Cannonball (10 page)

“You don't dive no more?” Umo said. I said I would tell him sometime because… I didn't know why, but I would. We passed a school where some Hispanic children were sword-fighting. And a bicyclist headed the other way on the sidewalk but stopped, and shouting at somebody—or she passed us, it seemed. Umo drove fast but didn't seem in a hurry. We passed a stand with lemons stacked up skewered it looked like on a stick near the beach in Chula Vista, Saint Louis Blues on the radio,. Hear that? I said, the Ethiopian army used that as its battle song. I said this was where I came in I wasn't going on into Baja and I had to get out, and I would take the bus back. “There's something funny going on,” Umo began again, braking politely. He needed me for something.

Once you'd decided, he didn't try to change your mind. He stayed with you, though. With
it
or you. The big decision coming up, I thought I might not see him. You might call him kind, but he was not kind. Kindness would be a favor you impose or so it seemed to me, my hand pressing the door handle down, the street a moving belt. I said that I might enlist. Was his politeness a falling-out with me? Strangely, he said to give his best to my sister, whom he'd never met and I awkwardly said my sister wanted to go East to college.

Was he right about my dad? Did Dad keep this noncitizen kid Umo for future use?

The speechwriter had moved on from Sacramento to Washington, DC, my mother advised me, to bigger things if he played his cards right or other people's. I was sitting on the living room floor thinking, and my sister kissed me on the top of my head as she did our dad when he had come home and was being himself—grilling me sometimes. She said, “With him it's the Olympics, not any old
war
, don't sell yourself short.” I said if she'd been at poolside and had heard our war called Fate after swimming prac—

My sister was waiting for her boyfriend to honk, not that he had a license, and the two-toned horn outside cuckooed her out the door, his sister was taking them to the movies, and she was gone but had a second thought knocking on the porch window and up close I could almost hear her words like an SOS or see them like a kiss,
He used you
.

Up so close I could almost decode in a ring, an aperture of dark light inside her mouth, what Umo had said to Dad about me that very first day at the pool after the quick, irritating phone call.

Dad had someone's ear (like a business person for a moment cleverly resigned to the nuts and bolts of knowing people); it was a phone call or two you were invited to hear at home his side of. “Thank you, Storm… Well, I don't know about
that
.… We're all in each other's debt, Storm.… Thanks, you keep the faith too.” Once, the same Storm asking about a maxillofacial injury he had sustained at the hand of a spokesman for a Christian mortgage concern who took exception to actually perfectly supportive remarks about our Lord's entrepreneurial skills. It was future deals (even just Sacramento-ish) or business and sport “at our level,” and some other plan I did and didn't want to know about. Faith in business trips now, their achievement mysterious practically in advance. Sacramento and, I heard, Washington on Olympic business would pay off. Why didn't I want to know? Hadn't his annual Reserve stint come and gone without his taking time off for it? I didn't ask. It was not what I needed to know. I understood that my father had drifted away from something or other. Maybe my mother, who planned a “birthday do.” Probably not.

But that name—why, it was “
Storm
” Umo had heard phoning Dad's somehow- not-turned-off cell at the
pool
!
Stom
, Umo said; “Stom”? I asked.
Wind, rain, thunder, lightning
,
flood
, Umo said the words; was he kidding, and the language game in
his
hands? “Oh
Storm
,” I said, and before long had understood it was the man's first name (pool money, I thought, but also the guy who wrote speeches for others). How long ago that phone call? And maybe I with the best will in the world, war-bound, had done the drifting.

I had resolved to enlist. A long-standing impulse, and my secret. I am standing on the beach and my sister's boyfriend has stomped off somewhere, a kid. I am standing behind her, my hands on her shoulders, one hand comes up to touch mine and draws it down an inch or two. Time to go. Do I have the sequence screwed up? Prophetic. Touching her, you see things. It is months later. And I think of sending Umo a shot from the outskirts of an ancient Middle East city, of music was how I thought of it, sand in my eyes that windy day of the future—an Afro-American GI, I imagined the scar down his cheek, earphones in hand, one ear mutilated, listening lost in concentration to “Let There Be Rock”; I would send it to Cheeky for Umo instead in case she knew where he was, and I had a picture in my mind of his license plate: a gray whale's fluke prophetically sinking into the sea. And some rowdy moments at a party, some words we'd had.

