We need you, Umo had said at the pool the day of the monster cannonball.
My father had come back from Level-Playing-Field task force brainstorming about the future of No-Competitor-Left-Behind Competition at a retreat in Fort Meade, Maryland. A welcome had been read from the President to the effect that You have the intelligentsia with you always but me you won’t always have, my mother reported after Dad had come home and left again. For Fort Meade? I asked. She thought so. Fort Meade stayed with me until it came to me, as I later did not have to tell my sister, she told me. To me, though, our father betrayed no special acquaintance with what was going on in those days. I betrayed little curiosity. Dad was being consulted. He got wind of things early it seemed to me though I was slow to read the papers. His news about capital punishment — that scholars had evidence Jesus with his sharp-honed ploughshare had not consistently opposed it — in fact appeared a month later in an obscure item Milt pointed out that ran in the Union supported by a quote not for attribution from someone well placed that there was nothing old-fashioned about Old Testament get-your-own-back grit. Like Christian business, always unfinished, even the Everybody Wins creed my dad had his doubts about. Had drive paid off for him? I didn’t know how to compete, he’d said of me at practice. Here comes nothing, I thought, at last, but that was it.
And about this time, some months after high school graduation and shortly before I enlisted (where was I? what was I doing? I took the measure of my life marking time, noting that Milt’s times had been improving) — my father, a hand on the wheel, driving home from practice as if it were current events a kid hasn’t time to keep up on, yet confiding as it half came out some great event, seemed exercised about speculation in water as commodity bought and sold in certain large hauls, the coming thing. And when I wondered if it ought to be on the market when there wasn’t enough to go around, Dad retorted that from a farmer’s viewpoint it was hardly free (any more than freestyle swimming) or without commercial value, and when I said, doubtless with some measure of defensive irrelevance, that it was salt water inside us, wasn’t it? (like tears, and Jesus wept and what about…spit? no, sorry Dad) he was suddenly speaking of the horizontal water wells never in olden times fully mapped by any single hand out among the oil fields of the Holy Land (how did he know?) and down toward the Gulf and up into the higher paths of the Euphrates (who had he been talking to?) somehow surviving rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs, you often heard initialed) and serious bombs. Oh they knew we were coming, the old wise guys and prophets in that part of the world, I happened to say.
What was I to gather? I checked out the salt-water-inside-us issue and I was right.
An issue to me where my dad had all this (though minor): from important or unimportant people? from speechwriter and tipster Storm Nosworthy, who once on the phone had acknowledged my help? (For a change, I thought. Though how? Through Dad?) I guess I wouldn’t ask him to name the source (if he could) but the horizontal wells — did they recall the veins of fluid minerals and water in Earth’s body which I had slipped (with a difference) into papers for tenth-grade Science and Global as well (only then to understand what I’d stumbled on) that my Global teacher had praised but over a difference of opinion graded B minus minus, unacceptable to my father at the time but not so bad after all and confirmed by ancient pattern-sources for these so-called wells, influenced in my own way by The Inventor and his cures I had some difficulty in admitting to myself because hadn’t I gone him one better?
A country of shallow democratic roots, some said, the Middle East, yet through whose very wells, along these unlikely waterways (networked roughly, yes, horizontal in this unaccustomed scuttlebutt or even confiding to a younger son) a germ or power or proof, or hinted Thing was to be tracked, yet more worrisome or explosive than that. Quite unlike him that he should broach such business to me all but swearing me to secrecy; as if I had partial clearance or might know something through my decision to enlist, of which he didn’t speak, having learned I gathered from my sister against my wishes, who had listened in on his end of a phone conversation and reported that “Storm” was “close to the loins of the Administration” (in her own words adopted from Miss Kim at the library). Or it involved me whose brains might be momentarily worth picking, a partner in some event (or device) hard to grasp, intelligently infectious even in its fluid delivery system so incongruous with the desert (though our own coastal city an oasis in a desert system). In fact, I did let one “soul” in on this meager lead, though my father (really because my father) said some people in the loop feared word would get out as it had of the Middle East “gold rush” for foreign corporations.
What had happened with the Marines? A father question but answered bluntly by me: He didn’t really think I was afraid of the Marines?
“Like being board-shy?” he said.
“I’m a backstroker, not Olympic caliber. You’re a coach, you can tell.”
“And a pretty fair photographer, thanks to me.” Maybe the Army needed some action pictures, I prolonged the sparring. Our lights blinked at a car moving very slowly, and my memory stumbled upon my friend Milt, what he had said he’d seen in The Inventor’s display case, the Directory of Coaches my dad was in — anything was possible.
9 backstroke a dive itself
Of the Scrolls my father seemed not to know at that time beyond a water passage as unprecedented as some hinted documenting of a weapon-like function. A passage eastward in which I now think he knew I was to participate when my moment came, knowing, unknowing, like two southbound rivers of an almost landlocked state becoming one, if I could put my finger on it. Not originally privy as you might think, as I move from panel to panel of the Hearings listening for history; yet always in memory which made less strange what the Scrolls said, we were to learn later and ongoingly through the run-up to the Hearings, documenting in what was left of the Scrolls from two contemporary eye-and-ear witnesses who were there (and interviewed Him) a Jesus even more hands-on and ahead of his time than that shown by the four later hearsay scribes; no member of the board but a radical persuader to clear up and redeem old creeds of employment, gainful enterprise formerly guilt-impeded now prophetically fundamental for, two millenia later, American market values born again each day. Knew how to get things done was what appealed to people in high places.
Always in what memory? The day Umo and I spoke to the Marines and I brought him along to East Hill? What did he say to my father who looked across the pool at me? What got transmitted, my resolve? A long-standing impulse, did I say — and what is that? — to enlist? I got something from Umo. I tried to get him started.
In the late fall Dad went fishing in Baja in, we heard, bad weather (and alone, my mother thought) and missed six practices. Not us. We were all there. We were there. I recalled Tortugas Bay when I was ten. The roosterfish on a blind strike quite deep trying to run off among the rocks, its blunt body and heavy-ribbed back huge — when we were supposedly hunting for yellowtail. This time he didn’t sound like he’d done much fishing. Was it because he went across to the Gulf of California side? Or the water that preoccupied him, fresh in some shape or form — not that he would drink it, not down there, but someone was selling it off to a UK conglomerate to be floated thousands of miles in giant seagoing bags, yet it wasn’t water quite in that form that he was evidently thinking about (though perhaps a new slant on electrolytes he was always urging us to replenish with bananas and fluids in case of cramps and exhaustion and in the middle of the night uncomfortable electric leg-nerves) or that he might have learned about the new water material from a contact in Mexico, but anyway, on his return, for the first time he instructed me as if it was mere history or a man-to-man exchange, and seemed to all but swallow his irritation at me. Why alone, Dad? Why did it seem he hadn’t really been fishing? And to myself, like an either-or fork in my life, why didn’t I speak to him of enlisting for this bizarre war?