Cannonball (32 page)

“You for
get
, Zach you for
get—
” a connection coming with Storm Nosworthy, who would see no way for himself but through me.

I hailed Wick, and for a moment hadn't recognized the blond-streaked hair of the woman whose kerchief not now in evidence had formerly seemed a token of some American religion even Muslim though I'd assumed she was working with Cap'n and “CEO,” but now Storm's voice gathered so in me the scent of virginsbreath and of my blood on his hand and some gross praise given in his cedared atrium in advance of my video-to-come, flights of stairs below, documenting my friend Umo's scheduled shooting, that, turning, I registered Storm's rage or madness only in its synched succession of grins that twitched some screaming code way inside the man somehow presiding in the words that reasoned firm as a priest's invoking
habeas corpus
, or villain's, tight as a lawyer's or parent's, glad as a politician's, modest as an athlete's, sanguine as generals' used to be, mysterious as a friend's or a false friend's, a doomed dominance and resource—these out-loud words pretty fast for Em and me but no, now out of nowhere breathtakingly like coup, like collapse, betraying here—

—like a blow to the chest—

—
Stom's secret weapon
!—“You forget
your
part in this—”—my sister trying to hear, to hear some complicity alleged with this ugly person—“the family that thought he was crazy and wanted to get hold of him mobbed in the street get him outa there, whom he disowned to go his own way—this leading Man from Nazareth ‘a more hands-on Jesus,' (?) don't you of all people recall? Not without friends, yet said, Be a passerby minding your business, but a virtual CE
O
, Zach? Your word, we have it on good authority, Zach—” “Zach?” Em says, an artist it comes to me who can put things together—“and that family, embarrassed, prudent, of
Jesu's
”—

—of course of course but…kill his own chances, to trap
me
? Storm?—

—when I had by now a way if not a job, my own and no one else's.

My roads not that remote, a couple of roads, a war apart at the same time sitting in two vehicles beside two future drivers I hear Storm still, meant for me his words: Civilians run this man's war.

And Jesus seeing profit ahead, your guy and mine, Zach, medicinal saliva and wind (the future of, respectively) you remember your own…
mem
ory, was
that
it for godsake? linked ovens, this Jesus one-on-one live—fighter and economist, private entrepreneurials, food-fasting and possibly fast-fooding, sensible take on capital punishment
when appropriate
, a very early, matching-grant Jesus where if you're not willing to work forget about it, sloth violates brotherly love, an
American
Jesus—what you said or are said to have said on the connecting ovens from you to your sister to your father, who was persuaded your fancy thoughts were redeemed by this Jesus's view that you don't beg if you can turn to, and against giving alms, he meant business, Zach, he had capitalized on what he had going for him, Christ had a job to do.

Em keeps watch but over
what
?—me at that slant of hers, getting it all in one short thought possibly, half-heard, the Scrolls ascribed to her brother, was that it? (Even to
her
through our
father
if she heard?) when the rest, or all I knew,
she
knew: 1) the arrival deep in the palace covered above by 2) a friend's dive, 3) disaster, 4) a cockeyed photographic record, while below 5) a questionable explosion to cover 6) a questionable project (to please an officially Christian government?) followed by 7) a deathly well current and now 8) back home uneasy phone calls and at least two break-ins:

but what can Em be processing now? We're equals (all but) and our father beyond his Reserve against mine cannot be much more of a father for her now than some use of me unknown to her but drifting in upon me—and almost not to be believed, his help, his confounded desire bringing him near some imaginary influence through this speechwriter from Sacramento Storm Nosworthy. But the root of the wind is water, I hear (from my sister, reading aloud). I was driving somewhere in two cars, true American, here in Calif, and back at the war, it was quite real.

The Law Dean touched Em's wrist smiling toothily but grew impatient; alerted, startled (even she), to hear the volume almost in rhyme of voices arriving from the lobby, she turned gracefully to direct the crowd debouching from the elevators down the broad, decisive hall at the end a plenary roomful of folding chairs, those who wait, those in profile who talk to their neighbor, something just to be here, surveying the wreckage of lunch.

