Rubicon Beach

by Steve Erickson

  A light was coming from the lounge. I held myself, shuddering. I’m damn cold, I said out loud. I got to the doorway of the lounge and it was immediately warmer. A bulb was burning at one end of the room dirty orange electricity. I said to myself, What, they have someone come around and change the bulbs? The lounge was gritty and lined with webs; a bar was at the back shadowed and still, with liquor bottles on the shelves behind it and glasses sitting upside down on what was once a white cotton towel. All of it was dimly visible to me in the light of the hearth at the other end of the room, where a fire was burning. The hearth was set in large flat stones and surrounded by large worn chairs. I went over Io the fire and was standing there several moments before I realized someone was sitting in one of the chairs. “Lee?” he said, blinking at me in the dark.

  I looked at him in stupefaction. He stood up and came over to me. Ile was tall, probably as tall as Jon Wade but nowhere near the mountainous build; he moved like an aristocrat. As far as I could tell from the flames of the fire he was in his mid-fifties. He was stylishly dressed and groomed but his face had a certain thickness to it, as though he drank a lot. At this moment, in fact, he was holding an amber glass with ice clinking in it and seemed just the slightest bit tipsy.

  “My God, Lee,” he said, touching my shirt, “you’re drenched. What the hell happened to you?” He pulled me by the elbow to one of the other chairs and I sat down in it. “Look here,” he said, “can I get you something from the bar?” He was watching me with utter concern. I stared at him and then over at the bar in the dark with all the dusty glasses upside down on the dirty white towel. I looked at the glass in his hand and back up at him, and water ran from my hair into my eyes.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “Here,” he said, “pull the chair closer to the fire.” He started to pull me out of the chair so he could move it closer to the fire.

  “It’s all right,” I said, resistant. “I’m fine here.” I looked around me.

  “What happened to you anyway?” he said. “I’ve been waiting damn near forever. The damn phone doesn’t work or I would have called.” He squinted at me in the dark.

  I shook my head. “I’m not Lee.”

  He kept squinting at me. He sighed heavily. “No, I can see that now.” He took a gulp from his amber glass and turned to the fire, anxious. He turned back to me. “Well I hope you’re all right,” he said a little absently. He sat in his chair and held the drink on one of its arms, thinking. Presently his attention came back to me. “Someone turn a hose on you or something?” he said, regarding me from head to foot.

  “I took a swim,” I explained.

  “A swim?”

  “Out in the water.” He stared at me. “The lagoon,” I said. “It was the only way I could get here.”

  “The lagoon?” he said in complete bafflement. But he waved it away. Ile sighed heavily again and looked toward the door, muttering. “Where is he anyway?” I heard him say under his breath.

  I turned toward the door too. “Waiting for someone?” I asked.

  “If we don’t come up with this script, it’s over for both of us,” he said. He was clearly agitated. “I can’t afford to lose this opportunity. I’m . . . I’m forty-five years old and I need a vehicle.” He was older than forty-five. I knew that not by the way he looked but by the way he said it. “I’ve been patient with Lee a long time, and I’ve been waiting a long time for the right vehicle.”

  I nodded. “Who’s Lee?” I said after a while.

  “Lee’s not fucking here, that’s who Lee is,” he said, his voice rising. He finished his drink. He was still a moment.

  “Name’s Richard,” he said, extending his hand.

  I took it. “Cale.”

  “Are you an actor?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Do you work in pictures at all?”

  I kept looking around me, at the bulb burning at the opposite end of the room. I was finally becoming warm from the tire. I didn’t know what he was talking about. “No,” I said.

  “Good for you. Bloody good for you. I mean it. It’s a fucked business and a fucked place. I admire anyone who can avoid it aItogether. What is it you do?”

  “Can you tell me,” I said slowly, “where the kitchen is?”

  “What kitchen?”

  “The kitchen of the hotel.”

  “I think it’s downstairs behind the ballroom,” he said. “Or maybe that’s the dining room.” He added, “The dining room’s closed.”

  “I have to find the kitchen,” I said.

