Lookout Cartridge (54 page)

The Dravidians from South India! he cried or stuttered—
they
are the ones who built Stonehenge!

His fury seemed to shrink Krish.

Or was this my renewed sense of his left pocket as if far below?

For it transmitted itself through his arm to my chest.

I knocked his arm away with one hand and with the other pulled the pistol, and this so startled him—he being unable to assimilate any of
my
power—that he leapt backward, hit his head against the Great Menhir, and caroming on fell eastward half into the sepulcher.

His head and shoulders were over the edge. He was on his back but his head was turned so blood came down from his nose. But when I hauled him onto the ground blood welled from inside his brown ear. I could not tell if I had his pulse or mine. The head was bad but not bleeding as badly as one would have expected from the scalp area. He’d hit the stone as hard as if he’d been trying to. He might be dead. The eyes were half open, and the nose bleeding brought back the Softball Game when Cosmo had tossed off a remark about blowing up the subway (and, diary aside, Krish would have been glad we had no sound track that Sunday), and the guy standing off first whom Cosmo had said it to had sprung a nosebleed and then with potential ferocity. The name was Nash. That footage could bear another look. But the map came first, and Paul’s hut, and a discreet sleep at the widow’s.

If Krish were found here at the tumulus in the center of the famous Callanish circle that no one ever visited in the northmost of the Outer Hebrides with a crumb of the Great Menhir in his head, the tabloids would make enough noise to alert the very people I might need.

I got him to the east fence. He was surprising. It took all I had to get him up and over. The place had drawn his spirit down. I went over after him and hauled him to a boggy ditch where he was safe unless someone came looking. At least he was spared the sordid mess on his white raincoat. The left pocket held a leather-covered cylinder some six inches long, like a long lighter—and at one end it was a lighter. But when I put my thumb on a button to strike a light to see the wallet in my hand, something shot out of the other end by lucky chance parallel with my upturned sleeve rather than into me, for it was a ten-inch antennalike instrument sharp as an icepick; but the lighter had worked too, so I was able to see that what had sprung the blade was a release near the other end that the heel of my palm had depressed. Using the lighter end you’d take care with the rest of your hand; no doubt Krish didn’t smoke. To retract the blade you pressed the release again. I pocketed the cylinder, first going through the wallet and taking the one thing I didn’t understand, which was numbers on a strip of file card, plus Krish’s money in case a false lead was useful. In an inside pocket of his coat I found a No. 12 Ordnance Survey map with, so far as I could tell in the light of the moon and the lighter, no marks. His ear had been bleeding but there was no cut to be seen.

Back in my room I hung my jeans on a chair and tilted my shoes against the baseboard of the wall. I looked at the numbers on Krish’s file card.

If Cosmo had been capable of “talking” about “others” watching me, and this kind of information evoked from Krish the name Wheeler, what system of accident had brought Jim Wheeler into this far-flung sequence?

I had to know what the destroyers had wished to destroy. Had Krish been thrown off by the strange thought that Jack hadn’t been straight with him? Krish acknowledged that Dagger’s flat had been broken into this second time but said he had not done it. So it had been arranged by him for Jack or by Jack directly. Or indirectly.

The numbers were unspaced: 5758450815½.

My watch still said four. It was ticking. Had I just started it?

It was as if I hadn’t been wakened by Krish’s eyes. I was asleep again, awake again—the pale force of the morning sky spaced itself between the magic concussions of a hand on my door, and there came the murmur of the widow’s voice saying it was nine o’clock, and when I opened my mouth to convert into energy the miles of peat between me and those numbers, and said, Latitude, the voice on the other side said, Yes in fifteen minutes, and I heard her creak lightly down the steep carpeted stairs.

My map open on the bed, the first six digits could be degrees, minutes, and seconds of latitude, a parallel which crossed the northern lowmost slopes of Mount Clisham if I read aright. The other numbers were not longitude, and as I drew my other pair of jeans on I kept looking back at these numbers as if they had a meaning in themselves.

South of Ardvourlie Castle heading down to Harris, I must turn off the road onto this parallel.

A ROUTE TO PAUL’S

What am I hungry for? What if I bought a bog? I might think up a revolutionary way to turn peat into tough elastic to shoe the wheels of a movable railway station. The soundlessness of rubber. Yet the cruel strength of steel like the metal-hard sapodilla wood the Maya whittled into lintel glyphs, not a few of which went up in poor Catherwood’s New York holocaust of 1842.

