Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

What had happened with the Marines? A father question but answered bluntly by me: He didn’t really think I was afraid of the Marines?

“Like being board-shy?” he said.

“I’m a backstroker, not Olympic caliber. You’re a coach, you can tell.”

“And a pretty fair photographer, thanks to me.” Maybe the Army needed some action pictures, I prolonged the sparring. Our lights blinked at a car moving very slowly, and my memory stumbled upon my friend Milt, what he had said he’d seen in The Inventor’s display case, the Directory of Coaches my dad was in — anything was possible.

Of the Scrolls my father seemed not to know at that time beyond a water passage as unprecedented as some hinted documenting of a weapon-like function. A passage eastward in which I now think he knew I was to participate when my moment came, knowing, unknowing, like two southbound rivers of an almost landlocked state becoming one, if I could put my finger on it. Not originally privy as you might think, as I move from panel to panel of the Hearings listening for history; yet always in memory which made less strange what the Scrolls said, we were to learn later and ongoingly through the run-up to the Hearings, documenting in what was left of the Scrolls from two contemporary eye-and-ear witnesses who were there (and interviewed Him) a Jesus even more hands-on and ahead of his time than that shown by the four later hearsay scribes; no member of the board but a radical persuader to clear up and redeem old creeds of employment, gainful enterprise formerly guilt-impeded now prophetically fundamental for, two millenia later, American market values born again each day. Knew how to get things done was what appealed to people in high places.

Always in what memory? The day Umo and I spoke to the Marines and I brought him along to East Hill? What did he say to my father who looked across the pool at me? What got transmitted, my resolve? A long-standing impulse, did I say — and what is that? — to enlist? I got something from Umo. I tried to get him started.

In the late fall Dad went fishing in Baja in, we heard, bad weather (and alone, my mother thought) and missed six practices. Not us. We were all there. We were there. I recalled Tortugas Bay when I was ten. The roosterfish on a blind strike quite deep trying to run off among the rocks, its blunt body and heavy-ribbed back huge — when we were supposedly hunting for yellowtail. This time he didn’t sound like he’d done much fishing. Was it because he went across to the Gulf of California side? Or the water that preoccupied him, fresh in some shape or form — not that he would drink it, not down there, but someone was selling it off to a UK conglomerate to be floated thousands of miles in giant seagoing bags, yet it wasn’t water quite in that form that he was evidently thinking about (though perhaps a new slant on electrolytes he was always urging us to replenish with bananas and fluids in case of cramps and exhaustion and in the middle of the night uncomfortable electric leg-nerves) or that he might have learned about the new water material from a contact in Mexico, but anyway, on his return, for the first time he instructed me as if it was mere history or a man-to-man exchange, and seemed to all but swallow his irritation at me. Why alone, Dad? Why did it seem he hadn’t really been fishing? And to myself, like an either-or fork in my life, why didn’t I speak to him of enlisting for this bizarre war?

I understood my historic distrust.

He wasn’t himself. I heard him actually tell our number-three freestyler concerning his “shape” the second day back almost nicely, I said it was not that bad .

One Umo-less evening like other swimmers under the eye of our coach — among them Milt three lanes over pissed off at what he had a hunch I was about to do yet perhaps also at the stopwatch unobtrusively thumbed by Coach — this resolve of mine and impulse to enlist found, looking back down at me from the arched ceiling upon this body of mine that shouldered the last two hundred meters of back-and-forth backstroke laps, a map of things drawing him away that I kind of knew about Umo; but with one new space like an absence we shared and in the whole ceiling and surely in no one point — and all this could be just about backstroke, you see, its exposure reaching back for the water yet for the onward end of each lap I had somehow moved my sister Em one night by describing, even if you reach too hard and pull a tendon. Halfway down this topography I placed the metal church that had been designed “by the Eiffel tower man,” shipped in pieces to Baja to a town on the Gulf side, though perhaps no less incredible Umo’s job to deliver there a load of bottled water, dozens of folding chairs, and, to be assembled, a wrestling platform with mats heavy as lead. On my left, meanwhile, a city that, unlike my uncle’s in his rumor about Umo’s wrestling, I could name — Tongchuan. Where like a crack in the plaster I could almost make out the path hand-in-hand skating at the annual ice festival, of Umo and his father, a skilled porcelain worker later employed at an industrial ceramic plant making red and white floor bricks side by side with a mysterious American: until Umo’s father had apparently disappeared, a Manchu patriot yet somehow of one of the minority tribes and hence earlier a weaver, who years before had carried off from her desert village in Inner Mongolia Umo’s mother-to-be who Umo said had been arrested for digging up rhizomes of Goldthread, knowing the old medicines, and this only a few months before the boy had left.

Backstroke another time, I thought, or space — forget that old sweep-hand stopwatch that anyway wasn’t timing me at the moment. Breathe the open air of backstroke. Was Umo coming back to East Hill? Was that what I had had to offer? The dive I went up too straight on and so came down too close to the board when I was just sixteen injuring not only my chest but perhaps my heart and making me board-shy drew me this evening to the ceiling, a light up there perhaps, a threshold dividing me; backstroke a dive itself paused exposed to the ceiling with everything paused behind and below from which I must get away. My way of backstroke is to look into the top of my head or with each arched reach quartering left or right trusting my lap to signal itself with a recoiling wash and a “loosening” of the water and over one shoulder or the other the corner further and sooner or closer and later my lap destination always known by some ceiling sign or blemish or crack knowing also how many strokes add up, though distracted once by Milt as he breathed turning a goggled eye at me three lanes across going the other way though I could catch it on the next lap because he’d been experimenting with breathing advised by Coach on alternate sides, to check his roll. My ceiling still there whichever way I went displayed still more Umo lives, which I woke my sister up in the middle of the night (my family almost) to describe and she said, full of sleep, that nothing was “upended,” no person, no village, no war, no water, and drifted off, loving me. Two new guys at the recruitment table knew him when I inquired — yes, he’d been there. And? I said. And? they replied. Wanted to know if the Rock music under the table had been picked for a reason, the new sergeant allowed.

His ever-returning grandfather, the miner near Mukden, admired the Japanese — their culture, their work or at least as a hobbyist the oracle scripts inscribed traditionally upon the curved surfaces of tortoiseshells. And that September night in 1931 he was on the train blown up in fact by the Japanese invader to look like the work of a nearby Chinese garrison. His longing to visit Mexico, grotesque if you know the governing classes there and unspeakable sidewalk misery guttering its bowels, seems fulfilled quite unexpectedly in the map of Umo’s arrivals before his thirteenth birthday.