Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

Distant music, Palestinian pop. And here was the disused fountain and the man with the nose was gone, as I turned from the departing car, and facing me in his absence through its open gateway the dull and dangerous palace, official, pale, and square. Loitering personnel cued from me got inside in a hurry — not only uniformed, for it came to me with their scuffing steps and scattered fire rattling somewhere and an explosion and then one closer — and mortars — as I made my way to the pillared steps, microcam in shirt pocket — that my driver meant by “others” civilians (my short-lived driver, beloved maybe): and at the steps on impulse, hearing like a social escort more fire not even totally unfriendly, I stretched out a hand to touch a limestone pillar’s fine spiral of fluting and a chipped crest, and something in my arm punished me in the act or stung a muscle or tendon stretched or sharply questioned. And I passed inside and was directed to a stairway and led down by a beat-uplooking man who, in the sudden abyss of the entry in his black T-shirt apparently Special Forces, I mistook for the one at the fountain when my car had pulled in.

Each downward step of marble or inlaid mahogany stair my boots like feet felt grit on, tracked inside from the city, each lintel-post and arch, each turn sealing me in, and each shadow coming up to meet me demanding protection or a now-andthen faintly vibrating all-bets-off plunge, a salt of humid reek ahead stirred by bodies using it, a clubby steam and memory of last month’s chlorine from some mosaic wash of light I knew pooling and dissolving us, and, someway nasty (why not, as my guide vanished ahead), a climax somehow disreputable of plan yet stubbornly mine beyond all plans of those who might have set me up as if I were not anyone;

and that bad guy I had seen from the car window I suddenly now in his absence knew — yet how could I? — I had been summoning him for months only by voice and name and suspicion and honest, doubt-dreaded, phone-fantasized face, broad but very thin shoulders I had thought, and was right:

but the face (of course of course) I in fact recalled looking up at from the waters I was working during an afternoon practice months ago at East Hill, the astute circumference of it, yet its parts disturbingly independent, the long upper lip, strong buck teeth, goatee, hair parted old-fashioned in the middle, the gross lucidity, though, of (of course!) the bluish nose now focusing everything with its swerve and parallel force broken since then but not seen by me broken till now. For this had to be the nose and cheek bone rezoned by the angry mortgage lender (who after all found himself in basic agreement with them) who had flown off the handle a moment at remarks updating Jesus’s enterprise skills lighting a friendly fire under you, beliefs which Storm had attributed to an associate, though this was apparently before the Scrolls arrived, which contained this stunner in the recorded interview as if Storm had had advance word, information enlarged in the fragmented Scrolls derived seemingly, though, from the associate later reported as two contemporary persons:

all this that had been crystallized in an absence now erased as he stood before me, an atrium and indoor garden suite behind him luminous of dwarf palms, giant virginsbreath (I now know), bird of paradise at a glance with the spiked orange blooms. Aromatic wood somewhere, his words a double dream, “Storm Nosworthy, Zach, so glad to intersect after all this time working together, Fort Meade…” (a rueful pucker of the strange mouth) shaking my hand, holding the other one then too sliding up past my elbows to hold my arms, pinching one; I thought (and working together? — a shmooze, yet startling too) (and black, short-sleeve guayabera just like vertically embroidered shirts Umo and his cop friend Zoose and Zoose’s new brother-in-law, the musician, had on in a snapshot with Zoose’s sister at her wedding in Laguna Salada more than a year ago?): “You smelled the cedar coming down. Look up, we’ve redone the ceiling, it’s one of the special things about the place we wanted to restore. Though ours is Himalayan cedar, true cedar, though it will doubtless be called cedar of Lebanon. Had it shipped direct by an appeals court justice’s law partner who has a second home in Tibet. He left a small branchlet and its couple of leaves still growing from the end of one plank as you can see in the far corner up there like a signature smelling of rosemary. I feel like Solomon. We’re so indebted to you, Zach, for what you’re doing.”

“‘ We ’?” I said—“‘ restore ,’ ‘ Tibet ’—‘working together,’ you said — and Fort Meade—” “Didn’t work out.” “It didn’t?” I led him on, he didn’t mean my Specialist studies but something else. This one of God’s creatures was rubbing his hands together and then on his white cotton, distinctly local pants, saying he felt like Solomon. “Solomon?”

“The war effort! Your father, and that whole good family I’ve heard like the good background noise over the phone, siblings real close — you have a sis ter,” came then the words all by themselves topped, then, by “nice work if you can get it” (so I could have soiled my palm swiping that broken nose back into line in that somehow familiar face, eyelids thick folds, eyes small or remote). “Where’d you get that ?” I murmured, chilled by a risk of memories above a springboard, Dad’s shouts, the law of pool tiles, the laws of slowing down very nearly grasped by Wick who, doctoring your thought, tried to pass them on for me to apply. “We’ve done our best, out done ourselves, to shoot Operation Scroll Down, get someone whose photographs…” Storm shook his head, agog, mouth open, drool-ready, twisted (expressive but of what? a change of subject?). “Done our best to get the best.” ( I wasn’t in competition with — I hear you, he said, hey I’d given him an idea.) (He me.) “And kept it in the family. Your dad’s ideas, well I confess I wondered if they could all be his, they were so…as if we didn’t know.”

Storm Nosworthy, smiling once twice three times, a dark, burnt-looking rim inside his lower lip. He did something to his pants, which now showed faint smudges. (What were they? Had he been gardening?) “Great springboard for the Operation — maybe it is the Operation, Zach. And keeping it to yourself. You won’t be forgotten.” (Operation Scroll Down, I thought he meant.) “As your father asked you to”—( to be forgotten? ) “Nobody even in the loop knows ev erything — but he will get what he wants, the Committee will see to that, what a competitive…hey competitive with his son, why not? And the diving? That whole story, you’ve gone deeper than diving, how does that grab you? Leave the board to someone—…you know what I’m saying. Another better way. You have to look ahead. You have a sister. You have a former…teacher you — (?)”

Storm came close up, a breath of mildew, and between dread and some partnership I recalled Dad had spoken of Umo as someone who would be of use to “us,” and I should keep it “under my cap” even from Umo, he knew what friends we were. ( If we were, Dad’d added in that way of his, probing, remote.) Of use as a swimmer? I thought, a diver? whatever, was he a team person? — all I wanted now with Storm in my face was to get where I was going to do the job I’d been sent to do, yet no — was this the real job, to be valued by a person like this somehow? Turning, thirsty, I felt that sting again maybe like the nip of a snake where Storm had thumbed my arm, clasped me, his fingers pinching underneath, though this adder had a chemical on his breath, and I started to mention that odd remark of my father’s after his trip, stopped myself, started again, “There was that trip to Baja,” I said, “when he had a meeting — with you, I believe…” For on his return Dad had called Umo “competent” and I had missed something he’d said that would come to me and now seemed sinister if I could recall it. What they learned of Umo in Mexico — little more, I’d bet, than his immigration status.