Cannonball (8 page)

Umo came and went at East Hills. He listened to my father “take inventory” on terrorism and health at the end of practice before we changed. The Olympic trials came up, and then, if it was not another evening though Umo was certainly there, a future war my father somehow didn't name but it was not the same as the War on Terror. Everyone had his job to do. He might have been receiving bulletins over and above reading the newspaper as he assigned us, he would do his part somehow.

I hoped for Umo's success. What would that be? Citizenship? To grow up. He was more than grown up probably. What is it we want for others? I said. He said others had to watch his weight. It was a joke.
Secret weapon
—a phrase of his. Later I decided everyone had a secret weapon, and did Umo really mean that? “Your father's secret weapon,” he'd said when he'd heard this end of the cell phone conversation at poolside that first day.

Did Umo dive at the Club? Yes, in the separate diving well. Did Dad keep track of him? In his own way, yes. No water partings or geysers for the moment. Someone asked when I would dive again. My father saw it all—who really owned East Hill and by the same token who
they
were. Or were owned
by
, I learned to think. Our secret weapon—but how and when would Umo be used, if ever?—and a distraction always though from what to what?. Not ever choosing to be the victim like the rest of us of my father's evil temper (that's all it was), Umo was shouted at in the air the first time, though indirectly: “Get that fat idiot off the board—” Umo already in the air—“in a hurry!”—a zero-difficulty front dive that silenced all sound but a wash of watery echo and the voice of the board stressed and then vibrating, which was time not at all simple for all of us in or out of the water to be alerted to this motion that could if it chose continue.

This talent. The arch high and natural, the legs part of it—not yanked.

Dolphin (!) as I also see him and see him slowed down during the moments of a dive even now with the tortoise side of my brain slice by infinitely small slice, beyond competing. The water lurks always, it is what water does. Cleaned in our city, with eye-burning chlorine (a fair price to pay for our southern California public pools and private)—luminous with its own light given back as a home or density not odorless like some other routine poisons but faintly giving off its promise for Umo leaving our three-meter East Hills board for a laborless entry we almost could not credit, for it seemed so beyond team use, and I was watching both my father and it, for I knew he had had an idea from the beginning of Umo's visits.

My father pointing accusingly at Umo surfacing in the diving pool after that mysterious entry, that pure “front”: “How did you do that, boy? It's what I always said before you were born, and you're doing it, it's what I always said before you were born.” Umo ducked under. What did the man mean? “Downright distracting,” my father said but to himself of course. Why had the astonishing inwash of that entry in the adjacent diving pool all but flattened our waters out here?—stilled them, surprised them? At once, then, to be engulfed by Umo's happy hand-assisted launch up out of the water to stand like a waterfall, then into the lap pool, where he gave us a length of butterfly, which as Umo's go-between at least proved me right in the eyes of the man who had nagged me half-jokingly (which is worse) for months,
Man, you don't know how to compete
…but I'd brought him a great talent from Asia to be invested in our—or my father's—Olympic future, not buried in the everyday wars of our life. “What do you know today, mister?” he asked. And I told him there was a spit that could cure blindness maybe if you knew how to build it up and I had told my sister who believed me and often one better.

One evening Umo was gone while I was completing my slow/fast drills, though I saw him go. His broad back, his purpose, glimpsed upside down beyond the ceiling like where I was headed as I reached back, stroke after stroke.

