Joseph McElroy: Cannonball

Seen on the corner of Friar’s Boulevard in conversation with Umo, I was later asked by my father’s Reserve friend, the motel manager, Corona, if I knew who I’d been talking to — a fella with no papers, Baja, the border, the other side of the world — he’d been told by a mutual friend who “stays with us when he’s in town, sells power-lifting equipment, y’dad knows him from the Reserve” but my father said Corona had played fast and loose with the building code though does that mean he doesn’t have something interesting to tell us? This I asked Milt one day we visited The Inventor, though Milt got mad, while my sister, when I asked her, kissed me for it.

Milt and I were approaching The Inventor’s out in North Wash one day, and a sixteen-foot truck pulled away from the curb, all marked over with graffiti. But a block and a half up the driver got out and it was Umo and he went in a bungalow as we waited staring till The Inventor’s old door painted purple on the top half and saffron orange on the bottom opened. Milt, too tall and starved-appearing, was arguing with The Inventor almost before we got inside — his stark skeleton towering over the unthinkably-dark or Dravidian Indian (or part “Paki” it was said he might be) who always welcomed us as his “collectors,” his “discoveries,” his “fellow citizenry,” and made a little speech which would irritate Milt, who I think really understood The Inventor but was nervous for some reason; and when I looked out the shop’s side window facing north the truck up the street was gone. But then Umo came out onto the porch of the bungalow and looked up and down the street, turning only his head, and looked in this direction and went back in.

Almost everything at The Inventor’s was secondhand, yet each visit we found something new. New for us. Third-hand, fourth-hand, sixth-, it occurs to me. A Watchman comic from way back when we were twelve, an action figure of the President to maybe tickle even my father; yet now among toys, curios, weird Peruvian crafts — Brazilian gods, Mexican animals, two Sumatran buffalos squaring off on a pedestal of polished wood — there were surprises in the back room and, of recent months, yellow and amber gum-stuffs the smells of which The Inventor could name — Pacific pine, woman hair, foot-sweet, gold, rank — and especially now these white business envelopes you had to buy without knowing what they held, and a slanting reference to current events and an old-world turn of phrase as when some Sacramento name I thought I recognized was said to be “close to the loins of the Administration,” meaning I assumed Washington.

The Inventor showed Milt a model fishing canoe made by a blind child and Milt was shaking his head this time with awe. “That’s ill.” The Inventor said he was giving it to Milt. I asked him later what it was that blew him away. He said The Inventor had had a daughter but had lost her. I envied Milt that he knew such a thing, for did not The Inventor confide in me as well? Umo’s truck had left; without Umo, I was certain. Suspicious especially when receiving a gift, Milt picked an argument with me when The Inventor went to find a box, Milt suddenly wondering why in our discussion of a cousin of his somewhat blinded by this awful foreign mainly skin disease erysipelas I mentioned a Korean chick I’d met at the high school track one Saturday morning who saw me spit on the ground of the long-jump approach run-up and told me to save my spit, Jesus had spat in the eyes of a blind man in Saint Mark and he could see. Why had I made up that nonsense, Milt wanted to know. No such thing, I said, she had grinned at me so maybe she was kidding. She was cute. Which was why I went home and looked it up in the Bible in my sister’s room and my mom found me there and I tried to explain the miracle to her, the truth behind it, Jesus at work, but my mom shut me up though not till she had heard enough. (Well, I had added a bit to it.) It wasn’t a happy moment though it sounds funny. No, it doesn’t, said my sister when she came home that night. There it was in the 8 thchapter anyway, and when I saw Milt at the pool I had told him and he went ballistic, he was a minister’s son (was he ashamed of that?) and here at The Inventor’s he came back to it because he was amazed The Inventor was giving him the canoe. I could understand all this. And it was only then that Milt asked if Umo in that truck had unloaded something at The Inventor’s.

Oh Umo was around. Seldom out of work. The work there if you could find it. He’d had to learn fast — what his grandfather had warned him. (Did my grandfather live with me? Nope.) Umo had been waiting to be picked up for work just the other day, as it happened near my school. He was always like, Hey I been waiting for you. It might be so. He was hard to find, but then easy, I said. Did I do the crossword puzzle? Was the Mexican who ran the Beatrice Motel a frienda mine? You know Baja? You go fishing? You ever shoot a gun? With my father once. Once? At the range. He was in the Reserve. Oh yeah? You know diving, right? Suddenly then in confidence asking me, What hap pened? The question possibly a real friend’s. Why did it hit home? We hardly knew each other. Or Umo had already checked it out. Diving? I mentioned his . How did he do that? An entry like that.

“Me?” (For I had changed the subject.) “Yeah, no splash, less than no. Someone as big as you.” (My “someone” sounds strange.)

“ That’s how.” (That was a good answer, I said.) He laughed. “ Less than no. That’s it, we are friends,” said Umo, each eye housed by an arch of bone. The face not really fat, just big. “But what happened? he changed the subject to where I’d changed it.

“In the air diver lose weight, he weigh gravity,” I would recall Umo telling the Marines at the recruiting table few weeks later. Told what? That he could lose weight diving — in midair, he said. A little more than a year he’d been over here. He wasn’t going to bus tables or help out at a roadside stand or lose it on the beach. Never never never. He was doing better, staying sometimes with the old lady from that day at the pool who boarded people, transients and kids and Umo said cooked them into pies, he laughed suddenly harshly — an Inner Mongolian laugh? Accidental meetings, though he knew where he could find me. What he didn’t know, an illegal immigrant kid, amid what he did.

So he was back and forth across the border on business. He said he would take me some time. Me? I said (this kid).

“You follow up,” he said—“I guess ,” I seemed to interrupt him. He cocked his head toward my school. I saw my science teacher leaning out the window. They teach history there? That’s right. Geography, maths? Umo had this respect for me.

That’s right, I used to be good in math, I said. Umo’s laugh was sudden and awful, older and childish. You have to pay attention, he said to me like I wasn’t. Did I know Sierra Madre mountains?

Mexico?

“Correct! Orien tal . You know Teziutlán?” “Sure,” I joked. “I got three paira these in maquiladora — see?” (Umo hooked a finger in a belt-loop of his jeans.) “Special for me, they’re gon’ outa business.” (Umo shook his finger at me.) “You got wood working, photography?” He pointed to the school buildings I never had really looked at till then. I had carpentry in my garage, I said, myself at issue here, tested, puzzled, wrought-up somewhere, God!

“You drive?” Umo said. I knew how. He pointed to my school. He had something on his mind. “Ask kids who is their Senator”—he burst into laughter—“they say, ‘ Who ?’ No: I ask you ! Ha ha ha!”

“You know photography,” Umo said, a friendly demand, he had something for me, I thought. My father had taught me maybe the basics. I had done nothing with it. No? After he taught you? That’s right. “Speaks for itself,” Umo and his English. “Why?” “Why!” That burst of neutral, harsh thought made laughter. “Nothing does that,” I said, “nothing speaks for itself,” and wondered if I was right. “You could be wrong.” “Always.” “Why always?” “I hope not.” Justice for all? said my friend. Sooner or later, Umo.