Cannonball Read Online Free PDF Page A

having over the phone with a customer, a model of a canoe at issue, and I was clear across the room flipping through the business envelopes in a shoebox. Yet when I remembered later, it seemed to have been for me, across that distance—Be there for some diving activ ee ty (how The Inventor spoke) of a highly unusual nature. It was natural to show up for the opening of a pool in this city where we have almost everything you need—even this cluttered, how-did-he-make-a-living store not by any means all junk, owned by a man with skin like night who said things and having spoken might think a moment and write it down in a book he had. Such that you were willing to pay now and then for an envelope that came out of a shoebox full of envelopes at the back of the store.
    For a message , the man had said; but he would say things like that. And his foreign command of the language—no less so for being foreign it came to me—that left its sometimes weirder words potential or a message in me like sediment in me a waterperson or not worth the work to share with anyone but my sister, for he would once in a blue moon crash land in an awkward or, better still, dirty word which he thought merely vivid.
    Though show up at the new pool for as good as a message ? That’s what The Inventor had said and I’d forgotten in the middle of Milt attacking Hindu views. (Of what? my sister asked that night. Anything alive, I said. Anything? she said.) Indiscriminate valuing of anything alive, it seemed.
    My sister I cherished for things only she said: dumb things, my father thought. But that you thought about then—the way you might oversleep or not take an insult seriously. My girlfriend wondered too about my sister E. Didn’t think her dumb, but what’s the fuss? ( No fuss, Liz.) And what’s so great about forgetting? she went on,. I do it all the time. (Liz, that’s what I—forget it, Liz.) But I did say I couldn’t explain it but if no one asks me why my sister affects me, I know, it’s how she surprises you with something next to you you could fall into, or how she rearranges her room or uses her hands, or knows you like a sister, and sounds like I’d never had one before.
    One evening she and her little boyfriend and his older sister with the driver’s license had seen Umo at the risk of his life hitch a southbound truck on the Interchange with Baja plates. “Don’t belittle him; you should have seen him just before he hopped in, standing there an inch from the traffic.” Belittle Umo? He was in the workforce, I said, recalling then that Umo, only thirteen supposedly, had called out to me that first time at the new pool that I was “needed.” One night in a darkened movie theater, a crisis of global countdown there in front of us on the screen, Liz whispered that “the President” reminded her of Umo. “Couldn’t get elected,” I said, “couldn’t get nominated.” Liz’s eyes aglint upon my lips aroused by holocaust on screen or having been out of town all day and come home, someone muttered behind us, and I said, “You never met him,” looking over my shoulder. “Don’t have to,” was her answer—some truth there.
    Seen on the corner of Friar’s Boulevard in conversation with Umo, I was later asked by my father’s Reserve friend, the motel manager, Corona, if I knew who I’d been talking to—a fella with no papers, Baja, the border, the other side of the world—he’d been told by a mutual friend who “stays with us when he’s in town, sells power-lifting equipment, y’dad knows him from the Reserve” but my father said Corona had played fast and loose with the building code though does that mean he doesn’t have something interesting to tell us? This I asked Milt one day we visited The Inventor, though Milt got mad, while my sister, when I asked her, kissed me for