Lookout Cartridge (31 page)

Near where the Usk crosses the Breconshire-Monmouth border, I said.

Is there any land for sale? said Claire. Let’s live in Wales, Daddy.

First let’s get to know our friend Cartwright better.

You knew me well enough to use my name the other day, I said, and pose as me.

Say that again, said Claire.

A little harmless cloak-and-dagger work, said Monty.

Sometime we’ll have to discuss what you found out, I said, but I was thinking of what Gilda could have told him and what she looked like when she was telling him, but also what might be of interest in the Softball Game to anyone wishing to destroy our film—for the Softball Game was the footage we’d had developed, and I wished now that I’d seen another run-through before coming to New York—I didn’t even know where Dagger had been lucky enough to have it stashed at the time of the break-in.

But now without any warning I wondered how he had known we were near the intersection (his word) of the River Usk and the Breconshire-Monmouth border. How in hell had he known that? No one there had told him, for I’d have heard. And outside the radial neighborhoods of our London Dagger is no geographer. He can make time on a main route, but he has no patience with maps. Yet he’d known this thing.

I was still standing. I looked at a wall at a photograph covered with glass that reflected my face. It was next to a painting that looked familiar.

Claire said, You look drawn.

I said, This painting by your sister?

Monty said, Yes.

Nice color, but messy. What’s it of?

Monty asked if Commons was about to vote Britain into the Market.

In this picture she’s trying to make the colors rise up against each other. So what?

Monty asked when I’d eaten.

I said no, really I thought she could use a few lessons in black-and-white drawing and she should learn not to use color so indiscriminately.

Claire came between us. Monty, she said, had wanted to be an engineer when he was a boy and he’d promised his sister he’d build a spaceship for the two of them.

Monty ignored Claire. He said he loved his sister and he loved her work. She’d been unlucky in more than one respect and he’d be obliged if I would not attack her work.

The word was too right, and Claire couldn’t resist identifying herself and said, You’ve come a long, long way today.

I excused myself and went downstairs. I heard Monty say, what about all those Mayas?

The phone was ringing.

I got on the scales.

I had not questioned Monty on what he’d meant about
two
films last Thursday.

He had not pressed me about the sound track.

I couldn’t hear anything upstairs.

I wondered if Sub had noticed the dishes were done.

I was now not sure of Dagger.

Somewhere in my system I knew that we devise motives for ourselves in order to supply their lack.

No. I was not sure of Dagger DiGorro any more.

THE MARVELOUS COUNTRY HOUSE

My idea. But what a day. Beaulieu magazine loaded with color in case we saw an elephant we could cut into the house after the footage was developed.

We’d focus on the inside of the house, Dagger thought. I believe we’d agreed that panning 180 degrees beyond the dining room to the window would not only give motion to the room itself but imply depth; and Dagger did get a shot of the patio through the rain streaming down the dining-room window and through the rain pelting down around the big striped table-umbrella covering the portable television someone had left on with the Apollo 15 jalopy on the screen or pointing the view. I never saw the Falcon module till lift-off the next day in Highgate.

But my idea. Flanked by green manurey meadows, neighbored by stone farms fixed in the earth and the yard mud and by the thick trees and past them the square tower of a parish church, the graystone country house was in a space of land we learned had shrunk under previous owners and been further hedged by the neighbors and by constables who had got into the habit of trying a polite bust on the odd weekend. The house of our film was in a way England, and you could imagine you heard a purling rill.

But the day was circuitous first and last.

