Rubicon Beach

by Steve Erickson

  I was computing an equation one night in my room at my desk when everyone else was sleeping, and there it was. I shouldn’t have been startled: it was the twentieth century. Mathematics was new. It shouldn’t have startled me that there was this other number no one had ever found. It was there between nine and ten. Not nine and a half or nine and nine-tenths, not the asteroids of ten or nine’s missing moon, but a world of a number unto itself. For the next year I tried to compute the moral properties of this number; it was not the number for justice or desire, or avarice or betrayal. It was the number of an altogether different promise made from an altogether different place. No field or plain had ever sung it. No dream or memory had ever known it. I told no one of it, not yet.

  Young “John Michael” fell in love with Leigh the second time he saw her only because he was incapable of so unequivocal a response to anything the first time; it was also one of those rare instances when he remembered a real life event with such statistical certainty. Jack Mick/John Michael had never gone with a girl, discouraged by his wiry slightness and the dark Indian quarter of him which he supposed would frighten the creamy girls of Chicago. Leigh was in fact attracted by this lndianness. She was the creamy daughter of a district judge and had scandalized her family by becoming a Red. Her cadre worked out of the shack of a newly failed boat-building operation on Lake Michigan. Jack/John saw her distributing leaflets one morning to eight hundred laborers in line for three jobs who watched her with open mouths. It wasn’t what she said to them, they had heard that before, it was the gold of her, as though in the windblown flame of her hair was the transience of their luck, the flight of their futures. They would have ridden her hair to other births, somewhere out west, where there was no history. “Ah, utopia,” the boy said when she handed him the paper, and he nodded knowingly. “Go back to your books, college boy,” she answered, and took back the leaflet. But it meant, of course, she knew who he was.

  He asked her out twice and twice she refused. The third time she said, “I want to drink whisky tonight. Come if you’d like.” He said, “It’s not legal,” and she laughed and walked away. He followed and she led him to a blue speakeasy down a back flight of steps where the patrons drank and danced to Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines playing “West End Blues,” and she barely paid attention to him. She got a little drunk and the two of them stumbled down the street under the eyes of the cops until they arrived at the brownstone of her father and mother. He had assumed she no longer lived with her father and mother. “I assumed you wouldn’t get along with them,” said Jack, “on account of the politics.” She laughed again. “They decided I’d only be wilder on my own,” she said. “Besides Daddy has a soft spot for his princess.” She leaned into the front door beneath the light of a gas lamp; up the street the iceman dropped a white glassy block from the back of his truck. She looked at the Indian virgin in hot silence. “What now?” he finally said, his mouth dry. “Utopia,” she answered, and opened the door and pulled him in. “But your parents,” he said, and she curled her lip and sneered, “College boy.” The seduction took place at the bottom of her father’s stairway, her claws predatory and her moans provocatively unrestrained. When it was over she laughed, “You do it like a bourgeois. Tenderly.”

  Nothing but trains. I moved into the far wing of one of the outer dormitories and stared out my window at the convergence of tracks. I went with Leigh to her political meetings and met her political people. “This is a college boy,” she told them. For utopians who espoused a brotherhood of man, they had impressive reserves of contempt. Later she asked what I thought of them and I explained I wasn’t a political person. Everyone’s a political person, she said. I attended the speakeasies, new subversive that I now was. Sometimes Leigh made love with me and sometimes she didn’t. Let’s say she never did me any favors. She got it when she wanted it. She took it till she was full of my Indianness, till she had drunk the quarter of my juices that came from the underwater cave of my mother. I went mad for her. Sleeping alone I slumbered into Leigh-madness and woke one night to the black roar of trains and the knowledge that this madness, it was my new number, beyond desire. Beyond justice. The communication of the maternal blank of my past with my most passionate dream, the most untouchable part of my integrity. What I felt for her was the new place beyond nine; when I entered her I was on a far journey into what I was capable of being. I was the anarchist of passion in an age when passion was a country.

