Rubicon Beach (10 page)

“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.

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.