Cannonball

by Joseph McElroy

  “Multeeple half gainers!” the Russian pounded a table. “Coach yelling, ‘Too far out, meedle of the air, too far out!’” “Umo wasn’t there,” said Em, letting the invoice fall sailing onto barely a corner of the long table. (“Milt,” I said.) “Somebody tawled him, that’s all. And so you quit half gainer and went up for tweest,” said the Russian dryly.

  “And then?” I said, wondering if Umo had grasped what Milt could not.

  “I would haf killed him,” said the Russian, creature of eerie attention and arrested imagination, his accent distinctly correct this time. “Your father?” I said. We turned back at the door.

  “Never had one. Let us say first cousin,” our man grinned, “what does it matter, it’s done.” “What’s done?” “But could it have been meedair, to cause such an accident? No, I think it was as you hopped and landed on board before leaving it that he shouded.” What the Russian saw in my face—a standoff between us. “Umo had sympaty—whatever happen with his vahter—those border Chinese working all over the place. Eemigrant mentality.” The Russian said father like he said water.

  Was he on a green card? I asked—I’m half out the door holding it for Em, who weighs a step, because he is not done with us, he thinks: “You did not follow his coaching. He was testing you.” “Your cousin,” Em said, “was it a him?” “But so what,” the Russian said, “some asshole shouts, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ so what if you crash? You see I remember the words ‘Go fuck yourself all night, be your own fucking vahter.’”

  Em is about to shift into Drive, he’s out here rapping at my window and I run it down. “He sayed you understand half gainer like nobody in world.” “Who?” “Inertial, I forget—it doesn’t matter. Tweest also, but.” I had brought something (?), the Russian asked…for Umo?

  News, I said. His citizenship. It had come through.

  Bending to the window, stunned, “Maybe I see him,” the Ukraine sound engineer said rather slowly. I thought he would reach in or go grab a tire iron. He shouted at us as we turned into the road north, “Feegurehead woman” the words my father’s on my half gainer virtually. Someone just like Cheeky came out of the 7/11 with a newspaper and a pink bottle of Snapple with a straw sticking out of it. “Cheeky,” I said, pointing. Em understood and didn’t look.

  “So was that all?” She was shaken and lit a cigarette. Or I lit it for her. I knew what it was, and it was not Umo or the Russian. I remember talking for a couple of miles. It was stupider the truer it was, because she was thinking about her father, what to do about him. I talked about him maybe setting myself up with such fluent indifference. Yet then, “What was the trashy book that was why Umo came here?” I thought she knew but was thinking of us, our father, our family.

  24 your real job

  Maybe the only way you get to do your real job is when you’re set up by outsiders who use you but they don’t know what they’re doing, I know I said, finding it as easy to talk as if I and Em on a sunny day in California had been marketers around an oval table, and simple for me in words to be indifferent or unforgiving, wherever he was, in Washington at some desk liaison job that would get him what he wanted in swimming, or in Colorado Springs, or back here for a short weekend with our mother, who said, We’re a good people—which he would say of an individual and without the a—of the CPA with the long jaw, “He’s good people,” as if he came with a group; or of Wick, who covered for Dad. So the Russian and the other one used Umo, and Storm used them in order to use me after Dad thought he was using Storm who used Dad to use me and even Em—“even you”—through me… I caught the smell of aloes and jasmine from her knees apparently—But the music video project, she said, watching the road, her cell in her lap, where did that begin?—“And look at them all, where it all got them,” I said.

