Cannonball (14 page)

(Had I let Umo go? Those locomotives—the numbers an eight-year-old fat boy wrote down when they passed near where he lived for a while in Shenmu until he was reported.)

The side of the most living and truthful, this history, I think I replied to the captain, so he put his hand on the phone and took it off, searched for a cigarette: “We're a family here,” he said, “and I'll see that your thoughts are passed on to those whom they may concern. They're certainly inspiring.” What they inspired in him I couldn't tell. Anyway, my assignment…that was all he knew. I said there must be a laptop somewhere if I could borrow it for a quick e-. “Try that one,” said captain of the one that was down. “And stay away from any elevators in this city. You were on a swimming team?” he said. “Diver, did I hear? “Once. Got injured,” I said. “Didn't keep you out of our clutches.” We thought about it.

Someone arriving at a site—I wondered if they were phasing me out. Dignitary? Scientist? A precarious archaeological operation, I thought, involving…“a weapon” (the captain had reached, I believe to this day through me, a need to speak the word)—“a weapon,” he concluded staring into my face as a whole, and I saluted for some reason, hearing quick steps at the door but the person didn't come in—a woman, I felt, from the captain's staring at his coffee mug and eyeing the ceiling.

One step back, two steps forward
, my sister had said one night in my room, shortly before I'd not volunteered to get up and pull the curtain, the light was bothering her; but
No
, she said really only a few minutes later, twenty minutes, twenty-five, of picking up my loud old clock and chucking it into the steel-mesh waste basket and leaving it there with its loud, old-fashioned marking-time weight—
one step forward two steps back but it's the two back that give you
—it was the doorway of
her
room late the night of the supposedly aborted sleepover, and it was me in the doorway of her room, a scent of what I'd been told was jasmine that her mother had given her strong in all directions. “Yes,” she said.

A premonition I would hardly have told the captain how Umo the morning I went for my enlistment physical laughed that harsh Chinese laugh to learn that my dad had managed to resign from the Reserve but had kept it to himself. First glad for my father, Umo then coolly enraged they wouldn't let him go in with me. Finding that my father had finessed the Reserve I saw that it had been precisely at a moment when, from his Club sponsors, all intimations pictured him as a person who knew what was going on. You don't apologize.

I had two pretty good books with me, the captain saw the angle of one digging at the canvas equipment bag but not camera equipment, and when I was leaving he touched the bag for that reason. Books, I said, one from my sister, one from me to myself. Your sister, he said.

Slightly fire damaged, their contents nearly intact, I read them because “experience,” whatever Dad meant, “isn't the only best teacher”; or reading is, too, it had come to me and is the best of someone else's all boiled down though one of these was long. Though one short but seemed long. Read it through only when I got home. Ancient but mentioning desert missiles that pass by the guilty and kill the blameless. Feathers that fall no more slowly than cannonballs, death not to be feared though the author didn't persuade me. (Was there a photo missing from the captain's batch of mine?)

The hotel had become also the stock exchange. There had been a pool near the hotel, and there were doors marked Changing Rooms from which it would have been a short run to the waters of the Tigris. There seemed to be no time during the slow three-and-a-half days I waited for the go-ahead, knowing only that I was going somewhere in the neighborhood, and it was my job.

A chance acquaintance, sitting in a street tea parlor under the sunshade canvas of a mail-order lean-to tent, had an e-mail for me from my sister. Umo was with a crew filming American GI's listening to Rock and talking about it. He was somewhere over here. Umo an export? What China has to offer Mexico in exchange for business Mexico has been relieved of. “What an old roly-poly” Umo was, according to my sister's e-mail, and she was “so tired” of the California sun she was moving East. My reply:
Like Dad almost
. Hers:
He don' care what ah do—Apply yourself—Mom buying me clothes every minute—don't know why, but do
.

My sister didn't censor much:
Your soldier there e-mailed asking Was I married?—I said
Not that I know of,
but thought again and added
, Talk not to me.

