Cannonball Read online

  CANNONBALL

  JOSEPH MCELROY

  Contents

  1 to meet the water

  2 I have died

  3 water trusts

  4 in return for what

  5 cutting rhizomes

  6 maybe if it was close by

  7 a better safelight for the darkroom

  8 board-shy

  9 backstroke a dive itself

  10 likes your approach

  11 words in the dark

  12 the stillness between the beginning breakers of his breathing

  13 might as well want a dive back

  14 a necessity like water

  15 Heard of you

  16 Best friend you never had

  17 a nation that would one day

  18 this shifting equation

  19 like a Third way

  20 make time free

  21 where he takes the plunge

  22 the already strange distance

  23 like nobody in the world

  24 your real job

  25 out

  1 to meet the water

  It is my brother I would speak of—I will call him that—though I begin with the Scrolls. How they made it through by water, as our people, a sect of them, said they would who reportedly at their peril had slid them like rolled-up maps into a capsule and sent them on their way underground secured from those who would have misused them. A great find, it was said, a weapon in the war—for in a way they were “maps” (though all Legend). Yet the Scrolls floating hundreds of miles under the deserts from En Gedi, even Gaza, eastward along a web of roughly horizontal wells, like missives arriving then with such long-range accuracy of time and place, proved less stunning on that day I record than the apparition on a diving board himself all too solid and familiar as the pool was notorious and strange. Suddenly here was my friend, my find—my borderline Chinese so far from our home—in the depths of a Middle Eastern palace standing immense and unlikely above waters put there once for a tyrant to swim, dive into, own, withhold, and worse.

  It is my friend I frame, my find, found and lost, from the neighborhood of another desert himself not Mesopotamian or American (though he wished). Border Chinese large enough of body and of heart for three potentates or persons, quite recently a vagabond teen in the public pools of a Southern California city who, ineligible to serve, still went to war, tracked me to that palace or was lured, large soul.

  Speak of what you know, it’s said. Because you were there. With a company piece of junk, an Army videocam not neutral but more yours than your hand holding it, expected to catch the scene as if your job is all you need to do. At one level, the arrival of the Scrolls I had been told to keep to myself. As if that were doing something. Yet at the now crucial moment a dive exploding off a sixteen-foot-long American-made springboard, someone I knew—a friend, I trust. Which largely escapes those at poolside—the nearly naked at their humid, echoing recreation, civilian, brass, in that still intact showplace of the capital’s outskirts, among them one set of eyes I thought I recognized if I could only recall his job—faintly like a teacher long ago? biology in the eyes, calculus in the heart, face, chin?—and a few plain-vanilla American women and men in camouflage fatigues (one in an old collector’s-item flak vest, at least didn’t probably have to share it) back near the pool’s walls garlanded with mosaic scenes and Arabic codes, fingering grainy butts of holstered .45s or packing M4 carbines ideal for close-quarter potshots ‘case something happens. Which was surely not the dive, left somehow above the deposed tyrant’s pool as if it might end there, a second thought, though electrifying.

  Though I, a house-to-house Specialist (slow on the uptake, I’ve been told) armed with what you see plus an equipment bag, fall back now on some other slowness of the diver, my friend midair twenty feet above the water and more than that above what was to happen, feeling it like a wound in my chest. While time, of which there seems so little between springboard and water, instant and instant, all but ignores this unlikely diver huge as a Sumo wrestler in my depth of field, only I knew how young up there coming off the old-fashioned cocoa-matting.