  A Well of Lebanon spa closed I remember, a fountain elsewhere for the moment, for none of this smart, gathered indictment and story was of interest to the person next to me. It was as if we were not getting anywhere, because the opposite was true, which later I grasped as the real job, receding into itself as we overtook it. Static on the radio, so many littler and littler things, her bike seat stolen from the trunk in the parking garage before she could get down there, anger in her eye when I noticed sweat on her upper lip, a bubble at the top of the windshield where a grain of gravel had been spun up by a passing truck—did she want some fruit we drove by (?) and her mouth pouting in concentration upon less and less, erasing a dimple, meant she might have to pull over and have a laugh, which didn’t mean we would never get back for we were not hopeless about all the tiny things adding up. (“Did he think Storm would get me into Yale?” I joked but it was no more true to what it came to me was “the real job” than my little string of people using people.) And somewhere in all of this she asked like a fact what we had done to drive him away—We were always wrong, I said—No we were always right, Em said, angry with herself almost indifferent to me. And I was able to say that we had made use of him to his surprise.

  How? I in a silence I occupied could feel her ask; and at me from the north-bright windshield came the unjust Why do you persecute me? war he would wage on us now and again, but my answer to her: “to have our life.”

  What had happened to precipitate Dad’s diving-accident words Em had never asked, nor why they threw me off, an experienced performer. You can’t know, for one thing, no more than why people have the voices they do. Em not one of those women’s voices, squeezed, pinched, all-business, and/or going on about nothing, soliciting (but it’s their job) on the phone, talking in line in a public place to another woman, a store, finding a friend to exchange emergency insights with at the same pace and with same vocal cord and nasal quick talk. European women and even African didn’t sound like this, not Polish, not even Mexican. My sister, though, was almost a singer in speech or a natural actress, sly or guttural too when I think of what she could say, and with a stagy range she kept for me.

  So I remember summing up, in the car-quiet, a danger-corrupted year or two, leaving out the Scrolls mostly, but what was to be done about our father, too.

  While swelling in my own voice I felt Em’s in my chest that always seemed to have returned from a droll surprise and disappointment to become her own surprise and overdrive—“‘I have a Navy in the West,’” (!) quoted from our poet in an e-mail intercepted I believe by Intelligence and Storm—and subtlety riding alongside my voice now with gift, anger, mouth, riding north also in her car in which, since it had not blown up, though someone had Remoted her trunk open in the parking garage the other day of my reeling, remarkable, but perhaps irrelevant analysis of the full twist in the afternoon to the plenary Competition Hearings (and taken her bike seat), she was on the move away from home and by some route not yet valued away from her brother who would be also far away and with other wheels.

  All of which, not just the sound guy’s quote from Dad, was turning over in Em’s mind when she said, “Was that all?” and I said I was going back for a second tour.

  My driver driving me sometimes to distraction thank God complained at our slow progress south. For we would stop often, in mixed towns around the capital. But look, it was she who’d made al Kut our southeast destination if not beyond, where I had said I had unfinished business which she I knew took to mean someone they thought I would lead them to. Hey, from here a hundred fifty miles dead south along the watercourse you would see its vandalized gates and dilapidated, dam-like barriers, she told me, called barrages to level the flow, and one of the embattled if not poorer oil fields near where she had seen twenty of our own oil tanker trucks lined up single-file—near Nassiriya, a few flat-roofed yellow-mud houses left here somewhere once the silver worker we kept an eye on who followed a religion of John the Baptist and Shem and the Mandaean Enos but one day died of burns inflicted by Sunni visitors with his own instruments—though all this made less and less difference to me. I was happy to have her to talk to, be with, she was good—we were both happy about that, we talked fast an
d it was warm and sexy, her beret in her lap. She said No it was I who had said Kut, I had unfinished business, yet had never, she added, told her on the way to the palace or since—

  “That turned-around morning—”

  —what I had said before I shot that picture.

  “It moved you, Livy—”

  That wasn’t all.

  “You said the picture moved you no end….”

  The Reservist—

  “Powerlifter, friend of my father’s—salesman, my father didn’t—one of those friends—in the picture arm-wrestling with the do-rag Triple Canopy construction mercenary, I told your beloved boss—”

  Going a little far with Livy didn’t stop her: “It was him like a wild horse, the eyes—someone under the table too, cropped out of the picture, a woman tied up you said,” my driver, my companion, I better believe her, Livy said, because remembering what happened she was never wrong. Well, I didn’t want to be the first to give her negative feedback. No, all Dad meant was telling him and her brothers not to believe a neighbor that if you’re wading in a stream deer won’t notice you.

