Umo didn’t go to school. I had learned this from the genius who tried to push him into the pool. How did he know? One morning first thing my older brother who hadn’t addressed me in almost years told me my “Chinese friend” was a hoodlum, a bad guy, a crook, and a smuggler. That would be the day, I said; at fourteen? I said—not even. My mother on the phone shook her head eyeing me: I always knew too much.
In truth, too little, I said with my eyes. For was this Umo my friend, I thought? If illegal and Chinese, where could he settle? Not the first time people knew things I didn’t. I had run into him at three pools. He had lived in Chula Vista on the street working for the Sanitation Department as a night engineer’s helper, in fact seen near Otay Park at midnight under the streetlight heading a salvaged soccer ball into the garbage truck’s cruncher too late for another kid to rescue it.
Part Manchurian, if one cared, it turned out, though there was more—this kid, this stranger who knew of East Hill swimming club and my father the coach and was friendly with the old woman in the hat at the pool and the free blood pressure nurse on Market Street and Station. Had he known me that first day? Because the proprietor of an out-of-the-way store that I and Milt visited religiously every other weekend who knew foreign languages had asked me how I had liked Umo on the springboard and I told him, never thinking how The Inventor—the name we knew him by—knew I’d been there for that first double-barreled launch.
How had I forgotten? Yet how good, it came to me, to forget that The Inventor himself had told us to be there.
For some unusual activeety, I thought he’d said. Told not me but Milt in the middle of some argument The Inventor was 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 activeety (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 it.
Milt and I were approaching The Inventor’s out in North Wash one day, and a sixteen-foot truck pulled away from the curb, all marked over with graffiti. But a block and a half up the driver got out and it was Umo and he went in a bungalow as we waited staring till The Inventor’s old door painted purple on the top half and saffron orange on the bottom opened. Milt, too tall and starved-appearing, was arguing with The Inventor almost before we got inside—his stark skeleton towering over the unthinkably-dark or Dravidian Indian (or part “Paki” it was said he might be) who always welcomed us as his “collectors,” his “discoveries,” his “fellow citizenry,” and made a little speech which would irritate Milt, who I think really understood The Inventor but was nervous for some reason; and when I looked out the shop’s side window facing north the truck up the street was gone. But then Umo came out onto the porch of the bungalow and looked up and down the street, turning only his head, and looked in this direction and went back in.
Almost everything at The Inventor’s was secondhand, yet each visit we found something new. New for us. Third-hand, fourth-hand, sixth-, it occurs to me. A Watchman comic from way back when we were twelve, an action figure of the President to maybe tickle even my father; yet now among toys, curios, weird Peruvian crafts—Brazilian gods, Mexican animals, two Sumatran buffalos squaring off on a pedestal of polished wood—there were surprises in the back room and, of recent months, yellow and amber gum-stuffs the smells of which The Inventor could name—Pacific pine, woman hair, foot-sweet, gold, rank—and especially now these white business envelopes you had to buy without knowing what they held, and a slanting reference to current events and an old-world turn of phrase as when some Sacramento name I thought I recognized was said to be “close to the loins of the Administration,” meaning I assumed Washington.
