That Sunday night I wrote an account of that first filming and though that first scene the softball game was silent I included Dagger’s words and Cosmo’s and Will’s but could not recall the batter’s name, and having faithfully recorded the filmed origin of the dispute about Cosmo’s low and inside smokeball, I found in the corner of my eye the Connecticut actor, a slight figure in tie-dyed jeans, passing behind the others at the center of the diamond, then emerging alone, strolling on and on as if the softball game were in another time, ambling off toward a pedestrian path and looking beyond it distinctly at something, though what I couldn’t tell. There was a woman maybe fifty yards beyond the walk and she seemed shadowed by the tree she leaned against and at that instant Dagger called to me not to go crazy now — for I’d raised the Beaulieu just to follow the guerrilla actor through the viewfinder for the hell of it — thinking what prospects a boy like that could have acting antiwar skits on street corners in Battersea with an undergraduate group from Oxford — and I lowered the camera and the thought of Jenny sobered me too much so I called back Christ I’m not shooting! — I had suddenly registered that the woman off by the tree was indeed what the guerrilla-theater actor was aiming for; but Dagger’s jibe was itself now interrupted by new words between Cosmo and the batter he’d dusted with his fastball. But now it wasn’t You fat blowfish, where’d you learn to play ball, the only way you going to get me out is keep me ten feet away from the plate, and chawing tobacco out there won’t help—
Nor Cosmo’s ordinary noise: You so close to the plate I got to pitch behind you to get it over, take the shades off, man, you’ll see better.
It was something else now, a new ball game they were speaking to each other: Got nothing better to do than hang around the park, the batter said, and I registered his words but still at that moment not exactly him, for way off to my left, though I wasn’t exactly looking at them, the guerrilla-theater actor was moving with a glow around him toward the woman at the tree. And then Cosmo, holding the white softball up so you could see the black seams and turning it this way and that the way he always did before his whirlwind double-three-hundred-sixty-degree windup, all of which Dagger had caught in the second or third minute of shooting, but now no windup, just the turning of the ball up near Cosmo’s jaw, a sort of screwing toward his new words, Cosmo said, Listen I did my time back home, man, my number came up, I quit the collegiate power structure and I did my two years in the army, man, and I been here long enough to know a free-loader when I see one so don’t shit me, man, you don’t like it here go back to Copenhagen, those sixteen-year-olds you been picking up.
The woman turned as if to stand behind the tree, but I think she was moving off ahead of the actor, but what happened now made it hard to follow her out of the shadow of the tree, for the batter — the same one Dagger had shot his first time up the first inning, big orange and silver and cherry-colored rings on his fingers, his body wiggling up and down trying — and successfully then — to get a walk off Cosmo — came right back at Cosmo now: Cosmo, a vet like you is just another poor pig, you’re a veteran of like Fort Dix, you never got to California much less Vietnam, and you’re over here because it’s a soft touch — the batter increasingly nameless the more I reached directly for his name, lifted his bat and there was Dagger taking it with both hands.
Back of third an English schoolboy in gray cap, gray knee-socks, monogrammed gray jacket, and dark blue shorts had a box camera over his eyes. He snapped us and turned away. I felt Jenny somewhere close, as if I were confined to a viewfinder’s tunnel-window ruling her out below and above.
Cosmo said, What you doing in the Underground all day, moving hash? The batter left his Louisville slugger in Dagger’s hands and lunged at Cosmo who with a wrist flick released the ball overhand and hit the other assailant in the bridge of the nose. I almost had his name.
Why did the batter not retaliate? He carried his bumped nose away toward Umpire Ismay.
I saw the hit just as exactly as in the second inning our Beaulieu caught the Indian-head patch on the seat of the right-fielder’s jeans and the drag bunt he laid down letting the bat give slightly with such finesse that the camera must have caught that instant of cushioned impact when the ball’s substance tried to melt back upon the curved wood of the bat and the right-fielder seemed to bear the ball around with him magically so my eye believed that if he hadn’t dropped the bat to head toward first he could have carried the softball indefinitely on the front of the bat by the sheer force of attention, like what he gave his long-time British Museum subject Catherwood. I said to Dagger as the camera stopped that it reminded me of the time in college when I’d put down a bunt, the third baseman overthrew first so I went to second, the first baseman overthrew second and I went to third, the shortstop overthrew third and I ran home only to be denied a bunt home run when the third baseman nailed me at the plate. Dagger said hold onto that, we can use that.
He had given up on peacemaking, but the batter, having walked away holding his nose and his bat, had been persuaded to play ball again by Umpire Ismay and was going to resume with a 3 and o count. Tempest in a teapot. Umpire Ismay had been rolling a cigarette and Dagger at the Beaulieu caught the concluding lengthwise lick.
Dagger with the camera on the tripod again showed his toothed grin beneath the moustache like a silent-film villain’s. I said, We could tape me telling that about the bunt homer and make it our sound track here.
The next pitch jumped straight through like a white weight — give Cosmo credit, he had a fastball. I said in Dagger’s ear, When we edit we’ll slow it down there and run a few stills to fix the ball. Dagger murmured, Depends on the lab.
Cosmo walked his man on the next pitch. But Dagger fooled me, he wasn’t focused on the plate but a bit to the right across the third-base line. The batter — whose name, Nash, came to mind when Jenny typed my notes — dropped his bat and trotted off, while Savvy Van Ghent complained to Ismay that Cosmo’s letup should have been strike two, while Cosmo as if he couldn’t resist called out to Nash, If you got to blow up the subway go do it in New York.
Nash turned at first base, shrugged as if at Cosmo but his face had blanched. But Cosmo may have sensed the shrug was aimed beyond him, for he turned toward third and behind third stood an Indian or Pakistani in a white shirt who was looking at Cosmo, who himself now shrugged.
I believe that I, rather than the camera, got the full gaze of this new figure just before he turned his back and put his hands in his pockets and went off. But Dagger panned around to a medium shot of Nash leading off first — just as Nash’s nose began to bleed as if the camera’s focus had drawn the blood.
My boy Will called, You’re bleeding. And when Nash touched knuckle to nostril, Cosmo threw to first and caught him off.
Dagger had every bit of this, and now switched off. I took the camera gingerly and through the viewfinder observed the Indian. He turned again and stopped and when I opened my other eye he seemed to make Cosmo look at him. Dagger said, Let’s see what’s left.