Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

My driver recalls what she knew of me, listens for what she’s been told to listen for, watch for, this second time around. (Not “get you there” this time, but.) Expecting we’d first go south — to Kut! — but here we are, just over forty miles north of Camp Warhorse where they weld steel sides onto small and medium trucks that can support them, and memory serves to oblong a space of weeds and empty ground where the trailer once sat. It trusts my smart Specialist from Wisconsin to see the boy’s face I describe in words, just where the hairline began scarcely fourteen months ago, hear him ask in English are you coming into his house, and hear as a joke, one is pretty sure, his Don’t get too close . His village abandoned by its residents who were hardly that, having been forcibly moved in under the old regime.

No pictures so far? No pictures by the Photographer of the Scrolls? If only of their arrival by water, it is said. Like me, leaving and arriving, after and before merging like a war victim’s real life, accepting her boat hook, her dumbfoundingly being there (for let your tool do the work according to our father’s handy nostrum out in the garage), and a dry shirt and pants. Speechless that late afternoon and untrusting but not dead; speaking, if memory serves, only of Umo’s feetfirst dive, of home, the two bloated books in my bag, and the color of winter wheat; and water, what it could do: she might have learned nothing of the jobs I did deep down in the palace though she remembered me.

Memory trusts her knowledge of anthrax, wells, hoopoe nests of olive-colored eggs, she knows also how they improvised claymore mines, knows the road, has a toolbox in back; memory trusts also her interest in, two day’s drive at our pace north from here past checkpoints, a bridge by a river from which we could see a field of green winter wheat I had once photographed, she recalled. Because I had told her on the way to the airfield for my flight home the night of the palace bomb, I beginning to smell, drying out, alive and smelling not only of that, the fresh shirt she had given me reeking of cigarettes I had not smoked. Her who had boat-hooked me out of that rank well rush. Needing a wash dreadfully — and the boots and decomposing socks she remembers and actually told people. That I stank? No that there was a nice feeling, almost a confiding, without any. What people? Don’t recall, she lies. (For what she told got back maybe clear to the top.) You were tired. Something about a third way — another route? But you didn’t know where we were going.

But memory trusts her impression of the northern Mesopotamian plain. U.S. contractor skipping status reports blowing millions on a pipeline intersection under the Tigris without doing the geology first. The division possible of the country up here as a result of this war, at the highest levels in DC thought a great idea. The depth of the water by our little bridge here, her eye a lead line, the current surprising, close. And a body passing, she thought (or the back of a T-shirt inhabited by it; or only a T-shirt? asks her companion) about which we argued as if about something between us, she hadn’t seen the head. Two people alone contain so much. And how was it, being home? she said, and was I not taking pictures this tour? What I had to say about an experimental bridge back home, 450-foot footbridge made of composite carbon-and-glass materials so far twenty times dearer than steel and concrete construction but a tenth the weight — her interest sort of in these things for their own sake, as is her right as a citizen. Or in me. Can you be interested in a bridge as an end in itself? A person yes, though maybe not. And one punctual star we saw above the desert near the bridge and the asphalt plant, and two cars that had pulled in near us.

One night near a city known now for danger, I pointed out a campfire a mile off the road. Did she have any brothers and sisters? Three bros. They were not serving. The campfire? she persisted. Oh just I recalled a campfire that we had approached along the lip of a canyon once in California near the Arizona border and I spoke of it since it was her I happened to be with.

We? said my driver. Me?

“When you were driving me to the palace, you would say that was all you knew, yet it wasn’t and you kept adding things and you still would say, That’s all I know.”

We had time to laugh about it now, she touched me. She checked the oil. The car had been acquired secondhand, thirdhand.

How I evacuated the palace my way. That’s life. I didn’t even know her name.

How outside the gate she said, This’s far as I go. What she had said to me through the window when I left her sandblasted half-camouflaged Suburban to go into the palace. It looked like “chose,” her lips meant you chose to be here .

That’s right, that’s right, Livy said.

Her names. Livia to her mother, Olivia to Grampa, Liv to one brother, Olive to the humorous one, Livy to another, O to her father who later calls her Livy, who tells others, She’s never wrong . As a compliment.

“You enlisted,” I said.

Well, trust her on dogs. Where she comes from, hunting, but. (And dog love.) But? Well, here it’s son of a dog, ibn il kalb . Thought to be filthy, should you touch them you shed your clothes.

Man’s best friend.

She gave me a look. She’s smug, a little. They should talk to a friend of mine who grew up eating dog. That’s right, that’s right, she… I had asked her once (?), she said (I’m a little astounded) — on the way to the palace (?) about an Asian kid unnamed working with (?)… Film crew, mmhmm—

South, she replies.

The splendid dive , though, the lost diver, the palace trashed (a bank now?)—

That explosion, she said, people who vanished.

Stuff of legend now, Livy, the selling of the Scrolls.

What a mess when she enlisted, she said (knows I’m interested). Never wrong? I suggest. When Dad’s old Saab started making a godawful noise I told him it was the diaphragm on the servo system operating the automatic clutch. No one else got it right.

The captain now. The job she is doing for — the major, excuse me— Is it for him? This trip, this tour for (we don’t quite talk about) the photographer. “That campfire,” she shifts gears. It’s night. Somehow, as I try to tell her in a blaring, acrid café full of soldiers my job within the job she comprehends, she pouts with insight, desire, she’s compact, hair unfurled, she knows that there is a job within the other job often. I have not called it the Third Way, but she is not unfamiliar with it. The winter wheat, and in the lower corner of my shot from the river a couple looking opposite directions, together. The Bedouin born without eyes. A bald child’s shaved-head hairline. Narrow escapes she knows of, amazing reappearances. Life. Her brothers, father, uncle hunting in the snow out of season — for her it’s walking in the woods, that’s all, she goes along. Farmers’ early warning systems at best, the dogs.

The café noisy, the crowd of men aware of us.

My move. What’s next? Time can be itself tonight, shifted into new places, reassembling, like power between people.

Though selugi , she continues: hunting dog (?), after one of the successors to Alexander’s empire, Seleucus in the South. And south is where she is inclined to head, how about it? She had several good harmonicas in the back of the car, all different keys in their red and white Marine Band boxes and protected in a backpack with her things. The major, now, I said. His irritation at her assignment to keep the photographer monitored I know that came down like major’s promotion from higher up — and something more. He got her her car replacement, I said, she was lucky.