Cannonball

by Joseph McElroy

  I looked back and five cops were gathered about the Bel Air, which was a spectacle in itself, and from the driver’s side, even at this distance of three long blocks it was the Coaches Directory being unloaded (but who to?—for in it what might you track to what happened before all this?). You don’t go around with an expired tag in a car like that if you don’t want to be just another immigrant.

  It got thick with downtown traffic now. Something had happened. Was it this morning’s revisiting of the explosion now thought to be ours?

  “The green ink and his fine hand,” said my sister, chauffeuring me, but on the move I could tell. That would be the Veins envelope—I knew what she was thinking, though we were not speaking, for the moment. You, I heard her think, but now she said, “You never went to the hospital. He wouldn’t take you there; then you wouldn’t go. I tried to bathe your chest. I thought it was broken. You couldn’t breathe, that’s all. You spent the night in my bed. Mom came in. She felt it but couldn’t speak, except. ‘For cryin’ out…’ she said, ‘Where does it hurt?’ she said. Your hand was on me.”

  A cadre of reverse-collared clergy stood waiting near the Center, and a crowd, or majority, waited massed near them, steadfast and American.

  “You were talking, it woke me up, you had your hand on me. That was OK. Four in the morning it was plenty dark. I see you then. You weren’t talking in your sleep. You told me the half gainer again, so free, that forward back dive, looking upward and back like a backstroker but impaled by trust—which way are you going?—dive within a dive—and Dad shouting to you, Closer, closer or worse. So the next time you answered with a twist, and came too close, which is not close but…the body is bombarded from without and within, that book said.”

  We came into the intersection where Stud the butcher had picked me up. My sister and I, however, were recalling a child who came within a hair of being sacrificed. “Milt said Dad shouted at you when you went up for the full twist too.” “Well it was an interruption,” I said, “whatever he said.”

  “I know pretty much what.”

  A state trooper laid his glove on the hood. I’d seen him one day walking up a sidewalk on Golden Hill I’d swear. Em braked and laid her hand on me, I’d been thrown forward in my cross-chest harness. It was not the moment to kill or even sideswipe a cop, and out of nowhere there was someone else outside like, of all the traffic surrounding us, a shadow that she would face more or less face to face, us plus this third person. “What became of him?” she said, for though we were both thinking of Dad and between us she could mean that too, she meant my Chaplain- photographer who I prayed had had an easy burial. My palace driver, who delivered me before and collected me after, divides her loyalties—that’s all she knows—and she’ll get another car out of Cap. I’m there again. But on another job. I feel it like a river moving.

  A wicked undercurrent dragged athwart the well rush a track not mine, and he was gone. One ripped-away sleeve of my friend’s wet suit I was left with.

  “You could have told me.” (Em swam well enough but without that undisplaced delight in the water; it was in a couple of poems she read me, but.)

  “What would you have done?—I lost someone’s body.”

  “Well,” she said (so close), “you were friends, because…but you were friends—”

  :because—the word so close to another word Em was about to say and maybe no more than “just because”—(friends with the Chaplain only because I would do something for him?—yet Em continuing) “—because you told him what our job is, the real job found inside the coercion—” (had I told Em, emailed her, the job found within the job you were forced to do and had even been set up to play an ugly part in?) the cause, the before like the after, becoming “just because,” collapsed to an instant as suspended as a dive above its remembering, or my despairing trip in reverse back up that dive’s tunnel to the top, where the twist has already begun, bearing words fired from an observer enraged who stops you because you stopped him, and yet an instant suspended for an hour at a time (and she would read to me when I came back from the palace war and I’d drift forward on a line to another car I imagined on its way to Kut with a fan of mine to finish what a photograph had started, win back something, answer more than her original question (driving me to the palace) what had just happened before the picture? so that (seeing her not as before in reverse, 7,6,5,4,3,2,1) I glimpsed her in future in a fairly late-model car-replacement finagled by our captain (now a major—so relieved to be not just an Army captain any more); when after, yes, a two-hundred-and-thirtymile trip north to the border where the possible division of the country was visibly an issue, we would now return south, Livia her name though called Livy by the captain and by me, and go to Kut I had virtually known in advance, she and I, approaching a roadblock and forced to pick up an armed passenger…)—

