Rubicon Beach

by Steve Erickson

  There is a tree by a river, it is out west. A man comes to the tree and looks up and sees among its branches a nation of men; they’re living their whole lives in the tree. The man calls to them and says, What are you doing living in that tree? And after some silence, from the deepest foliage of the tree’s highest limbs, someone answers . . .

  Suddenly I was exhausted. Suddenly I wasn’t fired anymore. I went to sleep and slept through the dawn and through the afternoon. Once I woke up to the daylight and another time I woke up to someone walking outside my cell. Both times I went back to sleep. When I woke again the sun was already beginning to go down again.

  I looked up and she was standing right in front of me.

  She was across the cell, and she kneIt down and looked at me. She looked tired, and brown splotches of dry blood were on her arms; she looked at my hands warily, a little frightened. She was watching to see if I had the knife. I opened my hands before me and turned them to show her they were empty. I put them on my legs. She would start to say something and then stop; she would look at me and then down at the ground between us. I knew she was trying to explain it but she couldn’t. She turned her head to take in the dark jail around us.

  “How did you get in here?” I said to her. “I know you weren’t here before.”

  But I thought about it and now I wasn’t so sure. She could have been here, back in the shadows of the cell, when they brought me in, just as she’d been in the shadows of the archives that night. She could have been brought in by the cops while I was sleeping; once l would have jumped to such a conclusion. She cocked her head and watched my lips the way people do when they don’t understand the language. “You can’t stay here,” I said. “You understand? They found the body. They have the knife. They’ll check it out and they’ll see I couldn’t have done it.” I thought about that too and now I wasn’t so sure that made any sense to me anymore either.

  The door at the end of the hall opened and closed, and she stood up. Mallory had come in to check things out, and now he stood there outside the cell looking in at me, and then looking at her. His mouth dropped a little and he got this queer look in his eyes. He looked at me and then back at the girl and said, Who the hell are you. I thought, We’re making progress. First the blood, then the knife, then the body, now the girl. Who is this, Mallory said to me. I didn’t answer. He was going to open the cell and then he thought better of it; he said, I’m getting the Inspector, and took off. He’ll be back, I said to her, with a man you don’t want to meet.

  She didn’t move. I began inching to her across the floor and she watched me still wary and suspicious. I could make out small puddles in my cell now; the jail smelled like the canals outside. The windows were at street level and sometimes when the canals rose around the city, water came over the ground and poured into the jail. Steam was rising from the floor. She didn’t seem to notice it. She blinked at me and her mouth was fuller and redder in the dark; she sighed heavily. A great sense of pain seemed to go through her. Her eyes were dazed and precise ovals in the small pool at our feet, and I could actually hear the sound of her lips parting. She shook her head a bit, as though to wake herself. In the deepening blue twilight of the windows in the opposite cells I saw a candle go by; I wondered if the people of Los Angeles had come to wear fires on their shoes. The flame reared like the trunk of an animal and the puddles of the jail caught the reflection of the candle and still held it after the candle had passed. Every small wave on the surface of the puddles of water muItiplied the color of the flame; a red and fiery sheen seemed to lie across the cell in the dark. She was a shadow framed by a ring of candlelight. At that moment I’d come too far down the white hourless hole of Los Angeles to give in to her so easily. Her face had smoke around it and she reached out to the bars of the cell when I caught her. I kept thinking that any minute someone would come to put out the flame of this candle, wherever in the city it was, so as to extinguish the reflections of the water’s surface. Old trash from the city lay by the doors. The shadows of the bars burned themselves into the water. A large dark cloud settled in the hall; for a moment I thought it was Wade. It’s Wade, I said to her. Her hair ran in black curls down her face, and I pressed myself to her. She was right against me. She shuddered at the sight of me. What is it, I said, I haven’t done anything.

  We watched each other, pressed to each other, and I looked down at my hand holding her arm. I let go. For a moment she didn’t move, and then her eyes became sad and she stopped shuddering. I dropped my hands to my sides, and she turned and pushed open the door of the cell.

  I know they locked that door. They gave it an extra rattle when they slammed it shut. But she pushed it open and walked through and stood in the hall looking back at me. I took a step; the door of the cell was still open. I swung it back and forth. Where are you going, I said. She walked into the dark end of the hall and I waited, looking at my fingers which had on them the blood from her arms that was not quite dry. For a moment I wasn’t sure if I was in a cell in Los Angeles or in a cell in Bell Pen somewhere in the ice of the north continent. At that moment it didn’t matter to me whether Ben Jarry had been hanged or whether my indiscretion had hanged him. I would have traded Ben Jarry a hundred times to have her pressed against me again. I looked at the shadow where she had vanished; I knew she wasn’t a ghost. I’d held her and she had opened the door and it was still open, and she had been too tired and afraid and suffering to be a ghost. The door at the other end of the hall opened and I looked, and there were Wade and Mallory. Wade was looking at me calmly. Mallory saw me standing in the open door of the cell and his face went white. Through the window was coming the last light of dusk, and the fire in the puddles all over the floor was gone.

