Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  I may sit in a hired helicopter and see what was not quite there when I had the real chance at it. But by now I’ve lived through the thing.

  From Savvy it had been learned that I knew when.

  Yet how could he know this from me?

  From Tessa maybe other things (she butted in between Dudley and Savvy and toyed with Savvy because she sensed his secret, that he wouldn’t lay a hand on her), maybe other things. But not this.

  I could not quite see why Jenny hadn’t tried to save me when she could have. She knew where at least two other parts of the diary were, and could have mentioned one. Not the Bonfire, for even if those pages were still over in Brooklyn Heights, why jeopardize her grandparents (if they were home?). But why not mention Corsica? By now Savvy Van Ghent’s dustman had probably carted it off.

  My headache was gone but my neck was stiff.

  I lit the pumpkin when I left Sub’s at seven thirty.

  When I came back later I blew it out. It scared me. I was by then no longer alone.

  By then I knew when: but not till I’m in the chopper the next day Sunday noon swashing gracefully hither and yon do I see that what I finessed from June Saturday I could have known in Sub’s twilight flat even before I lit the pumpkin and saw it on its window-sill against the dark slots of Manhattan and made out among cool dry American clouds what looked like a stretch of virgin white screen and was a close-up of one of the two big weather balloons Dagger gave my children that rose above Lorna’s rage one Sunday years too soon for the Beaulieu to catch their flight and together floated toward the Heath. On page three of the Times by the light of Sub’s TV and next to Webster’s open at mania, manhunt, man-hour, manhood, and manhole is former Prime Minister Macmillan, old hound bags under the eyes, coated, scarved, moustached, an overexposure behind him which the caption identifies as a bonfire on the Dover cliffs set by the old Tory himself to mark Heath’s Common Market victory in Parliament—old hound who knew the cause would overcome.

  As far back as ’65 Savvy had called it inevitable but said England wouldn’t get in until it cost too much. But Savvy did not talk shop. He filed his dispatches and he lived his life. July 25, while batting, I heard his voice behind and below me saying, I hear I’m a star in your journal.

  Dudley it seemed had mentioned the Softball Game when they ran into each other on Bastille Day at the British Museum, but I hadn’t turned up to play last Sunday. (Still in France, said I—Sightseeing again, said he—How did you know? said I) and well, said Savvy, the diary sounded almost better than the film (I swung and missed) and was it for public consumption, said Savvy, hunkering down behind the plate again (but now dark hair and bluejeans, there was Lorna first time ever at a Sunday softball game come unexpectedly on her own having slept late, now fingering a shy wave from the third-base coaching box if there’d been one); oh I use all the help I can get, I said (and Ball! called Umpire Ismay, for Cosmo’s bomb had risen high outside); I wouldn’t presume to help, said the voice behind, but I wouldn’t mind a peek at the next installment, and by the way how do you concentrate with that incredible creature giving you signals at third? (So blame it on Lorna’s not wearing a bra that Cosmo now spun a drop-ball by me at the knees) but it’s more than insurance, Bill, said the husky voice behind me, it keeps the record straight, makes the film open-ended, nothing like hearing someone tell it like it was in words—hey take your time. I signaled a change-up, said the voice below and behind (and Cosmo snapped furiously through but then at the last micro-second let up like some silent-comedy Jock calmly turning away into Jekyll), and the Air Force softball floated in and a slot was open I’d thought was closed and I hit that change-up with a waiting rhythm thanks to Savvy’s warning and felt the ball soften at the meat end of the bat and by the time I was rounding first it was just coming down over the left-fielder’s head and I wound up with a triple and a pat on the ass from Lorna and in the next fortnight Savvy who in what he’d said about open ends had touched a pulse connecting my knees and shoulders, fingers and head to a body of salt water where my heartbeat had once enlarged, dispersed, then vanished into the co-labor of other organs, received in his voluminous mail a Corsican Montage which I now at the end of October see through (past bits of a power station on the east side of the island blown up like burnt strips of Aut film)—through a hired face-mask to a far open end where immigrant sandhogs brave the bends to build the Brooklyn Bridge, and where beautiful Mary’s Montrose heart draws forth from my cuckolded Swiss Cottage swimming friend doubt about the Faeroes but fact that that matchless Scot had Germans among his water-borne troops—(for by a method Andsworth would judge well short of telepathic) the mind that made that Corsican Montage was secretly admitting further forces which the fine-printed channels of a daughter-typist’s finger-pads might pick up even more truly at a hundred words a minute where love may now be sheer energy of attention and the person typing knows in some new unbroken instinct the person typed. And so at half past seven I opened Sub’s door to go, and there was Gilda with some pale streaks through her hair saying she almost had not answered the phone because they were closing when I phoned, and she shouldn’t have come—and I kissed her and she touched my ear and said there was blood, and I took her with me. For, amid my fruitless survey of Savvy—his barbells, his parties, his lack of response to Corsican Montage (except to say he liked the diving), his flying lessons, his soft hand-made low boots, his drunken fag nephew who came to London for the theater once a year and was Savvy’s only connection with his own family, did I know Savvy any better than I knew Gilda?—a desperate though mechanical and trivial problem had struck me as I put my hand to the knob, and Gilda was the answer.

