Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  Hold it, said Sub, who’s Cosmo?

  An American who’s always over at Dagger’s eating little round slices of special Austrian wurst that Dagger buys at the Air Force PX. Well now a week after the film was ruined the Indian asks Cosmo to inquire about the camera. Dagger says sorry he gave the Beaulieu back, it was a liability after last week. So you can see I wondered if the Indian wanted just information, and I wondered if the Indian had phoned Dagger’s the morning the film was destroyed while Dagger and Alba were at the PX shopping.

  I hope my brain damage isn’t catching, said Sub, and something was happening in the living room.

  I looked at the pad. The woman would not be Claire. But was she phoning for Claire, or did Claire at least know about the call, or had Claire herself not received my bait?

  I’m trying to entertain you, I said to Sub, but heard in the dark side of my head looping at too few revs per moment in my first words, if anything happens. So listen, I got the name of the Knightsbridge gallery and went. I didn’t see any Indian. I liked a picture signed Jan Graf. Wondering where the Indian was, I asked the girl at the desk who Jan Graf might be.

  Monty Graf’s grandma, said Sub.

  Who but the wife of the gallery owner. And the owner is Mr. Aut, an American. Not Phil Aut, said I. Yes indeed, said the girl. But the visit isn’t over. For on the way out I bump into an Indian or Pakistani—probably the Indian; and I am sure I’ve seen him before only he looks bigger now in the gallery.

  Ruby screamed and started to cry, and Sub jumped.

  I have written too much. I have moved too slowly. If only I could have reduced my talk with Sub to a single picture framing say diary pages of mine lying in an open suitcase on a couch recomposed by Myma and a cluttered corner of Sub’s desk with his personalized checkbook open beside the portable radio he gave Rose for her birthday once which this very morning I had been able to reach without getting out of my day bed.

  Tris was saying in the living room, Now you’re a member of the secret group, and Ruby said, Look what he put on my hand.

  Sub said, I told you to put away the printing set.

  He sounded calmer.

  I asked if he got our college alumni review. He said he threw it away instantly.

  I heard again the urgency of Dagger’s words phoning in the middle of Jenny being difficult Monday night: Let Claire alone, she’s got her job. Our film made trouble for her. She doesn’t know all that’s going on.

  I could have told Dagger about Claire’s cable. But I didn’t.

  YELLOW FILTER INSERT

  Between Ruby and Tris on Ruby’s bed, I am also between them and their father, who is in the living room on the day bed couch having a stiff whiskey.

  Ruby in a canary nightgown and broad-brimmed white straw hat with cornflowers round the crown wants me to tell about when Sub and I were children. Tris, who goes to bed later and would not normally be in Ruby’s room at this hour, wants to hear how Dagger got his name. Really Tris wants some extensive conversation he can’t quite envision. He has heard that Dagger is the one I made the film with, that Dagger was a police reporter in California, a beachcomber in the Bahamas, and in the Med a dealer in certain articles including semipriceless eighteenth-century French maps of the Thames estuary. Tris leans back against the bedside wall, his hiking boots of unfinished hide crossed just beyond Ruby’s blanket; on his lap is a king-size paperback open at diagrams of home-made booby traps.

  Ruby says, I want how you and Daddy hid in the snowdrift.

  No, says Tris. How Dagger got his name.

  No. Daddy.

  My mom has the best camera you can buy and she has a darkroom and develops her own pictures. Do you know a lot about photography?

  Dagger DiGorro knows all about it. I just take pictures. I don’t develop them.

  Does Dagger develop his?

  Tell about Daddy when you were little.

  Dagger develops his own, yes.

  Do movies get developed too? You have a yellow lens for your camera. I saw it. Is that like wearing sunglasses?

  It’s a filter, not a lens. OK, one story for Ruby, one for Tris.

  Did someone else develop your movie? But I thought you lost it.

  We had a bit developed. Almost all the rest was ruined before we could process it.

  Why do you live in England?

  I just do.

  Tell about the snowdrift, complains Ruby.

