Cannonball (12 page)

Always in
what
memory? The day Umo and I spoke to the Marines and I brought him along to East Hill? What did he say to my father who looked across the pool at me? What got transmitted, my resolve? A long-standing impulse, did I say—and what is that?—to enlist? I got something from Umo. I tried to get him started.

In the late fall Dad went fishing in Baja in, we heard, bad weather (and alone, my mother thought) and missed six practices. Not us. We were all there.
We
were there. I recalled Tortugas Bay when I was ten. The roosterfish on a blind strike quite deep trying to run off among the rocks, its blunt body and heavy-ribbed back huge—when we were supposedly hunting for yellowtail. This time he didn't sound like he'd done much fishing. Was it because he went across to the Gulf of California side? Or the water that preoccupied him, fresh in some shape or form—not that he would drink it, not down there, but someone was selling it off to a UK conglomerate to be floated thousands of miles in giant seagoing bags, yet it wasn't water quite in that form that he was evidently thinking about (though perhaps a new slant on electrolytes he was always urging us to replenish with bananas and fluids in case of cramps and exhaustion and in the middle of the night uncomfortable electric leg-nerves) or that he might have learned about the new water material from a contact in Mexico, but anyway, on his return, for the first time he instructed me as if it was mere history or a man-to-man exchange, and seemed to all but swallow his irritation at me. Why alone, Dad? Why did it seem he hadn't really been fishing? And to myself, like an either-or fork in my life, why didn't I speak to him of enlisting for this bizarre war?

I understood my historic distrust.

He wasn't himself. I heard him actually tell our number-three freestyler concerning his “shape” the second day back almost nicely,
I said it was not that bad
.

One Umo-less evening like other swimmers under the eye of our coach—among them Milt three lanes over pissed off at what he had a hunch I was about to do yet perhaps also at the stopwatch unobtrusively thumbed by Coach—this resolve of mine and impulse to enlist found, looking back down at me from the arched ceiling upon this body of mine that shouldered the last two hundred meters of back-and-forth backstroke laps, a map of things drawing him away that I kind of knew about Umo; but with one new space like an absence we shared and in the whole ceiling and surely in no one point—and all this could be just about backstroke, you see, its exposure reaching back for the water yet for the onward end of each lap I had somehow moved my sister Em one night by describing, even if you reach too hard and pull a tendon. Halfway down this topography I placed the metal church that had been designed “by the Eiffel tower man,” shipped in pieces to Baja to a town on the Gulf side, though perhaps no less incredible Umo's job to deliver there a load of bottled water, dozens of folding chairs, and, to be assembled, a wrestling platform with mats heavy as lead. On my left, meanwhile, a city that, unlike my uncle's in his rumor about Umo's wrestling, I could name—Tongchuan. Where like a crack in the plaster I could almost make out the path hand-in-hand skating at the annual ice festival, of Umo and his father, a skilled porcelain worker later employed at an industrial ceramic plant making red and white floor bricks side by side with a mysterious American: until Umo's father had apparently disappeared, a Manchu patriot yet somehow of one of the minority tribes and hence earlier a weaver, who years before had carried off from her desert village in Inner Mongolia Umo's mother-to-be who Umo said had been arrested for digging up rhizomes of Goldthread, knowing the old medicines, and this only a few months before the boy had left.

Backstroke another time, I thought, or space—forget that old sweep-hand stopwatch that anyway wasn't timing me at the moment. Breathe the open air of backstroke. Was Umo coming back to East Hill? Was that what I had had to offer? The dive I went up too straight on and so came down too close to the board when I was just sixteen injuring not only my chest but perhaps my heart and making me board-shy drew me this evening to the ceiling, a light up there perhaps, a threshold dividing me; backstroke a dive itself paused exposed to the ceiling with everything paused behind and below from which I must get away. My way of backstroke is to look into the top of my head or with each arched reach quartering left or right trusting my lap to signal itself with a recoiling wash and a “loosening” of the water and over one shoulder or the other the corner further and sooner or closer and later my lap destination always known by some ceiling sign or blemish or crack knowing also how many strokes add up, though distracted once by Milt as he breathed turning a goggled eye at me three lanes across going the other way though I could catch it on the next lap because he'd been experimenting with breathing advised by Coach on alternate sides, to check his roll. My ceiling still there whichever way I went displayed still more Umo lives, which I woke my sister up in the middle of the night (my family almost) to describe and she said, full of sleep, that nothing was “upended,” no person, no village, no war, no water, and drifted off, loving me. Two new guys at the recruitment table knew him when I inquired—yes, he'd been there. And? I said. And? they replied. Wanted to know if the Rock music under the table had been picked for a reason, the new sergeant allowed.

