Cannonball

by Joseph McElroy

  25 out

  “That’s all it was,” I at last replied. My sister tossed her cigarette, we’d come a couple of miles up the highway. She put three fingers to her temple. “It was on his mind,” she said. “Mostly his,” I said, thinking the night before the dive, when I almost fainted in my boxers seeing him at the other end in the bathroom doorway, and looked once and went in my room and never lost it, and we sort of shook our heads about it now in the car, spinning our wheels. “I remember,” she said.

  “Because I told you in the morning.” “I remember everything,” Em’s voice was husky and droll. “I wish I remembered everything you read to me, but I kind of do,” I said. “I remember what I didn’t,” she said.

  The Directory on the floor, catalogues strewn among books, brochures, Summer programs, I didn’t know what. And Dad coming in on the kiss that didn’t end. “Not easy for him.”

  The Coaches Directory entry. I’d forgotten how she censored it. “He doesn’t like writing. But there it is. Résumé, nothing to it. Methods, goals—‘no secrets,’ ‘industrious,’ ‘punctual.’ Mom said how he agonized late-night. Then you—the son ‘who’”—her pause (she was “E” then) like everything equal, gripping, ready to move, and present in her speech and reading always for the brother infinitely worth attending to—“‘who, it was ruefully doubted could ever have it in him to double as diver slash swimmer on the East Hill ‘Imperial’ team West Zone USA Swimming affiliate.’” An omission—(Wait, she said under her breath)—hard to exactly recall as if it was not so much right then in the entry on page 153 but a few words on so that, as she would do when she sight-read a hymn, a Sousa march, the Haydn, or “I Thought About You” (where I now added a personal campfire to the standard’s stream, train, cars parked, and that A flat 13 chord Em showed me that comes after “you,” just before you hit the going-away G9 again), she was reading a little ahead at the same time. Like a dive, I had thought filled to the brim with the life and apparent slowness of a full twist finding myself at the top standing in front of the plenary session following not a hard act to follow erstwhile speechwriter Storm’s proxy welcome from the Chief Executive (“that we are one American family in healthy competition brother and sister”) and describing at Storm’s behest the full twist wondering what had happened to Em though relieved to learn her car was OK in the parking garage.

  “That birthday envelope I wrapped.”

  What was in it, Dad had held it up to the light, money? Held like a slide above the dinner table after I’d gone to the other party which turned out to be an enlistment party. It was not a poem, he was sure (though he never understood that I would learn to write, or how), and definitely not drugs (a hint of humor, warmth). Maybe some artwork? or words of wisdom (?)—or a will! Em had provided the blue ribbon, which Dad had been loath to disturb. “Happy Returns” was in her high, round hand. “It was like a fortune,” she said to me both hands on the wheel, “somebody just wrote it with no one specific in mind but it didn’t come out that way.”

  I took our mess hall trays away when Livy answered her ringtone, tilting her head as if she were taking the call while out walking, and I felt her waving a hand behind me to keep me there at the long table (near two friendly men in fatigues with, as it happened, the telltale cross on the collar). I didn’t like whatever was being said at the other end of her cell, but not because the major would want her back at headquarters.

  I stopped opposite the Chaplains, noticing a copy of the Scrolls propped open with a mug and a knife between two breakfast trays. What did they think of it? The elder said, Thought-provoking even if it’s not quite from that time. Either it is or it’s made-up, said his friend. From what? said the first. You think He knew anything about fish hatcheries? said the other. Wind energy, said the elder, oh shoot, the Apostle Thomas said some of that stuff a century or two later—India he got to. Further, said the other. It is what it is, said the elder to me like a whatchamacallit—benediction. Shoptalk they cut off abruptly, smiling and shaking hands after I had put down my two trays. The Chaplains had a look at Livy leaning into her cell but slanting a friendly look our way.

