Cannonball

by Joseph McElroy

  It was this I spoke to Umo about when I happened to see him. For he went away and came back you sometimes thought just to start these rumors that few checked on, like news in the newspaper or things you did in place of others. He had been cooped up in a juvenile home in Broadview for a few days, it was said; or he ran errands for a bail bondsman in Chula Vista for three dollars an hour on a good day and then for a sound studio in La Jolla—a Russian who worked there (no, Ukrainian) putting together a music tape for a superintendent of schools’ campaign for Assemblyman nomination but Umo said there was a big plan for international recording—even though they found out he didn’t have working papers yet rather than fire him as an illegal the Russian saw they could make this kid do pretty well anything. Umo was a supplier in ugly sporting activities in Baja on the Gulf Coast side, my brother heard, some said with his strength an actual participant even at his age; but the rumors like reassuring gossip had a dimension along which they seemed to gather toward a good decision you will make. Though my mother seemed unforgiving when she volunteered that I had “helped” my father even if he was too shy to say so with “all this new business”—that is, that I might thank him for his unexpressed acknowledgment of my help with…what?—his trips, his Sacramento speechwriter contact—news to me. You go your way, however involved you might be with these others—and through things you might have done?—or said?—like the miracle of everyday dealing, as if you knew things in advance like the Man from Nazareth unforgettably profiled in the words of these rumored first-century eyewitness “memos,” spreader of new ideas and of himself, plus one prophecy coming home to roost right now as the Administration had hinted.

  I kept putting off visiting my old teacher Wick, for there would be time.

  Umo caught up with me at the smoothie stand in Old Town, I had my little Olympus Epic around my neck, getting back into it. And I found myself up in the truck cab which smelled of cigarette and paint thinner, chlorine and the car deodorant 2-D Christmas tree hanging from the mirror. I was suddenly going to Baja. (Could I get out?) He pointed at me, my chest; ah, he meant my camera? “Good. Your father taught you. My father, he told me how my grandfather wanted to get to Mexico.” I already knew his grandfather, he said—well, I nodded, yeah, I felt I did. “You break things down,” Umo said, and laughed that laugh. Good old Route 5 looked like we were going straight south. “What are you trucking back and forth?” I asked. “Whatever is needed.” “People?” “Not the last time we looked.”

  “Come on”—Umo a fourteen-year-old immigrant commuter of some maturity or a repeater of phrases he’d heard, his eye on the road. I talked to him, I said my father would ask me a question out of the middle of silent thoughts he’s been in all day, you know (?) or they’d been in him, but you didn’t have a clue, and out comes this question. Umo said, “Like?” “Like Why would you go to any war? When he was the one in the beginning.” “‘Or they’d been in him’!” Umo said—it was funny—my words—“I like that,” he said; “you break things down. It could be OK to go to war,” he said. (I’d been phoned by the Army again.) Maybe if it was close by, I said, what about him? “Look at a map sometime, they got a map at your school? They got a big map at that store you go to: find Mongolia.”

  We passed a police car, restaurants, hardware, where were we going, it was like a plan coming to meet us. Real old jerky Blues on the radio band. Umo pointed to it and smiled. Well, grandfather had gone to Mexico to find the maker of a silver cup, dark and very small, that had fallen out of the bag of a man his grandfather had killed as it happened in a fight that began as a joke. “I got it right here,” Umo took his hand off the wheel and clapped his hand to his pocket. “It’s the real reasons we look for.” His grandfather came first (whom he’d never known—only in his father’s stories, the silver cup, those particular letters on the bottom (which maybe were not his name but words, Umo had realized). He had come to Mexico on his grandfather’s business that he had made his own. (A twelve-year-old?) Searching for the maker of the cup. Was that him on the bottom? “You sound like my father. ‘What the hell do you see in that picture?’” “You mean in the school paper?” Umo said, as if he remembered—“three and a half girls and your father shoved you—once in the school paper, or—” “Umo I never showed you that picture, I never told you!” “You’re going to be going to war sooner not later if you don’t look out,” said Umo, as if he knew. “Well, my father would suddenly say, Isn’t it against the Ten Commandments? and laugh like a retard, and my sister—”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Maybe one of them.” “Is your father your brother?” “Sure, if he could be.” “You talking American?” “Like my sister.” “Your sister’s your brother sometimes, you said.” “A lot.”