I have said Faith. My mother's I might mean, or that we were a family. And her sister's, who with my uncle joins this staggered history from a hopeless angle. They followed Sumo wrestling in its traditional Japanese form as so many American married couples curiously do (was there any other?). But they paid twelve ninety-nine a month for the Sumo channel as it aired in the border region through an offshore competitor, and they celebrated both the Thursday night bouts during the season in those days and the Sunday night reruns of bouts they remembered in as much detail as a shopkeeper in Sapporo (though how much could there be to remember?)—the chants, the quick side-step and shove, or grabbing the other guy's silk belt, the gravitational scale of budging that reminds one of the consequences of going wrong in small things. My aunt at least shared my mother's uncanny devotion to the War even before it began or had been foretold in the President's dream, and even seemed (though I'm slow on the uptake and probably wrong) to substitute in her normal use of “Him” for Jesus the Chief Executive after a press conference that had devolved into mostly an exchange between the President and one correspondent down on his right in the second row.

Imagine my reaction (and that I kept it to myself, I told my sister) when my uncle had heard of Umo, whom they regarded, sight unseen, as an alien upstart whose underground reputation as a wrestler, whether we're talking bastard Sumo or worse, not yet subsidized by commercial TV in La Jolla and Nueva Tijuana's new Micro Casas on the east side and further south in Guerrero Negro, Las Palomas, and a town with an imported metal church near the Volcano of the Three Virgins, was at the approximate and “Baja” level of cockfighting and human sacrifice. What
was
rumor, where did it come from? My mother, in reply, looked at me as if I might as well drop dead (as she would look at Dad, who had been much struck with my uncle's rumor though they had been discussing my aunt's pistol like the old German model).

A wish that it be so, I thought, in answer to my own question. Like faith, it came to me. Though nothing like why I might enlist. And far from why my father evidently had managed to resign from the Reserve. Why had I almost failed so long ago tenth-grade Math with
my
at least average brain, said my mother. Careless, I said. My sister, kneeling on the porch swing, hand on my shoulder, told me once that when I explained the hare and the tortoise riddle to her she had just gotten her period for the second time and she thought I was a math genius, but then “our two and my two make… I dunno,” was what it came down to. And that sister and brother no matter how close don't talk like that.

My father lacked faith in me, she told me like that. We were alone in her room, and she would have shut the door if she'd remembered. I watched her expressive mouth, which knew how to stay closed. It could fix the peculiarness of what she tended to say. Then maybe we held hands like “comrades.” We were in her room, the green glinting rock on her bureau, the penknife she would use to sharpen her drawing pencils. Blunt she was though not like Umo, then with a secret unsaid between us if only the future. It wasn't that I should come out of retirement, she said, and dive; but…(did it matter? I thought).

“Every day,” was all I said. My sister knew what I meant. Something I did. Or an aim. An action you just did, that was it. Was it inside the other major major things we were employed in? It was like what I would do in life and out of these little things I had with my sister. And what had she meant, almost soundless from the other side of the porch window, that he had “used” me? I understood her mouth, as when she read to me.
Dad
(she would say) always remembered my asking, Why a half gainer? What was being gained? Advance, retreat, I thought, and the best tactic was both at the same time.

“Oh he speaks of you,” she said, as if I didn't live there any more. “A Mr. Nosworthy tried to reach him and asked for
you
.” The caller had called her “dearest” (?). How did he get off doing that? And said they'd “done the best to get the best.” This Nosworthy was the Sacramento speechwriter now based in Washington. I know what Milt and my mother thought, and Liz, in her own casual, local way: that I would please my father. “They don't want you to get a swelled head.” “Right,” I said. “Swelled head about what?” she said. “Right,” I said, “water on the brain.” What did he want. It was my father. My sister had faith in me and more, and she asked why I would go, and looked at me. “Maybe oil well fires, rivers, bridges, soldiers, children, desert roads, pontoon bridges,” I said. I told her maybe it was route-clearing I wanted to work on, memorizing the location of suspicious trash heaps, scoping garbage piles for buried shells, maybe that was all.

