Cannonball (15 page)

I heard his interrupting as I ran for a bus that waited. A physical this
morning
?

You cannot fly but your body will sometimes feel spread out, there is so much of it, hand to mouth we say, hand, arm, shoulder, belly, and in the whole body with a little help from our friends there is not only a future but a gift to see it. I couldn't have taken my sister, who seemed all the family I had sometimes when I would lie beside her talking, speaking.

I had signed up knowing that my father weeks since had quit the Reserve somehow. He himself was surprised, he said, in moments of humor as soon as I was out the door, I learned; but at what? At himself that he'd resigned? That his son had enlisted? The two. “Happy birthday,” my sister said all over again across the table at him upon this last, she told me very late that night when I came home to tell her about Milt and Umo and the state cop Zoose and his sister dancing alone because her husband was in the Army, and the others. Was he surprised that I didn't break with him? (He'd resigned, because he'd been given leave to. In return for what?)

My sister and I that night and always in touch, and presently as fleeting e-mails would remind, tracking me not really. Yet, in my hopes of some secret employment, this person mine—her quaint hand on my heart, words on her lips, her words on my skin now and again, words in the dark touching my words, even as we heard the footfall outside her door at three in the morning pause and pass on. Upon which she regretted doing what she'd done when she had read me my father's entry in the Coaches Directory so long ago—omitting words, omitting words, her hand on my chest, perhaps waiting for me to ask, until I didn't but I had already read them, they didn't matter: you're diving into the wreck of this war she said that night of my enlistment when I came home to her, it didn't sound quite like her.

Others think they have plans for you but you keep a memory of your future free. The dive, its execution some say an infinite series of instants each bringing you somewhere as if you were stopped. No borrowed laptop at hand to tell my sister my orders came where I was billeted and apparently I would have company two mornings later. Meanwhile I waited in my own way. One afternoon I saw into a doorless home, not a rag of a curtain between me and that nearly impenetrable dusk and I was seen by faces, or in their alertness they were willing that I enter, perhaps it was to help the woman lying on a mat dead or sleeping even by spying. With what? A camera? A bow. In a hovel with a rifle bipod lying on a sandal in a corner, a talisman hanging on the wall, other people came in off the street, a gathering just to hear what might be said. Then I had to go. She was dead but her eyelids glued shut, willed, soldered, and I asked to use their e-mail, odd though the welcome seemed, and I asked as I typed myself in what “Arabiyoun ana Maisoon” meant and was told “I am an Arab,” and my sister wanted me to know that my 200 time that night of the ceiling had been a personal record.

Another day a boy asked me to come with him, he had American night vision goggles of the type for which replacement parts had run out. Along Haifa Street cavalry were now on foot patrol. One morning two armed men in shorts and t-shirts came running toward me but passed on either side. I photographed an old curved balcony, exposed a whole roll, and a man came out onto the balcony then. He showed his wrists, he was shouting to me, explaining. I thought it was about flex-cuffs so tight he developed gangrene in one hand. A picture of all that? Where was I going during the three-day wait for where I was going? Already there almost, impatient as a bad photographer (recalling, too, the photo of the burned-out trailer missing from what the captain had of mine) I heard of a sound crew taping/ recording GIs, I was just missing them.

Rather, a crew filming GIs and their music, word of three guys crossing the desert (a $900 cab ride from Syria!) to capture on videotape the listening habits of our soldiers. Headphones handed to me as friends at school used to, to hear “Raining Blood,” and aboard a parked truck where nothing was happening “Little Red Corvette,” and “Purple Haze” Jimi walking underwater, and in another set of headphones with this time talk by the numbers. “It's Too Late Now, We Ready,” Pastor Troy told it, and I had to ask someone three times if they had seen a big Asian kid in the sound crew till I got the attention of this plugged-in Specialist who said Plenty of Asians, tapping the headphone, grinning, “Weapon of mass instruction,” taking it in my stride, shaking his finger like a speaker, when a skinny little guy with rimless glasses said Yes he had “reconized” one of them; he turned away to his laptop.
Recognized
? I said; which one? I thought—but there was action down the avenue and in a warren of alleys, and I was on the run in mid-thought past a shut-down masquf restaurant, Wednesday I remembered the lucky day to eat fired carp guts, or hearing
Nineveh Street
I thought behind me, also someone's question behind me but up ahead Marines, spray-painting “Long live the muj killers” over a rebel sign in Arabic at the entrance to I didn't know what, dived for cover when a shooter moving from window to window opened up again from above. And I thought what “GIs” meant, and how headphones gave you out of mind out of sight. Yet Umo is here, I thought.

