“The race?” Umo said. He got it. “The race is,” he said, “but…” He really paid attention even when he didn’t, and he pretty much knew what I meant, because I at least know that the Bible or Benjamin Franklin, maybe both, say the race is not to the swift. I might be competing with Umo, for all I knew. He asked why I’d stopped diving. I would tell him about the accident some time, I said. I’d just had an idea or memory as you sometimes do swimming backstroke — shadow, though, of someone else’s memory, not mine — and here he was, here was Umo noticing the scar from when I had hit the board and could have been killed — and when he had said, “Water,” I had remembered, Water trusts the backstroker.
Here was Liz, too, my girlfriend body-wading across two active lanes, and when I stood up in mine and looked, Umo was gone, but not what he’d left. It was late August, senior year starting.
“Where’d he go?” “He’s over there,” Liz said (like, why?); she kissed my shoulder, I felt her; “now he’s gone.” “No he’s not.” A passing lap swimmer kicked a toe hard against the back of my hand and caught the nerve that runs clear up the arm and over the shoulder. “Independent,” Liz said, sort of out of sight out of mind. “He wants…,” I began.
Liz palmed my chest and kissed me there, as she often did to remind me, as if I’d had surgery there. Which maybe I had, as my sister had said late that terrible night when I was sore as hell whatever she meant. My idea I almost — (Liz was talking to me) — kept to myself. What would it mean to Liz — what not even Milt knew or my sister — that it was Mexico Umo had come to because it had been his grandfather’s dream? “Mexico!”
Liz puckered up, she made a beautiful face. “Why do we do that?” I said. “Other people’s dreams,” I said, in momentary possession of someone else’s private memory but only from outside — Liz would never to her credit just say, Yeah. “It’s not Mexico he wants,” said my girlfriend. I got a kiss on the shoulder. How’re you doing? was one of her thoughts said softly now standing hip-deep in my lane, afternoon tiny bubbles racing up from somewhere, her clear dreamy thigh, an escaped coil of hair at the seam of flesh and suit, whichever came first.
If she wanted to know, though I wasn’t about to say, it had been two years ago and three days after the accident, standing in the water here with Liz, I felt again before I’d even known her, the Goldthread herbs I had crushed and boiled and quite secretly with my sister applied the terrible night in her room when the door was flung open upon us like a snapshot by our father though we were the flash, yet time after time in mere memory another place of that time I was in a sweat arguing about nothing with Milt at The Inventor’s, and to the third person nearby could it have sounded set off by some For Sale thing on a shelf? — I was injured — not just injured — ill, sick, I had realized at that moment or changed (how the word has changed, was it a war to make “ill” mean “wonderful”?) — and the angry track the accident had raised on my chest only days ago was mine alone. Milt had hold of the early west Bengali biplane, swooping it this way and that, the fuselage orange and crimson, the top wing pocked with tiny dark marks as of anti-aircraft bursts The Inventor had said were drawings of sea pencils in fact that thrive on the marine reefs to the south off Sri Lanka, the plane designed and built by an oceanographer from Calcutta and these very tweezers lying on the shelf were the ones used to place and glue the balsa struts. (“Let the tool do the work,” I said. Milt flicked his finger at a poster of a woman looking at you over her shoulder showing a beautiful ass and just visible the thong top of her underwear, it was odd but I didn’t know how much if any experience Milt had had). Brought back from a mysterious unannounced trip abroad of The Inventor’s months before, the plane model cost only twenty-five dollars, but who had that kind of money? It was Milt’s sixteenth birthday, not enough to make me agree with everything he said today. “You’ll get over it, you’ll dive,” he’d said. “Why should I get over it? I can hardly breathe.” The injury to my chest was mine, and The Inventor was puttering in the far room, listening. I heard Milt talking to himself or to the plane behind me, for then I was standing in front of The Inventor counting my money and put it back in my pocket and lifted my sweatshirt to show him. “They said I was lucky.” “It needs to heal, then you will be better than never you knew,” he said.
“Than ever?”
The right words will do more had been nonetheless what The Inventor had said when I told him what had happened and that I couldn’t breathe, and when he laughed learnedly, sketchy, even forlorn, and asked how it had happened, the full twist that came too close to the board, I couldn’t breathe again and he lowered his voice and he said that worrds had caused the hurt and would do more than the herb to fix it but try the herb, and it made me mad but it was scary, this very dark man — had he been at the pool when it happened? He had a total outsider’s hunch — that was it — or weird melting-pot foreign knowledge, yet no, it was some fine-line or species tenderness; for, well, words of criticism had greeted my injury, surfacing, half unconscious or barely conscious or obeying the angry seed he did say somewhere near the very place in me, my heart channels, that had borne abrasion, but how could he know what had been shouted at me — could he? — in mid-dive before the accident? Of course not.
Remember (he said) what you have always known, the vein you can’t see running through the wound, and he handed me an envelope with something in it — the Goldthread — and then another that seemed empty though sealed and I knew Milt was in the other room trying to hear us and I had a grand total of twenty-six fifty in my pocket along with my keys knowing what Milt wanted for his birthday and I had a plunging feeling then hearing the jingle of the till ringing up the sale and knew that sometimes he should grow up, though, and that on the bus he wouldn’t be satisfied with loving the plane and would have to know what was in my envelopes but would have to settle for just one of them.
4 in return for what
Independent, Liz called Umo, sounding more a woman than I had heard her. She hauled herself lightly out of the pool. Water streamed down her thighs, no stopping it, and she fingered downward the butt line of her swimsuit. Why travel when we lived in a city like this? was one of her thoughts, I knew. How’re you doing? was another, said softly with no slant even now standing in my lane.
But had Umo grown up? And so fast. Had he? And illegal, for crying out tears! He gave to the bereft old sun-grained California drifter at the bus stop a couple of bills. Where did the dollars come from? What they call a silent offering at church, where pastor and sheep are not silent about, in our city, begging if you’re able to work, which my aunt years ago now called a sin of sloth (an animal I knew from a picture) but Milt’s minister father a violation of the very idea of brotherly love, according to someone with whom my mother agreed without knowing who it was and I passed all this on to Umo one day on a city bus. In his great frame and flesh unveined and smooth among its folds a declaration, a friendly force, a citizen of the world on the move. Mexico, anyway. Though maybe no place, and illegal, though maybe a place itself can acquire that status.