Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  This Sunday, what with the camera, Dagger didn’t play first. He could use a higher f-number than he’d expected, and hence increase his depth of field, because light under these pleasant English overcasts can turn out to be broader or more solid than you think putting it up against the high blue heavens of New York. But the overcast broke and the clouds that made the sky all the bluer would come and go across the spring sun so suddenly you might have felt that an umbrella was being passed back and forth over our part of the park.

  I was at short for an inning, came up once and doubled down the right-field line. I stood on the bag and talked to the second baseman about where he lived—he said he was here and there—I found Dagger getting a long shot of me. I had told him to leave me out of the film.

  He did some hollering at Cosmo to watch the side-arm delivery and wrist snap, for Cosmo was pitching. When I left the game and joined Dagger in foul territory between first and home, the Beaulieu was on the tripod ready. The camera seemed alive and way ahead of us.

  Jenny stood over the guerrilla-theater boy from Connecticut who’d been playing second when I got my hit. He was waiting on one knee to bat. He stood up, she giggled. He started to turn away, she slapped him on the upper arm. He danced away from her and she ran him up the imaginary third-base line, and Dagger tracked them for four or five seconds. When Jenny tried a few moments later to get into the game in the outfield, Cosmo puffed and frowned and said, Wait three innings.

  But then Jenny disappeared.

  But my son Will stayed and even got into the film. For when Cosmo unloaded his fastball, a black man from the Bronx who sometimes played if he was down from Oxford for the weekend lifted a foul straight back over the head of Cosmo’s catcher.

  This, as anyone would know who recognized the saber scar on the cheek or for that matter the red tan and blue flag on the bulging right arm with forty-eight infinitesimal pricks, or for that matter the depigmentation on the back of his horny right hand, was Savvy Van Ghent, Xavier Van Ghent, the UPI correspondent—and he didn’t push off his mask but turned and plunged after the ball all the way to a pedestrian path and a bench where an elderly couple, kerchief and cap, sat smoking. Dagger panned behind home, then halted, didn’t follow Savvy or the ball. I realigned my eyes to approximate the lens direction. It was a long shot of two men with black hair and white shirts and a woman with apricot hair and a green blouse sitting on the grass ignoring the game—nice touch, Dag—and since my son Will was kneeling near us, Dagger must have caught the crest of his chestnut hair the same shade as Lorna’s when Will turned toward me to point out that in cricket this shot behind the wicket keeper couldn’t have been foul and might have gone for four, and through some narrowing accent forced by the camera I heard my boy’s clear London English instead of—what?—the whole known person I live with who echoing down the stairwell or lecturing us at the kitchen table may seem no more English than American.

  We were in color, so my sense of what we shot that opening Sunday is all the closer to what might have emerged from the emulsion had the reel ever been developed. The camera is like a pure glove reaching untouching to the thing it takes. Hyde Park London would not have been anybody’s identifiable turf unless, say, you picked out a policeman’s (or, as American visitors say, a bobbie’s) black helm above a blond beard, or letters on a distant vendor’s white pushcart spelling ice lollies or cornet (which is English for cone). Dagger never once aimed at three small boys playing cricket, bowler batsman wicket-keeper, and if he did once flick over two veering white triangles you’d have to know Hyde Park well to know they were toy yachts sailing the Serpentine, and I suspect his depth of field wasn’t great enough to pick them up clearly.

  Even with inflation the life most of us had here was good. You didn’t need our umpire’s great blocks of Telephone stock, Corning Glass, or Standard of New Jersey. You didn’t have to send your children to expensive schools and commute twice a week to your American firm’s new offices in Geneva. You didn’t have to play poker Friday nights with some smart Fleet Street bachelors, or drink at the French pub in Soho with a relative of Freud’s, and you didn’t have to be a poet from Kentucky living off a BBC actress. You didn’t have to do what I did, or what Dagger did, or like the right-fielder on the side opposing Cosmo’s, sit under the British Museum Reading Room’s cloudy skylight (or in the warmer North Library when the age or rarity of the book required, though as Savvy Van Ghent’s researches claimed, the quality of the girls was not so high) week after week studying the elusive artist-engineer Catherwood till you almost thought you were Catherwood.