  I stared at my bloody fingers. “Inspector,” Mallory said to Wade, swallowing hard, “I swear to you we locked that cell.”

  Wade was still calm. He looked as though half of him were receding into the night, as though he were disappearing by the moment. His clothes hung on him and his face was sunken. He blinked at me. “How did you open the cell, Cale,” he said. I could barely hear him.

  “She opened it,” I told him.

  Mallory was still swallowing. He exhaled and said, “There was a girl, Inspector.” He worked up the nerve to look at the side of Wade’s face and said, “She was in there a few minutes ago, I swear it. She had black hair and looked Mex maybe, or—” Wade turned to him. Shut up Mallory, he said quietly. He turned back to me.

  I showed him my hands. “Well this isn’t my blood,” I said, “and I think you know it wasn’t on me when we came in last night.” Wade had his back to me before I finished talking. He was walking to the door at the end of the hall, and when he got there he pivoted imperceptibly and said to Mallory, Bring him along. He drifted out the door as though the ground were moving him. Nothing he did seemed of his own volition, not what he saw or what he said or did. Mallory gave me an utterly baffled look and motioned me on ahead of him. We followed Wade toward the front of the building and into his office. There were a few guys sitting around at their desks drinking coffee.

  In his office Wade walked behind the desk and, not even looking at me, said, “I’m putting you under house arrest. You won’t be leaving the library except under exceptional circumstances. We’ll have your food prepared for you and bring you those supplies you need” He said all this so softly I could barely hear him. He looked five or ten years older than the night before, he looked like someone who had seen some-thing amazing and inexplicable. I noticed something else. I had to listen for it and then I had to figure out what it was. I realized it was the sound of the buildings: the sound had changed again. I tried to remember if I had feIt the rumble of the ground; I thought of the pools of fire on the floor of the jail.

  “Am I still under arrest for murder?” I said to him.

  “No,” he answered. “If you were under arrest for murder you would be in jail. You’re under arrest for violating conditions of your parole.”
/>   I smiled. “It was Jarry wasn’t it,” I said.

  Wade let out a deep breath.

  “It was Jarry,” I said, “and you can’t arrest me for the murder of a man who’s already dead. That’s it, isn’t it?” I was angry. “You know what I think?”

  Mallory was pulling me by the arm, toward the door. “Come on, jack.”

  I was sure I had it all figured out. My mind was racing, inventing and discarding one theory after another, all in the course of seconds. For a moment I was sure Jarry had never been executed at all. For a moment I was sure it was all a setup to make me a scapegoat, to make me bait for whoever was coming here to get me. Whoever this Janet what’s-her-name was looking to meet up with. My mind was racing, trying to get it all straight, but it was going faster than I could follow, I was blathering to myself. “You know who she is,” I said to Wade, my eyes narrowing at him.

  “Your Spanish girl? No.”

  “But you know there is such a girl.”

  “I have no reason at this point to disbelieve it.” I could still barely hear him. “But listen to me,” and as he leaned across his desk his voice did not so much rise as solidify, “if there is a Spanish girl, you stay away from her. I’m telling you for your sake. You can believe that body was Ben Jarry if you want, it doesn’t matter. But for your sake, you stay away from her.”

  “You can’t admit it was him, can you?” I said, shaking my head. “It’s that hard for you, isn’t it.”

  He came around from the desk and took Mallory by the shoulders and nearly lifted him up and out of the room. He slammed the door and stood facing it with his back to me for several seconds before he turned. When he turned he had this exhilarated mirthless grin on his face. I went nauseated and weak; suddenly I knew I hadn’t figured it out. Suddenly I knew something was very wrong. He stepped up to me and put his face an inch from mine. “It’s you, Cale,” he whispered. I looked at him and he looked at me, and his eyes had become eminently satisfied, but he was still too afraid to quite laugh in my face. “We checked it all out, just like you said,” he nodded, with the same wild sickening grin. “The prints and the blood, we went over it and over it. Didn’t that corpse look just a little familiar? All those times you got a look at it? You decided it was the object of your guiIt, but you know it was a little more familiar than that. Because it’s your body.”

  I was confused. “My body?” I said.

  “There’s the lab report.” He pointed at a manila folder on his desk. “Fired back from Denver on the double, twenty minutes ago. Feel free to look it over. History of your death.” He was enjoying this now. “So I’m sure that you, being a man of I1 rather interesting intelligence, see my dilemma. I’m holding you for your own murder. I have in my morgue the corpse of the man who’s accused of killing him. Do you see the dilemma? Were that it was so simple as to be the body of Ben Jarry. Now I suggest you accept my offer of house arrest because the next time your mystery lady shows up with her knife, she may do all of us a favor and introduce the witness to the witnessed in a fashion more permanent and less complicated than she has done until now.”

  “I believe,” I managed to say a few moments later, “you once said we live in silly times.”

  “I believe I once did.” He opened the door. To Mallory waiting outside he said, “Take him home.”

