Cannonball (5 page)

God helps those who help themselves
, my mother had said, which is true except about God helping. “Where does it say that?” I said, picking up and twirling her blue Christian Lender ballpoint, but I knew it had made her angry. As if I didn't believe it. “It's in the Bible, wise guy,” she said after me, “you don't trifle with the Holy Spirit.” It was like a favorite word of hers—
spirit
I will give her. “God's matching grant,” I said and was sure it wasn't in the Bible, it sounded closer to home, a web site, I'd definitely seen it, Ben Franklin on some poster maybe. Umo forgetting me as the truck rolled forward, later I couldn't remember seeing anyone in the driver's seat, a vacancy due to him himself. But who was Cheeky? It was no secret, I had concluded as the black exhaust from the truck's tail pipe made me a promise.

I thought,
I'm going to enlist
. Me?

“Hey, you're good with the water,” came the voice another day, “you understand it.” “I do?” “So do I. I grow up in desert.” There was Umo seen upside down standing on the tiles above me, I was near the end of a backstroke lap, chancy in a public pool somebody coming the other way. “Water,” Umo began, he lifted an arm over his head, I knew what he meant. “Hey why not we start a backstroke heat with a back
dive
off the platform!” Umo looked down at me like something weird he just noticed. He pointed—I knew at what: “Whatdjoo do?” “Accident.” “You still got a vein there.” He laughed that nasty, explosive laugh. I hadn't seen him and here he was. “Your sister come here?” No she didn't. I said he would fit in OK here, the race was to the swift.

“The
race
?” Umo said. He got it. “The
race
is,” he said, “but…” He really paid attention even when he didn't, and he pretty much knew what I meant, because I at least know that the Bible or Benjamin Franklin, maybe both, say the race is not to the swift. I might be competing with Umo, for all I knew. He asked why I'd stopped diving. I would tell him about the accident some time, I said. I'd just had an idea or memory as you sometimes do swimming backstroke—shadow, though, of someone else's memory, not mine—and here he was, here was Umo noticing the scar from when I had hit the board and could have been killed—and when he had said, “Water,” I had remembered,
Water trusts the backstroker
.

Here was Liz, too, my girlfriend body-wading across two active lanes, and when I stood up in mine and looked, Umo was gone, but not what he'd left. It was late August, senior year starting.

“Where'd he go?” “He's over there,” Liz said (like,
why
?); she kissed my shoulder, I felt her; “
now
he's gone.” “No he's not.” A passing lap swimmer kicked a toe hard against the back of my hand and caught the nerve that runs clear up the arm and over the shoulder. “Independent,” Liz said, sort of out of sight out of mind. “He wants…,” I began.

Liz palmed my chest and kissed me there, as she often did to remind me, as if I'd had surgery there. Which maybe I had, as my sister had said late that terrible night when I was sore as hell whatever she meant. My idea I almost—(Liz was talking to me)—kept to myself. What would it mean to Liz—what not even Milt knew or my sister—that it was Mexico Umo had come to because it had been his grandfather's dream? “
Mex
ico!”

Liz puckered up, she made a beautiful face. “Why do we do that?” I said. “Other people's dreams,” I said, in momentary possession of someone
else's
private
memory
but only from outside—Liz would never to her credit just say,
Yeah
. “It's not Mexico he wants,” said my girlfriend. I got a kiss on the shoulder. How're you doing? was one of her thoughts said softly now standing hip-deep in my lane, afternoon tiny bubbles racing up from somewhere, her clear dreamy thigh, an escaped coil of hair at the seam of flesh and suit, whichever came first.