My father on some instinct had no need to help him, parentless, stateless, but not powerless. Listened, though, to Umo. A brother, we say, and brotherhood, which is harder, like Umo's laugh at brotherhood, when I answered a question he asked. What about your girlfriend, is she your brother? Sure. Your mother? I guess. Your sister? Well, not much, but, no, yeah she is…“You like her,” said Umo. Like her? (I must have said something with my face, like, Well yeah, something, and I at least picked it up and answered.) Yes, I do. Maybe she can be my brother, Umo said. Well, I said, she says…“Me, myself, and I.”
Me myself and
I? said Umo—he laughed like a shot; and she says our dad's a loaded gun, the thought tumbled out of me, and she says he wants to build us into whatever, and our mother wants—“Is she a brother?”—“wants to keep a united front, you know.” “A united front,” said Umo. “Yes, that's what she says.” That's tough, said Umo, but your real brother—Wait, I said, I recalled one Sunday I and my sister had gone to church with our mother—our brother being busy—and the pastor preached about the woman at the well where she finds Jesus sitting who asks her for a drink of water and she makes problems and he offers
her
water to
truly
quench her thirst and knows she's been with five men which amazes her because how did he know and so on and my sister got my mother mad saying Jesus holds out on her till he springs his secret that he's the prophet people have been talking about and I got in my two cents worth and my sister, with the smallest room in the house, came in again with Jesus competed with the woman on equal terms until he couldn't hold it back any longer, and Mom told Dad. But your
real
brother, Umo persisted, is… Is…, I began—Beyond the law, said Umo and laughed, and I wondered what he meant. He was right although my brother was aiming to be a lawyer for a mining or insurance company, I think he had said, and worked out and referred once to his girlfriend's box and never spoke to me much.

What is this box? Umo said. Her, you know, vagina. You call that a box? He does. So when you have to explain something, you find out you knew more than you thought, said Umo. When I came to, I wondered where I'd been but it was only a second or two, I said. Came to what? Umo laughed. Oh, like you've been knocked out and you…came to myself, Umo. Your brother, he said. And Milt, I said, you know Milt.

Who may have expressed his concern in weeks of silence when I was in the Army passing through deserted settlements apparently, photographing aerosol cans with ribbons at one end, and an archaeological team using noninvasive tricks of finding unexploded munitions, a black lake from a burst pipeline, children plugged into GI earphones in dangerous neighborhoods where I would borrow somebody's unsuspecting laptop and by chance or unsuspected prayer once intercepted word of a team filming GI music-listening habits and pictured Umo back home working the Mexican border.

“Why would you want him as a friend?” my mother had said, “you have homework to do. He needs help. You just have to look at him,” she said. We have to. It's true, I said. What did we find to
talk
about? Nothing much, music, his grandfather, wild camels, blood pressure monitoring, family, America, swimming, developing pictures, the exhaust manifold on that truck of his—“Well, there you are, he's not old enough to drive.”

“Never seems to get stopped.”

“That's worse, but how would you know?”

“Zach would hear about it,” my sister called from the other room. “The way I do,” she added. “You!” said our mother. “S'what I do for a livin',” said my sister.

There was an
interesting
homelessness in Umo's occupational movements that held you and disturbed you. With a chance for
you
to achieve. What? It was not anything illegal that kept Umo in reserve for my father, my mother retailing to him what I told her of being stopped by his friend Zoose, the state cop; Zoose's new brother-in-law the Hispanic rhythm guitarist, a recent citizen; a recording studio guy in Chula Vista: my father had Umo in his sights and in those of others, his contacts, I know, and should have guessed then. For me, though, it was something I had achieved, this resolve in my father to deal with Umo. Not ask him to compete in time trials. While seeing him some evenings occupy the swimming pool and the smaller adjoining and deeper diving pool, my father saw him also as a traveler among several homes, an alien commuter to be reckoned with, a powerful “body business” to be included without any singling out in talks to the team at pool side, and (once I remember) “of use to us” I was told, but “keep it under your hat.” My helmet, one day.

Like his size (“Have a little humility,” said my mother)—he should be smaller?—the mass, the sweat of his well-fed ribs and back meat, Umo's truck trips were thought “dirty” by my brother. A phenomenon (and associated with me, my future, not anyone else's, not even Umo's). From my mother, contempt for being orphaned and nothing “done about it.” She meant, I believe,
infected
(sort of) by his parents' absence. And a
Mongol
-Manchurian, it had been learned, Mongolian stuck in her mouth—not even quite Chinese, my mother said, who called the police on Umo when Corona phoned from the motel that the white truck with the Baja plates was parked outside, though my father when he got home said he would take care of it: but why? Only because Umo would be useful one day.

