Diving past the elevator door closing I would figure how to reach The Inventor without leaving a trace in Coronado; envisioning vehicles, drivers, my driver from the palace almost — sighting of all people my mother’s butcher a fellow communicant at her church idling in his minivan at the traffic light. He it was, then, who drove me twenty blocks to a bus stop he did not question; he pointed out the red, blue, and silver Heartmobile trailer (why?), said he’d heard I was back how did I like it it was different over there he guessed — his elbow out the window, his thick, pink and purple hand restoring a Camel to his teeth. I could see myself going back — I said this to some shepherd sympathy in him for a Reserve who, pretty slow on the uptake, he could not know was puzzling out whether the woman driver weeks ago I’d never expected to see again who’d fished me out and given me a fresh shirt had seen another bodily form moving under the surface or — half an hour before? — a great meaty shoulder gashed, peeled back by initial shrapnel sail by but free at least of the shot that found Storm’s CPA on the pool tiles. So, as I freed myself from the butcher’s front seat, thanking him with a surprise in my eyes for what had come to me and for his own loaded life as well before me in his long, narrow face and his competent, even savage, and for the moment helpless, hands and a curious glint in the left earlobe, and wondering if the Heartmobile nurse had weighed Umo; who should I see — or what — but a white truck (smaller than I remembered), blurred graffiti on its flanks, Baja plate, elbow out the driver’s window, though too bony, too dark to be Umo’s.
I thought about that elbow boarding my bus, my silenced devotion to Umo, his life our life I took apart, just now the free Heartmobile, the Sprint cell, a pack of Camels in the well in the butcher’s front seat with a blue ballpoint just like one in our kitchen, for I would have to phone my mother.
It might have come to me like an envelope from within the house, it came to me ringing the bell feeling almost followed by what I sought though I would not look away except up the street to some memory of Cheeky’s garden now overgrown like a field the stalks and weeds all but guarding her low, warped porch. Here at The Inventor’s the shades drawn against the sun, one window boarded but fresh paint slick as the painter’s hand on the purple and saffron front door, no peephole blessing this place, store shut but waiting and my job to know this like the Ziploc I carried in my pocket and not even under my pillow at night as my sister knew turning the pages, cross-legged on the bed, fresh from her shower, reading to me from the clipped, planed, carpentered sentences of her book, a loaded gun, ours I felt, bound in our heroic intimacy that must change.
I saw who they were after and it was not Umo. I rang again.
It was the underwater photographer they were after, the Chaplain.
I was satisfied that he had died in front of me and I had done for him what he had asked. So his body had not been found at the scene of the explosion. He had evidently not turned up in the water filtration plant downrange either, where two heads had been found, or riding memorial sewer currents or resurrected to tell (or be guaranteed not to) his story another day. His candor, plus the detached wet-suit sleeve — its animal toughness — that I had found still in my hand upon being boat-hooked like a miracle in upon the slimy rungs of an iron ladder where the well roof opened briefly to a luminous, late, and gathering sky, persuaded me again my Chaplain was dead. (Others were not persuaded.)
And the job we had somehow agreed was your real job. Not Up again (to the drained pool). Or even Down (into the rapid well currents). But something in the Third Way (even of Umo’s feetfirst dive I think I muttered of) persuaded me also. Muttering, vomiting the memorial waters, slipping on the rungs, feeling the lower dissolve as a foot found the next up, transferring the rubber sleeve onto my driver’s boat hook. And I understood that the Chaplain had given me the account of the Seal interrogation, or its cruel end, because he had been there. And both his death and living persuaded me, and the scrap of Scroll torn from his hand — not the Scrolls, but the scrap, or, more, its tornness — yes. So in a way he was still among us.
My finger on the bell about to ring again. The street never quite empty behind me, the greenish bronze god head of the door handle, turning, passes a glint across my eye as if to open, while inches above it the tumbler within yields to the other hand.
Inventor? Only our name for him, two kids fairly color-blind for California. After so long away — since my enlistment party — where do I begin? With questions about the break-in? The “nothing of value” taken, my sister had heard from Milt. News of my continuing war. The lease at risk, Cheeky’s, we had heard too. And a green card.
My scrap of papyrus, fingered and rubbed curiously by my sister, had become a necessity today. The translation, so strangely delayed by me, I needed now and wouldn’t get for free. My visit was for its own sake, though, like old times. A drab two-story wood and stucco house where, if I hadn’t already heard of that briefly historic pool, I had been advised by The Inventor to show up for its opening. Not the first time told to go do what I’m probably going to anyway. But I forgot promptly that I’d heard it here. (I was doing it.) Yet later didn’t wonder why. Because The Inventor, with his envelopes that made Milt mad, knew things—Be a passerby, his contrarian view of the disliked Samaritan story, in my birthday envelope the day I had taken Umo to East Lake — and was interested in my chest wound and how it came there — and in my roundabout humor; knew Umo before I did, and in some way that I accepted without expecting to have explained, had been expecting Umo before he had arrived in this part of the world. Perhaps a time had come when I would naturally have asked about these things, as I would have asked this black Indian treasure-house collector and poor sorcerer who his people were and what he thought he was doing here in this war-torn country, but that moment was when, against my suspicion of my father and his part in this, I had enlisted accepting a Specialist deal not even Umo knew of, much less this night-faced, genteel but life-and-death-eyed India Indian with a sharpness or kindness he could seem to save for two eleven-year-year-olds who over their formative years would blow some cash they almost didn’t have in his store by the time one of them had a bad pool accident soon after which an extraordinary or fugitive diver materialized first on a high board and then in my acquaintance and my disturbed loyalties who could at once promote me to my father who never took advantage as I had hoped of my introducing Umo to East Hill as a prodigy who could help him nor would grasp the real job I stumbled on because some foresight not all mine had planned to.
Yet what came back to me now in this deserted noontime street, inspecting The Inventor’s colorless, sandblasted or epoxy-patched Bel Air parked two feet from the curb and hearing his front door, was Umo’s We need you, that day. Said once across a corner of a grandly opened pool, what did it mean? — distant and personal like the lock tumbler and weathered bronze handle right here of this freshly painted front door which now sticks a little as it gives: