Rubicon Beach (8 page)

Now we roared up one of the smaller canals and the boat man cut his engine. The girls had already been at work. On the sand I could see the imprint of couples. The tide came in and went out and the imprints were filled with white foam, so the sand was spotted with the wet white pictures of lovers. The sun was down when he dropped me off; his farewell wasn’t exactly profuse. Ten feet from me there was nothing left but the noise of him. I was standing in front of a huge earthen house that was dark except for one gaslight coming from a front corridor. The house was arabic and like all Los Angeles houses it could have been buiIt anytime in the last five thousand years. As I walked up to the gaslight the sound of the boat disappeared completely and there was nothing but the faint din of the coast in the distance, the sound of the city buildings slivering through the stripped webbed trees. I got to the corridor which led to a door but off to my left were some steps upward and I took them. They led to a veranda. From there I could see the rest of the canal and some of the other houses; for a moment the water ignited from the sun as if someone had set a match to it and then went dark, a new fog drifting in and hanging on the fences like foliage. Creaking wooden bridges swung in the wind over the water between the houses. Three or four small boats were tied to shambling makeshift docks and someone was moving from dock to dock lighting the lanterns on the posts. After a while I could make out lights all over the lagoon, lanterns and gas lamps and a few fires.

I came down from the veranda and walked back out where the boat had left me off. The woman who’d been lighting the dock lanterns was coming my way in one of the boats, a torch burning in her hand. She sailed past me and then beached about fifteen yards away, where I could now see another dock in front of another house. We were separated by a small slough. She lit the lantern and got back in the boat, and I waited for her to see me. I called to her and she looked at me across the water. Who’s that? she said in a voice that didn’t carry very well. I’m from the city, I called. She said nothing but the boat came in my direction. The boat had no motor or oars; I couldn’t figure how she got it going where she wanted. About five feet from me I could make her out: she was blond with a small face and slight body, and she wore loose casual clothes, jeans and a blowzy top. She could have been any age between twelve and twenty-five. What are you doing here? she said when the tip of the boat touched the shore. I started to pull the boat up but she said, Leave it. She sat in the boat with the fire of the torch burning by her face, looking at me. There’s nothing over here, she said. “I’m looking for someone in particular,” I said. “About your height. Black hair, she might be Latin. She may not speak English.”

“Listen,” the girl said laughing, “I can manage the black hair and some words so nice you’d never know they meant nothing at all.” She said, “But I have the torch shift tonight and I don’t guess improvisation’s what you had in mind. Get in and we’ll see who we can find. Like I said, there’s nothing here anyway.” I got in the boat. I pushed off from shore and she watched me as we seemed to drift in exactly the direction she wanted to go. “You must be very undercover,” she said. “Whoever dropped you off out here didn’t want to be seen by nobody.”

“I’m not a cop,” I said.

She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter to anyone here if you are. Actually I assumed the opposite.”

“What?”

“Forget it. Your business with cops is your business.” The mansions of the park were gliding past us now, becoming more and more colossal. I could see into the houses where the tide flooded the lobbies and lights shone on the water lapping against the inner marble stairs. The first steps were covered with sea debris and the original drapes on the upper landings were rotted by the saIt air, hanging in tatters and bleached in color. Every once in a while we could hear low laughter in the dark and sometimes arguing. In the distance on the southern shore of the main canal was a huge structure sitting alone on a knoll. “That’s the old hotel isn’t it?” I said.

“Yes.”

I watched for a while, then I said to her, “Do you know the person I’m talking about?”

“There’s a woman named Lucia, up near the next river.”

“You think it’s her?”

“It might be her.”

“Are we going that way?”

“Eventually. I have another live or six lights.”

I looked around me. “Can I ask you something?”

She became impatient. “Not why am I doing this for a living.”

“Two questions, actually.”

We pulled into another dock and she leaned across the boat, bringing the torch within inches of me. With one sweeping motion she lit the lantern. “Well?” she said.

“How do you direct the boat?”

