Rubicon Beach (5 page)

I knew it was too convenient. “Like last time, I told you.”

“The headless man and the woman of the dunes,” he said.

He pissed me off and he knew it and didn’t care. “Same woman?”

“Same woman,” I said. “Same guy.”

“Same guy?”

There was another Hash of light and it was getting to me.

“Yes.”

“Same guy who lost his head last time lost it this time too?”

“Yes.”

“Is this man a snake?”

“Even a snake d0esn’t grow a new head,” I said.

“I know that. Do you know that?”

 “Then it was a dream,” I said.

“It was a dream that bleeds,” he said. “Did you
see
this guy?”

“I know it was the same guy.”

“Did you see him?”

“Of course I saw him.”

“You saw him clearly? I didn’t think last time you saw things so clearly.”

“I haven’t seen his face. I don’t have to. I know who it is. I didn’t last time, but I do now.”

“Does he have a name?”

“Everyone has a name.”

“You’re a fuck, Cale,” he said, angrier and angrier.

“His name is Ben Jarry,” I said.

“Shit.”

I looked at the raggedy crowd in the doorway. “What about them?”

“This is my investigation,” Wade said. But he looked back at them.

“She ran out,” I said. He looked back at me and I thought of something else. “She also said something this time, she said something to me.”

“What?”

“It was Spanish I think.”

“Are you sure?”

“If I knew for sure what she said I would know for sure if it was Spanish.”

“Like you know this was Ben Jarry,” he said, “the man with the world’s unluckiest neck.”

“I told you it was a dream,” was all I could say, and then there was the light again, and that did it. It was no electrical storm. I jumped up from the chair. “What’s that damned light,” I said. I looked in the direction it came from and so did Wade.

“Sit down,” he said and pushed me back into my chair.

“Mallory,” he called, turning to the wiry little man with red hair who had taken my radio. I could see a form moving for the door and it set me off and I jumped up from the chair again. Wade saw her too. He called to his man again. “What’s she doing here,” he said furiously.

It was the woman from the grotto in the blue-and-white dress, with the camera. “She’s a cop,” I said out loud to everyone who could hear it. I turned to Wade and said, “She’s a cop and you’ve got her following me taking pictures. That’s why she was in the bar that night.”

She was out the door with that, pushing aside the squatters who were still watching. The red-haired guy named Mallory started after her and so did a couple of others. Wade was looking at me in absolute amazement and then back at his men and then back at me, all within seconds. “Wait a minute!” he bellowed, and Mallory and the others stopped. In the distance in the lighted hall I could see her disappearing around a corner.

“She’s a cop,” I started in on him again.

“Shut up,” he said. He turned back to his men and then back to me. He was genuinely confused and he wasn’t pushing me into the chair anymore. His eyes narrowed. “You really don’t know who that woman is, Cale?”

“She’s a cop,” I said.

For a long minute he said nothing, and then he shook his head slowly. “No,” he said, and looked back down the hall, “she’s no cop,” and he got tired all at once and sat in the chair I’d been in, sagging into it almost the way the headless body had sagged onto the floor twenty feet away. You want us to go get her, Inspector? Mallory asked. “No,” Wade answered quickly. The cops looked at each other and didn’t move. “Cale,” Wade exhaled to me softly, “I had high hopes that you and I would have a low-key relationship. It hasn’t been turning out that way. It’s disappointing to me. Now I’m in a situation where I have several imponderable circumstances and no way to resolve therm.” He said, “Tonight something happened. Somebody bled enough for an army. But I still don’t have a body, I still don’t have a weapon, I still don’t have a perpetrator, and as a witness you’re a bit on the unreliable side. But I guess you know that. There’s nothing I can do except take blood samples and a statement. In the case of your statement, I’d rather not have it. It’s the kind of thing where I’d like to pretend something never happened but I can’t. You know what that’s like.”

“Yes,” I said quietly, “I know what that’s like.”

“Yes,” he said, “I suspect you do.” He got up. “You were easier to deal with,” he said, “when you were paralyzed with guiIt. What’s gotten into you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t still paralyzed with guiIt. But not so long before, before I saw a woman with a knife and hair as black as a gash in the day, I didn’t care who was my spy, or who thought I was on whose side of things, or how many times Ben Jarry died. I didn’t care if I was crazy or sane, or dreaming or awake, or alive or dead. Now I just wanted to see her again, and take her next time, Spanish or no Spanish, knife or no knife, and seize the chance to save Ben Jarry’s life once, for the once in which his neck had snapped on my account. That redemption was worth any measure of sanity or, for that matter, my life itself. Wade had to have seen some of that.

“Tell me when you figure it out,” he said.

“What about the woman with the camera?” I said.

“Stay away from her.”

Like hell, I thought.

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 . . .

I forget. I forget the answer. It’s a good punch line and now I’ve forgotten it. I heard it in New York, I’d been living in a tenement where I had met a woman with whom I fell in love. She loved me for a month in return, until it interfered with her work. She was involved with a cadre of political outlaws. They met in secret among the tenements of New York and left their meetings carrying in their heads little bits of America One, to which they gave voice in the streets. I wasn’t one of them, I had never been one of anything. I distrusted being one of something; I knew it wasn’t real, I knew the only oneness that was real was my own, being one of me. I met Jarry relatively soon; the woman whom I loved said to me, You’re lucky, you met him relatively soon. She said, I was involved in the cadre eighteen months before l met him. He traveled from cadre to cadre; as the leader he was the only one who knew all the cadres and who knew all the people who carried bits of America One. He was the only person who could put all the bits together if he wanted. Of course he didn’t seem particularly commanding at all. My height, with light hair and skin like alabaster, translucent and white-blue; the expression of his eyes was elfin and amused. He was the sort of person who shook your hand and smiled and judged you all at the same time. Are you interested, he said to me then, in becoming one of us? I’m not good at becoming one of things, I explained. How long, he said, you think you can be neither one nor the other. Then he said, There’s a tree by a river, it’s out west. A man comes to the tree and looks up and sees among the 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 . . .

