Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

The Law Dean touched Em’s wrist smiling toothily but grew impatient; alerted, startled (even she), to hear the volume almost in rhyme of voices arriving from the lobby, she turned gracefully to direct the crowd debouching from the elevators down the broad, decisive hall at the end a plenary roomful of folding chairs, those who wait, those in profile who talk to their neighbor, something just to be here, surveying the wreckage of lunch.

Forget I had, / the things I’d said — home from the war, my sleep flooded by some of them. Undeniably said. How meant? Husky himself had asked this morning if and how I’d meant what I’d said, and once long ago Umo too; for Em and I had our joint angle of saying — and now my things had passed into Storm’s listening system through my father, and not only — for in the elevator the Seal thug captain and my bothersome but this morning friendly critic Husky jazzing the real not dead-andalive Lazarus getting a strange reaction in Storm’s eyes, brought back a friend jogging, gasping, crediting me with reminding him of what I must now think he had passed on in anger to the men waiting to train and perhaps question him that day.

Storm’s voice and by contagion mine had reached a terrible hush like silence or unavoidable corruption or like the thought they rested on, and Wick, who had heard no more of what was happening than the others, approached now from the windows and near him the woman from this morning who looked so like my palace driver, and from the direction of the elevators and the hallway, the Law Dean, angry as she could be, who would draw us toward the plenary session where the afternoon Hearings, if not Storm Nosworthy’s welcome fresh from Washington, promised to go deep.

I a source for the Scrolls.

I said, “If it’s all from me suppose I go in there and say so.”

“There exist reasons not to. Your friend the diver’s citizenship. Your sister,” said the man grasping my arm as he had the day I was shot. “To say nothing of your father — your name as a photographer. And quite apart from their not being, as you put it, all from you, many think the Scrolls in their own way are true. Isn’t it what we’re about?”

I had heard right. And here was Wick, and behind him the troubled person who hated me beyond even her call of duty as a coworker with white captain, black CEO, and whose brother — unless I was way off — served in an MP brigade. My sister hadn’t moved from where the Law Dean had left her, her hand in her bag, while Storm was saying we go on faith in everything else …(?) “And the favor we ask of you, it would put a seal on all of this, Zach, a Presidential Seal of course but my seal my friend — the photographer of the Scrolls’ arrival, and my word! what a twist your survival that day — your enlistment bumped into the Reserve as you know, and—” (“What’s the deal,” I said bending confidentially close to his shoulder but Storm now like a show-off sharing some personal phone call or his half anyway for anyone within range) “—look, activating you we cut you a second tour, short form, go where you like, you got fans over there who you know will liaison a…a deal ? — like—” Storm pointed to the hall—“the twist! People in there who can’t wait to hear you.” Speak, he meant, of that dive at the Hearings today — Storm tapped me on the chest, my scar, the wound (if only my deluded father, working somewhere, probably in Colorado Springs, for USA Swimming, could be here!), “if I’d only been in time downstairs to see your entry into the well that palace day!”—the deeffayronce between me and Storm — and “liaison”? What meant liaison? — for like the future when it was only the past it came to me why he, as his eyes, their weather of prescience now dilated, wanted me back at the war, and he might not, like Em, have known that it had already been in my plans almost for its own sake.

His , flooded by the clang that came down upon us now repeatedly final of the building evacuation alarm that caused people to look around them, inconvenient as an air raid rounding more responsibly with each strike of the clapper, a blame for its own sake — Storm’s plans were overtaken utterly awash judging from his eyes, larger suddenly and you might have thought less unready for the great hands of the woman otherwise slight-looking crying, “ Deal !” reaching over her head then down upon him not me, fists that being all about themselves and their fighting, tuck-position fingers riveted you wielding a hell of an iron bar it seemed but holding nothing. Well apart at the top; at impact together. Yet it was more the consuming clangor of the alarm set off near the brain that for Storm did away with the moment. This was only apparently so remote from any school fire drill alarm for Wick to line his “people” up (most not unhappy to be interrupted) and walk them to the third-floor stairs (when the alarm had gone off the day after my accident just as Wick had begun an account of calculus cure, though hardly thrown off his stride as Storm, his weather eye out for a tornado, surely seemed to have been).

For this present charge, this bell of sound was like the chaos or comfort it saved you from and it was this in those eyes of a man who’d indirectly murdered or meant to two friends of mine hardly countenancing the woman’s blow I and somebody else and Wick tried partly in vain to deflect, that told you Storm’s mind, if he ever in fact had read a page of the volume of stories on his onyx table in the palace, was too quick to hold a thought. And the thighs and belly too slow, the damage control shallow, sweeping; his a body that had sought always maybe a face to go with it, unfold from it, yet one afternoon a modest blunder touting Jesu’s idea for a gray mullet and dogtooth grouper hatchery in a great pond drawn off from the Galilean Lake had got himself slugged by a Christian lender from McLean, Virginia, Storm sustaining the damage you saw, the face he had gained (appropriately in the lobby of the Willard Hotel in DC).

If not the bewildered eye barely flicked at the furious woman but penetrating the bell timeless for all its sequence, term, and alarm where it came from who knew, and what it meant, as we at once began to learn from the black officer I had been calling “CEO” absent some minutes but back to break his news first to my sister; since it was her car cordoned off.

Storm’s eyes shocked in their irises by plans put off or worse — no more than that, no less. And by interruption, not fear. And not at all by blame which bewilderment at a thing shouted had once caused in me lifting off a springboard. My sister did not turn to me or the wide eyes of Husky at large looking for a friend, soon that afternoon to be found in my voice in the Hearings room, yet I found a look in her mouth and cheeks and hair cruelly alert as if she’d had her pocket picked by the man who had threatened her over the phone, all thrown into the days following. And I looked back at Storm — he at me, as he could, his bloody temple, the ripped fold at the corner of his mouth; but his eyes, the meat of his eyes — but really the moment in them waiting for a bandage, even as the emerging multitude facing another delay would stir, do something, get out of that plenary space or exit the building by emergency stair. Up and down and back again captain and CEO in their combats boarded the major elevator bound for the lobby to screen would-be attendees, reduce them to manageable numbers, just a job, less for Hearings’ sake than to remind us who was in charge; and there was the garage.

A Heartland, if memory serves, almost unidentifiable but spotted by me thousands of miles away as a make of trailer seen in Chula V, the exterior door blown out, though, and the toasted styrofoam like bread, like tissue sandwiched between the weather-side thin steel plate and the inner-side vinyl. A raw hole in the steel where the dead bolt had been once lockable if useless against an intruder. A blown-out window aperture where just the framed head of a bald child of nine or ten had quit grinning as I shot, later to be framed out by the Intelligence processor as not germane to prove this mobile home a bio-facility.