Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

“Too straight, but your arch.”

It might have saved—

“Absolutely — your wrist, your head—”

My face because—

“Your arms are still wide enough to—”

To clear the board so I would have my face, my chin, head—

“You bring your hands together, they break your fall, you hit the bod.”

My arch cleared me all but…

“Ah! Make bod shorter.”

“No. Change him . Lengthen his fuse.”

“Lengthen his fuse, that’s good. He shout?” (Umo will not ask further.)

“Yeah. Something. At the top. I yanked it.”

Umo rubbed his chest because at the public pool with Liz that other night he had noticed the galactic tread mark still raised on mine, now fading though poisonous under stress. What happened after , he wants to know. He doesn’t ask what exactly was shouted midair during gainer, during twist, not the whole truth because equal truths substituted are just what he is practiced at. Not that I press him on his travels. Diving didn’t get him here. Swimming he had even escaped, I guessed from a mention of the athletic authorities in a city quickly named, it sounded like “Taiwan” or “Tuwain” but it wasn’t, it was — yuan , perhaps. Alone in the mountains, helping animals haul a wagon, swimming a lake in the dark, fat as a hibernating mouse, spotting the eyes of a tigress following him along the shore, until he reached a network of waterways, rivers, some made, invented, to give you new things to remember to survive.

Umo’s body was his mind during the weeks of his trip.

He knows his friend’s quite “famous” coach said some things that are not put into evidence, and that is enough, although one day he will talk to Oral the big flippered fool and one night he will talk to Milt the long-armed because Milt was close enough to the diving well at East Lake to hear most of the words but to this day made little of them except Were they about the dives? — and then of course I didn’t go to the hospital.

All this I needed now to speak of to Umo. New friend, maybe not close, he nodded about something, did not laugh. Foreigner, Competition, I was saying, my father… Umo nodded as if he had known about…what? “She took care of you after?” How he knew.

And before.

Before you got hurt?

Well, we always talked.

Oh.

Remembered, saw ahead.

Yes, yes.

Loved each other.

Oh.

Umo? I had gone too far. Maybe not.

He could see ahead too. His mother had shown him a leopard in the woods as a beautiful warning, she said, and he had read something in a book — he stopped and was private, and went on — had to get it translated, he said, something of what is expected of sons, you know? (Came out enigmatic, a barrier between us reached, thank God) — and only then understood his mother and could see ahead.

His damn privacy, I was saying — isn’t it shyness that’s standoffishness? What was that? Umo asked. We call it shy but. (I wanted to ask what he had read in that book. My father private at least through absence.)

We need you , Umo had said at the pool the day of the monster cannonball.

My father had come back from Level-Playing-Field task force brainstorming about the future of No-Competitor-Left-Behind Competition at a retreat in Fort Meade, Maryland. A welcome had been read from the President to the effect that You have the intelligentsia with you always but me you won’t always have, my mother reported after Dad had come home and left again. For Fort Meade? I asked. She thought so. Fort Meade stayed with me until it came to me, as I later did not have to tell my sister, she told me. To me, though, our father betrayed no special acquaintance with what was going on in those days. I betrayed little curiosity. Dad was being consulted. He got wind of things early it seemed to me though I was slow to read the papers. His news about capital punishment — that scholars had evidence Jesus with his sharp-honed ploughshare had not consistently opposed it — in fact appeared a month later in an obscure item Milt pointed out that ran in the Union supported by a quote not for attribution from someone well placed that there was nothing old-fashioned about Old Testament get-your-own-back grit. Like Christian business, always unfinished, even the Everybody Wins creed my dad had his doubts about. Had drive paid off for him? I didn’t know how to compete, he’d said of me at practice. Here comes nothing, I thought, at last , but that was it.

And about this time, some months after high school graduation and shortly before I enlisted (where was I? what was I doing? I took the measure of my life marking time, noting that Milt’s times had been improving) — my father, a hand on the wheel, driving home from practice as if it were current events a kid hasn’t time to keep up on, yet confiding as it half came out some great event, seemed exercised about speculation in water as commodity bought and sold in certain large hauls, the coming thing. And when I wondered if it ought to be on the market when there wasn’t enough to go around, Dad retorted that from a farmer’s viewpoint it was hardly free (any more than freestyle swimming) or without commercial value, and when I said, doubtless with some measure of defensive irrelevance, that it was salt water inside us, wasn’t it? (like tears, and Jesus wept and what about…spit? no, sorry Dad) he was suddenly speaking of the horizontal water wells never in olden times fully mapped by any single hand out among the oil fields of the Holy Land (how did he know ?) and down toward the Gulf and up into the higher paths of the Euphrates (who had he been talking to?) somehow surviving rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs, you often heard initialed) and serious bombs. Oh they knew we were coming, the old wise guys and prophets in that part of the world, I happened to say.

What was I to gather? I checked out the salt-water-inside-us issue and I was right.

An issue to me where my dad had all this (though minor): from important or unimportant people? from speechwriter and tipster Storm Nosworthy, who once on the phone had acknowledged my help? (For a change, I thought. Though how? Through Dad?) I guess I wouldn’t ask him to name the source (if he could) but the horizontal wells — did they recall the veins of fluid minerals and water in Earth’s body which I had slipped (with a difference) into papers for tenth-grade Science and Global as well (only then to understand what I’d stumbled on) that my Global teacher had praised but over a difference of opinion graded B minus minus, unacceptable to my father at the time but not so bad after all and confirmed by ancient pattern-sources for these so-called wells, influenced in my own way by The Inventor and his cures I had some difficulty in admitting to myself because hadn’t I gone him one better?

A country of shallow democratic roots, some said, the Middle East, yet through whose very wells, along these unlikely waterways (networked roughly, yes, horizontal in this unaccustomed scuttlebutt or even confiding to a younger son) a germ or power or proof, or hinted Thing was to be tracked, yet more worrisome or explosive than that. Quite unlike him that he should broach such business to me all but swearing me to secrecy; as if I had partial clearance or might know something through my decision to enlist, of which he didn’t speak, having learned I gathered from my sister against my wishes, who had listened in on his end of a phone conversation and reported that “Storm” was “close to the loins of the Administration” (in her own words adopted from Miss Kim at the library). Or it involved me whose brains might be momentarily worth picking, a partner in some event (or device) hard to grasp, intelligently infectious even in its fluid delivery system so incongruous with the desert (though our own coastal city an oasis in a desert system ). In fact, I did let one “soul” in on this meager lead, though my father (really because my father) said some people in the loop feared word would get out as it had of the Middle East “gold rush” for foreign corporations.