And I——why had I leaked even a word or two, a picture almost, of the interrogation story, some of it, in anger at this person whose kerchief you might like to tear off and in character even to the astringent soap smell of her perspiration. It would be of interest to the captain and the, it came to me the Chaplain had called the black man, CEO. A loaded gun, maybe, that poor, ill-fated Seal trained in EOD.
Why had the Chaplain told me?
And why had I spoken this morning to the angry woman at the Hearings as I had? Was my part to be provoked by these people? By history in the making embracing how belief in competition, as someone in a Goals workshop yesterday had said (and found it cool to have said), can eclipse competition itself in the name of faith in your own business or the promotion of these Scrolls that might put paid, as the British said, to our war (though it was said to be over) or eclipse it in importance?
19 like a Third way
Still, my leg, the scrap of Scroll Ziploc’d in my pocket against it, knew what was important. Attempting to leave, pressing this damp half-hand of a celebrity, I knew, like the mutual and distance-embracing future I and my self-reliant sister at curious moments shared, that Nosworthy on message addressing the afternoon session might find himself amended. Not that my real job would come to me in time, but had already. At war—in Kut, I thought, and in other unfinished business, and half-drowning with, in the custody of my hand, the body of the man with whom like a Third Way this very thing had been broached, Your job—grasped, too, in the words of the kerchiefed woman against an almost twenty-one-year-old profiteering sports psychologist, sometime contractor’s assistant, photographer, like a rightness inside her grosser or even pained and personal attempt at meaning; wondering now more than grasping, and calculating in baffling yet infinitely encompassing increments a distance from my father so unthinkably out of touch and his own up-or-down plan for himself in which I had been dragooned to function under fire, wait a minute, maybe it was true! (the Law Dean bearing down on me, her calculated scent only to be brushed past now by me for the business at hand like the initially by her announced “smorgasbord of topics the Hearings would offer” which was proving to be a broad umbrella for Operation Scroll Down, or what Storm Nosworthy for the Administration had planned to air, introduce, expound, and take possession of and validate the existence of, it came to me like the end of the war growing a new crop of enterprise) was it not possibly true, as a recent TV-interview citing from the Scrolls came to me like a familiar and sister-associated teasing memory of my own, that this first-century “Jesu” could really have envisioned as a practical enterprise to feed the hungry a natural fish hatchery with water captured from Lake Galilee?
“Umo,” I said, “the diver,” Storm reaching for my hand again, “There’s another, Zach—” “Why did you have him shot—with his gifts?” “The guard had her orders. Poor timing, Zach.” Still, Storm liked that I could ascribe that kind of act to him, whatever he said. “It was perfect timing,” I said, finding something in my words. “Not for him, Zach.” “With his gifts, what could have come to him, so young…” “Posthumous,” the hand on my elbow, I think. “Posthumous?” I said. “Posthumous citizenship?” I said. “Great idea, Zach.” (A person passed through me, or so it seemed; a gathering—my sister, Umo, the Chaplain, some lost father let him stay lost, all or none of these, gift and burden.) “Another?” you said. Another what?” “You were hit, Zach; we gotta do somethin’ about that too. Too bad what happened to my number cruncher—no purple heart for him.” “Well, you know why I was there for him,” I said. “To document whatever happened.” “Lucky I had more than that camera.” “Sister thought we were after the diver. Sister—” “Kind of a lost cause, you know.” (Did I mean Umo or Em? It was worth that moment, speaking with the ring of instinct.) “She’ll think twice about who we’re after,” Storm fired a grin at you.
“She doesn’t.”
“We know who she thinks about.”
“Wait for me,” I said.
“And nice work if you can get it.” Storm fingered his nose like a deaf signal, traced his lopsided mouth, pinched and long, his low, face-mask-wide brow, the center part in his scalp hair, this man I was trying to turn from. “We know all about her talents…,” the face said then.
“Who’s we?” I had the Canon out of my jacket. “Wait, Storm”—flashing it with equal depth of field by chance to read both his face like a fucking keyhole and way back in the room as if I had known all the time that she was working for them the woman in the kerchief with a plate of lunch pass the two men in camo fatigues; and as she blatantly ignored it, caught the captain’s polite smile expressly acknowledging this supposedly eccentric lady and obviously hiding his appreciation of what she had gotten out of me, under a ceiling of new acoustic panels stained by an intricate coastline of leaks.
“She’s in our sights, that job back East (?),” Storm let me know, “that application (?)…”—Storm was on the case, taking even care of us, yet in himself a field of experience full of the smell and plot of the real canal encircling delivery of waste and memory to be lived with not squashed like a locust or further eviscerated and maimed like a Kilimanjaro lion or a medicinal Mongolian rat—“yeah, that application—we can get in her way, bro, whatever.”
