Rubicon Beach (15 page)

The day Coba discovered he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was, Town Four was in the distance, a rim of dirty white lying on the green of the river. He watched the town with satisfaction and brought out from the cargo hold the last couple of pieces of fruit, saved for the moment when it was certain more food was on the horizon. Catherine sat at the other end of the boat watching in the other direction. You’re looking the wrong way, he called to her, and pointed to the town; she glanced at it briefly and silently turned back. He shook his head, relishing the day he wouldn’t have to put up with this crap anymore. He took out a sharp knife and cut the fruit, and tossed her a piece which fell on the deck at her feet. Someday this business will be over, he said to her, and you can have the long siesta on the fucking riverbed you want so bad. He feIt satisfied saying this because by now he was sure she understood him.

About this time he heard another voice.

He spun around to face in the direction of the town, which had now grown nearer. There, just a few feet from him, was another boat, somewhat smaller. Three men were in it. Two of them sat watching Coba idly while the third stood at the front of the boat, smiling broadly underneath a comic bushy mustache. Coba was confused; he looked at them and looked at Catherine and then back at them, wondering if he should rush to the girl and throw the cloth over her. Hi ho, said the man with the mustache to Coba; he tipped his hat to Catherine and called her señorita. Been on the river long? he asked cheerfully. Since the last town, Coba said; he laughed his laugh. Is this a welcoming party? he said, a bit more uneasily than he had planned.

Yes, that’s it, said the man with the mustache. A welcoming party. I’m sort of the town’s diplomatic service, let’s say. Trying to fix things before they get broken.

Uh huh, said Coba, still confused.

That’s it, said the man emphatically. Trying to fix things before they get broken, save everyone a lot of trouble. You, for instance. I’d like to fix you before you get broken, save you a lot of trouble. Give yourself a chance to take yourself out of the hand before it’s too late.

Coba did not like the gambling metaphor.

Now you can do one of three things, the man with the mustache explained with great joviality. You can sail into town, where a more formidable welcoming party is waiting for you and where you’ll find yourself put in a small jail and kept an undetermined period of time until it’s decided what’s to be done with you. Or you can sail back to the town from where you just came, at which place you might be given similar treatment if you’re very lucky. Or you can continue to sail downriver where it narrows, and where the jungle thickens so as to blot out the day, and long living vines throttle men slowly, and there are fast rapids, fanged serpents, fierce wild cats, mosquitoes the size of oranges with malaria that runs like juice, and natives the size of children that eat men the size of you. How’s that sound?

Coba said nothing.

The man with the mustache said, That’s about how I figured it sounded.

We have no food, Coba said in a dry mumble. We’re getting low on water.

Well now, that has to be your problem there, said the man with the mustache jauntily. During this discussion the other two men continued sitting idly in the boat, not saying a word but staring at Coba and Catherine with heavy lidded eyes. Now they picked up the oars and turned the boat in its place, starting back for town. We’ll be waiting for your decision, the man with the mustache said with a wave. Adios.

Coba sat a long time staring at the other boat as it grew smaller and the approaching town grew bigger. When he was close enough he could see that, as the man with the mustache had advised, a throng was waiting on the makeshift dock. They carried hatchets, machetes, guns and ropes. Coba decided he didn’t want to go there. He also knew he didn’t want to go back to Town Three. So, aimlessly, without any real command on his part, the boat slid past the town and approached the beginning of a more astounding lethal maze than any he had sailed. The entrance to the new jungle seemed to ooze darkness. He noticed there was a funny roar that seemed to come not from the ooze but from all around him, or behind him; and then he realized that it came from the town itself, and the roar was the laughter of the populace, ushering him off to oblivion. As Coba closed in on the jungle the merriment seemed to grow instead of fade.

Or perhaps it was mirth at another turn of events. For he turned to find that Catherine, who was still at her place on the other end of the boat, now instead of bonds was wearing two ragged rope bracelets, the two wrists having been separated from their captivity to each other. In her hands she held the knife with which the sailor had been cutting fruit.

