Cannonball

by Joseph McElroy

  “You knew that?” I said.

  “And here they broke in,” said The Inventor, changing to the current subject, “took my envelopes—forrteen shoeboxesful.” His laughter unseen, edgy, Cheeky’s by contrast agreed, transmitting with her brown fingers on my arm all but family memory extending me hither and yon. “Fourteen!” I said to a man who believed in words coming out of nowhere—that could be a good thing. “He had no papers,” Cheeky calls back.

  “And now you have brought me something from the War,” the voice continues learned in the blinds-drawn shadows. “To translate,” I called out. “And he’s wounded, you know,” said Cheeky—“his shoulder—” “He knows.” “We need you. What’s this?” Through my sleeve she felt my hard, gristly scar like a sinew growth. Were they mad at me? you had to wonder. Hard times (“We need you”), news of The Inventor’s green card to be reapplied for unexpectedly, Cheeky’s lease, her runaways moved on, and Umo—

  But the man, nearer now, still unseen, interrupts. Hearings have begun? Can something be done, about the War, the terrorist governments in the driver’s seat, the people being nickel-anddimed, the Cabinet, the money, when what are they about?

  “He dreamt you were there,” Cheeky confided to me. (Where? I thought.) She a starved little horse of an extreme Southern California human. Beyond her, the long tables empty now, the glassed-in display cases of this nomad imagination-for-sale-orbrowsing (“no problem”) crammed even fuller and anchored-down-looking, my God, a shadowy light as from water waiting for company and sound. And in the other direction, from which I’d come, beyond the boarded-up window an outdoor whirring sound, a sidewalk, a car door somewhere, a footfall, someone passing in the brightness, and I had to show what I came for. The Ziploc out, Syriac characters rippling with the page and almond-dye letters (or were they just ancient black-ink-faded) with angular arms like minute megaphones, backward r’s, an authority instinct with care, beauty, faint water stain as if, now that I’m about to hand it over, I had never really looked at it.

  Why am I speaking about Umo to this couple who I know are reluctant to comment (the woman touching me, the man as yet unseen—who are they to me)? What am I up to? Is it the Scrolls, my part in them, which even if bizarre, as I sometimes guess, won’t matter? Consulting another oracle, a childhood sanctuary of the miscellaneous? Is it friendship? Umo’s résumé?

  For he had divided his time between Baja and here and every point between, a catalogue of jobs if you wanted to know about jobs not for illegal kids but an infinitely resourceful soul who came in handy anywhere from here south able to turn always Between into a possible home. No end to it. Though his music job in the war zone I leave out, partnering an enemy combatant. The Inventor at last—he stands in the inner doorway, his face of a dye darkly material and fierce.

  Cheeky is so upset, “He said he’s glad to be thought dead,” she says.

  “How does he know he is?” I said, so religiously almost relieved to be learning it for the first time for certain, hearing the front door sticking. I knew someone, I was telling these vivid people, who was dead but thought not to be, I said; whereas Umo … Umo was pretty noticeable, wasn’t he? Was it he who’d painted the front door? I asked, holding out the Ziploc yet turning from The Inventor to find, standing inside the front door having pushed it shut, my sister, who took my breath away.

  20 make time free

  A stranger to this house I was certain.

  But not to the Ziploc she saw our irritated host take from my hand. She was dressed for her job, her dark hair tied back, her eyes bluer even than her shirt, her collar white, her black slacks tailored to her hips, cell phone at her waist, and some new partnership prophetically between us like a mysterious ultimatum quite beyond your control.

  “I saw him dive twice, I never met him,” said my sister, “and somewhere in between I saw him hop into a truck on the interchange with cars streaming by, and he was glad to be alive,” said E-m. “And so were we. He acted out, sort of…for us, for my brother…he acted for us (?).” “No, no,” I said—how could she speak? “He met you,” said Cheeky. “It’s always possible,” said my sister.

  “—spek lak he did. Lak he knew you and Zach…ye’fathuh.”