  Why the diver came to make that dive in that place, a palace pool, I would know before I’m done. You know already, you always knew, I think he says (he could be right), this matchless, often absent friend, my bond, my shadow enlarged—a grandly begun, almost incomplete dive or aiming to meet the sounds the increasing Rock music temblors rising from under this pool. An unidentified arrival up there on the board other armed watchers see the diver as this heavy out of nowhere, Asian or GI—how did he get in? through the ceiling painted with lyrebirds and Egyptian vultures, arabesques of paradise with magenta wings?—hailing from up there this witness his friend it seemed seeing me who aims a standard videocam automatically hurriedly from the hip, the chest, heart, history, keeping in my pocket in reserve the world’s neatest mini able to take stills too. The long desert day behind him, my friend launches like a game bird from the onetime marshes his upward dive (convertible at will we always recall back home into a tsunami of a cannonball) which ends still in shock, hope, the mind of an unknowing spy, forgetting his own language. My friend appearing in that palace pool nine thousand miles give or take a country from where I stand eighteen months later, an emerging professional or getting there, California veteran with a deal, to say what I saw, or show what I saved, really I see now suspend that dive, and maybe all it is is why I enlisted.

  How fine a fool to be a spy and not know it—witness, but to what? For spies the art of war will avoid it, though more to war than spies we learn from Sun Tzu, obvious if you ask strategists in Taiwan or, week in week out, subtle for the football coach who ascribes his success partly to The Art of War. Yet what is new about our ignorance of those who would own us? How do we speak in the midst of what we’re ignorant of? Nothing to it, let me tell you. What we’re made for on this good earth. Plotting an arc of motions that plotted me. A dive that would swallow up the pool, while history saw it differently, this pleasure place of the lately apprehended tyrant tiled with the vineyards of a vision, minaret, turret, once rich ceramic alcoves, cellars, and arched halls, surprising gardens, erotic resting rooms you might want to renovate, private mosque, and kitchens once red with lamb and trampled vintage, dark levels below even the strangely gamy waters of this pool—detainment quarters we’d erroneously heard housed even their captive leader, his bunker (ours now in the absence of our own bunker busters), and, most, the very wells or one that had been waiting to receive a weapon of critical instruction, long on its way encapsuled, sought for its own sake and to prove the rightness of the war if not even pay for it. A scroll or Scrolls it was said; and, recalling the Dead Sea discoveries, the Gnostic manuscripts at Nag Hammadi, a scroll for a scroll, some strict-constructionist archaeologists say. And now I suspected maybe the thing I had been sent to shoot was under the very waters beside which I found myself, under the pool itself, another level down.

  That one of our own specialists, so far from being dug in out among potshard and skull-sown hills, should have been instead wisely waiting for the find to come to him (his team), deep in the foundations of a conquered palace and by water along the wells and ruined sewers below pool level—seemed a feat—an Olympic-homing How shrouding the ancient What of the Scrolls themselves, their said-to-be-Roman/Syriac phrases and good news, ancient stuff of revelation itself. Yet revolutionary, we learn, in their firsthand word this time of the man from Nazareth, a fighter and free trader in ideas, economist, this Jesus the Scrolls would profile in a rare interview, no less than a man who, having the experience to disappear and reappear, might later be one of us attending California Hearings on Competition and who’d somehow always known that to him who hath shall be given. Why did the thought seem familiar?
That an undeniable weapon of instruction in the war of thoughts which is history should have turned up as predicted by our people seemed unprecedented because of this seldom piloted network of wells that had survived the mines parachuted in evidently, garden-variety bombs from other wars, our top-loaded quake littering “their backyard” with burnt-out vehicles, roadside attractions, barbecued faces, and “headless horsemen,” as a tabloid back home had put evidently it, this “fertile croissant” where agriculture began, this cradle of civilization, of wine-growing, to say nothing of infrastructural casualties of the military war by now winding down, a clock stopped but ticking.

