Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

Wheels out of line, chassis swaying, The Inventor overtaking, we let him, God. We pulled over and he to the opposite curb, the street broadening as we did so. We were late. Posters way up ahead — FINISH THE JOB — IF YOU GOT A JOB GIVE IT TO A BUSY MAN — JESUS ALL THE WAY — JESUS KNOWS THEY’RE RUNNING ON EMPTY — JESUS AND CO INVEST IN REALITY — FROM BURNING BUSH TO FREE ELECTIONS — two corners further south, the blue-and-white helmets of the California Highway Patrol here at the edge of downtown and parked motorcycles leaning next to squad cars. The posters meant really finish the finishing, end the ending —well, I hoped it was still going when I got back to the Middle East if only to finish my business not making any sacrifices for anybody. Pretend Arabic script I was able to make out, perhaps as a veteran, said, “Train them to take care of their shit so we can generate some wind to farm.” Though it was then, recalling I had hoped those wretched waters might jolt my friend to life, whose name I still didn’t know — and at the Lunch Buffet a wheelchair sergeant who had suffered some spinal nerve dissolution only many months after he had worked with a team that, up to their neck in the Euphrates, had cut the detonation wires in April 2003 to save a major bridge from blowing — that I heard Em’s cell, after her V for Victory deaf Beethoven man’s ringtone, announcing on Speaker the speaker I’d been expecting.

While our Inventor hastening across the road brought us the “bad luck” Coaches Directory he’d wrested from Cheeky’s bosom, whom he didn’t like to leave alone, warning us as he came stumbling toward us that the calls we had missed meant trouble (and two whirring bicycles nearly sideswiped him before, behind — man, woman, hybrids going possibly nowhere so in some endlessly final slowness of delay Time itself it almost came to me, the great interrupter, gathered all the motion it marked), while with his strange ear our dedicated Inventor by turns quick and occasionally deaf to what was uncool told us the new seeds promised if we recollected in the Scrolls that could “grow on fucking rock” and send “ears to heaven” (it was said) might all be “Fascist listening de vices” of which the re pellent voice on his home phone seeking us was a purr fect instance. Realizing as he came across to us that that very voice addressed us now on Em’s speakerphone, The Inventor was especially irked when by now Em had shouted back across me that we had our own copy she’d already told Cheeky — though No, he said, she doesn’t need it she — Cheeky of all of us should (I said), God, man, it’s Umo, Vera Cruz —!

“No, I will tell to you it is right heerre the page he marked—”

No no please, Em said, as Inventor reached our side safely, we knew the place. Which was strictly true only of her, my little sister who once upon a day, knowing I, the angry one (I thought), had no need to touch the Directory much less read the entry on that southern California swimming coach, had with one slip, a stumble, summed up for me: so the brief résumé that named East Hill (its local swim club area Imperial in the western zone of USA Swimming) and his background and the gist of his methods, let slip the reference to the son who it was hoped could…(it gave Em pause)…“could double as diver slash swimmer”—her pause, like so much in her reading and speech for the brother always infinitely worth attending to like her other body or a thought poised to spring, an omission not so much right then in the entry but a few words on so that, as she would do when she was sight-reading at the piano, she was reading a little ahead as well, “Page one fifty-three,” she said to The Inventor, a special number for me, she said (and then I thought he muttered — like an achievement till now kept to himself — Indeed I once translated that number into Chi nese).

Blackly outraged is The Inventor now by the phone voice its Speaker message that they’re glad we’re almost there they’re waiting patiently for what will keynote the Scrolls as ongoing war strategy but more a calculus of the aftermath; where today we “add what only one person, Zach, can give to amplify our sense of where these Scrolls are coming from, Zach, as if in the broad view historically we ‘outsourced’ for bottom line your veteran contribyoosh—”

Mine now? was I over-hearing, alerted, bummed, shocked, awed only at some toxic effrontery to be explained— my contribution? Says who?

—“so pivotal” to this project of “…pandemic democracy”—confided without a whiff of irony by the onetime Sacramento speechwriter, as, overheard now, The Inventor pounded the roof of our Honda lamenting the loss of those “forrteen shoe box es” of envelopes yet now to my ear alarmingly even heart-sinkingly regretting just moments ago an “indiscretion by Cheeky surrendarred to that warped and viperous voice” when it phoned seeking us , her parting question Then who was the one who was dead but thought to be living?—

— my true job nonetheless gathering with Cheeky’s true charity and hope, against sirens heard converging on us, their hood emblems pointed unknowing toward the future and what Storm Nosworthy and his team foregrounding the Seals captain and the agency “CEO” who had phoned Em would do to safeguard the Scrolls for the War’s sake where my job might be to safeguard the threat TO all this of a dead witness’s potential afterlife, my Chaplain— best friend you never had , my Em had called him.

“Why did we buy your envelopes without seeing what was inside?”

“You were good fellows. You knew.”

“Well, Milt got mad at them.”

“Ah yes, I tould him to get in touch with his—”

“—‘close to the loins of the Administration’ is all Milt let me see, and a name — where did you get that?” I asked The Inventor—“Em you remember Sacramento?”

“It is ulluways researrch of an eclectic—”

“—No no, no, Milt grabbed it back. But it was what I didn’t get to see, so who was this eclectic source?” “Ah, it may have been Umo?” “You mean it was?”

It was like the stones that when you took them to throw at someone they reversed to igneous and burst into fire in your hand according to Milt’s father, but the envelope had said, Make your sibling the apple of your eye and Milt didn’t have a sibling, furthermore it spoke against fathers, he said.

“And you did not only buy,” said The Inventor, preoccupied perhaps by the indiscretion he had admitted on behalf of Cheeky and forgetful of the Coaches Directory he held like a catalogue at his side, and looking in back as if he might ask for a lift, “I gave you two envelopes for your diving wound: the Goldthread to crush into a poultice—”

“You had a hole in your heart,” my sister said. “You were looking right through it,” I said.

“I knew what you were thinking, I heard the words through the hole—” “Yes you have the gift when you are together,” The Inventor began. “—you were thinking you couldn’t breathe.” “—and the other envelope I gave with the worrds—” “But you sold him two others,” said Em, she was my fortune, my beauty coldly knowing more than me, and she tapped the heel of her pedal foot on the floor, the sirens two blocks away; but had The Inventor ever seen us together before today? “It is good to get worrds from out of nowhere, a tradeoff,” said The Inventor, the cell phone streamed its Fifth Symphony tune into his mood and made him laugh—“The number Beet hov en put aside most fre quent ly and took up ah-gain of all his—!”