Cannonball Read Online Free PDF Page B

there if you could find it. He’d had to learn fast—what his grandfather had warned him. (Did my grandfather live with me? Nope.) Umo had been waiting to be picked up for work just the other day, as it happened near my school. He was always like, Hey I been waiting for you. It might be so. He was hard to find, but then easy, I said. Did I do the crossword puzzle? Was the Mexican who ran the Beatrice Motel a frienda mine? You know Baja? You go fishing? You ever shoot a gun? With my father once. Once? At the range. He was in the Reserve. Oh yeah? You know diving, right? Suddenly then in confidence asking me, What hap pened? The question possibly a real friend’s. Why did it hit home? We hardly knew each other. Or Umo had already checked it out. Diving? I mentioned his . How did he do that? An entry like that.
    â€œMe?” (For I had changed the subject.) “Yeah, no splash, less than no. Someone as big as you.” (My “someone” sounds strange.)
    â€œ That’s how.” (That was a good answer, I said.) He laughed. “ Less than no. That’s it, we are friends,” said Umo, each eye housed by an arch of bone. The face not really fat, just big. “But what happened? he changed the subject to where I’d changed it.
    â€œIn the air diver lose weight, he weigh gravity,” I would recall Umo telling the Marines at the recruiting table few weeks later. Told what? That he could lose weight diving—in midair, he said. A little more than a year he’d been over here. He wasn’t going to bus tables or help out at a roadside stand or lose it on the beach. Never never never. He was doing better, staying sometimes with the old lady from that day at the pool who boarded people, transients and kids and Umo said cooked them into pies, he laughed suddenly harshly—an Inner Mongolian laugh? Accidental meetings, though he knew where he could find me. What he didn’t know, an illegal immigrant kid, amid what he did.
    So he was back and forth across the border on business. He said he would take me some time. Me? I said (this kid).
    â€œYou follow up,” he said—“I guess ,” I seemed to interrupt him. He cocked his head toward my school. I saw my science teacher leaning out the window. They teach history there? That’s right. Geography, maths? Umo had this respect for me.
    That’s right, I used to be good in math, I said. Umo’s laugh was sudden and awful, older and childish. You have to pay attention, he said to me like I wasn’t. Did I know Sierra Madre mountains?
    Mexico?
    â€œCorrect! Orien tal . You know Teziutlán?” “Sure,” I joked. “I got three paira these in maquiladora—see?” (Umo hooked a finger in a belt-loop of his jeans.) “Special for me, they’re gon’ outa business.” (Umo shook his finger at me.) “You got wood working, photography?” He pointed to the school buildings I never had really looked at till then. I had carpentry in my garage, I said, myself at issue here, tested, puzzled, wrought-up somewhere, God!
    â€œYou drive?” Umo said. I knew how. He pointed to my school. He had something on his mind. “Ask kids who is their Senator”—he burst into laughter—“they say, ‘ Who ?’ No: I ask you ! Ha ha ha!”
    â€œYou know photography,” Umo said, a friendly demand, he had something for me, I thought. My father had taught me maybe the basics. I had done nothing with it. No? After he taught you? That’s right. “Speaks for itself,” Umo and his English. “Why?” “Why!” That burst of neutral, harsh thought made laughter. “Nothing does that,” I said, “nothing speaks for itself,” and wondered if I was right. “You could be wrong.” “Always.” “Why always?” “I hope not.” Justice for all? said my friend. Sooner or later,