And he saw some catalogue or magazine I guess at his feet and said, “What a mess.” And I thought I would like to tell The Inventor what she had said at the top of the stairs.
I was a diver then, I had a birthday. I needed to speak. One night my sister had — this would be right for the Hearings I now see — I gather it all together but it’s too good for them, Competition is only the beginning of it… My little sister had one night a kind of old-time sleep-over in my room and we compared experiences of looking into the future and touched each other, and then I said what I wanted up against her arm on me and it didn’t seem like much because it wasn’t clear and she made me laugh about it, that diving, especially the approach and in the soles of my feet, had gotten to be like payment for something. “Two steps forward, one back,” my sister lying on her elbow said. The light from the street was bothering her, she said; I failed to volunteer to pull the curtains over the shade, and she got up and left. She had me. What came after or what came before — both and neither in my mind. For a moment I was older. Umo often about things asked what happened after. My sister even when she was younger what came before.
8 board-shy
One day Umo’s employer was on jury duty and we swam at the high school, where diving off the one board you had to look out for swimmers. I tried to give an idea of how my father’s corporal punishment views had evolved over the years to Umo—Tell me about it, he laughed (his knack with the language) — You? I said — you’re too big to… To shoot? Behind the legendary Honda mower a rattan rod still stood in a corner of our garage. More talk than much else, abandoned in my case when I was ten following a trip to Mexico, CP (it sounds like resuscitation) couldn’t be quite eye-for-an-eye-enough administered, not measurable to the offence, hence—
Umo put his hand over his heart to speak—
Though “Fairness not the Issue,” another quaint or really sound principle with my father, I said, like Competitive Instinct. And “fancy-minded,” I recalled from my sister’s room him calling me, when he looked down at the Coaches Directory and other catalogues strewn on the floor and that was all he said that terrible and innocent time and I said Even Jesus’s family thought he was nuts out in the street when…and I’m glad Dad didn’t hear the joke, who might be a secret nonbeliever, worse.
Umo rubbed his chest. What happened? He meant the accident. I had hit the board. “Don’t want to do that.” Thanks, Umo. “Two dives, one crash.” “Two at once?” my friend asks — possible for him. “Half gainer too far out; twist too close.” “A full twist,” Umo said, “you scrape chest.” I did not tell him the whole truth, only what was to be seen. Two dives. Two different dives. Like a meet. But practicing the half gainer (?) — coach screaming at me.
It is a great idea, that dive, that forward back dive, looking upward and back like a backstroker, so free and exposed if you don’t have to wrench yourself over and back, the great arch still as inertia with a potential for surprise in it, dive within a dive, wheel in a wheel. Wheel? said Umo. When did he scream at you? A half gainer too far out, my feet going over a little on entry; several half gainers, and coach hollering too far OUT, what did I think I was a figurehead? Figurehead? Of an old-time ship ploughing ahead. A woman! “Yeah, too far OUT!” I raised my voice. “Too far out?” said Umo. Well, that’s putting it politely. And in the middle of the dive.
“So you came in closer with half gainer.”
“No I thought if I’m too far out, I’ll try a twist, and I did, because even if degree of diff doesn’t get you much points, a full twist, that’s…”
“You never see me do one all by itself. With best will in world,” he added, and I heard myself.
Not all by itself, but Umo, the bend, the stretch, arm folded across you then the twist unfolding it. So this time I went up off the board so high I had an hour up there to play with and this time straight up off the board to show him.
“You father.”
I had all the time and it was like I didn’t stop rising—“That’s right!”—And the turn was like a roll in space, finished with him, I wished my sister could have been there—“Right!”—No, wrong, Umo, wrong, wrong. She took care of me that night.
“Too straight, but your arch.”
It might have saved—
“Absolutely — your wrist, your head—”
My face because—
“Your arms are still wide enough to—”
To clear the board so I would have my face, my chin, head—
“You bring your hands together, they break your fall, you hit the bod.”
My arch cleared me all but…
“Ah! Make bod shorter.”
“No. Change him. Lengthen his fuse.”
“Lengthen his fuse, that’s good. He shout?” (Umo will not ask further.)
“Yeah. Something. At the top. I yanked it.”
Umo rubbed his chest because at the public pool with Liz that other night he had noticed the galactic tread mark still raised on mine, now fading though poisonous under stress. What happened after, he wants to know. He doesn’t ask what exactly was shouted midair during gainer, during twist, not the whole truth because equal truths substituted are just what he is practiced at. Not that I press him on his travels. Diving didn’t get him here. Swimming he had even escaped, I guessed from a mention of the athletic authorities in a city quickly named, it sounded like “Taiwan” or “Tuwain” but it wasn’t, it was — yuan, perhaps. Alone in the mountains, helping animals haul a wagon, swimming a lake in the dark, fat as a hibernating mouse, spotting the eyes of a tigress following him along the shore, until he reached a network of waterways, rivers, some made, invented, to give you new things to remember to survive.
Umo’s body was his mind during the weeks of his trip.
He knows his friend’s quite “famous” coach said some things that are not put into evidence, and that is enough, although one day he will talk to Oral the big flippered fool and one night he will talk to Milt the long-armed because Milt was close enough to the diving well at East Lake to hear most of the words but to this day made little of them except Were they about the dives? — and then of course I didn’t go to the hospital.
All this I needed now to speak of to Umo. New friend, maybe not close, he nodded about something, did not laugh. Foreigner, Competition, I was saying, my father… Umo nodded as if he had known about…what? “She took care of you after?” How he knew.
And before.
Before you got hurt?
Well, we always talked.
Oh.
Remembered, saw ahead.
Yes, yes.
Loved each other.
Oh.
Umo? I had gone too far. Maybe not.
He could see ahead too. His mother had shown him a leopard in the woods as a beautiful warning, she said, and he had read something in a book — he stopped and was private, and went on — had to get it translated, he said, something of what is expected of sons, you know? (Came out enigmatic, a barrier between us reached, thank God) — and only then understood his mother and could see ahead.
His damn privacy, I was saying — isn’t it shyness that’s standoffishness? What was that? Umo asked. We call it shy but. (I wanted to ask what he had read in that book. My father private at least through absence.)