What did I want to get my hands on? Some ready cash? Not really. The film? It might be sacrificed. But to what? Dagger and I the afternoon of May 26 paused at the foot of an insanely steep lane to look up after the slowly rising back of an old lady in a blue mac hauling her heart up the railing hand over hand. We were there on the south coast because I had to discuss with the boatyard man whose silent partner I was the possibility of my putting in another £500; he was determined to go beyond storing and repairing and into building, and he had two tentative orders, a 24-foot sloop and a 32-foot gaf-rigged ketch, from summer people who had inquired about bypassing a firm they’d heard of through friends who had taken up sailing, and my partner had encouraged them to have a boat made frame by frame right here in this yard.

He inclined toward fiberglass for the hull and he humored his grandfather, a small neat ninety-year-old countryman, who insisted that only wood would do, and when Dagger with great gentleness and good humor told of a friend of his family in Monmouth County, New Jersey, who had invented antipecking specs for chickens so they wouldn’t be able to see each other directly enough to kill each other and these he manufactured by the thousands in plastic—tiny red pince-nez blinkers—the grandfather said that was America and what they did there was their own business. When I said the new ferro-cement hulls gave you as much as 12 percent more space because you did away with framing, Granddad said he could remember when tin pails took over from wooden buckets. He’d worked seven years to learn to be a wheelwright, when you made a wagon wheel in those days you didn’t have nothing but your eye and your hands to go by, seven years wouldn’t teach you all you must know, say, about elm and ash and a bone-hard butt of beech eight feet long six inches square for an axle but nothing would do for spokes but oak, for spokes must never be sawn lest you get a cross-grain, and a cross-grained spoke could snap, so you had to have a wood that could be cleft, and the wood was oak—and not just for spokes—you used nothing but heart of oak for the old harrows—a hundred years ago wheelwright shops made harrows and the finished harrow was fitted with a copse; now a copse was a wrought-iron loop let into the wood so you could harness your horse, and the copse was hooked in with a bolt (once made of wood, then of iron) called a whippance. Oh yes, but there was a lot to a wheel, you could cast the felloes out of ash or beech or elm as well as oak. And Grandfather (whose south-country speech despite the rolling father’s was not so different from my late grandfather’s narrow dry Maine accent) bet we didn’t know what part of the wheel the felloes were.

But he was interrupted by his grandson, and Dagger walked off down to the beach with the old man, while I finished my business with my partner whom I so rarely saw.

And next day when Dagger and I were on our way up to Bristol and Wales, Dagger recounted what the old man had told him about the parallel grain of the oak that made it ideal for spokes, and how it had to be cleft in the summer still full of sap so the split would run from end to end. The old man had changed jobs around the turn of the century and had gone to work in a coach-and-foundry shop where he’d done all right. Dagger said the old man had never himself made harrows, for by the time he got into the trade harrows and ploughs were being made of cast iron, though wagon and cart wheels were still made largely of wood.

At Clifton near Bristol we parked in the gorge far below the marvelous bridge and Dagger consented to take some quick cut-in shots of the high limestone cliffs and the Giant’s Cave and the woods and the river cutting through to Bristol Channel, and above all Brunel’s bridge—with the 15, then rotating to the 25, then to the 50—from crag to crag across the sky famous as a spectacle and known to students of Brunel for his original drawings which are art in their own right. And as if I were sound-tracking what the Beaulieu filmed, I told Dagger how despite numerous flaws in Brunel’s calculations the bridge had beautifully survived, and he murmured getting his viewfinder-focus right how easy it would be to blow it up. I enumerated what in that case would be found under the first foundation stones—a plaque, some coins, a China plate bearing a picture of the bridge, and a copy of the Act of Parliament enabling its construction. The Egyptian towers Brunel had first designed were never built and because his sketches for them were lost we know of his projected tower-base plaque designs (for instance, men carrying one of the links of the chainwork) only through a friend’s memoirs.

No doubt much is better lost. I should like to make a conveyance. A conveyance may be a deed. I doubt I’ll ever get around to peat wheels. When I referred on May 24 to the Unplaced Room as a title of the footage we’d shot that morning, Dagger said Great, you make up the titles.

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.