  * * *

  Then take me home. When I left at eighteen, night was imminent; I reserved dawns for retrenchment. I turned my back on the sun sliding downward. In the last dusk of my adolescence I came to the fork in the road with the black phone in the yellow booth and it was ringing. When I answered this time there was that same void of sound, I knew it was someone on the other end dying. I knew somewhere on the plains around me someone lay in a bed clutching the telephone in a wordless gasp of demise. I let the phone hang to the ground and followed the one line that stretched from the booth across the road to the pole, and continued until a mile later where I came upon the line lying severed in the dirt, its ends exposed and jagged. It had a hum. It had small fire dancing around it, singeing the weeds and frying armadillos. The rest of the line was nowhere to be seen, not a pole in sight. The exposed ends of disconnection burned themselves into the planet. There was nothing I could do but go to New York City.

  Twenty years later I walked from a station in L.A. with a cop at my arm, informed of my own murder. It didn’t take long to find her again. We were crossing the wharf for the patrol car when I saw the boat that had come sailing to me out of the sun the night I bought the radio down behind the Weeping Storefronts. The boat had the same blind Asians and Latinos; as before, they were still standing on deck staring in the direction of the spray. I realized they hadn’t docked yet. I realized they had sailed into the harbor and on into the East Canal, down the other side of town out near the southern gulf, and had turned north again just to repeat the course. I realized they didn’t even know they were here, they didn’t know they’d been here for weeks. Nobody called to them from the shore; in Los Angeles you have to figure out for yourself when you’re there, nobody calls to you from the shore. There at the edge of the boat she was standing watching me. Nothing at this point surprised me. She could have been sitting in the front seat of the patrol car receiving dispatches, she could have been wearing one of those suits the feds wear. But she was there on the boat that kept circling the city, among all the blind people, her eyes directly on me, and she might have told them they were there too, but maybe she spoke a Spanish no one else did. Maybe it wasn’t Spanish at all. Maybe she spoke their language fluently but didn’t tell them anyway. Maybe this was her sanctuary where she was unreachable, out on a boat that never docked, among those dispossessed to whom no one called from shore. I grabbed Mallory’s arm as he was opening the back door of the car. He was staring at the ground, he was staring into the backseat. Look, I said, grabbing his arm, pointing at the boat gliding by. Get in, he said. But Mallory, look, I said again. He would not look. He would not turn his head up; his eyes were glued to the ground, or the backseat, straight in front of him. I shook him by the arm. Just get in, he said furiously, now turning to stare straight into my face. It’s her, I explained, out there on the boat. Just get in the car, he said, shaking with terror. He knew she was out there. But he wasn’t seeing anything tonight, he didn’t want to see it. He had the same look Wade had when he told me about the lab report. The town was terrorized by her. America was terrorized by her, by the mere fact of her being. The only one not terrorized by her was I, the man she’d murdered three times.

  The city was going crazy with sound. There was an explosion even as we stood there on the wharf; we could hear it and feel the timber rattle beneath us. There were two more explosions in the five-minute ride to the library, the car swerving both times. The sound was changing every time. Just when you thought it couldn’t get louder or more harrowing, it did. What the hell, Mallory muttered, is going on?

  That was nine days ago. I’ve been waiting in the tower, watching you.

  I’ve been waiting for the time to move. I have been, indeed, under house arrest as Wade promised. Indeed, as he promised, someone has brought my meals twice a day and asked if I needed anything. I haven’t seen Wade himself. I somehow don’t think I will. Not after the last time. Every once in a while I ask one of the cops what’s going on out there. They always pretend they don’t know what I mean. But they do know what I mean. I heard from one of them about Janet Dart or Dash. I heard she was in the grotto over on the east side where I always saw her and one night she stepped off one of the overlooking platforms and dropped like a stone into the river that ran past the bar. Not a sound from her. As though it would carry her out beneath the city to whomever it was she’d been looking for. As though to pursue her passion to the edge of her world and then beyond. She was gone in an instant.

  I don’t read the legends of murdered men any more. Instead I finish your poem. I’ve seen you go by eight times in nine days—not actually you, of course, though I wondered why yo
u didn’t simply appear at the foot of my bed or in the back rooms below. But I’ve seen your boat, or the top of it, pass every day at a different time, only once a day; though I haven’t seen you on the boat, I know you’ve been there. During this period the entire city has become a radio. It transmits songs from the deadest part of the center of the earth, and they’re living dead songs, zombie songs. Some of these songs last a day, some last only hours. Some last a few minutes before someone changes the channel in a flurry of geological static that shakes and recharts the underground rivers. Until yesterday I’ve been biding my time. The cops become lazier and more complacent. At the exact pitch of night, when the radio is turned to the right channel, I know it is no problem for a dead man to elude them. I could exit through doors they don’t even know exist. I’ve been biding my time: but yesterday something changed. Your boat stopped still in the harbor and rested all night; it was there this morning when the sun came up. But then I watched it turn in the harbor and I saw the smoke, and I knew a new voyage was in the making. And then I watched in horror as you sailed away, out toward the sea; and for several hours I believed I’d lost you. I should have known you’d jump ship. It should not have taken the flash of something signaling me from out across the bay in the moors to the north. But I see your knife now, and it calls me, and I don’t have any more time.