My idea had been to bring Umo to East Hill. Make a splash with the coach, his search for regional or even national attention. It might not cross my dad’s mind that we were after it together, whatever it was. Yet in some more interesting thought that I hadn’t learned to follow up, I was soon to be in another “it” with my surprising and sometimes embarrassing sister, who had described unforgettably Umo’s entry into the water one summer night in 2002. I beside her shot on film or tried to his dive but she just as she’d been interrupted passing on to me a weird family yet neighborhood question Corona’s Italian wife Bea had put to her as they had biked home the night before through rain divided and gathered and caressed by trees now tonight saw him pull off a two-and-a-half at a public pool under the lights that went out totally for a moment, a breaker fluke that went unexplained, as he left the board plunging us if not my camera into nowhere and came back to reveal him just passing the crest of the as yet undisclosed dive now crunched into tuck — as I became aware of the old woman of a year ago with the spotted skin and the veins materialized now as if by the power glitch itself beside me seeming to say hello with a word: for Umo’s dive was so busy a somersaulting that when he just came out of it he’s someone unaware of you headed somewhere else gone forever, my sister said, or executed, it came to me she had murmured to herself or me, I thought if anything a sucked-downward tongue or perfect loss. Which like my sister’s own, night-inspired remarks I recall, but, hoping for her success at least in life (for she dreamed of supporting herself while attending college far away “somewheres” if they would let her go), I’m struck by her thought that Dad was looking to get out of the Reserve “if we weren’t careful,” for Corona’s long-legged wife narrowly avoiding a bike collision with a parked car’s door opening had asked last night if it was true he had managed to swing it already, a friend of her husband’s told her. And my sister told me she had asked of Bea, “In return for what?” Yet what stayed with me wasn’t Dad finessing the Reserve, if it was even true, but the seeming slowness of the dive (caught by sheer luck in my snapshot on the back of which one day I found a few printed words of my sister’s), and so I recalled for months my sister’s I thought unanswered retort bicycling behind Bea, “In return for WHAT?”
That palace dive answers her nine thousand miles and counting months and months later though what had I for answer wrecked at the brink of a now wartime palace pool, too slow to get the micro out for a still, though v-c recorded from the hip? For a spy without knowing it, of what wretched use am I it comes to me like my body itself during the later Hearings? And he this once upon a time huge figure yet not quite of fun, a gigantic kid you could trifle with not at all at your peril, unless privately in your heart and his; a promise at the edge of my neighborhoods so unforgettable I couldn’t always hang with it, like my sister’s word for his entry, “farewell” (then “frequent farewell,” this being my sister) — he was an untouchable diver I only later far away at my own paid picture-taking understood — too late? — and had been a sort of friend before even the cannonball beginning. For what else could I make of the word Cheeky (her name) said to me at the moment of the breaker going by the old woman in blue jeans and the Australian hat, who perhaps a year and a half before had taken the snapshot of Umo on the gangway in Vera Cruz with his enlarged hand out in welcome or arrest?
How long had they all known me even two weeks before Thanksgiving when I all but ran into Umo, how could I not have seen him stepping down out of the Heartmobile? — and it was as if we knew each other pretty well even then. It was my birthday, I’d bought one of The Inventor’s special envelopes and, recalling the potency of an earlier one, I’d been quite absorbed in whether or not to open it and I’d wound up downtown across from the Coaster train station. But now Umo must stop at the recruiters table, flag-deco clipboard, pamphlets of the future spread out where music stampeded blindly somewhere under the table and the two Marines speechless behind grim smiling teeth; Umo asking if this would get him citizenship. You could take him for seventeen. An unusual person maybe. Was it experience? He would need to lose some pounds, said the corporal, not really answering Umo’s question. “Shed some weight,” said the sergeant. Umo pointed under the table at the pint-size speaker. “That’s what they gonna listen to over there.” Later I grasped the quality Umo gave to his speech when he opened his mouth — or it could feel like it was coming true anyhow and I was on home ground but it made me mad. “Over there?” said the sergeant, alarmed. “Rock,” said the corporal “It’s not going to be ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’” I said. “Not on a daily basis,” said the sergeant frowning, smiling, pushing a piece of paper toward me. “Help ’em shoot straight,” said the corporal. “He’s with you guys, though,” I said. “All the way,” the corporal said. “A peacemaker,” I said. “Hey, He was a Marine,” said corporal.
I asked him what would happen and he said it wasn’t up to him but we were always ready. “Who’s a Marine?” said Umo so quick always though never what you would call quick (though I wished he would pick these guys up and throw them like endover-end grenades into the middle of the lake, a dumb thought of mine that brought with it Jesus out on the water for the day — prepared was what he was — marine Jesus had come to me). “Well, Jesus,” I said, “he’s our C.O.” “C.O.?” “C.E.O.,” I added.
“CEO?” What did Umo miss? Not much in my voice. “He gives us a hundred and ten percent,” I said. The Marines stared. What made me unreal, these words? Why would any kid need to enlist? My foresight weighed me in, shutting me down. The sergeant, extremely low-body-fat, looked over his shoulder at three kids behind him. (“They high school?” he said.)
“He had something going for him,” I said. “Those fishermen just left their nets and followed him. Talk about miracles.” “Secret weapon,” I remember Umo said.
It was my birthday sort of self-anointed, though I kept it to myself when I said I would take him to the East Lake club to a practice. Umo looked at his watch. He understood I now think as much as I, or anyway he was seriously touched, but was ready. “CEO?” I said. Chief Executive Officer, though the Jesus may have lost him. “I like to see what we talk about.” That meant, we talked. I got us onto the East Lake bus. I saw something out the bus window. The three (I was pretty sure) middle-schoolers were collecting literature from the recruiters and it looked like ballpoints to sign their names with to and to keep. I was taking Umo over to East Hill to have a look at a practice and get his feet wet. “About Jesus,” I began again—“It is not what we believe,” Umo said. “—some say he was proactive,” I said, “that was the thing about him, getting things done on all fronts.” “That is your business,” I recall Umo said. “You get it,” I said, “and if you don’t get it yourself you can’t tell someone else.”
“So what are you doing?” Umo laughed like he might not agree, and the bus driver had us in his mirror. I was sorry for Umo and it came out wrong. I said my sister would agree with Umo. It was my birthday, I said. “Hey, your birthday, what’s up?” “East Hill.” “What else?” Well, my sister was cooking dinner.
I feared I had invited Umo but he said, East Hill, good. Or did he think we lived there? “Your sister,” he said, and nodded with enthusiasm or formality. I was sorry for him maybe.