Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

My sister knew me. She was moved, I could tell, that I’d asked our dad where really this country that he loved was —here, there. She had stopped practicing “Für Elise” and we were on the stairs and she made a sound almost like a laugh and at the top gripped my arm hard, the same fingers that had just been playing the piano: “I have no life but this,” she said. Brought me into her room to show me the floor, magazines spilling out of bookcase stacks, Halloween costume catalogues, mail-order out-of-dates, bike trek, worldwide directory of swimming coaches our family sort of was in, me and my dad she said and had once read the entry to me, some of it, a pine incense lingering from yesterday in the room. “Contentment’s suburb,” I know she said.

Catalogues and all had been stacked on the bottom shelf of her bookcase and she was going to throw some out; but she shut the door and, eye contact with me, shook her head (I knew, at what I’d said to Dad), my little sister, I’m deafened by my ears thumping and I’m two years older, fifteen going on sixteen, and what could I hear? — had she changed her mind about the stack on the floor? Up close a tiny bit taller than she’d been, darkest curly hair in a let-it-grow phase all over the place, and she laid one arm around my neck, cheek upon cheek as if we were dancing (and was saying something), I know, and I heard it out loud—“…to lead it here”—but then forehead to forehead, nose to nose as we sometimes did giggling years ago when we were eight and six, seven and five, but she turned her cheek I think so her nose was along side mine and we kissed. Or I kissed her. Not hard either; to get it done. I held her hand, fingers in fingers but someone would be told someday—

as when we camped years ago at Coon Hollow three to the tent near the river and held hands across Dad’s sleeping-bag feet at the other end of the tent and even rested them on his ankles and she whispered how funny his bony nose stuck up and we saw outside the tent, I realized, to, we thought, animals nearby and to the sky, even all that could happen, and we heard a train, and she remembered a train poem Mrs. Stame had also given her class that I had mentioned.

And I sensed now in her room she had opened her eyes, this very slightly chapped kiss, seconds long, was all there was to it, a smell of wool and concentration I knew again, but I had to give her another if she was doing research getting ready to be kissed by her fourteen-year-old “boyfriend,” and how could she remain that strange to me that my genes kicked in? It was almost the same kiss with a blindness to it, a thought, or privileged, hot, casual, and the door handle jarred the quiet, the door flung open upon her curtained room, yet she held with her lips for just a moment my lower lip, my mouth, for one more breath of time, infinitely small, eyes half open, that held, sealed, covered the thought, and my hand moved from her back into the back pocket of her jeans, and I knew she grasped what had happened to me though she hadn’t seen me except once or twice through the shower curtain since I was eleven maybe, and my father in the doorway I realized bore a striking resemblance (only as a type) to my sister except that for a moment of extreme and helpless courtesy he didn’t know what to do, nothing much to criticize — well I don’t know about that! — and we didn’t say a word; just couldn’t feel bad.

And he saw some catalogue or magazine I guess at his feet and said, “What a mess.” And I thought I would like to tell The Inventor what she had said at the top of the stairs.

I was a diver then, I had a birthday. I needed to speak. One night my sister had — this would be right for the Hearings I now see — I gather it all together but it’s too good for them, Competition is only the beginning of it… My little sister had one night a kind of old-time sleep-over in my room and we compared experiences of looking into the future and touched each other, and then I said what I wanted up against her arm on me and it didn’t seem like much because it wasn’t clear and she made me laugh about it, that diving, especially the approach and in the soles of my feet, had gotten to be like payment for something. “Two steps forward, one back,” my sister lying on her elbow said. The light from the street was bothering her, she said; I failed to volunteer to pull the curtains over the shade, and she got up and left. She had me. What came after or what came before — both and neither in my mind. For a moment I was older. Umo often about things asked what happened after . My sister even when she was younger what came before .

One day Umo’s employer was on jury duty and we swam at the high school, where diving off the one board you had to look out for swimmers. I tried to give an idea of how my father’s corporal punishment views had evolved over the years to Umo— Tell me about it, he laughed (his knack with the language) — You? I said — you’re too big to… To shoot ? Behind the legendary Honda mower a rattan rod still stood in a corner of our garage. More talk than much else, abandoned in my case when I was ten following a trip to Mexico, CP (it sounds like resuscitation) couldn’t be quite eye-for-an-eye-enough administered, not measurable to the offence, hence—

Umo put his hand over his heart to speak—

Though “Fairness not the Issue,” another quaint or really sound principle with my father, I said, like Competitive Instinct. And “fancy-minded,” I recalled from my sister’s room him calling me, when he looked down at the Coaches Directory and other catalogues strewn on the floor and that was all he said that terrible and innocent time and I said Even Jesus’s family thought he was nuts out in the street when …and I’m glad Dad didn’t hear the joke, who might be a secret nonbeliever, worse.

Umo rubbed his chest. What happened? He meant the accident. I had hit the board. “Don’t want to do that.” Thanks, Umo. “Two dives, one crash.” “Two at once?” my friend asks — possible for him. “Half gainer too far out; twist too close.” “A full twist,” Umo said, “you scrape chest.” I did not tell him the whole truth, only what was to be seen. Two dives. Two different dives. Like a meet. But practicing the half gainer (?) — coach screaming at me.

It is a great idea, that dive, that forward back dive, looking upward and back like a backstroker, so free and exposed if you don’t have to wrench yourself over and back, the great arch still as inertia with a potential for surprise in it, dive within a dive, wheel in a wheel. Wheel? said Umo. When did he scream at you? A half gainer too far out, my feet going over a little on entry; several half gainers, and coach hollering too far OUT, what did I think I was a figurehead? Figurehead? Of an old-time ship ploughing ahead. A woman! “Yeah, too far OUT!” I raised my voice. “Too far out?” said Umo. Well, that’s putting it politely. And in the middle of the dive.

“So you came in closer with half gainer.”

“No I thought if I’m too far out, I’ll try a twist, and I did, because even if degree of diff doesn’t get you much points, a full twist, that’s…”

“You never see me do one all by itself. With best will in world ,” he added, and I heard myself.

Not all by itself, but Umo, the bend, the stretch, arm folded across you then the twist un folding it. So this time I went up off the board so high I had an hour up there to play with and this time straight up off the board to show him.

“You father.”

I had all the time and it was like I didn’t stop rising—“That’s right!”—And the turn was like a roll in space, finished with him, I wished my sister could have been there—“Right!”—No, wrong, Umo, wrong, wrong. She took care of me that night.