Lookout Cartridge (2 page)

I thought, A girl doesn’t have to shave first thing in the morning.

In the summer of ’53 Lorna laughed and laughed when I couldn’t zip our sleeping bags together because one track was half rusted out.

When I was a boy my grandfather wouldn’t shave till after we came back for breakfast and cleaned our white perch. The loons the other end of the lake would toss out their watery laugh. No one else would be on the still surface. My grandfather would bob his rod a couple of times and so would I. If the Maine sky was gray he’d say, They love that sky.

The American girl’s suede desert boots were propped on her knapsack. My hand on the top of her deck chair felt the drizzle beginning. She looked up and said, You homing on me? and I said, Scrounger.

In summer I let the odd bus conductor take me for a tourist. What does it matter? But also English people down from the North with their children for a weekend have asked me the way. I know London as only an American can. They’d say how long since you’ve been back to America, and I’d say I’m always going back.

If you are not sure where you are, you have me.

Lorna came with me to the airport when I went to Chicago in ’64. Her perfume and her pallor went together. The cabbie when he let us out at the Departures Building said, Had a good time then? and Lorna quickly said, Oh we’ve lived here for years.

What do you mean,
always going back?
said the American girl. She worked the blanket up under her chin. You must be rich or you’ve got a racket. Spain’s cheaper.

No surprise in any case to be once again entering a holding pattern over Kennedy listening to the captain’s baritone pass on to his passengers the commuterized forecast of an autumn cold front coming in from Ohio, which to a New Yorker is the Midwest.

No surprise to be held up getting into Manhattan from Kennedy.

No surprise in ocher twilight on the expressway to see slowed, outbound cars with their lone drivers float toward us over the rise.

No surprise to find New York hard to enter, though perhaps always a surprise to find New York.

No surprise to be on a sidewalk Wednesday morning walking north trying to use the Druid’s advice.

Surprising only that this time I brought a venture whose principal product had been virtually ruined a month before. So instead of concentrating on letting my neck muscles ease into my lung mass, I was imagining that the Druid had secretly pondered Dagger’s film and my diary of it.

I knew just how much I was going to tell Claire.

Twenty blocks north the mauve and amber air waited retreating before a glittering length of vehicles. Down into the deafening business of the avenue down through the late-morning film the dots of light thirty-six stories up gave alternately time and temp. The traffic here close was spaced and moving. On the small panel truck that passed me was my name.

To feel the sheaf of diary inside my jacket I put my hand to my breast like a hatless bigwig hearing a national anthem.

I knew roughly what I was going to do.

However, I could not know in advance that at an intersection in Manhattan I would abruptly have to think about a piece of equipment common everywhere but put now to unusual use.

On such an instrument the stabber will leave no usable prints: at most a few curves broken from a second, still more fugitive set of marks in his moist palm. Recompose the two sets if you can, but it won’t be with an expert’s dust and a police photographer’s plate.

The stabber may reflect that given the instrument’s diameter there could be no prints worth developing. But what he will not recall is what he did not see or feel in his skin gripping the instrument—to wit, the presence behind him of an old college classmate Cartwright whom he might have known if he’d turned around.

At the comer ahead, sandy hair and a tanned neck became now the profile of Jim Wheeler, who turned his head sharply as if to peer at the couple on his left who had stepped off the curb and stood looking at each other.

It was Jim, and he’d appeared in front of me during the few moments I was seeing my name on the panel. I turned to see if likewise someone had spotted me from behind.

The light was now green sharing its light with the green word GO. The couple went forward still looking at each other. Jim stepped off the curb.

But from his left a black car with bird-lime on the hood launched itself veering out of the northbound avenue into the eastbound street they were moving to cross, and it must have brushed the couple and would have swiped Jim with the tail end but his hand came up onto the rear radio aerial and so he was able to stop himself, but when the car did not instantly brake, the aerial snapped in his hand, which it is not supposed to be able to do, and this was what seemed to stop the car.

