Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

Will Dudley find out why Catherwood’s Jerusalem panorama burnt? (Thebes, too.) The New York lawyer he corresponded with about it he consulted also on the question of an American divorce for an English marriage.

  Why did I wish to share Tessa with Lorna? Did Dudley know about Tessa and me? Do I? One bright warm day that Tessa and I got together in New York was a Monday, and she later told me that contrary to her information the Museum of the American Indian was closed Mondays but Dudley who was supposed to be there never mentioned this.

  Did Dudley know why he was taking up the study of Catherwood? If he didn’t at first, he came to know. For he told me on the tiled edge of the Swiss Cottage public swimming pool.

  Immediately after the New York holocaust Catherwood began the illustrations for his second Maya book with Stephens.

  Dudley’s hypothesis that an exponent of a rival archaeological theory had set the fire touched Tessa more than Dudley; he said there had been two hundred gaslights in the Rotunda the night of the fire, a considerable risk.

  But Tessa, who had come to think herself part Maya because of her East Asiatic fold—the epicanthic fold—at the inner corner of each eye, decided it was a Catholic continuing the work of the sixteenth-century priest Diego de Landa who had made good his revulsion at Maya religious practices by incinerating a number of codices containing Maya history.

  Felloes, said Dagger in the early hours of May 29 driving home to London from Wales, were the wooden sections of the rim of a wheel.

  We had discussed at length the strange man who had made a dash from the grove either into the dark and the fog or into a thicket.

  I said, We’ve got to get this footage developed Monday.

  It’s possible, said Dagger.

  13

  On the road it felt like Sunday. I might have been just another hiker. I observed the roadsides.

  When I left the widow’s and was still in sight of Callanish, I used my map to find three other sets of Standing Stones, some fallen. All three sites, but notably the largest and nearest, seemed now to me to look toward Callanish. Having been to those great crude contours on the headland, I wanted to tie to them these three other sites genuinely primitive in their present state.

  The first, in a spongy, rising field and above and behind a crofter’s house, seemed to communicate with Callanish, to share from its roughly equal elevation the signals of some observance. Here there were eight stones—I did not know why I studied them, I knew I had done with Callanish, knew where I must go, yet I paced and estimated, and could not believe it an accident that in one westward alignment two stones on opposite sides of the circle with one of the central cairn stones between them made a perfect pointer some three-quarters of a mile to the Great Menhir at Callanish. I slipped my compass back in my parka pocket and it rattled against the smaller of my borrowed weapons.

  At the second of these minor sites it was hard to tell if the marshiness or the original construction of the central cairn or perhaps some modern excavation had pitted out the center; again the stones were large and strangely intentional; but inescapably Callanish was there almost two miles off, and this site with the eight-stone circle a mile away and to the right of Callanish created a triangle so vivid in the solitary breeze that I saw here three points of one community where ancient forms were buried to dissolve upward to the sky or outward in the earth that, if not so brackish then, may have had trees.

  But I’d detoured already, though on a southwest road that would soon have brought me to where I could have set off crosscountry on that direct (and, as my driver in the red car had said, foolhardy) route to Clisham. So I turned back to the road that went first toward Stornoway and met the southward road that would best take me where I wished to go. But there were no cars. And then one came up over a hill behind me and was gone as if accelerating at the sight of my thumb. And then I found I was off the map.

  On a map you move faster, though often only somewhat faster. But each time you’re again in the actual place that holds your feet, the trick-contraction of the map seems to have been someone else’s thing you’ve poached on like a power not yours.

  Dagger had smuggled maps of the French eighteenth century around his legs and maybe something less antique between his skin and the cartographer’s parchment. But put him between Woking and Stonehenge, Lyme Bay and Bristol Channel, Monmouth County in Wales and the edge of Middlesex coming home to London, and he could not read a map to save himself.

