Cannonball by Joseph McElroy Read Free Book Online

injury, surfacing, half unconscious or barely conscious or obeying the angry seed he did say somewhere near the very place in me, my heart channels, that had borne abrasion, but how could he know what had been shouted at me—could he?—in mid-dive before the accident? Of course not.
    Remember (he said) what you have always known, the vein you can’t see running through the wound, and he handed me an envelope with something in it—the Goldthread—and then another that seemed empty though sealed and I knew Milt was in the other room trying to hear us and I had a grand total of twenty-six fifty in my pocket along with my keys knowing what Milt wanted for his birthday and I had a plunging feeling then hearing the jingle of the till ringing up the sale and knew that sometimes he should grow up, though, and that on the bus he wouldn’t be satisfied with loving the plane and would have to know what was in my envelopes but would have to settle for just one of them.

4 in return for what
    Independent , Liz called Umo, sounding more a woman than I had heard her. She hauled herself lightly out of the pool. Water streamed down her thighs, no stopping it, and she fingered downward the butt line of her swimsuit. Why travel when we lived in a city like this? was one of her thoughts, I knew. How’re you doing? was another, said softly with no slant even now standing in my lane.
    But had Umo grown up? And so fast. Had he? And illegal, for crying out tears! He gave to the bereft old sun-grained California drifter at the bus stop a couple of bills. Where did the dollars come from? What they call a silent offering at church, where pastor and sheep are not silent about, in our city, begging if you’re able to work, which my aunt years ago now called a sin of sloth (an animal I knew from a picture) but Milt’s minister father a violation of the very idea of brotherly love, according to someone with whom my mother agreed without knowing who it was and I passed all this on to Umo one day on a city bus. In his great frame and flesh unveined and smooth among its folds a declaration, a friendly force, a citizen of the world on the move. Mexico, anyway. Though maybe no place, and illegal, though maybe a place itself can acquire that status.
    My idea had been to bring Umo to East Hill. Make a splash with the coach, his search for regional or even national attention. It might not cross my dad’s mind that we were after it together, whatever it was. Yet in some more interesting thought that I hadn’t learned to follow up, I was soon to be in another “it” with my surprising and sometimes embarrassing sister, who had described unforgettably Umo’s entry into the water one summer night in 2002. I beside her shot on film or tried to his dive but she just as she’d been interrupted passing on to me a weird family yet neighborhood question Corona’s Italian wife Bea had put to her as they had biked home the night before through rain divided and gathered and caressed by trees now tonight saw him pull off a two-and-a-half at a public pool under the lights that went out totally for a moment, a breaker fluke that went unexplained, as he left the board plunging us if not my camera into nowhere and came back to reveal him just passing the crest of the as yet undisclosed dive now crunched into tuck—as I became aware of the old woman of a year ago with the spotted skin and the veins materialized now as if by the power glitch itself beside me seeming to say hello with a word: for Umo’s dive was so busy a somersaulting that when he just came out of it he’s someone unaware of you headed somewhere else gone forever, my sister said, or ex ecuted, it came to me she had murmured to herself or me, I thought if anything a sucked-downward tongue or perfect loss. Which like my sister’s own, night-inspired remarks I recall, but, hoping for her success at least in life (for she dreamed of supporting