The driver was out fast. He came back along the far side of the car as I slowed my approach. He was a big man in a white T-shirt with a brown decal on the chest. Someone said, Jersey plates.

A woman’s laugh was off to my right somewhere near a florist’s doorway flanked by pussywillows in a black can and soft dark and bright pansies in tiers of flats.

The driver came round the rear of his car, his hands in front of him at hip level.

Jim stuck the length of aerial straight out.

The man in the T-shirt rushed onto it.

It went into his shirt well below the brown decal, which I now saw was a target of numbered rings.

The two words “License revoked” suddenly survived above the engines whose din swirled like a virtually immeasurable air conditioner killing itself yet letting off staggered signal horns to mark its decaying sequences.

The victim’s mouth was open.

From the rise and fall of the woman’s laugh I couldn’t tell if she had seen the stabbing.

The driver had got his aerial back in one piece. The other man let go.

A few inches showed in front.

When the victim turned, as to avoid the aerial already in him, the rod could be seen to have gone clear through and pierced his back. But instead of puncturing his T-shirt again it tented it out as if he had a rolled tabloid in his back pocket sticking up under his shirt.

The stabber, Jim, stepped back onto the curb. He set out east finding his way into the clusters of early lunchtime strollers.

The driver, with the severed aerial through him, stood against his black fender not doing anything. The gathering mass of traffic pressed north. There was blood at the corner of the driver’s mouth. His eyelids were pinched shut.

I was at the curb now. There was more than enough of the broken silver rod to get hold of.

Jim walking east was already half a block away if that was his beige suit.

A voice like the laughing woman’s said, Call a cop.

The noise volume guarded by high buildings rose into a homogeneity like quiet; like a patient
Om
.

Back down the swarming block I saw Claire; it had to be Claire because she still looked much like my Jenny, who is only seventeen.

At once she turned back and went into a corner camera shop. Even if she simply didn’t want to meet me an hour before the time we’d agreed on as well as in a place other than her apartment, had she in any case seen the stricken man through the crowd?

At this point, then, the driver is several feet in front of me, Claire is in a shop a block south, Jim is now half a block east. The aerial is fixed in the driver’s front and gleaming so cleanly the T-shirt is like a new polishing rag.

He went to his knees and the aerial sticking out his back scraped a line on the fender.

The pressure then must have increased his pain inside, but his eyes were shut and he was apparently silent among the vehicle horns and the revvings of diesel trucks pushing dark fumes out of side-stacks.

The kneeling man dropped his large hands from his stomach to the street, and one mashed a length of ocher turd, the other a dark circle of spit. So he was on his hands and knees, and his T-shirt had ridden above the two inches of aerial that came straight up out of his back red-sleeved.

Two Puerto Ricans pushing coats and dresses along left their four-wheeled racks at the curb and looked into the black car.

One of the driver’s hands was missing part of the middle finger.

A siren that seemed in its low register as close as a speaking voicerose and swooped to rise again, a cop car in traffic a block and a half south.

There was clearly nothing to do for the man in the T-shirt till the ambulance came, certainly not disengage the aerial.

I felt I had been inserted into a situation.

I went back to the camera shop a block south but, being on the corner, it happened to have another door around on the cross-town street.

I entered and someone called behind me, I saw it.

I passed along the glass counter thinking to catch Claire in the cross-town street. The man said, What happened?

Jenny my daughter was in the market for a Leica IIIG box for a hundred dollars top, and if I could find one an Elmar f3.5 too.

I said over my shoulder, A man was stabbed.

Claire was out of sight.

Back through the door, the camera man said, Oi.

Could I get Jenny a reliable second-hand 200-millimeter automatic as cheap here in the camera capital as on the other side through Dagger?

It had been Claire, but she looked even more like my own seventeen-year-old Jenny now the difference in age was less.

My eyes stung as if blinking through chlorine. Eastward the way I thought Claire had gone, a Salvation Army hatband showed dull soft red moving toward me.

