Lookout Cartridge (14 page)

I hadn’t needed to say I had those two pages in my head.

Well, I asked Sub what sort of day it had been. He stretched, and said Rose had been livid. I shook out a cigarette and wondered if Jenny had thought about the pages she’d typed. She might be able to help after all.

Sub got up and turned off the telly. Rose was fit to be tied, he said, she came for Ruby and Tris and nobody was here. Almost.

You said you’d phone her, I said.

I almost meant to and forgot. Talking to Ticketron about going to work for them, Rose went right out of my head.

Rose keeps in touch, I said.

She’s not threatening a comeback, said Sub.

She have a key?

That’s almost what I wanted to ask you.

You said she was livid.

By phone and in the note she scrawled me.

Sub was leaning back on the couch that turned into my bed. I looked for an ashtray. On a bookshelf stood some old coffee tins painted purple.

Who’d you give your key to? said Sub.

I let myself in, didn’t you notice?

The labels on the coffee containers read
PENCILS, PENNIES, BUTTONS, SHELLS, STRING, MISC
. There was a slit in the plastic top of the
PENNIES
tin. My ash dropped on the carpet. I found an ashtray between two glass candlestick holders.

You see, said Sub, a man said to Rose you’d lent him your key.

To
Rose?
I said—which lucky for me was just about what I’d have wanted to say.

Rose came here expecting to find the children, said Sub, and when she didn’t find them she phoned me but couldn’t get through. So she phoned the school and found out what had happened. She was writing me a note when the buzzer went. She asked who it was and the man said a friend of Cartwright’s and he had your key but didn’t want to startle anyone if there was anyone in the apartment. Rose let him in. He said you’d been tied up at a studio and were meeting him later and had asked him to get something out of your suitcase. Rose couldn’t care less.

Perhaps, I said, I shouldn’t have.

She said he had a suede fringe outfit and big round glasses.

That’s him, I said. Steel-rim.

And said he was in films, that was how he knew you.

I’ve been running around all day, I said. New York confuses me. I didn’t think you’d mind.

Sub had gone into the kitchen. The fridge door smacked.

Want a beer? I got Heineken’s.

I said no thanks.

They might never tell me what it was they wanted in my pages.

Sub leaned against the doorway. He was tired. He tipped the bottle up.

I hoped he would say something else. I got my suitcase up onto the couch and got my pajamas.

I said I appreciated this—it was much more than a place to crash.

Saying the words I found them true.

But I’d begun to say them because Sub had had another lousy day; and he might say something else about the man, and I couldn’t very well ask without weakening my position. But the uttered words brought up the real feeling and real years. I was sorry Sub’s marriage had busted up. But why?

Sub nodded.

He turned toward his bedroom and I mentioned that Will had got interested in Babbage. Sub had once written something for a house organ on that peculiar English genius and his proto-computers. Sub murmured, Drain Babbage, brain
dommage
.

But then from his bedroom he said, Rose asked who he was, and he said Monty Graf. But you know it was Monty Graf.

My fingers were on my diary but from some lower layer of packing an odor as of Lorna reached me; I felt and found a waxy ball of her pine soap; it was American.

Sub came back: But didn’t this man with the suede fringe tell you he ran into Rose?

It was a good question and I kept my hands moving.

The pages were all there except the two I’d had in the envelope an hour ago. I said, He left the key for me in an envelope so I didn’t see him to talk to.

Sub turned away toward his room and I grabbed my trench-coat pocket and to my relief found Sub’s key. But why not?

Imagine the man in glasses taking it when I was in the loft; imagine him cutting a duplicate and returning mine to me in the envelope I then passed on to the real Monty Graf. But what would I have let myself in with just now?

Monty might be right. About my being in trouble.

Sub came back. He said, It’s not so much your life I envy as the changes in it. Hell, I said, you’re going to Washington tomorrow. Sub said he had watched a mystery movie tonight which had had little enough suspense and they had a trick of showing you shots of the big scenes before the thing started.