She would like to hold me and whisper me a joke that what I start in others need no more be mine than streams far as forever from their source. A faithful e-mailer even later when I got out of the service (I thought) and was seeing almost no one and she told me how they had visited a papermaking studio with the big Mixmasters and the felt blankets and cloudy water everywhere and that was the way she did things, from the ground up. Her exact geography in these e-mails of hers, plotting my whereabouts but exactly where is she, in her words? Another retrieved on a poor happy corporal's laptop who couldn't get his earphones or almost his ears to work so rachetting forth was the jam around him (and me) though Stones and Zeppelin-wise.

Again from my sister, this time “some numbers” she promised, and signing herself “Arabiyoun ana Maisoon.” What's your sister's
name
? the soldier wanted to know, though he had only to hit Reply to contact her. She changes it all the time, I said. I thought, Is he going to start up something with her?—and she was e-mailing me abroad that our mother had said Dad had told her one night before I left, and in fact did leave before he had a chance to drive me home, that I had come close to equaling the Club record for the 200 backstroke but he didn't get a chance to tell me, I had seemed in a real zone looking up into the sky almost…reaching like… She forgot, my sister said…my mother had forgotten what I'd been reaching like. And Umo… Javascript or garbage followed yet at the end,
haven't seen Dad over there, have you?
and it wasn't until I got home to California that I learned the other number she had bulleted for me for Umo. Why my father had not taken the opportunity to tell me my 200 time next morning no more needed to be explained (to me at any rate) than his decision (and permission) to quit the Reserve at this time. Because he knew someone—or had something to offer in exchange, it came to me. Yet my days were clear as memory, my parents, the speed of light in its actual presence (and therefore slowness), and the fact that I've never had its constancy (going away or toward) satisfactorily explained to me. A swelled head Dad and Mom would call it. Another e-mail retrieved at Kut asked what had happened just before the photo of the “two headless ones” I'd sent in a wretched mood; a second e-mail, what had happened before
that
? She could always help me. As she had just before I left.

Dad's forty-third birthday evening I was fresh from a friendship-ending debate with Milt. And faced with a scheduling conflict. Almost exactly the same age, we had known each other too long and so could swap words of our fathers'—“let your tool do its work,” Milt quoted my dad, and now throughout the forty-five-minute exchange on the way home from The Inventor's during which I laid out vastly more fact than Milt to establish the error of a war that I was joining up for, we found ourselves paused upon a narrow meridian—its gravelly ground advertised for Adoption—a fault line between opposing three-lane streams of rush-hour vehicles that all but drowned my friend out. So I observed him from head to toe with more clarity than regret somehow pairing the seventeen tons of ordnance dropped during the run-up by the President in a no-fly zone, with Milt's higher-pitched Lincoln voice; the President's unwillingness (like a silhouette heavily backlit) to share intelligence among our allies, with Milt's index finger shaking at me (thumb over the other three), still irritated that I had alleged Jesus had spat into someone's eye; that the ten-foot-high concrete blast walls in the capital separating protected visitors from exposed natives had been acquired from Kurdistan not poured in plentiful local cement, with Milt's huge feet encased in gray Converse; and the Middle East vet once trained as a Ranger in Fort Lewis up in Washington, then trained as a forward observer, now an RPG amputee and devoted hunter in Oregon, who had not liked me and had told us personally that his absolute certainty that there is a Jesus got him through—with Milt's unusually thin, marine neck with its elderly bobbing Adam's apple. So I felt like a swimmer whose shoulders and legs belong to the water on a very good day, with that coast and skim and play of power quite apart from how far you are going as if you had kid fins on, laying down on the dining room table for my sister to wrap it one of The Inventor's envelopes that had cost me twenty dollars I think and added its stake to whatever had made Milt mad—a difference with The Inventor often. Once about sex (which Milt said was just the release of tension, a biological function). Today more likely the news, edited in fact slightly by me as if it had been solo, that I had taken my physical at the ungodly hour of seven that morning. And now The Inventor had summoned us to a party that evening, at an address not his that I imagined I knew. But in the kitchen with my mother and the turkey molé conquistadores I asked that the evening be not about me but Dad, which she thought considerate though considerate of what? (Did I know what the envelope contained? my sister asked. Not really.)

