Cannonball (28 page)

“Well,
there's
a job I won't get.” “If what?” I said. Cheeky held the catalogue up. We heard The Inventor at work in the other room. The envelope room among other things. Was my hearing newly acute over my disappointment the last months with photography if not sight itself?

“I don't
know
what.” She must keep on behind me, my amazing girl for this historical moment if I could put it together (but
what
job?). “If he's not afraid of you, what you know,” I said, and I saw the warped, mobile face she would read when she met Storm (very soon I saw), as, just last night, I heard her draped in a towel read to me, “My Tools took Human—Faces—/ The Bench, where we had toiled—/ Against the Man—persuaded—”

—where “Against” also means
anticipating
, and “Bench” itself did the persuading, it came to us;

and hearing The Inventor muttering like a priest I saw Storm's eye gravitate to hairs on a toilet seat, stained underwear on a threshold, damp, dark towel reaching across a tossed family comforter my mother had given me; yet I seem to have foreseen that it wasn't our intimacy Storm cared to use against us but my knowledge he must keep inactive though not me.

“You went to my place?” At the office was where she was when her friend Bea phoned. “Collect some a my things,” she almost couldn't say it.

“Were they there?” Gather together things. Books, closet, laundry, bathroom, notebook on the kitchen windowsill, necklace on the bedroom rug, God knows what else incriminating on the dark green comforter she had given me—“a green bed,” she called it, though she'd left me her incense holder, gift of a neighbor child made in ceramics class. “Oh
we
have that!” my sister took the American Coaches Directory from Cheeky. Ours I had seen last in her room at home, on the floor, and long before that heard what I'd heard, and left it at that.

“She said—”

“Beatrice?”

“Yes, quite a story you told.”

“Part of it.”

“She told me. From that photographer, our Chaplain, my God, it made me realize—” “Passing it on.” “So they need to silence him?” “I said too much.” “But he's dead.” “Between you and me.” My sister alone for a moment, was this why she'd come? or to use all this? For what? to set out at last? to leave? I knew what she was thinking.

“And he took me in his arms,” said Cheeky, “and hugged me and gave me this very book he'd brought all the way with him thousands of miles and risked his life taking and I was to take charge of it, from Mexico he wanted to travel light, and here it is.” (“And ‘the Other'? all that?” murmured my sister, for I took her hand: “If I only knew who it was.”)

The Inventor was back among us. He said: “I will show you what I have written down and I will read it out loud, it is yours, but, but…”—he was deeply surprised, almost quieted—“I have made…” He had penned the words on an oblong brown paper panel torn from a Ralphs grocery bag in letters still smaller than those of the Scroll scrap. It was late. What did I owe my sister, him, anyone? “…I have made a discovery!” he said. “But here is your own private and perrssonal scroull, you and yours,” The Inventor said, who seemed moved or leaving something out in advance, his voice urgent, disturbed, honored. “Listen,” he said:

“But the last part,” The Inventor looked up to see E-m, “where the Man from Nazareth speaks about the woman's cohabiting sex
part
narrs, is not in the Scrolls they have published.” The Inventor turned upon me eyes glitteringly darker and because foreign now all the closer to me his young friend. “I know it for a fact. Can your papyrus be authentic?”

The phone went. We heard it like a voice, a face, a reply, something right in the neighborhood. Should he answer it?

What did I owe him, please?

With the hand that held the Scroll scrap and the grocery-bag brown paper translation, our host pointed to the Coaches Directory (
Big as a phone book
, Milt had said): “It's yours. Take it. It is bad luck. We help them, then one day they don't confide any more. Therein is why Umo came here to…” (I took both pieces of paper out of The Inventor's hand as he turned away distracted.) “…to our part of the world,” he added. “His place is marked.” The phone call might be about us, I thought;
for
us. “Be back,” The Inventor said politely, going to take it.

What were they willing to do to protect the Scrolls? Was it from higher up? A height from which nothing real is felt? Unreal becomes real when it hits you.

I hugged Cheeky, her feelings, her bones; and what was left of her was what I smelled, garlic and orange and bread, her well-used skin, the coffee churning in her stomach that had passed through her mouth—and the frankness of her grip, the earth of weeds and iron. “We're outa here,” I said.

Who was the one who was dead but was thought to be living? I heard her ask, as I got the door open. She was holding the Directory against her. My brain is in the street, my hand on E-m's arm, I see that I will go back to the war.

My Specialist driver tells the tale of her car parked down the street. She had checked on it every little while. Stood back from the office window, smelling the captain somewhere. She was parked at an angle between a mud-matte Humvee and an old truck with double-plated steel siding a local pickup could never have supported, welded at Camp Warhorse up in Baqubah forty miles from here. The captain calls her. Three boys stop to look at the Chevy, her old Suburban, and the boy at the hood glances up uncannily at her window and the other two lay hands on the doors and the driver's door gives way (she can hear it even from here—and I want to know what the captain called her) and the boy is inside in a second leaning across the front seat, and the whole car blows and the boy at the hood is tossed against a wall fifteen feet back from the curb and the boy at the passenger door is aflame and not going anywhere, slowed down he looks darkly absorbed in the material of the car. She steps forward to the window (had he flipped the ignition even?). The captain wanders in and watches with her. His smoky hand on her shoulder, she resists a gentle pressure encouraging her to lean back. Did she have anything in the glove? The trunk, the back?—he might be asking something else. Is he kidding? “Do you not understand those boys didn't do it? They only tripped a wire (but where?). Car was waiting for me to open the door and get in, me. Who would do that?” “No one. It's the car,” said the man who had procured it and will procure a better one but thinks about it. Has she only one name?

