Cannonball (35 page)

“If they
were
found.” “What else could they be?” I got out and shut the rear door. Words came to me and I said them, that my sister had once read out loud: “‘Dust is the only Secret—/ Death, the only…'” “Get inside,” said my driver. “‘…the only One / You cannot—'”

“Please.” “‘You cannot find out all about / In his “native town.'”

“Thanks. What else could they be? I think we're moving.”

“Made up, I guess. And he was—this archaeologist was,” I said, “liquidated. In Mexico (?).” She'd thought I would take a picture.

I was telling this woman who might be pumping me that what didn't get written up was the day that she'd delivered me when the Scrolls were supposed to come in by water and the bomb went off and the Scrolls were salvaged, most of it, and a half hour later—

Livy's window caught a blow from a rifle butt and the militiaman with the moustache was back just as the two cars ahead of us and the truck ahead of them took off and we with them and on my side out off the road a hundred yards the fat man who'd been shot in the leg was beating someone on the ground with a rifle butt and our militiaman running up stopped and lifted his musket—“Friendly fire, step on it”—but something, a cigarette, hit him from a car window, and he acted like it was a dog of a wasp at him, and I knew Liv had heard the words I'd come up with. “What did I say?—good with people.” She thought about it.

Her boss phoned all afternoon, she knew it was him, where there's a will there's a way, we were talking till two in the morning, I debriefed on recent events. The mobile gave up, and there was nothing left of our candles, one after the other, the flame shadowing her blond and dark hair as if her hair were the light, and I debriefed on the Competition Hearings back home, my talk on diving—the Twist, what you actually did, the time factor, competing not against but (in this slippery way recalling by chance the gray-haired square-shouldered man over on my left as my old girlfriend Liz's Navy now retired husband)… One more candle then, a special one I thought found at the bottom of Livy's bag and only when it was down to nothing she said it was in honor of us and her uncle in Australia had sent it to her on her enlistment a year ago it was one of the sixteen-thousandplus candles a minister had organized along the median of his town in the mountains to remember the civilian dead swept under the carpet in this unconscionable war and this candle had been blown out by the wind and rescued by her uncle, all they had was paper guards, no hurricane sleeves.

I had tossed a live coal from the campfire into the stream where we were camping once in a canyon, I was telling her when the mobile rang. I thought she better answer it. She explained what I wrongly (why should I have?) told her she didn't need to—what a mess at home with her enlistment, and family friends were worse. Vietnam-vet banker, hotel administration prof, mortgage broker, working mom attorneys, sporting goods equipment, all these tough guys in the neighborhood trashing the war—like, shoulda got out before we got in—and their legendary high school math teacher Ms. Mansfield, still unretired, hey younger programmers, though a
much
younger coach from Romania backed the war—nuke thaim if we need to, on'y keeding—

Gymnastics
, I said.

Howdjou know that? she said. I said I had a brother making an insurance run at mid six figures before he hits twenty-five, irony is it's the worst risk he could take with his life.

That campfire sounded nice, she could see it, the stream, the canyon, no canyons like that in Wisconsin. She was a good camper.

I held her for a long time, like reflections flickering on the walls. Our campfire, I said. Here thirty miles north of al Kut vehicles weighing down the asphalt all night, a billet for us at a faithful old base someone said the Under Secretary of Defense was going to pay a flyby visit to.

She's the one at home Dad said was never wrong. 'cause she looked up to him. Did I know Livy at all? Yes, going to sleep dissolved, thinking of sixteen thousand candles, talking softly as if anyone would hear us. Waking up, hungry—

But the Russian…

We weren't done with him.

And the archaeologist.

Went back down to take another look.

At the blast area, yeah. Good idea. Livy looking down at me, propped on her elbow.

“He heard I was down there…”

“Oh the Russian!” “Ukrainian.” “Like a big wrestler?” “Not that big.” “We know him.”