Dagger had just sent in a vita to Washington. He had given me the envelope with Health, Education, and Welfare on it to mail one day. Out of sight, out of mind, he said.

Much later I put my pages in my case.

I had an unmemorable dream but I know that as my thoughts were dissolving in the perpendicular laps of some Black and White Panther concubines, I was about to tell Ruby a bedtime tale of how her dad got the name Sub.

DAGGER-TYPE CASSETTE

At signal read vita: One winter Dagger camped on a Bahama beach. One Sunday morning some black boys who sometimes played on the beach came racing out and pretended to crucify one of their number near Dagger’s lean-to.

Read slowly but not so slowly it is not clear: Dagger was known on the Bahama isle as a colorful character from California. He said, I fill a need here.

At signal, read vita; begin with latest position, work backward: Dagger lived on the beach at the bottom of an incline of tough-bladed dune grass that was the seaward end of a strip an eighth of a mile wide that lay between Sea View, a hotel, and Spindrift, a guest house with motellike units below the main building.

At night he sat cross-legged before his fire. He borrowed a rubber raft from the lady who ran Spindrift and with a snorkel-mask spear-fished a hundred yards offshore where there were rocks and a barrier reef. Once from a boat he caught a thirty-pound grouper and sold it to the proprietor of Sea View, who had been in films and displayed on a wall by the desk a photo of himself on a date with Elizabeth Taylor. At Christmas and then occasionally after that Dagger filled in as bartender at Sea View.

Some nights cross-legged before his fire he’d open a cube of over-priced Spam, and if the island schoolmaster was there they’d look at the sizzhng mold of browning pink meat and the schoolmaster would tell what a treat Spam had been in England during the war. Dagger took his supper off the coals and offered the schoolmaster some Bacardi and told him about folk life in New Jersey when he was growing up. He’d just missed War II and had matriculated his way out of the Korean. The schoolmaster, a burly man in shorts who was strong in maths, Empire history, and games, would allow that he too had missed the war in that sense of having been just too young to serve; he’d been evacuated north and still recalled looking down over his chin at his identity badge. His wife had been evacuated too and the separation from her mother and father had left in her something permanent she couldn’t quite put her finger on. The schoolmaster was at present much concerned about the British government’s renewing his two-year contract.

Read vita at signal; list positions in reverse order beginning with most recent: One warm February morning before he was awake enough to switch on his transistor to get the Bahama Islands weather and the Nassau news, he heard (as if all around him) the boys’ familiar cries and a clattering of wood muted by open air, and for a second—for he saw he was still dreaming of California—he thought the boys were hammering up something out of all the driftwood he had looked at but never picked up off the beach in California when he was busy reading political theory in the San Francisco bay area, yet simultaneously had the thought that dreams are a species of sleep-teaching with a key difference that Dagger unfortunately lost just as he found it in his retreating dream. But he rubbed the sand from his eyes and dug at the salt in his bushy dark eyebrows thinking of two girls from Philadelphia in the hotel bar last night to whom he said he would be constant.

He saw that the boys were making a cross.

List education beginning with most recent institution and working backward: He had told his friends he was bound for the Gulf of Honduras because he wanted to find a long-lost schoolmate from Monmouth County, New Jersey, who was reputed to be down there diving for bullion, a fraternity brother. But he’d ended by answering an ad in an Oakland paper and driving to New York, where he encountered a Brooklyn cabdriver who was selling out and heading for the Virgin Islands to put his money in a boat and go into the moving business, and Dagger said he’d worked on charters out of New Orleans so when he left New York for the South Dagger had a loose arrangement with the cabdriver. But after transporting a car to Florida Dagger met a young painting contractor who’d just bought his first plane which he said he needed in his work; so Dagger flew with the contractor and his wife to Eleuthera, but then, being on principle opposed to round trips, he moved on across the bay to a smaller island when the painting contractor after an eventful week returned to his various commitments.

