Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

Sub’s plate I stood up in the water against the stack it had been part of and lifted out Ruby’s with its three-fold fable licked clean last night but speckled now with greaselets launched by sink-water. Sub said Rose made fun of Ruby’s bone-phobia; Sub, when he took the chops out of the oven and Ruby said she was having no bones on her plate, told Tris to put away his comic and get the bread and butter out of the icebox. Sub cut pieces of dry pork off Ruby’s bone, arranged them on her plate, and kept her bone to chew on himself. I asked if I could dish out the broccoli.

But today where was that copper-bottomed broccoli pot? Not in the sink with the rest of last night’s dishes or on the stove or on the windowsill by the ashtray with the filter-stub of my own cigarette yesterday. When I picked Tris’s overturned milk glass out of the new submerged chop pan, my fingers found a slippery strip of fat the detergent hadn’t had a chance to cut but couldn’t have cut anyway without spreading the grease around the sinkwater. I lifted the pork pan out emptying the water. I found a spatula and shoveled up paths of fat which with my hand under to catch water drips I bore one by one to the garbage. Then I squirted detergent into the pan and ran water into it and placed it carefully again on the sink counter.

Yes I phoned the number.

The same man said he didn’t know where Claire was but I should come now to an address downtown. When I asked if he worked for Aut he said Who’s Aut? Then he said, quite finally, OK.

I said Sorry, I was mistaken, I didn’t leave my diary at Claire’s.

The man said as if it were a complete assertion, If you don’t want these two pages.

And hung up.

I was feeling I hadn’t learned much by this ruse of yesterday. When he rang off, the idea that had been shunted away when I’d hung up before circuited now in a neat eight-by-ten-inch rectangle the very size of that pile of my diary Claire had neatened on her table when she’d gotten up to answer her phone — and I’d come from her lavatory and had seen the pages had been neatened, and felt my hints had been heeded.

Now I rushed out of the kitchen through the hall to the living room. I clipped my shin on the steel corner of the day bed frame. I tore through the sheets on Sub’s desk and at once found, yes, two pages missing that I knew I’d had at Claire’s and that were not with others in my suitcase atop my wife’s compact packing.

I took a bus downtown undecided.

If I chose not to go to the peremptory man who’d hung up on me, I could go all the way to Wall and get the brochures for my son. The bus was almost empty.

The pages must have been copied by now so I’d have no difficulty obtaining them. They might make Aut want to see the rest. Claire might not have had the chance to tell him she’d picked these two virtually at random having to run to answer the phone and knowing I’d be coming out of the bathroom. But if Aut thought these two pages were the best I had to offer, he might not care about others. But for him — if he was even involved — what in these pages mattered?

It was a rough bus ride. We started and stopped and I slid left and right on the seat’s molded plastic. A pale-faced black-haired woman with blood-red lipstick dropped her fare into the machine and spoke to the black driver. I didn’t see him speak, and as she spoke again the bus broke forward as if something had rammed it and the woman lost her hold on the fare machine and was inertially thrust toward the rear of the bus, but she lifted her knees in such a lucky slow-motion she didn’t fall until, halfway down the length of the bus, I reached out.

I caught her so that she seemed about to learn to swim. She regained her slim long-calved legs and so involved herself in a magic smile to me and the immediate issue of whether to remove herself from me by sitting across from me or on my side and thus out of my normal line of sight, that she forgot the driver’s behavior. She settled on my side toward the rear, slung one leg over the other, and looked straight ahead. The driver was answering a radio call, giving his position.

But what did Aut want with the diary pages? That is, what there in my words might equal what had been thought to be in the film? Almost the first words were Dagger’s.

We were two miles east of Stonehenge among the great green and sand-pale grasses of Salisbury Plain, and Dagger slowing down nodded at the brown car on the shoulder ahead and said, Speak of the Devil, here’s our volunteer for the final scene, let’s change his tire.

But in fact we hadn’t been discussing this Druid whose flat tire we now changed.

