Free Cannonball by Joseph McElroy Page A

Hills. He listened to my father “take inventory” on terrorism and health at the end of practice before we changed. The Olympic trials came up, and then, if it was not another evening though Umo was certainly there, a future war my father somehow didn’t name but it was not the same as the War on Terror. Everyone had his job to do. He might have been receiving bulletins over and above reading the newspaper as he assigned us, he would do his part somehow.
    I hoped for Umo’s success. What would that be? Citizenship? To grow up. He was more than grown up probably. What is it we want for others? I said. He said others had to watch his weight. It was a joke. Secret weapon —a phrase of his. Later I decided everyone had a secret weapon, and did Umo really mean that? “Your father’s secret weapon,” he’d said when he’d heard this end of the cell phone conversation at poolside that first day.
    Did Umo dive at the Club? Yes, in the separate diving well. Did Dad keep track of him? In his own way, yes. No water partings or geysers for the moment. Someone asked when I would dive again. My father saw it all—who really owned East Hill and by the same token who they were. Or were owned by , I learned to think. Our secret weapon—but how and when would Umo be used, if ever?—and a distraction always though from what to what?. Not ever choosing to be the victim like the rest of us of my father’s evil temper (that’s all it was), Umo was shouted at in the air the first time, though indirectly: “Get that fat idiot off the board—” Umo already in the air—“in a hurry!”—a zero-difficulty front dive that silenced all sound but a wash of watery echo and the voice of the board stressed and then vibrating, which was time not at all simple for all of us in or out of the water to be alerted to this motion that could if it chose continue.
    This talent. The arch high and natural, the legs part of it—not yanked.
    Dolphin (!) as I also see him and see him slowed down during the moments of a dive even now with the tortoise side of my brain slice by infinitely small slice, beyond competing. The water lurks always, it is what water does. Cleaned in our city, with eye-burning chlorine (a fair price to pay for our southern California public pools and private)—luminous with its own light given back as a home or density not odorless like some other routine poisons but faintly giving off its promise for Umo leaving our three-meter East Hills board for a laborless entry we almost could not credit, for it seemed so beyond team use, and I was watching both my father and it, for I knew he had had an idea from the beginning of Umo’s visits.
    My father pointing accusingly at Umo surfacing in the diving pool after that mysterious entry, that pure “front”: “How did you do that, boy? It’s what I always said before you were born, and you’re doing it, it’s what I always said before you were born.” Umo ducked under. What did the man mean? “Downright distracting,” my father said but to himself of course. Why had the astonishing inwash of that entry in the adjacent diving pool all but flattened our waters out here?—stilled them, surprised them? At once, then, to be engulfed by Umo’s happy hand-assisted launch up out of the water to stand like a waterfall, then into the lap pool, where he gave us a length of butterfly, which as Umo’s go-between at least proved me right in the eyes of the man who had nagged me half-jokingly (which is worse) for months, Man, you don’t know how to compete …but I’d brought him a great talent from Asia to be invested in our—or my father’s—Olympic future, not buried in the everyday wars of our life. “What do you know today, mister?” he asked. And I told him there was a spit that could cure blindness maybe if you knew how to build it up and I