“Next stop, Olympic trials!” it was I who called out.
“Who’m I swimmin’ for?” he shouted over his shoulder—he was sparring with three seniors from my school who needed to push him in and took to shoving and one missed and fell and his brother got mad and lunged and missed and magically fell in like a wrestler who can’t help stepping outside the ring. The off-duty parent-cop looked at me: “Who you think you’re talking to?” “East Hill,” I called out to Umo.
“East Hill, they got a coach there,” Umo called back again, he knew where I was, it seemed. And this was some days before Umo knew me, I had to think, though it was my father the coach of East Hill Club he had in mind, a USA Swimming affiliate club especially well known to me.
“Got no business up there, keep the fat boy off the board, that’s what we need to do,” said the off-duty. Three girls grabbing at Umo’s orange backpack, blocked his way, bathing suit gigglers manhandling his friendly flesh. But what was his “way”? Would he go again? People wanted it. “A coach, all right,” again he called, “but we need you.” Just talk, but why that difference?
Me? Was it me? How old was he? Old for his age. It was the two entries into the water, one exploding, the second silent, or even imploding, we say so familiarly; first, the cannonball, but then that overflowing bulk layered below the armpits slipping through water it seemed to make quiet, to anticipate. It was shock and it was vanishing. What did the diver mean, We need you? Nothing, to tell the truth. The sun I realized was behind me. Time itself splits up and is at me from all directions, I was nobody. I needed to get home. But why?
I tried to get around the corner of the pool through the crowd to ask Umo what he had meant. My father’s job in mind now, if I could bring him some talent. Help him. “…take over the world, those people,” said my neighbor the cop, not so off-duty after all. “He has a right,” someone said; I turned to see an undernourished guy with an earring and a beard nod to me, “Maybe he has, maybe he don’t. See you in court.”
Umo had gone. How had he gotten away?
I have dived, but am only a swimmer now, and often know what it is I am seeing. Or I know what I can do—I thought I did—and can tell a rumor flying a mile away. Thirteen going on fourteen was hard to credit, and somehow true. By the Fall of my junior year I had again spotted Umo—swimming at Ballast Circle on the south side and at Balboa Knoll on the east. That huge flip turn at the far end, and he comes up in a sweeping breaststroke only now, mid-lap, to medley into a freestyle rolling to swamp neighboring lanes at will, yet somehow not entirely in the water, riding it, his broad back rolling not all that much; a skimmer, too, was how you remembered him, a force if he felt like it, puffy eyes slit straight across, not “slant” (as immigrant watchers even in our Pacific city will term them), but concentrating and relaxed the citizen lap-swimmer with limited time, a purpose, a timeless habit I realized was what had made me notice in the first place months before I saw him go off a board. And not notice (if that is possible).
What did Umo bring, so free, though homeless it was said?
He made me want to speak.
As I do.
You want to do something with the rumors they cook up, anyone from family to the highest levels as you must know. But was that it? Speak for yourself is more it. I wondered if from his people or country, his years equaled half again as many of ours, somewhat as we reckon the human age of the African osprey we learned about so long as it avoids being pulled under by big fish it preys on from the air: so Umo’s thirteen, our twenty, the way we do with dogs or space-naut relatives who come back ten years younger, is more like it, or those very old Tibetans once upon a time. Already he was said to be Mongol Manchurian (was that Chinese?), rumored older—in his twenties—even Muslim, and encountered one day on a corner near my school, the first Fall month of my junior year—then gone. Where did he get to? Water his medium that first summer, Mexico-based, Baja trucking; but from the other side of the world was where he “was originally from,” as my mother likes to say, and “illegal as all get out”; mystery man (and kid); joker not quite, for my money. Young crook we heard.
I saw him throw his legs out and sit down on the end of a high board in August that gave so far he might have slipped off. Only to rebound onto his feet, sit down again and go higher now. Maybe well-over-three-hundred-pound teen, his greatness a specialty, was how others saw him and were moved by him, not his everyday life, like me. The diver we’d been maybe waiting for. In our public pools. It wasn’t me, certainly. Swan, back one and a half, and my once-upon-a-time favorite, the half gainer that launched you out into a forward-flying back dive, Coach yelling, “Out too far!” as if I didn’t hear.