  “We knew of you, Sister,” said The Inventor. He had a lamp turned on with a green-glass shade, he was staring at the piece of Scroll and would not quite be able to give her the once-over. “I have read your envelopes, some of them, and seen how they affect those close to me. I have seen your car drive up in the middle of the night,” my sister said, “and heard it.”

  “‘I have no life but this,’” said The Inventor, “I have harrd your brother say the seeme.” “It’s so,” said E-m, The Inventor’s theme uncanny or was it familiar through my sister? “Bottom lines I recognize but not just before,” said The Inventor. “I will be back in a matter of minutes.” He flapped the scrap of thin, stiff paper. “You don’t know how some fool might use your words, your ideas, your thought, your cut-up memory, philosophy, family, your gift, your shit,” said The Inventor, leaving the room. My sister looked about her and at me. Cheeky limped over to open a sliding glass display-case front.

  “What are you doing here?” I said. She had a job, and looked like it. And she’d never been invited in the days of my friendship with Milt, and had had a previous engagement, Dad’s birthday, the night of The Inventor’s party (though held at Cheeky’s) celebrating my enlistment from all appearances. Why would she come here? She was uninclined to, she wasn’t much of a collector and would have had no reason to visit The Inventor while I was gone and none now—she was so intelligent, it occurred to me. This so obvious a reason it was disturbing. She’d had to come here.

  “The girl has her own reasons for visiting,” Cheeky said. “Have I told you how that big boy took me in his arms when we met at the dock and thanked me for coming and gave me a book, but not a book book,…this—” she took out of the display case a catalogue big as a phone book, and slid the glass front out and down again, she was moved. “His own person,” she said. She wasn’t about to hold forth. She seemed to embrace what was coming. An old person listening. What for?

  “Your place”—E-m nodded quickly (so unlike her). For the story E-m told now wasn’t as she and I ever ever would speak to each other, like a clock telling time, boring almost, chitchat, going through the motions, and something was up to me: what was it like, a controlling person, which my sister did not know how to be, yet we were used to being surrounded by them.

  “Mom phoned my cell, she thought I was at work. There’s a break-in at your place. Stud called her. He dropped you off at the bus, she thought it would be the 41, but I figured out why—you were coming here and caught a ride with Stud in the middle of traffic (?)—He said, How’s it going? Ask me tonight, you said, tomorrow, next month if I’m here, Mom said, you were in a rush. And Bea phoned.”

  And, and, but when did she phone? I said mouthing the words—this was all jumbled, not even at our typical slant—it was up to me to calculate, and Cheeky, understanding that it was between the two of us which is not what you do when you invite yourself into someone else’s place, said “Break-ins” so softly that she seemed to want to speak only to us and it had its effect—“and phone calls. Only way to stop what’s going on is not to live anywhere. I’m going to have a pyre in the back yard here when I die; and I’m easy I don’t care if it’s quite soon.” My sister said she would like to see that. “What took you to my place?” I said, strangely for I was OK with it, more than OK. “Bea briefed you on the Hearings?” I seemed to change the subject. My sister looked at me, she put everything into it. “She sort of went on about it, how you handled those people. ‘Nice work,’ she said.” “Storm Nosworthy’s words,” I said changing the subject for she was jealous. “Him again?” said my sister—my father’s daughter, I understood—“didn’t we have enough of him? What did he mean?” “Us. The old Sinatra song. You, really. ‘Nice work if you can get it’s all I remember. He’s go
t a…” “He came clear across the country for this?” “No. But we’ll find out this afternoon.”

  “Well, there’s a job I won’t get.” “If what?” I said. Cheeky held the catalogue up. We heard The Inventor at work in the other room. The envelope room among other things. Was my hearing newly acute over my disappointment the last months with photography if not sight itself?

  “I don’t know what.” She must keep on behind me, my amazing girl for this historical moment if I could put it together (but what job?). “If he’s not afraid of you, what you know,” I said, and I saw the warped, mobile face she would read when she met Storm (very soon I saw), as, just last night, I heard her draped in a towel read to me, “My Tools took Human—Faces—/ The Bench, where we had toiled—/ Against the Man—persuaded—”

  —where “Against” also means anticipating, and “Bench” itself did the persuading, it came to us;

  and hearing The Inventor muttering like a priest I saw Storm’s eye gravitate to hairs on a toilet seat, stained underwear on a threshold, damp, dark towel reaching across a tossed family comforter my mother had given me; yet I seem to have foreseen that it wasn’t our intimacy Storm cared to use against us but my knowledge he must keep inactive though not me.

