Cannonball

by Joseph McElroy

  23 like nobody in world

  A Heartland, if memory serves, almost unidentifiable but spotted by me thousands of miles away as a make of trailer seen in Chula V, the exterior door blown out, though, and the toasted styrofoam like bread, like tissue sandwiched between the weather-side thin steel plate and the inner-side vinyl. A raw hole in the steel where the dead bolt had been once lockable if useless against an intruder. A blown-out window aperture where just the framed head of a bald child of nine or ten had quit grinning as I shot, later to be framed out by the Intelligence processor as not germane to prove this mobile home a bio-facility.

  My driver recalls what she knew of me, listens for what she’s been told to listen for, watch for, this second time around. (Not “get you there” this time, but.) Expecting we’d first go south—to Kut!—but here we are, just over forty miles north of Camp Warhorse where they weld steel sides onto small and medium trucks that can support them, and memory serves to oblong a space of weeds and empty ground where the trailer once sat. It trusts my smart Specialist from Wisconsin to see the boy’s face I describe in words, just where the hairline began scarcely fourteen months ago, hear him ask in English are you coming into his house, and hear as a joke, one is pretty sure, his Don’t get too close. His village abandoned by its residents who were hardly that, having been forcibly moved in under the old regime.

  No pictures so far? No pictures by the Photographer of the Scrolls? If only of their arrival by water, it is said. Like me, leaving and arriving, after and before merging like a war victim’s real life, accepting her boat hook, her dumbfoundingly being there (for let your tool do the work according to our father’s handy nostrum out in the garage), and a dry shirt and pants. Speechless that late afternoon and untrusting but not dead; speaking, if memory serves, only of Umo’s feetfirst dive, of home, the two bloated books in my bag, and the color of winter wheat; and water, what it could do: she might have learned nothing of the jobs I did deep down in the palace though she remembered me.

  Memory trusts her knowledge of anthrax, wells, hoopoe nests of olive-colored eggs, she knows also how they improvised claymore mines, knows the road, has a toolbox in back; memory trusts also her interest in, two day’s drive at our pace north from here past checkpoints, a bridge by a river from which we could see a field of green winter wheat I had once photographed, she recalled. Because I had told her on the way to the airfield for my flight home the night of the palace bomb, I beginning to smell, drying out, alive and smelling not only of that, the fresh shirt she had given me reeking of cigarettes I had not smoked. Her who had boat-hooked me out of that rank well rush. Needing a wash dreadfully—and the boots and decomposing socks she remembers and actually told people. That I stank? No that there was a nice feeling, almost a confiding, without any. What people? Don’t recall, she lies. (For what she told got back maybe clear to the top.) You were tired. Something about a third way—another route? But you didn’t know where we were going.

  But memory trusts her impression of the northern Mesopotamian plain. U.S. contractor skipping status reports blowing millions on a pipeline intersection under the Tigris without doing the geology first. The division possible of the country up here as a result of this war, at the highest levels in DC thought a great idea. The depth of the water by our little bridge here, her eye a lead line, the current surprising, close. And a body passing, she thought (or the back of a T-shirt inhabited by it; or only a T-shirt? asks her companion) about which we argued as if about something between us, she hadn’t seen the head. Two people alone contain so much. And how was it, being home? she said, and was I not taking pictures this tour? What I had to say about an experimental bridge back home, 450-foot footbridge made of composite carbon-and-glass materials so far twenty times dearer than steel and concrete construction but a tenth the weight—her interest sort of in these things for their own sake, as is her right as a citizen. Or in me. Can you be interested in a bridge as an end in itself? A person yes, though maybe not. And one punctual star we saw above the desert near the bridge and the asphalt plant, and two cars that had pulled in near us.

  One night near a city known now for danger, I pointed out a campfire a mile off the road. Did she have any brothers and sisters? Three bros. They were not serving. The campfire? she persisted. Oh just I recalled a campfire that we had approached along the lip of a canyon once in California near the Arizona border and I spoke of it since it was her I happened to be with.