A story to tell my sister one day—it won't have happened yet; though if about to, here to her beloved Honda, foreseen too catastrophically late—fuse wrapped into exhaust manifold is one way, drive around for a while let the charge warm up; though you can trip a car bomb with a phone and Em's cell sounds the first notes of the Fifth Symphony then caller hangs up as she thumbs Speaker—her notebook half under my foot, clothes and books in back, bicycle seat and half-empty suitcase in the trunk.

My sister said: “So he was dead, the Chaplain.”

She knew that, I said.

“How come
they
didn't? They're trying to silence a witness to the explosion—no, two explosions, you said—… Zach?—the second” (she thought a second) “…like a corroborating witness (!)—but all this time he's dead somewhere (?). Why wasn't he found?” My sister, looking through the windshield, eyeing the rearview, would answer for herself: “Because you took him with you. You were friends because you said you'd take him with you.”

Other way round, I said, I—Alive
or
dead, she said. I said I hardly knew why I hadn't told her. Not the first time, she said.

The fewer who knew the better, but tell her of all the people in the universe, I hardly knew why I couldn't when I was getting us into the water his body coming apart almost before I could haul him across the floor to the edge so when I dropped into the water he came down on top of my head.

It didn't matter, Em said. “On top of you?” She's amused, almost not there with me for once. I could feel the abyss, was it above or was it below? It's hard enough to make it in alone without somebody else unloading on you…and your ear all taped. She wanted to kiss, I knew. She slowed and turned and I leaned and kissed her at a slant and her mouth was moist and tasted of nothing but her.

Unloading
? It sounded like something else. I hadn't wanted her to see me lugging a body and then losing the body. “Water,” I said, “wait a sec—”—someone's voice
in
you survives their death—“‘Water makes many Beds,'” I began. Em went on, “‘For those averse to sleep—Its awful chamber open stands…'” Her mood again, her agenda today. I wondered how well I'd done at the Hearings.

“It was good of you, Zach.”

Beethoven's Fifth false-alarming again, Who's that? she murmured, and may have forgotten to ask what became of my cargo, my saved dead man, my attempted cross-chest carry, for she made a zigzag of residential blocks, she enjoyed it, a new route. The car was a mess inside, but she could drive, the tiny white scar on her right wrist came into view. Passed a couple of Craftsman houses. “I won't miss it; everyone wants to live here.” She might drive East or sell the car. We passed the bus. “You won't sell your Honda,” I said. What were we talking about? Were we putting off getting downtown or finding the way there? The Hearings, I said. I thought they went well for me but maybe not.

I was thinking out loud, Em too, driving, and together we're more prophetic it comes to me (and from the future) yet never again quite the couple. A trade-off, and we passed a playground with ceramic figures you entered and looked out of the eyes and mouths of—like Tarot, Em said (specific reference like her poets always with her—someone who'd actually built such things)—and then, “We temples build with human faces,” which made sense; we passed a school and a woman in shirtsleeves was leaning way out a window, and in a residential street a horse, a good sturdy quarter horse, a long cowboy sitting him, they seemed not to move and yet were headed in the other direction from us, the man's hands resting the reins on a snakehead pommel and I in this weird profit-stricken country like a great war-torn…body, I had said to the lost voice at the back of the Hearings room and what had he said?—that I didn't quite mean it with all my something or other I didn't get back to him; we passed a dumpster of rubble and fill and old painted planks and bare-ticking pillows and pure garbage waiting for pickup, and in our conversation maybe Em glad to have the windshield to keep her eyes looking through and the rearview: “The fresh paint ‘n all, Umo's gotta be somewhere.” “Inventor's hanging on.” “How does he live?” “Hard to see how they're plugged in.”

“There he is again,” my sister said as if it were nothing new. I twisted to look back. The rearview did not lie. The Inventor's old coupé ran a stop sign and just missed a car crossing like clockwork. When she'd said, “Who's that?” she hadn't meant the cell phone riff. “Em?” My sister wanted to deposit me and get back to her office, perhaps. “He wants to give us that Directory of Coaches and we have a copy at home,” she said. The Bel Air, though a loose-slung affair, was handling well, there is nothing to say that Hindus drive poorly, but I could see the driver's fierce eyes. I said we didn't know what he wanted when we were leaving, that call had come in.

“We have to get you back to the Hearings.” My sister slowed to pass a California Highway Patrol officer sitting on his parked motorcycle waiting. Did I remember the ten-dollar envelope I bought myself for my birthday that time? Em said.

I remembered showing it to her, resealing it, and giving it to Umo at the enlistment party. Did I remember what it said? I remembered a year or two previous citing it to Dad when Mom was calling the United States the Good Samaritan. Be a passerby, the envelope had said—or rather, its contents—the first line, and it only made him mad when he learned it came from a Gospel but not a well-known one, not that I'd read it. The cop had not pulled The Inventor over. His inspection had lapsed. The whole envelope was like that: You can't think except in conflict with the Other but stopping to help someone isn't the way and we are being told to feel things we don't and it might be a relief when a favorite uncle dies suddenly, like existence itself, and visiting the elderly might have nothing to do with one's real feelings. This had come up in the Scrolls, my sister had said. Between the lines there was another Jesus who conceived of the earned leisure of a successful person as a disquiet blessing the useless and the tiny, which, like the stone in the road, reality passes by. I'm putting into words what's pretty dumb but I can sort of see it.