Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

Thoughts in an “up” moment at poolside leaving me exposed so to Storm’s associate (yes) this deep-chinned KPMG accountant UK transplant to California I once saw through my swim goggles at East Hill checking their investment — though now as time, broken-down or not, ran out (shudderingly, I believe) through the palace building, witnessing an event that was and was not my job, I heard again the stupidly familiar words “ Come in handy ” this man before me now said to the plain vanilla Specialist he may in fact have fancied, meaning surely her old automatic rifle (of course of course — his words like memory itself) a Chinese SKS way-out-of-date post-World-War-II and trade-prohibited under U.S. law I’d caught a much better equipped contract-civilian on film ridiculing — the words felt in my chest an interruption of my heart waking the old surface scar bringing back my father’s prediction Come in handy of my friend Umo, and that they’d bring back the Draft, it was only fair, hearing like never before my name called from above, near where an almost invisible trap-hinged section of the ceiling’s mosaicked giant ear had snapped shut again too quick for me:

for there was Umo, compelled to be there, I could tell, arrived on that diving board notorious for penalties suffered by divers who fell short of excellence, yet in all his foreign flesh free — and “going,” as we say in our public pools back home or ask of somebody who stands up there on the high board too long ( You goin ’?): (but a dive multiplying all your damned questions into some moving, unanswerable statement, yet Umo here for me somehow)

and not here, I felt, for the same job as me:

yet for a job, solo probably — for where’s his crew, where’s the deserter? — for something has happened: and on the board still a boy, overflowing yet not surplus, still bound somewhere, diving it came to me for me at the same time as Get outa his way, a life weapon in himself. My throat would not sing out his name to him — he might have been Montezuma — I heard some familiar Rock ‘n Roll distantly below the pool yet somewhere central like a comfort level or taped home; mental yet sustaining like a wheel and on message, and as Umo (to these folk what , by these waters? — a not sufficiently developed or identifiable alien presence in the camouflage shorts, a local who doesn’t belong here — did my job give me these words? — troublemaker rising up — how’d he get in, through the ceiling?) — hailing this sweating, dumbfounded Army cameraman in boots on the wet tiles—“Zach!”—who aims his handy beat-up company-issue camcorder quickly from the hip and too low for Godsake unthinking reaching his other hand into his pocket:

registering behind me the double cluck of a different chamber readying (because it wasn’t the big blonde but the woman, small and dark, whose smell of jasmine soap, so bizarrely distinct from the gun oil and the gleaming slide and interlock of her newly rerustproofed M4 there and a hint of burn, I knew from the bedroom across the hall from mine at home) so I seriously doubted that this was my Operation Scroll Down job, handy as I might be:

for I suspected under these waters beside which I found myself, under the great tray or vessel of the pool itself, another level down or two, ran what I had been sent for to shoot — to witness, that is — where a branch of the vast desert well system passed by for the palace-builder’s onetime use and now for ours that we might deliver safely cradled the truly New capsule testimony to our Man and faith in what we were doing here and “next door” with benefits for all, or down there just some sewerside den.

I would not shout out I thought to Umo, he had made his stately approach and had given his trust to a strange diving board and I wouldn’t have my friend — targeted? — distracted as I had once been, yet found fixed in my throat dread or a power thrust into it of plural cry or covenant the silent question from my eyes and mouth Why’re you here? — virtual Hey Momma somewhere recalled song that my sister or (that was it!) Umo would have understood, hearing in this split delay or vocal two-note chord already, before Umo had launched his upward, arms-flungoutward trip like a vanishing crane white above its black flight feathers from some depleted tundra bog in the far north, the stab of the accountant’s voice at me, “Hey you’re bleeding.” Words come just in time to be part of what I couldn’t say quite, or only hear, the come in handy my father had summed up Umo in — and knew what had stung my arm arriving at the palace and reaching to touch the pillar’s fluting, and presently what I had seen on Storm’s pants and felt of impossibly even myself in his sticky palm.

And hearing in my head, arm, throat, fingers of my left hand that had drawn the tiny camera from my shirt pocket so that I was double-taking after first bringing my left hand to my chest then out again, Umo’s participation in a moment I didn’t grasp (except as I guessed they had promised him some corner of citizenship) and never taking my eyes off Umo calling to him only in my mind , my mind , to slow down, pause, in midair so we could talk, I stepped back flinging my other arm that was holding the clunky Army-issue videocam back around behind me half-knowing what I would strike and hearing as if I had detonated it the explosion from the M4 fired by the small dark Specialist its aim deflected because it’s a free country and you can always try — and in the corner of my eye aware only afterward of the accountant falling shot; for the dive I had never seen Umo or anyone try — from its surge and peak and sudden all but yanked and independent half twist and the surprises that followed it called up from the depths the gross counterpart of its own folding and unfolding and fall to be all but met by a concussion from below the diving well, bursting, bulging like a huge toilet flush or great bubble of oil from the diving well, bombed definitely from below as Umo was to have entered the water feetfirst, his joined legs, feet, and pointed toes all one, and a flying splinter of shrapnel like a shuttering split second tore a piece of his shoulder, expansion beneath and all around us as he would have made his entry into the vanishing water, yet the diving well section of the pool gave way, not inward at first — a gulp of force drawing up a gush under pressure, a bulbous blossoming water sucked where it came from yet at its ashen, pinkish rim for a split second not moving until following the first souvenirs of tile, cement, chrome, and human material, a leg and foot (the bald man who’d been floating in the well perhaps), and my friend’s vanishing form, the pool water largely draining out into the disaster area where Heavy Metal music resumed, never having ceased, spinning, coming up like what my friend and his team had come here to tape GIs listening to most of them and talking about this badly served-up war the wages of which were regularly paid out of experience to guys and women in sums of money quite modest because experience is almost beyond price, being a necessity like water, though what the terrorists had been after I had to figure was not swimmers or palace but the arriving Scrolls, and had a second explosion boosted the first or aftershocked it or was it still the first?

And the poolside faces and their bodies all so contingent, looking like bearing weapons’s the job in itself, turn this way and that shepherding nowhere in particular the rest, who might just be the voices all around in the still watery areas of alarm thickened by risk falling at you and away like speeds through some darkness of the noise, new to me in a threatened building. Denizens crowded about the near side of the pit left by the blast, my wrist was wrenched and the camcorder that I had put another notch in when I struck the rifle behind me like a backstroker in a busy lane was gone from my hand. I turned and went after the guard behind me but the big woman standing in the accountant’s watering blood steered me with her rifle another way, I was not to follow the small woman in oversize combats who at the swinging doors turned, rifle stock braced against her ribs her finger ready, my Army cam in her other hand, startled understanding across her cheeks: “Nobody on the high board after 1300 hours,” she said, she was backing, half not believing what she was doing, through the doors into the stairwell where a crush just visible not coming in or out nor loitering ascended from below — she said something else about the diving board.