  Such a hand, she says, a hand like a face!—but think of Savvy’s homy hand spearing Cosmo’s high outside bomb saving the wild pitch with a bare-fingered stab, for why did he say sightseeing? because he knew the man who looked like Dagger under the street lamp who came with Cosmo to deliver the carton but stayed outside? the man who shadowed me at Chartres?—such a hand! my God what a hand! she says again (and I put mine on her), it was like he would crunch the cash register like a beer can, such a hand (mine jumps an inch, for this is another bad cab, we’re all over the road, coming apart at every crossing, plenty of time, bullet-proof plastic divider completely plastered with notices in more than one language, some nearby religion its address lost in the shadows but its theme as clear as the formula I’d barely mined in Monty’s presence—You will not have both power and the understanding of it)—Estamos temprano I call from our compartment but he accelerates so there seems still more time for Gilda to speak of Incremona’s hand which she says is like a face and I say they’re planning new very thin beer cans that squeeze like foil; while I’m thinking around Savvy and getting no answer, and I should find a neutral corner on a flight to London but I’m increasing the improbability of a system at whose increasingly empty heart I am by being too well dressed for the service entrance twenty-five yards west of Claire’s gray awning and dressed too evidently for outdoors to be Claire’s next-door neighbors we’d pose as, if a cop answered Claire’s buzzer and I am too probably wanted in Claire’s death to be softly with a valid key letting myself into her dog-less flat together with a woman I know only through a stabbing I don’t understand who must wait a plausible number of rings (for June knows about answering services) but not so many that Claire’s own service picks up—and a woman whose breath I’ve just breathed who laughs a familiar laugh and says the dog’s been playing with the Sunday Times and whose shoulders I incredibly could make time now to undress (even as I note on the Times a letter whose letterhead U.K. means Universal Kinetic—the film distributor) and who says to my fingertip on her hip where her hip extends from her waist to meet her green flowered raincoat, There isn’t time, just as Claire’s phone goes fifteen minutes early and as I turn the other way Gilda recedes into the bedroom and the name of parents who never fought in front of Claire because they never fought—or never fair—and left the blood to
be shed by her from her own thirteen-year-old womb without warning when Dagger brought her back to Philadelphia from a day at the races and a night in Freehold’s American Hotel to a home that in her absence had at last been broken, and a living room that had always seemed large, and she sent Dagger (uncle or cousin or whatever he was) a pair of slippers for his birthday which never got forwarded to him and a year later asked him in person never to tell her mother about the onyx elephant from the gift shop in Freehold, unlike the red Mexican jaguar which she broke her promise and told Monty her fond employer Phil Aut had asked her to secretly pass on to DiGorro for Jan, which I did not know at the moment Gilda hung up in the bedroom and I in the living room pocketed the cloisonné cross and left the living room.

  Was Claire—unlike Gilda—wearing lipstick when Incremona killed her? I can’t ask Monty, for on Sub’s phone answered first by Gilda at dawn Sunday, Monty sounds blind except that the eyes staring at a wall in his King Street house do not know what even to imagine out of the zero that has been inserted behind those eyes, and as if from that absence of pulse I find an idea which he assents to—he knows a man on the west river—easy enough to rent a chopper on a Sunday but do it through Monty, when did I want it?—I had not even thought until his call came, I had been asleep in Sub’s bed my skin on someone’s hair—Monty will phone, will phone—nor can I ask if Claire had on no lipstick—I look 900 feet down hours later from a hired crow’s nest and June’s frantic words said to Claire’s late answering service come to me in Gilda’s voice in a delayed translation: Leave Chad out of it, it wasn’t his idea it couldn’t have been, you said you know where and when but not who, only that it’s Chad’s idea. But I don’t even know the idea but it’s not my brother’s please believe me it isn’t Chad, for Christ’s sake it takes a sick mind to blow up a bunch of children Halloween morning—and something makes the surface of Manhattan bulge and instead of the green which city or barren land or industrial area shows up in an infrared aerial photograph there is a blue of Claire’s lips snapped directly without box or emulsion into me like thought.