There it was again, the GI music-listening project, my friend coming in (as my father guaranteed) “handy” to dive with such originality it had been ignored at a moment when they wanted me at poolside. Dad could have swatted Storm like a fat, stumbling fly though he was not fat or hit like a bug with his windshield on a hot and threatening day, couldn't he?—upstairs with brownish blood on his pants brownish and blurred and a monitor screen above the virginsbreath and the little volume of large short stories, and I had told the Russian's little story like him to tempt a listener but this one wouldn't betray her assignment, which I knew was to use me to pick up the track of the Chaplain. “They're supposed to be so warm,” I said, as her mobile rang. “Not him.” “No.” “No,” she pursed her lips, “he never fooled me.” “How come you're never wrong?” “Never volunteer anything. Wait till they ask.”

“That's all it was,” I at last replied. My sister tossed her cigarette, we'd come a couple of miles up the highway. She put three fingers to her temple. “It was on his mind,” she said. “Mostly his,” I said, thinking the night before the dive, when I almost fainted in my boxers seeing him at the other end in the bathroom doorway, and looked once and went in my room and never lost it, and we sort of shook our heads about it now in the car, spinning our wheels. “I remember,” she said.

“Because I told you in the morning.” “I remember everything,” Em's voice was husky and droll. “I wish I remembered everything you read to me, but I kind of do,” I said. “I remember what I didn't,” she said.

The Directory on the floor, catalogues strewn among books, brochures, Summer programs, I didn't know what. And Dad coming in on the kiss that didn't end. “Not easy for him.”

The Coaches Directory entry. I'd forgotten how she censored it. “He doesn't like writing. But there it is. Résumé, nothing to it. Methods, goals—‘no secrets,' ‘industrious,' ‘punctual.' Mom said how he agonized late-night. Then you—the son ‘who'”—her pause (she was “E” then) like everything equal, gripping, ready to move, and present in her speech and reading always for the brother infinitely worth attending to—“‘who, it was ruefully doubted could ever have it in him to double as diver slash swimmer on the East Hill ‘Imperial' team West Zone USA Swimming affiliate.'” An omission—(Wait, she said under her breath)—hard to exactly recall as if it was not so much right then in the entry on page 153 but a few words on so that, as she would do when she sight-read a hymn, a Sousa march, the Haydn, or “I Thought About You” (where I now added a personal campfire to the standard's stream, train, cars parked, and that A flat 13 chord Em showed me that comes after “you,” just
before
you hit the going-away G9 again), she was reading a little ahead at the same time. Like a dive, I had thought filled to the brim with the life and apparent slowness of a full twist finding myself at the top standing in front of the plenary session following not a hard act to follow erstwhile speechwriter Storm's proxy welcome from the Chief Executive (“that we are one American family in healthy competition brother and sister”) and describing at Storm's behest the full twist wondering what had happened to Em though relieved to learn her car was OK in the parking garage.

“That birthday envelope I wrapped.”

What was in it
, Dad had held it up to the light,
money
? Held like a slide above the dinner table after I'd gone to the other party which turned out to be an enlistment party. It was not a poem, he was sure (though he never understood that I would learn to write, or how), and definitely not drugs (a hint of humor, warmth). Maybe some artwork? or words of wisdom (?)—or a will! Em had provided the blue ribbon, which Dad had been loath to disturb. “
Happy Returns
” was in her high, round hand. “It was like a fortune,” she said to me both hands on the wheel, “somebody just wrote it with no one specific in mind but it didn't come out that way.”

I took our mess hall trays away when Livy answered her ringtone, tilting her head as if she were taking the call while out walking, and I felt her waving a hand behind me to keep me there at the long table (near two friendly men in fatigues with, as it happened, the telltale cross on the collar). I didn't like whatever was being said at the other end of her cell, but not because the major would want her back at headquarters.

I stopped opposite the Chaplains, noticing a copy of the Scrolls propped open with a mug and a knife between two breakfast trays. What did they think of it? The elder said, Thought-provoking even if it's not quite from that time. Either it is or it's made-up, said his friend. From what? said the first. You think He knew anything about fish hatcheries? said the other. Wind energy, said the elder, oh shoot, the Apostle Thomas said some of that stuff a century or two later—India he got to. Further, said the other. It is what it is, said the elder to me like a whatchamacallit—benediction. Shoptalk they cut off abruptly, smiling and shaking hands after I had put down my two trays. The Chaplains had a look at Livy leaning into her cell but slanting a friendly look our way.