The Inventor showed Milt a model fishing canoe made by a blind child and Milt was shaking his head this time with awe. “That’s ill.” The Inventor said he was giving it to Milt. I asked him later what it was that blew him away. He said The Inventor had had a daughter but had lost her. I envied Milt that he knew such a thing, for did not The Inventor confide in me as well? Umo’s truck had left; without Umo, I was certain. Suspicious especially when receiving a gift, Milt picked an argument with me when The Inventor went to find a box, Milt suddenly wondering why in our discussion of a cousin of his somewhat blinded by this awful foreign mainly skin disease erysipelas I mentioned a Korean chick I’d met at the high school track one Saturday morning who saw me spit on the ground of the long-jump approach run-up and told me to save my spit, Jesus had spat in the eyes of a blind man in Saint Mark and he could see. Why had I made up that nonsense, Milt wanted to know. No such thing, I said, she had grinned at me so maybe she was kidding. She was cute. Which was why I went home and looked it up in the Bible in my sister’s room and my mom found me there and I tried to explain the miracle to her, the truth behind it, Jesus at work, but my mom shut me up though not till she had heard enough. (Well, I had added a bit to it.) It wasn’t a happy moment though it sounds funny. No, it doesn’t, said my sister when she came home that night. There it was in the 8th chapter anyway, and when I saw Milt at the pool I had told him and he went ballistic, he was a minister’s son (was he ashamed of that?) and here at The Inventor’s he came back to it because he was amazed The Inventor was giving him the canoe. I could understand all this. And it was only then that Milt asked if Umo in that truck had unloaded something at The Inventor’s.
Oh Umo was around. Seldom out of work. The work 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 happened? 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.
“Me?” (For I had changed the subject.) “Yeah, no splash, less than no. Someone as big as you.” (My “someone” sounds strange.)
“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.
“In 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).
“You 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?
“Correct! Oriental. 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!
“You 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!”
“You 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, Umo.
“Photography.” Umo pointed at the school. “Yes, with a friend.” “You have a friend?” “A teacher here. Coaches swimming. Assistant coach. He’s gonna show us calculus.”
“Got a pool?” “Of course. An old one.” “How big?” “Twenty-five yards.” “A team?” “A coach, an assistant coach, a science teacher who—” (I drew a notebook from my bag and leafed to some equations) “who…—” (but found something else). “I know,” said Umo, from a weight of experience as if the situation might be someone’s fault. “Assistant,” he said. “To my father,” I said. I indicated the building. He asked what grade would he go into? Did he want to go there? (I meant enroll.) “Well, I am fourteen…(?).” Maybe they counted life credits, I didn’t know. How could he have been fourteen? I thought. “Life credits?” He was dead serious. “You speak for me, OK?” “You can speak for yourself,” I said. “What have you lived through, Umo?” “Through?”
Did I have a dog? he wanted to know, he’s looking at my notebook, some writing of my sister’s—it said, pointed chin, maybe short life, too soon to know (a face belonging to someone she knew) and then Umo read out loud, “Blue spots on nose, imprisonment. I heard that.” “You did? Where? My brother says the Chinese eat dog,” I said. Umo laughed. Brother, eh? Even the dogs they ate where Umo came from were family friends. “Meat makes you grow up fast,” he said, “you gotta sister?” He showed me a snapshot. It was of the upper part of him, coming down a gangplank, blurred faces at the rail. Who took this? Some friend. From the boat, I said. “No. Cheeky took it.” Snapshot on the occasion of Umo’s entry at the port of Vera Cruz. He had come here on his own when he was twelve, a “regular Boy Scout,” he joked.
A boy with a Native American handshake and a secret in his voice I knew even if sometimes it might be me. He answered you back. You did the same. Umo made you want to speak. “You gotta sister?” “Sure.” “You say ‘Sure.’ You know Teziutlán?” “Grew up there.” Umo gave me a look. He looked down the street.
This Umo is about me, I think. He was and wasn’t enlisting my help. You don’t have a picture in your head of exactly where Vera Cruz is, but maybe it doesn’t matter. His English. His jobs. His age. Occasional work for The Inventor—epoxied a fender, painted a wall. “You have a sister?” “Yes, I do,” I said in a certain way. A truck came down the street right at us almost. Umo waved it over. “Home is where the heart is.” “Sooner or later.” Adopting a saying like that, his mind already on the move away from where we stood on the street corner near my school, he had a purpose.
A friend should.
Doesn’t everyone if they only knew it?