  He said he’d been at the barricades in Chicago in ’68—I’d never been clear why—and had been picked up by Mayor Daley’s cops with a couple of Yippie friends because they’d had maps of the city on them. One of these friends had come to stay with the DiGorros in January. He had spent a lot of time in a Haverstock Hill pub with UPI newsman Savvy Van Ghent, who liked to ripple his muscle under the American flag tattoo. He had come to one softball game in April and left (now I think of it) with the sensitive and surreptitious Nash—and I’d never seen this former Yippie again and I’d been then a bit sorry because, whatever Lorna thought of him with his large tattoo of a snake-handled knife extending concavely from under his chin down over his Adam’s apple disappearing into the heavy hair on his chest and well below the opening of his shirt, I had wanted Will to meet him—because (to carry us one backward jump further) Will had seemed to show a strange lack of appetite for visiting America and I wanted him to see someone of this sort. I mean someone free. Unbound by ambitions. Though you can’t tell these days—the most mystical Hawaiian drop-out when you look inside his guitar proves to be all business with a master plan set like a charge to launch him when the break comes. If no, keep looping; if yes, proceed.

  I had always had a purpose in others’ eyes. But it was a quality, not an object, and the quality was prudence, or the look of it. My father phoned me from New York to ask if I thought he should build a second cottage at the summer place. He’d had his martinis. Geoff Millan came and wept one night and when it was over and he was finishing the brandy Lorna had poured him and she was in the kitchen heating frozen pizza, he blinked out some sort of smile and said, Moral stability, yes, that’s what you’ve got—moral stability.

  A car flew by.

  I walked sideways across a cattle grid to avoid slipping my toes through the widely spaced bars.

  I was back on my Ordnance Survey map, now that my way had curved back south and west. So I could identify the cleanly delimited grove of trees on a hill to my right as a deliberate plantation.

  Later I stopped by a black chilly loch where the land was more rugged and hills were becoming mountains as if by dropping their lower slopes abruptly, for I was getting down into Harris. I had the sandwiches the widow had made for me. I was in someone else’s system. But certainly I knew some things that others did not.

  Some gods saw all time at once.

  I wished only to see—no, merely go—beyond where I was.

  In order not to be between.

  I had killed a moving watchman perhaps, if only through the threat of a pistol probably loaded.

  A motorbike with two peasants in leather and helmets came up under the hill—forty miles off the coast of the Scottish mainland—and flew over the crest with revs to spare where I sat on a rock.

  It was not Sunday, for I found a place open in a village and bought bread and milk and sardines. The old man asked if I was going to Tarbert, which I knew to be the steamer stop in Harris fifteen or twenty miles south of here through the mountains.

  Why had I not asked him for Paul’s hut? The question yielded an answer to another. The other numbers I now saw were hundred-meter grid references, 08 north, 15¼ east.

  I had a light but if I found myself—as indeed I preferred—approaching the hut in the dark, I wanted to know the map. The lines of dots in the area meant it was marshy, though the terrain was generally rugged.

  Passing Ardvourlie Castle I was in Harris without a doubt. Down to my left in a newly changed scale was Loch Seaforth grandly widening southeastward, not a
boat or tree or human body; and ahead of me was the first pass through the mountains toward Tarbert, and the rain began.

  The map and the country seemed to try to alter each other’s accelerations. Sixty meters south of the 09 grid reference, the road (as the map promised) came tangent with the electrical power line; I paced off forty meters from that point and prepared to leave the road; I estimated that grid west must be five or six degrees right of west on my compass.

  I had come twenty-five miles, even more with my archaeological detours, yet I was not tired. I was impatient; I was still in Glasgow. My way would have been easier had I not determined to stay on the grid fine. There’d been hardly enough gradation of light to show where the sun had been, and now there was no real light let alone sun. So I set my track at fifty-meter intervals on the peak of a bush or rock. I went down into a hollow tight with copse and surprisingly dry. I went up a spongy precipice and was wet to the knees.

  Circumstance had held me up. You could not have conveyed my idea of that on film. You’d have needed, back in view of Callanish, to feel against your ribs last night’s dark collision and the similarity Krish’s tailoring bore to my own which had, so to speak, had a hand in my near-accident when I’d been pushed down the stopped escalator now perhaps three mornings the far side of this light pack and these strong shoes.

  I shone Krish’s lighter to see my compass and my watch. I held my breath to hear voices. I didn’t need to breathe. Ned Noble—no, Andsworth—said you could master a way of breath-holding so that at a new limit of need you fell through an edge of your own head into an internal source of breath. I never believed in such miracles, but I didn’t forget.

  I’d climbed a thousand feet from the road. It wasn’t possible.