Dagger had said we’d need a larger car. But he turned up with the old Volkswagen and I said we could have used my Fiat station wagon if I’d known. He was on time, for him. But then he said we had to make some stops. It was a real Sunday circuit of north and northwest London, four different bed-sitters; in one we picked up a couple, and at another we picked up no one but stopped to give the girl who looked like my sister twenty years ago a chance to change. So after a while we were six—two in front, four in back—and headed into Kent or Sussex. Dagger said the house was close to the Sussex border. Herma, the dark-haired American girl who had changed her clothes, said she thought it was wonderful we were making a film just like that. She had a single long plait. Elizabeth, who was so small she could sit upright on her boyfriend’s lap without banging her head on the VW roof, said, What the middle class won’t do to keep itself entertained. She was English. Dagger said, That’s what a man needs behind him, a good woman. The boys who were English joked about someone they knew and after I’d seen a Canterbury sign left, Dagger turned right and soon stopped at a tidy bed-and-breakfast cottage in the middle of nowhere with a circle of hardy perennials at the center of an oblong lawn, and we acquired a seventh person, a tall Jewish boy named Sherman. He limped out with a high orange rucksack with bedroll on top and collapsed aluminum tentpoles sticking up like antennae and he set about lashing this rig to the luggage rack. Then he insinuated himself into the crowded back seat. Dagger said, Sherman’s from St. Louis. I said my sister lived there and was married to the manager of a department store. Sherman said, I just came from Africa. Herma asked if he’d ever been in a movie and he said he’d been invited to be in a skin flick, and Dagger said how was his performance, and he said it would have been OK. Elizabeth’s boy said his brother had been in a documentary on one of the Aldermaston marches by accident, and Elizabeth said, My father took me. Big deal, said Sherman quietly. Well as for me, said Herma, I’ve never been in a film. Elizabeth said, What do you mean,
big deal
. Dagger’s circus car was getting fuller, I saw another Canterbury sign, then two busloads of tourists; the traffic was heavier, Dagger turned off the Canterbury road. What were you doing in Africa? said Herma. Seeing some friends, said Sherman. Did you get your rhino? said Elizabeth. That’s not their scene, said Sherman. Still, said the English boy under Herma, you’re pretty tough aren’t you. Elizabeth said, For my father and for many of us it
was
a big deal. Liberals, said Sherman, the Jewish hiker from St. Louis. I said Let’s get them to go through this again when we get to the house. Dagger said Yucatan was just as tough as Africa and the heads were even tougher, and he told about a Mexican Indian he’d run across down there, a dwarf. Perhaps there were unusually many cars on the road; but enclosed in his VW I had the feeling that Dagger was prolonging the trip to the Marvelous Country House in order to complete his story.

It shot back and forth at first between Yucatan and Freehold, but the story was about the dwarf’s head and his mother. Dagger said over his shoulder, You know who it was the dwarf met, and Sherman said, Right, and Herma said, O wow, and I looked back to see her hand touch Sherman’s shoulder.

The Indians revered this dwarf, Dagger said, feared him—a fellow Indian but set apart, a legend in his own lifetime. His mother had been an old woman miserably childless who mourned for the kids she didn’t have as if they had lived and died. She had a dream, and it was of a deep well colored down as far as she could see with green and red and yellow shapes and the more she dreamt the more they became birds, then real birds, and she reached down the well mouth and found red eggs. A pair of green birds flew up out of the darkness and they took out her eyes and it didn’t hurt, for now she saw even better but something else. And in thanks for the red eggs and the new vision, she baked on her hand-packed earthen griddle some
tortillitas
and sailed them down into the well.

Well she woke from this dream and she took an egg and covered it with a yellow cloth and set it in a corner. She left it alone but always thought about it but told no one.

This is in Uxmal, said Dagger, and asked if we knew Yucatan, and Sherman said Right, and Dagger said it was strange on the map, Yucatan, like an underground water-cave you go way down to get to and pass under water then come upward, and come to think of it if you’ve come down from Laredo through Vera Cruz, Yucatan
is
like that.

Well one day the old woman got hungry looking at the blue sky at dawn and made some
tortillitas
, which are wheat cakes, and gobbled them up like a pregnant lady and when she went to the corner and lifted the yellow cloth, the egg had hatched and a
criatura
, a creature, had hatched and the old girl was happy and called the thing her son and took good care of it, fed it lots of fried beans and at the end of a year and a day, so this Mexican Indian dwarf told me, and he should know because he was it—walked and talked like a man, but it stopped growing.

Well the old woman was thrilled and she told him he would be chief man around there. One day she sent him to the house of the
gobernador
.