“Wait for me,” I said, thinking there should be laws for this, would genius and legislation just be at odds? What could that face tell me I didn’t know, but what had I just said, or heard? East Coast in my sister’s mind a while now, college, a marginal research slot—but news of her from that man turned it weird as if he would harm her, she hadn’t seen that face, but he thought he knew about us. It could only have been from one person but Dad would never in so many words have told Storm of a closeness Dad didn’t grasp himself as the heroic intimacy it was unless Storm, in his inexperience, had put unknowns together out of my father’s mouth and, fingering them, had finessed into insight some sexual case. I’m gone, hearing behind me the soft finger snap recalled from that palace lair alerting someone to keep an eye on me on the way down yet someone else following unbidden but not quick enough; the finger snap recalled the pale kilim newly signed with spots of healthy blood, recalled a job still to do beyond this errand that made the scrap of untranslated scroll heat like an aura its faithful Ziploc in my pants pocket.
Diving past the elevator door closing I would figure how to reach The Inventor without leaving a trace in Coronado; envisioning vehicles, drivers, my driver from the palace almost—sighting of all people my mother’s butcher a fellow communicant at her church idling in his minivan at the traffic light. He it was, then, who drove me twenty blocks to a bus stop he did not question; he pointed out the red, blue, and silver Heartmobile trailer (why?), said he’d heard I was back how did I like it it was different over there he guessed—his elbow out the window, his thick, pink and purple hand restoring a Camel to his teeth. I could see myself going back—I said this to some shepherd sympathy in him for a Reserve who, pretty slow on the uptake, he could not know was puzzling out whether the woman driver weeks ago I’d never expected to see again who’d fished me out and given me a fresh shirt had seen another bodily form moving under the surface or—half an hour before?—a great meaty shoulder gashed, peeled back by initial shrapnel sail by but free at least of the shot that found Storm’s CPA on the pool tiles. So, as I freed myself from the butcher’s front seat, thanking him with a surprise in my eyes for what had come to me and for his own loaded life as well before me in his long, narrow face and his competent, even savage, and for the moment helpless, hands and a curious glint in the left earlobe, and wondering if the Heartmobile nurse had weighed Umo; who should I see—or what—but a white truck (smaller than I remembered), blurred graffiti on its flanks, Baja plate, elbow out the driver’s window, though too bony, too dark to be Umo’s.
I thought about that elbow boarding my bus, my silenced devotion to Umo, his life our life I took apart, just now the free Heartmobile, the Sprint cell, a pack of Camels in the
well in the butcher’s front seat with a blue ballpoint just like one in our kitchen, for I would have to phone my mother.
It might have come to me like an envelope from within the house, it came to me ringing the bell feeling almost followed by what I sought though I would not look away except up the street to some memory of Cheeky’s garden now overgrown like a field the stalks and weeds all but guarding her low, warped porch. Here at The Inventor’s the shades drawn against the sun, one window boarded but fresh paint slick as the painter’s hand on the purple and saffron front door, no peephole blessing this place, store shut but waiting and my job to know this like the Ziploc I carried in my pocket and not even under my pillow at night as my sister knew turning the pages, cross-legged on the bed, fresh from her shower, reading to me from the clipped, planed, carpentered sentences of her book, a loaded gun, ours I felt, bound in our heroic intimacy that must change.
I saw who they were after and it was not Umo. I rang again.
It was the underwater photographer they were after, the Chaplain.
I was satisfied that he had died in front of me and I had done for him what he had asked. So his body had not been found at the scene of the explosion. He had evidently not turned up in the water filtration plant downrange either, where two heads had been found, or riding memorial sewer currents or resurrected to tell (or be guaranteed not to) his story another day. His candor, plus the detached wet-suit sleeve—its animal toughness—that I had found still in my hand upon being boat-hooked like a miracle in upon the slimy rungs of an iron ladder where the well roof opened briefly to a luminous, late, and gathering sky, persuaded me again my Chaplain was dead. (Others were not persuaded.)
And the job we had somehow agreed was your real job. Not Up again (to the drained pool). Or even Down (into the rapid well currents). But something in the Third Way (even of Umo’s feetfirst dive I think I muttered of) persuaded me also. Muttering, vomiting the memorial waters, slipping on the rungs, feeling the lower dissolve as a foot found the next up, transferring the rubber sleeve onto my driver’s boat hook. And I understood that the Chaplain had given me the account of the Seal interrogation, or its cruel end, because he had been there. And both his death and living persuaded me, and the scrap of Scroll torn from his hand—not the Scrolls, but the scrap, or, more, its tornness—yes. So in a way he was still among us.
My finger on the bell about to ring again. The street never quite empty behind me, the greenish bronze god head of the door handle, turning, passes a glint across my eye as if to open, while inches above it the tumbler within yields to the other hand.
Inventor? Only our name for him, two kids fairly color-blind for California. After so long away—since my enlistment party—where do I begin? With questions about the break-in? The “nothing of value” taken, my sister had heard from Milt. News of my continuing war. The lease at risk, Cheeky’s, we had heard too. And a green card.
