Joseph McElroy: Cannonball

How did he do it? Were we amazed? A spreading faith afoot among the watchers. A vanishing, a death almost, but wait. I saw the cop ship his personal pistol back under his arm. It looked something like the.22 semi-auto my aunt and uncle use, like the old German model. A crowd gathered at the pool ladder looking down there for this alien who seemed to hang under water for the longest time before he took hold of a rung and shot up like a penguin.

“Pouring like a waterfall,” said the old person, thin in a bikini and a down-under bush hat, a light like candle power in her face, an accent sort of English. “He’s an animal,” said the off-duty. “Just some of us are better at it,” the old person’s reply and then, oddly, “He’s on our team,” she adds. And thirty yards away across a corner of pool, Umo looked in our direction, mine. What did you think you were doing here? The old dame looking my way too, not quite in my eyes but below them, her skin all over spots or like some body painting trade you get in our city, her sandals and a flash of Moroccan gold on the toenails supportive somehow, her hat that of someone you’d visit, an old bird of a person.

And indeed I had seen the diver somewhere. Swimming? Swimming away from me, that was it. Slow motion muscled in folds and rolls of flesh, that back — its rolling bulk. His weight not what was said, but a rumor. But it was something you could see.

“Next stop, Olympic trials!” it was I who called out.

“Who’m I swimmin’ for?” he shouted over his shoulder — he was sparring with three seniors from my school who needed to push him in and took to shoving and one missed and fell and his brother got mad and lunged and missed and magically fell in like a wrestler who can’t help stepping outside the ring. The off-duty parent-cop looked at me: “Who you think you’re talking to?” “East Hill,” I called out to Umo.

“East Hill, they got a coach there,” Umo called back again, he knew where I was, it seemed. And this was some days before Umo knew me, I had to think, though it was my father the coach of East Hill Club he had in mind, a USA Swimming affiliate club especially well known to me.

“Got no business up there, keep the fat boy off the board, that’s what we need to do,” said the off-duty. Three girls grabbing at Umo’s orange backpack, blocked his way, bathing suit gigglers manhandling his friendly flesh. But what was his “way”? Would he go again? People wanted it. “A coach, all right,” again he called, “but we need you .” Just talk, but why that difference?

Me? Was it me? How old was he? Old for his age. It was the two entries into the water, one exploding, the second silent, or even im ploding, we say so familiarly; first, the cannonball, but then that overflowing bulk layered below the armpits slipping through water it seemed to make quiet, to anticipate. It was shock and it was vanishing. What did the diver mean, We need you ? Nothing, to tell the truth. The sun I realized was behind me. Time itself splits up and is at me from all directions, I was nobody. I needed to get home. But why?

I tried to get around the corner of the pool through the crowd to ask Umo what he had meant. My father’s job in mind now, if I could bring him some talent. Help him. “…take over the world, those people,” said my neighbor the cop, not so off-duty after all. “He has a right,” someone said; I turned to see an undernourished guy with an earring and a beard nod to me, “Maybe he has, maybe he don’t. See you in court.”

Umo had gone. How had he gotten away?

I have dived, but am only a swimmer now, and often know what it is I am seeing. Or I know what I can do — I thought I did — and can tell a rumor flying a mile away. Thirteen going on fourteen was hard to credit, and somehow true. By the Fall of my junior year I had again spotted Umo — swimming at Ballast Circle on the south side and at Balboa Knoll on the east. That huge flip turn at the far end, and he comes up in a sweeping breaststroke only now, mid-lap, to medley into a freestyle rolling to swamp neighboring lanes at will, yet somehow not entirely in the water, riding it, his broad back rolling not all that much; a skimmer, too, was how you remembered him, a force if he felt like it, puffy eyes slit straight across, not “slant” (as immigrant watchers even in our Pacific city will term them), but concentrating and relaxed the citizen lap-swimmer with limited time, a purpose, a timeless habit I realized was what had made me notice in the first place months before I saw him go off a board. And not notice (if that is possible).

What did Umo bring, so free, though homeless it was said?

He made me want to speak.

As I do.

You want to do something with the rumors they cook up, anyone from family to the highest levels as you must know. But was that it? Speak for yourself is more it. I wondered if from his people or country, his years equaled half again as many of ours, somewhat as we reckon the human age of the African osprey we learned about so long as it avoids being pulled under by big fish it preys on from the air: so Umo’s thirteen, our twenty, the way we do with dogs or space-naut relatives who come back ten years younger, is more like it, or those very old Tibetans once upon a time. Already he was said to be Mongol Manchurian (was that Chinese?), rumored older — in his twenties — even Muslim, and encountered one day on a corner near my school, the first Fall month of my junior year — then gone. Where did he get to? Water his medium that first summer, Mexico-based, Baja trucking; but from the other side of the world was where he “was originally from,” as my mother likes to say, and “illegal as all get out”; mystery man (and kid); joker not quite, for my money. Young crook we heard.

I saw him throw his legs out and sit down on the end of a high board in August that gave so far he might have slipped off. Only to rebound onto his feet, sit down again and go higher now. Maybe well-over-three-hundred-pound teen, his greatness a specialty, was how others saw him and were moved by him, not his everyday life, like me. The diver we’d been maybe waiting for. In our public pools. It wasn’t me, certainly. Swan, back one and a half, and my once-upon-a-time favorite, the half gainer that launched you out into a forward-flying back dive, Coach yelling, “Out too far!” as if I didn’t hear.

Later, twists were the secret — and now I thought as if in our ancient sea life we had come out of the water exposing all of our body plane by plane, elbow by elbow. A plain full twist, arm across chest first pointing the way, like a sworn loyalty, a beauty. As I was in the end called upon to explain at the Hearings in front of another audience, maybe hungry for competition and the failure of others where they imagined I was telling all I knew about competition. For Umo comes up and what might have been his last dive and, it was thought, the insurgent enemy’s last-minute targeting of the suddenly important Scrolls and their early first-century witness to Christ’s work ethic to go with all the other witnessing to whoever. His food-fasting vision and good sense, never losing your cool with a rival or over-broadcasting your edge to a pretty woman come to a well with her bucket, experience you don’t just have but learn from. Nine thousand miles away in that other seamy, medium toxic though chlorine-rich pool, deep within a deposed leader’s palace or very vitals, Umo makes his approach along the board. The double cluck of a chamber at the ready behind me I hear and forget the Scrolls, catch gun oil on the humid air, a hint of burn, a scent of black manganese phosphate I would swear if I could believe the user had found the means to re-rustproof her barrel like back home, or was it a smell of salted raw flesh that haunted my bowel, my balls? We were awaiting momentarily the Scrolls, my orders said, rumor rife in Administration circles already of early first-century Christian, by all reports either a young Roman or Jesus’s brother, who, on a friendly footing, had interviewed him on a range of issues, sustainable risk prediction, wind, water, capital punishment within reason, turning always back to the talent that begins as a small-case seed but placed in good earth cannot but grow great, can’t miss. Why was I at pool level shooting a dive and not down below at Scroll reception-point among the archaeologists et al?