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.
“Why 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.”
“Never seems to get stopped.”
“That’s worse, but how would you know?”
“Zach would hear about it,” my sister called from the other room. “The way I do,” she added. “You!” said our mother. “S’what I do for a livin’,” said my sister.
There was an interesting homelessness in Umo’s occupational movements that held you and disturbed you. With a chance for you to achieve. What? It was not anything illegal that kept Umo in reserve for my father, my mother retailing to him what I told her of being stopped by his friend Zoose, the state cop; Zoose’s new brother-in-law the Hispanic rhythm guitarist, a recent citizen; a recording studio guy in Chula Vista: my father had Umo in his sights and in those of others, his contacts, I know, and should have guessed then. For me, though, it was something I had achieved, this resolve in my father to deal with Umo. Not ask him to compete in time trials. While seeing him some evenings occupy the swimming pool and the smaller adjoining and deeper diving pool, my father saw him also as a traveler among several homes, an alien commuter to be reckoned with, a powerful “body business” to be included without any singling out in talks to the team at pool side, and (once I remember) “of use to us” I was told, but “keep it under your hat.” My helmet, one day.
Like his size (“Have a little humility,” said my mother)—he should be smaller?—the mass, the sweat of his well-fed ribs and back meat, Umo’s truck trips were thought “dirty” by my brother. A phenomenon (and associated with me, my future, not anyone else’s, not even Umo’s). From my mother, contempt for being orphaned and nothing “done about it.” She meant, I believe, infected (sort of) by his parents’ absence. And a Mongol-Manchurian, it had been learned, Mongolian stuck in her mouth—not even quite Chinese, my mother said, who called the police on Umo when Corona phoned from the motel that the white truck with the Baja plates was parked outside, though my father when he got home said he would take care of it: but why? Only because Umo would be useful one day.
Poor boy, with no papers, no family, no good reason to be here floating around, my mother observed, “grandfather a Muslim, they say”; (“His grandfather’s dead, Mom”) and he gives to beggars when Liz said it’s encouraging laziness (“Liz said that to you?” I said.): description shaping rumor and presently from my uncle—was it Fall 2001?—an interest in “identity papers for all citizens,” putting us on a wartime footing like Europe in the movies. Reading the paper at the breakfast table, “We’re running a check on him,” my father said to my mother, meaning Umo. A way to let me know—but what?—though I heard her tell him my view on begging as if it was mine and not the minister’s. My brother was leaving the room—because I had entered it, I often thought—but paused at the threshold hearing me making a statement he instinctively knew was pointed toward a concept he could get behind: In class once Milt had said that the old Lutherans objected to the monk’s oath of poverty because if you vow to remain poor you refuse the chance of a future job, gainful employment, and, key to it all as you find in the parables, profit. “The Lutherans don’t put up with any nonsense,” said my brother, gone into the hall. Umo kept much information, if not his thoughts, to himself. He couldn’t speak sometimes.
Everyone comes to our city sooner or later, my uncle said; they hear about it, it’s nice here. A child wrestler he’d heard Umo had been where he came from near the Mongolian border, some city it slipped his mind. Like Sumo in the balancing, the need to keep on your feet, but “nothing like Sumo if you know what I mean.”
The truck was in your mind speeding along the I-8 one night, seen one day in City Heights. Umo a big lug who knew exactly, I thought, what he was doing, cheerful, routinely resigned after thirty years in the same job—this fourteengoing-on-fifteen-year-old alien driving a truck. Milt said he’d damn well get a look inside. There was too much talk about Umo, he thought. This proved to be a time when Umo would be gone for days. I imagined him in Mexico sponging (which was true) illegible graffiti off his white truck—those beautiful Baja plates encrusted with seaweed, mud, silvery waste. Where would Umo contribute? An unbelievable swimmer, yet my father hadn’t said the word.
He was an underestimated coach, called on to step in and help potential Olympic backstrokers in early Zone meets in 2001 (to my surprise) and 2002. By then, something else was afoot. His love of country well known, I like a foreigner once had asked him what exactly the country was and where would I go to see it? He lowered his eyelids—like, Did I hate him? Only that I had known it would drive him nuts and he would not show it (though would), and because I had thoughts about it myself and ran them by my sister, which touched her strangely.
“If you have to ask, I can’t tell you,” he said.
And on the fishing trip when I was ten, I had taken some lame (I guess) pictures of just the roadside at Tortugas Bay and a rusty panel of scrap-iron fence not even the cactuses inside the fence and wished I’d had the buzzing sounds to go with it and had a fleeting thought about a real real close-up so you couldn’t tell what it was—this at ten, probably worth encouraging—and the boring foothills by a village named El Arco, some other shots—and my father took the camera away for two days because I was wasting film, but I recall he regarded Baja Mexico as part of the United States and almost was friends with me again when I remembered the fishmonger my mother visited and what he had told her about color-added salmon and hatchery-bred trout which seemed reasonably sad though when I said they could use some fish hatcheries down here in Baja to feed the people but what was the matter, they’d had fish hatcheries in ancient times (I thought), he laughed for once. Took the camera away another day reading my mind about men and women walking the highway—thinking (for myself) who were these people, Americans?