  No, you might enjoy decent obscurity in your neighborhood watching the postal service decline, your English friend Millan’s work get bigger, BBC TV show movies without the interruption of commercials, the London air get cleaner but hold in its smell the same stony tonic that came into the house the first year when Lorna’s char at five bob an hour threw open all the windows in any weather. You take the wife to the theater and in the lobby at intermission hear an American explain that this is Shakespeare’s only real-time play in which fictive time almost equals our time, Prospero’s alchemical time almost equals the time we spend watching. You come to know Millan’s friends, and their friends; but after a bad period in the fifties Lorna has made some friends of her own and you begin to move around, begin to make these carefully aimed returns to the States; you get a second London like some second wind, and instead of going home to America on the evening brink of J. F. Dulles’s death and its advance lamentations, you stay: you get off the red double-decker two steps early and cut through a park always unexpectedly large and secret and sloping: you answer your parents’ letters, for this is long before your mother on one of her visits brings a cassette recorder so you and Lorna and especially Jenny and Billy (with their accents that have a Cockney force their grandparents can’t hear) can send cassettes instead of ah letters—Billy at the word-game stage. You read the American news in the Guardian. One night years later you and your closest American friend cook up a film sort of: you’ve begun to think about London and England again, but you are comfortable, you live here in one way or another; but the altercation that now stops the Sunday softball game and draws the players in around the pitching rubber seems outlandishly to come from your own fear here in the third inning that there is something wrong about the film you and Dagger DiGorro are beginning; Dagger’s camera is singing its gnatlike note at the Connecticut actor who’s now standing on second and pounding his glove; Jenny’s nowhere in sight, and the actor, as Cosmo raises his voice to the batter who has approached him from home plate and whose name eludes me as I watch the actor, moves idly around the disputants and keeps going and crosses the imaginary third-base line and without telling anyone walks away from the weekly American softball game. Dagger has unscrewed the camera base from the tripod, and now like my own head wandering from what we were there for that Sunday into the issue of whether or not the motorbike that brought Jenny home at 3 A.M. was the Connecticut guerrilla-theater actor, who indeed rides a motorbike, Dagger seems to let the man crossing behind the group at the pitching rubber draw his focus off over the third-base line into foul territory, which for the Connecticut actor is no longer even that, for he’s stepped out of the game. When I murmur in Dagger’s ear, Hey I wonder where that guy thinks he’s going, Dagger takes his finger off the thumb button at the top of the pistol grip, hands me the Beaulieu, and heads for the pitching rubber where Cosmo is loudly claiming the batter was crowding the plate, and as the batter lowers his voice to a new intensity his left hand which has never dropped the bat tightens and through the midst of the group the blond bat with its meat end resting on the English grass seems a sinister and potential pole the mere people there depend on.

  That Sunday night I wrote an account of that first filming and though that first scene the softball game was silent I included Dagger’s words and Cosmo’s and Will’s but could not recall the batter’s name, and having faithfully recorded the filmed ori
gin of the dispute about Cosmo’s low and inside smokeball, I found in the corner of my eye the Connecticut actor, a slight figure in tie-dyed jeans, passing behind the others at the center of the diamond, then emerging alone, strolling on and on as if the softball game were in another time, ambling off toward a pedestrian path and looking beyond it distinctly at something, though what I couldn’t tell. There was a woman maybe fifty yards beyond the walk and she seemed shadowed by the tree she leaned against and at that instant Dagger called to me not to go crazy now—for I’d raised the Beaulieu just to follow the guerrilla actor through the viewfinder for the hell of it—thinking what prospects a boy like that could have acting antiwar skits on street corners in Battersea with an undergraduate group from Oxford—and I lowered the camera and the thought of Jenny sobered me too much so I called back Christ I’m not shooting!—I had suddenly registered that the woman off by the tree was indeed what the guerrilla-theater actor was aiming for; but Dagger’s jibe was itself now interrupted by new words between Cosmo and the batter he’d dusted with his fastball. But now it wasn’t You fat blowfish, where’d you learn to play ball, the only way you going to get me out is keep me ten feet away from the plate, and chawing tobacco out there won’t help—

  Nor Cosmo’s ordinary noise: You so close to the plate I got to pitch behind you to get it over, take the shades off, man, you’ll see better.