  Tris while talking stares at cartoon-scrawl diagrams of booby traps.

  Ruby’s got to go to bed, he says. It’s eight-thirty. I do not.

  Sweet dreams, Ruby.

  She reaches across my lap for Tris’s hand and punches his book.

  Well, Ruby, it used to snow a lot in New York in those days and we lived in Brooklyn Heights which is still the nicest part of Brooklyn, quiet streets of houses, children playing outside but not so many now. The snowdrifts along the sides of the street got even higher when the snowplow came through trying to clear the street. The snowdrifts were long and high and thick, and we tunneled out the insides of the drifts and sat in there snug as a squirrel in a tree trunk and listened to cars come slushing down our dead-end street.

  What’s a dead-end street? said Tris.

  You know what a dead-end street is. In England it’s called a cul-de-sac. It doesn’t go through to another street, you have to turn around at the end and come back.

  Oh.

  A car, maybe a truck, would come by and park further on, or turn around and come back, or it might stop right by us, but parking was hard because of the snowdrifts.

  Ruby rubs closer to me, hand on my leg, scraps of bright red nail polish, a clean leg soft through the pale yellow nightie. I like children and this isn’t the first time in England or America I’ve introduced this snowdrift intact into a child’s room. Jenny and Will have heard this one more than once. There’s really nothing to it. Think of what I leave out—the lunch Sub and I took into the tunnel was toasted cheese-bacon-and-tomato sandwiches, we had dark blue corduroys on for we’d refused to wear snowsuit pants this year, and Boyd, who played with us, still wore snowpants, maroon they were, but that was why we left him out that January day so cold it seemed to still the traffic in other blocks and the warning honks in the harbor where there floated in close to our Brooklyn docks great floors of ice which we said we’d use as rafts or aim like icebergs at the Queen Mary or the Normandy when one of those famous lengths appeared between the Statue of Liberty and the tip of Manhattan and as if by scale more than size cut off the gray waterfront of Jersey City. I haven’t stopped talking, I’m telling about Boyd coming up to us wiping his nose on his mitten and sleeve and saying, Hey are you guys my friends?

  We looked at him over our sandwiches and looked at each other and at our sandwiches, and I said, Gee I don’t know, Boyd, and Sub shrugged and said, Let’s have our lunch in the tunnel, and when Boyd asked if he could come—which was just as foolish to ask as about being friends, because we were sort of friends and Boyd had helped dig the tunnel—we said Sorry, Boyd, we got to discuss a plan, we’ll see you later.

  We climbed over the drift to get to the entrance which was on the street side so we could be private from people walking by on the sidewalk. We crawled in on two knees and one hand, holding our sandwiches and finished them in no time with Boyd squatting at the tunnel mouth watching. Then we decided to close the entrance and we dug into a mound we’d left inside the entrance when we were lengthening the tunnel.

  Tris and Ruby don’t want to hear how stony-hard the crust of that pile was so that at first we couldn’t get hold of enough snow to block the entrance but then, with both pulling, the whole piece came away like a boulder and we jammed it perfectly into the hole and our den was a bluish dark yet shadowy white too, shutting out Boyd’s dripping red nose and damp yellow mittens.

  I wish I had a snowhouse.

  It was cold in there. Boyd kept saying, Hey come on, you guys, you discussed your plan, lemme come in there now, can I?
And we said Not yet, Boyd, and tried not to giggle because if he’d heard that, he’d have tried to bash his way in, and he was bigger.

  How old were you? said Tris.

  Eight. Just a year older than you, Ruby. I guess the drift was small inside but it seemed big. Well, Boyd wasn’t there after a while, and I was cold and thinking my mother could make us some of her special hot chocolate with marshmallow, but we were discussing whether we’d join the Boy Scouts when we were eleven going on twelve.

