Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

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.