Lookout Cartridge by Joseph McElroy

review. He said he threw it away instantly.
    I heard again the urgency of Dagger’s words phoning in the middle of Jenny being difficult Monday night: Let Claire alone, she’s got her job. Our film made trouble for her. She doesn’t know all that’s going on.
    I could have told Dagger about Claire’s cable. But I didn’t.

YELLOW FILTER INSERT
    Between Ruby and Tris on Ruby’s bed, I am also between them and their father, who is in the living room on the day bed couch having a stiff whiskey.
    Ruby in a canary nightgown and broad-brimmed white straw hat with cornflowers round the crown wants me to tell about when Sub and I were children. Tris, who goes to bed later and would not normally be in Ruby’s room at this hour, wants to hear how Dagger got his name. Really Tris wants some extensive conversation he can’t quite envision. He has heard that Dagger is the one I made the film with, that Dagger was a police reporter in California, a beachcomber in the Bahamas, and in the Med a dealer in certain articles including semipriceless eighteenth-century French maps of the Thames estuary. Tris leans back against the bedside wall, his hiking boots of unfinished hide crossed just beyond Ruby’s blanket; on his lap is a king-size paperback open at diagrams of home-made booby traps.
    Ruby says, I want how you and Daddy hid in the snowdrift.
    No, says Tris. How Dagger got his name.
    No. Daddy.
    My mom has the best camera you can buy and she has a darkroom and develops her own pictures. Do you know a lot about photography?
    Dagger DiGorro knows all about it. I just take pictures. I don’t develop them.
    Does Dagger develop his?
    Tell about Daddy when you were little.
    Dagger develops his own, yes.
    Do movies get developed too? You have a yellow lens for your camera. I saw it. Is that like wearing sunglasses?
    It’s a filter, not a lens. OK, one story for Ruby, one for Tris.
    Did someone else develop your movie? But I thought you lost it.
    We had a bit developed. Almost all the rest was ruined before we could process it.
    Why do you live in England?
    I just do.
    Tell about the snowdrift, complains Ruby.
    Tris while talking stares at cartoon-scrawl diagrams of booby traps.
    Ruby’s got to go to bed, he says. It’s eight-thirty. I do not.
    Sweet dreams, Ruby.
    She reaches across my lap for Tris’s hand and punches his book.
    Well, Ruby, it used to snow a lot in New York in those days and we lived in Brooklyn Heights which is still the nicest part of Brooklyn, quiet streets of houses, children playing outside but not so many now. The snowdrifts along the sides of the street got even higher when the snowplow came through trying to clear the street. The snowdrifts were long and high and thick, and we tunneled out the insides of the drifts and sat in there snug as a squirrel in a tree trunk and listened to cars come slushing down our dead-end street.
    What’s a dead-end street? said Tris.
    You know what a dead-end street is. In England it’s called a cul-de-sac. It doesn’t go through to another street, you have to turn around at the end and come back.
    Oh.
    A car, maybe a truck, would come by and park further on, or turn around and come back, or it might stop right by us, but parking was hard because of the snowdrifts.
    Ruby rubs closer to me, hand on my leg, scraps of bright red nail polish, a clean leg soft through the pale yellow nightie. I like children and this isn’t the first time in England or America I’ve introduced this snowdrift intact into a child’s room. Jenny and Will have heard this one more than once. There’s really nothing to it. Think of what I leave out—the lunch Sub and I took into the tunnel was toasted cheese-bacon-and-tomato sandwiches, we had dark blue corduroys on for we’d refused to wear snowsuit pants this year, and Boyd, who played with us, still wore snowpants, maroon they were, but that was why we left him out that January day so cold it seemed to still the traffic in other blocks and