Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

Why should I, looking not back or forward, have plotted these facts upon the East Lake ceiling measured, lap by lap, one evening before my enlistment? One reason was that Umo had stopped showing up. Was it our coach’s war talks to the troops, or was it me? That Umo deep in the South passed through once upon a time and survived an unheard-of factory town Teziutlán where they were losing out in exports from Chinese over the water and blue-jean maquiladora closing down — and had found his way up into the highlands from Vera Cruz and Tierra Blanca and, avoiding Mexico City, trekked at thirteen through farmland and chill and rain to the Pacific coast of Mexico would have been already incredible if to him had not accrued the mantle and distance of an Acapulco cliff diver, which I knew from him he never was but felt he could become if need be.

A hundred and thirty feet above the sea at La Quebrada — The Gorge — arms outstretched let him be seen from the hotel he briefly and off the books worked in some capacity at, by freeloader tourists who haven’t paid their seven dollars to watch at the cliff, because Umo could have done that dive with his talent; instead, watching from way below a diver miss his aim into the twelve-foot-deep, thirty-square-foot rock-bound sea pool, Umo had dived in to rescue this forty-year-old champion who came out with a bloody, shark-size gash along his leg and belly, ripping his white suit. The father, it turned out, of a blind child who made boat models, canoe and outrigger and Bengal flat-bottoms with bamboo mast, one of whose small masterpieces the father had given to Umo, a wanderer who always made a mark where he was or on the move, and once, narrowly quit of China, with nothing to do but “sit on the windlass and sail” on a coastwise Burmese sloop out of Rathedaung built by a Bangladeshi entrepreneur of hard, dark, porous wood from the Chin Hills, though I tried to trace the boat, like Umo’s trip, too late to learn more than what I here set down. Umo, a wanderer even the night we all were to meet at Cheeky’s to surprise-celebrate it was not clear what — just being alive.

But by then, and that earlier evening of the ceiling, my old friend Milt’s lane-rage, the stopwatch, perhaps an absentmindedness my dad imagined in me from my diving accident and before, I’m not only distracted hauling myself out of the pool as on the far side he’s showing Milt the time cupped in his hand, his other on Milt’s shoulder in praise, yet then snapping a finger in my direction; I’m also a fool once more thunderstruck by an overlooked fact of my overhead geography: coming from China the Pacific route how in the world would my friend Umo have arrived on the Gulf of Mexico at Vera Cruz?

And with his talent, China would want him.

Maybe diving got him known.

Except it did not matter any more than whether my dad had really gone fishing on the Baja trip or met on business the speechwriter Nosworthy and his 60s Porsche with cocoa-matting on the floor, for the speed of light, my poor teacher tried to persuade us and himself, is constant no matter which way you’re going or how fast. And Vera Cruz was up there on the pool ceiling left behind like someone’s unknown war as I left that night in a hurry, my face, chest, withered fingers unrinsed of chlorine; the payphone at Adams near the Interchange in my hand to call Liz and her car, yet before she can pick it up, back on the hook because I had won something in my laps of wandering — an absence — my course unfolding secure inside me — Umo or no Umo — though that night my father might wonder for a time what had happened. Though not that I would become smarter or readier for others in my trek. And what he thought of me remained clear, though what? When I was far away my sister — her voice, exact (to me), eccentric — e-mailed the void.

A phone call comes back from the season of my enlistment as if I control the world, two weeks before, in fact; though mustn’t it have been earlier? I had been speaking with my uncle about college and the war. He had never risked his life that he knew of. A private person, childless, a weirdly satisfying conversation with a family member considering his looks, round face ladder-like body as if an extension might come into use released, and he had asked if I would go with him to an old black-and-white film about World War II bombers over Europe, and I had said, “Low budget?” half joking but had no intention of going to the movies with him much less in the afternoon. By coincidence we were comparing notes about picture-taking when I took a call though it was about his because he did a lot of family videocam and I didn’t even own a digital. I had a little Canon automatic actually in my hand as I took the call and it was a practiced voice on the end of the line said they were an Army agency and was I Zachary? The Army? I said. They understood I was a pretty fair photographer and (my uncle raised his eyebrows and kept them raised) were offering a Specialist assignment should I enlist. I said I was nowhere close to being a pro and had been told so by a member of my family who should know; but it didn’t sound like how the recruiters promise you Tahiti — it was praise over the phone and the phone is powerful, and, hanging up, I shook my head as if mystified by my distinction, and my uncle and I went on about college but he was dying of curiosity and I let him be.

Except to say it had been the Army calling. And after my uncle had said I was quite a decent guy (as if that had been in question), I asked him a personal question that all but stopped him: Had he ever been in a fistfight? He had the habit of frowning and smiling at the same time and I thought I had found Christian people doing it a lot, maybe it was me — why, a wedding photographer friend of my mother’s who had fulfilled a lifelong dream by going into the firearm business, had a nose like Dad’s, high, bony, a pointed tip, look out but…(Imagined himself a gun, my sister said, I remember her mystifying words, “Vulcan begat me, / Minerva me taught”—a reader at three in the morning? she read me poems as if to my extended body — that one a riddle for some kind of gun.)

And so until a critical conversation with a captain about certain shots months later I gave little thought to that phone call (except that it was odd if not improper, mysterious as the clearness of my prior will to enlist, the offer a Specialist benefit I’m prequalified for if I signed a Reserve enlistment package, which at first and because of my uncle’s presence I felt no desire to do). I thought of sending my dad a shot from the outskirts of Kut, or of music — that’s how I thought of it — an Afro-American GI, scar down his cheek, earphones in hand, listening with his friend to “Let There Be Rock” just after he said it would make his last day worth it and Ghostface Killah rapping about having to pay the rent; I sent photo to Cheeky for Umo case she knew where he was, along with my long-traveled digital shot a gray whale’s fluke subsiding into the sea (his license plate). I recalled the Mexico trip with my father when I was ten, the dumb shots I just shuttered one after the other and the humbling cut I took from him without a peep, though the snaps were not much but something else, it had come to me, sort of true how you can let yourself get distracted in the middle of…and came back years later during a dive…because…it was about waiting and patience with him and to my mind the hidden instant you couldn’t ever pose that didn’t really exist except in a snapshot was it (?) and even then you couldn’t count the time even in memory which was all I thought I had when he took the camera away from me. So there was a positive side.

The week he went to Baja and came back not himself and talked to me, it was of water (yes, yes, what chemical event could move it briefly uphill) and of underground delivery systems they were brainstorming, tricky stuff frankly “if not quite over your head” (but wasn’t it me he came to), a thing on the move I felt in there somewhere. Like a weapon, were his words. Yet as if I should speak, when what did I know, and he was the one. And though it was said to have surfaced in the newspapers like some 4 thdimension of information peculiar to half-hidden forces about the time I resolved privately to enlist (despite what my sister had passed on to me though this was from Bea, the Italian wife of the Mexican motel man, Corona, one of my father’s Reserve connections), I never came across word of it; not that I read the papers, each day’s revelations superseded by the next.