We’d been reviewing the raw stock we’d used in the Beaulieu up to now. A motley lot, I grant — but Dagger of all people should have recalled that the camera was lighter without the magazine one very bright morning the second day in Corsica, for we’d used a roll of black and white that was only a 100-footer. I said it had been between the petrol station and the fortress, around the corner from Place Napoléon, and the glare and shade decided Dagger to use instead the less inherently contrasty black and white. He’d had a hundred feet of Anscochrome in the camera when we came into Ajaccio on the Marseilles car-ferry the day before and he’d let it all go on the white, pink, yellow, and sky-blue crowd watching from the pier; but at once he’d said he should have waited, the contrasts would have been clearer in black and white, though he added I hadn’t yet sold him on mixing color with black and white. In London I’d given him £12 to pay for six hundred feet of Anscochrome. He’d said Claire’s boss would foot that expense and gas to and from Corsica. But it was black and white he was using when the two men and a girl came up the street that crossed the end of ours. The fortress wall left almost no pavement to walk on— sidewalk is the word in America, not that pavement is exactly the word in Corsica, where the language is French.

They were coming slowly up from the port in single file like tourists who’ve had their café crême. The girl pointed at us, her midriff blouse stark white. The blond man stepped off the pavement toward us but was recalled by the other young man, bony brown and bald. The three continued quite quickly along the fortress wall, the bald man now with his hand on the girl’s back where it was bare. We were less than fifty yards from the end of our street where theirs crossed coming up from the port, and Dagger who had been feeling into his pocket for a pack of Turns gave up and went down to the end of our street to look up after them. He wasn’t shooting. They turned into Place Napoléon out of sight. The blond man ambled behind. It was this incident we were disagreeing about on the road from Stonehenge a month later. Dagger insisted now on confusing that black-and-white footage with some Anscochrome we’d used the following day. We’d shot a naval encounter off the beach just three blocks from the École Normale where our American academic friend was putting us up. Aquamarine sea, three Corsicans in bikinis in one yellow inflated landing raft, three Americans in cut-off jeans and bright headbands in the other. And on the road from Stonehenge Dagger seemed to have forgotten the black and white he’d used to shoot the two men and the girl at the fortress in Ajaccio. I’d pointed out that the b & w he shot there was almost the last of the single-perforation b & w he’d bought cheap by mail order from Freestyle Sales in L.A. I described in detail the faces and clothes of the threesome, and how he had complained about his stomach and the École coffee and I’d said he obviously needed to change his diet. I reminded him they’d not wanted to be filmed and tried to get away fast, but when we went diving next day the same blond man was sitting with another girl in a port café and as soon as we were in the gray rubber raft that looked like French Navy surplus, I and the girl and the man who was taking us out, with our suits on and the air tanks yellow alongside our fins and masks and under the thwarts weighted belts like a sound-man’s power pack, and Dagger and the boy who worked for the boss got in and the boss got the outboard going, the blond man got up from the table and walked across the cobbles and stepped inside the trailer with something- Plonger painted on it, presumably to engage the boss’s wife in conversation about Dagger and me. The b & w in question was negative film, which is less adaptable to poor light than reversal film because if you’re using a lab that will push it, negative unlike reversal usually can’t be pushed in the developing to a higher emulsion speed as graded by the American Standards Association (ASA), whose system dating from 1943 was, I’m glad to say, adopted by the British in 1947, though the British use a logarithmic scale by degrees. In any case the last lot of b & w Dagger had had shipped from L.A. was ASA 200 but not with the magnetic stripe. The base price was $11.25 for four one-hundred-foot rolls, a saving of less than fifteen cents a roll at the single-roll price but much more if compared to prices elsewhere. Dagger and I, as we sighted the Druid and pulled over to help with the the, had been disagreeing not about Freestyle, or perforation, or magnetic stripe, or price, but about whether we’d used black and white for those three people Dagger didn’t recall having seen. So when he said, Speak of the Devil, I guessed that during our discussion he’d been thinking not of Ajaccio but of our dealings at Stonehenge minutes before with the very Druid we were now slowing down to help.