Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

The boy was a bit of a runt, compared to his father and uncle, both barrel-chested and filling rooms. It was supposed his size derived from the Indians on his mother’s side. His hair had the coarseness of his mother’s and the lightness of his father’s. His temperament was his mother’s stony inscrutability, into which, as his father said, one dropped words and did not hear the splash for days. When the boy was seven the father noted, as did Jack Junior’s teachers, that his eyes were bad; the parents drove him into Chicago on a Saturday to get him glasses. As they left Chicago the blur that had accompanied him on the way in was transformed into a panorama of revelations: the blast of the lake in the distance and a great hubbub in the streets on behalf of a newly ratified constitutional amendment. Women carried on as men watched in silence from the doors and windows of the shops. Young Jack looked to his mother who smiled to herself. He looked to his father who looked to his mother and said something to the effect that he hoped her first contribution to democracy would not be the election of Harding. In her way she turned from the window with her knowing smile and answered without saying a word; in his way he smiled too, once she had turned back to the window. Jack gazed at it all through his heavy glasses, gladly bearing the burden of their weight in exchange for a thousand distinctions, colors that cut.

He had eyes of a blue that vanishes with infancy only to return a lifetime later with old age; in all the years between, the blue journeys to some unknown place, presumed dead and, upon homecoming, is received with some resentment as it lays out a treasure of sights the eyes can never understand. That the eyes of the boy retained the blue didn’t mean the blue never journeyed, didn’t mean he more sensibly deciphered its treasure; but it may have explained the numbers. Behind his large thick glasses the blue took the form of dual spheres, as though his eyes were two moons that had always been in the sky but had never been seen because they were exactly the sky’s color, and now they had fallen to hover before the face of a child. He was also a little hard of hearing. This may have explained the music.

I was out in the fields behind the house and I heard it. I don’t know how old I was, twelve or so; it was after Pop and Bart came back from out west. Part of the field was ours but a lot of it was no-man’s-land, where lived a few Indians the country tried to run off until my father made a thing of it in the paper. Not my mother’s people at any rate. It was early in the evening. The sun was down but there was still a cold light left, and from out of the ground came a music, cool and hazy and windy like the light, and in the music were a hundred numbers, sixes and sevens and threes waving back and forth in the sound of the light. It was the music and light of a person’s sleep, as when you dream in the morning and everything is very sharp except the background, people’s faces sharpest of all against back grounds that go nearly blank. There was a big burly Negro man who ran a mill down by a creek a couple of miles over the ridge, and in my dream when he laughed his Negro face was sharp and clear and the room behind him fell away utterly: he laughed a five. A deep full five. The light now in these fields was of that kind of sleep and the music of that kind of light. But no fives. Sixes and sevens and threes. Honestly I don’t think it was a dream when I heard that music; but honestly I have to say no one else heard it or admitted to hearing it. My mother and father hadn’t heard it. I asked Bart once and he hadn’t heard it. They didn’t laugh at it when I told them; l had never made up such a thing before. They knew about my numbers.

It was true he didn’t make up such things. Even as a child he didn’t imagine things; he never feared the dark. Moreover his talent with numbers was already clear; he mastered the basics of mathematical deduction by the time he was six, geometric principles by the time he was eight. By the time he was “twelve or so” he moved into the realm of calculative theory, with the fledgling University of Chicago watching him closely. His other intellectual capabilities were above average but not spectacular. He read occasionally but not feverishly; geography interested him but not history. So mathematics was his genius, and that he heard numbers in music and music from the earth did not alarm his parents. They didn’t wish to make his talent any more of a chasm between them than it already was. Therefore he did not ask them and they did not ask him to take them to the fields where he heard the music; if they were to go together and he were to hear it while they did not, the chasm would only be wider: they did not need to confront each other’s distance. Fully aware of his son’s genius, Jack Senior, who in all other ways encouraged it, did sometimes wonder at its usefulness and remark to his wife, “Be nice if he lived in the real world now and then.” She gave him that look, like in the motor car in Chicago on that day of her suffrage. She knew (he knew) the numbers came from her, from a place back beyond her being born, traveling up through her to the son as though she were an underwater cave, the sunken burial ground of the Potawatomi tribe, the Fire Nation.

It is interesting, given his proclivity, that everything in Jack Junior’s real world happened when he was “twelve or so,” “twenty-two or — three.” Later it drove his father a little crazy, a perfect example in the father’s mind of the exotic futility of the son’s abilities; this was a man who, every day of his life, checked the exactitude of the date on every page of his newspaper, who numbered his achievements by such dates, every memory recorded by a number of significant intractability. Ten. Thirty. One thousand nine hundred twenty-nine. On that date his newspaper announced the pending economic collapse of a hundred million lives. “Yes,” Jack Junior would remember later, “I was about sixteen.”

He and I were different in a lot of ways, and as we got older he got more and more like who he was and I got more and more like who I was. He always needed people around him, he was always taking them into his orbit; down at his paper he’d be mixing it up with the printers or whomever, his sleeves up to his elbows and his hands black from ink and blue from the metal filings beneath the first level of flesh. He put up with things for which, from his own family, he wouldn’t have had the patience; sometimes I thought he had more patience with those he employed than with those he loved. By the time I was nearly twenty I felt as though I had no patience for anyone.

If you’d called him a reformer or liberal he would have stared at you aghast. If you’d called him a crusader he would have been disgusted. Later after my mother was gone, close to the second world war, I’d hear people in bars call him a crusader. When they called him this it wasn’t meant as a compliment. But when I was younger, after I began hearing the music in the fields, I woke one night to a red glow over the ridge down by the creek; the Negro’s mill was afire. The Klan had come over from Indiana at the news that a woman in Gary had been affronted by a colored man in broad daylight. Given the broad daylight, you might have thought they’d have a better idea of who it was, but it probably didn’t matter; they picked on the first colored man they came across and the fact that he was in another state just made it all the more inconvenient in terms of legal prosecution. The Negro got out of it roughed up but alive. Pop ran about seven or ten stories on it and got copies into Gary. He shamed two states into extradition proceedings. He was always running stories about the Indians too. But call him a crusader, he had no use for it.