  “Are you a chef?” he asked, distracted. He was getting agitated again. He stood up from the chair. “The hell with this. I’ve been patient with Lee a long time. I’ve been waiting a long time for the right vehicle.” He looked around. “Maybe I should catch a cab into Beverly Hills, phone from there.”

  I stared at him. This man thought he was going to take a cab somewhere. “Lee?” he called. He was calling into the dark beyond the doorway behind me. I turned and then he said, “There’s someone there. Is that you, Lee?” he called. “I’ve been waiting.”

  I saw a form move in the dark; there was someone there. I stepped toward the door and the form backed away, and when I got there I could hear the light steps of someone running across the lobby. The guy behind me called again but now I took off after the footsteps and reached the stairs that went back down the way I had come.

  ‘There was music above me and the shine of stars, and I looked up into the sky six floors away. The tall silhouette of the actor was small in the far door.

  I turned back to gaze into the mouth of the stairs, and I saw her. It was absolutely black but I saw her anyway; she held the knife in her hand. It already had blood on it. “It . . . is you?” I heard her say, in awkward English.

  It’s me, I said. I stepped toward her, down the stairs. She ran.

  At the bottom of the stairs I heard her steps fade away down a long corridor. At the end of the corridor was another light and in the light I could see a small glowing object on the floor. As I came closer I could see it was the knife, glistening red. I half expected that, when I reached it, it would vanish. I half expected that, as I bent to pick it up, it would dissolve in my hand. It did not. When I held it, it feIt ordinary, nothing epiphanic at all. It took me ten minutes to find the kitchen. It had a burning bulb too, like the lounge and the corridor from where I’d just come. The kitchen was strewn with utensils and appliances and pots, and the large white doors of the freezer were wide open. It looked as if it had been abandoned only a moment before, and there was the barely lingering smell of rotted food. Next to one of the freezer doors lay the headless body of a man, still bleeding. I reeled for a moment, not looking at him; I wasn’t used to that yet. I didn’t see the rest of him and I wasn’t inclined to search for it. I went over to a place some ten or twelve feet from him and took off my clothes and lay on the ground with the knife in my hand.

  Maybe I slept, maybe I passed out. I say maybe because later, when I learned how much time had gone by, sleeping or passing out seemed the only explanation; I feIt as though I’d been lying there only a few minutes. Occasionally I would raise my head to see if the body was still there. But then I must have fallen asleep, because a voice woke me. Cale, the voice said, what are you doing?

  I opened my eyes. A very big shadow was standing over me.

  “Wade?”

  “What are you doing?” he said again.

  I held my hand up in front of my face. I still had the knife. “I’m guarding the body of Ben Jarry,” I said. When Wade didn’t answer, I said, “Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me there’s no body over there.” When he still didn’t answer, I raised my head from the floor and looked over in the direction of the body. There were a bunch of cops and there was something on the ground with a sheet over it. I nodded. “Finally. Finally got a body. There’s no eluding me forever.”

  “No,” came Wade’s voice out of the big shadow, “there’s no eluding me fore
ver.”

  “I knew you’d get him sooner or later,” I explained, “I always had confidence in you. No matter how tough the assignment, you were bound to snare him. Millions of murdered men, true, but not having a head is a distinguishing characteristic. No way you can escape notice very long if you don’t have a head. You guys are aces. You guys are crackerjacks.”

  “What are you doing, Cale?”

  “In the archives of the library are the legends of murdered men, Inspector. Maybe some are real and maybe some aren’t. I’m familiar with most of them at this point. I’ve been smuggling their legends into my tower, I’ve been poring over them in my sleep. My favorite is the one of the man murdered in this kitchen. This very one. Like Ben over there, except this murdered man would be a little harder for you to track down, since he had a head. He was shot with a gun. Do you know about this man?”

  “No.”

  “In this very kitchen. Shot with a gun. By an Arab of some sort. Late one spring night and many people saw it. He bled on the floor and did not die immediately. He aspired to lead his people and at the moment he was shot he was in the throes of triumph, his people had acclaimed him on this very night just outside this very kitchen. Before him, his own brother had led the people, and his brother was another murdered man, and the brother that came before them was a murdered man as well. A whole family of murdered men. They were born in America.”

