Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

The pages were all there except the two I’d had in the envelope an hour ago. I said, He left the key for me in an envelope so I didn’t see him to talk to.

Sub turned away toward his room and I grabbed my trench-coat pocket and to my relief found Sub’s key. But why not?

Imagine the man in glasses taking it when I was in the loft; imagine him cutting a duplicate and returning mine to me in the envelope I then passed on to the real Monty Graf. But what would I have let myself in with just now?

Monty might be right. About my being in trouble.

Sub came back. He said, It’s not so much your life I envy as the changes in it. Hell, I said, you’re going to Washington tomorrow. Sub said he had watched a mystery movie tonight which had had little enough suspense and they had a trick of showing you shots of the big scenes before the thing started.

Dagger had just sent in a vita to Washington. He had given me the envelope with Health, Education, and Welfare on it to mail one day. Out of sight, out of mind, he said.

Much later I put my pages in my case.

I had an unmemorable dream but I know that as my thoughts were dissolving in the perpendicular laps of some Black and White Panther concubines, I was about to tell Ruby a bedtime tale of how her dad got the name Sub.

At signal read vita: One winter Dagger camped on a Bahama beach. One Sunday morning some black boys who sometimes played on the beach came racing out and pretended to crucify one of their number near Dagger’s lean-to.

Read slowly but not so slowly it is not clear: Dagger was known on the Bahama isle as a colorful character from California. He said, I fill a need here.

At signal, read vita; begin with latest position, work backward: Dagger lived on the beach at the bottom of an incline of tough-bladed dune grass that was the seaward end of a strip an eighth of a mile wide that lay between Sea View, a hotel, and Spindrift, a guest house with motellike units below the main building.

At night he sat cross-legged before his fire. He borrowed a rubber raft from the lady who ran Spindrift and with a snorkel-mask spear-fished a hundred yards offshore where there were rocks and a barrier reef. Once from a boat he caught a thirty-pound grouper and sold it to the proprietor of Sea View, who had been in films and displayed on a wall by the desk a photo of himself on a date with Elizabeth Taylor. At Christmas and then occasionally after that Dagger filled in as bartender at Sea View.

Some nights cross-legged before his fire he’d open a cube of over-priced Spam, and if the island schoolmaster was there they’d look at the sizzhng mold of browning pink meat and the schoolmaster would tell what a treat Spam had been in England during the war. Dagger took his supper off the coals and offered the schoolmaster some Bacardi and told him about folk life in New Jersey when he was growing up. He’d just missed War II and had matriculated his way out of the Korean. The schoolmaster, a burly man in shorts who was strong in maths, Empire history, and games, would allow that he too had missed the war in that sense of having been just too young to serve; he’d been evacuated north and still recalled looking down over his chin at his identity badge. His wife had been evacuated too and the separation from her mother and father had left in her something permanent she couldn’t quite put her finger on. The schoolmaster was at present much concerned about the British government’s renewing his two-year contract.

Read vita at signal; list positions in reverse order beginning with most recent: One warm February morning before he was awake enough to switch on his transistor to get the Bahama Islands weather and the Nassau news, he heard (as if all around him) the boys’ familiar cries and a clattering of wood muted by open air, and for a second — for he saw he was still dreaming of California — he thought the boys were hammering up something out of all the driftwood he had looked at but never picked up off the beach in California when he was busy reading political theory in the San Francisco bay area, yet simultaneously had the thought that dreams are a species of sleep-teaching with a key difference that Dagger unfortunately lost just as he found it in his retreating dream. But he rubbed the sand from his eyes and dug at the salt in his bushy dark eyebrows thinking of two girls from Philadelphia in the hotel bar last night to whom he said he would be constant.

He saw that the boys were making a cross.

List education beginning with most recent institution and working backward: He had told his friends he was bound for the Gulf of Honduras because he wanted to find a long-lost schoolmate from Monmouth County, New Jersey, who was reputed to be down there diving for bullion, a fraternity brother. But he’d ended by answering an ad in an Oakland paper and driving to New York, where he encountered a Brooklyn cabdriver who was selling out and heading for the Virgin Islands to put his money in a boat and go into the moving business, and Dagger said he’d worked on charters out of New Orleans so when he left New York for the South Dagger had a loose arrangement with the cabdriver. But after transporting a car to Florida Dagger met a young painting contractor who’d just bought his first plane which he said he needed in his work; so Dagger flew with the contractor and his wife to Eleuthera, but then, being on principle opposed to round trips, he moved on across the bay to a smaller island when the painting contractor after an eventful week returned to his various commitments.

Give dates of each: there were eight hundred blacks on the island and two hundred resident whites. The Mayor of New York City once rented a beach house here for ten days. The schoolmaster did not visit Dagger often at night, for his wife disapproved; but he offered Dagger their porch swing in case of rain. The schoolmaster’s father had been a Liverpool docker before the war and claimed to have played baseball with American sailors.

Dagger said to the schoolmaster, I’m between jobs you might say.

The schoolmaster wore a full moustache. He said he had never in fact believed his late father’s claim to have played baseball in Liverpool. Dagger said, I believe him.

The lady at the guest house bawled Dagger out but liked him. He had told her the trouble with her station wagon was the differential. She did not like what was happening in Nassau but thought there still would never be a takeover. Her brother was in the glass business. She went to Miami to shop twice a year. The Anglican vicar Mr. Ash with a vintage tan over his face gave Dagger a nod when they met along the bright, hibiscus-scented streets. The real estate agent, who was always stamping out a cigarette, always asked Dagger if he was in the market for a house, and laughed loudly at his joke. Dagger would stroll across the island at lunchtime and sit under the fig tree by the combined ferry-ticket, ice cream, and clothing shop and discuss Harlem, which he had never actually been to, with two natives, one of whom had but had come home and now worked at the hotels. Dagger would discuss the future of the islands with these two. He would ask if they were ready for freedom from exploitation and they’d laugh and say It’s OK if you got the money, and turn the talk back to cricket or English and American football because that would get Dagger going on some mad thing like the strangeness of a ball game where you had to keep hands off — so English, so un-American.

Dagger wanted to start a seminar on the beach. He was visited at his lean-to by natives and vacationers alike, a Toronto lawyer, a girl who had just quit her job in Chicago, a New York broker, the local Gospel preacher who tried in vain to get Dagger to play cornet Sunday night.