He was an underestimated coach, called on to step in and help potential Olympic backstrokers in early Zone meets in 2001 (to my surprise) and 2002. By then, something else was afoot. His love of country well known, I like a foreigner once had asked him what exactly the country was and where would I go to see it? He lowered his eyelids — like, Did I hate him? Only that I had known it would drive him nuts and he would not show it (though would), and because I had thoughts about it myself and ran them by my sister, which touched her strangely.
“If you have to ask, I can’t tell you,” he said.
And on the fishing trip when I was ten, I had taken some lame (I guess) pictures of just the roadside at Tortugas Bay and a rusty panel of scrap-iron fence not even the cactuses inside the fence and wished I’d had the buzzing sounds to go with it and had a fleeting thought about a real real close-up so you couldn’t tell what it was — this at ten, probably worth encouraging — and the boring foothills by a village named El Arco, some other shots — and my father took the camera away for two days because I was wasting film, but I recall he regarded Baja Mexico as part of the United States and almost was friends with me again when I remembered the fishmonger my mother visited and what he had told her about color-added salmon and hatchery-bred trout which seemed reasonably sad though when I said they could use some fish hatcheries down here in Baja to feed the people but what was the matter, they’d had fish hatcheries in ancient times (I thought), he laughed for once. Took the camera away another day reading my mind about men and women walking the highway — thinking (for myself) who were these people, Americans?
And when we got home I didn’t have the camera to show my sister and I thought she was making fun of me when she wasn’t and I got her down on the dining room floor and split her wrist rubbing it on the rug and not a whimper out of her, though hysterical giggling, a strong person, my baby sister, and I told her about fish hatcheries in ancient times and then thought of loaves, while I held her down and she waited, and I never took the individual snapshot very seriously after that but the roll turned up partly developed and I remembered I’d meant to give the real real close-up to my teacher Mrs. Stame who was thin as a stem and had given us a poem about a train to read which was hard until you got it and I had thought it was about a shadow but I was wrong.
After practice at East Hill one night (the phone from the Principal’s office at my former high school ringing off the hook because my father coached the team there too, supposedly, and blew them off now and then), after optional weigh-in on the old physician’s scales with the height rod he had sat us all down on the hard tiles to talk hygiene, diet, bananas and fluids sustaining the electrolytes in the system and preventing cramp; sex as primarily only a matter of releasing tension; and the coming war he spoke about also (standing). Sometimes a nation feels its mission greater than other daily struggles like beating your time for the two hundred, and to submit to that fate now could sharpen the competitive edge for these lesser struggles — let’s take inventory and just tend to business, he said. World Series of swimming was an idea of his. The Olympics but more than nations. Silence and some inner, partnering echo of tiles and water stilled the settling echoes of his voice. A war? I thought. A war to end weapons, he had said. Well, we could do that.
It was this I spoke to Umo about when I happened to see him. For he went away and came back you sometimes thought just to start these rumors that few checked on, like news in the newspaper or things you did in place of others. He had been cooped up in a juvenile home in Broadview for a few days, it was said; or he ran errands for a bail bondsman in Chula Vista for three dollars an hour on a good day and then for a sound studio in La Jolla — a Russian who worked there (no, Ukrainian) putting together a music tape for a superintendent of schools’ campaign for Assemblyman nomination but Umo said there was a big plan for international recording — even though they found out he didn’t have working papers yet rather than fire him as an illegal the Russian saw they could make this kid do pretty well anything. Umo was a supplier in ugly sporting activities in Baja on the Gulf Coast side, my brother heard, some said with his strength an actual participant even at his age; but the rumors like reassuring gossip had a dimension along which they seemed to gather toward a good decision you will make. Though my mother seemed unforgiving when she volunteered that I had “helped” my father even if he was too shy to say so with “all this new business”—that is, that I might thank him for his unexpressed acknowledgment of my help with…what? — his trips, his Sacramento speechwriter contact — news to me. You go your way, however involved you might be with these others — and through things you might have done? — or said? — like the miracle of everyday dealing, as if you knew things in advance like the Man from Nazareth unforgettably profiled in the words of these rumored first-century eyewitness “memos,” spreader of new ideas and of himself, plus one prophecy coming home to roost right now as the Administration had hinted.
I kept putting off visiting my old teacher Wick, for there would be time.
Umo caught up with me at the smoothie stand in Old Town, I had my little Olympus Epic around my neck, getting back into it. And I found myself up in the truck cab which smelled of cigarette and paint thinner, chlorine and the car deodorant 2-D Christmas tree hanging from the mirror. I was suddenly going to Baja. (Could I get out?) He pointed at me, my chest; ah, he meant my camera? “Good. Your father taught you. My father, he told me how my grandfather wanted to get to Mexico.” I already knew his grandfather, he said — well, I nodded, yeah, I felt I did. “You break things down,” Umo said, and laughed that laugh. Good old Route 5 looked like we were going straight south. “What are you trucking back and forth?” I asked. “Whatever is needed.” “People?” “Not the last time we looked.”
“Come on”—Umo a fourteen-year-old immigrant commuter of some maturity or a repeater of phrases he’d heard, his eye on the road. I talked to him, I said my father would ask me a question out of the middle of silent thoughts he’s been in all day, you know (?) or they’d been in him, but you didn’t have a clue, and out comes this question. Umo said, “Like?” “Like Why would you go to any war? When he was the one in the beginning.” “‘Or they’d been in him’!” Umo said — it was funny — my words—“I like that,” he said; “you break things down. It could be OK to go to war,” he said. (I’d been phoned by the Army again.) Maybe if it was close by, I said, what about him? “Look at a map sometime, they got a map at your school? They got a big map at that store you go to: find Mongolia.”
We passed a police car, restaurants, hardware, where were we going, it was like a plan coming to meet us. Real old jerky Blues on the radio band. Umo pointed to it and smiled. Well, grandfather had gone to Mexico to find the maker of a silver cup, dark and very small, that had fallen out of the bag of a man his grandfather had killed as it happened in a fight that began as a joke. “I got it right here,” Umo took his hand off the wheel and clapped his hand to his pocket. “It’s the real reasons we look for.” His grandfather came first (whom he’d never known — only in his father’s stories, the silver cup, those particular letters on the bottom (which maybe were not his name but words, Umo had realized). He had come to Mexico on his grandfather’s business that he had made his own. (A twelve-year-old?) Searching for the maker of the cup. Was that him on the bottom? “You sound like my father. ‘What the hell do you see in that picture?’” “You mean in the school paper?” Umo said, as if he remembered—“three and a half girls and your father shoved you — once in the school paper, or—” “Umo I never showed you that picture, I never told you!” “You’re going to be going to war sooner not later if you don’t look out,” said Umo, as if he knew. “Well, my father would suddenly say, Isn’t it against the Ten Commandments? and laugh like a retard, and my sister—”