  —when the lock behind Em clucked because she had touched the back door release and, the door open, into the warm day of her car (which she had once wanted me to think of as ours) came a face she’d heard in the old days on our home phone more than once, and for a moment she was quivering and chill, seeing in the rearview like a tiltable screen the man whose presence, function, use that we must face I knew now not just for all else he was and likely the murderer of my friend Umo even though Umo I knew lived (to jump one afternoon cannonball, then dive; then, like a Third way of gathered understanding, that wartime palace dive which as a double somersault also like a jump went in feetfirst), but a Storm voice that praised me for “ideas” or “other” of mine mysterious for he’d received them prompted some way that I hadn’t grasped because even bad people have second sight and hear things:

  I have a driver with orders from above and we are entering Kut where I have unfinished business that will show itself to me only when I get there. The Chaplain’s voice is waiting but not the Chaplain. I see powerlifting equipment; brand new squat benches, but see no more, though am seen.

  And joining now our very track close in in traffic convening for the afternoon session like he’d been listening in or had bonded (giving us however not more stability as Wick once explained chem but less—and a scent—but of the three of us, now?—some mustard-sweet gum from the incense tree, less myrrh than frankincense it might have been named), Storm it was who settled down on hangersful of colored shirts and rested an elbow on a plump laundry bag (pronounced it a nice little car), though Umo was in my thought and not Storm’s real aim, the car rolling now I’d swear sliding half-sideways on a surface influenced by our slippery and pointing-out passenger. And with a word or two from him how to get where we needed to get and pointing out for some reason suggestively the trolley station—though as “your fans, Zach and others upstairs,” didn’t know, “your friend Umo has been reported near Acapulco, a false sighting we think—for why would someone want us to think him alive, Zach, after we’ve agreed on posthumous citizenship in principle? Another great idea from Zach! (Are these your things, E-m?)”—the letters pronounced separately like an in-the-know interviewer.

  “Posthumous—?” she slipped through a red light, attending only to cars. “Your dear brother’s—” “What if he isn’t—?” “—darling idea still.”

  “Guaranteed?” I said.

  “Dead or alive.” Storm getting into it exactly but always overdoing it, it would get him killed (I saw, I saw it, was he in an Iraq mess hall?—lauding the Scrolls?—or was that me, another tour of duty up ahead?). “In return for what?” I said, my sister murmuring agreement.

  “He had borderline high blood pressure. Heartmobile told us; though where exactly he did die matters less and less…even if not known to you the friend he followed halfway round the world—now, your dad—”

  “You have nothing to do with my father.”

  “He trusted me. Did he you? But we—” My sister squeezed my hand, then needed hers to steer. “He thinks the world of you, Zach, but he does not put his best foot forward, but—” “He has a birthday coming up,” Em said, I felt
in my legs and actually in hers that she wanted me to take the bait, ask what the deal had been, she had her elbow up on the edge of the window, which she never did, and she heard what maybe I didn’t in this man’s words.

  “—we will see,” Storm said ominously, again the sweet odor, surer than sight or sound; “the world being at stake, the bleeding needing to be stopped, I’m sure you on my case and I on yours can find common ground for tradeoffs to safeguard for the time being…your sister…her job…college applications, what not—am I sitting on your underwear back here, Em?—and, to be frank, Zach, Dad’s future. You two, you, you,” the man seemed to stammer, “who find each other and a matrix ready-made, the clouds burst, the stream flows, it is them, it is original, and then comes the matrix ready-made which turns them into…”

  A basement garage Em had driven us down into must prove to be connected with the Conference Center. Why does he call you Zach all the time? she muttered under her breath, and You’re quite generous (I know why). She pulled the ignition key. “What could you do?” she said over her shoulder, getting out of the car. What I had learned I would have to use. I felt that Wick was close now and someone else up there I would need.

