A couple of miles ahead a small, bulky gray plane banked around and around at an altitude of maybe three hundred feet, we were close, a repainted Cessna from the Seventies, they had enlarged the cabin of that model I seemed to recall, it would have sat Umo snugly. “Maybe he hates you,” Umo laughed that staccato laugh.
“My mom says he tells people things I say, his asshole son.”
“You give up diving. You give up photography. ‘Killuh English.’” Umo brayed his laugh.
“He didn’t like my dumb pictures. My sister figured out a better safelight for the darkroom.” “How can picture be dumb?” “Well, my dad said I’m a lousy competitor.” “No, your dad likes the war. You do what he says.” Came the evil laugh, he was my friend being silly. We had an agreement. What was it? “You be C.O. some day.”
Mexico was coming up on us in more than geography. And I thought that during this period I had discovered in my father a new strength (from my point of view). He didn’t object to the war policy or controlling the oil, yet what would happen to their country and ours? He would call them both idiots, also those close to home he disagreed with. They were not worth talking to. It was the man I had known as swimming coach and father, who seemed to have acquired a different kind of reserve, if I only knew what I meant.
“You don’t dive no more?” Umo said. I said I would tell him sometime because… I didn’t know why, but I would. We passed a school where some Hispanic children were sword-fighting. And a bicyclist headed the other way on the sidewalk but stopped, and shouting at somebody — or she passed us, it seemed. Umo drove fast but didn’t seem in a hurry. We passed a stand with lemons stacked up skewered it looked like on a stick near the beach in Chula Vista, Saint Louis Blues on the radio, Hear that? I said, the Ethiopian army used that as its battle song. I said this was where I came in I wasn’t going on into Baja and I had to get out, and I would take the bus back. “There’s something funny going on,” Umo began again, braking politely. He needed me for something.
Once you’d decided, he didn’t try to change your mind. He stayed with you, though. With it or you. The big decision coming up, I thought I might not see him. You might call him kind, but he was not kind. Kindness would be a favor you impose or so it seemed to me, my hand pressing the door handle down, the street a moving belt. I said that I might enlist. Was his politeness a falling-out with me? Strangely, he said to give his best to my sister, whom he’d never met and I awkwardly said my sister wanted to go East to college.
Was he right about my dad? Did Dad keep this noncitizen kid Umo for future use?
The speechwriter had moved on from Sacramento to Washington, DC, my mother advised me, to bigger things if he played his cards right or other people’s. I was sitting on the living room floor thinking, and my sister kissed me on the top of my head as she did our dad when he had come home and was being himself — grilling me sometimes. She said, “With him it’s the Olympics, not any old war, don’t sell yourself short.” I said if she’d been at poolside and had heard our war called Fate after swimming prac—
My sister was waiting for her boyfriend to honk, not that he had a license, and the two-toned horn outside cuckooed her out the door, his sister was taking them to the movies, and she was gone but had a second thought knocking on the porch window and up close I could almost hear her words like an SOS or see them like a kiss, He used you.
Up so close I could almost decode in a ring, an aperture of dark light inside her mouth, what Umo had said to Dad about me that very first day at the pool after the quick, irritating phone call.
Dad had someone’s ear (like a business person for a moment cleverly resigned to the nuts and bolts of knowing people); it was a phone call or two you were invited to hear at home his side of. “Thank you, Storm… Well, I don’t know about that.… We’re all in each other’s debt, Storm.… Thanks, you keep the faith too.” Once, the same Storm asking about a maxillofacial injury he had sustained at the hand of a spokesman for a Christian mortgage concern who took exception to actually perfectly supportive remarks about our Lord’s entrepreneurial skills. It was future deals (even just Sacramento-ish) or business and sport “at our level,” and some other plan I did and didn’t want to know about. Faith in business trips now, their achievement mysterious practically in advance. Sacramento and, I heard, Washington on Olympic business would pay off. Why didn’t I want to know? Hadn’t his annual Reserve stint come and gone without his taking time off for it? I didn’t ask. It was not what I needed to know. I understood that my father had drifted away from something or other. Maybe my mother, who planned a “birthday do.” Probably not.
But that name — why, it was “Storm” Umo had heard phoning Dad’s somehow- not-turned-off cell at the pool! Stom, Umo said; “Stom”? I asked. Wind, rain, thunder, lightning, flood, Umo said the words; was he kidding, and the language game in his hands? “Oh Storm,” I said, and before long had understood it was the man’s first name (pool money, I thought, but also the guy who wrote speeches for others). How long ago that phone call? And maybe I with the best will in the world, war-bound, had done the drifting.
I had resolved to enlist. A long-standing impulse, and my secret. I am standing on the beach and my sister’s boyfriend has stomped off somewhere, a kid. I am standing behind her, my hands on her shoulders, one hand comes up to touch mine and draws it down an inch or two. Time to go. Do I have the sequence screwed up? Prophetic. Touching her, you see things. It is months later. And I think of sending Umo a shot from the outskirts of an ancient Middle East city, of music was how I thought of it, sand in my eyes that windy day of the future — an Afro-American GI, I imagined the scar down his cheek, earphones in hand, one ear mutilated, listening lost in concentration to “Let There Be Rock”; I would send it to Cheeky for Umo instead in case she knew where he was, and I had a picture in my mind of his license plate: a gray whale’s fluke prophetically sinking into the sea. And some rowdy moments at a party, some words we’d had.
I have said Faith. My mother’s I might mean, or that we were a family. And her sister’s, who with my uncle joins this staggered history from a hopeless angle. They followed Sumo wrestling in its traditional Japanese form as so many American married couples curiously do (was there any other?). But they paid twelve ninety-nine a month for the Sumo channel as it aired in the border region through an offshore competitor, and they celebrated both the Thursday night bouts during the season in those days and the Sunday night reruns of bouts they remembered in as much detail as a shopkeeper in Sapporo (though how much could there be to remember?) — the chants, the quick side-step and shove, or grabbing the other guy’s silk belt, the gravitational scale of budging that reminds one of the consequences of going wrong in small things. My aunt at least shared my mother’s uncanny devotion to the War even before it began or had been foretold in the President’s dream, and even seemed (though I’m slow on the uptake and probably wrong) to substitute in her normal use of “Him” for Jesus the Chief Executive after a press conference that had devolved into mostly an exchange between the President and one correspondent down on his right in the second row.
Imagine my reaction (and that I kept it to myself, I told my sister) when my uncle had heard of Umo, whom they regarded, sight unseen, as an alien upstart whose underground reputation as a wrestler, whether we’re talking bastard Sumo or worse, not yet subsidized by commercial TV in La Jolla and Nueva Tijuana’s new Micro Casas on the east side and further south in Guerrero Negro, Las Palomas, and a town with an imported metal church near the Volcano of the Three Virgins, was at the approximate and “Baja” level of cockfighting and human sacrifice. What was rumor, where did it come from? My mother, in reply, looked at me as if I might as well drop dead (as she would look at Dad, who had been much struck with my uncle’s rumor though they had been discussing my aunt’s pistol like the old German model).