Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

What had happened to precipitate Dad’s diving-accident words Em had never asked, nor why they threw me off, an experienced performer. You can’t know, for one thing, no more than why people have the voices they do. Em not one of those women’s voices, squeezed, pinched, all-business, and/or going on about nothing, soliciting (but it’s their job) on the phone, talking in line in a public place to another woman, a store, finding a friend to exchange emergency insights with at the same pace and with same vocal cord and nasal quick talk. European women and even African didn’t sound like this, not Polish, not even Mexican. My sister, though, was almost a singer in speech or a natural actress, sly or guttural too when I think of what she could say, and with a stagy range she kept for me.

So I remember summing up, in the car-quiet, a danger-corrupted year or two, leaving out the Scrolls mostly, but what was to be done about our father, too.

While swelling in my own voice I felt Em’s in my chest that always seemed to have returned from a droll surprise and disappointment to become her own surprise and overdrive—“‘I have a Navy in the West,’” (!) quoted from our poet in an e-mail intercepted I believe by Intelligence and Storm — and subtlety riding alongside my voice now with gift, anger, mouth, riding north also in her car in which, since it had not blown up, though someone had Remoted her trunk open in the parking garage the other day of my reeling, remarkable, but perhaps irrelevant analysis of the full twist in the afternoon to the plenary Competition Hearings (and taken her bike seat), she was on the move away from home and by some route not yet valued away from her brother who would be also far away and with other wheels.

All of which, not just the sound guy’s quote from Dad, was turning over in Em’s mind when she said, “Was that all?” and I said I was going back for a second tour.

My driver driving me sometimes to distraction thank God complained at our slow progress south. For we would stop often, in mixed towns around the capital. But look, it was she who’d made al Kut our southeast destination if not beyond, where I had said I had unfinished business which she I knew took to mean someone they thought I would lead them to. Hey, from here a hundred fifty miles dead south along the watercourse you would see its vandalized gates and dilapidated, dam-like barriers, she told me, called barrages to level the flow, and one of the embattled if not poorer oil fields near where she had seen twenty of our own oil tanker trucks lined up single-file — near Nassiriya, a few flat-roofed yellow-mud houses left here somewhere once the silver worker we kept an eye on who followed a religion of John the Baptist and Shem and the Mandaean Enos but one day died of burns inflicted by Sunni visitors with his own instruments — though all this made less and less difference to me. I was happy to have her to talk to, be with, she was good — we were both happy about that, we talked fast and it was warm and sexy, her beret in her lap. She said No it was I who had said Kut, I had unfinished business, yet had never, she added, told her on the way to the palace or since—

“That turned-around morning—”

— what I had said before I shot that picture.

“It moved you, Livy—”

That wasn’t all.

“You said the picture moved you no end….”

The Reservist—

“Powerlifter, friend of my father’s —salesman, my father didn’t — one of those friends — in the picture arm-wrestling with the do-rag Triple Canopy construction mercenary, I told your beloved boss—”

Going a little far with Livy didn’t stop her: “It was him like a wild horse, the eyes — someone under the table too, cropped out of the picture, a woman tied up you said,” my driver, my companion, I better believe her, Livy said, because remembering what happened she was never wrong. Well, I didn’t want to be the first to give her negative feedback. No, all Dad meant was telling him and her brothers not to believe a neighbor that if you’re wading in a stream deer won’t notice you.

I said one reason obviously she enlisted was a talent—

She agreed but—

— a talent for Intelligence, I finished my thought, she picked up something I’d said, That turned- around morning? (Oh now she saw, it was just the way things went at the pool. I said No it was something else before that, the drive to the palace, for she had reminded me of seeing things in reverse as if to rerun them.) Meanwhile, if I was right, her assignment made less and less difference to me, a cushy slot compared to most women, leaving us with the mysterious real job like exactly where we were and where we were coming from, my sister’s one step forward two back or diagonal or a relief so I very nearly told Livy the job within the job idea my Chaplain credited me with — long dead, my underwater friend and no matter what they’d told her to watch for she was never going to see me in contact with him, I very nearly told her, but…nor could I explain that flash turnaround so arriving at palace came first, leaving from hotel in repainted Chevy Suburban last.

Did she recall me asking about an Asian kid with a film crew? Asking, yes. I had gotten him his citizenship even though they thought he was dead. Livy drove. What kind of citizenship was that? Maybe it brings you back to life, I said.

An American soldier in the road wanted something. There’s more to it, I said.

We stopped for him. He had his headphones on. Where was he going? It was the drive-bys, four in Kut last week. We gave him a cigarette he didn’t want. He took some crackers and a newspaper we unloaded on him. He just wanted to talk. He was interested in Livy, talking across me. He said the Secretary of War had announced that you could make a claymore out of office supplies, some tape, some toner, talc, pepper, a straw he almost forgot, he listed them. Did we know that a palace was being renovated for a bank? I said it was a branch of the Euphrates. Drive-bys worried him, what it was was you’re the target but they’re moving. He was nodding at us. He didn’t want a lift. We left him standing there, his headphones, what was he listening to? — the Base newspaper under his arm. He didn’t belong out on the road, Livy said, she knew him. His unit anyway. Which wasn’t Kut. One reason she enlisted she was good with people, I said. We arrived at a roadblock. Was that it? she said, was that—? Most people, I added.

— was that all?

It wasn’t a reason in itself, but maybe it was, I said. A dusty militiaman in a T-shirt got in back with a rifle and heaved a sigh.

Well, the Russian’s story, she wanted to get that straight. Archaeologist of…(?).

Livy, I said.

Of water , Livy said. She seemed to ignore the guy in back. And he had discovered the well intersection under the palace — (?)

The intersection of the whole—.

— before the Scrolls—? Livy was armed. She sniffed, she kept an eye in the mirror, what was the militiaman sitting on?

A hundred yards off the road a hooded man was rifle-butting three it looked like men on the ground. One, with a wine cask for a belly, got up like a snowboarder who’s been having balance problems, and was shot. “Why don’t you do something about that?” I said to the militiaman. “What you have in trawnk?” he said. His automatic rifle had a taped-together ammunition clip. He opened his door. He said that we were not moving, Livy braked and he got out, leaving the door open, and walked up ahead.

“He discovered it before the Scrolls were even found ?” Livy finished her question, her fingers on the door handle.

“If they were found.” “What else could they be?” I got out and shut the rear door. Words came to me and I said them, that my sister had once read out loud: “‘Dust is the only Secret—/ Death, the only…’” “Get inside,” said my driver. “‘…the only One / You cannot—’”