  “I will marry her,” Umo said.

  “That’ll be the day.”

  “Right. She will wait, but the day will come.”

  “Why would she marry you?”

  “The sister of my brother.”

  “She’s got other plans.” “You go to war for her?” “Sometimes.” “You gotta defend yourself,” Umo said.

  “That’s my mother; she’s for the war.” “Your mother,” said Umo, “she’s preparing fresh shrimp and getting sore fingers”—such a sharp rememberer, Umo!—“and cooking and taking care of the house, a good Christian—” “You don’t know a thing about it,” I said wondering at Umo’s memory.

  “My mother was a sheepherder—” “So she left her home?” “—out where desert invading grasslands, Mongol…but wild camels let her come up to them, she was the only one, but that had a bad ending because she learned the medicine herbs they eat and she got arrested.”

  “Not the only thing, Umo.” “No not the only thing,” he laughed that harsh laugh, really amused at me. His lost grandfather had had in his possession some tortoiseshells with fine lettering on them he had taught himself to do, but what happened to the tortoiseshells…? Umo, that awful laugh again.

  Was I saving him for some loss—even his own—that I didn’t ask about his travels or the truck much? He was in Shaanxi. Then he was in Yichang and he mopped deck on a river boat and must have been extremely noticeable. He was in a village helping animals to haul a loaded wagon, but he did not show me his journey out of China or even across the ocean, though it seemed clandestine, a powerful motion, except in certain geographical points, fixed on a map: even the hard seats of a railway train car, tunnels, then jumping off where there was no platform. He had to be just thirteen then. There was a mountain, some foggy mountain at top when you get up there, people like it. (Did he have a bag?) Oh yes, and English book—catalogue, magazine (?)—laughed differently and looked away.

  I wondered how Umo had left…where he had grown up. You didn’t just leave China. A poor village on a mountain, a wooden pulley over a well creaking, a ranger watching people dynamite fish out of a lake, ermine hunters, the rumored size of a boy slipping through trees, a borrowed bicycle, drumbeats. I felt a miracle next to me: he had taken over his own life at his age. And for some reason I said, “But the women don’t herd the sheep.” Umo nodded amazingly but it was not in agreement, his eyes on the road, a state trooper across the intersection waving us over. I couldn’t believe what I’d said from the height of my ignorance in the cab of this truck. I wondered what had happened to Umo’s mother, or really to Umo. “Listen, your city is far from the coast. How did you get away?” Our truck ran a red light to remind us of itself. “Listen, my grandfather was—” Umo braked and pulled over and leaning across me greeted the state trooper: “Zoose, what’s happening?”—the little cop gave us a look, “Your friend has a license,” he said, he was joking. “You don’t even have the permit—” “No, wait, we’re talking,” Umo said to Zoose, and to me, “No my grandfather was a policeman for a while—” “A policeman! I thought he was a miner,” said Zoose. He had a hand on my window ledge. “That’s where his heart was,” Umo said; and to me, “He was a magnesium miner.” Umo had some bills in
his fist. “He admired Plutarco Calles, the revolutionary; my grandfather would come to Mexico and be a miner in Mexico and work with Calles.”

  “I know you don’t have your learner’s permit today.” Zoose waved us on. “Arrastras el chasis,” Umo called across to him—you draggin’ your ass.

  Umo was sort of known. “Zoose,” he said. “When you need him, you know? He’s got a sister. He’s a wild man. We tape. She married a guitar player just got his citizen papers, he’s a wild man too, lead guitar,” said Umo. Zoose had a part interest in a Chevron station.

  How it worked, you could ask.

  7 a better safelight for the darkroom

  The cop was into music, into the war. “Never know what he’ll do ’cept let you past.”

  The grandfather had never lived with them out west in China. (Umo was bummed out thinking.) “How could he? He was dead.” Umo took his hands off the wheel and looked at his palms. “He ran into Japanese, they ran into him, find it on the map 1931,” Umo seemed to growl. “They got a map for 1931? He died, he liked the Japs, some things—I told you—he liked their island, they were smart, you agree?—he was a fighter, he could stand on his hands. Find it on the map. Mukden. But he didn’t believe the war. You like this one?”