  The late Hearings bring back the reasons for the war and, as if he was one, the full figure of my friend Umo. Elusive, illegal, happily homeless we would think here and in Baja at going on fourteen (when we first knew him but wouldn’t have guessed his age), going off a high board into one of our outdoor pools, he was later to find his moment in that other pool nine thousand miles east. Biographers say “was to” (or “would”) as if they could have known what their man would do. We know better still. Make history our own. Or conceive what we could not know about my friend, a disappearing act competing with me as the worst but best friends will, had we been never so christened with hindsight and what appeared to be the will to win for our city the site of these so-called “postwar” Hearings, their announced Spring Theme Competition. Which, like the Scrolls, was good for anybody grounded, or trying to be, in gain and growth, gifts grounded but not to be hidden away. Even, as I found, in the Goals split up by the Conference organizers into panels and days of far-flung questions, in the later Hearings embracing the Scrolls themselves, what remained of them, for they were Scrolls, and how belief in competition might eclipse belief-based competition itself, to say nothing of faith in your own time management business, the very fragrance you’re marketing, and the newfound Master’s ancient assurance that “if you give alms it is evil you will do to the beggar and your own spirit.” For I had rethought spirit coming home from my war. Where I overshoot is where I still am. Trying for this.

  It was the summer of 2001 that word of Umo spread among us. Enterprising stray, giant waif, What will he do? this upstart and mysterious truant. A newly opened public pool I myself was told of—why? I later asked myself. A bright seacoast day, a population, everyone there. Two pools, two blue-floored freshly chlorined oblongs, seen by the recruiting blimp above us, tiles of real estate passing beautiful, squares of California, square 2, square 1.

  Suddenly this. What would he do, this massive person at home up there on the high board? Big boy and then some; “big” the smallest word for what this was. Torso, shoulders, legs, long black hair, cheeks puffy about the eyes, the spread of face presiding Asian over three hundred and some pounds you would understand, ready to go, in command. Of what? He looks sixteen, seventeen, this sure-footed newcomer of a scale majestically slower along the durable acrylic surface rough as a bearded lizard’s back. His first go off the board.

  It would take a beating, if that is even true of boards? He padded out to the end, bent his knees to snap his springboard and let its give lift him jumping straight up. To come back down and bounce again toes pointed and again. And in midair turned immensely and landed and bounced and—the confidence also of a kid—landed now as if he would go off backward but, settling the board, walked to where he’d started, and about-faced.

  What could have prepared you, though, for the jump which was first that high, prancing approach hop onto the almost end of the board to depress its laminated wood-and-fiberglass core so deep—don’t I myself know—it might have thrown Umo out into the street had he not landed straight up and let the board lift him—like a tool you should let do its work, as my father, a somewhat unfinished carpenter and craftsperson, in the garage would sometimes say of plane or hoe or knife or tinkering with his stopwatches that would one day time Umo—upward stretched leaping like a crane to the wind rising at first eternally only at the top to become a thing compressed like a spring but turned into like a rock in space or something inevitable: and this was the cannonball later discussed, as we liked to say, the mother and brother of all cannonballs to target a pool in our city: that where he hit you’d have said the water parted six feet down and within four of the turquoise-tiled bottom, indicating in the flushed pit of its absence with strange exactness the concave point of the drain that marked the graded low point of the deep end.

  It was like one of our patented earthquakes, but from the air. You wondered the excellent homegrown tiles did not crack their grouting.

  A pregnant soul well back of the brink got drenched and stood her ground leaning back on her hips, gray-haired. Two deck chairs almost waterborne I seemed to make look back at me, on one a newborn uncomplaining till saved from drowning.

  The sound of the impact like something being permanently fixed blots out of my slow mind for a second the future war, its meaning, and Umo’s eventual link to the Scrolls. For what do we need if not distraction from the burdens of our nation, our responsibilities, as my mother put it?

  Now kids give the high board ladder space. Umo’s feat is something else, that day of the first cannonball. No one wants to go and there’s a murmur. A path is parted for him back to the ladder. Someone said, “That’s Umo.” So somebody knew him. “Changsta,” someone called. You felt the awe, the silence, the bias. His broad back, bull neck, his confident arms, his hands climbing the silver rungs, holding on, had I seen that back before? Rung by rung, a race apart, brute prophecy was it? A prophecy not easy for me. Someone said, “Cannonball!” Someone older, “He’s going again.”