  We? said my driver. Me?

  “When you were driving me to the palace, you would say that was all you knew, yet it wasn’t and you kept adding things and you still would say, That’s all I know.”

  We had time to laugh about it now, she touched me. She checked the oil. The car had been acquired secondhand, thirdhand.

  How I evacuated the palace my way. That’s life. I didn’t even know her name.

  How outside the gate she said, This’s far as I go. What she had said to me through the window when I left her sandblasted half-camouflaged Suburban to go into the palace. It looked like “chose,” her lips meant you chose to be here.

  That’s right, that’s right, Livy said.

  Her names. Livia to her mother, Olivia to Grampa, Liv to one brother, Olive to the humorous one, Livy to another, O to her father who later calls her Livy, who tells others, She’s never wrong. As a compliment.

  “You enlisted,” I said.

  Well, trust her on dogs. Where she comes from, hunting, but. (And dog love.) But? Well, here it’s son of a dog, ibn il kalb. Thought to be filthy, should you touch them you shed your clothes.

  Man’s best friend.

  She gave me a look. She’s smug, a little. They should talk to a friend of mine who grew up eating dog. That’s right, that’s right, she… I had asked her once (?), she said (I’m a little astounded)—on the way to the palace (?) about an Asian kid unnamed working with (?)… Film crew, mmhmm—

  South, she replies.

  The splendid dive, though, the lost diver, the palace trashed (a bank now?)—

  That explosion, she said, people who vanished.

  Stuff of legend now, Livy, the selling of the Scrolls.

  What a mess when she enlisted, she said (knows I’m interested). Never wrong? I suggest. When Dad’s old Saab started making a godawful noise I told him it was the diaphragm on the servo system operating the automatic clutch. No one else got it right.

  The captain now. The job she is doing for—the major, excuse me—Is it for him? This trip, this tour for (we don’t quite talk about) the photographer. “That campfire,” she shifts gears. It’s night. Somehow, as I try to tell her in a blaring, acrid café full of soldiers my job within the job she comprehends, she pouts with insight, desire, she’s compact, hair unfurled, she knows that there is a job within the other job often. I have not called it the Third Way, but she is not unfamiliar with it. The winter wheat, and in the lower corner of my shot from the river a couple looking opposite directions, together. The Bedouin born without eyes. A bald child’s shaved-head hairline. Narrow escapes she knows of, amazing reappearances. Life. Her brothers, father, uncle hunting in the snow out of season—for her it’s walking in the woods, that’s all, she goes along. Farmers’ early warning systems at best, the dogs.

  The café noisy, the crowd of men aware of us.

  My move. What’s next? Time can be itself tonight, shifted into new places, reassembling, like power between people.

  Though selugi, she continues: hunting dog (?), after one of the successors to Alexander’s empire, Seleucus in the South. And south is where she is inclined to head, how about it? She had several good harmonicas in the back of the car, all different keys in their red and white Marine Band boxes and protected in a backpack with her things. The major, now, I said. His irritation at her assignment to keep the photographer monitored I know that came down like major’s promotion from higher up—and something more. He got her her car replacement, I said, she was lucky.

  Me? she touched my wrist
. (I hadn’t thought what I was saying.) You know about all that. She taps my knuckle as I finish my drink and go to get up (we’re going).

  No, I…—how’m I going to explain what I’d pictured, driving with Em from The Inventor’s into the Center, the car bomb with Livy’s name on it, boys, windowpane shivering, odor of cigarettes on the man’s fingers. “I must have heard,” I said, holding the door for her.

  “No, I don’t believe so.” She smiles up at me in the dark, the outtake of breath from her nostrils, walking to our billet. Sometimes two people were better than one, she said. That campfire you approached (?), she said.

