Read Online Cannonball by Joseph McElroy - Free Book Online Page B

mud. She had an evil look in her eye, my mother said—though that was next morning. She liked Liz. Which said it all, my sister said, with that slant of hers. Which you can’t explain to people who don’t understand it, any more than I could achieve anything by sharing with Liz all the sometimes mysterious encounters with The Inventor and his store of work. (I loved her, but.) A drawing sketch he had brought back long ago for a dam porous enough that it wouldn’t destroy downstream silt. His new type of oven made of local earth and porous stone encouraging interconnecting ovens, easing the division of labor and multiplying the product a hundredfold (like a thought of mine dreamed up for a Global paper); his ice-skating rink shrine of Five Triangles for the Descendant ( Which “descendant”? “Thomas.” “Which rink?” “Oh far away in China, somewhere like that.” “‘Thomas’?” “Forget I ever said it,” The Inventor guided me to another object. A Thomas in China? I murmured, persisting. “Very ancient,” said The Inventor. “You know Chinese?” I asked. Inventor acted modest; he had once had to translate a page of English into Chinese.)
    It must have been when I was still diving, because one of our every other Saturdays or Sundays the Inventor’s door was locked and nobody home. Milt pounded on the door a little too long and rapped with the knocker so it sounded up and down the deserted street. We went away, it was like the future—was that it? Milt and I had an argument, I forget what about. In fact, a rich customer who worked for the City had paid to send The Inventor on a trip to bring back the Bengali plane but then did not buy it. Other goods he brought back—from Bangalore—included an antique pinhole camera found on an island in one of those garden lakes; the camera had been used to draw a huge bull as well as a great droog, that subtle topographical eminence, a fortified hill, and the camera was said to even contain the subject matter it had been used to help the artist to draw. It was less than two weeks The Inventor was gone, it was when I was still diving because he changed the subject to that, when I asked where he had gone; because I had only been to Mexico, and only Baja with my dad and when I told my sister, who was up in her room and had never been to The Inventor’s, she said, “He went to find his wife.” “What would he need with a wife?” I said, and she, “Don’t ask me.” “What would you say if I did?” “He brought her back because—” “He did?” “—because a temple would have been too big to bring, and we build them here,” my sister said, her head now on my shoulder, for I knew we were on the same plane whether I understood her perfectly or not.
    He did bring her back?
    First I’d heard. Maybe I didn’t know him in that way, or rather, he me. Not his house either, apart from the main floor…
    Quite a while ago, it seems, some Indian gadgets and models you could find in The Inventor’s stock if you looked to outdate fission or poison weaponry—these would have seemed the material side of concepts contained often in his familial backroom envelopes like facts a spy might pass on to outwit war itself if one could only tell the idea to invent the invention. (Were there spies who didn’t know it?) So that when I felt Umo hear me say something that would help him prosper, I felt myself unknowingly a part of a real job or even war effort, yet kept from a danger that would help me. I asked what goods my friend Umo had trucked north for The Inventor from Mexico, who, not the least surprised that I knew Umo, pointed to minute Christmas mangers made by convicts out of nuts, and an ancient Chinese (though Mexican-made) tool for cutting rhizomes from the Goldthread plant, imitation antique knives—had there