  “America One,” came Wade’s voice from the big shadow, “or America Two?”

  I got up off the floor. I stood toe to toe with him and held the knife hard. I held the knife as hard as his eyes held me. “Not America One or America Two,” I said, seething. “Just America. They were born in America.”

  Wade licked his lips. “I have to arrest you.”

  “Because we have a body here and we have you holding what by all appearances seems to be a murder weapon.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “That’s Ben Jarry over there. You can’t arrest me for murdering Ben Jarry. You’ve already set me free for helping you murder Ben Jarry, remember?”

  Wade slowly blinked. “Put your clothes on.” He looked down at my side where I held the knife hard, and he put his hand out, palm open and draped with a white handkerchief. We stared at each other a good half minute before I put the handle of the knife on the white handkerchief. He wrapped the knife and called over Mallory and gave it to him. I put my clothes on. We walked from the hotel kitchen up the stairs into the lobby. I could still see the light of the lounge where the bar was. “There was somebody else here earlier tonight,” I said to Wade, nodding at the light. “Some sort of actor, your height, fiftyish. I talked to him.” Wade lumbered over to the lounge, looked in and came back. “No one I can see but check it out,” he said to Mallory. Check it out, Mallory said to the cop next to him. Wade walked on ahead, and Mallory and another cop led me out into the night, where we followed Wade to a boat down by the beach, where there were still more cops.

  They had spotted me taking off with the boatman that evening. They hadn’t picked me up at the time because they wanted to see where I was going and why. They’d lost us in the fog and only when they got the boatman coming back could they make him show them exactly where in Hancock Park he’d dropped me off. You must have made great friends with the little blond hooker, Wade said to my surprise, she wouldn’t tell us shit. They’d been stymied again until they got a report from a schooner that docked in the south harbor with a small boat tied to its tail.

  Back in town they took me to the station. It was now nearly dawn. A few cops were standing outside smoking and in the front room a couple of women who did not look as though they worked the lagoon but over by the East Canal were sitting on a bench that ran along the wall. Next to them on the bench a guy was slumped over. Wade talked to the cop behind the desk and then after a few minutes we went through the door down a green hall to a small windowless room. Everyone was exhausted. I should have been exhausted too. Instead everything in me was fired, I couldn’t remember when I had feIt this tired. Perhaps I had never feIt like this, even before prison. I had this ridiculous sense of being in control of everything, I had this feeling of calling all the shots. It was ridiculous because I wasn’t calling any shots at all, it was ridiculous because everyone thought I was out of control. We sat in the small windowless room at a single table with two chairs. I was in one of them and Wade was in the other. Mallory stood by the door and another cop stood in the corner. I sat looking wild and fired; Wade looked exhausted. “Have you settled down now?” he said to me.

  “What do you mean?” I looked at the other cops.

  “Are you clear in your own head?” he said.

  “Everything in me is fired,” I explained. With perfect timing someone knocked on the door, and Mallory opened it. It was the police doctor. He said he wanted to take some blood and a urine sample. Wade said, Fuck that, this man isn’t drugged. “Everything in me is fired,” I explained to the doctor. The doctor had me open my shirt; he took my pulse and put his hand on my head. He turned to Wade and said I was burning up, and I said, What did I tell you.

  “I don’t care about that,” Wade said slowly, “this man and I are going to have a talk now.”

  “This man should be hospitalized,” said the doctor. He and Wade argued, and that ended with Wade still sitting in his chair and the doctor outside the room and the door locked between them. “Tonight,” Wade said to me, “you’re going to tell all about it.” He was still speaking very slowly but biting the words so hard I could hear the pain in them. “You’re going to tell me who you went to meet in the lagoon tonight and why.”

  “A woman,” I said.

  “We found a woman,” he said, meaning the blonde, “and nothing happened between you as far as we can tell from what she told us.”

  “A different woman.”

  “A woman named Janet Dart?”

  That confused me. “Who?”

  “Janet Dart,” he said. “We know you met her a week ago and we know you went to her place. I told you to stay clear of that woman.”