  Pop and I got into it one night in the city. We were supposed to meet at Gene the Wop’s for supper, off Clark; I was late and didn’t arrive until he’d finished his meal. He glared at me as I walked in. I also smelled of bourbon. “You’ve been in a speakeasy,” he whispered. “I thought you’d changed your mind about prohibition,” I answered, and all he said was, “Law’s still the law.” Then he saw some of Leigh’s handouts I had with me. “Oh you’re a bolshevik now,” he said. “No,” I said, and forlorn pain shot through me because I thought of her and wished I was a bolshevik, I kept thinking I’d gladly be one if it got me Leigh, and yet the fact was that, for some reason inside me I couldn’t understand, I wouldn’t be one, glad or any other way. From there on Pop and I just began yelling at each other across the table, and the more I thought of Leigh the worse it got. Finally he just pushed away, stood up and put on his coat, and walked out without a word; it was the last conversation we had in a while, until my uncle died.

  In the face of the Depression, as he struggled to save his paper, in the face of his estrangement from his son as he struggled to save his family, Jack Mick Senior received a letter one day from Bart’s wife, Melody. By now Bart was nearly sixty. The early sexual disappointments of the marriage had come to be, after ten years, profound failures as his wife, past thirty, lived in the late afternoon of her fertility. “These things never mattered to me,” Melody wrote, “but he doesn’t believe this.” She was frantic. He drank all the time. “There’s one soul prohibition never saved,” Jack said bitterly to Rae. “I can’t continue with this much longer,” Melody went on. “I don’t know what to do.” Two months later she left him.

  The last time Leigh and Jack made love it was at twilight on a cold May day down by the water, where she unzipped and straddled him, her coat pulled around her neck and a flurry of revolutionary announcements flung from her fingers. “Damn you,” she snarled in his ear when they had finished, and he knew by the way she looked at him as she left that he would never have her again. In the subsequent nights he continued to wake to the black roar of the trains and the despair of an irretrievable connection with her; and he would throw the sheets from him and go to his dark window naked, erect and aroused, standing in the window and pressing his whole body against the glass so as to freeze the black roar of his veins. He supposed he could put out the fire this way. To the tracks below, to the country beyond them, he called her name, and the hardness burst beneath him, the wet white of him rivering off into the beyond country; and he called her again. Later he could not remember how long he stood there or how many times he said it.

  On the day of John Michael’s commencement Bart died, some six months after Melody had left him. The father and son accepted a mutual truce long enough to journey to Milwaukee, where they and Rae spent the afternoon with Bart’s daughter and her own children. Most of these hours were taken up with a general discussion among members of the family about the tragedy of Bart’s end and his awful second wife. Bart’s awful first wife—that is, his daughter’s mother—went unmentioned. Jack Mick Senior did not comment on any of this except once when he interrupted a rather euphemistic autopsy report to say, “Medical complications due to kidney disorder hell: the man drank himself to death.” After that the entourage traveled to the mortuary together amidst the continuing castigation of Melody Lake. The mortuary was small and filled with light; the open casket was at the front. The family filed in and there in the corner of the room, in an empty row, Melody sat sobbing with such a spastic grief that John Michael couldn’t imagine
she would ever stop. Her face was invisible in her hands and she choked with desolation, gasping. The family stood watching in cold mortification.