Forget I had, / the things I'd said—home from the war, my sleep flooded by some of them. Undeniably said. How meant? Husky himself had asked this morning if and how I'd meant what I'd said, and once long ago Umo too; for Em and I had our joint angle of saying—and now my things had passed into Storm's listening system through my father, and not only—for in the elevator the Seal thug captain and my bothersome but this morning friendly critic Husky jazzing the real not dead-andalive Lazarus getting a strange reaction in Storm's eyes, brought back a friend jogging, gasping, crediting me with reminding him of what I must now think he had passed on in anger to the men waiting to train and perhaps question him that day.

Storm's voice and by contagion mine had reached a terrible hush like silence or unavoidable corruption or like the thought they rested on, and Wick, who had heard no more of what was happening than the others, approached now from the windows and near him the woman from this morning who looked so like my palace driver, and from the direction of the elevators and the hallway, the Law Dean, angry as she could be, who would draw us toward the plenary session where the afternoon Hearings, if not Storm Nosworthy's welcome fresh from Washington, promised to go deep.

I a source for the Scrolls.

I said, “If it's all from me suppose I go in there and say so.”

“There exist reasons not to. Your friend the diver's citizenship. Your sister,” said the man grasping my arm as he had the day I was shot. “To say nothing of your father—your name as a photographer. And quite apart from their
not
being, as you put it,
all
from you, many think the Scrolls in their own way are true. Isn't it what we're about?”

I had heard right. And here was Wick, and behind him the troubled person who hated me beyond even her call of duty as a coworker with white captain, black CEO, and whose brother—unless I was way off—served in an MP brigade. My sister hadn't moved from where the Law Dean had left her, her hand in her bag, while Storm was saying we go on faith in everything
else
…(?) “And the favor we ask of you, it would put a seal on all of this, Zach, a Presidential Seal of course but my seal my friend—the photographer of the Scrolls' arrival, and my word! what a twist your survival that day—your enlistment bumped into the Reserve as you know, and—” (“What's the deal,” I said bending confidentially close to his shoulder but Storm now like a show-off sharing some personal phone call or his half anyway for anyone within range) “—look, activating you we cut you a second tour, short form, go where you like, you got fans over there who you know will liaison a…a
deal
?—like—” Storm pointed to the hall—“the twist! People in there who can't wait to hear you.” Speak, he meant, of that dive at the Hearings today—Storm tapped me on the chest, my scar, the wound (if only my deluded father, working somewhere, probably in Colorado Springs, for USA Swimming, could be here!), “if I'd only been in time downstairs to see your entry into the well that palace day!”—the
deeffayronce
between me and Storm—and “liaison”? What meant liaison?—for like the future when it was only the past it came to me why he, as his eyes, their weather of prescience now dilated, wanted me back at the war, and he might not, like Em, have known that it had already been in my plans almost for its own sake.

His
, flooded by the clang that came down upon us now repeatedly final of the building evacuation alarm that caused people to look around them, inconvenient as an air raid rounding more responsibly with each strike of the clapper, a blame for its own sake—Storm's plans were overtaken utterly awash judging from his eyes, larger suddenly and you might have thought less unready for the great hands of the woman otherwise slight-looking crying, “
Deal
!” reaching over her head then down upon him not me, fists that being all about themselves and their fighting, tuck-position fingers riveted you wielding a hell of an iron bar it seemed but holding nothing. Well apart at the top; at impact together. Yet it was more the consuming clangor of the alarm set off near the brain that for Storm did away with the moment. This was only apparently so remote from any school fire drill alarm for Wick to line his “people” up (most not unhappy to be interrupted) and walk them to the third-floor stairs (when the alarm had gone off the day after my accident just as Wick had begun an account of calculus cure, though hardly thrown off his stride as Storm, his weather eye out for a tornado, surely seemed to have been).

For this present charge, this bell of sound was like the chaos or comfort it saved you from and it was this in those eyes of a man who'd indirectly murdered or meant to two friends of mine hardly countenancing the woman's blow I and somebody else and Wick tried partly in vain to deflect, that told you Storm's mind, if he ever in fact had read a page of the volume of stories on his onyx table in the palace, was too quick to hold a thought. And the thighs and belly too slow, the damage control shallow, sweeping; his a body that had sought always maybe a face to go with it, unfold from it, yet one afternoon a modest blunder touting Jesu's idea for a gray mullet and dogtooth grouper hatchery in a great pond drawn off from the Galilean Lake had got himself slugged by a Christian lender from McLean, Virginia, Storm sustaining the damage you saw, the face he had gained (appropriately in the lobby of the Willard Hotel in DC).