  The person had vanished, I said. (We’ve double-checked the car, and taken the backpack with the harmonicas and her things.)

  You have a sister, I recall.

  I had never mentioned any sister. So Livy’s been briefed. (Who by? Does this come under briefing? Trickle-down intelligence.) I had hopes for her, and clear as many running feet in a ruined schoolyard a block away sounded distinct from the Metal Rock massing objective at a distance and distinct from, close by, the indigenous instrumental we had been told was about a murdered Palestinian child—it came to me that they were after maybe the Chaplain (Storm Nosworthy’s baby still at large) yet even Storm didn’t matter now at a distance except as someone associated with my father, and I asked Livy why she’d enlisted and she said she would dredge that up for me sometime, she was no prize package and—

  Dredge? I’d brace myself. Perhaps so, she said.

  Interested in her, but not without doubt, I told her something of a story inspired as the Russian in Chula V, the teller, had himself been inspired when, before shipping out again, I had come by the sound studio one day (bearing gifts in case).

  A story the Russian for all his affable suspicion could not know had filled in my own: that the “water” archaeologist, the specialist, on the Scrolls team—who, that day of the palace, getting a brainstorm, was the one whose steps with a guard I had heard descending as I was making my getaway—and a third person trying to keep up—heard just as I dropped into the well current, like a casual death by elimination, Why I Enlisted opening unexpected reasons then as I sank and swam, some dredged-up remains of which from the virtual sky Livy herself had boat-hooked further down—this specialist, said the Russian on his own track, had got himself killed: what you get for a Mexico vacation but almost certainly had been investigating fallout from Scrolls explosion, the Russian had it on good authority (“eef you recall our conversation”—as if that had been what we’d talked about on the intensely inescapable tiles of a pool!). An archaeologist of water itself, said the Russian, holding forth a bit for present company but with a savor of intelligence—for who knows what “vahter” brings with it from where it was to where it will go, “he tell me heemself”—and where eez division between what-has-been and whatweel-be?—“a shout in the meedle of the air, eh,” the Russian adds (not lost on me): and water archaeologist had been drawn to the foundations of this palace as a sinkhole for the net of horizontal wells “like secret map across land before even Scrolls were found.”

  Inspired by suspicion to tempt me to betray he didn’t quite know what—by delusions of tactics perhaps, the Russian had himself betrayed more than he knew: for the archaeology team-member whose steps coming down I’d heard along with those of guard and third party, was none other than the ill-fated specialist written up in the magazine I had underlined who’d been independently tracing someone not to be identified to Livy I knew, a friend (I thought now two friends, Umo and the Chaplain)—

  nor, for safety’s sake, even the person with whom I stood my ground listening to the foreign sound engineer play the authority, interrupting himself to go and dive into his earphones, adjust a dial, keep us waiting, and come back—and something else that all but came to me, about the archaeologist getting a brainstorm at that moment after the explosion and after a soldier the Russian had talked with had just jumped down into the void.

  But the Russian, a dark and gravitational or sinkhole or routine imagination but without real character, could never quite put real things together—my reluctance to learn he was not Russian but Ukraine; my vanishing down the bomb rupture in the palace diving well after the water; and the object of that archaeologist’s search then and later, what he might have said publicly and to Storm who might not want an actual Lazarus on his hands; then, home again in California weeks later, from his path one morning when he had some typically Russian or Ukrainian business I figured at the University looking up to see me observing him from the famous footbridge high above; our host only now in his place of work in Chula V recognizing the dark-haired girl close up who had been with me at the rail, her legs, her look, and recalling the “meedair shout,” yet that the archaeologist, with that profound specialty had been seeking not me but an underwater photographer (and Navy Chaplain) had entered the Russian’s brain no further than I had permitted it into my midnight story to Livy inspired by suddenly guessing her particular mission assigned by some headless HQ, though the Russian was much taken with my sister who had come with me to Chula V, for each to each a goodbye errand. What was hers? “Lucky your little war is done with,” he said.