And when we got home I didn’t have the camera to show my sister and I thought she was making fun of me when she wasn’t and I got her down on the dining room floor and split her wrist rubbing it on the rug and not a whimper out of her, though hysterical giggling, a strong person, my baby sister, and I told her about fish hatcheries in ancient times and then thought of loaves, while I held her down and she waited, and I never took the individual snapshot very seriously after that but the roll turned up partly developed and I remembered I’d meant to give the real real close-up to my teacher Mrs. Stame who was thin as a stem and had given us a poem about a train to read which was hard until you got it and I had thought it was about a shadow but I was wrong.
After practice at East Hill one night (the phone from the Principal’s office at my former high school ringing off the hook because my father coached the team there too, supposedly, and blew them off now and then), after optional weigh-in on the old physician’s scales with the height rod he had sat us all down on the hard tiles to talk hygiene, diet, bananas and fluids sustaining the electrolytes in the system and preventing cramp; sex as primarily only a matter of releasing tension; and the coming war he spoke about also (standing). Sometimes a nation feels its mission greater than other daily struggles like beating your time for the two hundred, and to submit to that fate now could sharpen the competitive edge for these lesser struggles—let’s take inventory and just tend to business, he said. World Series of swimming was an idea of his. The Olympics but more than nations. Silence and some inner, partnering echo of tiles and water stilled the settling echoes of his voice. A war? I thought. A war to end weapons, he had said. Well, we could do that.
It was this I spoke to Umo about when I happened to see him. For he went away and came back you sometimes thought just to start these rumors that few checked on, like news in the newspaper or things you did in place of others. He had been cooped up in a juvenile home in Broadview for a few days, it was said; or he ran errands for a bail bondsman in Chula Vista for three dollars an hour on a good day and then for a sound studio in La Jolla—a Russian who worked there (no, Ukrainian) putting together a music tape for a superintendent of schools’ campaign for Assemblyman nomination but Umo said there was a big plan for international recording—even though they found out he didn’t have working papers yet rather than fire him as an illegal the Russian saw they could make this kid do pretty well anything. Umo was a supplier in ugly sporting activities in Baja on the Gulf Coast side, my brother heard, some said with his strength an actual participant even at his age; but the rumors like reassuring gossip had a dimension along which they seemed to gather toward a good decision you will make. Though my mother seemed unforgiving when she volunteered that I had “helped” my father even if he was too shy to say so with “all this new business”—that is, that I might thank him for his unexpressed acknowledgment of my help with…what?—his trips, his Sacramento speechwriter contact—news to me. You go your way, however involved you might be with these others—and through things you might have done?—or said?—like the miracle of everyday dealing, as if you knew things in advance like the Man from Nazareth unforgettably profiled in the words of these rumored first-century eyewitness “memos,” spreader of new ideas and of himself, plus one prophecy coming home to roost right now as the Administration had hinted.
I kept putting off visiting my old teacher Wick, for there would be time.
Umo caught up with me at the smoothie stand in Old Town, I had my little Olympus Epic around my neck, getting back into it. And I found myself up in the truck cab which smelled of cigarette and paint thinner, chlorine and the car deodorant 2-D Christmas tree hanging from the mirror. I was suddenly going to Baja. (Could I get out?) He pointed at me, my chest; ah, he meant my camera? “Good. Your father taught you. My father, he told me how my grandfather wanted to get to Mexico.” I already knew his grandfather, he said—well, I nodded, yeah, I felt I did. “You break things down,” Umo said, and laughed that laugh. Good old Route 5 looked like we were going straight south. “What are you trucking back and forth?” I asked. “Whatever is needed.” “People?” “Not the last time we looked.”
“Come on”—Umo a fourteen-year-old immigrant commuter of some maturity or a repeater of phrases he’d heard, his eye on the road. I talked to him, I said my father would ask me a question out of the middle of silent thoughts he’s been in all day, you know (?) or they’d been in him, but you didn’t have a clue, and out comes this question. Umo said, “Like?” “Like Why would you go to any war? When he was the one in the beginning.” “‘Or they’d been in him’!” Umo said—it was funny—my words—“I like that,” he said; “you break things down. It could be OK to go to war,” he said. (I’d been phoned by the Army again.) Maybe if it was close by, I said, what about him? “Look at a map sometime, they got a map at your school? They got a big map at that store you go to: find Mongolia.”