His ever-returning grandfather, the miner near Mukden, admired the Japanese—their culture, their work or at least as a hobbyist the oracle scripts inscribed traditionally upon the curved surfaces of tortoiseshells. And that September night in 1931 he was on the train blown up in fact by the Japanese invader to look like the work of a nearby Chinese garrison. His longing to visit Mexico, grotesque if you know the governing classes there and unspeakable sidewalk misery guttering its bowels, seems fulfilled quite unexpectedly in the map of Umo's arrivals before his thirteenth birthday.

Why should I, looking not back or forward, have plotted these facts upon the East Lake ceiling measured, lap by lap, one evening before my enlistment? One reason was that Umo had stopped showing up. Was it our coach's war talks to the troops, or was it me? That Umo deep in the South passed through once upon a time and survived an unheard-of factory town Teziutlán where they were losing out in exports from Chinese over the water and blue-jean maquiladora closing down—and had found his way up into the highlands from Vera Cruz and Tierra Blanca and, avoiding Mexico City, trekked at thirteen through farmland and chill and rain to the Pacific coast of Mexico would have been already incredible if to him had not accrued the mantle and distance of an Acapulco cliff diver, which I knew from him he never was but felt he could become if need be.

A hundred and thirty feet above the sea at La Quebrada—The Gorge—arms outstretched let him be seen from the hotel he briefly and off the books worked in some capacity at, by freeloader tourists who haven't paid their seven dollars to watch at the cliff, because Umo
could
have done that dive with his talent; instead, watching from way below a diver miss his aim into the twelve-foot-deep, thirty-square-foot rock-bound sea pool, Umo had dived in to rescue this forty-year-old champion who came out with a bloody, shark-size gash along his leg and belly, ripping his white suit. The father, it turned out, of a blind child who made boat models, canoe and outrigger and Bengal flat-bottoms with bamboo mast, one of whose small masterpieces the father had given to Umo, a wanderer who always made a mark where he was or on the move, and once, narrowly quit of China, with nothing to do but “sit on the windlass and sail” on a coastwise Burmese sloop out of Rathedaung built by a Bangladeshi entrepreneur of hard, dark, porous wood from the Chin Hills, though I tried to trace the boat, like Umo's trip, too late to learn more than what I here set down. Umo, a wanderer even the night we all were to meet at Cheeky's to surprise-celebrate it was not clear what—just being alive.

But by then, and that earlier evening of the ceiling, my old friend Milt's lane-rage, the stopwatch, perhaps an absentmindedness my dad imagined in me from my diving accident and before, I'm not only distracted hauling myself out of the pool as on the far side he's showing Milt the time cupped in his hand, his other on Milt's shoulder in praise, yet then snapping a finger in my direction; I'm also a fool once more thunderstruck by an overlooked fact of my overhead geography: coming from China the Pacific route how in the world would my friend Umo have arrived on the Gulf of Mexico at Vera Cruz?

And with his talent, China would want him.

Maybe diving got him known.

Except it did not matter any more than whether my dad had really gone fishing on the Baja trip or met on business the speechwriter Nosworthy and his 60s Porsche with cocoa-matting on the floor, for the speed of light, my poor teacher tried to persuade us and himself, is constant no matter which way you're going or how fast. And Vera Cruz was up there on the pool ceiling left behind like someone's unknown war as I left that night in a hurry, my face, chest, withered fingers unrinsed of chlorine; the payphone at Adams near the Interchange in my hand to call Liz and her car, yet before she can pick it up, back on the hook because I had won something in my laps of wandering—an absence—my course unfolding secure inside me—Umo or no Umo—though that night my father might wonder for a time what had happened. Though not that I would become smarter or readier for others in my trek. And what he thought of me remained clear, though what? When I was far away my sister—her voice, exact (to me), eccentric—e-mailed the void.