You knew he had a reason for happening to meet me here. “Vera Cruz,” I said. “Mexico, my Grampa,” Umo said. “Your grandfather!” “Wanted to get there but never did. Never never.” The truck pulled over, Umo stood there broad as a Chargers linebacker. “Silverwork…” he said. I didn’t understand all this but here he was, my friend maybe, or I could help him. The truck waiting, he showed me a little silver cup that had belonged to his Mukden grandfather whom he’d never known. My dad had a Mexican friend in the Reserve, I said, as if that was something, but Umo right back at me, “With wife much taller,” he laughed (like a bark, a harsh I know), his hand on the door handle of the passenger side. “And she’s going out for pole vault,” I said, “I could really help her, but she…” “I know,” Umo grinned over his shoulder. He got up into the passenger seat. He worked for The Inventor sometimes, knew him in some way closer than Milt and I, who had known The Inventor years before Umo had appeared in our city. Some kids alone in the world just take over, looking ahead. And lose out? “I’ll find that place on the map,” I called. The truck was pulling out. Sooner not later, I thought I heard.
God helps those who help themselves, my mother had said, which is true except about God helping. “Where does it say that?” I said, picking up and twirling her blue Christian Lender ballpoint, but I knew it had made her angry. As if I didn’t believe it. “It’s in the Bible, wise guy,” she said after me, “you don’t trifle with the Holy Spirit.” It was like a favorite word of hers—spirit I will give her. “God’s matching grant,” I said and was sure it wasn’t in the Bible, it sounded closer to home, a web site, I’d definitely seen it, Ben Franklin on some poster maybe. Umo forgetting me as the truck rolled forward, later I couldn’t remember seeing anyone in the driver’s seat, a vacancy due to him himself. But who was Cheeky? It was no secret, I had concluded as the black exhaust from the truck’s tail pipe made me a promise.
I thought, I’m going to enlist. Me?
“Hey, you’re good with the water,” came the voice another day, “you understand it.” “I do?” “So do I. I grow up in desert.” There was Umo seen upside down standing on the tiles above me, I was near the end of a backstroke lap, chancy in a public pool somebody coming the other way. “Water,” Umo began, he lifted an arm over his head, I knew what he meant. “Hey why not we start a backstroke heat with a back dive off the platform!” Umo looked down at me like something weird he just noticed. He pointed—I knew at what: “Whatdjoo do?” “Accident.” “You still got a vein there.” He laughed that nasty, explosive laugh. I hadn’t seen him and here he was. “Your sister come here?” No she didn’t. I said he would fit in OK here, the race was to the swift.
“The race?” Umo said. He got it. “The race is,” he said, “but…” He really paid attention even when he didn’t, and he pretty much knew what I meant, because I at least know that the Bible or Benjamin Franklin, maybe both, say the race is not to the swift. I might be competing with Umo, for all I knew. He asked why I’d stopped diving. I would tell him about the accident some time, I said. I’d just had an idea or memory as you sometimes do swimming backstroke—shadow, though, of someone else’s memory, not mine—and here he was, here was Umo noticing the scar from when I had hit the board and could have been killed—and when he had said, “Water,” I had remembered, Water trusts the backstroker.
Here was Liz, too, my girlfriend body-wading across two active lanes, and when I stood up in mine and looked, Umo was gone, but not what he’d left. It was late August, senior year starting.
“Where’d he go?” “He’s over there,” Liz said (like, why?); she kissed my shoulder, I felt her; “now he’s gone.” “No he’s not.” A passing lap swimmer kicked a toe hard against the back of my hand and caught the nerve that runs clear up the arm and over the shoulder. “Independent,” Liz said, sort of out of sight out of mind. “He wants…,” I began.
Liz palmed my chest and kissed me there, as she often did to remind me, as if I’d had surgery there. Which maybe I had, as my sister had said late that terrible night when I was sore as hell whatever she meant. My idea I almost—(Liz was talking to me)—kept to myself. What would it mean to Liz—what not even Milt knew or my sister—that it was Mexico Umo had come to because it had been his grandfather’s dream? “Mexico!”
