Cannonball (19 page)

for I suspected under these waters beside which I found myself, under the great tray or vessel of the pool itself, another level down or two, ran what I had been sent for to shoot—to witness, that is—where a branch of the vast desert well system passed by for the palace-builder's onetime use and now for ours that we might deliver safely cradled the truly New capsule testimony to our Man and faith in what we were doing here and “next door” with benefits for all, or down there just some sewerside den.

I would not shout out I thought to Umo, he had made his stately approach and had given his trust to a strange diving board and I wouldn't have my friend—targeted?—distracted as I had once been, yet found fixed in my throat dread or a power thrust into it of plural cry or covenant the silent question from my eyes and mouth
Why're you here?
—virtual Hey Momma somewhere recalled song that my sister or (that was it!)
Umo
would have understood, hearing in this split delay or vocal two-note chord already, before Umo had launched his upward, arms-flungoutward trip like a vanishing crane white above its black flight feathers from some depleted tundra bog in the far north, the stab of the accountant's voice at me, “Hey you're bleeding.” Words come just in time to be part of what I couldn't say quite, or only hear, the
come in handy
my father had summed up Umo in—and knew what had stung my arm arriving at the palace and reaching to touch the pillar's fluting, and presently what I had seen on Storm's pants and felt of impossibly even myself in his sticky palm.

And hearing in my head, arm, throat, fingers of my left hand that had drawn the tiny camera from my shirt pocket so that I was double-taking after first bringing my left hand to my chest then out again, Umo's participation in a moment I didn't grasp (except as I guessed they had promised him some corner of citizenship) and never taking my eyes off Umo calling to him only in my
mind
, my
mind
, to slow down, pause, in midair so we could talk, I stepped back flinging my other arm that was holding the clunky Army-issue videocam back around behind me half-knowing what I would strike and hearing as if I had detonated it the explosion from the M4 fired by the small dark Specialist its aim deflected because it's a free country and you can always try—and in the corner of my eye aware only afterward of the accountant falling shot; for the dive I had never seen Umo or anyone try—from its surge and peak and sudden all but yanked and independent half twist and the surprises that followed it called up from the depths the gross counterpart of its own folding and unfolding and fall to be all but met by a concussion from below the diving well, bursting, bulging like a huge toilet flush or great bubble of oil from the diving well, bombed definitely from below as Umo was to have entered the water feetfirst, his joined legs, feet, and pointed toes all one, and a flying splinter of shrapnel like a shuttering split second tore a piece of his shoulder, expansion beneath and all around us as he would have made his entry into the vanishing water, yet the diving well section of the pool gave way, not inward at first—a gulp of force drawing up a gush under pressure, a bulbous blossoming water sucked where it came from yet at its ashen, pinkish rim for a split second not moving until following the first souvenirs of tile, cement, chrome, and human material, a leg and foot (the bald man who'd been floating in the well perhaps), and my friend's vanishing form, the pool water largely draining out into the disaster area where Heavy Metal music resumed, never having ceased, spinning, coming up like what my friend and his team had come here to tape GIs listening to most of them and talking about this badly served-up war the wages of which were regularly paid out of experience to guys and women in sums of money quite modest because experience is almost beyond price, being a necessity like water, though what the terrorists had been after I had to figure was not swimmers or palace but the arriving Scrolls, and had a second explosion boosted the first or aftershocked it or was it still the first?

And the poolside faces and their bodies all so contingent, looking like bearing weapons's the job in itself, turn this way and that shepherding nowhere in particular the rest, who might just be the voices all around in the still watery areas of alarm thickened by risk falling at you and away like speeds through some darkness of the noise, new to me in a threatened building. Denizens crowded about the near side of the pit left by the blast, my wrist was wrenched and the camcorder that I had put another notch in when I struck the rifle behind me like a backstroker in a busy lane was gone from my hand. I turned and went after the guard behind me but the big woman standing in the accountant's watering blood steered me with her rifle another way, I was not to follow the small woman in oversize combats who at the swinging doors turned, rifle stock braced against her ribs her finger ready, my Army cam in her other hand, startled understanding across her cheeks: “Nobody on the high board after 1300 hours,” she said, she was backing, half not believing what she was doing, through the doors into the stairwell where a crush just visible not coming in or out nor loitering ascended from below—she said something else about the diving board.