  It was something else now, a new ball game they were speaking to each other: Got nothing better to do than hang around the park, the batter said, and I registered his words but still at that moment not exactly him, for way off to my left, though I wasn’t exactly looking at them, the guerrilla-theater actor was moving with a glow around him toward the woman at the tree. And then Cosmo, holding the white softball up so you could see the black seams and turning it this way and that the way he always did before his whirlwind double-three-hundred-sixty-degree windup, all of which Dagger had caught in the second or third minute of shooting, but now no windup, just the turning of the ball up near Cosmo’s jaw, a sort of screwing toward his new words, Cosmo said, Listen I did my time back home, man, my number came up, I quit the collegiate power structure and I did my two years in the army, man, and I been here long enough to know a free-loader when I see one so don’t shit me, man, you don’t like it here go back to Copenhagen, those sixteen-year-olds you been picking up.

  The woman turned as if to stand behind the tree, but I think she was moving off ahead of the actor, but what happened now made it hard to follow her out of the shadow of the tree, for the batter—the same one Dagger had shot his first time up the first inning, big orange and silver and cherry-colored rings on his fingers, his body wiggling up and down trying—and successfully then—to get a walk off Cosmo—came right back at Cosmo now: Cosmo, a vet like you is just another poor pig, you’re a veteran of like Fort Dix, you never got to California much less Vietnam, and you’re over here because it’s a soft touch—the batter increasingly nameless the more I reached directly for his name, lifted his bat and there was Dagger taking it with both hands.

  Back of third an English schoolboy in gray cap, gray knee-socks, monogrammed gray jacket, and dark blue shorts had a box camera over his eyes. He snapped us and turned away. I felt Jenny somewhere close, as if I were confined to a viewfinder’s tunnel-window ruling her out below and above.

  Cosmo said, What you doing in the Underground all day, moving hash? The batter left his Louisville slugger in Dagger’s hands and lunged at Cosmo who with a wrist flick released the ball overhand and hit the other assailant in the bridge of the nose. I almost had his name.

  Why did the batter not retaliate? He carried his bumped nose away toward Umpire Ismay.

  I saw the hit just as exactly as in the second inning our Beaulieu caught the Indian-head patch on the seat of the right-fielder’s jeans and the drag bunt he laid down letting the bat give slightly with such finesse that the camera must have caught that instant of cushioned impact when the ball’s substance tried to melt back upon the curved wood of the bat and the right-fielder seemed to bear the ball around with him magically so my eye believed that if he hadn’t dropped the bat to head toward first he could have carried the softball indefinitely on the front of the bat by the sheer force of attention, like what he gave his long-time British Museum subject Catherwood. I said to Dagger as the camera stopped that it reminded me of the time in college when I’d put down a bunt, the third baseman overthrew first so I went to second, the first baseman overthrew second and I went to third, the shortstop overthrew third and I ran home only to be denied a bunt home run when the third baseman nailed me at the plate. Dagger said hold onto that, we can use that.

  He had given up on peacemaking, but the batter, having walked away holding his nose and his bat, had been persuaded to play ball again by Umpire Ismay and was going to resume with a 3 and o count. Tempest in a teapot. Umpire Ismay had been rolling a cigarette and Dagger at the Beaulieu caught the concluding lengthwise lick.

  Dagger with the camera on the tripod again showed his toothed grin beneath the moustache like a silent-film villain’s. I said, We could tape me telling that about the bunt homer and make it our sound track here.

  The next pitch jumped straight through like a white weight—give Cosmo credit, he had a fastball. I said in Dagger’s ear, When we edit we’ll slow it down there and run a few stills to fix the ball. Dagger murmured, Depends on the lab.

