Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

The Indians revered this dwarf, Dagger said, feared him — a fellow Indian but set apart, a legend in his own lifetime. His mother had been an old woman miserably childless who mourned for the kids she didn’t have as if they had lived and died. She had a dream, and it was of a deep well colored down as far as she could see with green and red and yellow shapes and the more she dreamt the more they became birds, then real birds, and she reached down the well mouth and found red eggs. A pair of green birds flew up out of the darkness and they took out her eyes and it didn’t hurt, for now she saw even better but something else. And in thanks for the red eggs and the new vision, she baked on her hand-packed earthen griddle some tortillitas and sailed them down into the well.

Well she woke from this dream and she took an egg and covered it with a yellow cloth and set it in a corner. She left it alone but always thought about it but told no one.

This is in Uxmal, said Dagger, and asked if we knew Yucatan, and Sherman said Right, and Dagger said it was strange on the map, Yucatan, like an underground water-cave you go way down to get to and pass under water then come upward, and come to think of it if you’ve come down from Laredo through Vera Cruz, Yucatan is like that.

Well one day the old woman got hungry looking at the blue sky at dawn and made some tortillitas , which are wheat cakes, and gobbled them up like a pregnant lady and when she went to the corner and lifted the yellow cloth, the egg had hatched and a criatura , a creature, had hatched and the old girl was happy and called the thing her son and took good care of it, fed it lots of fried beans and at the end of a year and a day, so this Mexican Indian dwarf told me, and he should know because he was it — walked and talked like a man, but it stopped growing.

Well the old woman was thrilled and she told him he would be chief man around there. One day she sent him to the house of the gobernador .

The boy under Elizabeth said abruptly as if he wanted to identify himself, Who built those ancient cities, I mean Uxmal, Copan?

Dagger said, It’s all connected, Egyptian pyramids and hieroglyphs, Hindu temples even carved out of the living rock — the point is there was communication.

Telepathy at most, I said.

From the orient, you mean, said Elizabeth to Dagger.

Both ways, said Dagger.

Rubbish, said Elizabeth.

I’m convinced of it, said Dagger. But the dwarf’s old lady now you see sent him to the gobernador and challenged him to a test of strength. The gobernador scoffed and told him to lift a one-hundred-pound stone, so the dwarf ran back home crying but his mother sent him back to the gobernador to say if the gobernador lifted it he would too, and that’s what happened. And they had other tests. Same thing — it was as if the dwarf tied into the gobernador’s power that had an inadequate purpose and used that power for his own ends.

Is he still alive? said Herma, and I looked around at her to check if she did have that lovely imagination in the cheekbone and mouth that my sister once had and I thought I’d heard this tale before in different form and I let Dagger get away with the power-direction idea he’d recruited from me to help his story.

The gobernador, anyway, got fed up and told the dwarf he must in one night build a house taller than any other there or he’d have the priests cut out his heart on top of one of their pyramids which were only fifty feet high. So the dwarf raced home crying and again his mother said to cool it.

Now according to him, he woke next morning and found himself in this high, high building which I myself have seen and if only I hadn’t dropped my Pentax in a swollen river back in the jungle, but what you remember is the best. So the gobernador wakes up and looks out thinking what a great day for a rite, and lo and behold here’s this high, high stone building with the dwarf leaning out of a top window enjoying the view of the village, and the gobernador’s wife looks over his shoulder and says what a white elephant that’s going to be — but the gobernador put on his hat and went out and collected two bundles of the hardest wood and went to the dwarf and proposed the ultimate test. He would beat the dwarf over the head with the wood and then when that was over, the dwarf would have his turn.

The hiker from St. Louis, Sherman, asked when we were getting there, and I said, So the dwarf ran home crying.

Right, said Dagger. Well the old lady put one of her special tasty tortillitas on the crown of his head, a thin buckwheat cake, and back he went and all the bigwigs gathered round.

Well, the gobernador stepped up and he put the wood to him, whaled away for as long as it took to bust the whole bundle, and he never raised even a pea on the dwarf’s head, much less an egg.

What next, for heaven sake! Well the gobernador naturally tried to get out of his deal but he couldn’t because he’d made it in front of his officers and the town fathers who were pretty interested by this time in what was going to happen.

Too bad the Nagra’s in the boot, I said, we could use this. We could even play you outside the Marvelous Country House on a loudspeaker — what equipment do they have there? — while inside we film.

Is Gene running this show? said Sherman.

Dagger said it was Gene’s place we were going to but the film was ours. Now Dagger had been in more than good form, he was talking faster than usual and seemed half-surprised at how the tale revealed itself. And the others in the crammed car must have felt with me that we were almost at our filming location. There was a man striding along swinging a cane. There was a stucco-faced pub with people outside at trestle tables. I’ll always remember them, brown beer in mugs, red tomato juice in wine glasses, a kid with a can and a straw, then high hedgerows, a tunnel of overhanging leaves, every hundred yards a slight widening where two cars could pass, and Dagger expatiated upon tortillita de trigo , the wheat flour that went in and how they pounded the paste, until I said get on with it, but Dagger kicked the brakes, the Beaulieu tipped forward and I reached down and tapped my head on the dash. Another car, a black Mercedes 300, was upon us and the passing place was on the left and Dagger had us nearly in a ditch. And as the Mercedes passed he said, You know the dwarf took a single swipe and smashed the gobernador’s skull into a hundred bits and the people hailed the dwarf as the new gobernador.

We were on the road again; one of the English boys said, You’ve got excellent brakes, and Herma said, What then?

But we had turned into a drive through an acre of unmown lawn and approached the house as rain began to skid down the windscreen.

Dagger had entirely set up the Corsica trip three weeks ago. Yet when we got into it even though, having come such a way, we were shooting a lot of footage and the camera work was largely Dagger’s, I felt in charge. Why?

However, here, as we piled out and I examined the low circular wall and turned to the bonnet as Dagger pulled the knob under the dash so I could open the boot and lift out the Nagra unit, and then as I touched the rusty sculptured figures which were the hinges of the ironwork gate through which we passed toward the house which was as much my idea as the Unplaced Room, I felt not at all in charge.

A thin woman greeted us without enthusiasm looking over the younger contingent. She knew Dagger and Sherman. She told Sherman that Gene had had to split. She went off by the stairs with Sherman and seemed to be catching up on mutual acquaintances — her hair was pulled back along her narrow skull, she had long bare bony dirty feet and she wore her Big Smith overalls as nicely as she’d pressed them. Sherman pulled one of her shoulder straps in front but it didn’t snap. I heard him say Costume, and she laughed and thumbed a ride and said, Len says it’s a cover, what the hell, and Sherman started upstairs and called back, Count me out, I’m covered already.