Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

“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.

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.” Probably not.