  I said one reason obviously she enlisted was a talent—

  She agreed but—

  —a talent for Intelligence, I finished my thought, she picked up something I’d said, That turned-around morning? (Oh now she saw, it was just the way things went at the pool. I said No it was something else before that, the drive to the palace, for she had reminded me of seeing things in reverse as if to rerun them.) Meanwhile, if I was right, her assignment made less and less difference to me, a cushy slot compared to most women, leaving us with the mysterious real job like exactly where we were and where we were coming from, my sister’s one step forward two back or diagonal or a relief so I very nearly told Livy the job within the job idea my Chaplain credited me with—long dead, my underwater friend and no matter what they’d told her to watch for she was never going to see me in contact with him, I very nearly told her, but…nor could I explain that flash turnaround so arriving at palace came first, leaving from hotel in repainted Chevy Suburban last.

  Did she recall me asking about an Asian kid with a film crew? Asking, yes. I had gotten him his citizenship even though they thought he was dead. Livy drove. What kind of citizenship was that? Maybe it brings you back to life, I said.

  An American soldier in the road wanted something. There’s more to it, I said.

  We stopped for him. He had his headphones on. Where was he going? It was the drive-bys, four in Kut last week. We gave him a cigarette he didn’t want. He took some crackers and a newspaper we unloaded on him. He just wanted to talk. He was interested in Livy, talking across me. He said the Secretary of War had announced that you could make a claymore out of office supplies, some tape, some toner, talc, pepper, a straw he almost forgot, he listed them. Did we know that a palace was being renovated for a bank? I said it was a branch of the Euphrates. Drive-bys worried him, what it was was you’re the target but they’re moving. He was nodding at us. He didn’t want a lift. We left him standing there, his headphones, what was he listening to?—the Base newspaper under his arm. He didn’t belong out on the road, Livy said, she knew him. His unit anyway. Which wasn’t Kut. One reason she enlisted she was good with people, I said. We arrived at a roadblock. Was that it? she said, was that—? Most people, I added.

  —was that all?

  It wasn’t a reason in itself, but maybe it was, I said. A dusty militiaman in a T-shirt got in back with a rifle and heaved a sigh.

  Well, the Russian’s story, she wanted to get that straight. Archaeologist of…(?).

  Livy, I said.

  Of water, Livy said. She seemed to ignore the guy in back. And he had discovered the well intersection under the palace—(?)

  The intersection of the whole—.

  —before the Scrolls—? Livy was armed. She sniffed, she kept an eye in the mirror, what was the militiaman sitting on?

  A hundred yards off the road a hooded man was rifle-butting three it looked like men on the ground. One, with a wine cask for a belly, got up like a snowboarder who’s been having balance problems, and was shot. “Why don’t you do something about that?” I said to the militiaman. “What you have in trawnk?” he said. His automatic rifle had a taped-together ammunition clip. He opened his door. He said that we were not moving, Livy braked and he got out, leaving the door open, and walked up ahead.

  “He discovered it before the Scrolls were even found?” Livy finished her question, her fingers on the door handle.

  “If they were found.” “What else could they be?” I got out and shut the rear door. Words came to me and I said them, that my sister had once read out loud: “‘Dust is the only Secret—/ Death, the only…’” “Get inside,” said my driver. “‘…the only One / You cannot—’”

  “Please.” “‘You cannot find out all about / In his “native town.’”

  “Thanks. What else could they be? I think we’re moving.”

  “Made up, I guess. And he was—this archaeologist was,” I said, “liquidated. In Mexico (?).” She’d thought I would take a picture.

