Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

They were on a hill. Trees were behind them, across the road; they stood on a dirt patch overlooking a basin.

The basin was filled with a city bigger and stranger and more ridiculous than the city she had seen on her one night walking through Bogota. She’d never imagined there could be such a big and strange and silly city. It appeared to her a monstrous seashell curling to its middle, the roof beveled gray and the ridges pink where the clouds edged the sky; and the din was the dull roar of all shells, she remembered the roar, somewhere beyond memory aItogether, from when she was a child, the sound of the sea her father had told her. Coursing through the city were a thousand rivers like the rivers of the jungle, except that these were gray rivers of rock, some of them hurtling into the sky, carrying thousands of the automobiles like the one she had ridden in with the professor and his companion, like the isolated ones she had seen struggling across South American countrysides. From one end of the panorama to the other ran this city, and in the distance was a black line she recognized as the sea. Carved in the side of a mountain was a huge map like the maps of ancient Indians she’d seen on pyramid walls. The huge white map looked like this: HOLLYWOOD. “America?” she said to the driver, unconvinced.

The driver took a beer from the truck and opened it on the door handle. “Not just yet, sister,” he said with a shake of his head; and pointed west. “America.”

“But there’s nothing else out there,” she said in her own language, looking at the sea.

For the next three nights the five new immigrants lived on a mattress beneath the Pasadena Freeway. They were waiting for the moment when the driver of the truck would come and tell them it was finally time to cross into America. Every morning the driver brought them fruit and bread and water. Catherine knew this meant sooner or later the driver was going to want more money. She had one coin left.

The dawn of the first day she found a small white kitten among the trash around them. The kitten was a couple of months old. A mongrel snarled at the kitten as she cowered in an empty tin can; Catherine woke to the sound of it and drove the dog off. Catherine took the kitten in her hand and kept her close to her chest. In this small kitten’s eyes was a familiar glint of refuge Catherine could not place; in fact it was familiar from the reflection in the river of Catherine’s own eyes. It didn’t seem possible a creature so little and new to the world could already have learned to be so desperate, but had she thought about it, Catherine would have realized this was familiar too. When the driver came that day with the fruit and bread and water, Catherine pointed at the kitten. The driver was annoyed; an hour later, however, he returned with a small carton of milk.

The third night the driver came unexpectedly, and the lights of his truck swept across the underbelly of the freeway, the five illegals scattering to hide. When they saw it was him, he explained to one of the men who understood a little English, mixed with a little of the driver’s Spanish, that tomorrow they would indeed all be crossing into America. As Catherine had expected, the driver now demanded another payment for the final trip. The illegals looked at each other. We’ve paid you twice now, Catherine said to the driver; unsure of the words, he nonetheless detected the tone of insubordination. He looked at the Mexican who understood some English. The Mexican and Catherine had a conversation, a flurry of Spanish and jungle dialect, in which Catherine told the Mexican to tell the driver there’d be no more money until they had finally reached the American border. “America, money,” Catherine said in English, turning to the driver. “No America, no money.” She pointed at the mattress: “No America.” She pointed west: “America. America, money.”

“Yeah yeah, America money,” said the driver in irritation.

He gazed around at the others and when no one else said anything, the driver gestured. “Hey,” he said, “any way you want it.” He walked back to the truck and said, “Tomorrow we go to America. Be ready.” He said it with Coba’s easy cheer. The truck left and Catherine had a feeling it wouldn’t be back. The five of them went to sleep. Well we’ll just have to see what comes with morning, Catherine said to the white kitten. After the girl dozed off the kitten ventured on her own into the trash again, until she heard the howl of another dog. She hurried back to Catherine and stayed there.

But the truck did come back in the morning. By that time the illegals had been up and waiting four hours. Nothing was said; the driver simply got out and opened up the back flap and the five paraded in. The driver held out his hand; the old woman at the front of the line held out her money. Catherine, standing behind her, snatched it from her fingers. “America, money,” she said to the driver, and gave the currency back to the woman who watched with frightened eyes. The driver exploded with a furious epithet.

They drove through Chinatown into Downtown. At Wilshire Boulevard the truck turned west, winding past MacArthur Park where Catherine saw the lake glittering in the sun and people sitting on the grass. The roads and buildings were bigger than anything she’d seen since the jungle except the pyramids, but the people looked the same as they had in Mexico. Beyond MacArthur Park and Lafayette Park, the truck rolled to the corner of Wilshire and Vermont, where there was a great deal of traffic and a policeman stood in the middle of the intersection, giving directions in lieu of a broken blinking traffic light. On the corners stood pedestrians waiting to cross. The driver pulled to the side of the street and put the truck in park. He turned to his passengers in the back and pointed across Vermont Avenue.

“America,” he said.

“America?” they said.

They all sat gazing across Vermont Avenue as a stream of traffic lurched by. The driver sat patiently, letting them take it all in. Catherine looked across the street, looked at the other four passengers and then at the driver. Holding the white kitten to her chest, she started to laugh. The others turned to her as she laughed for several moments; when she stopped she said to the driver, “You think we’re imbeciles.”

“What did she say?” the driver asked the Mexican who spoke English.

“I said,” Catherine retorted without waiting for the translation, “you must think we’re imbeciles. This is no border,” and now she was becoming angry, “look at all the people just walking across. Don’t you think I’ve crossed enough borders by now to know one when I see one?”

“What’s she talking about,” the driver said with some agitation to the Mexican, who was also becoming agitated.

Catherine turned in the back of the truck and threw open the back flap. “Hey!” said the driver; and with her kitten and her scarf of one gold coin, she stepped out of the truck. She looked once to see if the others would follow; they were frozen in their places. She snorted with disgust. The driver was now out of the truck and coming at her, and as she stepped onto the sidewalk, she dodged his reach and ran for the intersection, clutching the cat to her.

She got to the corner and started for the other side. By now the driver was some yards behind her, torn between pursuit and the risk that the others might also leave the truck. Catherine stepped into the middle of the street and heard someone call her; it was the cop in the intersection. He pointed at her and yelled something, and suddenly she believed she had made a terrible mistake, this was a frontier after all, and the border guard had immediately identified her as a trespasser. She jumped back onto the sidewalk and looked at the driver, who was also backing away from the cop. Catherine turned from both of them and ran down Vermont Avenue, where she hid behind an electronics shop, people on the sidewalk watching as she fled.