Where I overshot is where I still am, he and I. Thought where is he now? A dive divided. Yet they could have their plan and that company camera I guess set to auto-iris whatever they figured was in it. My job blown but not by me, still mine even my own I hoped to do if I could find my way. The gray pool a current with a sideways wash evacuating toward the pit opened by the blast, I am addressed by a swimmer standing up to his shins as if the associate of Nosworthy up here curled on the tiles undone by his own blood didn't exist, asking me what I had thought of the dive—“was it not two or three combined?”

“Always,” I think I said.

“Quite the diver.”

“A brave diver,” I said, so stunned.

“He want you to veedeotape.”

“No, he wanted citizenship.”

“Citizen!” The man vaulted onto the tiles, built like a wrestler with lethal eyes and looked like some Russian soldiers I had photographed at an airfield in the south in Wasit playing soccer and dolls with little kids; physical, broad-faced, he had the blond brush cut, small ears close to the head, and the blunt blue eyes. “Dey will take you for enemy combatant if you hang out with wrong people. Hang
out
with a target…” his shoulders shrugged forward, you know what I'm saying was what he meant.

“What?” I said forgetting even to turn away from him. What had the guard making off with my videocam called back to me: something “diving board” and “nothing happened.”

The man bobbed his jaw at the smoking pit, what had been the diving well. Human sound loomed up from somewhere below. “I think he had no choice,” said the man. “Think what you like,” I said.

“He was competitor to the end,” said the man. “He's my friend,” I said. “He's a great diver.”

“Nothing break his concentration. Unless his own death.” The man laughed. “He was your friend.”

“Is.”

He looked past me with his lingering hair-trigger alertness, this civilian adviser or reconstruction hustler, as I took him to be, on the margins. “Go see what's left of him,” the man said, then thought better of it: “That dive,” he said.

Three point something, high degree of difficulty, I was saying from somewhere in myself, a wish to be accurate, self-important——

“A simple dive but den a tweest…and den—”

“—but tuck
then
layout then
pike
before entry—he's known for his entry.”

“You know this stuff,” the man shifted tactics. “So tell me, under this kinda deal could
you
…?”

“I damn near killed my—”

“This kinda pressure—”

“—killed myself once,” I said.

The man squinted. “Your
self
?”

“Oh I let it happen.”

“Ah well…”

I heard the killer contempt, yet I was on my way, I was stricken and needed to get to my job but speak words.

“Somebody…,” I began.

“Een meedair,” said the Russian softly with a Russian clairvoyance quite poisonous.

“Yeah. Somebody shouted.”

“Een meedair,” the Russian said.

“That's right.”

“A dive, a diver. My sympaty.”

I dropped the mini into my shirt pocket and freed my hands, supposing that the soldier who had been pointing her rifle at me and had used it as a prod that had originally brought me to the edge of the pool, was behind me and my best way was through the pool, yet free of the videocam the woman in oversize combats had taken with film inside but had said what about the diving board?

“Like lights going out,” said the Russian, almost a memory, but Russian. “You are upset now, what you have seen, you are crazy, I think you are involved.” Nearer my age than he had appeared, “He was
my
friend too; it can drive you nuts,” he said dramatically. “And then?” I said.

“You should have that seen to,” he said; “you came in here with that.” He laughed, it was the dark wet stain where my arm stuck to my upper sleeve. He thought I had put two and two together about him, something he had done.

He was quick only.

He turned away toward the changing rooms. “We better get outa here,” he said.

I squatted supporting myself on my hand and jumped into the shallows and a tremor seemed to spread from my footfall upon the rust-streaked bottom and was my nerves claiming territory. Over there in what was left of the diving area, they were trying to clear the fools away from the great rupture in the floor that had carried the drain down with it. “You're done,” the blonde said, meaning my job, I thought, and the muzzle-sight at the end of her rifle barrel came my way from above as if it would target me sideways and the barrel struck the camera in my shirt pocket hardly bigger than a coin, I felt it clear across my chest scar. I kept my hands off her rifle, walked through it, and kept going.