Later, twists were the secret—and now I thought as if in our ancient sea life we had come out of the water exposing all of our body plane by plane, elbow by elbow. A plain full twist, arm across chest first pointing the way, like a sworn loyalty, a beauty. As I was in the end called upon to explain at the Hearings in front of another audience, maybe hungry for competition and the failure of others where they imagined I was telling all I knew about competition. For Umo comes up and what might have been his last dive and, it was thought, the insurgent enemy’s last-minute targeting of the suddenly important Scrolls and their early first-century witness to Christ’s work ethic to go with all the other witnessing to whoever. His food-fasting vision and good sense, never losing your cool with a rival or over-broadcasting your edge to a pretty woman come to a well with her bucket, experience you don’t just have but learn from. Nine thousand miles away in that other seamy, medium toxic though chlorine-rich pool, deep within a deposed leader’s palace or very vitals, Umo makes his approach along the board. The double cluck of a chamber at the ready behind me I hear and forget the Scrolls, catch gun oil on the humid air, a hint of burn, a scent of black manganese phosphate I would swear if I could believe the user had found the means to re-rustproof her barrel like back home, or was it a smell of salted raw flesh that haunted my bowel, my balls? We were awaiting momentarily the Scrolls, my orders said, rumor rife in Administration circles already of early first-century Christian, by all reports either a young Roman or Jesus’s brother, who, on a friendly footing, had interviewed him on a range of issues, sustainable risk prediction, wind, water, capital punishment within reason, turning always back to the talent that begins as a small-case seed but placed in good earth cannot but grow great, can’t miss. Why was I at pool level shooting a dive and not down below at Scroll reception-point among the archaeologists et al?
And why out of nowhere this diver who’d stood before me many times back home? His own person another foreigner had said of Umo when he was fourteen (which sometimes means, I see, Look out, or Trouble). Whose home, though? I ask, like a why or a how I would put together to understand for myself this Competition our at first not quite postwar Hearings are about. The dive, once up and happening, will be thoughtless, opening, closing—what my father meant by “character”—you just do it. It speaks for itself. Is what it is—which seemed to say, is, not what. To me, though, retired from diving at sixteen, now home-from-the-war sports psychologist-in-the-making at almost twenty-one as it happened (years after quitting diving), the instants of the dive, infinitely little, half-known to intent derived from all the little I know, and reckoned in your chin and armpits, arching back and calves, as I have so far worked it out (helped by a struggling eleventh-grade teacher who was an assistant coach but more) from increments of flight infinitely slowing and small—like interruption, my sister said (but what of? she said) and you don’t mean they’re real like snapshots or (she also said one night when I came home from my own enlistment party ) what was it in you close as the person so close up you can’t see her or say what it is, a double-talk narrowing really the thought down, even if Dad cut you short, or a fine, sometimes puzzled, wild teacher taking your speeds to show you where you were at one instant, till years later you cared.
A math that I later linked with life—or slowing
down, or reliving, even the lunch hour between morning and afternoon sessions on a day of the Hearings reserved in part for me, careless with figures, honestly. And my own memorial for Umo in particular this big person’s entry into the waters of a onetime luxury pool in the basement of an appropriated palace during the war which came up to meet him though that was not the end of it: which recalled all over again a future of my own not that descried by my mother through her daily windshield missing nothing at the wheel or by my father, Reservist big-time who the Spring I graduated high school had made his peace with the coming war across the board (meaning little to me as he reported it except to place on me some curious decision unless he was salting me up), and he would have to reconcile himself and my mother (he said) to my serving, though maybe not her. What did it matter? It was the last thing he said about it to me at any rate. A father is a father.