  “If we can agree about the explosion…,” Storm walking across the subbasement concrete floor rising on the balls of his feet, led the way into a brushed stainless steel elevator big enough to lift a car. “That it happened?” I said. He turned to the buttons, wheeling about, now, so the evidence of his recreated and horrendous face of slants seemed to belong to him no more than a parallel field. “That we don’t know who did it.” “Not the actual ones.” “Though we’ll find them—”

  “If we haven’t already,” I said.

  “—be they after the Scrolls or their leader himself who there was a story going around of the palace detainment unit housing him when in fact we’ve had him locked up safe and sound elsewhere for months. As we will find the Chaplain-photographer,” said the face Em read, its talk, the finger on the Up button.

  I said they might.

  “You don’t seem to know his name though you met at Fort Meade.” “Lucky for me.” “We fucking arranged it,” Storm Nosworthy said. The confiding (and cursing) of a fool, a killer. Em near me at once all but inside me but in the new way, her “you” voice had ceased in my head for the moment, for steps approached along the echoing floor of the great garage—with luck there would be another break coming—and Storm got the door to close. “We don’t know how he swung this, for all I know you may have described it to your sister-love whom I would have known from her pictures”—Storm’s smile thick, warped, richly working—“the dove’s eyes, no, too blue, a Celtic queen sold to a King of the Nile, what says the Song? ‘my sister, my spouse,’ and where I was sitting in her backseat the smell of her laundry was as the smell of Lebanon.”

  I was the killer now.

  The elevator lifted almost at a slant and slowly and like a cabin of secure space that stalled when its computer received calls from a higher and lower floor simultaneously sometimes, Storm warned. The smile again, now quick spasm of a public asshole’s fitful show, punctuating the tradeoff to be agreed to: “The palace explosion I trust we can call a mystery? In return for… Not that I’d expect you two chums would need much cajoling…(?).”

  The huge elevator cut off and my sister leaned on me. Storm Nosworthy clear across the elevator floor from us jabbed the buttons—Is it us? she breathed—brother-sister…?

  What could he know?

  The break-in. Your place.

  The bed…the bathroom?

  What could anyone know?

  Think.

  “West Coast contractors,” Storm said, hitting the whole button panel. “You saw the acoustic ceiling above the buffet, the recessed lighting?” “Over the farmed blue marlin,” I said, seeing that coastline-stained, that darkening map. Water damage, worse than water, Storm, I thought. “Care about two adolescents?” my sister whispered, meaning What was there to know and nobody did anyway. “One person,” I murmured. Em snapped her fingers and the elevator was on its way. “Would he?” she said.

  “We outsourced the blue marlin farm,” Storm said remembering. A brown business envelope in his jacket pocket, he had it out now. “We know we know…that he crawled some fifteen feet or was dragged because…because…because we tracked DNA from the main urine deposit and and through skin scrapings, waste products, fabric. To where he takes the plunge.” (“A friend,” Em muttered.) “What was that?” “A devoted friend,” I said. “Yet a three-hundred-pound steel plate was found to have his traces on its underside—” (“For friendship’s sake?”) “—and how he could have got out from under it—crushed when it fell on him…” (“Not his face, though,” Em whispered.)

  “Two’na half maybe. Three, never,” I said. Storm hasn’t missed my meaning. “Your devoted friend?” “His.” “Ah, his.” Storm alive as not before. “You would…” “Do anything to bring him back.” “Somewhere, along that metropolitan well network that we’re setting to rights, he exists (as we need to address spills right here of untreated sewage, Storm purred), and how he got away from the blast site we can guess, Zach, until we know more—” Em slid her arm through mine again—along a leg of that sewer named after the President I recalled—a sewer I’d described to Em, water part of what contained it inspiring me when she would kindle her incense, turn out the lights, ask what came “just before that” as if not what comes now.