The Russian said wait a minute, he was the fool who makes a practice of not being one. I had seen him from a car, a truck, yes maybe my one trip in an armored vehicle he was standing in the sun watching, listening somewhere. I stepped over the safety rope of small black-and- white buoys slack in the shallows and into the diving well, remembering him now with headphones. A bathing suit. California. “Hey you're the Russian.”

He came after me along the tiles at the edge of the pool. I made my way down the mostly drained warp of what had been the diving well floor, catching traction on split, broken grouting, slipping on the downward break, getting almost the hang of it, a ship, a section of deck, disaster. The Russian followed along at his level: “Hey. I am Ukrainian!” he shouted. He was trotting around the pool to the far side of the demolition area. “Ukrainian, not Russian!—Ukrainian.” “All the same,” I called across, heard a siren above.

I pulled a bather away from the edge—I might be Security, I waved several bathers back, an elderly Arab couple with small knapsacks, this wasn't a public pool. Close to the pit I would see for myself. Groans from below, clamor, rooms shifting and things piled and after-concussion and structural undulation abhorrently underfoot. I had thought there had been a second explosion as well. I would more than see what it was, it was what I could do for Umo, if I believed such truths, this rebel bombing, this accident, this the two of us coinciding and far away a steady thump of Rock ‘n Roll going down.

Someone in a bathing suit got hold of my bad arm, I lost my footing like a skater, now it was this nearly naked fellow who held
me
up, and then I had a sight that almost drew me far down in the smoke and structure though mysterious of what I seemed to hear—yet a visible glint of waters burning like sewers you just know are sewers and then gone from view as wreckage of darkness or raft of rubble slid across below, and under my feet and down there a yelling, a sieve of words even howled but only a few clear—“…up behind,” a bosun's order, reached me, and two voices I almost recognized, or one voice in trouble, struggling, so you thought “not with the men” wasn't the real words.

The Russian shouting…

But I would get down to where I should have been all alone.

“Why they shout at you when you dive?” he demanded to know. In midair, he meant. Why did he know something? Why would Umo tell him? He was directly across the pit from me now, past the diving board ladder and above the destroyed diving pool. “Ukraine,” he shouted. “When?” I said (“Last year! Always!”)—my passing interest involuntary, like future turning these tiles into the bread of his own life and schemes to be pursued as sheep follow the provider, and, papers, green card, everything in hand he won't forget, for he needed a deal to get here and will deal again. What would he do?—a “Russian,” after all. But he would come no further, his no one-way ride. He was talking at me, stopping for new tremors I took to be a sign damage was ongoing like aftershock. Had the insurgents overshot? Where were they? Oblivion?

“The dive, eet began like swan. He tweested halfway to face board and then doble somersault. Layout and tuck was amazing thing.” Russian had missed Umo's last pike.

The warped slope of tile shivered sideways, and the woman who had fallen again and I were pulled back. They had caught on to me, that I was not Security. I slipped, I fell.

“He was your friend, he was my friend,” I heard the Russian say, the link itself alert with lurking shifts, motive, plausible profit. “Changsta, they call him.” I crawled, lunged with a bloody palm now down to the lip of the pit that was peeled, burned like shit, jagged and the drained peach color of fat tissue exposed by cutting. “He bothered you,” I got out.

But then where I kneeled came to life, it got me to my feet like aftershocks homegrown, bad arm out for balance. It was the Russian calling: “What they shouted?” he had to know; and then “You have a seester” and then, “Was
hees
idea—” said on a surge of the same old music from below—“to film here.” I had it: La Jolla, Chula Vista—the truth like a friend's staggering indiscretion or the jump when something comes to you—for that was who this was: Umo's
boss
! the sound engineer—no, an assistant sound engineer, this Russian who had dared mention my sister, recalling her radiance recalling so vividly
my
Umo at La Jolla leaning on the fender of a truck watching paragliding as if the sun itself was buoyant: but if like Umo the Russian is traveling with that third member of the documentary recording team a deserter who would be viewed as an enemy combatant caught out after curfew, why hang here?