  Her cell did not make her seem between. And in the car presently her absent boss seemed more the proxy than she relaying what she knew wouldn’t surprise me but the trip was scrubbed and we had to turn around but she’d told him the car was heating up and we might need another day. She had left something out, I knew, sealed in a fond female act just as she had made our time a gift. And as we drove I marked her being “thoughtful” (my mother’s word if you were being quiet and she had to know why). Like increments of delay, intelligent breath, this thoughtfulness—hope, control—touched by me she was—nothing too wrong between us if she could only privately plan. “Oh I’m no prize package,” Livy said coming along what she said was Highway 27 toward a bridge.

  We were suddenly enveloped in dust from truck traffic congestion and the desert and we ran up the windows and we kissed each other: Was it true I had said at those Hearings in California that the President should get the No-Bid Peace Prize? I nodded skeptically. Where’d she hear that? She tapped her cell and put us in gear. I said I had taken a hit or two and came out better on a particular dive I had explained the competitive fine points of, though was that even it?—I had taken a hit or two. Livy said I had to protect myself, where was my camera?—and it came to me that the major might not be my friend.

  We weren’t turning back the way we’d come, but wherever you are things go on behind your back and the real job of your life comes in pieces wherever you think you’re going, to be at the war or opposing it or answering a stranger or at a bridge.

  I had a hunch they’d decided my Chaplain underwater photographer was dead. I figured that was the good news.

  His torn scrap of Scroll snatched by me supposedly lost from a master that had been part-destroyed on arrival in the depths of the palace yet present in the eventual book, argued an explosion not by insurgents but by the purveyors of the book whose master text in the custody of Administration scholars (and in the absence of the underwater photographer’s voice and witness) had gone largely unchallenged.

  And would go unchallenged, except for me, armed with the scrap that could now be harmless without me. Yet who but a crank would put down the appeal of these so-called Scrolls, this small commodity?

  Another historical Jesus you might say sold by authority to an inspired people. American Jesus. Humbled but blessed by the term outlook for a democracy of those who are motivated. It was one thing that hadn’t quite come up with Livy—the Scrolls. The Cross found a whole new world of meaning when the Chief Executive with his unique distance on the issues of our time calls for the supreme sacrifice from some of our families. God’s Lottery. Jesu’s Casino.

  I was moved to have told Livy how I plucked a coal from the campfire and tossed it into the stream we found along the floor of the canyon, how it hissed meeting its reflection; like recalling what Em read me. Like a member of the family, Livy kept on about little things—that other lonely campfire in extreme southeastern California that my sister and I had approached over the ridge of a canyon in search of water which, in talk, spread to another fire that had flickered on the horizon of my dive talk to the Competition Hearings people, I who might not know how to compete. One dark summer night swimming out to the neighbor’s float and leaving our suits on the old planks and skinny-diving into the bare and waiting lake. The arc, the entry, my sister’s fear of the unknown depth at Pyramid scooting up almost as her head met the water—who swam pretty well, with a quick long stroke or a short, bent-elbowed stroke but not quite with my feeling for the water.

  How the dive itself wants, yes, to outwit the water below yet never maybe get there, be it a two-and-a-half tuck or a half twist or, as I’ll show, full, I told the Hearings people, though Em wasn’t there yet.

  And to Livy, back at the war a month later, that campfire down the lake shore six summers ago noticed only upon arriving at the float, for we saw
then beyond this cove to a point on the next, minute, darting flames, and gathered there savage faces you only saw when you got this far from shore—a shoreline, the Earth, others; yet not to Livy us diving, emerging on the canvas edge of the float, my sister on her knees, her arms, her flickering body observing the darkness of the lake; then my patented backflip, then Em jumping in, hand-in-hand the two of us, treading water, her fingers on my shoulders, remembering things said at dinner, snickering, swallowing water, giggling, when subtly there were flashlights on our shore here forty yards away prowling our rocks bobbing and stopping; one lifting across the water, finding us before we went briefly under and beyond us the swimsuits left on the clammy planks, her gleaming white, my dark, her legs now around me, giggling low, her whisper the lake naked on us, Let’s swim in and make a run for the towel, the second flashlight in our eyes, was it the dinner guest’s?

