Read Online Cannonball by Joseph McElroy - Free Book Online Page A

he could tell watching you in the water. “Wait, wait,” he shouted, your elbow too high, arm extended up, shoulder over too far, too high, stroke, reach, turn, and fingers ( that’s right) more like a close grid than a diver’s sealed hand. Explain, if you could be bothered, what you thought you had been doing, and he’s with you—“That’s correct,” or, “No, that’s incorrect.” Another remark heard more than once after I gave up diving was, You don’t know how to compete . Did he think it was true? It wasn’t as if I was against the man, I told my sister. Just be prepared, she said— Semper paratus . He was flying far and near. Why? I read where the President himself had intercepted a letter authenticated as written by the insurgent Manadel Marouf-al-Saddam Booshawa prophesying that America would be made to run, as in Vietnam, when it was the big picture this terrorist feared. Well, I wasn’t the President yet.
    It was true enough of our seriously award-winning city that we had everything here, Liz thought. Why leave? Liz wasn’t interested in travel; an hour’s trip up to Oceanside on the Coaster to fish off the public pier with her aunt who was married to a veteran who worked at a big kind of men’s or bachelor’s club just behind the beach, and back by seven the same day, was it. Why go to war? Liz had taken Umo for Hawaiian. My sister said he wasn’t old enough, which contained some truth: they had been there so long before they became a state. Liz thought Umo’s accent Hawaiian the once they met. She was way off. Liz with a much older Navy pen pal in Ewa who conducted tours of a Pearl Harbor battleship. It was not she who brought Umo up, or when I did she had little to say but liked something about him. It was his body. He was a traveler, she said of his trips back and forth across the border.
    â€œTravel!” I exploded—Umo’d been halfway around the world, and it was pretty much on his own. It probably was, Liz said, he’s independent. “A wanderer,” I said, and felt it was a word, a better one, and, as I sometimes would backstroking, I had a thought that the one I really loved was my sister, and lap after lap, my dad was, what?—pretty distant, and Umo, fat, but not mainly fat, but huge, but a kid, which expanded my narrow world of family and all that, though then I thought, Was he really a wanderer?
    No surprises for Liz, even if Umo was twenty, which he wasn’t. China doesn’t let you travel just like that, I said. She said she wasn’t surprised even considering they had lots of people there. She seemed to take for granted what I told her of Umo, that is the circumstances noted or unmentioned that called forth his family (if any were left), his reports of them, even the gathering of these upon me tightened by my motive for (though I hadn’t announced it) enlisting: Umo’s mother taking him to see a leopard in a forest, her fear of water, her winters keeping sheep along the desert borderlands of the steppes before his part-Manchu father one spring delivering a porcelain pot made with his own hands, met her in a village and ran off with her and brought her home to his family’s astonishment if not horror. The woman followed the man for some reason of love.
    Liz didn’t think that happened in China. She was hardly someone you’d say you couldn’t keep up with, yet I would listen always.
    Was it indifference in her to something? It didn’t seem so, moist, her eyes weighty as bees on the hunt or mysteriously bright, everything instinctively regulated, tender, infinitely slow her touch, the cocoa-mat-imprinted troughs of scar upon my chest less angry than a while ago. What did she think of me beyond love? She didn’t like my father. She had even told him so one night, and everyone laughed. Liz had dropped in for a piece of my mother’s Thursday chocolate