  “We take this guy out,” I said. “It’s a no-brainer.” I might be joking. “Out?” “Throw him out.” “You think?” The great Olympic training facility not far from the Mexican border flashed past on our left in the noise of our moaning, downshifted vehicle in need of a ring job. “Olympics,” I pointed. I guess I changed the subject but to what? Umo laughed. “‘No-brainer,’” he said. “You smart. You know photography. You listen, you break things down. But you are…” “I changed the subject?” I said. “That’s what your father said to me,” said Umo now. “He did?” “Smart son of a gun.” “About me?” “I said me and him, and he turned away, he was gonna shout at somebody—that kid—” Umo meant Milt—“and I asked if you enlist. Not changing subject, Zach.”

  Beyond friendship, that.

  What had Umo said to Dad? I might never know. “First day. He say, ‘Where you learn that?’ Not front dive but butterfly first day.”

  “Yeah, butterfly’s tough guy stroke,” I said, speaking like Umo, who’d changed the subject.

  “Yeah, he slapped me here—” Umo took his hand off the wheel to touch his right side like a tender spot, “you saw.” “Yeah, the two of you the other side of the pool. He said I—?” “Yeah, how you talk. I tell him you said Jesus, he’s our CEO, he meant business, he was a Marine.” “Look what they did to him. He was a tough guy they were up against; that’s why they crucified him, but he was…proactive,” I said—“what did he say?”

  “Gonna give me a book to read, for my English.” “Your English is killer English, Umo.” “But he didn’t.” “Maybe he will. About an American pilot flying over mountains to help China beat Japanese, I know.”

  “God Is My Co-Pilot. I told him that’s a band.” Umo shot a burst of laughter at the windshield. Umo and my father met in me maybe. This kid, easily illegal, at home in this vehicle with a sometime shadow coworker, moving what goods who could tell—he had never talked like this… “Hey, he might believe in this war he might not, but…” Umo said something in Chinese, I guess, and I kind of agreed. Umo said, “He has to…” and then, “He say butterfly blind will power. Blind.”

  A couple of miles ahead a small, bulky gray plane banked around and around at an altitude of maybe three hundred feet, we were close, a repainted Cessna from the Seventies, they had enlarged the cabin of that model I seemed to recall, it would have sat Umo snugly. “Maybe he hates you,” Umo laughed that staccato laugh.

  “My mom says he tells people things I say, his asshole son.”

  “You give up diving. You give up photography. ‘Killuh English.’” Umo brayed his laugh.

  “He didn’t like my dumb pictures. My sister figured out a better safelight for the darkroom.” “How can picture be dumb?” “Well, my dad said I’m a lousy competitor.” “No, your dad likes the war. You do what he says.” Came the evil laugh, he was my friend being silly. We had an agreement. What was it? “You be C.O. some day.”

  Mexico was coming up on us in more than geography. And I thought that during this period I had discovered in my father a new strength (from my point of view). He didn’t object to the war policy or controlling the oil, yet what would happen to their country and ours? He would call them both idiots, also those close to home he disagreed with. They were not worth talking to. It was the man I had known as swimming coach and father, who seemed to have acquired a different kind of reserve, if I only knew what I meant.

  “You don’t dive no more?” Umo said. I said I would tell him sometime because… I didn’t know why, but I would. We passed a school where some Hispanic children were sword-fighting. And a bicyclist headed the other way on the sidewalk but stopped, and shouting at somebody—or she passed us, it seemed. Umo drove fast but didn’t seem in a hurry. We passed a stand with lemons stacked up skewered it looked like on a stick near the beach in Chula Vista, Saint Louis Blues on the radio,. Hear that? I said, the Ethiopian army used that as its battle song. I said this was where I came in I wasn’t going on into Baja and I had to get out, and I would take the bus back. “There’s something funny going on,” Umo began again, braking politely. He needed me for something.

  Once you’d decided, he didn’t try to change your mind. He stayed with you, though. With it or you. The big decision coming up, I thought I might not see him. You might call him kind, but he was not kind. Kindness would be a favor you impose or so it seemed to me, my hand pressing the door handle down, the street a moving belt. I said that I might enlist. Was his politeness a falling-out with me? Strangely, he said to give his best to my sister, whom he’d never met and I awkwardly said my sister wanted to go East to college.