Her cell did not make her seem between. And in the car presently her absent boss seemed more the proxy than she relaying what she knew wouldn't surprise me but the trip was scrubbed and we had to turn around but she'd told him the car was heating up and we might need another day. She had left something out, I knew, sealed in a fond female act just as she had made our time a gift. And as we drove I marked her being “thoughtful” (my mother's word if you were being quiet and she had to know why). Like increments of delay, intelligent breath, this thoughtfulness—hope, control—touched by me she was—nothing too wrong between us if she could only privately plan. “Oh I'm no prize package,” Livy said coming along what she said was Highway 27 toward a bridge.

We were suddenly enveloped in dust from truck traffic congestion and the desert and we ran up the windows and we kissed each other: Was it true I had said at those Hearings in California that the President should get the No-
Bid
Peace Prize? I nodded skeptically. Where'd she hear that? She tapped her cell and put us in gear. I said I had taken a hit or two and came out better on a particular dive I had explained the competitive fine points of, though was that even it?—I had taken a hit or two. Livy said I had to protect myself, where was my camera?—and it came to me that the major might not be my friend.

We weren't turning back the way we'd come, but wherever you are things go on behind your back and the real job of your life comes in pieces wherever you think you're going, to be at the war or opposing it or answering a stranger or at a bridge.

I had a hunch they'd decided my Chaplain underwater photographer was dead. I figured that was the good news.

His torn scrap of Scroll snatched by me supposedly lost from a master that had been part-destroyed on arrival in the depths of the palace yet present in the eventual book, argued an explosion not by insurgents but by the purveyors of the book whose master text in the custody of Administration scholars (and in the absence of the underwater photographer's voice and witness) had gone largely unchallenged.

And would go unchallenged, except for me, armed with the scrap that could now be harmless without me. Yet who but a crank would put down the appeal of these so-called Scrolls, this small commodity?

Another historical Jesus you might say sold by authority to an inspired people. American Jesus. Humbled but blessed by the term outlook for a democracy of those who are motivated. It was one thing that hadn't quite come up with Livy—the Scrolls. The Cross found a whole new world of meaning when the Chief Executive with his unique distance on the issues of our time calls for the supreme sacrifice from some of our families. God's Lottery. Jesu's Casino.

I was moved to have told Livy how I plucked a coal from the campfire and tossed it into the stream we found along the floor of the canyon, how it hissed meeting its reflection; like recalling what Em read me. Like a member of the family, Livy kept on about little things—that other lonely campfire in extreme southeastern California that my sister and I had approached over the ridge of a canyon in search of water which, in talk, spread to another fire that had flickered on the horizon of my dive talk to the Competition Hearings people, I who might not know how to compete. One dark summer night swimming out to the neighbor's float and leaving our suits on the old planks and skinny-diving into the bare and waiting lake. The arc, the entry, my sister's fear of the unknown depth at Pyramid scooting up almost as her head met the water—who swam pretty well, with a quick long stroke or a short, bent-elbowed stroke but not quite with my feeling for the water.

How the dive itself wants, yes, to outwit the water below yet never maybe get there, be it a two-and-a-half tuck or a half twist or, as I'll show, full, I told the Hearings people, though Em wasn't there yet.

And to Livy, back at the war a month later, that campfire down the lake shore six summers ago noticed only upon arriving at the float, for we saw then beyond this cove to a point on the next, minute, darting flames, and gathered there savage faces you only saw when you got this far from shore—a shoreline, the Earth,
others
; yet not to Livy us diving, emerging on the canvas edge of the float, my sister on her knees, her arms, her flickering body observing the darkness of the lake; then my patented backflip, then Em jumping in, hand-in-hand the two of us, treading water, her fingers on my shoulders, remembering things said at dinner, snickering, swallowing water, giggling, when subtly there were flashlights on our shore here forty yards away prowling our rocks bobbing and stopping; one lifting across the water, finding us before we went briefly under and beyond us the swimsuits left on the clammy planks, her gleaming white, my dark, her legs now around me, giggling low, her whisper the lake naked on us,
Let's swim in and make a run for the towel
, the second flashlight in our eyes, was it the dinner guest's?