Cannonball (6 page)

I asked him what would happen and he said it wasn't up to him but we were always ready. “
Who's
a Marine?” said Umo so quick always though never what you would
call
quick (though I wished he would pick these guys up and throw them like endover-end grenades into the middle of the lake, a dumb thought of mine that brought with it Jesus out on the water for the day—prepared was what he was—marine Jesus had come to me). “Well, Jesus,” I said, “he's our C.O.” “C.O.?” “C.
E
.O.,” I added.

“C
E
O?” What did Umo miss? Not much in my voice. “He gives us a hundred and ten percent,” I said. The Marines stared. What made me unreal, these words? Why would any kid need to enlist? My foresight weighed me in, shutting me down. The sergeant, extremely low-body-fat, looked over his shoulder at three kids behind him. (“They high school?” he said.)

“He had something going for him,” I said. “Those fishermen just left their nets and followed him. Talk about miracles.” “Secret weapon,” I remember Umo said.

It was my birthday sort of self-anointed, though I kept it to myself when I said I would take him to the East Lake club to a practice. Umo looked at his watch. He understood I now think as much as I, or anyway he was seriously touched, but was ready. “CEO?” I said. Chief Executive Officer, though the Jesus may have lost him. “I like to see what we talk about.” That meant, we talked. I got us onto the East Lake bus. I saw something out the bus window. The three (I was pretty sure) middle-schoolers were collecting literature from the recruiters and it looked like ballpoints to sign their names with to and to keep. I was taking Umo over to East Hill to have a look at a practice and get his feet wet. “About Jesus,” I began again—“It is not what we believe,” Umo said. “—some say he was proactive,” I said, “that was the thing about him, getting things done on all fronts.” “That is your business,” I recall Umo said. “You get it,” I said, “and if you don't get it yourself you can't tell someone else.”

“So what are you doing?” Umo laughed like he might not agree, and the bus driver had us in his mirror. I was sorry for Umo and it came out wrong. I said my sister would agree with Umo. It was my birthday, I said. “Hey, your birthday, what's up?” “East Hill.” “What else?” Well, my sister was cooking dinner.

I feared I had invited Umo but he said, East Hill, good. Or did he think we lived there? “Your sister,” he said, and nodded with enthusiasm or formality. I was sorry for him maybe.

Did I have a look on my face? Jesus had meant business, I said, he had capitalized on what he had going for him, he had a job to do, I said. Umo gave me a look. Not did I believe all that, but. I let my face not say to him Yes
or
No, I think.

“You so…” Umo, pausing to not find the word, was momentarily older. He knew it was something to not quite find the word you wanted. He was learning. Even kids, I said wryly, should enlist with Jesus, that's what
he
said, “come unto me,” as I recalled. It was almost new to me, what I found myself saying, as if my sister and I were up in her room kidding around and talking in our private little family way a job within a job and treating each other right.

“I'm so…so what?” I said, wondering again what was the secret weapon.

“So plenty,” Umo said, and laughed, and the bus driver had us in his mirror. And listen, the old cowboy Umo'd given a dollar to (he hitched his thumb) that's not begging. He was doing his job. “Two dollars,” I said. We sort of laughed. “You knew about East Lake and my father,” I said. “Yeh, I don't say I know someone already when I meet them. They don't like it.” That was right, I said, thinking my sister would have something great to say and then I imagined she got
on
our bus, her hair tied back, just before the doors unfolded shut; and I smelt the aqueous echoing of the pool we were traveling to, and felt an elbow lifting out of the water we hadn't arrived at yet and someone's arm reaching. Umo was looking past me, which he didn't do, but not out the window at the girls with little backpacks, but somewhere; and I remembered the envelope I had given The Inventor ten dollars for for my discounted birthday.

Umo, maybe he wasn't used to the city by bus, a system the envy of L.A. He was a trucker, with or without a license, a kid also. On the spur of the moment deciding to mention The Inventor by his surname, I said he knew all these languages. Had Umo known him long? The bus came to a stop and Umo looked around him and I thought he would get off. We were getting near our stop and Umo was looking out for it like he knew where it was. Inventor knew many languages, I said, that's what we called him, The Inventor. Umo said, Oh yeah. He was paying attention to me somehow.

