Rubicon Beach (11 page)

“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 you 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.

It was you, wasn’t it. It was you on the other end of that line when I picked up that telephone out in the middle of nowhere twenty years ago, out in America, probably at the very moment you were somewhere being born. At the very moment you were somewhere being born I answered the phone and heard the silence of your dying in a bed. Sometimes one must live half a lifetime before he understands the silences of half a lifetime before—sometimes, if it’s someone like me. Sometimes, if it’s someone like you, one understands from the first the silences of a lifetime to come, the silences that come at the end; and one emulates them early, so as to recognize them later. I hear the call of your knife over the songs of a zombie city. I cast myself in flight for the decapitation of my own guiIt, to live where I once died, to resurrect my passion, my integrity, my courage from out of my own grave. Those things that I once thought dead. By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.

Later, in a Malibu hospital listening to a Malibu sea, she dreamed of the night of the shipwreck. She wasn’t certain this was her earliest memory but it was the earliest memory of which she was certain. She had awakened as a small girl of three to the sounds of her brothers outside her window; sitting straight up in the dark, she was too self-possessed even as a child to open her mouth and cry. Rather, typically, she waited to correctly place her own consciousness, misplaced during the previous hours of the evening. She heard four of her brothers talking. The fifth, a year older than herself, slept three feet from her side. She listened for the sound of either her mother or father or sisters. She rose from the bedding of grass in the middle of the hut and went to the window and gazed out. The four brothers stood on the edge of the cliff that overlooked the bay jabbering among themselves with a quiet heat in their voices, their father watching the bay and speaking only to silence his sons. They were five dark forms before her. Catherine went into the other small room of the hut and found her mother in the door, the other two daughters watching from their beds. Calmly the three-year-old girl slipped beneath the skirts of her mother so that by the time the mother saw her it was too late, Catherine was off down the path toward the bay, where now there stretched out before her blotches of sand and dark water in the glare of men’s torches, and unfamiliar people lying strangely on the beach, and also the scattering of toppled trunks and drowned lanterns, the splinters of the ship and the rags of its white sails washing in with the tide, and more motionless unfamiliar people who didn’t know enough to lift their faces from the sand. At the bottom of the path Catherine stood watching one such person gaze face down into the earth, in the way she had seen her brothers gaze into the rivers looking for fish. To the corpse at her feet the small child explained, Nothing swims in the dust.

It was like Catherine that she did not exclaim joy at the freedom of being on the beach any more than she exclaimed terror at the night to which she woke, some moments before, in puzzlement. On the path behind her she heard her mother running and calling her name. The beach was covered with men poring over the sand and its bodies and loot, and the light of the torches was bright enough so that, as she wandered among and between them, she could distinguish only vaguely the form of the ship out in the water. It looks like a huge dead critter, she thought to herself. It’s a tangle of arms and extended things. She stepped out into the tip of the bay and stood several minutes watching the dead ship. The sights and sounds of everyone around her died away. It was the earliest memory of which she would ever be certain again, standing there in the middle of the night staring out into the dark of a dead ship, lights and voices somewhere behind her. Many years west of her, many thousands of miles to the north of her, she thought of it; and lying in a hospital bed in Malibu, as she slipped from the oppressive care of her attendants, she recalled last her father’s laugh in her ear as he came from behind and scooped her up from a white hooded wave. It’s time to sleep, she remembered him saying, for little girls of crazy courage. When he carried her back up the path from the tumuIt of the beach, her wet feet in his hair, they were met by her exasperated mother and all her older siblings, jealous of her recklessness. For the first time that night, and maybe in her life, she allowed her face to display delight.