  A truck rolled down the block, it seemed slow but then it was on top of us, the motor still running though the truck had stopped. Then it seemed to move and stop again and move and stop. Then some man was yelling, Come on back you got plenty room, come right in here, and before we knew it a great behind crunch shook us where we sat, and then some yelling and talking I couldn’t understand, and another crunch and this time the street-side wall moved right in on us and Sub said, Get the roof, and rammed his hands up but didn’t have enough room and the snow was hard and the wall on the sidewalk side was too hard and thick and we got scared because we couldn’t see what was happening to us.

  The motor idled down and a man yelled, Come out of there, and we hauled on our boulder, got it away from the entrance, and crawled out into bright daylight right face to face with the tail-lights of a green delivery truck. Well, big Boyd was on the sidewalk crying. The man said, Lucky your friend told us you were in there.

  Boyd was really crying, you know.

  That’s a crazy story, says Tris, who turns the page to a new set of bomb diagrams. He turns to me sharply—I bet there would have been a lot of blood in the snow.

  Is it over? asks Ruby.

  No. The funny part is that Boyd got up on our snowdrift and cursed the truckdriver and the man in the cab with him saying they had no right to drive like that, and you wrecked our tunnel, what’d you have to go bust up all our work—and Boyd called them names, then the helper got out of the truck and came over and reached for Boyd to grab him and shake him or hit him but just then when Boyd staggered, his weight got too much for the roof and he dropped through the drift up to almost his waist, and the man laughed and Sub and I on the sidewalk laughed too.

  Was Boyd your friend? says Ruby.

  Hey look at this, says Tris. A bomb you make out of a book—look, you hollow it out, stick in a dry-cell battery, stick in your TNT—but how do you hook up this wedge that keeps the contact points apart?

  Simple, I say, the wedge is attached to your bookcase, some one pulls the book out, the wedge stays on the shelf, the contact points in the book close completing the battery circuit activating the primer detonating the charge.

  Look at the bomb made out of a loose floorboard, says Tris.

  His father calls from the living room, You got one thing wrong: Boyd came up to us and said are you my friend to you not to both of us.

  Maybe so, I call back to Sub, but I know we all went up to my apartment and my mother made us hot chocolate with marshmallow.

  Ruby says, You didn’t live in England then.

  Of course not.

  What’s your job? says Tris. When did you leave America?

  A year or so after Charlie Chaplin.

  Who’s he?

  A funny man in the movies.

  Why did he leave?

  Some people told him not to come back.

  Did you ever get divorced?

  I want to go to bed, says Ruby.

  What does a yellow filter do?

  Darkens the blue of the sky so you get a sharp contrast to clouds.

  Between blue and white.

  No, it’s black and white. With color film a yellow filter keeps strong blue rays in the light from getting to the red and green layers. Cuts down blue.

  Cuts down blue but darkens blue. I don’t get it.

  I’m going to bed, says Ruby. Sub’s paper crackles in the living room.

  I think of isolated elevators. A map stolen. Challenges from children. Lust in a capsule. A clear explanation pigeon-holed and lost.

  Can you make gelatin dynamite? Tris has lowered his voice.

  Will you color with me tomorrow? says Ruby.

  4

  It was the second morning, soon the second afternoon. It would be the third evening. At Sub’s desk I went through his bills and some personal letters. I read a few pages of my diary. The New York sky was deep and bright. I watched a bearded man washing tenth-floor windows across the street, stretching for the top of the top pane, squatting to get the bottom pane so his harness made his shirt ride up leaving his lower back bare.

  Noon images in those panes stirred with the wind.

  If it hadn’t been that the window-washer’s building kept going up far beyond his floor, I might not have felt so keenly his height above the street. Even so, I could fire a baseball at him across the sixty or so feet between us and he could burn it back. He turned so as to miss the ledge, and spat.

  He unhooked his terminal from the right-side anchor and swooping it under the left-side strap of his harness which remained hooked he stretched around the stone post to hook his free terminal on to the right-side anchor of the next office window on his left; then he released the left-hand terminal from its anchor in the window he’d finished, swung his left foot around the post to the ledge of the new window and reining his life belt close up to the new anchor he brought the rest of his body around so he was now standing on the next ledge. He gave upper and lower halves a swift wet swipe with his large brush, then got his rubber blade out of its belt loop and ran the water off back and forth, then a radial turn to finish.