Give dates of each: there were eight hundred blacks on the island and two hundred resident whites. The Mayor of New York City once rented a beach house here for ten days. The schoolmaster did not visit Dagger often at night, for his wife disapproved; but he offered Dagger their porch swing in case of rain. The schoolmaster’s father had been a Liverpool docker before the war and claimed to have played baseball with American sailors.

Dagger said to the schoolmaster, I’m between jobs you might say.

The schoolmaster wore a full moustache. He said he had never in fact believed his late father’s claim to have played baseball in Liverpool. Dagger said, I believe him.

The lady at the guest house bawled Dagger out but liked him. He had told her the trouble with her station wagon was the differential. She did not like what was happening in Nassau but thought there still would never be a takeover. Her brother was in the glass business. She went to Miami to shop twice a year. The Anglican vicar Mr. Ash with a vintage tan over his face gave Dagger a nod when they met along the bright, hibiscus-scented streets. The real estate agent, who was always stamping out a cigarette, always asked Dagger if he was in the market for a house, and laughed loudly at his joke. Dagger would stroll across the island at lunchtime and sit under the fig tree by the combined ferry-ticket, ice cream, and clothing shop and discuss Harlem, which he had never actually been to, with two natives, one of whom had but had come home and now worked at the hotels. Dagger would discuss the future of the islands with these two. He would ask if they were ready for freedom from exploitation and they’d laugh and say It’s OK if you got the money, and turn the talk back to cricket or English and American football because that would get Dagger going on some mad thing like the strangeness of a ball game where you had to keep hands off—so English, so un-American.

Dagger wanted to start a seminar on the beach. He was visited at his lean-to by natives and vacationers alike, a Toronto lawyer, a girl who had just quit her job in Chicago, a New York broker, the local Gospel preacher who tried in vain to get Dagger to play cornet Sunday night.

Date of birth, name of father, living, deceased. One Sunday in February after a night tending bar and a dream about dreams, Dagger woke to shouts and clatter, wood hammering wood. He kept his eyes tight shut. He knew it was his friends the little black boys from the bay side who had evidently not found any fallen coconuts in the road to sit down and crack and so had come the three-quarters of a mile across from their side of the island.

They were crucifying one of their number, tying his hands with seaweed and rotten twine to the crosspiece which had been nailed to an upright Dagger through one eye identified by its half-stripped white and black paint as a plank of driftwood he had set on the east side of his lean-to to keep sand from blowing.

Two little girls in bikinis who were at the hotel Dagger worked at were watching from the brink of a trench as deep perhaps as long, from which some of the boys were pelting their happy sacrifice with sand. One little girl jumped into the trench and could barely be seen as she began pitching sand too while the victim loosely strung upon the cross gave exaggerated yells of agony.

It was a good sight and Dagger looked under his plastic poncho for some fig newtons to give out but found a can of beer and sat up and opened it.

Most recent position: his knees cracked comfortably as he crossed his legs.

After he introduced himself into the University of Maryland operation in England some months later and thus gained access to low-priced audio equipment, he became interested in cassette collage, still later in the technical implications of semigratuitous switch-back and switch-forward juxta-sequences using eight-track cartridges, and he planned to work out his own way of cutting to an earlier or later track without having to start at its beginning.

When accused by one of his older U.S. Air Force students of being a closet-radical coming on as a professional discussion-provoker who was in reality a hired conflict-monger, he replied that he was designed to fit most systems.

Name (last name first): Who wants to know? said Dagger, rising when the father in his maroon Bermudas marched the little girls over to the lean-to and demanded to know Dagger’s name.

When Dagger said, Who wants to know? the man said, Never mind who
I
am, just you explain how come you just sat there in your hobo jungle and let my little girls be subjected to God knows what. Dagger sat down again. But she liked it, he said.

The father said, If I didn’t have these kids with me.

Keeps you out of trouble, said Dagger.

Do you think you own this beach, said the man.

List institutions, looking backward and forward: The little girl was being lifted out of the trench. She was screaming and laughing. She helped the black boys heap up sand for her to stand on to be high enough to have her arms properly tied to the cross. On the ocean side of the trench her sister was jumping up and down.