  “You went to my place?” At the office was where she was when her friend Bea phoned. “Collect some a my things,” she almost couldn’t say it.

  “Were they there?” Gather together things. Books, closet, laundry, bathroom, notebook on the kitchen windowsill, necklace on the bedroom rug, God knows what else incriminating on the dark green comforter she had given me—“a green bed,” she called it, though she’d left me her incense holder, gift of a neighbor child made in ceramics class. “Oh we have that!” my sister took the American Coaches Directory from Cheeky. Ours I had seen last in her room at home, on the floor, and long before that heard what I’d heard, and left it at that.

  “She said—”

  “Beatrice?”

  “Yes, quite a story you told.”

  “Part of it.”

  “She told me. From that photographer, our Chaplain, my God, it made me realize—” “Passing it on.” “So they need to silence him?” “I said too much.” “But he’s dead.” “Between you and me.” My sister alone for a moment, was this why she’d come? or to use all this? For what? to set out at last? to leave? I knew what she was thinking.

  “And he took me in his arms,” said Cheeky, “and hugged me and gave me this very book he’d brought all the way with him thousands of miles and risked his life taking and I was to take charge of it, from Mexico he wanted to travel light, and here it is.” (“And ‘the Other’? all that?” murmured my sister, for I took her hand: “If I only knew who it was.”)

  The Inventor was back among us. He said: “I will show you what I have written down and I will read it out loud, it is yours, but, but…”—he was deeply surprised, almost quieted—“I have made…” He had penned the words on an oblong brown paper panel torn from a Ralphs grocery bag in letters still smaller than those of the Scroll scrap. It was late. What did I owe my sister, him, anyone? “…I have made a discovery!” he said. “But here is your own private and perrssonal scroull, you and yours,” The Inventor said, who seemed moved or leaving something out in advance, his voice urgent, disturbed, honored. “Listen,” he said:

  “‘—always inspiring’ [it begins,” he said, “(where someone tore the paper)—he means, ‘Be’—‘Be inspiring’ ] ‘but make yourself like firewood or water scarce, commodity-wise’ [that’s what it says] ‘though present’ [‘on call’(?)]. ‘And when you are mobbed, and the Jerusalem scribes try to get hold of you but first your family try to detain you out there in the street because they think you are crazy’—[‘beside yourself’ is closerr]—‘to your hearers you will say, “Who are my real mother and brothers?” and answer, “Those who do the will of God, and have the Godspeed gift,” but in another place next day, “A house divided within itself is a bed of ferment where enterprise can thrive,” and without warning you appear somewhere else near a barren fig tree for which you prescribe a particular transplant, or another day ask, “Why baptism if you do not understand water?” Or elsewhere if you imagine a water that quenches thirst once and for all for a woman just like a sister who you know has taken several lovers and she thinks you are a prophet to know such a thing about her, you as a storyteller in your own story this time keep your identity secret from this mere Samaritan woman whom you compete with on equal terms until the moment when you can’t hold it back any longer and it will be a stunner until…when they write about you, you will seem to have said all these things in one day, and you can foresee a tool invented many years hence, to put pictures side by side better than talk.’

  “But the last part,” The Inventor looked up to see E-m, “where the Man from Nazareth speaks about the woman’s cohabiting sex partnarrs, is not in the Scrolls they have published.” The Inventor turned upon me eyes glitteringly darker and because foreign now all the closer to me his young friend. “I know it for a fact. Can your papyrus be authentic?”

  The phone went. We heard it like a voice, a face, a reply, something right in the neighborhood. Should he answer it?

  What did I owe him, please?