My scrap of papyrus, fingered and rubbed curiously by my sister, had become a necessity today. The translation, so strangely delayed by me, I needed now and wouldn’t get for free. My visit was for its own sake, though, like old times. A drab two-story wood and stucco house where, if I hadn’t already heard of that briefly historic pool, I had been advised by The Inventor to show up for its opening. Not the first time told to go do what I’m probably going to anyway. But I forgot promptly that I’d heard it here. (I was doing it.) Yet later didn’t wonder why. Because The Inventor, with his envelopes that made Milt mad, knew things—Be a passerby, his contrarian view of the disliked Samaritan story, in my birthday envelope the day I had taken Umo to East Lake—and was interested in my chest wound and how it came there—and in my roundabout humor; knew Umo before I did, and in some way that I accepted without expecting to have explained, had been expecting Umo before he had arrived in this part of the world. Perhaps a time had come when I would naturally have asked about these things, as I would have asked this black Indian treasure-house collector and poor sorcerer who his people were and what he thought he was doing here in this war-torn country, but that moment was when, against my suspicion of my father and his part in this, I had enlisted accepting a Specialist deal not even Umo knew of, much less this night-faced, genteel but life-and-death-eyed India Indian with a sharpness or kindness he could seem to save for two eleven-year-year-olds who over their formative years would blow some cash they almost didn’t have in his store by the time one of them had a bad pool accident soon after which an extraordinary or fugitive diver materialized first on a high board and then in my acquaintance and my disturbed loyalties who could at once promote me to my father who never took advantage as I had hoped of my introducing Umo to East Hill as a prodigy who could help him nor would grasp the real job I stumbled on because some foresight not all mine had planned to.
Yet what came back to me now in this deserted noontime street, inspecting The Inventor’s colorless, sandblasted or epoxy-patched Bel Air parked two feet from the curb and hearing his front door, was Umo’s We need you, that day. Said once across a corner of a grandly opened pool, what did it mean?—distant and personal like the lock tumbler and weathered bronze handle right here of this freshly painted front door which now sticks a little as it gives:
—untrusting as Umo, who hid his distrust in humor, or was it of (Stom’s “secret weapon you better get to know”—well, what or who was that? my sister lite? ) and gifts of friendship—that palpable drive south, or a snapshot: yet hid his untrustingness also in true trust asking who was meant by “brother,” and telling me his grandfather’s plan to come and work in the mineral mines, sign up with Plutarco Calles. Calles? The revolutionary leader (though I have learned now always to ask exactly what revolution) who wanted to keep church and the government from teaming up, and became a somewhat ill-fated President of Mexico; “while” Umo busily sought a place for himself, U.S. citizenship in fact from authorities who now presumed him dead. The day of the explosion, he had by quite some minutes, twenty or thirty, preceded me like a shot, a condemned in unfree fall, the aftershock-shifting plates like trap or shutters parting for him miraculously. And I hadn’t known where I was going—up, down, a third way, delaying the plunge, taping the scroll scrap into my ear hearing steps and the waters almost beside me. And a difference now in the steps of three people, one pair softer, like a voice not to miss. And chaotically thinking I would ask my oracle about Umo’s “secret weapon you better get to know” if I made it out of here, why I let myself down into the well-stream current dragging the body of my new friend over the brink so it came down on top of me and took what from me? Above and at once behind us the people by now arriving downstairs searching for the photographer, the waters’ rush and wish, density and stench too great for us to hear them calling.
For us, I say.
For The Inventor’s door opening had twisted my own story round to see instead of a stretcher for a medevac carried out of the stairwell like a companionway into the still heaving wreckage of that lower floor below the palace pool, a surveillance monitor totaled, two or three of them—shredded—down by where the blast had detonated and the Chaplain had been crushed, and the need of somebody’s eyes to see for themselves if not finish the job.
The pitted door gashed, gnawed-looking, but so freshly painted in half, saffron above, purple below, the soft oak itself in an instant had shown me how the door would be opened. Swiftly by The Inventor or not at all. Dead bolt snapped open-and-shut first as a test by Milt. A little kid in there might look up at the door and call out or fling it open; a bigger one would have yanked without first turning the knob—all people are different sometimes for their own sake at best (the war said—though like History, it could be made to say anything, or nothing, which was harder perhaps in truth.) And my sister, it occurred to me, would sometimes peer out the far corner of our living room window slantwise. All these openers, upon opening, would take a good look at you. But the ravaged one who opens to me now already talking a flood of hope that I had come because I was expec
ted, and recollecting “last time,” and having begun talking already, it seems, a few minutes ago, like an experienced poor tramp on a moving train who jumps off sideways and hits the ground running, was Cheeky, her old brown forehead spotted more than ever and now scabbed as if she might change her skin or might be stuck with it.
“Vera Cruz remember—I didn’t get to tell you, because Umo had to swing Milt around my ceiling. They were upset with you, and you have the snapshot I took of him coming down the gangway because he told me you did, such a big roly-poly boy, such a small suitcase over his shoulder, what shoulders—and that was the last I saw of him for two months. Some welcome. And I got sick in Vera Cruz but not a bad place to be sick and I went bass fishing with this.” Cheeky touched her forehead and her bare arm. “Made the best of it before I took the train home, went fishing with a former Miss Costa Rica who was on vacation from her job at the national park studying the mantled howler monkeys and their strange family turnovers—”
“I tould harr not to go,” called The Inventor from the far room.
“He had no papers!” Cheeky screamed like I didn’t know what, meaning Umo, I assumed.
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