Cannonball by Joseph McElroy

Author:Joseph McElroy [McElroy, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781938604218
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2013-07-16T04:00:00+00:00

15 Heard of you

He came after me along the tiles at the edge of the pool. I made my way down the mostly drained warp of what had been the diving well floor, catching traction on split, broken grouting, slipping on the downward break, getting almost the hang of it, a ship, a section of deck, disaster. The Russian followed along at his level: “Hey. I am Ukrainian!” he shouted. He was trotting around the pool to the far side of the demolition area. “Ukrainian, not Russian!—Ukrainian.” “All the same,” I called across, heard a siren above.

I pulled a bather away from the edge—I might be Security, I waved several bathers back, an elderly Arab couple with small knapsacks, this wasn’t a public pool. Close to the pit I would see for myself. Groans from below, clamor, rooms shifting and things piled and after-concussion and structural undulation abhorrently underfoot. I had thought there had been a second explosion as well. I would more than see what it was, it was what I could do for Umo, if I believed such truths, this rebel bombing, this accident, this the two of us coinciding and far away a steady thump of Rock ‘n Roll going down.

Someone in a bathing suit got hold of my bad arm, I lost my footing like a skater, now it was this nearly naked fellow who held me up, and then I had a sight that almost drew me far down in the smoke and structure though mysterious of what I seemed to hear—yet a visible glint of waters burning like sewers you just know are sewers and then gone from view as wreckage of darkness or raft of rubble slid across below, and under my feet and down there a yelling, a sieve of words even howled but only a few clear—“…up behind,” a bosun’s order, reached me, and two voices I almost recognized, or one voice in trouble, struggling, so you thought “not with the men” wasn’t the real words.

The Russian shouting…

But I would get down to where I should have been all alone.

“Why they shout at you when you dive?” he demanded to know. In midair, he meant. Why did he know something? Why would Umo tell him? He was directly across the pit from me now, past the diving board ladder and above the destroyed diving pool. “Ukraine,” he shouted. “When?” I said (“Last year! Always!”)—my passing interest involuntary, like future turning these tiles into the bread of his own life and schemes to be pursued as sheep follow the provider, and, papers, green card, everything in hand he won’t forget, for he needed a deal to get here and will deal again. What would he do?—a “Russian,” after all. But he would come no further, his no one-way ride. He was talking at me, stopping for new tremors I took to be a sign damage was ongoing like aftershock. Had the insurgents overshot? Where were they? Oblivion?

“The dive, eet began like swan. He tweested halfway to face board and then doble somersault.

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