  I was telling this woman who might be pumping me that what didn’t get written up was the day that she’d delivered me when the Scrolls were supposed to come in by water and the bomb went off and the Scrolls were salvaged, most of it, and a half hour later—

  Livy’s window caught a blow from a rifle butt and the militiaman with the moustache was back just as the two cars ahead of us and the truck ahead of them took off and we with them and on my side out off the road a hundred yards the fat man who’d been shot in the leg was beating someone on the ground with a rifle butt and our militiaman running up stopped and lifted his musket—“Friendly fire, step on it”—but something, a cigarette, hit him from a car window, and he acted like it was a dog of a wasp at him, and I knew Liv had heard the words I’d come up with. “What did I say?—good with people.” She thought about it.

  Her boss phoned all afternoon, she knew it was him, where there’s a will there’s a way, we were talking till two in the morning, I debriefed on recent events. The mobile gave up, and there was nothing left of our candles, one after the other, the flame shadowing her blond and dark hair as if her hair were the light, and I debriefed on the Competition Hearings back home, my talk on diving—the Twist, what you actually did, the time factor, competing not against but (in this slippery way recalling by chance the gray-haired square-shouldered man over on my left as my old girlfriend Liz’s Navy now retired husband)… One more candle then, a special one I thought found at the bottom of Livy’s bag and only when it was down to nothing she said it was in honor of us and her uncle in Australia had sent it to her on her enlistment a year ago it was one of the sixteen-thousandplus candles a minister had organized along the median of his town in the mountains to remember the civilian dead swept under the carpet in this unconscionable war and this candle had been blown out by the wind and rescued by her uncle, all they had was paper guards, no hurricane sleeves.

  I had tossed a live coal from the campfire into the stream where we were camping once in a canyon, I was telling her when the mobile rang. I thought she better answer it. She explained what I wrongly (why should I have?) told her she didn’t need to—what a mess at home with her enlistment, and family friends were worse. Vietnam-vet banker, hotel administration prof, mortgage broker, working mom attorneys, sporting goods equipment, all these tough guys in the neighborhood trashing the war—like, shoulda got out before we got in—and their legendary high school math teacher Ms. Mansfield, still unretired, hey younger programmers, though a much younger coach from Romania backed the war—nuke thaim if we need to, on’y keeding—

  Gymnastics, I said.

  Howdjou know that? she said. I said I had a brother making an insurance run at mid six figures before he hits twenty-five, irony is it’s the worst risk he could take with his life.

  That campfire sounded nice, she could see it, the stream, the canyon, no canyons like that
in Wisconsin. She was a good camper.

  I held her for a long time, like reflections flickering on the walls. Our campfire, I said. Here thirty miles north of al Kut vehicles weighing down the asphalt all night, a billet for us at a faithful old base someone said the Under Secretary of Defense was going to pay a flyby visit to.

  She’s the one at home Dad said was never wrong. ’cause she looked up to him. Did I know Livy at all? Yes, going to sleep dissolved, thinking of sixteen thousand candles, talking softly as if anyone would hear us. Waking up, hungry—

  But the Russian…

  We weren’t done with him.

  And the archaeologist.

  Went back down to take another look.

  At the blast area, yeah. Good idea. Livy looking down at me, propped on her elbow.

  “He heard I was down there…”

  “Oh the Russian!” “Ukrainian.” “Like a big wrestler?” “Not that big.” “We know him.”

  There it was again, the GI music-listening project, my friend coming in (as my father guaranteed) “handy” to dive with such originality it had been ignored at a moment when they wanted me at poolside. Dad could have swatted Storm like a fat, stumbling fly though he was not fat or hit like a bug with his windshield on a hot and threatening day, couldn’t he?—upstairs with brownish blood on his pants brownish and blurred and a monitor screen above the virginsbreath and the little volume of large short stories, and I had told the Russian’s little story like him to tempt a listener but this one wouldn’t betray her assignment, which I knew was to use me to pick up the track of the Chaplain. “They’re supposed to be so warm,” I said, as her mobile rang. “Not him.” “No.” “No,” she pursed her lips, “he never fooled me.” “How come you’re never wrong?” “Never volunteer anything. Wait till they ask.”