Poor boy, with no papers, no family, no good reason to be here floating around, my mother observed, “grandfather a Muslim, they say”; (“His grandfather's dead, Mom”) and he gives to beggars when Liz said it's encouraging laziness (“Liz said that to you?” I said.): description shaping rumor and presently from my uncle—was it Fall 2001?—an interest in “identity papers for all citizens,” putting us on a wartime footing like Europe in the movies. Reading the paper at the breakfast table, “We're running a check on him,” my father said to my mother, meaning Umo. A way to let me know—but what?—though I heard her tell
him my
view on begging as if it was mine and not the minister's. My brother was leaving the room—because I had entered it, I often thought—but paused at the threshold hearing me making a statement he instinctively knew was pointed toward a concept he could get behind: In class once Milt had said that the old Lutherans objected to the monk's oath of poverty because if you vow to remain poor you refuse the chance of a future job, gainful employment, and, key to it all as you find in the parables, profit. “The Lutherans don't put up with any nonsense,” said my brother, gone into the hall. Umo kept much information, if not his thoughts, to himself. He couldn't speak sometimes.

Everyone comes to our city sooner or later, my uncle said; they hear about it, it's nice here. A child wrestler he'd heard Umo had been where he came from near the Mongolian border, some city it slipped his mind. Like Sumo in the balancing, the need to keep on your feet, but “nothing like Sumo if you know what I mean.”

The truck was in your mind speeding along the I-8 one night, seen one day in City Heights. Umo a big lug who knew exactly, I thought, what he was doing, cheerful, routinely resigned after thirty years in the same job—this fourteengoing-on-fifteen-year-old alien driving a truck. Milt said he'd damn well get a look inside. There was too much talk about Umo, he thought. This proved to be a time when Umo would be gone for days. I imagined him in Mexico sponging (which was true) illegible graffiti off his white truck—those beautiful Baja plates encrusted with seaweed, mud, silvery waste. Where would Umo contribute? An unbelievable swimmer, yet my father hadn't said the word.

He was an underestimated coach, called on to step in and help potential Olympic backstrokers in early Zone meets in 2001 (to my surprise) and 2002. By then, something else was afoot. His love of country well known, I like a foreigner once had asked him what exactly the country was and where would I go to see it? He lowered his eyelids—like, Did I
hate
him? Only that I had known it would drive him nuts and he would not show it (though would),
and
because I had thoughts about it myself and ran them by my sister, which touched her strangely.

“If you have to ask, I can't tell you,” he said.

And on the fishing trip when I was ten, I had taken some lame (I guess) pictures of just the roadside at Tortugas Bay and a rusty panel of scrap-iron fence not even the cactuses inside the fence and wished I'd had the buzzing sounds to go with it and had a fleeting thought about a real real close-up so you couldn't tell what it was—this at ten, probably worth encouraging—and the boring foothills by a village named El Arco, some other shots—and my father took the camera away for two days because I was wasting film, but I recall he regarded Baja Mexico as part of the United States and almost was friends with me again when I remembered the fishmonger my mother visited and what he had told her about color-added salmon and hatchery-bred trout which seemed reasonably sad though when I said they could use some fish hatcheries down here in Baja to feed the people but what was the matter, they'd had fish hatcheries in ancient times (I thought), he laughed for once. Took the camera away another day reading my mind about men and women walking the highway—thinking (for myself) who were these people, Americans?

And when we got home I didn't have the camera to show my sister and I thought she was making fun of me when she wasn't and I got her down on the dining room floor and split her wrist rubbing it on the rug and not a whimper out of her, though hysterical giggling, a strong person, my baby sister, and I told her about fish hatcheries in ancient times and then thought of loaves, while I held her down and she waited, and I never took the individual snapshot very seriously after that but the roll turned up partly developed and I remembered I'd meant to give the real real close-up to my teacher Mrs. Stame who was thin as a stem and had given us a poem about a train to read which was hard until you got it and I had thought it was about a shadow but I was wrong.