Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

At the end of the fourth day the river came to a sudden stop. It was in the middle of a clearing, framed by the jungle but with a distinct circle of sky above them, as though they were in a crater. The sun was shining through, not in fluttering rays of light but in a big soft ball. Coba began to laugh. He couldn’t quite tell where the river went from here, unless this was a lake; he didn’t care if it went nowhere. He was delighted with the clearing and the big soft ball of sunlight. Hole in the river, he said, laughing at Catherine.

She just blinked at him and held the knife.

We’re through it, he said with satisfaction, though to where they’d come he didn’t know. He looked at her and had half a mind to risk the knife and get rid of her, just so he could get some sleep. Maybe later go into the jungle and see if he could find something to eat.

Then he feIt the slow swirl of the boat beneath him and noticed the landscape beginning to inch past. Then he noticed the river was beginning to move again after all. At about the same time he noticed these things, a rapierlike flight of pain launched itself from his thigh. He was horrified to think he might look down and find himself bitten by a snake that had, unnoticed, slithered on board. Instead his leg had a small pink mushy puncture, out of which an arrow still quivered before his eyes.

Another arrow sliced past his cheek, and he had barely distinguished the sound of a third when a new flight of pain took off from the side of his belly. Again he looked down; he had now been shot twice.

He flung himself into the cargo hold out of a rain of arrows. The river was picking up speed with frightening velocity; the new blur outside reminded him, rather foolishly, of subways in Europe and the way underground walls flew by. The sound of the arrows was like that of countless orifices of the jungle each taking in a quick breath. The river was flying and yet the arrows kept coming, which meant the banks were filled with barbarians; there must be miles of them, he thought to himself. The pain of his thigh had grown cold while the pain of his belly leaked a flood of red. Between the cold below his waist and the fire above it, he expected he would divide in two.

The next thing he knew, everything was still again. The sound of the arrows had stopped. For a moment he thought he had dreamed, but he still had an arrow in his side and an arrow in his leg; now all of him was cold. Nothing was on fire. He wanted the feeling of being on fire. He didn’t like feeling this cold. He feIt as though he were lying at the bottom of fear, waiting for someone to lower a rope. Then he realized something seemed sequentially missing from the last few moments; he realized he had passed out. For a moment he feIt great alarm at having slept, then great relief. He knew she was lying at her end of the boat in a torrent of red arrows; if nothing else he had outsurvived her. At least that, he said. He was wrongly cold. He wanted to go to sleep.

He looked up to see her walk around the corner of the cargo hold, stand over him and look at him.

There wasn’t a mark on her. Like the mosquitoes, like the vines. Fever inflamed him. She wasn’t smiling or superior. She was waiting. Ile looked again and she wasn’t there for a moment, and then she was. Damn witch, he cursed her; but it wasn’t that she disappeared and then reappeared, though that was the effect of it. He looked again, and then he saw it.

It was like the puzzles he remembered doing as a child, in which one tries to find a hidden picture in a larger picture: you look and look and suddenly you see a cat in the wall, clear as can be, though a moment before you hadn’t seen it at all.

They never saw her face. Not the Crowd, for a moment not the sailor, and not the jungle. They took her eyes to be the large fiery insects that buzzed among the reeds of the river. They took her mouth to be the red wound left by hunted animals or perhaps their own women each month. They took her chin to be the bend of a bough and her hair to be the night when there was no moon. She lived in a place where she did not know her own face; and where she did not know it, the jungle never saw it; identity was something known in a way utterly removed from the vessel that carried it. Here, far from the men who gave her face its beauty, she was impervious to the view of the jungle and everything in it.

Even the fever, he whispered. Even the fever doesn’t see you.

So she waited for him to die. The boat drifted along peacefully now. He bled and he bled. When he tired of lying in his blood he pulled himself out onto the deck; wrongly cold in the cargo hold, he thought he might snatch some warmth from a big soft ball of sunlight. But there was no big soft ball anymore. She did not slit his throat. She would let the cord wither on its own, so that the memory might wither too. It would leave less of a scar that way. As he shed his life on the deck of the boat she went through his things in a casual, practical way, sorting out odds and ends. She thought of casting his coins overboard, but that seemed spiteful and overwrought. She came upon his cards and his scarves. Layering the sturdiest and plainest scarf twice, she wrapped a seemly number of coins in it. Then she watched him some more.

The night passed. Before dawn of the fifth day something erupted from down inside him and filled his mouth and nostrils. He was astonished to notice that it was the smell he had first noticed four days before, the smell he had thought was of the jungle but which in fact was the smell of his own recesses.

His head shot up from the deck. He gasped for a huge gulp of air, his eyes wide. She walked up to him and, putting her foot under the biceps closest to his heart, rolled him off the edge of the boat. His eyes were still wide as he sank, staring up at her through the water. There was a bubble from him. In after him went the cards, queen of clubs and all. Deal, she said.

The westward river spat her out somewhere in northern Peru. Since she was deposited on the right bank rather than on the left, she went in the direction of Colombia rather than Chile; by such accidents whole lives are determined. Bogota was the first city she had ever seen, though all she saw were its lights in the night. She didn’t stay long, entering at sunset and crossing through the middle of town; by dawn she had already come out the other end, and it was behind her.

She continued in the same direction, to the coast west of Barranquilla, where she decided, at the edge of the sea, to turn in the direction of the sun. Since it was late afternoon and the sun was on her left, she followed the coast to Panama rather than to Brazil, where she would eventually have stumbled on where she had started. Continually walking along the edge of the sea, she approached, after two weeks and another three hundred miles, a river she easily identified as made by men. She was shrewd enough to understand the value of her gold. With it she bought food and passage on a barge, which exited the canal on the side of the Pacific Ocean and sailed to a small merchants’ port in the Gulf of Tehuantepec.

She lived on the beaches of the gulf for two months, sleeping in a hole she dug with her hands and covering herself with the sand that baked so hot in the day it kept her warm in the night. Each morning she got up as soon as the sun rose above the trees to get wood for a fire. She went down to the ships to buy food from the boatmen. She began to notice the way they looked at her; it was the way Coba had looked at her when he’d first come to the Crowd. One day she got up to get wood and kept on walking. She walked ten days until she finally came to the pyramids of southern Mexico. They gleamed a tarnished gold in the sun, and in the gaping holes pocked by the heat burned the fires of Indians. It may be that the pyramids of Mexico were the first thing to fire Catherine’s sense of wonder since the night she stood on the beach when she was three years old watching the husk of a dead ship. For a while she lived with an old Indian woman in one of the pyramids where she would pass the time strolling among the catacombs. There were ancient pictures on the walls that told stories, none of which she understood since she had never seen pictures before. Some of the pictures looked alarmingly like the treacherous watercreature. She refused to believe that there might be a whole species of watercreatures, rather she preferred to think the one she knew was an aberration of nature. Sometimes she recognized the pictures of suns and stars, of mountains and waters. One day she came to the strangest picture of all, which didn’t resemble anything she had ever seen. She couldn’t make head or tail of it; perhaps, she decided, it was the likeness of a peculiar kind of forest or maybe the huge city she had seen in Colombia. The picture looked like this: AMERICA.