  Was he right about my dad? Did Dad keep this noncitizen kid Umo for future use?

  The speechwriter had moved on from Sacramento to Washington, DC, my mother advised me, to bigger things if he played his cards right or other people’s. I was sitting on the living room floor thinking, and my sister kissed me on the top of my head as she did our dad when he had come home and was being himself—grilling me sometimes. She said, “With him it’s the Olympics, not any old war, don’t sell yourself short.” I said if she’d been at poolside and had heard our war called Fate after swimming prac—

  My sister was waiting for her boyfriend to honk, not that he had a license, and the two-toned horn outside cuckooed her out the door, his sister was taking them to the movies, and she was gone but had a second thought knocking on the porch window and up close I could almost hear her words like an SOS or see them like a kiss, He used you.

  Up so close I could almost decode in a ring, an aperture of dark light inside her mouth, what Umo had said to Dad about me that very first day at the pool after the quick, irritating phone call.

  Dad had someone’s ear (like a business person for a moment cleverly resigned to the nuts and bolts of knowing people); it was a phone call or two you were invited to hear at home his side of. “Thank you, Storm… Well, I don’t know about that.… We’re all in each other’s debt, Storm.… Thanks, you keep the faith too.” Once, the same Storm asking about a maxillofacial injury he had sustained at the hand of a spokesman for a Christian mortgage concern who took exception to actually perfectly supportive remarks about our Lord’s entrepreneurial skills. It was future deals (even just Sacramento-ish) or business and sport “at our level,” and some other plan I did and didn’t want to know about. Faith in business trips now, their achievement mysterious practically in advance. Sacramento and, I heard, Washington on Olympic business would pay off. Why didn’t I want to know? Hadn’t his annual Reserve stint come and gone without his taking time off for it? I didn’t ask. It was not what I needed to know. I understood that my father had drifted away from something or other. Maybe my mother, who planned a “birthday do.” Probab
ly not.

  But that name—why, it was “Storm” Umo had heard phoning Dad’s somehow- not-turned-off cell at the pool! Stom, Umo said; “Stom”? I asked. Wind, rain, thunder, lightning, flood, Umo said the words; was he kidding, and the language game in his hands? “Oh Storm,” I said, and before long had understood it was the man’s first name (pool money, I thought, but also the guy who wrote speeches for others). How long ago that phone call? And maybe I with the best will in the world, war-bound, had done the drifting.

  I had resolved to enlist. A long-standing impulse, and my secret. I am standing on the beach and my sister’s boyfriend has stomped off somewhere, a kid. I am standing behind her, my hands on her shoulders, one hand comes up to touch mine and draws it down an inch or two. Time to go. Do I have the sequence screwed up? Prophetic. Touching her, you see things. It is months later. And I think of sending Umo a shot from the outskirts of an ancient Middle East city, of music was how I thought of it, sand in my eyes that windy day of the future—an Afro-American GI, I imagined the scar down his cheek, earphones in hand, one ear mutilated, listening lost in concentration to “Let There Be Rock”; I would send it to Cheeky for Umo instead in case she knew where he was, and I had a picture in my mind of his license plate: a gray whale’s fluke prophetically sinking into the sea. And some rowdy moments at a party, some words we’d had.

  I have said Faith. My mother’s I might mean, or that we were a family. And her sister’s, who with my uncle joins this staggered history from a hopeless angle. They followed Sumo wrestling in its traditional Japanese form as so many American married couples curiously do (was there any other?). But they paid twelve ninety-nine a month for the Sumo channel as it aired in the border region through an offshore competitor, and they celebrated both the Thursday night bouts during the season in those days and the Sunday night reruns of bouts they remembered in as much detail as a shopkeeper in Sapporo (though how much could there be to remember?)—the chants, the quick side-step and shove, or grabbing the other guy’s silk belt, the gravitational scale of budging that reminds one of the consequences of going wrong in small things. My aunt at least shared my mother’s uncanny devotion to the War even before it began or had been foretold in the President’s dream, and even seemed (though I’m slow on the uptake and probably wrong) to substitute in her normal use of “Him” for Jesus the Chief Executive after a press conference that had devolved into mostly an exchange between the President and one correspondent down on his right in the second row.