  (Bliss, I remembered.) “Bliss, understand me, bliss—up, out off the board, exposed,” I said to the Hearings the almost endlessly delayed afternoon after we were done with the evacuation alarm, and Storm, walking wounded, bandaged and God knows what under the bandage, had given the executive welcome clear from DC (and still no Em)—thinking what do I do now?—Scrolls, Umo, Dad, future, a going-back verbal agreement with the unspeakable Storm; but Bliss, Em—“you have basically three axis variants,” I went on, maybe being in myself jumping hand-in-hand off the float, what I was thinking to break down. “First, the fore-and-aft axis of your body remains constant and you turn forward or backward, spin, whatever. Second variant, body axis itself turns, as in twist, half and full; and the old fore-and-aft of number one becomes just the dive’s own axis but where is that dive? And third”—I saw Husky, Wick, Bea, a square-shouldered, gray-haired, clean military sort younger than he looked whom I had met (if I could only remember—and so it seemed important—and are all these faces accredited?); and CEO and captain and between them the woman who resembled Livy who had attacked Storm a scant hour and a half ago; who, at the back, his job done, slipping out, grinning through a gauze and adhesive creation that looked like what was left of a bandage covering his whole face, Storm himself, but where was Em? gone in the car?—“number three,” I said, “‘Bliss,’ I’ll say, joining the first two in the slipperiest of all so you forget…you forget…how exposed you are further out—and who’s watching or competing against you which is in your mind (excuse me) but you…” “‘Happy Returns’ for Godsake,” the light changed, she was a good driver—we’re not giggling in the water about a dinner guest, or in a Bureau of Land Management zone we think trudging toward that other campfire beyond the canyon ridge, or in her room, reading out loud. “He had it coming, I don’t say he didn’t, but you, you still don’t know what was in The Inventor’s envelope.”

  “‘Food for thought,’ Mom said.”

  I hear myself not joking quite but doubled. And Em easing her pedal recalling, half-reciting, “‘absentee slash parent we knew of you and beg to doubt,’” from The Inventor’s envelope (the fifth in my life by my count), “‘proud father has it in his absence’ something something ‘to be both here and not’ (wait, honey”—the endearment word from her odd again or, maybe like me, she’s in two places)—“‘tiger and fish…enigma’ (I think) ‘For’ (what was it, Zach? didn’t you tell me some of this?) ‘right words will do more than all a parent’ (I forget) ‘deeds away by’ yes! something something and…‘rue the day thinker slash dreamer doubles the single vein—’well ‘absentee’ is clear enough—hey, who knows what he means?”—Em made a sound—“he’s right here with us, our Inventor—some of it’s familiar though I swear, ‘rue the day’ and ‘slash’ spelled out, I ask you!”

  “Is it us he means or—” (just words now out in the car—) I recalled whatever—it was not only board-shy and Dad’s breathing but my own small wave receding down the beach like a great thing to see I nearly held onto—the envelope not quite so anonymous after all a cooked fortune revealed on the anvil of our aims to be annealed not by dumping cold water but by long ruminating, I said to my sister. Not funny. Our wheels spinning. “You may laugh,” she said—we passed a stand with lemons stacked on skewers and I remembered getting out of Umo’s truck having had enough—“but it’s my father, not just yours.” “He tried to do too much probably,” I said. I had imagined he would be present for my Hearings talk on diving.

  Instead Em. Come in haste, there she’d been at the back in time for Husky’s loud words with me and CEO and captain appearing front and back to grab an arm to remove him, when I was the one (and another person’s gesture I took in but recalled only later). For what Husky did to speak up they were right enough to try to get him out of there, as my own admonitory interdiction to CEO and captain proved a signal hit for the majority of the assembled accredited. And our military presence hadn’t gone unremarked even among such a loyal citizenry and, now on hand at the back, my own latecomer sister trying to think things through still had a car to drive me to Chula Vista a week later gathering my resources.

  “See, it’s heating up,” Livy said, she’d been wondering about my California campfire just beyond the canyon ridge, in fair flame though mysteriously deserted, but she meant the car now. We approached the bridge in low gear. “That’s what you told your…” A smile between us—boss, I meant. “In case,” she says. “You must have known,” I said. “What I know is…” “Well, you’re never wrong.” “That campfire above the canyon? when you were looking for water late at night?”

