One evening Umo was gone while I was completing my slow/fast drills, though I saw him go. His broad back, his purpose, glimpsed upside down beyond the ceiling like where I was headed as I reached back, stroke after stroke.
6 maybe if it was close by
My father on some instinct had no need to help him, parentless, stateless, but not powerless. Listened, though, to Umo. A brother, we say, and brotherhood, which is harder, like Umo’s laugh at brotherhood, when I answered a question he asked. What about your girlfriend, is she your brother? Sure. Your mother? I guess. Your sister? Well, not much, but, no, yeah she is…“You like her,” said Umo. Like her? (I must have said something with my face, like, Well yeah, something, and I at least picked it up and answered.) Yes, I do. Maybe she can be my brother, Umo said. Well, I said, she says…“Me, myself, and I.” Me myself and I? said Umo — he laughed like a shot; and she says our dad’s a loaded gun, the thought tumbled out of me, and she says he wants to build us into whatever, and our mother wants—“Is she a brother?”—“wants to keep a united front, you know.” “A united front,” said Umo. “Yes, that’s what she says.” That’s tough, said Umo, but your real brother — Wait, I said, I recalled one Sunday I and my sister had gone to church with our mother — our brother being busy — and the pastor preached about the woman at the well where she finds Jesus sitting who asks her for a drink of water and she makes problems and he offers her water to truly quench her thirst and knows she’s been with five men which amazes her because how did he know and so on and my sister got my mother mad saying Jesus holds out on her till he springs his secret that he’s the prophet people have been talking about and I got in my two cents worth and my sister, with the smallest room in the house, came in again with Jesus competed with the woman on equal terms until he couldn’t hold it back any longer, and Mom told Dad. But your real brother, Umo persisted, is… Is…, I began — Beyond the law, said Umo and laughed, and I wondered what he meant. He was right although my brother was aiming to be a lawyer for a mining or insurance company, I think he had said, and worked out and referred once to his girlfriend’s box and never spoke to me much.
What is this box? Umo said. Her, you know, vagina. You call that a box? He does. So when you have to explain something, you find out you knew more than you thought, said Umo. When I came to, I wondered where I’d been but it was only a second or two, I said. Came to what? Umo laughed. Oh, like you’ve been knocked out and you…came to myself, Umo. Your brother, he said. And Milt, I said, you know Milt.
Who may have expressed his concern in weeks of silence when I was in the Army passing through deserted settlements apparently, photographing aerosol cans with ribbons at one end, and an archaeological team using noninvasive tricks of finding unexploded munitions, a black lake from a burst pipeline, children plugged into GI earphones in dangerous neighborhoods where I would borrow somebody’s unsuspecting laptop and by chance or unsuspected prayer once intercepted word of a team filming GI music-listening habits and pictured Umo back home working the Mexican border.
“Why would you want him as a friend?” my mother had said, “you have homework to do. He needs help. You just have to look at him,” she said. We have to. It’s true, I said. What did we find to talk about? Nothing much, music, his grandfather, wild camels, blood pressure monitoring, family, America, swimming, developing pictures, the exhaust manifold on that truck of his—“Well, there you are, he’s not old enough to drive.”
“Never seems to get stopped.”
“That’s worse, but how would you know?”
“Zach would hear about it,” my sister called from the other room. “The way I do,” she added. “You!” said our mother. “S’what I do for a livin’,” said my sister.
There was an interesting homelessness in Umo’s occupational movements that held you and disturbed you. With a chance for you to achieve. What? It was not anything illegal that kept Umo in reserve for my father, my mother retailing to him what I told her of being stopped by his friend Zoose, the state cop; Zoose’s new brother-in-law the Hispanic rhythm guitarist, a recent citizen; a recording studio guy in Chula Vista: my father had Umo in his sights and in those of others, his contacts, I know, and should have guessed then. For me, though, it was something I had achieved, this resolve in my father to deal with Umo. Not ask him to compete in time trials. While seeing him some evenings occupy the swimming pool and the smaller adjoining and deeper diving pool, my father saw him also as a traveler among several homes, an alien commuter to be reckoned with, a powerful “body business” to be included without any singling out in talks to the team at pool side, and (once I remember) “of use to us” I was told, but “keep it under your hat.” My helmet, one day.
Like his size (“Have a little humility,” said my mother) — he should be smaller? — the mass, the sweat of his well-fed ribs and back meat, Umo’s truck trips were thought “dirty” by my brother. A phenomenon (and associated with me, my future, not anyone else’s, not even Umo’s). From my mother, contempt for being orphaned and nothing “done about it.” She meant, I believe, infected (sort of) by his parents’ absence. And a Mongol-Manchurian, it had been learned, Mongolian stuck in her mouth — not even quite Chinese, my mother said, who called the police on Umo when Corona phoned from the motel that the white truck with the Baja plates was parked outside, though my father when he got home said he would take care of it: but why? Only because Umo would be useful one day.
Poor boy, with no papers, no family, no good reason to be here floating around, my mother observed, “grandfather a Muslim, they say”; (“His grandfather’s dead, Mom”) and he gives to beggars when Liz said it’s encouraging laziness (“Liz said that to you?” I said.): description shaping rumor and presently from my uncle — was it Fall 2001?—an interest in “identity papers for all citizens,” putting us on a wartime footing like Europe in the movies. Reading the paper at the breakfast table, “We’re running a check on him,” my father said to my mother, meaning Umo. A way to let me know — but what? — though I heard her tell him my view on begging as if it was mine and not the minister’s. My brother was leaving the room — because I had entered it, I often thought — but paused at the threshold hearing me making a statement he instinctively knew was pointed toward a concept he could get behind: In class once Milt had said that the old Lutherans objected to the monk’s oath of poverty because if you vow to remain poor you refuse the chance of a future job, gainful employment, and, key to it all as you find in the parables, profit. “The Lutherans don’t put up with any nonsense,” said my brother, gone into the hall. Umo kept much information, if not his thoughts, to himself. He couldn’t speak sometimes.
Everyone comes to our city sooner or later, my uncle said; they hear about it, it’s nice here. A child wrestler he’d heard Umo had been where he came from near the Mongolian border, some city it slipped his mind. Like Sumo in the balancing, the need to keep on your feet, but “nothing like Sumo if you know what I mean.”
The truck was in your mind speeding along the I-8 one night, seen one day in City Heights. Umo a big lug who knew exactly, I thought, what he was doing, cheerful, routinely resigned after thirty years in the same job — this fourteengoing-on-fifteen-year-old alien driving a truck. Milt said he’d damn well get a look inside. There was too much talk about Umo, he thought. This proved to be a time when Umo would be gone for days. I imagined him in Mexico sponging (which was true) illegible graffiti off his white truck — those beautiful Baja plates encrusted with seaweed, mud, silvery waste. Where would Umo contribute? An unbelievable swimmer, yet my father hadn’t said the word.