  He had lifted the earphones off and stared at a computer screen. So we had just stopped by? he went on, secretly alert. “Our Umo doesn’t work here any more,” he said, and laughed at his joke. Found something better, I said. Long tables, mixers, swivel chairs, screwdrivers, window into another room. I had something for Umo, I said. Em at the far end, the Russian let the phone ring, cagey, his back very straight, physically strong. Everyone has an instinct. “He’s prob’ly dying somewhere, I mean diving,” said the Russian, making a joke. “Nothing throws heem off.”

  My gift would not be posthumous I felt sure. My sister had a good look around; returning to our end she might have been thinking of renting the place. She picked up a screwdriver, a big one with a black rubber handle, looked at it, a Phillips-head; looked at me, pouted. Russian measured the distance to Em’s humor, her eyes, her breasts, her hips, in a dress today, so it was in self-defense that he plotted the positions of everything here, equipment, speakers, job clipboards hanging, the sound of the phone. “He deed what I told him. Good working relationship.” And? “He told me things.”

  “Yeah?” said Em. The Russian thought something was up, I thought of the deserter, the way Umo had been used, even of my father for an instant, whom I did not think of.

  “Why he came here in first place. His trucking: where he went. He kept that wreck running. Music. The cops. Why he came here.”

  “Why did he come here?” said my sister. Russian found this amusing. “Some trrash he read in a book. He gotta get some papers. That’s where you came in, right?” the Russian grinned at me narrowly. “He lied about age, no?” “What book?” my sister said.

  “A nine-thousand-mile job with you guys and he doesn’t have papers?” I said.

  In the eyes contempt beaming for an illegal trying to survive. “Papers we deescussed.”

  “And the deserter?” I signaled Em, we were going. She picked up an invoice off a stack of cartons.

  “Discussed many things. Mexico, drugs, music, Chula Vista, you and your vahter,” the Russian seemed to ignore my question. “Lied about his age?” “Both ways, up, down,” was the reply. “Well,” the Russian said then, sagely…“talked about you,” he said, “and you,” flicking his eyes at Em. “And your vahter when he shouted meedair.”

  My sister frowned at me and my life. “Milt,” I said—with a gesture, we were going—Milt had told Umo, why would either friend speak to others of it? “It was the half gainer,” said the Russian as if he knew. “So what you bring?” he asked me.

  Em flapped the invoice. “Whadda ya got there?” said the man.

  Why had Em come along? It was my next-to-last week, I was going back, a brief tour. Yet what my dearest only sister thought she owed me for—and astonished by my intervening at the previous afternoon’s Hearings when
CEO and captain thought they were hustling Husky away at the end of the day and discovered they were not going to do that and stood publicly warned in front of a hundred willing Americans—for who was this brother of hers?—it was, I believed, no more than that I knew where somebody was that especially Storm wanted to catch up with. And Em came along today guessing it wouldn’t be Umo but the Russian I would run into, and said later when she’d looked down from the bridge at him looking up that he had the unafraid forehead of a killer—“a life you could miss without a misery.” Also she came along to Chula V because her car liked the road and she liked to drive; and she believed something was going to get said.

  The person I loved, but more. “My tools took human faces,” her poet had said in my sister’s voice reading to me the night of the accident having sought to protect, bathe, soothe, heal, use a bloody abrasion wound dividing my heart nearly, and painfully imperceptibly kissing the raging tissues and opening her book—had she a headache building in her temples?—which became my homework for a Wick quiz I wouldn’t miss the next unbreathable morning then miraculously foregone by him for this new calculus he would glimpse for us of narrowing down from your position to some instant speed if it ever could exist while also narrowing down even more magically and for me that hour from speed to speed to where you are, for the assistant coach knew where I was. Between what has been and what will be, that horrendous crash dive to be rethought—though paused as gravity rushing through you isn’t?