“Urdu for one (which really says it all),” I said, a bait Umo didn't take (and who was to say The Inventor was Pakistani because he knew Pakistani jokes?)—“and because of Urdu some Middle Eastern. And French.” Had Umo known The Inventor long? Yes: long time—and Parsee he knows, I said, distracted. (But how long
could
he have known him? I thought.) “And he knows Hindi, some of those Indian languages—Dravidian, I think.” I didn't know what I was talking about, I said.

“That's right,” Umo laughed. He was looking out the bus window, somehow occupying only his one seat. He said, “You don't know if you do or you don't. But you do, if you can find out.” We had a strange chuckle about that, I thought. What kind of birthday present was this, my bringing him to East Lake, when it was my birthday? I had to open the envelope purchased from The Inventor but had to wait. It was all taking a long time today.

“You like you sister?”

Surprised by the question (feeling still the door and what it had brought), “We do a lot together,” I said.

“And Father?”

Soon we were there. At the threshold of the locker room I went looking for towels. I heard Umo shout like an overjoyed kid. Where was he? He was changed ahead of me. I hadn't thought about a swimsuit for him; he must have had it on. Where was he? I had brought him to show my father, but Umo might have been the one enlisting me in the activities of the pool. Yet it was practice time yet discipline is doing what you really want, isn't it? An eight-lane 50-meter pool, a regular palace sometimes almost too big for us. Umo jumped in, arms over head, sinking like a ship you might have thought very slowly and drawing the water to him with scarcely a ripple, and it was magnetic. He had found a lost domain.

Before anyone could get acquainted he swam a sample medley, freestyle and so easy backstroke up like he's on a current, easy breast and volcanic butterfly back, and in the middle my father as if he hadn't noticed from the moment this broad, great-bellied figure had come out of the shower in his camo bikini, yelled, “Get him out of the water” and turned back to following a swimmer along the far side. He was yakking like a crow to “SHAPE it,” it was Milt, and my dad could shout so the sound didn't spread but struck like a karate chop upon a stack of pine squares. The water echoes through me, the tile, the volume of the water and the air above it swaying also, a future I would have to do something about, an invader among us. Some people had given our city this club and subsidized it, maintained it, whatever, the pool and the two-board-and-platform diving well, people my father had once told me he knew and didn't know.

Umo standing in front of him a minute later, “What's he doing here?” my father said, arms hanging a little out from his body. Umo grinned, “What did you think, sir?” “That's correct,” said my father. “I'm the one you ask.”

So you could say I introduced them, two actual black-haired people, one large with a vast field of balance all around him sort of; one wiry, a nervous darter and preoccupied or concentrated strider or occasional staggerer thrown forward by something
in
him, his thoughts, as if he were his own weapon; Umo, mind you, without a really deeply valid driver's license; Dad with his military haircut a relentless driver too. “You don't swim in this Olympic pool without checking in with me.” “Zach brought me.” “He
brought
you?” “I was hoping to show you something, Coach.” “You showed me you are with my son, so what?” “I meant, show
you
—” “
Meant
.” “Correct.” “‘Correct,' you say to
me
?” “What we could learn from each other.” “You and him? Everything he knows he learned from me.” “No, you and me, sir.” My father turned and gestured to Milt, who was standing up tall in the water, and to others who had approached.

“You gonna sign up,” Umo said, looking me up and down, question or prophecy you couldn't tell. My father in profile almost turned. “The music they were playing,” Umo burst out with that harsh laugh. My father gave us a look, blinking like he had something in his eye. “At the recruiters table in Old Town,” I said, and my father heard something in my voice. “Under the table,” Umo said. “You could hardly hear it,” I said; “it was ‘Stairway to Heaven'.” “You had to scratch your head to hear it,” Umo said, jovial. “Not Led Zeppelin,” I said, “some other band, I was surprised.” “You enlisting,” said Umo. “Not the Marines,” I said. My father shouted at someone sprinting a middle lane; it was shaved-head Oral with the enormous hands and he didn't hear. Dad had forgotten us but, his back to us, his streamlined ears dishing his surroundings, breaking a stroke up into I can imagine what, his brain on all the time, I and on short acquaintance Umo saw him as he was, I believe—
teachin' you what you got to do for yourself sooner or later, not rely on coach tell you what to do
, he was heard to say, I now think in spite of himself.