If she wanted to know, though I wasn't about to say, it had been two years ago and three days after the accident, standing in the water here with Liz, I felt again before I'd even known her, the Goldthread herbs I had crushed and boiled and quite secretly with my sister applied the terrible night in her room when the door was flung open upon us like a snapshot by our father though we were the flash, yet time after time in mere memory another place of that time I was in a sweat arguing about nothing with Milt at The Inventor's, and to the third person nearby could it have sounded set off by some For Sale thing on a shelf?—I was injured—not just injured—ill, sick, I had realized at that moment or changed (how the word has changed, was it a war to make “ill” mean “wonderful”?)—and the angry track the accident had raised on my chest only days ago was mine alone. Milt had hold of the early west Bengali biplane, swooping it this way and that, the fuselage orange and crimson, the top wing pocked with tiny dark marks as of anti-aircraft bursts The Inventor had said were drawings of sea pencils in fact that thrive on the marine reefs to the south off Sri Lanka, the plane designed and built by an oceanographer from Calcutta and these very tweezers lying on the shelf were the ones used to place and glue the balsa struts. (“Let the tool do the work,” I said. Milt flicked his finger at a poster of a woman looking at you over her shoulder showing a beautiful ass and just visible the thong top of her underwear, it was odd but I didn't know how much if any experience Milt had had). Brought back from a mysterious unannounced trip abroad of The Inventor's months before, the plane model cost only twenty-five dollars, but who had that kind of money? It was Milt's sixteenth birthday, not enough to make me agree with everything he said today. “You'll get over it, you'll dive,” he'd said. “Why should I get over it? I can hardly breathe.” The injury to my chest was mine, and The Inventor was puttering in the far room, listening. I heard Milt talking to himself or to the plane behind me, for then I was standing in front of The Inventor counting my money and put it back in my pocket and lifted my sweatshirt to show him. “They said I was lucky.” “It needs to heal, then you will
be
better than never
you
knew,” he said.

“Than ever?”

The right words will do more
had been nonetheless what The Inventor had said when I told him what had happened and that I couldn't breathe, and when he laughed learnedly, sketchy, even forlorn, and asked
how
it had happened, the full twist that came too close to the board, I couldn't breathe again and he lowered his voice and he said that
worrds
had caused the hurt and would do more than the herb to fix it but try the herb, and it made me mad but it was scary, this very dark man—had he been at the pool when it happened? He had a total outsider's hunch—that was it—or weird melting-pot foreign knowledge, yet no, it was some fine-line or species tenderness; for, well, words of criticism had greeted my injury, surfacing, half unconscious or barely conscious or obeying the angry seed he did say somewhere near the very place in me, my heart channels, that had borne abrasion, but how could he know
what
had been shouted at me—could he?—in mid-dive
before
the accident? Of course not.

Remember (he said) what you have always known, the vein you can't see running through the wound, and he handed me an envelope with something in it—the Goldthread—and then another that seemed empty though sealed and I knew Milt was in the other room trying to hear us and I had a grand total of twenty-six fifty in my pocket along with my keys knowing what Milt wanted for his birthday and I had a plunging feeling then hearing the jingle of the till ringing up the sale and knew that sometimes he should grow up, though, and that on the bus he wouldn't be satisfied with loving the plane and would have to know what was in my envelopes but would have to settle for just one of them.

Independent
, Liz called Umo, sounding more a woman than I had heard her. She hauled herself lightly out of the pool. Water streamed down her thighs, no stopping it, and she fingered downward the butt line of her swimsuit. Why travel when we lived in a city like this? was one of her thoughts, I knew. How're you doing? was another, said softly with no slant even now standing in my lane.

But
had
Umo grown up? And so fast. Had he? And illegal, for crying out tears! He gave to the bereft old sun-grained California drifter at the bus stop a couple of bills. Where did the dollars come from? What they call a silent offering at church, where pastor and sheep are not silent about, in our city, begging if you're able to work, which my aunt years ago now called a sin of sloth (an animal I knew from a picture) but Milt's minister father a violation of the very idea of brotherly love, according to someone with whom my mother agreed without knowing who it was and I passed all this on to Umo one day on a city bus. In his great frame and flesh unveined and smooth among its folds a declaration, a friendly force, a citizen of the world on the move. Mexico, anyway. Though maybe no place, and illegal, though maybe a place itself can acquire that status.