Damned if I can remember. It was a good line, but later, when I thought about it, l wasn’t sure it really proved his point. I sort of thought it proved my point.

I was arrested with the cadre one night. I was there because she was there. The others in the cadre never really trusted me, but I had resolved that if I was not one of the cadre, neither was I one of those who arrested us. In the questioning I did not identify Ben Jarry. They tried many tricks, little things to slip me up. They knew Jarry was their man but they couldn’t pin him down, they couldn’t connect him with us. They sent me to jail with the others. They split up the cadre so everyone was in a different place. They sent me to Montana-Saskatchewan I think, they charged me with having a bit of America One in my head. I’d been there over two years, alone, without much contact with any of the other prisoners, who seemed to be there for similar reasons. The men who ran Bell Pen kept such contact to a minimum. I managed to make friends with a man named Judd who had an ingenuous expression in his eyes and the laugh of a little kid. He said he didn’t even know what he was in for, and if he was anything like me, I could believe it. His fatalism about his imprisonment struck the rest of us as something almost angelic; he did not seem to know malice. One day he was a little sadder, and at dinner I put my elbows on the table and said, to cheer him up, Well Judd, I heard a good one not so long ago. There’s a tree by a river, it’s 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 . . .

Nobody laughed. Nobody said anything. I looked around, and then I knew they had all heard it before, and they had all heard it from the same place. And I looked at Judd and he had this awful smile on his face, and I knew he had heard it too. And I looked in his eyes and he didn’t look so ingenuous anymore, he looked like a man who knew malice. And I knew he wasn’t a prisoner at all. He got up from the table and smiled the whole time and walked away. I never saw him again. What Ben Jarry and I had in common after all was that we were both stupid enough to repeat the same joke to the same wrong person.

The other prisoners just sat looking at me. Later I would be astonished to learn how many of them thought I told the joke on purpose, how many of them believed I had just been waiting all along to finger Ben Jarry.

I waited in my cell all night, eyes open, for them to come get me. After two days passed I had almost convinced myself that a joke could mean nothing, as it had meant nothing when I told it. I heard it years ago, I said, when they finally brought me in for questioning. I heard it from my grandfather, who told it all the time when I was a kid. Everybody’s heard that one, it’s a common joke.

It’s not a common joke, they said.

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 . . .

I don’t remember. Since that day I haven’t been able to remember; the bit of America One in my head was the punch line to that joke.

But then was then and now is now, and after the night in the back room of the library there was nothing in my head, no punch lines at all but Spanish words and a trace of the voice that carried them. And after I heard those words and the voice that carried them there was nothing but more such words; I found pages of them. I found them the next day and it didn’t seem like an extraordinary coincidence; instead it seemed like perfect. The fog that morning hung like snow on the tall empty skyscrapers of Los Angeles and the gnarled little bridges that joined them a hundred feet above the streets. Men were there bright and early to clean up the archives, slopping wet mops on the dry carnage of the previous night and smearing the floor into a rusty red, packing up the manuscripts that were streaked with blood. The idea, I suppose, was to eliminate everything but the trace of a voice speaking Spanish words in my head. I came in as someone in a gray worksuit was pulling down the offending volumes from the shelf and loading them into a box. I took the box from him and took the manuscripts from the box and put them back on the shelf. He blinked at me in stupefaction. What do you think you’re doing, I said. We have instructions to confiscate this material, he answered. I don’t give a fuck what your instructions are, I said. You can clean up the floors but you’re leaving these manuscripts. He shrugged and signaled his crew, and they picked up their mops and pails and left.

Then I began going through the manuscripts strewn at my feet where I’d fallen asleep the night before, and there it was; and as I say, it wasn’t much of a surprise. It was natural it should have been there for me just as it was natural she should have been there in the archives or on a passing beach as seen from the deck of a boat. Of course it hadn’t been there before, and it wasn’t even a manuscript so much as a sheaf of papers; but it was ageless like all the rest of it and splattered with blood like the rest of it. In fact it was more splattered than the rest of it and that made sense too. The paper was dry and brown and the writing was faded. It was a thin collection of maybe fifty or sixty verses and poems. I sat in the chair and read them the rest of the day. Some of it was hard to make out because of the blood and the faded words. All the pieces were concerned with one subject, and anybody could recognize her immediately, the hair the color of night and the rage to match, and her mouth the color of Ben Jarry’s blood. He wrote of her eyes as having the opaque rushing depthlessness of the blind, like the color of white skies and seas meeting at some point in the distance. The author said nothing of her body, just as her body when I had seen her had said nothing of itself: it was all about a face that was ignorant of its own image. When I finished the poems I realized I hadn’t been breathing; I was high-tuned and frozen like a thief in a room with a single way out, and through the doorway of escape come the footsteps of capture. It didn’t even occur to me—well, maybe it occurred to me but not seriously—that there could ever been another woman in another place or time with raging gunpowder hair and such eyes. That these poems hadn’t been here before this dawn was insignificant, except in the ways it was perfect. Finally the poet described the rorschach of her tongue and the accent of her past, the language of topsy-turvy question marks and its languid lustful music. He never understood Spanish either but he knew it when he heard it, and he preferred it to the broken English with which she sometimes violated the prison he made for her from his dreams. If he loved her, he never said. If he made love to her, he never told of it. If he lied about her, I would have known it. But someone knew her and said so, and somewhere left me his poems of it, written of her in a place where or when the woman I had seen could never have been.