  “Bliss.”

  “Bliss?”

  “‘ …the plaything of the child,’ Livy —‘The secret of the man’—yeah that’s it—‘ The sacred stealth of Boy and Girl / Rebuke it if we can,’ it comes right back.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Livy; “that campfire, though, was your father.”

  “We found two gallons of water but left them,” I said, stunned, not exactly agreeing.

  But now exposed by the bridge, oncoming.

  Improvised by our own Corps of Engineers, a floating bridge, if we speak of the foundations laid across the river for a modest span to handle fifty thousand of us a day. You would hardly know what lay below arriving on foot. No vast perspective of six miles of Seattle concrete pontoons, and, once on, not the vibration of a suspension bridge, the constant flood beneath. Yet like why you enlisted, a swirling voice transmitted from the river and the structure to our feet having left the car to walk for the sake of it.

  I was exposed. It was ahead always. It was base and banal news whatever the major had phoned in.

  Through the burden of vehicle sound Livy heard the cries ahead and looked at me. She said, “That photographer? They gave up on him. I believe he was a Chaplain.”

  News, I thought. “Lost in action maybe,” Livy said, eyeing me.

  No link to our trip, of course. Her assignment, her men. “Where is the camera?” A shout, a shriek coming up from below. “And that Nosworthy?”—her voice behind me now—“with the face?”

  From the barrier I could see a sturdy child in the water swung overwhelmingly by the surging tracks of river that came together there. He hung on to some projection he could just reach with one hand below the roll of currents, it might be trying to pull him lower. The cries not his. I ran ahead and found a way down. Not a high bridge but a serious crossing. Below me two women on the ledge of a pontoon a dozen feet above the water seemed unable to move turning back and forth calling for help, calling to the children—there were two children in the water. It seemed like one. The women, their heads covered, found themselves trapped by need, not their own risk.

  On the ladder I heard Livy call. She couldn’t leave the car.

  I looked up at her. I had stopped for a second. “Stay,” she said. She meant don’t come back up. What would I do, climb back up the ladder to see if my father was the one who’d caught up with Storm? Never in the world, and I do not forgive him even for not being the one who trained the flashlight on two naked kids racing for a beach towel tha
t comes into view, huge and yellow draped over a rock, but figure he was behind the government’s almost unprecedentedly turning Umo down, finding his decision unacceptable when, just before I left, he had reportedly declined our offer of citizenship. Umo’s value as an Olympic prospect? China’s part in this.

  A paint job on a door may be a job with some exchange value to split your heart between here and there—what did Umo owe The Inventor?

  I have the time of others to work with, more than they know, and another father though this old mole died but not to me, and a faint ringtone is neither here nor there but like family to be gathered in and understood in its time: look at a half twist on tape, rerun it, the arch all but inertial, at the top the head-tilt leading the way for the shoulder and its extended arm to bank into what becomes a back dive, an axis that was always there, timeless, and you’re unbeatable you know then, but what (I ask the Hearings) is this half or full twist like?—it’s that you have no competitors, they’re another zone. This was my Chinese diver’s secret the day of the palace, his dive a jump—feetfirst, as they describe how the Reservist gets mustered out of this war—(laughter somewhere)—his twist and the three different positions his somersaults assumed capturing time itself and with it, better still, an understanding better than any dive. Which must be like my real job. To see the ground coming up, and from a long angle winter wheat growing out of it. Be the Bedouin born without eyes or a bald child’s shaved-head hairline, or a tongueless.

  And what gives me, through having worked my way down to semiretired Reserve photographer reportedly of the Scrolls’ landfall, eighteen-inch capsule turning and aiming, turning some more, along the currents of the great system of wells restless as undulating rooms I hear my sister reading when we think of water, the right to hold forth on competitive full twist or answer if the President should be on the short list for the Peace Prize? At least I do not dream of training on the job as CEO of the nation having owned a chain of prisons or laundry slash dry cleaning establishments or a baseball team or for a thousand days read the Tao in a public place to learn how to do nothing, or studied how to be a photo op against strong backlight.