My idea had been to bring Umo to East Hill. Make a splash with the coach, his search for regional or even national attention. It might not cross my dad's mind that we were after it together, whatever
it
was. Yet in some more interesting thought that I hadn't learned to follow up, I was soon to be in
another
“it” with my surprising and sometimes embarrassing sister, who had described unforgettably Umo's entry into the water one summer night in 2002. I beside her shot on film or tried to his dive but she just as she'd been interrupted passing on to me a weird family yet neighborhood question Corona's Italian wife Bea had put to her as they had biked home the night
before
through rain divided and gathered and caressed by trees now tonight saw him pull off a two-and-a-half at a public pool under the lights that went out totally for a moment, a breaker fluke that went unexplained, as he left the board plunging us if not my camera into nowhere and came back to reveal him just passing the crest of the as yet undisclosed dive now crunched into tuck—as I became aware of the old woman of a year ago with the spotted skin and the veins materialized now as if by the power glitch itself beside me seeming to say hello with a word: for Umo's dive was so busy a somersaulting that when he just came out of it he's someone unaware of you headed somewhere else gone forever, my sister said, or
ex
ecuted, it came to me she had murmured to herself or me, I thought if anything a sucked-downward tongue or perfect loss. Which like my sister's own, night-inspired remarks I recall, but, hoping for
her
success at least in life (for she dreamed of supporting herself while attending college far away “somewheres” if they would let her go), I'm struck by her thought that Dad was looking to get out of the Reserve “if we weren't careful,” for Corona's long-legged wife narrowly avoiding a bike collision with a parked car's door opening had asked last night if it was true he had managed to swing it already, a friend of her husband's told her. And my sister told me she had asked of Bea, “In return for
what
?” Yet what stayed with me wasn't Dad finessing the Reserve, if it was even true, but the seeming slowness of the dive (caught by sheer luck in my snapshot on the back of which one day I found a few printed words of my sister's), and so I recalled for months my sister's I thought unanswered retort bicycling behind Bea, “In return for WHAT?”

That palace dive answers her nine thousand miles and counting months and months later though what had I for answer wrecked at the brink of a now wartime palace pool, too slow to get the micro out for a still, though v-c recorded from the hip? For a spy without knowing it, of what wretched use am I it comes to me like my body itself during the later Hearings? And he this once upon a time huge figure yet not quite of fun, a gigantic kid you could trifle with not at all at your peril, unless privately in your heart and his; a promise at the edge of my neighborhoods so unforgettable I couldn't always hang with it, like my sister's word for his entry, “farewell” (then “frequent farewell,” this being my sister)—he was an untouchable diver I only later far away at my own paid picture-taking understood—too late?—and had been a sort of friend before even the cannonball beginning. For what else could I make of the word Cheeky (her name) said to me at the moment of the breaker going by the old woman in blue jeans and the Australian hat, who perhaps a year and a half before had taken the snapshot of Umo on the gangway in Vera Cruz with his enlarged hand out in welcome or arrest?

How long had they all known me even two weeks before Thanksgiving when I all but ran into Umo, how could I not have seen him stepping down out of the Heartmobile?—and it was as if we knew each other pretty well even then. It was my birthday, I'd bought one of The Inventor's special envelopes and, recalling the potency of an earlier one, I'd been quite absorbed in whether or not to open it and I'd wound up downtown across from the Coaster train station. But now Umo must stop at the recruiters table, flag-deco clipboard, pamphlets of the future spread out where music stampeded blindly somewhere under the table and the two Marines speechless behind grim smiling teeth; Umo asking if this would get him citizenship. You could take him for seventeen. An unusual person maybe. Was it experience? He would need to lose some pounds, said the corporal, not really answering Umo's question. “Shed some weight,” said the sergeant. Umo pointed under the table at the pint-size speaker. “That's what they gonna listen to over there.” Later I grasped the quality Umo gave to his speech when he opened his mouth—or it could feel like it was coming true anyhow and I was on home ground but it made me mad. “Over there?” said the sergeant, alarmed. “Rock,” said the corporal “It's not going to be ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,'” I said. “Not on a daily basis,” said the sergeant frowning, smiling, pushing a piece of paper toward me. “Help 'em shoot straight,” said the corporal. “He's with you guys, though,” I said. “All the way,” the corporal said. “A peacemaker,” I said. “Hey, He was a Marine,” said corporal.