My teammate Milt wouldn’t think of going, and if elected would not serve. He often quoted his dad, North-side Lutheran minister, whom I photographed bowling once, right arm out-thrust in follow-through so long ago with Milt in the foreground and blurred but his diagonally slanting, almost converging eyebrows visible, as my sister pointed out, and the minister’s very own black-and-white “DNA ball” we called it bending down the alley ambushing the head pin to bring them all down, a first strike—a father for you—and once, surprising him when I took a picture of him in his living room his hands clasped together talking to Milt and me, there would be no Draft and if there was had we heard of civil disobedience? A father for you.
For have I begun really with mine, my dad I will call him (and not after all with my friend and with the Scrolls sent under the Mesopotamian desert by water)?—a father who because everyone needs a hobby, not knowing it should be your life, taught me, when I was so young it was still The Dark, how to make a darkroom with a sheet of plywood half covering the bathtub: work slow then fast, change the whole look, the take, lifting a picture with your tongs, agitating it in its bath sometimes diluted (not by me) of TD3 turning its (no telling what)…spirit I could now not then say to my testy teacher aware that I would soon get back to working on Lego castles and precarious balconies with my sister, “E,” who was willing to follow with her delicate hand (though not as my father taught me) and would join me in our improvised darkroom for experiments parenthetical and blurry she had thought up so we ran out of printing paper and had to ask Dad to get us some more though how it curled up at the edges killed him—whose face itself would have been something to work with, my sister said, a crowd in itself, teaching me important things about crowds, I saw, as well as our father, though she was younger, and giggling in the middle of something in the dark remembering how our mother was the one who…who…who said the word “spirit.”
How to swim as well, I was willing to believe our father taught me, though I began with more there; and had less of him because my father belonged to hundreds of others in the tile-hard, watery fields (yes) of two unforgiving swimming pools in particular—a somewhat well-known coach at our club targeting Zone meets and always Olympic shortlists but at my high school too, though there, at the risk of getting fired he relied on our cherished assistant, Wick, it is always coming to a head long ago and then recently at the Hearings, it comes up at the Hearings, my dad trained with the Reserve every year and went to meetings, though I see he was away a lot Umo’s second summer among us. There were postponements and, putting it all together (but what?), I recall as a habit my father’s trips to Sacramento on swimming business and a week’s East Coast “DC junket,” announced by my mother after he was gone. Travel helped him “blow off steam.” These trips added up, stopping off at Colorado Springs, an Olympics meeting, on the way home. Wick was polite about it. Get into that loop it’s endless. What loop? “Zone business.”
My father sometimes knew exactly what the score was, and sometimes it was about him. He had the latest news, named names who were for him and was still close-lipped, boiled things down; though who for? Maybe in the end someone, but who would know? Me? Though complained that he had been “pigeonholed” as a backstroke specialist curiously soon after I, his son, quit competitive diving. Our historically AAU-affiliated club in its own small way a fixture here like the Marine Lab (which as I pointed out to a father not amused is also “an independent swimming club sometimes”), kept a weather eye on the Olympics, the now “USA Swimming” affiliates (sincejust-after-Vietnam, my dad once said), the authentication of meet times, alliances read sometimes as if between the lines of directives coming out of Colorado Springs—but within and beyond, where the money came from. This was what was really going on. And to be placed, if not by me, in the overall scales.
(A father is not an older brother either.)
East Hill had sent three freestylers to the early Zone trials the year before, and a 400 butterfly; but not really our coach, his status that of a provisional backstroke backup coach. The funding was quite real to me, I see now, the money, if I never seemed to think about it, and why would I? It often seemed to come from people, and to be private by some smart, even brilliant stroke like a signature or a voice. I heard Colorado Springs—somewhere where a committee “sat”—and Washington, DC. And a Sacramento-based speechwriter my mother said Dad had glommed onto or the other way around, who worked both coasts.