A phone call comes back from the season of my enlistment as if I control the world, two weeks before, in fact; though mustn't it have been earlier? I had been speaking with my uncle about college and the war. He had never risked his life that he knew of. A private person, childless, a weirdly satisfying conversation with a family member considering his looks, round face ladder-like body as if an extension might come into use released, and he had asked if I would go with him to an old black-and-white film about World War II bombers over Europe, and I had said, “Low budget?” half joking but had no intention of going to the movies with him much less in the afternoon. By coincidence we were comparing notes about picture-taking when I took a call though it was about his because he did a lot of family videocam and I didn't even own a digital. I had a little Canon automatic actually in my hand as I took the call and it was a practiced voice on the end of the line said they were an Army agency and was I Zachary? The Army? I said. They understood I was a pretty fair photographer and (my uncle raised his eyebrows and kept them raised) were offering a Specialist assignment should I enlist. I said I was nowhere close to being a pro and had been told so by a member of my family who should know; but it didn't sound like how the recruiters promise you Tahiti—it was praise over the phone and the phone is powerful, and, hanging up, I shook my head as if mystified by my distinction, and my uncle and I went on about college but he was dying of curiosity and I let him be.

Except to say it had been the Army calling. And after my uncle had said I was quite a decent guy (as if that had been in question), I asked him a personal question that all but stopped him: Had he ever been in a fistfight? He had the habit of frowning and smiling at the same time and I thought I had found Christian people doing it a lot, maybe it was me—why, a wedding photographer friend of my mother's who had fulfilled a lifelong dream by going into the firearm business, had a nose like Dad's, high, bony, a pointed tip, look out but…(Imagined himself a gun, my sister said, I remember her mystifying words, “Vulcan begat me, / Minerva me taught”—a reader at three in the morning? she read me poems as if to my extended body—that one a riddle for some kind of gun.)

And so until a critical conversation with a captain about certain shots months later I gave little thought to that phone call (except that it was odd if not improper, mysterious as the clearness of my prior will to enlist, the offer a Specialist benefit I'm prequalified for if I signed a Reserve enlistment package, which at first and because of my uncle's presence I felt no desire to do). I thought of sending my dad a shot from the outskirts of Kut, or of music—that's how I thought of it—an Afro-American GI, scar down his cheek, earphones in hand, listening with his friend to “Let There Be Rock” just after he said it would make his last day worth it and Ghostface Killah rapping about having to pay the rent; I sent photo to Cheeky for Umo case she knew where he was, along with my long-traveled digital shot a gray whale's fluke subsiding into the sea (his license plate). I recalled the Mexico trip with my father when I was ten, the dumb shots I just shuttered one after the other and the humbling cut I took from him without a peep, though the snaps were not much but something else, it had come to me, sort of true how you can let yourself get distracted in the middle of…and came back years later during a dive…because…it was about waiting and patience with him and to my mind the hidden instant you couldn't ever pose that didn't really exist except in a snapshot was it (?) and even then you couldn't count the time even in memory which was all I thought I had when he took the camera away from me. So there was a positive side.

The week he went to Baja and came back not himself and talked to me, it was of water (yes, yes, what chemical event could move it briefly uphill) and of underground delivery systems they were brainstorming, tricky stuff frankly “if not quite over your head” (but wasn't it me he came to), a thing on the move I felt in there somewhere.
Like
a weapon, were his words. Yet as if I should speak, when what did
I
know, and he was the one. And though it was said to have surfaced in the newspapers like some 4
^th
dimension of information peculiar to half-hidden forces about the time I resolved privately to enlist (despite what my sister had passed on to me though this was from Bea, the Italian wife of the Mexican motel man, Corona, one of my father's Reserve connections), I never came across word of it; not that I read the papers, each day's revelations superseded by the next.