Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

“That birthday envelope I wrapped.”

What was in it , Dad had held it up to the light, money ? Held like a slide above the dinner table after I’d gone to the other party which turned out to be an enlistment party. It was not a poem, he was sure (though he never understood that I would learn to write, or how), and definitely not drugs (a hint of humor, warmth). Maybe some artwork? or words of wisdom (?) — or a will! Em had provided the blue ribbon, which Dad had been loath to disturb. “ Happy Returns ” was in her high, round hand. “It was like a fortune,” she said to me both hands on the wheel, “somebody just wrote it with no one specific in mind but it didn’t come out that way.”

I took our mess hall trays away when Livy answered her ringtone, tilting her head as if she were taking the call while out walking, and I felt her waving a hand behind me to keep me there at the long table (near two friendly men in fatigues with, as it happened, the telltale cross on the collar). I didn’t like whatever was being said at the other end of her cell, but not because the major would want her back at headquarters.

I stopped opposite the Chaplains, noticing a copy of the Scrolls propped open with a mug and a knife between two breakfast trays. What did they think of it? The elder said, Thought-provoking even if it’s not quite from that time. Either it is or it’s made-up, said his friend. From what? said the first. You think He knew anything about fish hatcheries? said the other. Wind energy, said the elder, oh shoot, the Apostle Thomas said some of that stuff a century or two later — India he got to. Further, said the other. It is what it is, said the elder to me like a whatchamacallit — benediction. Shoptalk they cut off abruptly, smiling and shaking hands after I had put down my two trays. The Chaplains had a look at Livy leaning into her cell but slanting a friendly look our way.

Her cell did not make her seem between. And in the car presently her absent boss seemed more the proxy than she relaying what she knew wouldn’t surprise me but the trip was scrubbed and we had to turn around but she’d told him the car was heating up and we might need another day. She had left something out, I knew, sealed in a fond female act just as she had made our time a gift. And as we drove I marked her being “thoughtful” (my mother’s word if you were being quiet and she had to know why). Like increments of delay, intelligent breath, this thoughtfulness — hope, control — touched by me she was — nothing too wrong between us if she could only privately plan. “Oh I’m no prize package,” Livy said coming along what she said was Highway 27 toward a bridge.

We were suddenly enveloped in dust from truck traffic congestion and the desert and we ran up the windows and we kissed each other: Was it true I had said at those Hearings in California that the President should get the No- Bid Peace Prize? I nodded skeptically. Where’d she hear that? She tapped her cell and put us in gear. I said I had taken a hit or two and came out better on a particular dive I had explained the competitive fine points of, though was that even it? — I had taken a hit or two. Livy said I had to protect myself, where was my camera? — and it came to me that the major might not be my friend.

We weren’t turning back the way we’d come, but wherever you are things go on behind your back and the real job of your life comes in pieces wherever you think you’re going, to be at the war or opposing it or answering a stranger or at a bridge.

I had a hunch they’d decided my Chaplain underwater photographer was dead. I figured that was the good news.

His torn scrap of Scroll snatched by me supposedly lost from a master that had been part-destroyed on arrival in the depths of the palace yet present in the eventual book, argued an explosion not by insurgents but by the purveyors of the book whose master text in the custody of Administration scholars (and in the absence of the underwater photographer’s voice and witness) had gone largely unchallenged.

And would go unchallenged, except for me, armed with the scrap that could now be harmless without me. Yet who but a crank would put down the appeal of these so-called Scrolls, this small commodity?

Another historical Jesus you might say sold by authority to an inspired people. American Jesus. Humbled but blessed by the term outlook for a democracy of those who are motivated. It was one thing that hadn’t quite come up with Livy — the Scrolls. The Cross found a whole new world of meaning when the Chief Executive with his unique distance on the issues of our time calls for the supreme sacrifice from some of our families. God’s Lottery. Jesu’s Casino.

I was moved to have told Livy how I plucked a coal from the campfire and tossed it into the stream we found along the floor of the canyon, how it hissed meeting its reflection; like recalling what Em read me. Like a member of the family, Livy kept on about little things — that other lonely campfire in extreme southeastern California that my sister and I had approached over the ridge of a canyon in search of water which, in talk, spread to another fire that had flickered on the horizon of my dive talk to the Competition Hearings people, I who might not know how to compete. One dark summer night swimming out to the neighbor’s float and leaving our suits on the old planks and skinny-diving into the bare and waiting lake. The arc, the entry, my sister’s fear of the unknown depth at Pyramid scooting up almost as her head met the water — who swam pretty well, with a quick long stroke or a short, bent-elbowed stroke but not quite with my feeling for the water.

How the dive itself wants, yes, to outwit the water below yet never maybe get there, be it a two-and-a-half tuck or a half twist or, as I’ll show, full, I told the Hearings people, though Em wasn’t there yet.

And to Livy, back at the war a month later, that campfire down the lake shore six summers ago noticed only upon arriving at the float, for we saw then beyond this cove to a point on the next, minute, darting flames, and gathered there savage faces you only saw when you got this far from shore — a shoreline, the Earth, others ; yet not to Livy us diving, emerging on the canvas edge of the float, my sister on her knees, her arms, her flickering body observing the darkness of the lake; then my patented backflip, then Em jumping in, hand-in-hand the two of us, treading water, her fingers on my shoulders, remembering things said at dinner, snickering, swallowing water, giggling, when subtly there were flashlights on our shore here forty yards away prowling our rocks bobbing and stopping; one lifting across the water, finding us before we went briefly under and beyond us the swimsuits left on the clammy planks, her gleaming white, my dark, her legs now around me, giggling low, her whisper the lake naked on us, Let’s swim in and make a run for the towel , the second flashlight in our eyes, was it the dinner guest’s?

( Bliss , I remembered.) “Bliss, understand me, bliss — up, out off the board, exposed,” I said to the Hearings the almost endlessly delayed afternoon after we were done with the evacuation alarm, and Storm, walking wounded, bandaged and God knows what under the bandage, had given the executive welcome clear from DC (and still no Em) — thinking what do I do now? — Scrolls, Umo, Dad, future, a going-back verbal agreement with the unspeakable Storm; but Bliss , Em—“you have basically three axis variants,” I went on, maybe being in myself jumping hand-in-hand off the float, what I was thinking to break down. “First, the fore-and-aft axis of your body remains constant and you turn forward or backward, spin, whatever. Second variant, body axis itself turns, as in twist, half and full; and the old fore-and-aft of number one becomes just the dive’s own axis but where is that dive? And third”—I saw Husky, Wick, Bea, a square-shouldered, gray-haired, clean military sort younger than he looked whom I had met (if I could only remember — and so it seemed important — and are all these faces accredited?); and CEO and captain and between them the woman who resembled Livy who had attacked Storm a scant hour and a half ago; who, at the back, his job done, slipping out, grinning through a gauze and adhesive creation that looked like what was left of a bandage covering his whole face, Storm himself, but where was Em? gone in the car? — “number three,” I said, “‘Bliss,’ I’ll say, joining the first two in the slipperiest of all so you forget…you forget…how exposed you are further out — and who’s watching or competing against you which is in your mind (excuse me) but you…” “‘Happy Returns’ for Godsake,” the light changed, she was a good driver — we’re not giggling in the water about a dinner guest, or in a Bureau of Land Management zone we think trudging toward that other campfire beyond the canyon ridge, or in her room, reading out loud. “He had it coming, I don’t say he didn’t, but you, you still don’t know what was in The Inventor’s envelope.”