Joseph McElroy: Cannonball

The late Hearings bring back the reasons for the war and, as if he was one, the full figure of my friend Umo. Elusive, illegal, happily homeless we would think here and in Baja at going on fourteen (when we first knew him but wouldn’t have guessed his age), going off a high board into one of our outdoor pools, he was later to find his moment in that other pool nine thousand miles east. Biographers say “was to” (or “would”) as if they could have known what their man would do. We know better still. Make history our own. Or conceive what we could not know about my friend, a disappearing act competing with me as the worst but best friends will, had we been never so christened with hindsight and what appeared to be the will to win for our city the site of these so-called “postwar” Hearings, their announced Spring Theme Competition. Which, like the Scrolls, was good for anybody grounded, or trying to be, in gain and growth, gifts grounded but not to be hidden away. Even, as I found, in the Goals split up by the Conference organizers into panels and days of far-flung questions, in the later Hearings embracing the Scrolls themselves, what remained of them, for they were Scrolls, and how belief in competition might eclipse belief-based competition itself, to say nothing of faith in your own time management business, the very fragrance you’re marketing, and the newfound Master’s ancient assurance that “if you give alms it is evil you will do to the beggar and your own spirit.” For I had rethought spirit coming home from my war. Where I overshoot is where I still am. Trying for this.

It was the summer of 2001 that word of Umo spread among us. Enterprising stray, giant waif, What will he do? this upstart and mysterious truant. A newly opened public pool I myself was told of— why ? I later asked myself. A bright seacoast day, a population, everyone there. Two pools, two blue-floored freshly chlorined oblongs, seen by the recruiting blimp above us, tiles of real estate passing beautiful, squares of California, square 2, square 1.

Suddenly this. What would he do, this massive person at home up there on the high board? Big boy and then some; “big” the smallest word for what this was. Torso, shoulders, legs, long black hair, cheeks puffy about the eyes, the spread of face presiding Asian over three hundred and some pounds you would understand, ready to go, in command. Of what? He looks sixteen, seventeen, this sure-footed newcomer of a scale majestically slower along the durable acrylic surface rough as a bearded lizard’s back. His first go off the board.

It would take a beating, if that is even true of boards? He padded out to the end, bent his knees to snap his springboard and let its give lift him jumping straight up. To come back down and bounce again toes pointed and again. And in midair turned immensely and landed and bounced and — the confidence also of a kid — landed now as if he would go off backward but, settling the board, walked to where he’d started, and about-faced.

What could have prepared you, though, for the jump which was first that high, prancing approach hop onto the almost end of the board to depress its laminated wood-and-fiberglass core so deep — don’t I myself know — it might have thrown Umo out into the street had he not landed straight up and let the board lift him — like a tool you should let do its work, as my father, a somewhat unfinished carpenter and craftsperson, in the garage would sometimes say of plane or hoe or knife or tinkering with his stopwatches that would one day time Umo — upward stretched leaping like a crane to the wind rising at first eternally only at the top to become a thing compressed like a spring but turned into like a rock in space or something inevitable: and this was the cannonball later discussed, as we liked to say, the mother and brother of all cannonballs to target a pool in our city: that where he hit you’d have said the water parted six feet down and within four of the turquoise-tiled bottom, indicating in the flushed pit of its absence with strange exactness the concave point of the drain that marked the graded low point of the deep end.

It was like one of our patented earthquakes, but from the air. You wondered the excellent homegrown tiles did not crack their grouting.

A pregnant soul well back of the brink got drenched and stood her ground leaning back on her hips, gray-haired. Two deck chairs almost waterborne I seemed to make look back at me, on one a newborn uncomplaining till saved from drowning.

The sound of the impact like something being permanently fixed blots out of my slow mind for a second the future war, its meaning, and Umo’s eventual link to the Scrolls. For what do we need if not distraction from the burdens of our nation, our responsibilities, as my mother put it?

Now kids give the high board ladder space. Umo’s feat is something else, that day of the first cannonball. No one wants to go and there’s a murmur. A path is parted for him back to the ladder. Someone said, “That’s Umo.” So somebody knew him. “Changsta,” someone called. You felt the awe, the silence, the bias. His broad back, bull neck, his confident arms, his hands climbing the silver rungs, holding on, had I seen that back before? Rung by rung, a race apart, brute prophecy was it? A prophecy not easy for me. Someone said, “Cannonball!” Someone older, “He’s going again.”

A parent near me, something in how he held himself, T-shirt, a camouflage vest, and you didn’t know what else to be inventoried under it because when the man hollered to the big boy to get down off that board, I knew him for an Old Town cop off-duty with children here, hand over his heart maybe. I thought he would do something, it’s a free country, you can try: stop the engulfing wave sure to arise from Umo’s more than weight that threatened with a second cannonball to evacuate half the water at his end of the pool: a strange but (the kids knew) worthwhile risk, Umo bouncing and bouncing on City equipment. “Big buck, yellow tail,” the off-duty cop-parent said to his little girl — which wasn’t the “style” we hoped in our award-winning port city with its melting-pot neighborhoods, its opportunity, its Christian lenders, its Gaslamp Quarter, pink sidewalks, Fashion Valley, and Pacific Beach. The little girl said, “He’s Chinese.” “Monkey outa nowhere,” said the man who yelled to Fatso not to go again. “Nobody’s out of no where,” came a woman’s voice, an old party in a hat.

What could have prepared you for what came next? The approach, a surplus some might say or vastness of flowing flesh — secret weapon, yay, but a target surely, the sun itself marking the glimmering, drying shoulders up there, the slick hair. Off-duty cop, his hand inside his vest. A cannonball again? Until it hits the water a dive is not a dive, we know, so swift but sometimes a slowness so divided it might never finish in your mind; and the swan — or front dive — that arched upward now from a board bent not to breaking but to some force unforeseen by “the maker,” as we trace performance to the factory, carried Umo up arms at full stretch for all to see, or see from his vista — the city out beyond the Presidio and the Marine Lab and out to shark land and whale country, unknown sea, high it could seem as our much traveled Assemblyman’s hang glider riding a broomstick thermal sliding out of the sky it seemed like for a few feet above the sacred peak in Rio harbor:

a cannonball to maybe blast us all out this time,

but no: for suddenly the diver, that human bulk, its arms now at its sides, axled a great diameter impossibly greater than the diver himself and wheeled over into a layout somersaultand-a-half, not tuck, not even jackknife-pike position but layout more distinguished than any stunt for which mysteriously (if you measure it) there could not have been time but, in the gasp of silence or gratitude through which we heard two car horns like another question off the I-8, wheeled the huge spoke of this person’s body, its flesh, surplus and all, a devoted unit aiming to meet the water hands first, bring somehow legs and toes following the rest of him to snap upright like a tail — and no less a cannonball, it came to me — hands, head, shoulders, belly, hips into the water — for no real splash at all I must be understood to say, but a perfectly small spurt fountaining a foot high at most and a muffled thud like when you fire a smooth stone end over end out into Otay Lake over the head of an outboard troller and it slips in with scarcely a gulp.