Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

Sometimes people with faces the color of Coba’s came to the pyramids. They came in automobiles. By now Catherine had seen an automobile, moving isolated across empty terrain. But what she had not seen were the cameras the tourists brought; to her they looked like mysterious little boxes raised in ritual. One day Catherine met a couple. The man was a university professor in his late twenties and the woman with him was a postgraduate student. They spoke to Catherine in a language she didn’t understand, unlike any she had heard. They were fairer than even Coba had been. By now Catherine was tired of living in the pyramids, and she pointed up the road from where the couple had come in their automobile and asked, in her own language, which they could never have comprehended, if she could go back up the road with them. She kept pointing up the road and pointing at herself, back and forth. The man was absolutely amenable to this proposal; the woman didn’t say anything. They got in the ear and drove the rest of the day, Catherine in the backseat with her scarf of gold coins. They came to a hacienda where the couple was staying. Catherine assumed she would find a patch of dirt somewhere out by the house and dig a hole where she would sleep; the young professor, however, would have none of this. He kept pointing at Catherine and pointing at the house where he intended to have her sleep. The other woman looked off in the distance during this “conversation.” Catherine and the couple were together two days, continually driving up the same road and always staying at another hacienda or, as was the ease on the third night, a small hotel. By the beginning of the third day Catherine understood that the woman hated her. She understood that the man looked at her the same way the other men had. In the hotel in the middle of the night, as Catherine lay in a blanket in the entryway of the couple’s suite, she heard them have a terrific argument. She got up, took her scarf of gold coins and left. She walked up the road during the night and in the morning was still walking when a familiar automobile screamed past as though she weren’t there.

She continued through Mexico, living for a while in the back room of an estate outside Guadalajara, working in the kitchens of a territorial governor. She was surrounded by Indian servants and didn’t go beyond the large wooden doors that divided the kitchens from the dining room. Once, when she heard the sounds of many people in the dining room, she peered through the crack of the door at a large table covered with food, surrounded by elegant women and men. Sometimes the governor came into the kitchen to speak to the chef; Catherine had been there three weeks when the governor saw her for the first time. He pulled aside the Mexican woman who was in charge of the servants and spoke to her as his eyes watched Catherine the whole time. When the conversation was over and the governor was gone, the Mexican woman kept looking at Catherine with concern. The next day the governor came back into the kitchen and smiled at Catherine; he spoke again to the Mexican woman. After that the Mexican woman avoided the governor whenever possible, and the governor began coming back into the kitchens more often. The governor’s wife, a tall thin but not unattractive woman with light hair and a long neck, noticed this pattern as well. She also kept looking at Catherine and had her own conferences with the Mexican woman in charge of the servants. Catherine found herself assigned to chores farther back in the house, until she was confined to the laundry area and then the grounds. The governor developed an intense interest in laundry. He toured his grounds with new enthusiasm. His wife regarded Catherine with frosty resolve. There were more conferences with the Mexican woman, and the other servants watched this spectacle with amusement. Finally the Mexican woman came to Catherine. Go away, she said kindly. It’s not your fauIt, but for your own sake you should leave. Catherine didn’t fully understand all the words but nevertheless grasped the point. The Mexican woman drew Catherine a map of where to go; Catherine had seen it before. The map looked like this: AMERICA. “America,” the Mexican woman said when she handed the map to Catherine. She repeated it until Catherine repeated it back.

She fell in with a caravan of wagons and mules led by a gypsy couple with four small children. The caravan made its way up through Durango and Chihuahua, across the flattest emptiest lands Catherine had ever seen, beneath skies that chattered with starlight, so bright as to pale the luminance of her own eyes. In the lives of the gypsy couple the magic of Catherine’s face was prosaic. The caravans moved five hours in the morning, stopped four hours in the afternoon so the couple and the children could sleep through the heat, and then moved another three hours in the early evening. In the second week rains came, stranding the caravan where it stood for four days. For two months Catherine lived with the gypsies and crossed fourteen hundred miles of Mexico to the northeastern part of Sonora, where they finally came to Mexican Nogales, which stared across the border at Yanqui Nogales. “America,” the gypsy man said to Catherine. “America?” she said. She parted as she had joined them, a stranger after two months. Outside the border crossing she walked up to a man leaning on his truck drinking a beer and said, “America?” pointing at the ground. The man smiled. “America,” he repeated and pointed across the border. “America,” he said again, and opened his empty hand. When she gave him half the gold coins she had left, he looked at them curiously, squinted at her suspiciously, smiled again and shrugged.

That night, in the back of the truck with two men, a boy and an old woman, Catherine rode across the border. She heard a discussion between the driver and the border guard, the talk was good-natured and friendly and there was laughter between them. There was a protracted moment of silence, during which Catherine understood the surreptitiousness of her journey. The old woman was watching her, and one of the two men raised his finger to his lips. They waited in the dark. One man made a signal to the other that reminded Catherine of Coba when he used to deal cards, except that in this case it was not cards being deaIt. When the driver and the guard had finished their business there was more laughter, discreet and conspiratorial, and the truck began to move again. After three hours the truck stopped, the driver got out and came around to open the back. The six of them were in the middle of Arizona in a desert not unlike the Mexican desert Catherine had crossed for two months. They looked around them in the dark. “America?” Catherine said to the driver, pointing at the ground. “America,” he said and pointed to the western black. “America,” he said again and rubbed his fingers together. Catherine gave him another coin, and when he continued to hold out his hand, gave him another. He looked at the coins still askance but smiled slightly and shrugged again, and after the others had paid him they all got back in the truck, driving west.

They drove all night. What woke Catherine the next day was not the glimmer of light through the edges of the back flap but the din, unlike any din she’d heard since the river sent her and the sailor roaring through the jungle. When she woke to this din it was ten and a half months since Catherine had left the Crowd, ten and a half months since the day she had watched Coba murder her father. It was nearly beyond memory aItogether. Some hours later, in the early afternoon, the truck came to a stop. Catherine and the other four passengers heard the door of the truck open and close and the footsteps of the driver coming around to the back. He threw the flap open.

The five got out. Catherine got out last.