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.
Date of birth, name of father, living, deceased. One Sunday in February after a night tending bar and a dream about dreams, Dagger woke to shouts and clatter, wood hammering wood. He kept his eyes tight shut. He knew it was his friends the little black boys from the bay side who had evidently not found any fallen coconuts in the road to sit down and crack and so had come the three-quarters of a mile across from their side of the island.
They were crucifying one of their number, tying his hands with seaweed and rotten twine to the crosspiece which had been nailed to an upright Dagger through one eye identified by its half-stripped white and black paint as a plank of driftwood he had set on the east side of his lean-to to keep sand from blowing.
Two little girls in bikinis who were at the hotel Dagger worked at were watching from the brink of a trench as deep perhaps as long, from which some of the boys were pelting their happy sacrifice with sand. One little girl jumped into the trench and could barely be seen as she began pitching sand too while the victim loosely strung upon the cross gave exaggerated yells of agony.
It was a good sight and Dagger looked under his plastic poncho for some fig newtons to give out but found a can of beer and sat up and opened it.
Most recent position: his knees cracked comfortably as he crossed his legs.
After he introduced himself into the University of Maryland operation in England some months later and thus gained access to low-priced audio equipment, he became interested in cassette collage, still later in the technical implications of semigratuitous switch-back and switch-forward juxta-sequences using eight-track cartridges, and he planned to work out his own way of cutting to an earlier or later track without having to start at its beginning.
When accused by one of his older U.S. Air Force students of being a closet-radical coming on as a professional discussion-provoker who was in reality a hired conflict-monger, he replied that he was designed to fit most systems.
Name (last name first): Who wants to know? said Dagger, rising when the father in his maroon Bermudas marched the little girls over to the lean-to and demanded to know Dagger’s name.
When Dagger said, Who wants to know? the man said, Never mind who I am, just you explain how come you just sat there in your hobo jungle and let my little girls be subjected to God knows what. Dagger sat down again. But she liked it, he said.
The father said, If I didn’t have these kids with me.
Keeps you out of trouble, said Dagger.
Do you think you own this beach, said the man.
List institutions, looking backward and forward: The little girl was being lifted out of the trench. She was screaming and laughing. She helped the black boys heap up sand for her to stand on to be high enough to have her arms properly tied to the cross. On the ocean side of the trench her sister was jumping up and down.
Date, place of birth: February 1928, Freehold, New Jersey.
Part-time, University of Maryland, U.K. Division, 1963 to present.
But possessed of a full-timer’s card. Which, to his unofficial captain’s status, added access to U.S. Government stores — cameras, liquor, booze, or for instance groceries (which he and eventually his wife Alba with him put in a supply of as a rule one morning toward the end of each week).
6
The silent softball game came first. But five or six weeks after we shot it Dagger said let’s put the Softball Game between the Hawaiian-in-the-Underground and the Suitcase-Slowly-Packed. This left the Unplaced Room first.
Opening our film with a silent softball game might have made us look like Super-8 weekenders, and I pointed this out. But the Unplaced Room had an austere dimension. And a real live U.S. deserter. And something genuine I felt Dagger had helped create without quite knowing what he was doing.
Not that the softball game wasn’t genuine. T. R. Ismay, our retired Wall Street lawyer who lived nearest of any of us to Hyde Park, umpired. Dagger got bats and balls and bases through his Air Force connections, not to mention a catcher’s mask. The bases were the regulation softball distance apart, and the Hyde Park grounds-keepers maybe had never thought about why our bases stayed put, namely with long anchoring spikes. Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe they were thinking of the next tea-break. Or do they work on Sunday?