If not the bewildered eye barely flicked at the furious woman but penetrating the bell timeless for all its sequence, term, and alarm where it came from who knew, and what it meant, as we at once began to learn from the black officer I had been calling “CEO” absent some minutes but back to break his news first to my sister; since it was her car cordoned off.

Storm's eyes shocked in their irises by plans put off or worse—no more than that, no less. And by interruption, not fear. And not at all by blame which bewilderment at a thing shouted had once caused in me lifting off a springboard. My sister did not turn to me or the wide eyes of Husky at large looking for a friend, soon that afternoon to be found in my voice in the Hearings room, yet I found a look in her mouth and cheeks and hair cruelly alert as if she'd had her pocket picked by the man who had threatened her over the phone, all thrown into the days following. And I looked back at Storm—he at me, as he could, his bloody temple, the ripped fold at the corner of his mouth; but his eyes, the meat of his eyes—but really the moment
in
them waiting for a bandage, even as the emerging multitude facing another delay would stir, do something, get out of that plenary space or exit the building by emergency stair. Up and down and back again captain and CEO in their combats boarded the major elevator bound for the lobby to screen would-be attendees, reduce them to manageable numbers, just a job, less for Hearings' sake than to remind us who was in charge; and there was the garage.

A Heartland, if memory serves, almost unidentifiable but spotted by me thousands of miles away as a make of trailer seen in Chula V, the exterior door blown out, though, and the toasted styrofoam like bread, like tissue sandwiched between the weather-side thin steel plate and the inner-side vinyl. A raw hole in the steel where the dead bolt had been once lockable if useless against an intruder. A blown-out window aperture where just the framed head of a bald child of nine or ten had quit grinning as I shot, later to be framed out by the Intelligence processor as not germane to prove this mobile home a bio-facility.

My driver recalls what she knew of me, listens for what she's been told to listen for, watch for, this second time around. (Not “get you there” this time, but.) Expecting we'd first go south—to Kut!—but here we are, just over forty miles north of Camp Warhorse where they weld steel sides onto small and medium trucks that can support them, and memory serves to oblong a space of weeds and empty ground where the trailer once sat. It trusts my smart Specialist from Wisconsin to see the boy's face I describe in words, just where the hairline began scarcely fourteen months ago, hear him ask in English are you coming into his house, and hear as a joke, one is pretty sure, his
Don't get too close
. His village abandoned by its residents who were hardly that, having been forcibly moved in under the old regime.

No pictures so far? No pictures by the Photographer of the Scrolls? If only of their arrival by water, it is said. Like me, leaving and arriving,
after
and
before
merging like a war victim's real life, accepting her boat hook, her dumbfoundingly being there (for let your tool do the work according to our father's handy nostrum out in the garage), and a dry shirt and pants. Speechless that late afternoon and untrusting but not dead; speaking, if memory serves, only of Umo's feetfirst dive, of home, the two bloated books in my bag, and the color of winter wheat; and water, what it could do: she might have learned nothing of the jobs I did deep down in the palace though she remembered me.

Memory trusts her knowledge of anthrax, wells, hoopoe nests of olive-colored eggs, she knows also how they improvised claymore mines, knows the road, has a toolbox in back; memory trusts also her interest in, two day's drive at our pace north from here past checkpoints, a bridge by a river from which we could see a field of green winter wheat I had once photographed, she recalled. Because I had told her on the way to the airfield for my flight home the night of the palace bomb, I beginning to smell, drying out, alive and smelling not only of that, the fresh shirt she had given me reeking of cigarettes I had not smoked. Her who had boat-hooked me out of that rank well rush. Needing a wash dreadfully—and the boots and decomposing socks she remembers and actually told people. That I stank? No that there was a nice feeling, almost a confiding, without any. What people? Don't recall, she lies. (For what she told got back maybe clear to the top.) You were tired. Something about a third way—another route? But you didn't know where we were going.