I understood my historic distrust.
He wasn’t himself. I heard him actually tell our number-three freestyler concerning his “shape” the second day back almost nicely, I said it was not that bad.
One Umo-less evening like other swimmers under the eye of our coach — among them Milt three lanes over pissed off at what he had a hunch I was about to do yet perhaps also at the stopwatch unobtrusively thumbed by Coach — this resolve of mine and impulse to enlist found, looking back down at me from the arched ceiling upon this body of mine that shouldered the last two hundred meters of back-and-forth backstroke laps, a map of things drawing him away that I kind of knew about Umo; but with one new space like an absence we shared and in the whole ceiling and surely in no one point — and all this could be just about backstroke, you see, its exposure reaching back for the water yet for the onward end of each lap I had somehow moved my sister Em one night by describing, even if you reach too hard and pull a tendon. Halfway down this topography I placed the metal church that had been designed “by the Eiffel tower man,” shipped in pieces to Baja to a town on the Gulf side, though perhaps no less incredible Umo’s job to deliver there a load of bottled water, dozens of folding chairs, and, to be assembled, a wrestling platform with mats heavy as lead. On my left, meanwhile, a city that, unlike my uncle’s in his rumor about Umo’s wrestling, I could name — Tongchuan. Where like a crack in the plaster I could almost make out the path hand-in-hand skating at the annual ice festival, of Umo and his father, a skilled porcelain worker later employed at an industrial ceramic plant making red and white floor bricks side by side with a mysterious American: until Umo’s father had apparently disappeared, a Manchu patriot yet somehow of one of the minority tribes and hence earlier a weaver, who years before had carried off from her desert village in Inner Mongolia Umo’s mother-to-be who Umo said had been arrested for digging up rhizomes of Goldthread, knowing the old medicines, and this only a few months before the boy had left.
Backstroke another time, I thought, or space — forget that old sweep-hand stopwatch that anyway wasn’t timing me at the moment. Breathe the open air of backstroke. Was Umo coming back to East Hill? Was that what I had had to offer? The dive I went up too straight on and so came down too close to the board when I was just sixteen injuring not only my chest but perhaps my heart and making me board-shy drew me this evening to the ceiling, a light up there perhaps, a threshold dividing me; backstroke a dive itself paused exposed to the ceiling with everything paused behind and below from which I must get away. My way of backstroke is to look into the top of my head or with each arched reach quartering left or right trusting my lap to signal itself with a recoiling wash and a “loosening” of the water and over one shoulder or the other the corner further and sooner or closer and later my lap destination always known by some ceiling sign or blemish or crack knowing also how many strokes add up, though distracted once by Milt as he breathed turning a goggled eye at me three lanes across going the other way though I could catch it on the next lap because he’d been experimenting with breathing advised by Coach on alternate sides, to check his roll. My ceiling still there whichever way I went displayed still more Umo lives, which I woke my sister up in the middle of the night (my family almost) to describe and she said, full of sleep, that nothing was “upended,” no person, no village, no war, no water, and drifted off, loving me. Two new guys at the recruitment table knew him when I inquired — yes, he’d been there. And? I said. And? they replied. Wanted to know if the Rock music under the table had been picked for a reason, the new sergeant allowed.
His ever-returning grandfather, the miner near Mukden, admired the Japanese — their culture, their work or at least as a hobbyist the oracle scripts inscribed traditionally upon the curved surfaces of tortoiseshells. And that September night in 1931 he was on the train blown up in fact by the Japanese invader to look like the work of a nearby Chinese garrison. His longing to visit Mexico, grotesque if you know the governing classes there and unspeakable sidewalk misery guttering its bowels, seems fulfilled quite unexpectedly in the map of Umo’s arrivals before his thirteenth birthday.
Why should I, looking not back or forward, have plotted these facts upon the East Lake ceiling measured, lap by lap, one evening before my enlistment? One reason was that Umo had stopped showing up. Was it our coach’s war talks to the troops, or was it me? That Umo deep in the South passed through once upon a time and survived an unheard-of factory town Teziutlán where they were losing out in exports from Chinese over the water and blue-jean maquiladora closing down — and had found his way up into the highlands from Vera Cruz and Tierra Blanca and, avoiding Mexico City, trekked at thirteen through farmland and chill and rain to the Pacific coast of Mexico would have been already incredible if to him had not accrued the mantle and distance of an Acapulco cliff diver, which I knew from him he never was but felt he could become if need be.
A hundred and thirty feet above the sea at La Quebrada — The Gorge — arms outstretched let him be seen from the hotel he briefly and off the books worked in some capacity at, by freeloader tourists who haven’t paid their seven dollars to watch at the cliff, because Umo could have done that dive with his talent; instead, watching from way below a diver miss his aim into the twelve-foot-deep, thirty-square-foot rock-bound sea pool, Umo had dived in to rescue this forty-year-old champion who came out with a bloody, shark-size gash along his leg and belly, ripping his white suit. The father, it turned out, of a blind child who made boat models, canoe and outrigger and Bengal flat-bottoms with bamboo mast, one of whose small masterpieces the father had given to Umo, a wanderer who always made a mark where he was or on the move, and once, narrowly quit of China, with nothing to do but “sit on the windlass and sail” on a coastwise Burmese sloop out of Rathedaung built by a Bangladeshi entrepreneur of hard, dark, porous wood from the Chin Hills, though I tried to trace the boat, like Umo’s trip, too late to learn more than what I here set down. Umo, a wanderer even the night we all were to meet at Cheeky’s to surprise-celebrate it was not clear what — just being alive.
But by then, and that earlier evening of the ceiling, my old friend Milt’s lane-rage, the stopwatch, perhaps an absentmindedness my dad imagined in me from my diving accident and before, I’m not only distracted hauling myself out of the pool as on the far side he’s showing Milt the time cupped in his hand, his other on Milt’s shoulder in praise, yet then snapping a finger in my direction; I’m also a fool once more thunderstruck by an overlooked fact of my overhead geography: coming from China the Pacific route how in the world would my friend Umo have arrived on the Gulf of Mexico at Vera Cruz?
And with his talent, China would want him.
Maybe diving got him known.