And the night before this odd or as I expected then routine assignment—an “archaeological arrival,” the captain had said in confidence—why did I feel I had no business here listening as though my life depended on it to the mumbled words of a swarthy redhead from a northern California military police brigade on a table, with a head wound, a bloody bandage all across his eyes, poor guy?—blood under the table.

My sister's lips upon one eyelid, then the other, then the first, dizzying (the touch itself another's touch to call me back beyond the dizziness), my eyes sore from party smoke, I recounted the droll farewell night in a whisper, if anyone here were still awake after The Inventor's ‘57 Bel Air (never guilty of the sloth on which its owner disagreed with some mysterious “Apostle” who had said sloth violated brotherly love) had picked the worst moment, delivering me at my door, to detonate two blats of backfire in our street.

Though no lights had gone on. Though my sister's face in an upstairs window welcomed me like a wife who'd been sleeping.

Who was there? she asked, sixteen and a half years old lying beside me, my shirt half-unbuttoned, a scent blurred and slept-on.

Well, everybody. Three little runaways Cheeky lets stay there; one smokes right along with her. Weed? Course not. Cheeky? It was her place not The Inventor's, out in North Wash. Up the street from him, a bungalow with a blue door, everybody was there.

Everybody? Well, Milt. Of course, he picked the right party to go to. No, he was mad at me. And
me
. You? He thinks we might go out. Milt argued with The Inventor—he was there. Well, the party was
for
him except—Right, it was an enlistment party it turned out. And The Inventor's two nieces and his plumber and the plumber's teacher of some kind, and a Mexican girl, very tall, lives in Chula Vista, husband they let him outa jail to enlist, a music guy worked for a Russian, got into some stuff; and
U
mo, who you haven't—Yes that night on the Interchange—You only saw him—Yeah—And I not since seven—This morning—Yeah—Who you haven't set eyes on, my sister began—Since seven this morning, I said. Your
physical
. I don't know how he knew what time it was, he lined up, they wouldn't let him in. The Mexican girl was a basketball player, she laughed and laughed (such a smile), a friend of Umo's. He thought he was going to enlist this morning. They wouldn't let him in. ‘Course they wouldn't, you're a team, said my sister. Did Milt know? He said why would he think they'd let him in, he didn't even have papers, better clean up his act, Milt said. Umo pulled out an old photo ID from Republic of China, Milt snapped it out of his fingers. He never
rec
ognized Umo, E said beside me. No, he did, I said. Oh he's a free—Yeah—A mountain in your way. Shoulda gone all the way down to Mexico with him, my sister said. You saw him, I said—Mmhmm, getting up into that—Hey, who was driving—? On the Interchange—Yeah you saw him climbing into a truck in the middle of traffic. Who was driving?

My baby clucked. She threw the bedclothes back and rolled over on me:
No
body, she said, nobody was driving. Her voice touched my ear, the mouth spread, a finger on my shoulder hours between night and dawn deepened like hope against hope And I told how Umo said,
Give my best to
…and grinned. Umo did? That's right
. Umo will go where you go, my sister said into my ear, that's the agreement. He's going to marry my sister, he said. Marry your sister? (she coughed against me, laughing) “Milt didn't like it,” I said. “
You
didn't.” Umo, I murmured. He's luck of some kind, said my sister. Mm hmm, and a friend, but he competes. He'll go where you go. He will? Yeah, a secret weapon. He'll follow you and—

She says in the dark,
I can understand
. You can what? I said. So go to war, you do your job, we'll do ours—words, music, I know she said. And
I have a navy in the west
.