On a shelf in my father’s office at East Hill stood my grandfather’s copy of God Is My Co-Pilot, about the overage Flying Tiger in World War II China. On the wall among many informative photos one outdoor shot, somewhat boring, from 1968 of a Vietnam correspondent he had known standing with an older guy who had on a seemingly white suit and a dark tie and a dark hat, not looking at the camera, the head of the World Bank, hands on his hips, and the difference in the way the two men stood a giveaway, and contrasts of dark and light, it seemed to me, whatever the World Bank was. Well, my father was an expert on government support for true enterprise; on water, which trusts us and is to be trusted; on the body’s forces and vectoring diagonals to a point where, with the will and practice (and team desire), you might become a hydrofoil; expert on a trick with the abs, a kind of hike with the muscles, to get the extra stroke on the man in the next lane (yet keeping it all “seamless”). A difficult man (my own father)—nothing personal, perhaps—who knew the way to lift the elbow just so far to swing the wrist through. The body this thing or raft with side paddles (“let the tool do the work,” he said in his shop in the garage) and a kick motor that never stops, while, face down except to breathe (like a religion with him), the pool floor glimmering below like the ground, you were a bird on the wing, the planes of air your depth.
Did he love science more than the stopwatch—or team chemistry? If you had to ask, he couldn’t explain it to you. Why do I recall here the very rare photo my dad found of mine in the school paper that made him mad enough to anyway shove me: an underexposed overcrowded shot on slow film like a botched time delay of three and a half girls jogging. Nice, my sister had said, eyes and heads everywhere; which set Dad off. Photography was photography. It’s a matter of getting it—no more than that, he said with a contempt that disowned me, so once again I thought maybe forget it, a wick waiting for a match. Yet he came back and talked some more, like an unhappy eccentric. A camera could remember a face and catch a criminal, he pointed out (as I recall the pad of bare feet past my room in the middle of the night and my sister’s). And I heard him say still photos were an eyewitness record to show a swimmer his habits, his “shape” better than video any day. Some swimmers, he said, “mature ridiculously young” and “the embrace” of the water reminds them of “when they were a fish or nothing and they shouldn’t forget they might still wind up nothing.”
So long as the competitive drive is there, roughly what he said, awash with echoes, and more than roughly.
Coach’s unpredictable kindness—asking you, coaxing you like there was no God to find your form, your “shape”: Was that how he did it, co-axing you? E replied, she was on the floor below me charming
the floor itself stacking magazines she would clip from, science, home carpentry, garden, fish and game, electrical merchandising, that fell to her before being thrown out. She chuckled (exactly the word) from her cocoon, my pretty sister, to mine and couldn’t stop, yet joined me with a word wherever I was going when I was going to stop to be surprised by her: “Coaxing to find…what?” she said—“…like a faith and a better one for his money if he could let you alone”—what other profit was there than the competitive beat of your life? “His ‘competitive’ could make you choke, “E said, remembering.
Because nobody knew what shape he meant for you, or beat—like breathing, if you didn’t think about it—words we all including the team joked about, but for him just so, but one day I heard myself think them—zone, water trust, take inventory, character (just do it), reach (from the shoulder not the hand, whether swimming or at the pistol firing range)—think those words like my own far from home, even why I had enlisted; and knowing not quite empty-handed who and what I might be looking at up there approaching the end of the imported Maharajah cocoa matting suddenly of a dictator’s U.S.-imported three-meter board in that palace of a wartime Green Zone outskirt. A payoff, was it?—of all the talk, rumors, interesting spite voiced against Umo to turn him into a notorious delinquent enticed on another business trip—or intervention, as it turned out—into the war itself, was it?
3 water trusts
Umo didn’t go to school. I had learned this from the genius who tried to push him into the pool. How did he know? One morning first thing my older brother who hadn’t addressed me in almost years told me my “Chinese friend” was a hoodlum, a bad guy, a crook, and a smuggler. That would be the day, I said; at fourteen? I said—not even. My mother on the phone shook her head eyeing me: I always knew too much.
In truth, too little, I said with my eyes. For was this Umo my friend, I thought? If illegal and Chinese, where could he settle? Not the first time people knew things I didn’t. I had run into him at three pools. He had lived in Chula Vista on the street working for the Sanitation Department as a night engineer’s helper, in fact seen near Otay Park at midnight under the streetlight heading a salvaged soccer ball into the garbage truck’s cruncher too late for another kid to rescue it.
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