Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

When he woke she was gone. He looked up and his eyes followed his own arm to the end of his own hand, to the tip of his own fingers that had touched her; and they were empty of her. He looked around him and she was nowhere to be seen. The rain was pounding the sheIter furiously. He woke his wife and she too looked for Catherine. They checked the spaces between each of the seven other children. Catherine was nowhere in the nest. Frantically the father ran to the base of their hometree to look for his daughter. The sea was in utter turmoil; the sky was black and the ship in the distance opened the night like a hole. Leaping from tree to tree, he called her again and again. His neighbors watched as he seemed to dissolve from sanity. All he could remember was the night of the shipwreck fifteen years before and how instinctively Catherine had rushed from their home to the edge of the sea, watching a boat die in the distance. Yet now it was different. Now they lived beyond the edge of the sea. Only the efforts of the others kept him from launching his own small canoe out into doom; they pulled him hack and held him pinned and listened to him shout himself into exhaustion.

Over the course of the next few hours they noticed something. They noticed the boat turn dramatically away from shore, even as it was pillaged by the rain and the wind. By morning, when the wind was broken and the rain was a drizzle, the boat was in the distance, small and diminishing. That was when they found her.

She was high in the tallest tree, where she had often gone in hopes of sailing her forest home to another place. She had taken her long ferocious hair and wrapped it around the tree where it held like a bond of wet rope. There she’d signaled all night to the ship with a light no rain could extinguish, the incandescence of her eyes. In any other circumstances she would have understood this to be futile; on any other night, after all, her eyes would only have been two more stars in the sky. But on this night, a storm-blotted night of no moon, there were no stars. The ship steered clear. Six hours she swayed in the tree, holding her eyes open against every force of nature that conspired to close them. She was battered, thrashed, mauled, pilloried by a night that hated her. Her flesh was beaten bloodless cold. But she had stopped, on an approaching ship, the hearts of men, and thus had freed their passion to survive. The men of the Crowd had to hack through her black hair to free her from the tree. Though her eyes were wide open, she did not hear when her father spoke to her. They knew she was alive by the way her mouth quivered with frozen shock. Her father grabbed her and pulled her to his chest, and he cried into her chopped thicket of hair. It’s time to sleep now, he whispered, for young girls of crazy courage. They took her to the nest. He closed her eyes and she slept. The people of the Crowd watched her, while somewhere else sailors read the memory of her face, the compass of mazes.

Another day passed before the first signs of him drifted into the forest: splinters of the huge black ship whose luck had run out; a chest of scarves, coins, a deck of cards; the crescent fragment of a wheel by which the boat had steered. He washed up himself some hours later, at the moment Catherine, in the nest, woke from her recuperation. She sat up looking out to where several men pulled the sailor from the water. He was laughing. Flung twenty miles by the storm back to the site of his ship’s averted disaster, half-drowned by the water and cooked by the sun, he was laughing. He had a shock of yellow hair. They hadn’t gotten him from the water two minutes before he’d rattled off three obscene jokes, which the men of the Crowd might have found amusing had they understood Portuguese. By the time they laid him across the roof of a low breakwater he had sung several sea chanteys. He laughed himself out of consciousness. Gazing around him, he fixed momentarily, before blackness, on the eyes of the most extraordinary face he’d ever seen. These eyes watched him across the short distance of a small slough, from beneath hair so black that in his delirium he took it for a mass of feathers, fallen from malevolent black birds plunging somewhere to their doom.

When he looked at her she caught her breath. At that moment she understood he was the instrument of destruction. When he laughed it was the sound of destruction’s motor, and his hair was the static of its reWing. As he slept she looked in the river for her watercreature, pointed at the sailor lying in the sun and ordered the creature to eat him. The creature didn’t move until she jabbed at it in the water and it disappeared.

By evening the sailor was still there, uneaten by the watercreature. Catherine said to herself with grim dissatisfaction, It’s my own fauIt. I climbed the tree and tied myself to it with my hair. I signaled the boat all night when the sea and the sky had other plans for it. It might now be at the bottom of the ocean had I kept out of it.

I must take command of things again, she told herself. As night fell and the sailor slept, she crept across the fallen tree that bridged the slough over to the other side. At one point on the bridge she looked into the water and saw her creature beside her, dim in the light of the moon. She angrily kicked it with her foot, almost toppling in. On the other side she walked calmly to the sailor and kneIt beside him. She listened to him sleep, then she began to roll him from where he slept into the river. She would kneel on his back and hold him under the water with all her weight. When he was dead she would sail him out into the mouth of the sea. She would point him in the direction of the maze’s worst and most confused dead-end passage. His disappearance in the morning would be accepted by the Crowd with the same fatalism as his appearance.

He hadn’t touched the water, however, before she found him sitting up looking at her, one hand around her wrist. He had an amazed smile. With his other hand he reached out to hold her face, at which point with her other hand she hit him so hard his head would have made a complete pivot but for the stubborn intractability of his spinal cord. Given his mad-ness, he thought this fairly hilarious. He laughed as he had when he was pulled from the sea, throwing back his chin. She calmly beIted him again. He laughed some more and she did it again and again, each time without a flicker of fury anywhere but in the deep white lava of her eyes. She would have been content to beat him to death, but after she’d struck him five times he stopped laughing. His jaw tightened; he raised his hand to her and someone grabbed it.

The sailor looked up to see her father. The other men of the Crowd stood with him. We rescue this man from the sea, they said in their language, and he tries to violate our young girls. This bitch, said the sailor in his language, tried to fucking drown me. What happened? Catherine’s father asked her. I was trying, she explained, to drown him. I was trying to sail him into the maze’s worst and most confused dead-end passage. The men looked at each other confused and slowly let the sailor go. Catherine’s father looked at the sailor in rage, but it was compromised rage. He looked at his daughter in exasperation but it was compromised exasperation. But why? he said. That he is here, she said to him, is a consequence of what I have done: I bear a responsibility for that consequence. Her father nodded as though he understood her.

Catherine took her face back across the fallen tree to the other side of the water. The men dispersed. The sailor watched and smiled his amazed smile. You touch my daughter, said Catherine’s father in his language, and I’ll make you yearn for the thighs of the sea. The sailor answered back in his language, Some night, huh, captain? Catherine, on the banks of her river, beat at the reflection of her face twenty minutes, splashing in the water until her flock of savage hair lay wet and listless on her back.