Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

A truck rolled down the block, it seemed slow but then it was on top of us, the motor still running though the truck had stopped. Then it seemed to move and stop again and move and stop. Then some man was yelling, Come on back you got plenty room, come right in here, and before we knew it a great behind crunch shook us where we sat, and then some yelling and talking I couldn’t understand, and another crunch and this time the street-side wall moved right in on us and Sub said, Get the roof, and rammed his hands up but didn’t have enough room and the snow was hard and the wall on the sidewalk side was too hard and thick and we got scared because we couldn’t see what was happening to us.

The motor idled down and a man yelled, Come out of there, and we hauled on our boulder, got it away from the entrance, and crawled out into bright daylight right face to face with the tail-lights of a green delivery truck. Well, big Boyd was on the sidewalk crying. The man said, Lucky your friend told us you were in there.

Boyd was really crying, you know.

That’s a crazy story, says Tris, who turns the page to a new set of bomb diagrams. He turns to me sharply — I bet there would have been a lot of blood in the snow.

Is it over? asks Ruby.

No. The funny part is that Boyd got up on our snowdrift and cursed the truckdriver and the man in the cab with him saying they had no right to drive like that, and you wrecked our tunnel, what’d you have to go bust up all our work — and Boyd called them names, then the helper got out of the truck and came over and reached for Boyd to grab him and shake him or hit him but just then when Boyd staggered, his weight got too much for the roof and he dropped through the drift up to almost his waist, and the man laughed and Sub and I on the sidewalk laughed too.

Was Boyd your friend? says Ruby.

Hey look at this, says Tris. A bomb you make out of a book — look, you hollow it out, stick in a dry-cell battery, stick in your TNT — but how do you hook up this wedge that keeps the contact points apart?

Simple, I say, the wedge is attached to your bookcase, some one pulls the book out, the wedge stays on the shelf, the contact points in the book close completing the battery circuit activating the primer detonating the charge.

Look at the bomb made out of a loose floorboard, says Tris.

His father calls from the living room, You got one thing wrong: Boyd came up to us and said are you my friend to you not to both of us.

Maybe so, I call back to Sub, but I know we all went up to my apartment and my mother made us hot chocolate with marshmallow.

Ruby says, You didn’t live in England then.

Of course not.

What’s your job? says Tris. When did you leave America?

A year or so after Charlie Chaplin.

Who’s he?

A funny man in the movies.

Why did he leave?

Some people told him not to come back.

Did you ever get divorced?

I want to go to bed, says Ruby.

What does a yellow filter do?

Darkens the blue of the sky so you get a sharp contrast to clouds.

Between blue and white.

No, it’s black and white. With color film a yellow filter keeps strong blue rays in the light from getting to the red and green layers. Cuts down blue.

Cuts down blue but darkens blue. I don’t get it.

I’m going to bed, says Ruby. Sub’s paper crackles in the living room.

I think of isolated elevators. A map stolen. Challenges from children. Lust in a capsule. A clear explanation pigeon-holed and lost.

Can you make gelatin dynamite? Tris has lowered his voice.

Will you color with me tomorrow? says Ruby.

It was the second morning, soon the second afternoon. It would be the third evening. At Sub’s desk I went through his bills and some personal letters. I read a few pages of my diary. The New York sky was deep and bright. I watched a bearded man washing tenth-floor windows across the street, stretching for the top of the top pane, squatting to get the bottom pane so his harness made his shirt ride up leaving his lower back bare.

Noon images in those panes stirred with the wind.

If it hadn’t been that the window-washer’s building kept going up far beyond his floor, I might not have felt so keenly his height above the street. Even so, I could fire a baseball at him across the sixty or so feet between us and he could burn it back. He turned so as to miss the ledge, and spat.

He unhooked his terminal from the right-side anchor and swooping it under the left-side strap of his harness which remained hooked he stretched around the stone post to hook his free terminal on to the right-side anchor of the next office window on his left; then he released the left-hand terminal from its anchor in the window he’d finished, swung his left foot around the post to the ledge of the new window and reining his life belt close up to the new anchor he brought the rest of his body around so he was now standing on the next ledge. He gave upper and lower halves a swift wet swipe with his large brush, then got his rubber blade out of its belt loop and ran the water off back and forth, then a radial turn to finish.

A girl in the office was smiling quite close to him probably at him and I felt her hair was a special color but the brilliant window reflections of brick and sky through which I saw her secreted her colors from her. The window-washer turned and threw me a grin as if he’d known I was watching through Sub’s gray-specked glass.

Baseball isn’t cricket. Will fancies himself a spin-bowler at school and he’s amused that when we put up the wicket in the garden and I bat he can’t bowl me out. I don’t get many solid hits off him, yet he reminds me it’s the runs that count, but I know what I mean, I mean a clean pull-hit to left field even if it’s only a single, with none of your stylish slices off a wittily angled cricket bat which there’d be no point in anyway because there’s only the two of us. Jenny came out before supper — neighbors clicking tools and tidying nearby gardens — and she’d play (as she said) Silly Mid-on right on top of me when I was batting. Sunday she went with me to Hyde Park to the American softball game where I play shortstop to Dagger’s first. Sometimes Dagger rather than get on the train to London after an evening stint teaching at one of the less accessible U.S. bases like Alconbury will stay the night in officers’ quarters and play hardball the next day; he has a cap from the old San Francisco Seals. But what I am saying is that I waited for a phone call, and I looked through Sub’s glass at a window-washer about as far away as pitcher’s mound from home, and while fingering some pages of my diary I got into a baseball game played from perilous individual towers ten stories high and each hit ball that dropped to the ground was merely a foul.

Yet the phone did ring in that apartment and I went toward it and turned off Sub’s FM which had modulated from a gallant lunch-time suite for clavecin into news as if the set’s selectivity or frequency control failed to hold station. The Bach sweatshirt lay on the threshold of the bathroom. What with shrinkage Alba’s baby could wear it in four or five years.

If the charter man was calling, it wouldn’t be to break news about some alteration in our arrangement, for he’d sooner do that by mail. I put my hand on the smudged white wall phone in the kitchen within reaching distance of the supper and breakfast dishes I’d said I’d do — but maybe instead of Monty Graf it was Dagger from London in my imagination announcing that the fugitive footage we’d had a rush of weeks ago and that had escaped destruction had now vanished from behind the Acoustic Research turntable and he figured it would be dumped in some north London dust bin in the next few hours all seven minutes plus of it and so we were dead.