Liz puckered up, she made a beautiful face. “Why do we do that?” I said. “Other people’s dreams,” I said, in momentary possession of someone else’s private memory but only from outside—Liz would never to her credit just say, Yeah. “It’s not Mexico he wants,” said my girlfriend. I got a kiss on the shoulder. How’re you doing? was one of her thoughts said softly now standing hip-deep in my lane, afternoon tiny bubbles racing up from somewhere, her clear dreamy thigh, an escaped coil of hair at the seam of flesh and suit, whichever came first.
If she wanted to know, though I wasn’t about to say, it had been two years ago and three days after the accident, standing in the water here with Liz, I felt again before I’d even known her, the Goldthread herbs I had crushed and boiled and quite secretly with my sister applied the terrible night in her room when the door was flung open upon us like a snapshot by our father though we were the flash, yet time after time in mere memory another place of that time I was in a sweat arguing about nothing with Milt at The Inventor’s, and to the third person nearby could it have sounded set off by some For Sale thing on a shelf?—I was injured—not just injured—ill, sick, I had realized at that moment or changed (how the word has changed, was it a war to make “ill” mean “wonderful”?)—and the angry track the accident had raised on my chest only days ago was mine alone. Milt had hold of the early west Bengali biplane, swooping it this way and that, the fuselage orange and crimson, the top wing pocked with tiny dark marks as of anti-aircraft bursts The Inventor had said were drawings of sea pencils in fact that thrive on the marine reefs to the south off Sri Lanka, the plane designed and built by an oceanographer from Calcutta and these very tweezers lying on the shelf were the ones used to place and glue the balsa struts. (“Let the tool do the work,” I said. Milt flicked his finger at a poster of a woman looking at you over her shoulder showing a beautiful ass and just visible the thong top of her underwear, it was odd but I didn’t know how much if any experience Milt had had). Brought back from a mysterious unannounced trip abroad of The Inventor’s months before, the plane model cost only twenty-five dollars, but who had that kind of money? It was Milt’s sixteenth birthday, not enough to make me agree with everything he said today. “You’ll get over it, you’ll dive,” he’d said. “Why should I get over it? I can hardly breathe.” The injury to my chest was mine, and The Inventor was puttering in the far room, listening. I heard Milt talking to himself or to the plane behind me, for then I was standing in front of The Inventor counting my money and put it back in my pocket and lifted my sweatshirt to show him. “They said I was lucky.” “It needs to heal, then you will be better than never you knew,” he said.
“Than ever?”
The right words will do more had been nonetheless what The Inventor had said when I told him what had happened and that I couldn’t breathe, and when he laughed learnedly, sketchy, even forlorn, and asked how it had happened, the full twist that came too close to the board, I couldn’t breathe again and he lowered his voice and he said that worrds had caused the hurt and would do more than the herb to fix it but try the herb, and it made me mad but it was scary, this very dark man—had he been at the pool when it happened? He had a total outsider’s hunch—that was it—or weird melting-pot foreign knowledge, yet no, it was some fine-line or species tenderness; for, well, words of criticism had greeted my injury, surfacing, half unconscious or barely conscious or obeying the angry seed he did say somewhere near the very place in me, my heart channels, that had borne abrasion, but how could he know what had been shouted at me—could he?—in mid-dive before the accident? Of course not.
Remember (he said) what you have always known, the vein you can’t see running through the wound, and he handed me an envelope with something in it—the Goldthread—and then another that seemed empty though sealed and I knew Milt was in the other room trying to hear us and I had a grand total of twenty-six fifty in my pocket along with my keys knowing what Milt wanted for his birthday and I had a plunging feeling then hearing the jingle of the till ringing up the sale and knew that sometimes he should grow up, though, and that on the bus he wouldn’t be satisfied with loving the plane and would have to know what was in my envelopes but would have to settle for just one of them.