Joseph McElroy: Cannonball

Did he love science more than the stopwatch — or team chemistry? If you had to ask, he couldn’t explain it to you. Why do I recall here the very rare photo my dad found of mine in the school paper that made him mad enough to anyway shove me: an underexposed overcrowded shot on slow film like a botched time delay of three and a half girls jogging. Nice, my sister had said, eyes and heads everywhere; which set Dad off. Photography was photography. It’s a matter of getting it — no more than that, he said with a contempt that disowned me, so once again I thought maybe forget it, a wick waiting for a match. Yet he came back and talked some more, like an unhappy eccentric. A camera could remember a face and catch a criminal, he pointed out (as I recall the pad of bare feet past my room in the middle of the night and my sister’s). And I heard him say still photos were an eyewitness record to show a swimmer his habits, his “shape” better than video any day. Some swimmers, he said, “mature ridiculously young” and “the embrace” of the water reminds them of “when they were a fish or nothing and they shouldn’t forget they might still wind up nothing.”

So long as the competitive drive is there, roughly what he said, awash with echoes, and more than roughly.

Coach’s unpredictable kindness — asking you, coaxing you like there was no God to find your form, your “shape”: Was that how he did it, co- ax ing you? E replied, she was on the floor below me charming the floor itself stacking magazines she would clip from, science, home carpentry, garden, fish and game, electrical merchandising, that fell to her before being thrown out. She chuckled (exactly the word) from her cocoon, my pretty sister, to mine and couldn’t stop, yet joined me with a word wherever I was going when I was going to stop to be surprised by her: “Coaxing to find…what?” she said—“…like a faith and a better one for his money if he could let you alone”—what other profit was there than the competitive beat of your life? “His ‘competitive’ could make you choke, “E said, remembering.

Because nobody knew what shape he meant for you, or beat — like breathing, if you didn’t think about it — words we all including the team joked about, but for him just so, but one day I heard myself think them— zone, water trust, take inventory, character (just do it), reach (from the shoulder not the hand, whether swimming or at the pistol firing range) — think those words like my own far from home, even why I had enlisted; and knowing not quite empty-handed who and what I might be looking at up there approaching the end of the imported Maharajah cocoa matting suddenly of a dictator’s U.S.-imported three-meter board in that palace of a wartime Green Zone outskirt. A payoff, was it? — of all the talk, rumors, interesting spite voiced against Umo to turn him into a notorious delinquent enticed on another business trip — or intervention, as it turned out — into the war itself, was it?

Umo didn’t go to school. I had learned this from the genius who tried to push him into the pool. How did he know? One morning first thing my older brother who hadn’t addressed me in almost years told me my “Chinese friend” was a hoodlum, a bad guy, a crook, and a smuggler. That would be the day, I said; at fourteen? I said — not even. My mother on the phone shook her head eyeing me: I always knew too much.

In truth, too little, I said with my eyes. For was this Umo my friend, I thought? If illegal and Chinese, where could he settle? Not the first time people knew things I didn’t. I had run into him at three pools. He had lived in Chula Vista on the street working for the Sanitation Department as a night engineer’s helper, in fact seen near Otay Park at midnight under the streetlight heading a salvaged soccer ball into the garbage truck’s cruncher too late for another kid to rescue it.

Part Manchurian, if one cared, it turned out, though there was more — this kid, this stranger who knew of East Hill swimming club and my father the coach and was friendly with the old woman in the hat at the pool and the free blood pressure nurse on Market Street and Station. Had he known me that first day? Because the proprietor of an out-of-the-way store that I and Milt visited religiously every other weekend who knew foreign languages had asked me how I had liked Umo on the springboard and I told him, never thinking how The Inventor — the name we knew him by — knew I’d been there for that first double-barreled launch.

How had I forgotten? Yet how good, it came to me, to forget that The Inventor himself had told us to be there.

For some unusual activ ee ty, I thought he’d said. Told not me but Milt in the middle of some argument The Inventor was having over the phone with a customer, a model of a canoe at issue, and I was clear across the room flipping through the business envelopes in a shoebox. Yet when I remembered later, it seemed to have been for me, across that distance — Be there for some diving activ ee ty (how The Inventor spoke) of a highly unusual nature. It was natural to show up for the opening of a pool in this city where we have almost everything you need — even this cluttered, how-did-he-make-a-living store not by any means all junk, owned by a man with skin like night who said things and having spoken might think a moment and write it down in a book he had. Such that you were willing to pay now and then for an envelope that came out of a shoebox full of envelopes at the back of the store.

For a message , the man had said; but he would say things like that. And his foreign command of the language — no less so for being foreign it came to me — that left its sometimes weirder words potential or a message in me like sediment in me a waterperson or not worth the work to share with anyone but my sister, for he would once in a blue moon crash land in an awkward or, better still, dirty word which he thought merely vivid.

Though show up at the new pool for as good as a message ? That’s what The Inventor had said and I’d forgotten in the middle of Milt attacking Hindu views. (Of what? my sister asked that night. Anything alive, I said. Anything? she said.) Indiscriminate valuing of anything alive, it seemed.

My sister I cherished for things only she said: dumb things, my father thought. But that you thought about then — the way you might oversleep or not take an insult seriously. My girlfriend wondered too about my sister E. Didn’t think her dumb, but what’s the fuss? ( No fuss, Liz.) And what’s so great about forgetting? she went on, I do it all the time. (Liz, that’s what I — forget it, Liz.) But I did say I couldn’t explain it but if no one asks me why my sister affects me, I know, it’s how she surprises you with something next to you you could fall into, or how she rearranges her room or uses her hands, or knows you like a sister, and sounds like I’d never had one before.

One evening she and her little boyfriend and his older sister with the driver’s license had seen Umo at the risk of his life hitch a southbound truck on the Interchange with Baja plates. “Don’t belittle him; you should have seen him just before he hopped in, standing there an inch from the traffic.” Belittle Umo? He was in the workforce, I said, recalling then that Umo, only thirteen supposedly, had called out to me that first time at the new pool that I was “needed.” One night in a darkened movie theater, a crisis of global countdown there in front of us on the screen, Liz whispered that “the President” reminded her of Umo. “Couldn’t get elected,” I said, “couldn’t get nominated.” Liz’s eyes aglint upon my lips aroused by holocaust on screen or having been out of town all day and come home, someone muttered behind us, and I said, “You never met him,” looking over my shoulder. “Don’t have to,” was her answer — some truth there.