The boy under Elizabeth said abruptly as if he wanted to identify himself, Who built those ancient cities, I mean Uxmal, Copan?

Dagger said, It’s all connected, Egyptian pyramids and hieroglyphs, Hindu temples even carved out of the living rock—the point is there was communication.

Telepathy at most, I said.

From the orient, you mean, said Elizabeth to Dagger.

Both ways, said Dagger.

Rubbish, said Elizabeth.

I’m convinced of it, said Dagger. But the dwarf’s old lady now you see sent him to the gobernador and challenged him to a test of strength. The gobernador scoffed and told him to lift a one-hundred-pound stone, so the dwarf ran back home crying but his mother sent him back to the gobernador to say if the gobernador lifted it he would too, and that’s what happened. And they had other tests. Same thing—it was as if the dwarf tied into the gobernador’s power that had an inadequate purpose and used that power for his own ends.

Is he still alive? said Herma, and I looked around at her to check if she did have that lovely imagination in the cheekbone and mouth that my sister once had and I thought I’d heard this tale before in different form and I let Dagger get away with the power-direction idea he’d recruited from me to help his story.

The gobernador, anyway, got fed up and told the dwarf he must in one night build a house taller than any other there or he’d have the priests cut out his heart on top of one of their pyramids which were only fifty feet high. So the dwarf raced home crying and again his mother said to cool it.

Now according to him, he woke next morning and found himself in this high, high building which I myself have seen and if only I hadn’t dropped my Pentax in a swollen river back in the jungle, but what you remember is the best. So the gobernador wakes up and looks out thinking what a great day for a rite, and lo and behold here’s this high, high stone building with the dwarf leaning out of a top window enjoying the view of the village, and the gobernador’s wife looks over his shoulder and says what a white elephant
that’s
going to be—but the gobernador put on his hat and went out and collected two bundles of the hardest wood and went to the dwarf and proposed the ultimate test. He would beat the dwarf over the head with the wood and then when that was over, the dwarf would have his turn.

The hiker from St. Louis, Sherman, asked when we were getting there, and I said, So the dwarf ran home crying.

Right, said Dagger. Well the old lady put one of her special tasty
tortillitas
on the crown of his head, a thin buckwheat cake, and back he went and all the bigwigs gathered round.

Well, the gobernador stepped up and he put the wood to him, whaled away for as long as it took to bust the whole bundle, and he never raised even a pea on the dwarf’s head, much less an egg.

What next, for heaven sake! Well the gobernador naturally tried to get out of his deal but he couldn’t because he’d made it in front of his officers and the town fathers who were pretty interested by this time in what was going to happen.

Too bad the Nagra’s in the boot, I said, we could use this. We could even play you outside the Marvelous Country House on a loudspeaker—what equipment do they have there?—while inside we film.

Is Gene running this show? said Sherman.

Dagger said it was Gene’s place we were going to but the film was ours. Now Dagger had been in more than good form, he was talking faster than usual and seemed half-surprised at how the tale revealed itself. And the others in the crammed car must have felt with me that we were almost at our filming location. There was a man striding along swinging a cane. There was a stucco-faced pub with people outside at trestle tables. I’ll always remember them, brown beer in mugs, red tomato juice in wine glasses, a kid with a can and a straw, then high hedgerows, a tunnel of overhanging leaves, every hundred yards a slight widening where two cars could pass, and Dagger expatiated upon
tortillita de trigo
, the wheat flour that went in and how they pounded the paste, until I said get on with it, but Dagger kicked the brakes, the Beaulieu tipped forward and I reached down and tapped my head on the dash. Another car, a black Mercedes 300, was upon us and the passing place was on the left and Dagger had us nearly in a ditch. And as the Mercedes passed he said, You know the dwarf took a single swipe and smashed the gobernador’s skull into a hundred bits and the people hailed the dwarf as the new gobernador.

We were on the road again; one of the English boys said, You’ve got excellent brakes, and Herma said, What then?

But we had turned into a drive through an acre of unmown lawn and approached the house as rain began to skid down the windscreen.