  Ahead voices were alight with feeling but ahead all I saw was a dark rise and over it a cleared space I thought was the rainy sky.

  I heard Frenchman and dynamite.

  I could tell something about the men talking but did not yet understand what they said. The deep, flatly unmodulated voice bored in: No sweat. The gentler intellectual voice given to ups and downs said, How’s he going to find this god-forsaken place? He’s no Sherman. The deep voice—which I took for Gene because I’d last seen Sherman the hiker from St. Louis in Gene’s house—said, God forsaken! This hut’s been a regular mecca from what I’ve heard, I had no trouble getting here. Oh, said the gender voice—Paul’s I thought (which if so made me the third brother, Jack), you’ve camped in the Northwest Territories, brother, you’ve trapped and portaged, you’ve strip-mined (haven’t we?), you’ve killed, you’ve expanded, you’re great, you’ve blasted craters for factory foundations with magnificent views, you’ve flown your own red plane out of the wilderness and home to Chicago, you’ve made a killing in real estate, you are a child in the fun warehouse of the profit system, you are a man, oh are you a man, never mind the Midwest, what do we have in New York City, Jack?

  So the deep voice was Jack not Gene.

  Jack said, You forget the Midwest, you’re living over here. What do you mean what do we have in New York? You know what we have—a warehouse and a parking lot.

  Oh a parking lot, that’s new. And what’s the price of natural gas?

  Washington’s had the lid on since the middle fifties, but you wouldn’t know that.

  I think you’d gladly liquidate Paul is what I think.

  Jack said, Look, Krish planned to come and he would have come two weeks ago but he had to be in London; look, when he acts he doesn’t leave anything to chance.

  The other voice said, How come you’re here, then? Oh you’re just like Dad.

  Thanks for the welcome, said Jack.

  This isn’t my place, said the other, who was obviously not Paul.

  On the crest of the rise I wanted to check the compass. But I knew that if my steady stumbling steps were right, I’d come some 350 meters, close enough for Krish’s lighter to be seen if Paul’s hut was on target. So I should just be able to hear the voices.

  But I’d heard them more than just.

  But as I stood on the crest wondering if I had not heard the answer to the big question that the gentler voice had asked Jack because I had started going away from the voices, I smelled a peat fire and found a shape slightly to my left—and lower down (though I knew I was looking at Clisham’s upward slope rising to a summit 1100 feet above me): and as I saw the shape, it gained uncertain light as if I had exhaled tentatively then with confidence into its stony window, and Jack’s voice answering some inaudible complaint said, I don’t know why he’s not here yet but let’s give him some help, and who’s around except someone’s sheep.

  The dots on the map meant bog, possibly between me and the hut. The light barely curved out beyond the window frame but I imagined the roof was the thick gray-brown Hebridean thatch I’d actually seen little of today, that is held down with wire netting weighted at the edges with rocks and that can last as many as ten well-insulated winters. The hut’s walls were evidently stones jammed together like the stone wall separating the cow pasture from the west side of the Callanish site.

  Instead of descending directly to the hut, I moved westward along a sort of ridge and came to the hut from the southwest seeing into a window on this other side of the hut from an angle that did not let me quite see the speakers and then I went up to my knees in bog, and then I saw blond hair and on the other head a hat.

  I leaned onto dry ground, scratched my hands, crawled, crouched head up, watching the man with the deep voice, Jack, till he moved and sat down. He wore an olive green bush hat and had a thick growth of dark stubble. The wind was all around me as if the influence of Clisham created a wilderness of currents. The voice I’d thought was Paul’s came again, and then I saw him.

  I wasn’t paying strict attention. It didn’t matter to my luck that I paid attention of that sort. I felt my automatic and wondered if its use last night had lightened it. Even if I hadn’t killed Krish he might die in the ditch, he might turn into a new peat fraught with force, through a change accelerated by the fact that the moor had never had an Indian like Krish to absorb before. The automatic felt like about two pounds but maybe I couldn’t judge now. Prolonged weightlessness shrinks the heart. I was powerful.

  Well, I’m wasting my time too, said the gentle voice, and furthermore you didn’t have to come.

  But I did, said Jack, this thing’s gone too far.

  A chair scraped.

  He was always dangerous, said the gentle one who was sounding not so gentle.

  Krish? said Jack.