  A parent near me, something in how he held himself, T-shirt, a camouflage vest, and you didn’t know what else to be inventoried under it because when the man hollered to the big boy to get down off that board, I knew him for an Old Town cop off-duty with children here, hand over his heart maybe. I thought he would do something, it’s a free country, you can try: stop the engulfing wave sure to arise from Umo’s more than weight that threatened with a second cannonball to evacuate half the water at his end of the pool: a strange but (the kids knew) worthwhile risk, Umo bouncing and bouncing on City equipment. “Big buck, yellow tail,” the off-duty cop-parent said to his little girl—which wasn’t the “style” we hoped in our award-winning port city with its melting-pot neighborhoods, its opportunity, its Christian lenders, its Gaslamp Quarter, pink sidewalks, Fashion Valley, and Pacific Beach. The little girl said, “He’s Chinese.” “Monkey outa nowhere,” said the man who yelled to Fatso not to go again. “Nobody’s out of nowhere,” came a woman’s voice, an old party in a hat.

  What could have prepared you for what came next? The approach, a surplus some might say or vastness of flowing flesh—secret weapon, yay, but a target surely, the sun itself marking the glimmering, drying shoulders up there, the slick hair. Off-duty cop, his hand inside his vest. A cannonball again? Until it hits the water a dive is not a dive, we know, so swift but sometimes a slowness so divided it might never finish in your mind; and the swan—or front dive—that arched upward now from a board bent not to breaking but to some force unforeseen by “the maker,” as we trace performance to the factory, carried Umo up arms at full stretch for all to see, or see from his vista—the city out beyond the Presidio and the Marine Lab and out to shark land and whale country, unknown sea, high it could seem as our much traveled Assemblyman’s hang glider riding a broomstick thermal sliding out of the sky it seemed like for a few feet above the sacred peak in Rio harbor:

  a cannonball to maybe blast us all out this time,

  but no: for suddenly the diver, that human bulk, its arms now at its sides, axled a great diameter impossibly greater than the diver himself and wheeled over into a layout somersaultand-a-half, not tuck, not even jackknife-pike position but layout more distinguished than any stunt for which mysteriously (if you measure it) there could not have been time but, in the gasp of silence or gratitude through which we heard two car horns like another que
stion off the I-8, wheeled the huge spoke of this person’s body, its flesh, surplus and all, a devoted unit aiming to meet the water hands first, bring somehow legs and toes following the rest of him to snap upright like a tail—and no less a cannonball, it came to me—hands, head, shoulders, belly, hips into the water—for no real splash at all I must be understood to say, but a perfectly small spurt fountaining a foot high at most and a muffled thud like when you fire a smooth stone end over end out into Otay Lake over the head of an outboard troller and it slips in with scarcely a gulp.

  2 I have died

  How did he do it? Were we amazed? A spreading faith afoot among the watchers. A vanishing, a death almost, but wait. I saw the cop ship his personal pistol back under his arm. It looked something like the .22 semi-auto my aunt and uncle use, like the old German model. A crowd gathered at the pool ladder looking down there for this alien who seemed to hang under water for the longest time before he took hold of a rung and shot up like a penguin.

  “Pouring like a waterfall,” said the old person, thin in a bikini and a down-under bush hat, a light like candle power in her face, an accent sort of English. “He’s an animal,” said the off-duty. “Just some of us are better at it,” the old person’s reply and then, oddly, “He’s on our team,” she adds. And thirty yards away across a corner of pool, Umo looked in our direction, mine. What did you think you were doing here? The old dame looking my way too, not quite in my eyes but below them, her skin all over spots or like some body painting trade you get in our city, her sandals and a flash of Moroccan gold on the toenails supportive somehow, her hat that of someone you’d visit, an old bird of a person.

  And indeed I had seen the diver somewhere. Swimming? Swimming away from me, that was it. Slow motion muscled in folds and rolls of flesh, that back—its rolling bulk. His weight not what was said, but a rumor. But it was something you could see.