  Whose open end betrays across the East River Brooklyn Heights where trees soften the edge of the promenade below which cars flash softly along that stretch of the Belt Parkway; the St. George Hotel sticks up; I know where there is a wood-frame house, and on the top step of its stoop I tried my tongue upon the corner of Renée’s closed mouth and when she at once turned her head my tongue-tip ran all along the fold where her lips met until my mouth was in her russet hair which we found we liked and under the angled light from the street lamp the russet took on a less soft sheen though hardly that hot San Francisco copper I have made so much of somewhere here—her parents’ house not original New Amsterdam though like it, as the Dutch wood-framing was like the New England and the New England like the Virginian, itself a recollection of Tudor half-timbering—but what those great brick-layers the Dutch thought up was stone masonry construction, first rubble laid in straw-bound clay but ultimately oyster-shell-mortared stone-block walls which with wood-framing inside came to be your common combination in taverns and warehouses; and I know if I can’t quite see where there are a hundred stoops, I know one near my parents’ old apartment house where we played stoop ball which was in those days a matter of angles (unlike London where in any case they don’t play stoop ball) but now is a matter of wide cars oncoming between parked cars like a transistor’s printed circuit. The kids, said Gilda, as we listened in Claire’s foyer and heard steps in the hall and now the phone again, you won’t let anybody blow up some kids.

  Alba’s false labor was false. Why did we leave Corsica when we did? Not because she phoned, because she didn’t phone. But why in the first place did Dagger change his mind again and go?

  Have I asked that before?

  In the long cozy trench of English life I say that the tortoise has come back and Lorna who has got into the habit of not hearing says, What? and I (as they say in the military) say again; but the next day when I say the man from the County Council is coming about the tortoise and Lorna says What? in a servo-circuit which threatens to loop until Doom’s Day, I interest myself by saying the County Council man’s coming about the grass, which exits me even excites me out of that forlorn loop—a service to us both.

  LIBERTY, the ’68 poster said in another language, IS THE CRIME WHICH CONTAINS ALL OTHER CRIMES.

  I was at liberty, a framed killer of Claire, but only so long (Aut said) as I stayed lost. But how could he call me “someone” and say “lost” if he knew I was collapsed right there in a closet?

  What are you doing, said Gilda, for I had sprung into Claire’s room, fallen across her bed and speared the phone on the eighth or ninth ring.

  June sounded farther away now than the message Gilda had related.

  Did I have the news?

  Tragic, I said.

  Had I been at Claire’s long?

  Two minutes, still out of breath, just long enough (I said) to call the answering service and find out its log was impounded, so it was lucky I hadn’t missed June.

  Oh. Did I know their name? the answering service?

  I knew where, I knew when, but I didn’t know who (remember?)—only that it was Chad’s plan.

  Oh. Yes.

  Gilda snuggled her ear in, but for a moment there was nothing to hear; then June asked for the name of the answering service and I said quid pro quo—and I heard nothing, not a breath. I pointed to the bed-table drawer and Gilda moved over and pulled it out so she didn’t hear June say with a matter-of-factness that was not like her: It’s tonight.

  But I know that, I said without thinking, at least I figured it out before your brother or someone hit me on the head. But I want to know who.

  June got nice. She pleaded. She honestly didn’t know who.

  You could say for her that she loved her brother.

  I looked in the bed-table drawer and saw the name of the service. I gave it to June, she gave me the time, I said I was going to be held up downtown just south of the warehouse till nine thirty and tonight was in fact more convenient for me. I hung up.

  What am I doing here? said Gilda when I blew out Tris and Ruby’s jack-o’-lantern. A light moved one-way between two dark towers and it was a helicopter or a plane. Former Prime Minister Macmillan was on Rose’s indestructible acrylic-fiber carpet which by the light from the new solid-state TV which came on at once and which I hadn’t reimbursed Sub for had changed color from what I recalled as orange and magenta.

  George Washington Carver and me—peanuts and peat, for Christ’s sake. I lit a cigarette.