  “She was showing me her pictures. Have you seen them?”

  I said, “I thought she was a cop.”

  “My understanding of your case,” he whispered, smoldering, “is such as to lead me to conclude you never thought she was a cop. My understanding of your case is such as to lead me to conclude you know why she came here.” He was hot and his face was wet as it was in the grotto that night, but now he didn’t notice it at all. “We know about her connection,” he said. “We know she came here to Los Angeles to see a man who was a member of your political cadre in New York City two and a half years ago. We know he escaped from an upper-annex New York prison seven weeks ago. We know your former political cronies have sent him for you and we’re reasonably certain he’s the one who’s been setting off the underground detonations. My understanding of your case is such as to lead me to conclude you went to the lagoon tonight to meet Janet Dart and perhaps this man, though we’re not sure why. I guess you’re right about one thing, we still can’t quite figure whose side you’re on.”

  “Listen,” I said, “that woman’s crazy. She doesn’t care about politics. She’s in love with a guy who doesn’t even know who she is. She’s in love with a face that doesn’t need a light. Check the places with no lights.”

  “Did you murder her too?”

  “I haven’t murdered anybody.” I looked at him. “You think I murdered the man in the kitchen? What about those other times? On the beach and in the library. What about that.” Wade looked at me incredulously, and suddenly I saw it too. Suddenly I stopped seeing everything my way and saw it his. “Shit,” I said, still looking at him, “I keep forgetting. I keep forgetting you never saw those other times. I keep forgetting I’m the only one who ever saw those other times.”

  He leaned back in the chair and waited. “Was it your contact, Cale?”

  “It’s Ben Jarry,” I said. “And I did kill Ben Jarry once, as sure as if
I had done it with a knife in my hand. But I didn’t kill him tonight.”

  Wade didn’t even hear it. “They’ve sent someone for you, very possibly to kill you. Do you understand? I told you to leave that woman alone.” He sat up in the chair. “Stop jerking us around and we can make a case here for self-defense.”

  “That would put me on your side for sure, wouldn’t it,” I said.

  “But you have to level with us,” Wade said, nodding.

  “Check out that body,” I said to him. “Check out the fingerprints and the blood type. Maybe it doesn’t make sense but I know it’s Jarry. I have a feeling you know it is too.”

  Wade looked at the other two cops. “Get him out of here,” he said.

  “Take him to the doc?” said Mallory.

  “Take him to fucking jail,” said Wade. He got up so furiously the chair flew out behind him, hitting the wall. He slammed the door open and left.

  They took me to the cells, toward the back of the building and down half a level. They opened one and threw me in. Up until this point they’d been relatively civil, but I guess now their general frustration with me bubbled over. They weren’t particularly gentle about introducing me to the prison floor. They also gave the cell door an extra rattle when they slammed it shut. In the dark I could distinguish several other cells, and though I couldn’t make out any other prisoners I could hear them sleeping. I lay on the ground against the wall thinking about being in jail again. A month ago, a week ago, there would have been something comfortable about it. It had been very uncomfortable to feel imprisoned, as I had feIt, and not have the bars and floor and the physical evidence of a jail to confirm the feeling. If one is a prisoner by nature, it is best to have a prison as home; it’s a hard thing to be a prisoner trapped in the body of a free man. But then I escaped. I escaped the prison of my free body, and became a free man—at which point the free body was no longer a prison but a natural habitat. I would probably never understand how I had made this escape, I would probably never understand how she did it; but I knew she had done it, that she had cut me loose with her knife. I knew I was a step away from becoming another legend in the archives, I knew I was writing the documentation of it this very night. The poetry of the lines someone had once written about her from some other place came to me easily; I feIt around in my pockets to see if I had the pages. It didn’t matter. I knew all the verses anyway; my brain was exploding. Sitting there in the cell I started doing something odd: I began composing in my head the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read but the poem after the last poem. Not a new poem, not my poem, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and page. So there I sat with the poem that came after the last poem, knowing I didn’t belong here in this jail, that I didn’t want any more jails. Knowing that now I was a free man trapped in the body of an imprisoned one.