Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

Where I overshot is where I still am, he and I. Thought where is he now? A dive divided. Yet they could have their plan and that company camera I guess set to auto-iris whatever they figured was in it. My job blown but not by me, still mine even my own I hoped to do if I could find my way. The gray pool a current with a sideways wash evacuating toward the pit opened by the blast, I am addressed by a swimmer standing up to his shins as if the associate of Nosworthy up here curled on the tiles undone by his own blood didn’t exist, asking me what I had thought of the dive—“was it not two or three combined?”

“Always,” I think I said.

“Quite the diver.”

“A brave diver,” I said, so stunned.

“He want you to veedeotape.”

“No, he wanted citizenship.”

“Citizen!” The man vaulted onto the tiles, built like a wrestler with lethal eyes and looked like some Russian soldiers I had photographed at an airfield in the south in Wasit playing soccer and dolls with little kids; physical, broad-faced, he had the blond brush cut, small ears close to the head, and the blunt blue eyes. “Dey will take you for enemy combatant if you hang out with wrong people. Hang out with a target…” his shoulders shrugged forward, you know what I’m saying was what he meant.

“What?” I said forgetting even to turn away from him. What had the guard making off with my videocam called back to me: something “diving board” and “nothing happened.”

The man bobbed his jaw at the smoking pit, what had been the diving well. Human sound loomed up from somewhere below. “I think he had no choice,” said the man. “Think what you like,” I said.

“He was competitor to the end,” said the man. “He’s my friend,” I said. “He’s a great diver.”

“Nothing break his concentration. Unless his own death.” The man laughed. “He was your friend.”

“Is.”

He looked past me with his lingering hair-trigger alertness, this civilian adviser or reconstruction hustler, as I took him to be, on the margins. “Go see what’s left of him,” the man said, then thought better of it: “That dive,” he said.

Three point something, high degree of difficulty, I was saying from somewhere in myself, a wish to be accurate, self-important—

“A simple dive but den a tweest…and den—”

“—but tuck then layout then pike before entry — he’s known for his entry.”

“You know this stuff,” the man shifted tactics. “So tell me, under this kinda deal could you …?”

“I damn near killed my—”

“This kinda pressure—”

“—killed myself once,” I said.

The man squinted. “Your self ?”

“Oh I let it happen.”

“Ah well…”

I heard the killer contempt, yet I was on my way, I was stricken and needed to get to my job but speak words.

“Somebody…,” I began.

“Een meedair,” said the Russian softly with a Russian clairvoyance quite poisonous.

“Yeah. Somebody shouted.”

“Een meedair,” the Russian said.

“That’s right.”

“A dive, a diver. My sympaty.”

I dropped the mini into my shirt pocket and freed my hands, supposing that the soldier who had been pointing her rifle at me and had used it as a prod that had originally brought me to the edge of the pool, was behind me and my best way was through the pool, yet free of the videocam the woman in oversize combats had taken with film inside but had said what about the diving board?

“Like lights going out,” said the Russian, almost a memory, but Russian. “You are upset now, what you have seen, you are crazy, I think you are involved.” Nearer my age than he had appeared, “He was my friend too; it can drive you nuts,” he said dramatically. “And then?” I said.

“You should have that seen to,” he said; “you came in here with that.” He laughed, it was the dark wet stain where my arm stuck to my upper sleeve. He thought I had put two and two together about him, something he had done.

He was quick only.

He turned away toward the changing rooms. “We better get outa here,” he said.

I squatted supporting myself on my hand and jumped into the shallows and a tremor seemed to spread from my footfall upon the rust-streaked bottom and was my nerves claiming territory. Over there in what was left of the diving area, they were trying to clear the fools away from the great rupture in the floor that had carried the drain down with it. “You’re done,” the blonde said, meaning my job, I thought, and the muzzle-sight at the end of her rifle barrel came my way from above as if it would target me sideways and the barrel struck the camera in my shirt pocket hardly bigger than a coin, I felt it clear across my chest scar. I kept my hands off her rifle, walked through it, and kept going.

The Russian said wait a minute, he was the fool who makes a practice of not being one. I had seen him from a car, a truck, yes maybe my one trip in an armored vehicle he was standing in the sun watching, listening somewhere. I stepped over the safety rope of small black-and- white buoys slack in the shallows and into the diving well, remembering him now with headphones. A bathing suit. California. “Hey you’re the Russian.”

He came after me along the tiles at the edge of the pool. I made my way down the mostly drained warp of what had been the diving well floor, catching traction on split, broken grouting, slipping on the downward break, getting almost the hang of it, a ship, a section of deck, disaster. The Russian followed along at his level: “Hey. I am Ukrainian!” he shouted. He was trotting around the pool to the far side of the demolition area. “Ukrainian, not Russian! — Ukrainian.” “All the same,” I called across, heard a siren above.

I pulled a bather away from the edge — I might be Security, I waved several bathers back, an elderly Arab couple with small knapsacks, this wasn’t a public pool. Close to the pit I would see for myself. Groans from below, clamor, rooms shifting and things piled and after-concussion and structural undulation abhorrently underfoot. I had thought there had been a second explosion as well. I would more than see what it was, it was what I could do for Umo, if I believed such truths, this rebel bombing, this accident, this the two of us coinciding and far away a steady thump of Rock ‘n Roll going down.

Someone in a bathing suit got hold of my bad arm, I lost my footing like a skater, now it was this nearly naked fellow who held me up, and then I had a sight that almost drew me far down in the smoke and structure though mysterious of what I seemed to hear — yet a visible glint of waters burning like sewers you just know are sewers and then gone from view as wreckage of darkness or raft of rubble slid across below, and under my feet and down there a yelling, a sieve of words even howled but only a few clear—“…up behind,” a bosun’s order, reached me, and two voices I almost recognized, or one voice in trouble, struggling, so you thought “not with the men” wasn’t the real words.

The Russian shouting…

But I would get down to where I should have been all alone.

“Why they shout at you when you dive?” he demanded to know. In midair, he meant. Why did he know something? Why would Umo tell him? He was directly across the pit from me now, past the diving board ladder and above the destroyed diving pool. “Ukraine,” he shouted. “When?” I said (“Last year! Always!”) — my passing interest involuntary, like future turning these tiles into the bread of his own life and schemes to be pursued as sheep follow the provider, and, papers, green card, everything in hand he won’t forget, for he needed a deal to get here and will deal again. What would he do? — a “Russian,” after all. But he would come no further, his no one-way ride. He was talking at me, stopping for new tremors I took to be a sign damage was ongoing like aftershock. Had the insurgents overshot? Where were they? Oblivion?