I looked in vain for Umo these weeks running into early November—the war launched months ago without me—Umo gone for all I knew or anchoring a Mexican brigade to that desert front (though the intelligence we were getting you had to put through a strainer, as The Inventor was fond of saying). Why had the man Nosworthy asked for me? As far as I knew he had put my father in touch with the Olympic Committee. So my father lacked faith in me? We know things in the absence of evidence, a housing judge turned television chef and grief counselor was to say to me two years later on the eve of the Hearings, having read it somewhere. And that is faith.

My father's faith was flooded with evidence, and could seem little more than his Olympic ambition. He had paid his dues and had a payoff coming. Or this the speechwriter who put words in the mouth of Chairmen, Governor, even lately Press Secretaries and, I understood, a Vice President assured him. I knew where my father stood: on training, on swimming (what he would say about their work I could tell teammates in ten seconds), “putting it all together,” chain of command, athlete's paid expenses, free trade (about which I had learned a thing or two from Umo), Congressional committee hot air, taking the Fifth, will, driver courtesy, his brother-in-law's videocamming and couch-bound spectator Sumo, and so on—so much I knew of him.

My sister knew me. She was moved, I could tell, that I'd asked our dad where really this country that he loved
was
—here, there. She had stopped practicing “Für Elise” and we were on the stairs and she made a sound almost like a laugh and at the top gripped my arm hard, the same fingers that had just been playing the piano: “I have no life but this,” she said. Brought me into her room to show me the floor, magazines spilling out of bookcase stacks, Halloween costume catalogues, mail-order out-of-dates, bike trek, worldwide directory of swimming coaches our family sort of was in, me and my dad she said and had once read the entry to me, some of it, a pine incense lingering from yesterday in the room. “Contentment's suburb,” I know she said.

Catalogues and all had been stacked on the bottom shelf of her bookcase and she was going to throw some out; but she shut the door and, eye contact with me, shook her head (I knew, at what I'd said to Dad), my little sister, I'm deafened by my ears thumping and I'm two years older, fifteen going on sixteen, and what could I hear?—had she changed her mind about the stack on the floor? Up close a tiny bit taller than she'd been, darkest curly hair in a let-it-grow phase all over the place, and she laid one arm around my neck, cheek upon cheek as if we were dancing (and was saying something), I know, and I heard it out loud—“…to lead it here”—but then forehead to forehead, nose to nose as we sometimes did giggling years ago when we were eight and six, seven and five, but she turned her cheek I think so her nose was along
side
mine and we kissed. Or I kissed her. Not hard either; to get it done. I held her hand, fingers in fingers but someone would be told someday—

as when we camped years ago at Coon Hollow three to the tent near the river and held hands across Dad's sleeping-bag feet at the other end of the tent and even rested them on his ankles and she whispered how funny his bony nose stuck up and we saw outside the tent, I realized, to, we thought, animals nearby and to the sky, even all that could happen, and we heard a train, and she remembered a train poem Mrs. Stame had also given her class that I had mentioned.

And I sensed now in her room she had opened her eyes, this very slightly chapped kiss, seconds long, was all there was to it, a smell of wool and concentration I knew again, but I had to give her another if she was doing research getting ready to be kissed by her fourteen-year-old “boyfriend,” and how could she remain that strange to me that my genes kicked in? It was almost the same kiss with a blindness to it, a thought, or privileged, hot, casual, and the door handle jarred the quiet, the door flung open upon her curtained room, yet she held with her lips for just a moment my lower lip, my mouth, for one more breath of time, infinitely small, eyes half open, that held, sealed, covered the thought, and my hand moved from her back into the back pocket of her jeans, and I knew she grasped what had happened to me though she hadn't seen me except once or twice through the shower curtain since I was eleven maybe, and my father in the doorway I realized bore a striking resemblance (only as a type) to my sister except that for a moment of extreme and helpless courtesy he didn't know what to do, nothing much to criticize—well I don't know about that!—and we didn't say a word; just couldn't feel bad.