” civilians (my short-lived driver, beloved maybe): and at the steps on impulse, hearing like a social escort more fire not even totally unfriendly, I stretched out a hand to touch a limestone pillar’s fine spiral of fluting and a chipped crest, and something in my arm punished me in the act or stung a muscle or tendon stretched or sharply questioned. And I passed inside and was directed to a stairway and led down by a beat-uplooking man who, in the sudden abyss of the entry in his black T-shirt apparently Special Forces, I mistook for the one at the fountain when my car had pulled in.
Each downward step of marble or inlaid mahogany stair my boots like feet felt grit on, tracked inside from the city, each lintel-post and arch, each turn sealing me in, and each shadow coming up to meet me demanding protection or a now-andthen faintly vibrating all-bets-off plunge, a salt of humid reek ahead stirred by bodies using it, a clubby steam and memory of last month’s chlorine from some mosaic wash of light I knew pooling and dissolving us, and, someway nasty (why not, as my guide vanished ahead), a climax somehow disreputable of plan yet stubbornly mine beyond all plans of those who might have set me up as if I were not anyone;
and that bad guy I had seen from the car window I suddenly now in his absence knew—yet how could I?—I had been summoning him for months only by voice and name and suspicion and honest, doubt-dreaded, phone-fantasized face, broad but very thin shoulders I had thought, and was right:
but the face (of course of course) I in fact recalled looking up at from the waters I was working during an afternoon practice months ago at East Hill, the astute circumference of it, yet its parts disturbingly independent, the long upper lip, strong buck teeth, goatee, hair parted old-fashioned in the middle, the gross lucidity, though, of (of course!) the bluish nose now focusing everything with its swerve and parallel force broken since then but not seen by me broken till now. For this had to be the nose and cheek bone rezoned by the angry mortgage lender (who after all found himself in basic agreement with them) who had flown off the handle a moment at remarks updating Jesus’s enterprise skills lighting a friendly fire under you, beliefs which Storm had attributed to an associate, though this was apparently before the Scrolls arrived, which contained this stunner in the recorded interview as if Storm had had advance word, information enlarged in the fragmented Scrolls derived seemingly, though, from the associate later reported as two contemporary persons:
all this that had been crystallized in an absence now erased as he stood before me, an atrium and indoor garden suite behind him luminous of dwarf palms, giant virginsbreath (I now know), bird of paradise at a glance with the spiked orange blooms. Aromatic wood somewhere, his words a double dream, “Storm Nosworthy, Zach, so glad to intersect after all this time working together, Fort Meade…” ( a rueful pucker of the strange mouth) shaking my hand, holding the other one then too sliding up past my elbows to hold my arms, pinching one; I thought (and working together?—a shmooze, yet startling too) (and black, short-sleeve guayabera just like vertically embroidered shirts Umo and his cop friend Zoose and Zoose’s new brother-in-law, the musician, had on in a snapshot with Zoose’s sister at her wedding in Laguna Salada more than a year ago?): “You smelled the cedar coming down. Look up, we’ve redone the ceiling, it’s one of the special things about the place we wanted to restore. Though ours is Himalayan cedar, true cedar, though it will doubtless be called cedar of Lebanon. Had it shipped direct by an appeals court justice’s law partner who has a second home in Tibet. He left a small branchlet and its couple of leaves still growing from the end of one plank as you can see in the far corner up there like a signature smelling of rosemary. I feel like Solomon. We’re so indebted to you, Zach, for what you’re doing.”
“‘We’?” I said—“‘restore,’ ‘Tibet’—‘working together,’ you said—and Fort Meade—” “Didn’t work out.” “It didn’t?” I led him on, he didn’t mean my Specialist studies but something else. This one of God’s creatures was rubbing his hands together and then on his white cotton, distinctly local pants, saying he felt like Solomon. “Solomon?”
“The war effort! Your father, and that whole good family I’ve heard like the good background noise over the phone, siblings real close—you have a sister,” came then the words all by themselves topped, then, by “nice work if you can get it” (so I could have soiled my palm swiping that broken nose back into line in that somehow familiar face, eyelids thick folds, eyes small or remote). “Where’d you get that?” I murmured, chilled by a risk of memories above a springboard, Dad’s shouts, the law of pool tiles, the laws of slowing down very nearly grasped by Wick who, doctoring your thought, tried to pass them on for me to apply. “We’ve done our best, outdone ourselves, to shoot Operation Scroll Down, get someone whose photographs…” Storm shook his head, agog, mouth open, drool-ready, twisted (expressive but of what? a change of subject?). “Done our best to get the best.” (I wasn’t in competition with—I hear you, he said, hey I’d given him an idea.) (He me.) “And kept it in the family. Your dad’s ideas, well I confess I wondered if they could all be his, they were so…as if we didn’t know.”
