Joseph McElroy: Cannonball

“Please.” “‘You cannot find out all about / In his “native town.’”

“Thanks. What else could they be? I think we’re moving.”

“Made up, I guess. And he was — this archaeologist was,” I said, “liquidated. In Mexico (?).” She’d thought I would take a picture.

I was telling this woman who might be pumping me that what didn’t get written up was the day that she’d delivered me when the Scrolls were supposed to come in by water and the bomb went off and the Scrolls were salvaged, most of it, and a half hour later—

Livy’s window caught a blow from a rifle butt and the militiaman with the moustache was back just as the two cars ahead of us and the truck ahead of them took off and we with them and on my side out off the road a hundred yards the fat man who’d been shot in the leg was beating someone on the ground with a rifle butt and our militiaman running up stopped and lifted his musket—“Friendly fire, step on it”—but something, a cigarette, hit him from a car window, and he acted like it was a dog of a wasp at him, and I knew Liv had heard the words I’d come up with. “What did I say? — good with people.” She thought about it.

Her boss phoned all afternoon, she knew it was him, where there’s a will there’s a way, we were talking till two in the morning, I debriefed on recent events. The mobile gave up, and there was nothing left of our candles, one after the other, the flame shadowing her blond and dark hair as if her hair were the light, and I debriefed on the Competition Hearings back home, my talk on diving — the Twist, what you actually did, the time factor, competing not against but (in this slippery way recalling by chance the gray-haired square-shouldered man over on my left as my old girlfriend Liz’s Navy now retired husband)… One more candle then, a special one I thought found at the bottom of Livy’s bag and only when it was down to nothing she said it was in honor of us and her uncle in Australia had sent it to her on her enlistment a year ago it was one of the sixteen-thousandplus candles a minister had organized along the median of his town in the mountains to remember the civilian dead swept under the carpet in this unconscionable war and this candle had been blown out by the wind and rescued by her uncle, all they had was paper guards, no hurricane sleeves.

I had tossed a live coal from the campfire into the stream where we were camping once in a canyon, I was telling her when the mobile rang. I thought she better answer it. She explained what I wrongly (why should I have?) told her she didn’t need to — what a mess at home with her enlistment, and family friends were worse. Vietnam-vet banker, hotel administration prof, mortgage broker, working mom attorneys, sporting goods equipment, all these tough guys in the neighborhood trashing the war — like, shoulda got out before we got in — and their legendary high school math teacher Ms. Mansfield, still unretired, hey younger programmers, though a much younger coach from Romania backed the war — nuke thaim if we need to, on’y keeding—

Gymnastics , I said.

Howdjou know that? she said. I said I had a brother making an insurance run at mid six figures before he hits twenty-five, irony is it’s the worst risk he could take with his life.

That campfire sounded nice, she could see it, the stream, the canyon, no canyons like that in Wisconsin. She was a good camper.

I held her for a long time, like reflections flickering on the walls. Our campfire, I said. Here thirty miles north of al Kut vehicles weighing down the asphalt all night, a billet for us at a faithful old base someone said the Under Secretary of Defense was going to pay a flyby visit to.

She’s the one at home Dad said was never wrong. ’cause she looked up to him. Did I know Livy at all? Yes, going to sleep dissolved, thinking of sixteen thousand candles, talking softly as if anyone would hear us. Waking up, hungry—

But the Russian…

We weren’t done with him.

And the archaeologist.

Went back down to take another look.

At the blast area, yeah. Good idea. Livy looking down at me, propped on her elbow.

“He heard I was down there…”

“Oh the Russian!” “Ukrainian.” “Like a big wrestler?” “Not that big.” “We know him.”

There it was again, the GI music-listening project, my friend coming in (as my father guaranteed) “handy” to dive with such originality it had been ignored at a moment when they wanted me at poolside. Dad could have swatted Storm like a fat, stumbling fly though he was not fat or hit like a bug with his windshield on a hot and threatening day, couldn’t he? — upstairs with brownish blood on his pants brownish and blurred and a monitor screen above the virginsbreath and the little volume of large short stories, and I had told the Russian’s little story like him to tempt a listener but this one wouldn’t betray her assignment, which I knew was to use me to pick up the track of the Chaplain. “They’re supposed to be so warm,” I said, as her mobile rang. “Not him.” “No.” “No,” she pursed her lips, “he never fooled me.” “How come you’re never wrong?” “Never volunteer anything. Wait till they ask.”

“That’s all it was,” I at last replied. My sister tossed her cigarette, we’d come a couple of miles up the highway. She put three fingers to her temple. “It was on his mind,” she said. “Mostly his,” I said, thinking the night before the dive, when I almost fainted in my boxers seeing him at the other end in the bathroom doorway, and looked once and went in my room and never lost it, and we sort of shook our heads about it now in the car, spinning our wheels. “I remember,” she said.

“Because I told you in the morning.” “I remember everything,” Em’s voice was husky and droll. “I wish I remembered everything you read to me, but I kind of do,” I said. “I remember what I didn’t,” she said.

The Directory on the floor, catalogues strewn among books, brochures, Summer programs, I didn’t know what. And Dad coming in on the kiss that didn’t end. “Not easy for him.”

The Coaches Directory entry. I’d forgotten how she censored it. “He doesn’t like writing. But there it is. Résumé, nothing to it. Methods, goals—‘no secrets,’ ‘industrious,’ ‘punctual.’ Mom said how he agonized late-night. Then you — the son ‘who’”—her pause (she was “E” then) like everything equal, gripping, ready to move, and present in her speech and reading always for the brother infinitely worth attending to—“‘who, it was ruefully doubted could ever have it in him to double as diver slash swimmer on the East Hill ‘Imperial’ team West Zone USA Swimming affiliate.’” An omission — (Wait, she said under her breath) — hard to exactly recall as if it was not so much right then in the entry on page 153 but a few words on so that, as she would do when she sight-read a hymn, a Sousa march, the Haydn, or “I Thought About You” (where I now added a personal campfire to the standard’s stream, train, cars parked, and that A flat 13 chord Em showed me that comes after “you,” just before you hit the going-away G9 again), she was reading a little ahead at the same time. Like a dive, I had thought filled to the brim with the life and apparent slowness of a full twist finding myself at the top standing in front of the plenary session following not a hard act to follow erstwhile speechwriter Storm’s proxy welcome from the Chief Executive (“that we are one American family in healthy competition brother and sister”) and describing at Storm’s behest the full twist wondering what had happened to Em though relieved to learn her car was OK in the parking garage.