Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

“Out of nowhere? Words from some one don’t come out of nowhere,” said my sister. (That envelope, it was the one I’d given Dad, the day, the night, of two enlistment parties, sight unseen.) “Your Leader it is said never opens en vel opes except when it’s a memorial awarrd,” said The Inventor, “our trip has more than one cause, and I traveled to find the oceanographer’s handmade aeroplane but also to re plenish the Goldthread which I fore saw we would need.”

I flipped my wrist to show him the time. “The Hearings,” I tapped his fine fingers. “They were cut -rate,” said The Inventor, and let go of the window edge, “hey, a steal at ten dollars for the last you bought and more pers o nalized than you…” He lifted the Directory as if to heave it past me into the backseat. “I tould that scoundrel on the phone only that yes I was competent in the Eddessian Syriac you had just given me to render.” Em’s foot on the pedal left The Inventor standing alone in this street of two-story homes, me with the translation and what it meant. Squad cars passed us in a line. (Maybe ten dollars, maybe twenty, I thought.)

I looked back and five cops were gathered about the Bel Air, which was a spectacle in itself, and from the driver’s side, even at this distance of three long blocks it was the Coaches Directory being unloaded (but who to? — for in it what might you track to what happened before all this?). You don’t go around with an expired tag in a car like that if you don’t want to be just another immigrant.

It got thick with downtown traffic now. Something had happened. Was it this morning’s revisiting of the explosion now thought to be ours?

“The green ink and his fine hand,” said my sister, chauffeuring me, but on the move I could tell. That would be the Veins envelope — I knew what she was thinking, though we were not speaking, for the moment. You , I heard her think, but now she said, “You never went to the hospital. He wouldn’t take you there; then you wouldn’t go. I tried to bathe your chest. I thought it was broken. You couldn’t breathe, that’s all. You spent the night in my bed. Mom came in. She felt it but couldn’t speak, except. ‘For cryin’ out…’ she said, ‘Where does it hurt?’ she said. Your hand was on me.”

A cadre of reverse-collared clergy stood waiting near the Center, and a crowd, or majority, waited massed near them, steadfast and American.

“You were talking, it woke me up, you had your hand on me. That was OK. Four in the morning it was plenty dark. I see you then. You weren’t talking in your sleep. You told me the half gainer again, so free, that forward back dive, looking upward and back like a backstroker but impaled by trust — which way are you going? — dive within a dive — and Dad shouting to you, Closer, closer or worse. So the next time you answered with a twist, and came too close, which is not close but…the body is bombarded from without and within, that book said.”

We came into the intersection where Stud the butcher had picked me up. My sister and I, however, were recalling a child who came within a hair of being sacrificed. “Milt said Dad shouted at you when you went up for the full twist too.” “Well it was an interruption,” I said, “whatever he said.”

“I know pretty much what.”

A state trooper laid his glove on the hood. I’d seen him one day walking up a sidewalk on Golden Hill I’d swear. Em braked and laid her hand on me, I’d been thrown forward in my cross-chest harness. It was not the moment to kill or even sideswipe a cop, and out of nowhere there was someone else outside like, of all the traffic surrounding us, a shadow that she would face more or less face to face, us plus this third person. “What became of him?” she said, for though we were both thinking of Dad and between us she could mean that too, she meant my Chaplain- photographer who I prayed had had an easy burial. My palace driver, who delivered me before and collected me after, divides her loyalties— that’s all she knows —and she’ll get another car out of Cap. I’m there again. But on another job. I feel it like a river moving.

A wicked undercurrent dragged athwart the well rush a track not mine, and he was gone. One ripped-away sleeve of my friend’s wet suit I was left with.

“You could have told me.” (Em swam well enough but without that undisplaced delight in the water; it was in a couple of poems she read me, but.)

“What would you have done? — I lost someone’s body.”

“Well,” she said (so close), “you were friends, because…but you were friends—”

:be cause —the word so close to another word Em was about to say and maybe no more than “just because”—(friends with the Chaplain only because I would do something for him? — yet Em continuing) “—because you told him what our job is, the real job found inside the coercion—” (had I told Em , emailed her, the job found within the job you were forced to do and had even been set up to play an ugly part in?) the cause, the before like the after, becoming “just because,” collapsed to an instant as suspended as a dive above its remembering, or my despairing trip in reverse back up that dive’s tunnel to the top, where the twist has already begun, bearing words fired from an observer enraged who stops you because you stopped him, and yet an instant suspended for an hour at a time (and she would read to me when I came back from the palace war and I’d drift forward on a line to another car I imagined on its way to Kut with a fan of mine to finish what a photograph had started, win back something, answer more than her original question (driving me to the palace) what had just happened before the picture? so that (seeing her not as before in reverse, 7,6,5,4,3,2,1) I glimpsed her in future in a fairly late-model car-replacement finagled by our captain (now a major — so relieved to be not just an Army captain any more); when after, yes, a two-hundred-and-thirtymile trip north to the border where the possible division of the country was visibly an issue, we would now return south, Livia her name though called Livy by the captain and by me, and go to Kut I had virtually known in advance, she and I, approaching a roadblock and forced to pick up an armed passenger…)—

— when the lock behind Em clucked because she had touched the back door release and, the door open, into the warm day of her car (which she had once wanted me to think of as ours) came a face she’d heard in the old days on our home phone more than once, and for a moment she was quivering and chill, seeing in the rearview like a tiltable screen the man whose presence, function, use that we must face I knew now not just for all else he was and likely the murderer of my friend Umo even though Umo I knew lived (to jump one afternoon cannonball, then dive; then, like a Third way of gathered understanding, that wartime palace dive which as a double somersault also like a jump went in feetfirst), but a Storm voice that praised me for “ideas” or “other” of mine mysterious for he’d received them prompted some way that I hadn’t grasped because even bad people have second sight and hear things:

I have a driver with orders from above and we are entering Kut where I have unfinished business that will show itself to me only when I get there. The Chaplain’s voice is waiting but not the Chaplain. I see powerlifting equipment; brand new squat benches, but see no more, though am seen.

And joining now our very track close in in traffic convening for the afternoon session like he’d been listening in or had bonded (giving us however not more stability as Wick once explained chem but less — and a scent — but of the three of us, now? — some mustard-sweet gum from the incense tree, less myrrh than frankincense it might have been named), Storm it was who settled down on hangersful of colored shirts and rested an elbow on a plump laundry bag (pronounced it a nice little car), though Umo was in my thought and not Storm’s real aim, the car rolling now I’d swear sliding half-sideways on a surface influenced by our slippery and pointing-out passenger. And with a word or two from him how to get where we needed to get and pointing out for some reason suggestively the trolley station — though as “your fans, Zach and others upstairs,” didn’t know, “your friend Umo has been reported near Acapulco, a false sighting we think — for why would someone want us to think him alive, Zach, after we’ve agreed on post humous citizenship in principle? Another great idea from Zach! (Are these your things, E-m?)”—the letters pronounced separately like an in-the-know interviewer.