Free Cannonball by Joseph McElroy Page B

had told my sister who believed me and often one better.
    One evening Umo was gone while I was completing my slow/fast drills, though I saw him go. His broad back, his purpose, glimpsed upside down beyond the ceiling like where I was headed as I reached back, stroke after stroke.

6 maybe if it was close by
    My father on some instinct had no need to help him, parentless, stateless, but not powerless. Listened, though, to Umo. A brother, we say, and brotherhood, which is harder, like Umo’s laugh at brotherhood, when I answered a question he asked. What about your girlfriend, is she your brother? Sure. Your mother? I guess. Your sister? Well, not much, but, no, yeah she is…“You like her,” said Umo. Like her? (I must have said something with my face, like, Well yeah, something, and I at least picked it up and answered.) Yes, I do. Maybe she can be my brother, Umo said. Well, I said, she says…“Me, myself, and I.” Me myself and I? said Umo—he laughed like a shot; and she says our dad’s a loaded gun, the thought tumbled out of me, and she says he wants to build us into whatever, and our mother wants—“Is she a brother?”—“wants to keep a united front, you know.” “A united front,” said Umo. “Yes, that’s what she says.” That’s tough, said Umo, but your real brother—Wait, I said, I recalled one Sunday I and my sister had gone to church with our mother—our brother being busy—and the pastor preached about the woman at the well where she finds Jesus sitting who asks her for a drink of water and she makes problems and he offers her water to truly quench her thirst and knows she’s been with five men which amazes her because how did he know and so on and my sister got my mother mad saying Jesus holds out on her till he springs his secret that he’s the prophet people have been talking about and I got in my two cents worth and my sister, with the smallest room in the house, came in again with Jesus competed with the woman on equal terms until he couldn’t hold it back any longer, and Mom told Dad. But your real brother, Umo persisted, is… Is…, I began—Beyond the law, said Umo and laughed, and I wondered what he meant. He was right although my brother was aiming to be a lawyer for a mining or insurance company, I think he had said, and worked out and referred once to his girlfriend’s box and never spoke to me much.
    What is this box? Umo said. Her, you know, vagina. You call that a box? He does. So when you have to explain something, you find out you knew more than you thought, said Umo. When I came to, I wondered where I’d been but it was only a second or two, I said. Came to what? Umo laughed. Oh, like you’ve been knocked out and you…came to myself, Umo. Your brother, he said. And Milt, I said, you know Milt.
    Who may have expressed his concern in weeks of silence when I was in the Army passing through deserted settlements apparently, photographing aerosol cans with ribbons at one end, and an archaeological team using noninvasive tricks of finding unexploded munitions, a black lake from a burst pipeline, children plugged into GI earphones in dangerous neighborhoods where I would borrow somebody’s unsuspecting laptop and by chance or unsuspected prayer once intercepted word of a team filming GI music-listening habits and pictured Umo back home working the Mexican border.
    â€œWhy would you want him as a friend?” my mother had said, “you have homework to do. He needs help. You just have to look at him,” she said. We have to. It’s true, I said. What did we find to talk about? Nothing much, music, his grandfather, wild camels, blood pressure monitoring, family, America, swimming, developing pictures, the exhaust manifold on that truck of his—“Well, there you are, he’s not old enough to drive.”
    â€œNever seems to get