Joseph McElroy: Cannonball

“Photography.” Umo pointed at the school. “Yes, with a friend.” “You have a friend?” “A teacher here. Coaches swimming. Assistant coach. He’s gonna show us calculus.”

“Got a pool?” “Of course. An old one.” “How big?” “Twenty-five yards.” “A team?” “A coach, an assistant coach, a science teacher who—” (I drew a notebook from my bag and leafed to some equations) “who… — ” (but found something else). “I know,” said Umo, from a weight of experience as if the situation might be someone’s fault. “Assistant,” he said. “To my father,” I said. I indicated the building. He asked what grade would he go into? Did he want to go there? (I meant enroll.) “Well, I am fourteen…(?).” Maybe they counted life credits, I didn’t know. How could he have been fourteen? I thought. “Life credits?” He was dead serious. “You speak for me, OK?” “You can speak for yourself,” I said. “What have you lived through, Umo?” “Through?”

Did I have a dog? he wanted to know, he’s looking at my notebook, some writing of my sister’s — it said, pointed chin, maybe short life, too soon to know (a face belonging to someone she knew) and then Umo read out loud, “ Blue spots on nose, imprisonment . I heard that.” “You did? Where? My brother says the Chinese eat dog,” I said. Umo laughed. Brother, eh? Even the dogs they ate where Umo came from were family friends. “Meat makes you grow up fast,” he said, “you gotta sister?” He showed me a snapshot. It was of the upper part of him, coming down a gangplank, blurred faces at the rail. Who took this? Some friend. From the boat, I said. “No. Cheeky took it.” Snapshot on the occasion of Umo’s entry at the port of Vera Cruz. He had come here on his own when he was twelve, a “regular Boy Scout,” he joked.

A boy with a Native American handshake and a secret in his voice I knew even if sometimes it might be me. He answered you back. You did the same. Umo made you want to speak. “You gotta sister?” “Sure.” “You say ‘Sure.’ You know Teziutlán?” “Grew up there.” Umo gave me a look. He looked down the street.

This Umo is about me , I think. He was and wasn’t enlisting my help. You don’t have a picture in your head of exactly where Vera Cruz is, but maybe it doesn’t matter. His English. His jobs. His age. Occasional work for The Inventor — epoxied a fender, painted a wall. “You have a sister?” “Yes, I do,” I said in a certain way. A truck came down the street right at us almost. Umo waved it over. “Home is where the heart is.” “Sooner or later.” Adopting a saying like that, his mind already on the move away from where we stood on the street corner near my school, he had a purpose.

A friend should.

Doesn’t everyone if they only knew it?

You knew he had a reason for happening to meet me here. “Vera Cruz,” I said. “Mexico, my Grampa,” Umo said. “Your grandfather!” “Wanted to get there but never did. Never never.” The truck pulled over, Umo stood there broad as a Chargers linebacker. “Silverwork…” he said. I didn’t understand all this but here he was, my friend maybe, or I could help him. The truck waiting, he showed me a little silver cup that had belonged to his Mukden grandfather whom he’d never known. My dad had a Mexican friend in the Reserve, I said, as if that was something, but Umo right back at me, “With wife much taller,” he laughed (like a bark, a harsh I know ), his hand on the door handle of the passenger side. “And she’s going out for pole vault,” I said, “I could really help her, but she…” “I know ,” Umo grinned over his shoulder. He got up into the passenger seat. He worked for The Inventor sometimes, knew him in some way closer than Milt and I, who had known The Inventor years before Umo had appeared in our city. Some kids alone in the world just take over, looking ahead. And lose out? “I’ll find that place on the map,” I called. The truck was pulling out. Sooner not later , I thought I heard.

God helps those who help themselves , my mother had said, which is true except about God helping. “Where does it say that?” I said, picking up and twirling her blue Christian Lender ballpoint, but I knew it had made her angry. As if I didn’t believe it. “It’s in the Bible, wise guy,” she said after me, “you don’t trifle with the Holy Spirit.” It was like a favorite word of hers— spirit I will give her. “God’s matching grant,” I said and was sure it wasn’t in the Bible, it sounded closer to home, a web site, I’d definitely seen it, Ben Franklin on some poster maybe. Umo forgetting me as the truck rolled forward, later I couldn’t remember seeing anyone in the driver’s seat, a vacancy due to him himself. But who was Cheeky? It was no secret, I had concluded as the black exhaust from the truck’s tail pipe made me a promise.

I thought, I’m going to enlist . Me?

“Hey, you’re good with the water,” came the voice another day, “you understand it.” “I do?” “So do I. I grow up in desert.” There was Umo seen upside down standing on the tiles above me, I was near the end of a backstroke lap, chancy in a public pool somebody coming the other way. “Water,” Umo began, he lifted an arm over his head, I knew what he meant. “Hey why not we start a backstroke heat with a back dive off the platform!” Umo looked down at me like something weird he just noticed. He pointed — I knew at what: “Whatdjoo do?” “Accident.” “You still got a vein there.” He laughed that nasty, explosive laugh. I hadn’t seen him and here he was. “Your sister come here?” No she didn’t. I said he would fit in OK here, the race was to the swift.

“The race ?” Umo said. He got it. “The race is,” he said, “but…” He really paid attention even when he didn’t, and he pretty much knew what I meant, because I at least know that the Bible or Benjamin Franklin, maybe both, say the race is not to the swift. I might be competing with Umo, for all I knew. He asked why I’d stopped diving. I would tell him about the accident some time, I said. I’d just had an idea or memory as you sometimes do swimming backstroke — shadow, though, of someone else’s memory, not mine — and here he was, here was Umo noticing the scar from when I had hit the board and could have been killed — and when he had said, “Water,” I had remembered, Water trusts the backstroker .

Here was Liz, too, my girlfriend body-wading across two active lanes, and when I stood up in mine and looked, Umo was gone, but not what he’d left. It was late August, senior year starting.

“Where’d he go?” “He’s over there,” Liz said (like, why ?); she kissed my shoulder, I felt her; “ now he’s gone.” “No he’s not.” A passing lap swimmer kicked a toe hard against the back of my hand and caught the nerve that runs clear up the arm and over the shoulder. “Independent,” Liz said, sort of out of sight out of mind. “He wants…,” I began.

Liz palmed my chest and kissed me there, as she often did to remind me, as if I’d had surgery there. Which maybe I had, as my sister had said late that terrible night when I was sore as hell whatever she meant. My idea I almost — (Liz was talking to me) — kept to myself. What would it mean to Liz — what not even Milt knew or my sister — that it was Mexico Umo had come to because it had been his grandfather’s dream? “ Mex ico!”

Liz puckered up, she made a beautiful face. “Why do we do that?” I said. “Other people’s dreams,” I said, in momentary possession of someone else’s private memory but only from outside — Liz would never to her credit just say, Yeah . “It’s not Mexico he wants,” said my girlfriend. I got a kiss on the shoulder. How’re you doing? was one of her thoughts said softly now standing hip-deep in my lane, afternoon tiny bubbles racing up from somewhere, her clear dreamy thigh, an escaped coil of hair at the seam of flesh and suit, whichever came first.