  And I was looking at her, and I was thinking that someone crying like this could never stop, and then I saw my father walk over to her and touch her gently on the shoulder and just rub his hand back and forth on her arm, over and over. I guess my cousins were stunned. My mother’s eyes had that way-back look in them. And my father stood there a long time, rubbing her shoulder over and over, not saying anything as she clutched the bottom of his coat and held on. It was the greatest thing I ever saw anyone do for any one. He didn’t care whether the family liked it or not. It didn’t matter that the last of his brothers was gone, well of course it mattered, it mattered in that he’d lost everything of his childhood, but it mattered a little less than the fact there was this stricken woman alone in an empty row who needed the mercy of the living to survive the judgment of the dead. And my father stood there alone with her, and all I wanted was to know that sometime in my life I would do something as good. “She gave him the worst moments of his life,” someone said to him later. “She gave him the best too,” he answered. That night we sat in our house by the fire where I had found the two brothers so stunned on that morning years earlier, returned from the west; and my father remembered all the nights they had sat there, back to when I was an infant sleeping in a bed by the heat, and they talked about the war and whether we’d be getting into it or not and how Jack Johnson lost the heavyweight championship of the world. Now on this night he said to me gently, “Go easy on the drinking, son,” thinking I guess of our argument in Gene the Wop’s and how I had smelled of bourbon. I flushed with shame. “I will, Pop,” I said. We had fights to come; we were still different. But not on this night.

  On the last morning of her life Leigh got into an argument with Jack about his father. She dismissed the stories Jack Senior had printed in his newspaper about the Klan and the Indians as mere bourgeois reformism, the last throes of a dying society trying to resurrect itself. “My father,” the son answered, “is worth three of you.” Walking away she said, “Go do it to yourself, college boy.” She said it without her usual malicious gaiety; the scorn was bottomless.

  He wasn’t in college anymore anyway. He was in town trying to get a job. Since everyone was losing jobs, he didn’t have much luck. There had been a riot at the market two days before with people nearly killed by the police; on this morning there were rumors that unemployed workers were building a barricade of blocks pried from the brown stones along the street. All Clark Street was brownstones with holes. Men passed the stones down a line to those mortaring them into a wall in the middle of the road. He could hear the pickaxes chiming all the way up the block; by that afternoon the wall was a man’s height and ten feet long. For a while he sat on some steps with other passersby and watched.

  At some point he looked up and there was nothing but police.

  The sun was burning and rows of police stood snapping sticks in their hands, and the men building the wall in the middle of the street began raising their heads, looking up at the police and dropping their arms to their sides. There were many people just watching, children with their faces between the rails of the fences along the walkways and old women with yellow sashes around their waists, stopped in midstroll. Jack had an idea that there was some zone where the police couldn’t touch them, those like himself who weren’t political. But there wasn’t any zone like that. The police sealed off the street and everything stopped, the air itself stopped; and when Leigh suddenly appeared in the middle of it, it was as though her auric flash was a signal for everything to begin.

  Years later he had a vision that, right before the fall of the stick across her head, she turned to him there in the street where she stood and called to him. “I love you,” he heard her say in this ludicrous vision. Then there was the splash of her hair on the ground and the gush from the deep red well of her face.

  There is a number for everything. There is a number for defiance. There is a number for the lethal vertigo one feels when a bash of brain matter floods the inner ear. Once I would have supposed that the number of every demise was nine, including the demise of the New World. But then I became older, and found it wasn’t so.

  And she was forty-one or -two; I was twenty-two or -three; and I saw her on the tracks that night, the moon too full for my eyes to play any sort of trick. For a moment he thought he was back in the college dormitory, looking out the window at the trains of the city; he woke many nights this way, gripped in the six-month fever of Leigh’s death: the fever hadn’t stopped when he came home. Absently he reached his fingers to his brow to feel the bandage that hadn’t been there for at least four months. Absently he clutched his nose and his mouth so as not to taste or smell the smoke of the riot. Then he remembered he was in his father’s house, and that was when he looked out the window and saw his mother on the tracks that ran by the road down which Bart and Jack Senior had returned from the west many years before. She just stood on the track staring at the fields; and out of the red moon of the east, as though it were a tunnel, the train was suddenly there, insidious and silent. John Michael screamed to the glass. The train screamed back.

  She must have heard it, he thought later. But then perhaps she hadn’t. Over the following three days, as men paraded up and down the rails looking for a sign of her, while his father stood devastated among them, hands in his hair, the son crossed the rails to gaze out at the same fields that had entranced his mother and, with a chill, every bit of the down on his flesh standing on end, considered the hush. The hush. Where is the music? he thought to himself: The music’s gone. Did she come out here that night to hear it? Did, in the face of everything’s decomposition, she wish to hear the music of dreams, when no one could dream anymore? The son’s guilt was immense. Had I only kept it a secret, he anguished; had I only never spoken of it. Then he wondered if she had heard it; and wherever she had gone, back through the underwater cave of herself, he wondered if she had taken it with her.