Did Jenny even want something from America this time? Why did I have the idea she was saying to me, Don’t bother, I’ll get it myself when the time comes.

In 1957 she was three and didn’t yet object to
Ginny;
I said I’ll bring you a present when I come back from America. She knew
present
but not
America
. A list of all I’ve brought her since would make a history.

If I told the camera man my problem too simply, he’d say, Look, all your camera prices are much higher in England, they got a very serious problem with their economy.

But when he got my point about the American PX or the continental duty-free shops Dagger had connections with, he’d turn right off; he’d say, Well we don’t compete with those foreign prices—maybe you need some film? you take slides, try this Fuji color.

During this absence from my house in London that has almost no mortgage left on the freehold, I could be holed up in another part of London for a fortnight and not even be in America. Bringing a present from the PX in Ruislip on the outskirts of London or the Navy place near the Embassy was like bringing a present from the States. But Jenny wanted something else.

I cut back through the camera shop, I would meet Claire as arranged. The man was outside the other door looking up the block, but behind the counter now was evidently the proprietor, a white-haired broad swarthy man in very dark glasses.

A man in a stained apron came in behind me and put a lidless shallow cardboard box on the counter. The clerk came back in the other door. The ambulance is stuck in traffic, he said.

What’s the ambulance? said the deli man.

On his forearm across a vein and barely visible in the hair were five blue numerals.

Claire’s disappearance wouldn’t have mattered if she hadn’t first appeared. You see Jim Wheeler you haven’t seen in years, or been aware of not seeing. You see him impale somebody without exactly meaning to and walk away down a lunch-hour street. You see behind you a young woman you’re going to talk to in half an hour. She cuts back through a camera shop and you lose her.

My children aren’t children any more. Not like the Kodacolor display ad propped high on this glass counter—a regular neighborhood snap enlarged and backed—five kids aged say six to ten: if I could draw them out from behind their u-v filter, slide away the health spectrum, leave them black and white, they’d hear the tale of my trip to America and dismiss it in none of the adult ways your own family can.

The weekend had been confusing. Jenny had picked an argument Friday night but dropped it until Monday night and then Lorna seemed deliberately to have stayed upstairs packing my bag when I knew she’d normally get into the act.

I hadn’t told Lorna and Jenny and Will the trip was more than business, though Lorna unlike Dagger knew I had an appointment with Claire, and Lorna must have thought I wanted support for a second try on the film and wasn’t just having a friendly lunch with Dagger’s beautiful niece. And Lorna knew nothing of the Indian I thought might have slipped into Dagger and Alba’s flat during the three hours when someone had broken in and ruined most of our film.

My son Will would not dismiss the trip’s true purpose if he could understand it. But he’d think big, he’d imagine international manipulations.

Feed facts to wife, son, daughter: before you’re through you’re retrieving responses.

You take these little Americans in the Kodacolor blow-up who would be just as multiracial in black and white: whip them out of their crush of color-corrected health, polarize them into Tri-X prints, and they’d ask good questions.

About Dagger’s film. They’d ask why and how. Maybe not when.

And
who
ruined the movie? And
why
did they?

Were the cops there—? The pigs, you mean, says the oldest, a ten-year-old black girl, her full lips moving in this still enlargement and my mind moving with her lips—let’s say she had fish-fingers for lunch at her school on Ninth Avenue this noon—fish-
fingers
! What’s fish-
fingers
? calls a nine-year-old oriental boy whose mother does not permit him to take advantage of the new hot breakfast how many New Yorkers in the highest-taxed city in America know is given at that same public school on Ninth Avenue—It’s fish-
sticks!
And the rest giggle, and two little ones add their motion to this blow-up ad for Kodacolor and start wrestling saying Fish-
fingers
! Fish-
fingers!
—and I’d tell them that in London fish-sticks are called fish-fingers (hot, fish-fingers old,
which
little piggie stays home with a cold), and I’d remind them it was in London that the film was destroyed.