Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

In one long shot of three people, Dagger went on in the second paragraph of his letter, he knew of course two but had to dig a bit to place the other Indian. No doubt, he said, I will run into him Friday. It’s been fun using the Beaulieu, blows better to 35 but it’s just a nicer little machine to hold than a Bolex though hell to load and with a few French shortcuts, but we might have to switch to a Bolex if I have to give back the Beaulieu. Advance some more bread, I’ll rent an Angenieux zoom. We are getting good now. We had a little practice this morning, but nothing to write home about. So far it’s been just the ball game Sunday, May 16, but we’ll be running both burners from this weekend on.

The steps started again but proceeded slowly. The second was like two people with a shared limp. The steps stopped down the hall. I thought I picked up a whisper. But I couldn’t have at that distance and through walls. The steps went off and then I didn’t hear them. I thought a door latched.

When the phone started again I noticed that when the steps had continued it had stopped ringing.

I was not sure. I closed the drawer, keeping the letter. I slipped to the wall and doused the light. I found my way back to Claire’s desk. I struck a match so I must have laid Dagger’s letter down. I wanted to check the deep drawer right bottom again in case the DiGorro film-file was in another folder. My match burned my fingers. I hadn’t found anything. I straightened up to strike another, I would try the last four or five folders, the names on them had meant nothing to me.

Steps, the same, came along again and stopped. It was two men very clearly. Would Phil Aut have come in, or called the watchman? The watchman had been unarmed.

The flame pricked my finger. I had taken it not even for granted, I had forgotten it. The steps had gone away again. To soothe and cure the burn, I didn’t know how long I’d stood there with Claire’s bottom right drawer out. I struck a match and as my head turned down to the folders my eye stopped on Dagger’s P.S. and I read, and my recollection is that it said, Don’t worry about Aut, I will definitely be able to handle the group in Wales, having experienced my Uncle Stan from Yonkers and New Jersey who once said, Don’t talk to me about the Stones and transcendental meditation!

The penny dropped — noiselessly — two pennies — a pound — an inflation of pounds blown up and dropped on the moon. But how can a paper pound drop into a slot. My brain was going soft. But so were the things that had been occupying its slots.

In shape or not, I was on the treadmill and couldn’t get off but it was moving the way I wanted it to and I was adding my movement to it. Dagger’s letter was May 24. So he’d already known about a group in Wales; but we didn’t find them in their field (by accident) till Friday, May 28.

The phone was ringing on the receptionist’s desk. I was receiving signals and the Cartwright-DiGorro enterprise looked like passing into receivership. Whole printed circuits sailed softly through the new soft-warped slots of my head. Micro-circs. Faster than a speeding bullet, slower than an old movie. Sub believed in messages; people who knew the precision of his professional mind and the inspired practicality with which he keeps his home going do not know about his messages — pain in the dentist chair (a message understood, hence liquidated); coincidence a section drawn from the map of one’s force field; if he had considered his word clairvoyant , no telling what he’d make of it. Or of Jim and the aerial stabbing now so far back, yet not six working days from this present Monday night, 8:45, October 18, 1971.

But Wales was not Dagger’s idea, it was mine. For Wales was passion and sorcery, heroes and deceptive mountains and music and boozing and hidden communes up behind a misty hill and lambs bleating in the gorges. There was the story of the hound-dog Gelert left by his master the warrior Llywelyn in a tent to watch over his infant son. When Llywelyn returned that night he found the tent collapsed and his dog calmly sitting beside it, his head and coat all matted with blood. Llywelyn in a frenzy of vengeance ran Gelert through with his spear, but hearing then a cry he pulled back the canvas and found not only his child safe in the cradle but a huge wolf ripped open and hideously dead. Gelert breathed his last licking Llywelyn’s hand and Llywelyn gave him a hero’s burial in a tomb visible to this day, a great slab on its side and two upright stones, and the valley where the meadow lies is called Bethgelert. Dudley Allott would tell you of American place names in Wales; he made no more of Gelert, Ontario, than of Tessa’s animal legends, he wasn’t much on mystic tumuli or Arthur’s knights, but Dudley knew where the stone castles had been that marked the lines of the River Wye and the River Usk and he was moderately interesting on a name like Gelliswick, which is Celtic gelli (hazel grove) and Norse wick (haven). And he knew who holed up at Harlech and what prince of Gwynedd held a mountain against strangers from the east by means of the canniest practical skill. How Green Was My Valley came from my parents’ book club and I read it from cover to cover the weekend of Pearl Harbor and got 70 on my geography test Monday. There was the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas whom my immediate predecessor with Lorna took us to hear read at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association before we left for England and who in ’52 or ’53 along the college circuit seemed like the Voice of America until he was consumed by an America in himself. Lorna read him, I could not; but I could listen. And there was a young Welsh conductor for whom Lorna had sung in a chorus who went to Cleveland and New York seeking his fortune, and Cincinnati and Florida, and who got sick of podium politics and came back to London though his wife stayed. Catherwood’s friend Stephens records a theory that ascribes to the Welsh the first and original peopling of America. Ned Noble and my sister and I saw the movie of How Green Was My Valley and when the lights went up Ned taunted me that there were tears in my eyes, and Ned would have had a fat eye or a bloody nose if we hadn’t by some magical incoherence shunted off into whether it was anthracite or bituminous coal the miners were mining in the picture and my sister sided with me because she was still clutching my bandanna handkerchief that she had borrowed dry. Tessa and Dudley spent some weekends in a converted schoolhouse in Wales that had been bought by a friend who Dudley said had had the DT’s at one time, but he wasn’t American. The Welsh “Bells of Rhymney” Pete Seeger made into an American socialist anthem and we heard him sing it in Royal Festival Hall with the changeless Dietrich his friend sitting in the same row with us and Tessa, which was some months before the Allotts went to America in ’64. Wales, then, had been in my mind.

But this fact remained, that Dagger had known that on Friday, May 28, the day after the day we’d planned to be on the south coast where I had to see a man about a boatyard, on Friday the 28th of May, after passing through Bristol to say hello to a mutual friend an actor in the repertory and to take another look at Brunel’s great suspension bridge on the Clifton heights, we would film a group in Wales which was to Claire the group. Had known as early as the 24th. Earlier.

I snapped out the match, moved toward the partitioned-off cubicle, wheeled about, found Claire’s desk and retrieved Dagger’s letter, didn’t fold it lest it crackle, went again toward Aut’s cubicle wondering what I would do if I found him sprawled in his swivel chair dead, put down the letter, struck a match, heard the steps approach like two people with one unnatural rhythm, doubtless the two who’d paused to look at Outer Film’s door and the darkness on my side and might conceivably have seen my match.