We passed a police car, restaurants, hardware, where were we going, it was like a plan coming to meet us. Real old jerky Blues on the radio band. Umo pointed to it and smiled. Well, grandfather had gone to Mexico to find the maker of a silver cup, dark and very small, that had fallen out of the bag of a man his grandfather had killed as it happened in a fight that began as a joke. “I got it right here,” Umo took his hand off the wheel and clapped his hand to his pocket. “It’s the real reasons we look for.” His grandfather came first (whom he’d never known—only in his father’s stories, the silver cup, those particular letters on the bottom (which maybe were not his name but words, Umo had realized). He had come to Mexico on his grandfather’s business that he had made his own. (A twelve-year-old?) Searching for the maker of the cup. Was that him on the bottom? “You sound like my father. ‘What the hell do you see in that picture?’” “You mean in the school paper?” Umo said, as if he remembered—“three and a half girls and your father shoved you—once in the school paper, or—” “Umo I never showed you that picture, I never told you!” “You’re going to be going to war sooner not later if you don’t look out,” said Umo, as if he knew. “Well, my father would suddenly say, Isn’t it against the Ten Commandments? and laugh like a retard, and my sister—”
“Isn’t it?”
“Maybe one of them.” “Is your father your brother?” “Sure, if he could be.” “You talking American?” “Like my sister.” “Your sister’s your brother sometimes, you said.” “A lot.”
“I will marry her,” Umo said.
“That’ll be the day.”
“Right. She will wait, but the day will come.”
“Why would she marry you?”
“The sister of my brother.”
“She’s got other plans.” “You go to war for her?” “Sometimes.” “You gotta defend yourself,” Umo said.
“That’s my mother; she’s for the war.” “Your mother,” said Umo, “she’s preparing fresh shrimp and getting sore fingers”—such a sharp rememberer, Umo!—“and cooking and taking care of the house, a good Christian—” “You don’t know a thing about it,” I said wondering at Umo’s memory.
“My mother was a sheepherder—” “So she left her home?” “—out where desert invading grasslands, Mongol…but wild camels let her come up to them, she was the only one, but that had a bad ending because she learned the medicine herbs they eat and she got arrested.”
“Not the only thing, Umo.” “No not the only thing,” he laughed that harsh laugh, really amused at me. His lost grandfather had had in his possession some tortoiseshells with fine lettering on them he had taught himself to do, but what happened to the tortoiseshells…? Umo, that awful laugh again.
Was I saving him for some loss—even his own—that I didn’t ask about his travels or the truck much? He was in Shaanxi. Then he was in Yichang and he mopped deck on a river boat and must have been extremely noticeable. He was in a village helping animals to haul a loaded wagon, but he did not show me his journey out of China or even across the ocean, though it seemed clandestine, a powerful motion, except in certain geographical points, fixed on a map: even the hard seats of a railway train car, tunnels, then jumping off where there was no platform. He had to be just thirteen then. There was a mountain, some foggy mountain at top when you get up there, people like it. (Did he have a bag?) Oh yes, and English book—catalogue, magazine (?)—laughed differently and looked away.
I wondered how Umo had left…where he had grown up. You didn’t just leave China. A poor village on a mountain, a wooden pulley over a well creaking, a ranger watching people dynamite fish out of a lake, ermine hunters, the rumored size of a boy slipping through trees, a borrowed bicycle, drumbeats. I felt a miracle next to me: he had taken over his own life at his age. And for some reason I said, “But the women don’t herd the sheep.” Umo nodded amazingly but it was not in agreement, his eyes on the road, a state trooper across the intersection waving us over. I couldn’t believe what I’d said from the height of my ignorance in the cab of this truck. I wondered what had happened to Umo’s mother, or really to Umo. “Listen, your city is far from the coast. How did you get away?” Our truck ran a red light to remind us of itself. “Listen, my grandfather was—” Umo braked and pulled over and leaning across me greeted the state trooper: “Zoose, what’s happening?”—the little cop gave us a look, “Your friend has a license,” he said, he was joking. “You don’t even have the permit—” “No, wait, we’re talking,” Umo said to Zoose, and to me, “No my grandfather was a policeman for a while—” “A policeman! I thought he was a miner,” said Zoose. He had a hand on my window ledge. “That’s where his heart was,” Umo said; and to me, “He was a magnesium miner.” Umo had some bills in his fist. “He admired Plutarco Calles, the revolutionary; my grandfather would come to Mexico and be a miner in Mexico and work with Calles.”
“I know you don’t have your learner’s permit today.” Zoose waved us on. “Arrastras el chasis,” Umo called across to him—you draggin’ your ass.
Umo was sort of known. “Zoose,” he said. “When you need him, you know? He’s got a sister. He’s a wild man. We tape. She married a guitar player just got his citizen papers, he’s a wild man too, lead guitar,” said Umo. Zoose had a part interest in a Chevron station.
How it worked, you could ask.