  With the hand that held the Scroll scrap and the grocery-bag brown paper translation, our host pointed to the Coaches Directory (Big as a phone book, Milt had said): “It’s yours. Take it. It is bad luck. We help them, then one day they don’t confide any more. Therein is why Umo came here to…” (I took both pieces of paper out of The Inventor’s hand as he turned away distracted.) “…to our part of the world,” he added. “His place is marked.” The phone call might be about us, I thought; for us. “Be back,” The Inventor said politely, going to take it.

  What were they willing to do to protect the Scrolls? Was it from higher up? A height from which nothing real is felt? Unreal becomes real when it hits you.

  I hugged Cheeky, her feelings, her bones; and what was left of her was what I smelled, garlic and orange and bread, her well-used skin, the coffee churning in her stomach that had passed through her mouth—and the frankness of her grip, the earth of weeds and iron. “We’re outa here,” I said.

  Who was the one who was dead but was thought to be living? I heard her ask, as I got the door open. She was holding the Directory against her. My brain is in the street, my hand on E-m’s arm, I see that I will go back to the war.

  My Specialist driver tells the tale of her car parked down the street. She had checked on it every little while. Stood back from the office window, smelling the captain somewhere. She was parked at an angle between a mud-matte Humvee and an old truck with double-plated steel siding a local pickup could never have supported, welded at Camp Warhorse up in Baqubah forty miles from here. The captain calls her. Three boys stop to look at the Chevy, her old Suburban, and the boy at the hood glances up uncannily at her window and the other two lay hands on the doors and the driver’s door gives way (she can hear it even from here—and I want to know what the captain called her) and the boy is inside in a second leaning across the front seat, and the whole car blows and the boy at the hood is tossed against a wall fifteen feet back from the curb and the boy at the passenger door is aflame and not going anywhere, slowed down he looks darkly absorbed in the material of the car. She steps forward to the window (had he flipped the ignition even?). The captain wanders in and watches with her. His smoky hand on her shoulder, she resists a gentle pressure encouraging her to lean back. Did she have anything in the glove? The trunk, the back?—he might be asking something else. Is he kidding? “Do you not understand those boys didn’t do it? They only tripped a wire (but where?). Car was waiting for me to open the door and get in, me. Who would do that?” “No one. It’s the car,” said the man who had procured it and will procure a better one but thinks about it. Has she only one name?

  A story to tell my sister one day—it won’t have happened yet; though if about to, here to her beloved Hond
a, foreseen too catastrophically late—fuse wrapped into exhaust manifold is one way, drive around for a while let the charge warm up; though you can trip a car bomb with a phone and Em’s cell sounds the first notes of the Fifth Symphony then caller hangs up as she thumbs Speaker—her notebook half under my foot, clothes and books in back, bicycle seat and half-empty suitcase in the trunk.

  My sister said: “So he was dead, the Chaplain.”

  She knew that, I said.

  “How come they didn’t? They’re trying to silence a witness to the explosion—no, two explosions, you said—… Zach?—the second” (she thought a second) “…like a corroborating witness (!)—but all this time he’s dead somewhere (?). Why wasn’t he found?” My sister, looking through the windshield, eyeing the rearview, would answer for herself: “Because you took him with you. You were friends because you said you’d take him with you.”

  Other way round, I said, I—Alive or dead, she said. I said I hardly knew why I hadn’t told her. Not the first time, she said.

  The fewer who knew the better, but tell her of all the people in the universe, I hardly knew why I couldn’t when I was getting us into the water his body coming apart almost before I could haul him across the floor to the edge so when I dropped into the water he came down on top of my head.

  It didn’t matter, Em said. “On top of you?” She’s amused, almost not there with me for once. I could feel the abyss, was it above or was it below? It’s hard enough to make it in alone without somebody else unloading on you…and your ear all taped. She wanted to kiss, I knew. She slowed and turned and I leaned and kissed her at a slant and her mouth was moist and tasted of nothing but her.

  Unloading? It sounded like something else. I hadn’t wanted her to see me lugging a body and then losing the body. “Water,” I said, “wait a sec—”—someone’s voice in you survives their death—“‘Water makes many Beds,’” I began. Em went on, “‘For those averse to sleep—Its awful chamber open stands…’” Her mood again, her agenda today. I wondered how well I’d done at the Hearings.