“I know the water,” she said.

“Were you born in America?” I said.

“No.” She waited. “Were you?”

“I’m sure of it.” We sailed beneath a row of overhanging trees and then into the lobby of the mansion where the woman named Lucia lived. The mansion was buiIt in an antebellum style. Inside the lobby were several very small fires burning in different wall alcoves; the light from them was dim. We sailed through some doors in the back of the lobby, and at the end of this second room I could make out the stairs. We bobbed around a little from wall to wall. For the first time she had to physically push the boat where she wanted it to go. Back here, she explained, the water’s unknowable. She got us to the stairs and I got out; it was impossible to be sure but my guess was the water came about a quarter of the way up the steps. She also got out and we pulled the small boat up the stairs to the top. We were standing in the dark and the girl called Lucia’s name, and when she didn’t get an answer we started down the hall. After a minute we saw some faint light coming from a room; she called Lucia again. I was thinking of her peering out at me from the dark corner here; I was looking for the flash of the knife but there was no moon, and the fires were too dim to catch the glint of it. Walking down the dark hall it occurred to me I didn’t really want to find her here. If she lived here then I would know the man at her knees was just another pimp for whom a little throat-slashing was not enough; I didn’t want to believe that. I didn’t want to believe the man at her knees was any common stranger other than Ben Jarry, because I needed him to be there, I needed to save his life. When I’d done that I knew I would free all of us, Jarry and myself and this Lucia; then he and I would be through with each other. Then she and I would be just beginning.

Lucia! the girl said, and we heard something from the room with the light at the end of the hall. A woman’s voice and a Spanish word.

We got to the doorway of the room. There was a large tousled bed and the threads of a canopy hanging from the posts. A white matted rug was on the floor and wallpaper ran down the sides of the room like brown water. A small dresser was directly opposite us, with a mirror.

In the mirror I caught the momentary dark reflection of someone’s black hair. There was a movement to my side, I saw it out of the corner of my eye. I turned and lurched for it, my hands in front of me to catch the blow of a knife.

Lucia, said the girl.

Lucia said something in Spanish.

The woman called Lucia indeed had black hair. She wore a black robe. But she was ten years too old and her hands were one weapon and one victim too empty. She looked at me like I was crazy.

I stopped and stared back at her. Then I looked at the other girl. She looked at both of us, and Lucia said something else, or maybe it was the same thing she’d said before.

Not your Lucia? the girl said.

She said something to Lucia and while they talked a moment I went back into the hall. I waited for the girl to come out. When she did she said, Sorry. That’s it for Spanish women with black hair, at least around here.

I knew it wasn’t her, I said. I’m glad it wasn’t her.

The girl shrugged and we headed back for the stairs. She sighed and said, I’m going to have to take you up to the Rossmore. That’s the best place for you to catch a ride back to town. If I put you back where I found you, you’ll never get anywhere.

I have one more favor to ask, I said to her.

“What’s that?”

“Take me out to the old hotel. You can drop me off there.”

She shook her head. “I can`t do that, mister. I’d help you out if I could, I’ve tried to help you. But that hotel is
out there
, and I don’t just mean the distance. There are people who have been in that hotel for
years
.”

She wasn’t going to change her mind. We got to the stairs and dragged the boat down the steps; I was in front pulling the boat behind me, and she followed. I feIt bad that she didn’t catch on. She had tried to help and she trusted me. I got the boat in the water and she was three steps behind me. I got in the boat and looked over at her, and she reached out her hand.

I pushed off alone. She stood on the steps watching me drift away. In the dim light of the moon she seemed even younger, childlike, which she had not seemed before. It took her several full seconds to figure out I was leaving her there.

I’m sorry, I said. I heard my echo in the dark and on the water.

You bastard, I heard her say.

I said, I’m sorry. But I have to get out to that hotel.

You don’t know the water, she said.

I’ll bring the boat back, I called to her.

Don’t fucking bother. You come back and I’ll fucking slit your throat.

