Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

“There he is again,” my sister said as if it were nothing new. I twisted to look back. The rearview did not lie. The Inventor’s old coupé ran a stop sign and just missed a car crossing like clockwork. When she’d said, “Who’s that?” she hadn’t meant the cell phone riff. “Em?” My sister wanted to deposit me and get back to her office, perhaps. “He wants to give us that Directory of Coaches and we have a copy at home,” she said. The Bel Air, though a loose-slung affair, was handling well, there is nothing to say that Hindus drive poorly, but I could see the driver’s fierce eyes. I said we didn’t know what he wanted when we were leaving, that call had come in.

“We have to get you back to the Hearings.” My sister slowed to pass a California Highway Patrol officer sitting on his parked motorcycle waiting. Did I remember the ten-dollar envelope I bought myself for my birthday that time? Em said.

I remembered showing it to her, resealing it, and giving it to Umo at the enlistment party. Did I remember what it said? I remembered a year or two previous citing it to Dad when Mom was calling the United States the Good Samaritan. Be a passerby, the envelope had said — or rather, its contents — the first line, and it only made him mad when he learned it came from a Gospel but not a well-known one, not that I’d read it. The cop had not pulled The Inventor over. His inspection had lapsed. The whole envelope was like that: You can’t think except in conflict with the Other but stopping to help someone isn’t the way and we are being told to feel things we don’t and it might be a relief when a favorite uncle dies suddenly, like existence itself, and visiting the elderly might have nothing to do with one’s real feelings. This had come up in the Scrolls, my sister had said. Between the lines there was another Jesus who conceived of the earned leisure of a successful person as a disquiet blessing the useless and the tiny, which, like the stone in the road, reality passes by. I’m putting into words what’s pretty dumb but I can sort of see it.

“So…” I said, “this translation in my pocket, y’think Jesus ever… — ?” “He had a mission statement.” “The ‘house divided’ (?) — sounds familiar like a fucked-up family’s a good thing not a bad thing (?) because it—”

“—gees up your—”

“Unh huh, initiative yeah (and not even very fucked-up), you think Christ ever said anything like that?”

“The first part of your… papyrus ? — your piece of paper, your scrap, it’s in the book: I remember it from the library. So they didn’t need—” “They didn’t need it—” “For the book they had their Scrolls down already, their Scrolls,” my sister pushed forward her lips, dwelling on the word.

“And the explosion,” I said, as my sister put her hand on my knee, “it probably didn’t make any difference—”

“—they had what they needed—”

“—wait: ‘they got what they needed ,’ the Chaplain said. Does that mean, from the explosion?” Scraps and glimpses to weigh like a fool, my life, not papyrus which would disintegrate but parchment, animal, but my scrap manufactured to look old, it came to me.

“God you remember. But didn’t the Chaplain say also, ‘ Not what was meant by the other one’? ’cause honey you told me.” “I must have.” “There’s that ‘other’ again,” said my sister; “well, he said a lot for a guy who was dying.” “I don’t see that.” She took a right turn at a stop sign, both hands on the wheel, was she going to the Hearings?

Honey ? Em would never call me Honey . It didn’t sound right. We had slowed and the Bel Air was behind us, the full anatomy of The Inventor’s old Bel Air drummed wild syncopation around the moan of an engine soon to drop its tailpipe, the message radiating at greater speed than our own forward motion. My sister asked if I was going back to the war. How she knew, I had no idea. She like Umo didn’t think of changing my mind, she was cruising an edge of family feeling and calculation and something she wasn’t telling me, well she was in the workforce. Yet could there be anything too much to talk about with her, the strongest person in our growing-up home when she chose. I persist in finding my job. What if she’s way ahead of me? It is gathering my “things” together on my free time. Something awful here, as she swings the wheel and the front wheels turn and turn and then turn back and we’re south-west bound and I’m telling her how Wick seemed at the Hearings, Bea too, and the odd memories in the Scrolls, though I’ve not read the book, forcing on me action yet asking a presentiment, a shadow to cast in order to be in.

Yet like following the path we are making, it is gathering now Em’s things and future and other durable goods like the Scroll scrap. Down a canyon in Little Picacho once where we could still hear the Chocolate Mountain aerial gunnery range, we went the wrong way we thought and passed a tortoise carcass on the way down and photographed a wild horse we thought on the opposite ridge that didn’t turn up on the print. A turning point for us the canyon path we made more than followed, followed only by making, we agreed, a future, an apex for us, knowing we couldn’t live forever in the tent and tossed a burning coal into the stream little more than cool and damp sand like what Indians we once visited plant their beans in. Make time free, it came to me, for we were in reverse at the same time that we were heading into the Hearings feetfirst, and a teacher Wick and Umo as if I owed it to him to find him, and with any luck an inexcusable father or the deserter, Zoose’s guitar-playing brother-in-law whose whereabouts I had little interest in now; or a Scrolls archaeology team member whose steps were among those I’d heard on the stairs coming to check the blast site for signs of life or witness, who had met with foul play while vacationing at a remote coastal point near Acapulco — all gathered together by me in motion beside my sister so as at once to make free time.

Though I would have to say that’s where we were going, the Hearings, and I would have to make my sister come and find out what Storm Nosworthy had in mind; he had his value over time.

But if Storm’s people harmed her, her name, her faith in herself, a hair of her, the Scrolls would be exposed by me in at least their circumstances and called into question, minor as maybe they’ll prove — and for Storm they were a special project he’d organized, his claim on whatever, for he got even the Intelligence people tracking for him and had found out about us even more than was worth finding out. Why? We’d know how to give him a good time. What if we had a Biblical child? she had murmured. I know what night. A Biblical what? I said — no, I meant what kind of…? We were well along. It was intelligent, like the tent night when E and I held hands, fingers really, across our father’s feet but tonight I had a hand on M’s belly, recently now she was in writing “M,” which, said, was “Em” (between us). Would that be a lucky child? I said. Depends which Bible you keep. Keep? I never threw one away, she said but not only the self-proclaimed holy kind. I wondered what I had done.

And so did the man who was waiting at the end of the hall on the bathroom threshold with only the darkness of the medicine cabinet mirror behind him, it was war as I left her door faintly ajar — yes, her door was open — and crossed to my room and when I locked the door I was free or had a breather from it, but two hours later I woke up in my room thinking and alive and I had to piss and I pissed into a collie dog coffee mug and two old tumblers that I found in my room rather than walk the hall. And lived with my sister’s intelligence when I said, This kid wouldn’t be like the one in the Bible that his father took him out and sacrificed him. No, she said, another night, at the last minute his father didn’t after all. It was a story. Last minute. What good is that? What can you expect? The Old Testament is old? Old news. Out of date, Christians like to think. Pretty primitive, black-and-white, low-budget. It was slanted, her joking, from way back. It could be anxious a little (like asking if something had happened today as if that would explain tonight). (I said “primitive” was a good word for her.) Whereas the New Testament would never sacrifice anyone like that… Are you kidding? I said. Now look, she whispered, having me in her grasp.