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“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?
    â€œHey, 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.
    â€œThe 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.
    â€œWhere’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