  Cosmo walked his man on the next pitch. But Dagger fooled me, he wasn’t focused on the plate but a bit to the right across the third-base line. The batter—whose name, Nash, came to mind when Jenny typed my notes—dropped his bat and trotted off, while Savvy Van Ghent complained to Ismay that Cosmo’s letup should have been strike two, while Cosmo as if he couldn’t resist called out to Nash, If you got to blow up the subway go do it in New York.

  Nash turned at first base, shrugged as if at Cosmo but his face had blanched. But Cosmo may have sensed the shrug was aimed beyond him, for he turned toward third and behind third stood an Indian or Pakistani in a white shirt who was looking at Cosmo, who himself now shrugged.

  I believe that I, rather than the camera, got the full gaze of this new figure just before he turned his back and put his hands in his pockets and went off. But Dagger panned around to a medium shot of Nash leading off first—just as Nash’s nose began to bleed as if the camera’s focus had drawn the blood.

  My boy Will called, You’re bleeding. And when Nash touched knuckle to nostril, Cosmo threw to first and caught him off.

  Dagger had every bit of this, and now switched off. I took the camera gingerly and through the viewfinder observed the Indian. He turned again and stopped and when I opened my other eye he seemed to make Cosmo look at him. Dagger said, Let’s see what’s left.

  Reviewing all this now weeks, months later late at night in Sub’s New York flat high above a woman’s streetcorner soprano delivering a demented oration, I knew with a new natural ease as if I’d often known and it were somewhere among the luminous inhalations of my head, that this man, yes this man in the white shirt, had been the Indian I was later to see in the Knightsbridge gallery. He was Cosmo’s Indian.

  Godlike I said, Get a long shot of these girls pushing the pushchairs (strollers you say in American).

  Right, said Dagger, and swung toward right-centerfield and ran through a hundred frames or so as one of the tots lurched up in his harness and tried to fall out. Dagger said, That’s it. Two hundred feet.

  We had another spool but didn’t want the hassle of loading it in the light and threading it through those sprocket wheels so the divider would go in just right.

  Our first footage was finished and the game was only into the third inning. The sequence was too full of nothing and I had missed something, yet something possibly not on the film; however, like some roving sense I hadn’t controlled, Dag’s focus had shifted with such natural drift I would have to watch it next time.

  I couldn’t see opening the film with that softball game, and la
ter I couldn’t see anything wrong with Dag’s idea that it should go between the Suitcase and the Hawaiian.

  I woke to coffee deep in my nostrils and saw through my narrowed lids the smell standing in the air’s bright dust and listened to Sub in the kitchen taking a step here, a step there, having breakfast this third morning of my stay, and of all things Monty Graf’s remark last night about two films seemed now, as I awoke, to fill the long evening of that inaugural Sunday we shot the softball game, for Jenny didn’t come home till one and Lorna was off singing the Fauré Requiem with her chorus and Will had shut himself in, and as I wrote the opening record of the film, I needed family sounds around me. Our road in Highgate is by a quiet square, and on a Sunday evening you’ll hardly hear a car or a passing laugh until the pubs let out at ten thirty, the kids who go by don’t live in Highgate many of them, they come from around North London to the old courtyard pub called The Flask at the end of our road. Lorna came into the house at midnight with her music in her hand, a flush on her cheek, and her eyes dark, and I put down my pen. Her head snuggled down next to mine. Her hair covered her profile, I didn’t see her eyes but smelled her vanilla scalp. She was reading my page and it seemed from the tilt of her head the last lines not the top lines.

  So what I think she read was this: that after Jenny chased the actor up toward third base he circled and made it back to the plate ahead of her just as the batter struck out on a rising pitch that Savvy had to go up for. The actor grabbed the bat and Jenny stopped short at the umpire’s elbow and she turned as if in a continuous motion and sank down cross-legged but so close that Ismay asked her to move and she got up with her head and long light hair dipping for an instant to the green grass, then interrupted Cosmo’s full-circle windup to the actor asking if she could play now.