  22 the already strange distance

  But now, “His nose,” she whispers, “the blue spots,” she whispers, “it means ‘Imprisonment,’” she read the face across the elevator car, my arm knew each finger that gripped it, we heard now a hubbub coming our way. And the other wide door at right angles to the door we’d come in slid back leaving us face to face with a mob in the lobby going to the same place as us and struck silent as we came into view. First, though, or almost first, the Seals captain and his ramrod teammate “CEO” in combats waving back a hundred others who could wait or take the other elevator, but clearly a two-man escort for the sixth passenger making this trip to the Conference level.

  Was it my frog-in-the-throat questioner? It was.

  In the long white spiritual garment and no badge showing. And Em greeted him (“Husky,” she said), the very one who before they’d cautioned him this morning had told me I didn’t “mean” what I said, but we had been uneasy and close and I’d cut him off; and my “profit-stricken country” and more than that “one great war-torn body” meant also the globe I suppose, glib with parallels ungrasped and the facts we collect on the job from the voices we hear, yet left me taxed for what I might have said. To Umo, my sister, my father, Milt, the accredited conferees, Marine recruiters on a no-kid’s-butt-left-behind watch, War Child snapping his wrist by the hotel turned stock exchange.

  And now against this crowd balked by the spaces of the multiuse elevator closing on their faces, accreditation badges somehow not to be seen on their lapels, pullovers, shirt pockets, breasts, ID lockets, though there in their free faces Entitled (but to what?)—“Get ‘em outa the building,” captain said (“Done,” said CEO, his idea practically…“This Hearing!”)—it was jealousy in me not envy of Husky, and even as my sister unsure of what she had entered into gripped my arm, and captain and “CEO,” his cell phone out so quick it might have been up his sleeve, took up formation along the wall opposite us with this peaceable, curiously significant person in front, I must gather what was going on even in an elevator and against this operator Storm to be undone I believed but dangerous to Em, who had met a friend of hers who seemed to be in custody and hardly acknowledged me though he had something remarkable in him to say and would say it.

  “Your people,” I said. “My people?” “Come on, that woman working with captain and the black guy acting the wacko?”

  Though now Storm points at my chest.

  Tradeoff time, he means. A brown business envelope in hand, Storm Nosworthy will cross this room that rose
toward our Hearings floor, target what he will use, and, doomed, it came to me, can’t know how my father’s birthday envelope divides me between what random hurt Em hints it held and what really I’d paid twenty dollars for (or was it ten?), Earth Veins you make your own running universally through each of us, rift and river, a hole in the head, a half-completed dive to heal, yet quite parentless (if you could prove it, Em once said); how Umo pronounced him—“Stom’s secret weapon you better get to know.” The humoring muscle of distrust an orphan doubt no less trusting me, asking what meant “brother,” describing grandfather’s plan to come to Mexico, work the mineral mines, sign up with Plutarco Calles, live right; the secret weapon, though, Umo, how do you figure that? The brown envelope, always about to be drawn out for me, delayed, I can feel it, that voice to nail down our understanding quid pro quo as, on the other cheek, Storm’s face shouts our very History et habeas corpus silentem—beside us (for I was right, he has come across to us) he speaks in confidence from his own, base Faith—Umo dead, Chaplain alive (yet Umo come thousands of miles to hook up with me—do I understand that trip, those Umo miles?—while the other guy lives again in a scrolled-down monitoring of those dark and memorial waters) the Scrolls Storm’s baby (!), for holistic proof rests beneath ineetiative, ineetiative beneath democracy, and what shall it profit us near term if we lose the Near and Middle East?—this giant lift inching up retarded by what’s left in return for what was always there; Wick’s morning-after calculus healing more wounds than my dive, more pitfalls than an elevator’s division between waiting silence and, with two adjacent doors, a need to speak before time runs out.