He walked around the corner of the pool and yelled at Milt.

I wanted to see what was going on over there, I said. “But enlist?” said Umo.

“For God and country, to bring democracy to the heathen.”

“You always saying…something; you always so…” the words or word he needed for me or didn't know, I could guess, it came to me, probably. “Take a few real pictures,” I said then, as if I'd been thinking of it but I hadn't been, and Umo knew I meant it. Why didn't I correct the impression Umo might have given my father impossible as my father was?

Umo was in the water. Then somehow he was in the far lane and up out of the water and got my father's attention and he said something and my father slapped him hard in the ribs like walrus meat, they actually laughed, and my father had me in his peripheral vision, nothing special about that, it was something no one I ever met was better at, yet not look your way. Sure enough him and Umo—I don't know, they were conversing on the far side of the pool when Coach's cell as if it could hear to interrupt went, and he was irritated, sour, hard for a second; then agreeable to whoever it was suddenly, and laughed (more than he ever did) and frowned sideways at Umo for listening and Umo looked at me and nodded as if hopefully, like when he said whatever he said the first time at the outdoor pool. And then my dad looked at me and was done so quick he had obviously paid attention to what had been said at the other end and then he looked at his phone as if it was the odd thing and shut it, and said something to Umo that was not about swimming and said something else; and more than once now there was something Dad was about to do. Then at last he did it, looked over at me, back at Umo, listening to this water person as big as two Hawaiians, though Dad's patience was to be reckoned not maybe in minutes but in space, and here not just laps—a listener now to the foreign visitor. You notice what you don't get sometimes, and this knowing and not knowing wasn't exactly what I had seen through the bus window, sergeant handing out literature to the middle-school kids and the kids looking at the literature but it brought it back. Umo was speaking to my father about, I was certain, me. I had brought Umo to the pool and introduced him, a bit of iron in my soul said.

My term paper that had some science in it I should hope, my sister kept in a scrapbook, a lipsticked impression marking the first page.

Dad went away more, and came home. What had I done while he was gone? he asked. Learned to speak Spanish. That all? I needed to take control of my time, my father said. Break it down. I do, I said.
And
I read some of
this
. (I held up a paperback classic that my sister had gotten out of the library.). Old stuff, my father said. Ancient, Dad. Yeah, why would you read that—or him for that matter (as if you could “rue the day,” as he liked to say, that I read a few pages of some Roman on the way things are). Talked to the
Daily Transcript
, I said. They should start you on headlines, you can't write a straight sentence. Mrs. Browning never realized what she had, said my sister, writing in a homework notebook at the dining room table wearing dark glasses for some reason, drawing
and
writing. Mrs. Browning would have given him B minus for a complete thought, said my dad, all he needed to do was—

Talked to Marine Lab, I said. About? said Dad A job. You what? said Dad. Phoned U. Hawaii. Pre-Business. You call that a—?

I said
Pre
, Dad.

And Pre-Med advice, I added, from a personal trainer who got a callback interview with the Chargers. With
your
Chem—get real. Talked to the Coast Guard, Dad.
Coast
Guard! (The retired bosun's mate down at the boatyard who did not vote had taken me out in his retired USCG 38-foot picket boat, and hanging next to the binnacle were his old running spikes that had been bronzed by his high school in memory of a hard-to-believe-if-you-looked-at-him-now State Championship 880, worth a snapshot.) There's a war on, my father said. There is? said my sister.

“Elizabeth…,” my father said. He used her given name (with almost a weird and distant respect) though she had dropped it years ago even at her age. In favor, first, of “E” and later of “Em,” or “M” (for the “m” in “family,” she said), though E-Z, I heard occasionally during the summer like a toll pass or, with my first initial, some married name of ours, was the Z a nod back to her given name, and had E to begin with just set her apart from my girlfriend Liz, though it began before Liz's time.