The evening was not well attended. We were missing the assistant coach at the high school Wick and his wife, and my brother and Liz and Milt. Sinatra singing “Five Minutes More,” my mother handed me a platter to carry in from the kitchen. My aunt and uncle came for the fresh local shrimp and turkey molé and spoke cordially of this friend of mine they had yet to meet because a young Mongolian (of all things) Sumo had taken Osaka by storm (they laughed frowning at this), broken taboo by taking prize money with his left hand, being left-handed, but in Japan you don't throw your opponent by yanking him forward by the hair and he'd had to go back to Mongolia until things cooled down. Umo himself, I pointed out, had told me how this AsashōryÅ« glared, but Umo was a diver, he was not into Sumo, in fact I didn't know where he was (I felt my sister smiling on me—the way I had said it).

I hadn't seen him in weeks.

Had I done something? We gather what we can together, and that's it.

My sister made an impromptu speech, wordy for her, in honor of the breadwinner who brings home his loaded gun unfired, and in a moment slightly embarrassing but we didn't quite know why, she remembered wrestling in the living room with brother Zach over a joke and Dad's not breaking it up—

He came upon us wrestling—

Angry on the rug.

Father to us both, he thought

Fight—or sport—or hug.

They dive into their home work—

Espousing not to shirk.

His kids—for all they lack—

Making the path they track.

—and that on the camping trip we had taken with Dad I had seen an indigo bunting on the Bradshaw Trail that wasn't supposed to be there and Dad had said,
But it is
, and with his prompting we had taken another camping trip on our own and learned to make the path you follow even while hearing almost on top of us the aerial gunnery at Chocolate Mountain though we had wound up with all this food tonight, look only at the birthday dude and think of all the different people there in that chair, and someone had said this of James Thurber when he came to dinner.

My father and I didn't bother telling each other what we each knew anyhow—his somehow quitting the Reserve, my more than impending enlistment. His shortness with me, and transferring the beribboned envelope, its own wrapping, unopened from the table to the top of my older brother's straw sombrero he wore on the twenty-nine-dollar-a-weekday golf course on the floor—I felt it in the flush on my face a message in both directions telling me Dad was angry at having, in some original way, used me.

If he had, the phone call a month ago might be paying me off. How was not clear, an assignment the Army might not make good on or I could decline or not enlist.

Yet I was acting for myself. No matter what had been done to get me in. Less enlisting in the Army than enlisting the war in a plan of my own no dumber than other stuff I'd done. Family? East Hill? Math? Love? Getting in my own way, my mother just said when I ran into her in front of the Heartmobile having her picture taken by the butcher, a friend. I had asked my father when he got back from his strangely timed trip if he had checked into Umo's activities on the east coast of Baja. Yes, he said, yes.

Yes? I said.

The kid was quite competent. “Competent!” A reliable shipper and contact person, my father understood, he would come in handy. “And for your information it's a lot to say about anyone, that they're competent.” I had missed something and it would come to me. The phone rang. “The envelope,” I said.

It was Milt's surprised voice reminding me of The Inventor's party, the scheduling conflict I regretted for my mother and sister's sakes, respectively, the cook and, I sensed then and confirmed late that night in her room, the secret genius of the moment with whom I left the issue of the envelope. Though I picked it up—
Happy Returns
my sister had written on it—and carried it into the hallway.

“Thank you,” my father said, his napkin in hand, appearing and taking the envelope from me. I didn't much want to see what was inside right then and neither did he. A wide and brilliant smile in a narrow face—stranger than truth—there was a joke on someone. I said I was enlisting in the Army and had taken a physical this—“It's your decision,” my father broke in. “That's what I'm saying, Dad.” “If you were in the Reserve you'd be out sooner,” he said. “Feet first,” I pulled open the somehow heavy front door into the night. I said I thought the President would let me go in good time. “And good luck with your…” I looked him in the face and didn't flinch at the unknown, a touchy man, enterprising, but why this outlandish hook-up or patron, Storm and with a last name Nosworthy at that?