  A girl in the office was smiling quite close to him probably at him and I felt her hair was a special color but the brilliant window reflections of brick and sky through which I saw her secreted her colors from her. The window-washer turned and threw me a grin as if he’d known I was watching through Sub’s gray-specked glass.

  Baseball isn’t cricket. Will fancies himself a spin-bowler at school and he’s amused that when we put up the wicket in the garden and I bat he can’t bowl me out. I don’t get many solid hits off him, yet he reminds me it’s the runs that count, but I know what I mean, I mean a clean pull-hit to left field even if it’s only a single, with none of your stylish slices off a wittily angled cricket bat which there’d be no point in anyway because there’s only the two of us. Jenny came out before supper—neighbors clicking tools and tidying nearby gardens—and she’d play (as she said) Silly Mid-on right on top of me when I was batting. Sunday she went with me to Hyde Park to the American softball game where I play shortstop to Dagger’s first. Sometimes Dagger rather than get on the train to London after an evening stint teaching at one of the less accessible U.S. bases like Alconbury will stay the night in officers’ quarters and play hardball the next day; he has a cap from the old San Francisco Seals. But what I am saying is that I waited for a phone call, and I looked through Sub’s glass at a window-washer about as far away as pitcher’s mound from home, and while fingering some pages of my diary I got into a baseball game played from perilous individual towers ten stories high and each hit ball that dropped to the ground was merely a foul.

  Yet the phone did ring in that apartment and I went toward it and turned off Sub’s FM which had modulated from a gallant lunch-time suite for clavecin into news as if the set’s selectivity or frequency control failed to hold station. The Bach sweatshirt lay on the threshold of the bathroom. What with shrinkage Alba’s baby could wear it in four or five years.

  If the charter man was calling, it wouldn’t be to break news about some alteration in our arrangement, for he’d sooner do that by mail. I put my hand on the smudged white wall phone in the kitchen within reaching distance of the supper and breakfast dishes I’d said I’d do—but maybe instead of Monty Graf it was Dagger from London in my imagination announcing that the fugitive footage we’d had a rush of weeks ago and that had escaped destruction had now vanished from behind the Acoustic Research turntable and he figured it would be du
mped in some north London dust bin in the next few hours all seven minutes plus of it and so we were dead.

  Not quite, said my imagination. I took the receiver and recognized Rose.

  If I phoned Dagger in London to warn him, why was there more danger now than two weeks ago when his flat had first been visited? That fugitive footage was in my notes too and some of the pages were right here at Sub’s in my suitcase. Why, in this imaginary transatlantic call, had I not asked him where he’d stashed the 8-millimeter cartridge of ours that he’d been against shooting. Was I afraid that if I asked, the cartridge would be gone.

  Rose accepted my presence. Myrna there today? Rose was calling to say the kids could come tonight, Thursday, and did I know when they’d be home from school because yesterday they were late. Rose has the fine, rather long English face that can make the switch from literate sparkle to sharp sexual sobriety, not that she isn’t in her view a sex object either way. Her call seemed one of many she was making, and so her message to Sub sounded recorded though also unrehearsed, you could practically hear the beeps. I said why didn’t she call him at work and she said she had a hard time getting through to him, she couldn’t just hold. And oh yes she wanted to say hello to me anyway, and she thought Myrna was there today. She asked if I’d shown any unsuspecting American girls around London lately. I said, Women, not girls. She said Sub had told her all about my film and ah well maybe something like that would happen to Sub. I said did she mean have his film destroyed, and she laughed and said abruptly So long, and hung up.

  I phoned Sub. The children were going to a school friend’s until Sunday night.

  Maybe phone Dagger at that. From me Claire now knew there was more film. How many people in London and New York were thinking about our film? Anyone but me? Could Claire have deceived someone she was so fond of?