Joseph McElroy: Cannonball

“Yes?” I said, the crowded Hearings room still before me, the hand raised now Husky’s: “That’s it,” he says, “that’s it. ‘ Yes ,’ you said, Yes ,” getting to his feet managing to tip his chair into someone’s lap—“I said it this morning, or I didn’t say it, or I did,” Husky calls — while, edging down the aisle as if he would do something or, now in the row behind, hand Husky a mike, CE O broad-shouldered — while at the back who but my sister comes into view, Husky’s her friend—“the kid with his tongue cut out, Zach,” Husky unaware of CEO, the stillness embarrassed, souls having to cope with intelligence, Christian doubtless or fascinated, and still adrift in their own seamless interruption, mortal, knowing, shy, American, Husky though trying: “Feel like I know you, Zach. Photos I wasn’t meant to see — headless kids, that blindfolded wheelie going off the ramp at the Base— you know what you did — down by al Kut, was it? And the one-legged Specialist coming in for her layup, and someone tied up under a table biting somebody, blood on her leg, on the floor, the Wildcat of Kut, was it sex you cropped outa that shot, take a mouthful to tell what’s going on there.” CEO with captain behind him reaches through the row. “And you’re smart here and we all get the point but do we? Like ‘profit- stricken ’ country, and it’s funny, it’s called for, but listen—”

Captain stepping on the overturned chair in the row behind and almost falling collars Husky; CEO stepping over bodies to pull Husky by the arm back toward the aisle, who finds himself if not the word, “The trouble is you’re…”—

Umo, my brother I will call him, who agreed that this Jesus must have meant business and capitalized on what he had going for him, asked if I really believed all that about proactive and gave me a look — did I believe all that? “‘Course not, but—” and Umo said, “You’re so…” and found not the word but the moment.

Wind like another gravity slashed the crests and put the boy under again and rung by rung foot by foot I found a place to be hit by wind, dust, river, my own weight. The women at the other end of the ledge see what they see — that I have no rope, but a hand, a foot, to reach with, a foreigner here. Will I go in? The boy’s face comes up, it knows it has lost the other. I will reach a whole level lower than the women’s and crouch and find a concrete ledge to grip now half underwater for my hands and crawl out at right angles where I’m in range, it might be easy then. I miss my footing and hit my shin slipping down two rungs. It is only river wind but the current lifts even the cross-troughs, the surge rises at us on another scale, and the boy is cold, holding on and beaten. The women are speaking possibly to me, or silent. The time I have is no one’s and I remember nothing, but it is in me.

Wick thinks it was good, very good, my choice words dispatching the military timed so well, public, how they just let that guy go. “Better get outa town, Zach.”

Bea and the gray-haired retired Navy, who must be Liz’s husband, and others crowd me now as another speaker on algebra olympiads and middle-school mathletes is announced and we might get away in one piece, yet Wick, with an always loosely assembled face of planes and a sag from the pure eyes, and I are here. Wick so glad I had rethought that old dive. You saved my life, Wick. Thanks, he says, but — it took him back, insisting now on some “fact of the matter” for I must pay for praising him.

My sister’s disappeared on me, and I’m hearing Wick out. A window is thrown up on that terrible morning after the dive unbreathable, my whole self limping like the aged, left at the door by E to my teacher who’d heard.

Not very artistic, I said. You sleep? he asked. Back to the drawing board, I said almost voiceless. No, Wick didn’t think so. Not able to ease into my desk, I find a chair at the back. What was the test gonna prove, Mr. Wicklow, a girl asked. It is what it is, was the answer. Our formative years, I said from the back, and got a nonlaugh. You finish building your house, Mr. Wick? Milt asked. Wick shakes his head, Not really — it’s a job (the wife, the kids, money). Now at the board he’s drawing posts like pillars. An infinite house, I say, an effort for me; an infinite… Wick goes and throws up the window and I felt the frame collide in my carved, beating chest. Rethink it, Zach, rethink it, he had turned to me reserved, decisive. At the back of the room I looked up from my throbbing chest recalling I had offered to help him and his wife with the—

Rethink, hear? He was writing letters, fractions, on the board under the temple of his unfinished house.

So he bagged the quiz inspired he tells me now by me, and, barely holding a pencil, I wrote down stuff we hadn’t had and hearing him demand to know what instantaneous motion was in a dive from point to point of the arc, then instantaneous position from time and a little more time, I grasped only that he had run the two tricks of what he called calculus together and, while the class writes frantically from board to page glad no gravity quiz today, I’m left with some infinite division of my failed full twist and a promise that I could remeasure it or myself, having made it to class really to measure how this high school swim-coach assistant to my dad might measure, move, assist me in what he now at the Competition Hearings called my doing. What I’d said.

Derived I couldn’t take time or have mind to show spilled out from my sister reading with a headache the night before for me some space-time carpentered and planed self-building by a poet’s unpretending time.

“You gotta go,” Wick said, one eye on the math Olympics coach talking up front, and it’s only after I’m in the elevator, angry Em had left, with according to Wick “ironic” the word the Hippy, like Umo long ago and to be sought out this coming week in Chula V, meant for me—“though that’s how we grasp time, and Zach…and—” (everyone stopping for everyone else yet in motion) Wick thanking me for saving his life that morning of the canceled test — it got his house finished! — Zach? — and I with the smell of my sister’s sheets winding along the ventricles of my hopes, soothing my terrible chest — Zach?

I had seen somewhere in my head the Honda’s taillight and license plate disappearing out the basement garage ramp, trunk unlocked, which left me in a position not so miserable as in time not now endless but still to be gathered up in thought.

An instinct not to stick around, who were we, staring at someone else’s water shadowed by their campfire? Our pathmaking along a different route back into the hidden dark of our chill canyon carries barely with us the evening light surveyed behind along the ridge and time that rushes subtly down around the horizon. A giant paintbrush so-called, ragged and growing up three inches off the dry ravine toward us living off underground relations, weeds — who knew what? — now blooms scarlet under the flashlight, it wasn’t supposed to be there. Pathfinding we’re as long as it took to find at the bottom our coals distant under their ash beside the stream our undrinkable BLM stream and the taut flank of our two-man tent and inside our half-zipped-together sleeping bags, a sweatshirt, a toothbrush, restless, ungathered, and there over the rampart of this canyon, just one of several canyons, that stranger’s fire, the gallon jugs, three waters but what had we to swap for such a steal? — not even an underage beer.

I bear it in me on my hands and knees to the end of the concrete ledge and hear nothing but the river water and wind and trucks on the bridge up behind me and over my shoulder catch sight of four or five watchers on the bridge and so as not to lose my place and the boy, I lie in the shifting depth of water on the concrete ledge, the small of my back balanced on the end, extending my legs, my boots as far as I can and further for the boy to bring his other hand this way, and then I bring my legs together to give him more to get hold of: one hand and now, something in his open mouth and eyes, reading my foot, the other hand letting go of the submerged projection I figure he’d sunk his claw anchor onto, and I feel his weight in my stomach and push with my hands against the raw sides of the ledge to bring us in toward the other ledge, a two-person dive in reverse but almost too slow exchanging what we bring to each other.