  She touched me and I spoke to her. All these things I knew that others didn’t. Gene in effect lied about the Marvelous Country House letting Jack think it didn’t figure on the film. Aut’s so-called man who Claire told Jack had shot the Bonfire was really Dagger. Gene let Jack believe the portfolio on Paul’s table was Jan’s. Gene did not dispute Jack’s assertion that Jan had been at the hut with Paul just before Gene and Jack had come. My eyes caught smoke as if this were my first cigarette and I touched Gilda and I wondered where Aut and John as Aut had said were meeting tomorrow. But all these things I knew that others didn’t left me feeling like a rat whose brain has been somato-mapped so you can predict which cells will show electrical response when a given limb is stroked.

  Hair-thin pages of mica flipping now fast as Will’s hand-made movie—

  Digital mosaic compounded through liquid crystal techniques but impounded from me—

  So what good was what I knew?

  She said and was still saying the next day 900 feet high above Manhattan (but by then only in her mind), I think you have to go to the end, I think there is an end.

  Too high to see Incremona inflating with mad rage, say, his own taxi Paul left to be towed off. A yellow taxi balloons between buildings, squeezes out into the air.

  Something is about to happen. Is there an anti-Lenin demonstration? From here I could never see into the Ukrainian neighborhood nort
h and far east of where I watch—and just south of that ancient and dilapidated and only theoretically open-ended street of chipped stone and greasy fire escapes and chilly mattresses and busted glass where that junkie you remember having (through me) not met, hides in the fourth-floor toilet to count the stolen wallet’s cash he doesn’t know is hot.

  Something else is making Manhattan bulge.

  It probably isn’t the Flint warehouse. This turns out to be a grab-bag full of things left over or waiting—surplus acupuncture models; surplus science treasure chests with magnets, one-way mirrors, materials for many experiments a ten- or twelve-year-old can do; 25-foot surplus weather balloons (for holding up swimming-pool covers, facilitating aerial photography, marking scuba divers’ descents); a dry-chem component of a surplus experimental liquid fertilizer destined for Cambodia; thousands of rounds from a Minnesota cartridge firm now lobbying to weaken the ’68 gun control law; and to plug the ears, cartons and cartons of Swedish Wool made of glass down best for frequencies of 2000 to 4000 cycles per second. Don’t forget also surplus Science Fair projects, geodesic dome kits, Digital Counter Kit with integrated circuits, and water that goes uphill.

  Where are the armored vests found by the forces in Vietnam to be defective? Are there any left? Or the 40,000 emergency artificial respirators sold in the U.S. though known to be badly designed and ineffective?

  Don’t forget also acres of thin plastic sheets that change color because of the liquid crystals inside them but compared to other liquid crystal displays will have uses far more sophisticated (to use a term from weaponry, confides the man himself, J. K. Flint, approaching a flagon of Scotch during an encounter so fatally fortuitous Saturday night very late that now these five moments of October 30 and 31 turn slowly at different speeds in an equilibrium more spatial than genuine: attempted ambush earlier Saturday night; attempted helicopter-watch Sunday afternoon; the bombing of Incremona Sunday at twilight; the eye of all this terminal action Sunday morning, and the midnight chat with Jack Saturday). I said we had talked about women and the Hebrides and my various accents, and speaking of liquid crystals Jack must know that our old associate Red Whitehead would shift his ground at the drop of a toy bomb and kept his mouth shut only at home watching color TV (though it wasn’t, said Jack, just the TV that shut him up at home and he might be my associate but he wasn’t his), and (I got up, I went on, I could capitalize on what lay behind the affability) I couldn’t trust anything now except cash, I said, Dagger had set me up never guessing what I wanted out of the carton in Claire’s closet of which I could make interesting use, though what I really hoped to get into was the digital mosaic capability with John who had the real-time-projection ideas (mind through machine direct, though he was getting a bit irritated at delays) while I had as Jack knew a certain commercial acquaintance with plasma crystals, as I suspected so did Jack (who now again grinned affably saying Commute from London but my only tie with “Whitehead was what Len got out of him about you and as I moved to the window-seat he leaned to take up the decanter again with the smooth coordination of an alumni fullback whom the pressures of domestic life have not kept from staying in shape), so since I said the footage showing the revolutionaries was just going to get in the way of my work with John whom I was going to see first thing tomorrow after he got through with Aut, the footage was for sale and—(and recalling some Yucatan or Hindu and in some way Maya proverb about plunging ahead without too much thought if you’re going to get what you didn’t know you wanted) I slipped something in Jack’s trenchcoat lying on the window-seat beside Sub’s black navy mac and gray forties fedora, returned to put my glass on the desk in this hotel room and after he asked if first thing tomorrow meant Monday, for it was now past midnight and it was Sunday, I said, Twenty thousand cash tonight would almost do it.