  He came to the field every day after that, but the music was gone for good. His father languished awhile, then slowly took himself back to the tasks of the newspaper. The fervor of the past was gone for good; but John Michael didn’t ask that everything be the same as it was: he would accept it that anything could even be similar. He thought of changing his name back to Jack Mick Junior and decided this would somehow make it worse. His father, as he had done in the case of Bart upon comforting Melody the prodigal wife, would not insult or demean his tragedy by calling himself a victim. For his father the concept of victimization would always belong more appropriately to others of even more unfathomable tragedies. Intuitively Jack Mick Senior understood that the greatest tragedy was not the loss of Rae but of the music she had taken with her, even though it was music he had never heard or perhaps even believed. In the sense that she was the last to hear the music, John Michael thought one day, my mother was the last American. In the sense that he must now survive never having heard the music at all, John Michael thought, the last American is my father.

  One day in 1937 he had walked from his house a mile down the track to catch a ride on the same train he had watched from the dormitory window of his Leigh-madness, the same train he had watched take his mother. He rode it across the state about a hundred miles, which was ninety-nine farther west than he had ever been before. He came to a wide river that ran to his left. He believed he should have come to this river about ten years earlier. He walked down the beach looking to the river’s other side.

  He fell asleep on the banks of the river in the last light of the sun and woke that night to a sound he’d never heard. He couldn’t tell if this sound came from the sand beneath his head or from the river, or from the other side of the river or the very air itself. The night was cold and, pushing the palms of his hands into the sand, he shook his head slowly to the sound, rousing himself and saying, or perhaps someone said it to him, Nothing swims in the d
ust.

  Or perhaps someone said it to me; and I looked up and there were men carrying torches, and debris scattered over the sand, and the dark form of something in the middle of the river. Its sail draped the beach and the remains of the ship washed to shore bit by bit: there’s been a wreck, he told himself. And then, standing there by his head, he saw the little girl gazing at him intently, a little girl who seemed to belong to no one. She wore no shoes and had a tangle of black hair that fell over her face; she was a very serious little girl, three or four years old, and she didn’t smile. She looked as though she might be Indian. I don’t know if she saw me looking at her in the dark, I could barely open my eyes. I managed to say, “Did you speak to me,” but when I opened my eyes again she was gone. I felt the weariness of this far journey and slept some more.

  When I woke again none of it was there, no men with torches, no ship in the river, no sail on the beach. I was still exhausted. I finally shook myself to consciousness in the earliest hours of the morning; I felt a rush of anxiety about Pop. I can’t be worrying him like this, I thought to myself he has nothing but me to lose anymore. The red moon was out, its tunnel gate having shifted to the other side of the river. In its red light I was surprised to see small footsteps leading across the beach to the water; I had figured the little girl for a dream like the rest of it. But there were definitely the steps, and I followed them to the river and at the edge I heard it again, the music I’d never heard before. I had figured it for part of the dream too. It was right there, coming from the other side of the river; and with the same chill as when I’d stood staring across the tracks that morning after my mother had gone, with my hair standing on end just the same way, something occurred to me. It occurred to me that this particular music was the music of The Number, the number and music of the black distant part of me beyond desire, beyond justice. This number was no mad fancy then, no theoretical conceit, it was out there, beyond the river that stunned the fathers and uncles of America into incommunicable silence; and it also occurred to me, standing where the small steps of the Indian child vanished, that my mother had heard this music too the night she left, and that at this very moment I was very close to that which had taken her. Confronted by it, courage fled. Before I bolted I listened once more to the farthest beach where the red tunnel ran to the end of the night; and it sang to me. It sang.