Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

My sister frowned at me and my life. “Milt,” I said — with a gesture, we were going— Milt had told Umo, why would either friend speak to others of it? “It was the half gainer,” said the Russian as if he knew. “So what you bring?” he asked me.

Em flapped the invoice. “Whadda ya got there?” said the man.

Why had Em come along? It was my next-to-last week, I was going back, a brief tour. Yet what my dearest only sister thought she owed me for — and astonished by my intervening at the previous afternoon’s Hearings when CEO and captain thought they were hustling Husky away at the end of the day and discovered they were not going to do that and stood publicly warned in front of a hundred willing Americans — for who was this brother of hers? — it was, I believed, no more than that I knew where somebody was that especially Storm wanted to catch up with. And Em came along today guessing it wouldn’t be Umo but the Russian I would run into, and said later when she’d looked down from the bridge at him looking up that he had the unafraid forehead of a killer—“a life you could miss without a misery.” Also she came along to Chula V because her car liked the road and she liked to drive; and she believed something was going to get said.

The person I loved, but more. “ My tools took human faces ,” her poet had said in my sister’s voice reading to me the night of the accident having sought to protect, bathe, soothe, heal, use a bloody abrasion wound dividing my heart nearly, and painfully imperceptibly kissing the raging tissues and opening her book — had she a headache building in her temples? — which became my homework for a Wick quiz I wouldn’t miss the next unbreathable morning then miraculously foregone by him for this new calculus he would glimpse for us of narrowing down from your position to some instant speed if it ever could exist while also narrowing down even more magically and for me that hour from speed to speed to where you are, for the assistant coach knew where I was. Between what has been and what will be, that horrendous crash dive to be rethought — though paused as gravity rushing through you isn’t?

“Mul tee ple half gainers!” the Russian pounded a table. “Coach yelling, ‘Too far out, meedle of the air, too far out!’” “Umo wasn’t there ,” said Em, letting the invoice fall sailing onto barely a corner of the long table. (“ Milt ,” I said.) “Somebody tawled him, that’s all. And so you quit half gainer and went up for tweest,” said the Russian dryly.

“And then?” I said, wondering if Umo had grasped what Milt could not.

“I would haf killed him,” said the Russian, creature of eerie attention and arrested imagination, his accent distinctly correct this time. “Your father?” I said. We turned back at the door.

“Never had one. Let us say first cousin,” our man grinned, “what does it matter, it’s done.” “What’s done?” “But could it have been meedair, to cause such an accident? No, I think it was as you hopped and landed on board before leaving it that he shouded.” What the Russian saw in my face — a standoff between us. “Umo had sympaty — whatever happen with his vahter — those border Chinese working all over the place. Eem i grant mentality.” The Russian said father like he said water .

Was he on a green card? I asked — I’m half out the door holding it for Em, who weighs a step, because he is not done with us, he thinks: “You did not follow his coaching. He was testing you.” “Your cousin,” Em said, “was it a him?” “But so what,” the Russian said, “some asshole shouts, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ so what if you crash? You see I remember the words ‘Go fuck yourself all night , be your own fucking vahter.’”

Em is about to shift into Drive, he’s out here rapping at my window and I run it down. “He sayed you understand half gainer like nobody in world.” “Who?” “Inertial, I forget — it doesn’t matter. Tweest also, but.” I had brought something (?), the Russian asked…for Umo?

News, I said. His citizenship. It had come through.

Bending to the window, stunned, “Maybe I see him,” the Ukraine sound engineer said rather slowly. I thought he would reach in or go grab a tire iron. He shouted at us as we turned into the road north, “Feegurehead woman” the words my father’s on my half gainer virtually. Someone just like Cheeky came out of the 7/11 with a newspaper and a pink bottle of Snapple with a straw sticking out of it. “Cheeky,” I said, pointing. Em understood and didn’t look.

“So was that all?” She was shaken and lit a cigarette. Or I lit it for her. I knew what it was, and it was not Umo or the Russian. I remember talking for a couple of miles. It was stupider the truer it was, because she was thinking about her father, what to do about him. I talked about him maybe setting myself up with such fluent indifference. Yet then, “What was the trashy book that was why Umo came here?” I thought she knew but was thinking of us, our father, our family.

Maybe the only way you get to do your real job is when you’re set up by outsiders who use you but they don’t know what they’re doing, I know I said, finding it as easy to talk as if I and Em on a sunny day in California had been marketers around an oval table, and simple for me in words to be indifferent or unforgiving, wherever he was, in Washington at some desk liaison job that would get him what he wanted in swimming, or in Colorado Springs, or back here for a short weekend with our mother, who said, We’re a good people — which he would say of an individual and without the a —of the CPA with the long jaw, “He’s good people,” as if he came with a group; or of Wick, who covered for Dad. So the Russian and the other one used Umo, and Storm used them in order to use me after Dad thought he was using Storm who used Dad to use me and even Em—“even you”— through me… I caught the smell of aloes and jasmine from her knees apparently — But the music video project, she said, watching the road, her cell in her lap, where did that begin? — “And look at them all, where it all got them,” I said.

A Well of Lebanon spa closed I remember, a fountain elsewhere for the moment, for none of this smart, gathered indictment and story was of interest to the person next to me. It was as if we were not getting anywhere, because the opposite was true, which later I grasped as the real job, receding into itself as we overtook it. Static on the radio, so many littler and littler things, her bike seat stolen from the trunk in the parking garage before she could get down there, anger in her eye when I noticed sweat on her upper lip, a bubble at the top of the windshield where a grain of gravel had been spun up by a passing truck — did she want some fruit we drove by (?) and her mouth pouting in concentration upon less and less, erasing a dimple, meant she might have to pull over and have a laugh, which didn’t mean we would never get back for we were not hopeless about all the tiny things adding up. (“Did he think Storm would get me into Yale?” I joked but it was no more true to what it came to me was “the real job” than my little string of people using people.) And somewhere in all of this she asked like a fact what we had done to drive him away — We were always wrong, I said — No we were always right, Em said, angry with herself almost indifferent to me. And I was able to say that we had made use of him to his surprise.

How? I in a silence I occupied could feel her ask; and at me from the north-bright windshield came the unjust Why do you persecute me? war he would wage on us now and again, but my answer to her: “to have our life.”