Storm Nosworthy, smiling once twice three times, a dark, burnt-looking rim inside his lower lip. He did something to his pants, which now showed faint smudges. (What were they? Had he been gardening?) “Great springboard for the Operation—maybe it is the Operation, Zach. And keeping it to yourself. You won’t be forgotten.” (Operation Scroll Down, I thought he meant.) “As your father asked you to”—(to be forgotten?) “Nobody even in the loop knows everything—but he will get what he wants, the Committee will see to that, what a competitive…hey competitive with his son, why not? And the diving? That whole story, you’ve gone deeper than diving, how does that grab you? Leave the board to someone—…you know what I’m saying. Another better way. You have to look ahead. You have a sister. You have a former…teacher you—(?)”
Storm came close up, a breath of mildew, and between dread and some partnership I recalled Dad had spoken of Umo as someone who would be of use to “us,” and I should keep it “under my cap” even from Umo, he knew what friends we were. (If we were, Dad’d added in that way of his, probing, remote.) Of use as a swimmer? I thought, a diver? whatever, was he a team person?—all I wanted now with Storm in my face was to get where I was going to do the job I’d been sent to do, yet no—was this the real job, to be valued by a person like this somehow? Turning, thirsty, I felt that sting again maybe like the nip of a snake where Storm had thumbed my arm, clasped me, his fingers pinching underneath, though this adder had a chemical on his breath, and I started to mention that odd remark of my father’s after his trip, stopped myself, started ag
ain, “There was that trip to Baja,” I said, “when he had a meeting—with you, I believe…” For on his return Dad had called Umo “competent” and I had missed something he’d said that would come to me and now seemed sinister if I could recall it. What they learned of Umo in Mexico—little more, I’d bet, than his immigration status.
Storm had my hand again, my name in his mouth implicates me, “You’re right, Zach, faith in the system—even over friendship, other priorities, risk by association, you know what I’m saying—silence is golden. You’re up to this, it’s already part yours, we wanted to be able to get you outa here in a hurry if we had to, so the captain probably mentioned your enlistment got switched to Reserve—finish the job I always say.” Up to what, did Storm Nosworthy mean? Videotape, but stills too? Some historical thing arriving—getting unearthed, or plucked in a rush from these waters somewhere below me. Storm had nerve. A vast horizontal well system? Ancient. To impact the war (though it was said to be sort of over).
No contingency plan—this is it: Storm’s words a spinning, flip-sided guarantee of reward and/or punishment (in the frowning smile of a faith-based relative, a punitive reward comes back; but a Reserve enlistment?)—I experience Storm’s hand moist and distinctly sticky, local candies maybe, until I can bow and, processing these words of his hang out with a target, you’re one, and proceed down to the pool and wait there for your…—turn away then behind me, distantly, a soft snap of the fingers I thought as I saw a figure appear ahead of me and something else from Storm almost to himself (what’s this…?)…the indoor garden there behind Storm, the dwarf olive, my thirst, several violet and orange and, I think, indigo, pink, and bulbous plants, in a gold pot a dwarf tree too small for Jonah to have retired under—“You need a drink, Zach” (Storm toasted me with an empty hand)—a silent tortoise, a bird’s shadow near the skylight in this land that seemed to Storm though not exactly our land a new frontier to build having been torn down, a small volume of Kipling with a half-empty, sordid drink on it he hands me, a family crest on the glass—“What’s this on the…?” (on the what?—I hear fingers snap as distinctly as the neck of a hanged culprit—“our family Virginia 18th century and before that Cornwall, Devon”—)—stairs rejoining me down past ceramic alcoves, a mouth-watering recipe of pots on the stove and ovens roasting as a door opens somewhere for a second, as my palace escort appeared once more in the shadows on this flight of stairs taking me past a rose-colored room and the elbows, butts, a momentarily one-legged foot of a man and another of a woman or two stepping into or out of something I thought, another door flings open below upon the warp of voices and pool waters, closing again. Till I am there, and a steel door with deadbolts and a lever-handle I jiggle must yield more stairs, but I’m guided away from it to the two swinging portals into the pool area that I push following perhaps my guide who I have the feeling now is not ahead but behind me and more gone from me than even he knows, for I would not tell him what I enlisted for.
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