  No, Paul, said the other, who was saying, Krish wouldn’t tell us straight about the film.

  Incremona asked him too many questions, said Jack. Krish doesn’t go for that.

  Incremona’s up tight. I only know what Jan said—that Krish was watching DiGorro’s friend. Did you tell him to do that? DiGorro’s friend was in New York.

  My people had someone on him but it fell through.

  Jan told Paul she was afraid of Cartwright because he expected something of her.

  Sure, but Krish thought Cartwright was in London, and I said do what you have to. Then Cartwright was in London two days ago. And Krish gave me a rough schedule and with him a time-line’s a guarantee. OK, so he was detained tonight. He’s a perfectionist. Whatever he does, he does right.

  I’ve never set eyes on Cartwright.

  But you must know Cartwright: they were going to film your place? Something about a vicar down the road Len said preaches sermons on Marilyn Monroe?

  It fell through, said Gene (it had to be Gene of the Marvelous Country House, the other brother of the absent host Paul—just as it had to be Krish they were waiting for who’d said he wanted my presence but not my company on the Stornoway plane back to Glasgow and who if he had risen from the neolithic muck to press onward rather than downward might at this very moment be watching me from behind, and not like some wet-wool-matted black-faced sheep).

  I had to speak but couldn’t. I lo
oked behind me wondering if I was between again. I hoped that if the soft spots I’d crept over had been bodies I’d done them as much good as the Druid that politician.

  As if they felt my field had impinged, the brothers had dropped their voices; but I could hear them, they were protesting that of course they accepted each other, Gene had nothing against the chemical business and he had always hoped Jack was an enlightened employer; Jack for his part had nothing against expatriate life or marrying money (he felt they went together) and by the way it wasn’t just chemicals, it was natural gas in Michigan (had he told Gene?) and liquid fertilizers and pollution research, and government contracts—and Gene said he had nothing against fertilizers per se and I heard a clink and saw the dark dumb undersea green of a bottle, and Jack said just as well Gene had stayed out of the business, and when Gene said, All the better for you, Jack said he hoped Gene knew he had nothing against the film business, and by the way what was with the portfolio, kind of an odd thing to bring up here.

  So Gene was in films. But whose?

  Jack said Incremona didn’t seem the best type of employee, he’d heard he went around armed, he was certainly a transient. Gene said, Ask him, and Jack said, Maybe I will.

  Gene said on the whole Len had confined himself to making arrangements like passports and taxi working papers—and Jack said quickly, I’d like to put Paul in a capsule and shoot him up to the moon. Gene said you’ve probably got just the capsule, and Jack said, I probably have, and Gene said, Take out some insurance on him and send him up in your little red Comanche, and Jack said, Help pay my alimony—must be nice to have a rich wife, Geney.

  Mind you, said Gene, Len’s been filmed at the gallery with me and Jan and Reid and Sherman, the boy from St. Louis. Sherman’s the only one he trusts.

  Well, said Jack, Incremona didn’t ever take rainy-day pistol practice with your kids around, did he? Gene asked what that meant, and Jack seemed not to answer but said he doubted Jan’s original idea was commercial enough, and Gene said they’d been through all that today and where was the Indian, and Jack said, No sweat, he’ll be here—said it so soft I heard only because he’d said it before. Gene said, Noncommercial films are making money. Jack said, Aut must have been doing it for his crazy wife but anyway how had Gene and Nell and Jan gotten involved with characters like Incremona and Nash and this Negro genius Chad, and Gene seemed not to reply; then a glass banged the table and Gene said they’d been all over that this afternoon and Jack was hopelessly out of the picture, for instance had he ever in his life heard of Harry Pincus and what Harry Pincus had done to force into English politics the issue of Vietnam and the American exiles, and what did Jack mean about Chad? And Jack said, I know, I know—and Gene kept at him, had he ever heard of Harry Pincus? And Jack said he’d decided to act when he’d heard that Phil’s man from New York had got some great night shots of Paul running out of a grove in Wales, yet at that point Jack had had it. Gene said Jack had acted already, and Jack said would Gene please drop that, if he’d really had the film destroyed would he be trying to get hold of the Bonfire now? And Gene asked who had told Jack that Aut’s man had shot a bonfire, and Jack said almost inaudibly, Claire.