So I’ve heard, I said. I pushed my way out into the lobby and then glided toward the doorway. She stood in the distance on the stairs as though at the back of a cave, the water black and wounded with occasional light. You don’t know the water! she shouted. I nodded and turned a corner, and she disappeared from view.

I emerged from the house and floated out into the canal. She was right of course; I didn’t know the water, and all I did was meander aimlessly between currents. Finally I got myself to the nearest of the docks where I tore off one of the posts that was lit at the top. I doused it in the canal and pulled it back into the boat with me. It wasn’t flat enough to use as an oar but it was ten or twelve feet long and, kneeling in the boat, I could push myself along the shallow part of the river. I kept as quiet as I could, heading back up canal until I reached the main waterway from where we had originally come. I imagined a tribal horde of women suddenly emerging from the houses with weapons, to get back their boat and take care of me good.

I got to the southern edge of the lagoon and could see the old hotel plainly in the distance. But I could also see the girl was right: the hotel was far, farther than I’d thought, and now I was in some trouble. The water was too deep for the pole to do any good. I was somewhere between lagoon water and ocean water; the sea itself wasn’t a quarter of a mile behind me, and while the tide was washing me in rather than out, the island where the hotel stood was still far away. I was sitting in the dark staring into the distance and trying to gauge whether I had the remotest chance of making a swim for it when I heard a voice that sounded as though it were directly behind me. I turned and a large schooner was some twenty feet away, sailing silently by; someone on deck shone a light. Need a tow? came his voice, and out here on the flat water beneath the flat black sky his words carried as though he were sitting in my boat.

I’m trying to get to the hotel, I said.

He answered in an even lower voice than before, I can’t take you there, that’s off limits you know. I can tow you in to the southern harbor, though.

The southern harbor was not the one in Downtown but rather where the East Canal emptied out onto the coast, near the beach where I’d seen the Latin girl and Ben Jarry the first night. All right, I said. Toss me a line and I’ll follow you in.

The schooner edged up to me and this guy in a jacket and T-shirt tossed me a line. In the dark he looked as if he was probably friendly. Then we started on our way.

Everybody trusted me tonight.

Because the point was, of course, that since we were heading to the southern harbor rather than Downtown, we were going to pass the island with the hotel—if not right by it, then a hell of a lot closer to it than I was now. It’s possible the guy on the schooner suspected something. He insisted that I ride in his boat instead of remaining in my own, which dragged along behind us at the end of a rope. So the blonde in the mansion wouldn’t be getting her boat back after all.

I kept watching the island, waiting. When we had almost passed by, skirting its eastern tip on our way to port, I knew this was as near as I was going to get, about half the distance from where I had been before, out in the middle of the water. In another three minutes the island would be irrevocably behind me. I never even thought of not going.

In midair, when my hands were inches from touching the water, I could already feel the cold of it. Then there was the shocking black rush, and when I came up the first time I almost thought I might have heard shouting in the distance. But I went back under, and for a moment I saw her in the sea, where blood knows no stain but only rivers. That was only for a moment. I’ve been acting funny, I said to myself. I’ve been doing strange things.

I began swimming hard. The most difficuIt thing was maintaining my orientation, keeping my head clear as to where I was and where I was trying to get. After it seemed I had swum half an hour I began to panic; I feIt my effort collapsing. In fact I probably hadn’t swum half an hour at all. Probably it was more like ten minutes. I was treading and thinking to myself, I’m thirty-eight or thirty-nine; my body does not believe it. My body believes my face, which believes my heart, and it makes me an old man in the water, who believes his panic and exhaustion. For the moment I cared nothing about her, I cared nothing about Ben Jarry. This, I said to myself, maybe aloud though I don’t remember, this is as my damned traitor heart would have it. It would have me in my tower living in the gloom of moral death. I began to swim again. I swam against my face and my heart, I swam as though I had my face in one hand and my heart in the other, and I pummeled the sea with them in order that they would take me, against their will, where I chose to go.