Follow me? I got past the abandoned bathhouse which had served the pool of the hotel which had become the stock exchange, and there around the corner waiting for me (at this hour, when I had no
business
being out, the quick little woman from the Wisconsin Reserve brigade would ball me out in the morning, who had “found something” in my cropped shot of the Reservist arm-wrestling the mercenary in the beret) appeared not the skinny, hungry soldier with glasses who had “recognized” one of the crew filming GIs listening to music, but the black guy
near
him as smart as if he was in some disguise, who had joked about…—the headphones he tapped or music nation coming out of them, whatever—he was waiting for me now and shook his head like you never learn.

I said, “The film crew? Someone familiar?” reminding him. He shook again, “Police?” he doubted me almost. Hey
he
was the one with the side arm, I said. “Asked you before but you didn't hear, man,” he said begrudging his grin happy-paranoid recalling the afternoon or Bad Company for all I knew.

“Sorry ‘bout that. The Asian kid?” “You looking for him?” “If he's the one.” “Plenty a them.” “That's what you said this afternoon. And the guy you knew?” “He's
with
one.” “With an Asian—the guy you know?” “Knew.” “You don't know him now?” He shook his head, something bad, “Real big,” he changed the subject. “The Asian kid,” I said. “I thought he knew me, how he looked at me.” “The guy you used to know? The film crew guy? You knew him…?” “Down around Kut, down there.” Yes, I had heard. Kut? It was terrible, I said. “Took me for somebody else.” “Your film crew guy?” “No, the Asian kid. I thought he knew me, how he looked at me.” “Why would he know you?” “Right.” “What did he do?” “He should watch out who he works with, the other guy's wanted.” “Real big?” I persisted—“was he like, a teenager?” I said. “Asian kid? Lotta teens. Look at me, I'm older now. No kid left out. They knew about me when I was in ninth grade, nobody told the school withhold my file, no kid left unrecruited, like a track scholarship. You coming from Kut?” “That's it,” I said. “How about that.” I hung with my questions, there was a problem. “The film crew guy you knew is a civilian…” “Not then.” “Shows up
with
the Asian—” “—and not now,” my soldier decides to add. “Thought he knew you?” “Nine hundred dollar cab ride with equipment, I heard, like as far as from here to Cleveland.” “
Cleve
land?” “
Brook
lyn to Cleveland, sorry. Hey yeah they had a driver, Syrian cop moonlighting, he sat in front with him, the kid, bigger'n…—” My soldier, rewinding, had heard something.

“‘Did I have a
sister
?'” he said.

“The Asian kid?”

“I said sure.” My soldier snapped his wrist. He heard something. “War child, war child” was what he said—like a not great song—“and ‘was my sister my brother?'”

“Said that,” I said.

“Right. You could hear worse.”

“It's my friend,” I said. Soldier snapped his wrist, pumped his thumb. “You going back to Kut?” “How did you know,” I joked. “Said he was getting married to his brother's sister, he better watch who he works with, they looking for the other guy.” “Who, the guy you used to know?” “Unfinished business,” said the soldier clairvoyantly, and was gone, calling back to my “San Diego?” “Naw, Kut”—as if he had been deserted—burning his presence into some act to come that was mine; still taller turning a corner, he had heard me and was gone before I asked if the other guy was his friend. I was left with my thoughts and with tomorrow.

One of Umo's film crew, then, was a serviceman, I thought, though not
now
was a second thought, but why? Not a civilian now
either
, come to think of it. Still in the service but. What
was
he, this known man who might be using as an assistant a very young Asian, and there were three of them and maybe a fourth, a driver (maybe not).

I heard shots clear as kindling branches snapping, and I was certain that it was about my informant that they clustered like deerflies to sting his blood. When would they come after me? The whirr of bicycles in the dark and that double ring of one handlebar bell answering itself, and a third in some code unmistakable to one acquainted with the dark in these no longer bicycled streets curfewed five and a half hours nightly even for women in labor who had to get to the hospital. Locals lacking good radios fired their rifles to let each other know where they were when they patrolled the palm groves and here in town. Someone was coming for me in the morning.