Later in Los Angeles, when the dreams began, she would remember, but only vaguely, the way the knife felt in her hands on that boat on the river while she was watching him. No vengeance coursed through her, and she was nearly beyond hatred, she was beyond the color of it, into something white. Rather she was caught by the necessity of it, as though by slashing the knife across the pale of his throat she would sever herself from a cord, through which she had once been nourished with food and air but by which now, at the moment of a kind of birth, she could only be strangled. He was not this cord of course, but her memory of him was a cord attaching her to what and where she had been before; and she wondered if every fetus regards the cord with the same sense of betrayal, as an attachment to something black, before memory, nourishing one’s journey to something white, beyond hate, until the journey only stalls in another station, where the wait between departures is a thousand colors that never end.

For himself, one of the last of life’s revelations would be a smell in the jungle, a smell he’d never known, after a life in which the vocabulary of sensations seemed to have exhausted itself early. By the second day of the New Jungle it was all around him, this odor. It wasn’t fruit, it wasn’t a plant, it wasn’t the water, it wasn’t the fine blue mist of the air; it was human. Not human in that the jungle was filled with humanity, though it might have been, but rather in that the boat was always entering a small black round cavity where the leaves had the purple texture of flesh pulled over a mass of broken capillaries and the branches clotting the river passageway were webbed with veins. The boat drifted farther into the dark epidermal tissue of the jungle, the smell getting stronger and stronger until he was mortified to even consider hacking through it, he was convinced it would splatter blood across his eyes. Huge drops hung from the trees. At the other end of the boat Catherine said to him, The jungle mourns that it has to foul itself with your death. Shut up, he whispered to her, peering around him.

The jungle got blacker. Have I been swallowed by a monster? he cried. She answered, You’ve been swallowed by yourself.

The river was moving faster, the momentary beams of sunlight that fiItered through Hashing by more and more quickly. Where does it go? he said, not really to her. There’s a hole at the end, she explained, where the water runs in. You lunatic bitch, he snarled, rivers don’t have holes. He watched the river carefully and tried to make out what was ahead. Of course he constantly had to keep his eye on Catherine too, who still had the knife.

Since she’d gotten the knife they’d been at a standoff. Coba had the oar of the boat, the reach of which was obviously a good deal longer than a knife’s, the same oar that had cracked the head of Catherine’s father. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure but that she couldn’t throw the knife; it seemed a more complicated skill than a young girl would have mastered, but cutting loose with her hands the very ropes that bound them was a complicated skill as well, and she hadn’t had much trouble figuring that out. It was to Coba’s credit that he didn’t underestimate her. So he stayed at his end of the boat and she at hers, each of them waiting. By their second day in the jungle neither had slept. You think you can outlast me at this? he said laughing, his bravado becoming increasingly transparent since the welcoming party had met them at Town Four. Do you remember, she asked calmly, how you came to my village? You came to my village because one night I climbed a tree and tied myself to it with my hair and signaled your ship till dawn. I slept with my eyes open that night. You never know whether I’m awake or sleeping, I can sit as still as sleep (she demonstrated this by becoming absolutely still) or I can sleep while I appear awake. How will you know? It’s fitting that having saved your life this way, I’ll end it this way too.

You’re a witch, he said to her, his voice breaking. I did your people a favor when I took you from them.

By the end of the second day he began to feel the mosquitoes; by the third day there were citadels of them, hovering over the river ahead. He might have taken refuge in the cargo hold, a blanket covering the open side; but to have confined himself to this space, without the advantage of the long reach of the oar, would have compromised his position of defense against Catherine, who wasn’t touched by the swarms at all. On the third day the vines of the trees seemed to be wrapping themselves around his limbs; he overcame his fear of splattering blood and hacked his way loose, no sooner loosening one than becoming caught by another. Of Catherine the vines took no notice. By the end of the third day Coba heard the sounds of the thicket, the crunching of grass and a distant haze of drums.

On the fourth day the river was moving faster than ever. The hole in the bottom must be close, said Catherine. There’s no fucking hole in the bottom of the fucking river, Coba screamed. The boat was spinning wildly and he had to use the oar to maintain whatever control was possible. Frantically he was trying to direct the boat and steer it clear of the hungry trees while watching Catherine at all times; any moment she might hurl the knife at him. You know you can’t survive the river without me, he said to her, we’re in this together.

We’ve never been in anything together, she answered.

By now he hadn’t slept in three and a half days. He hadn’t eaten since the last of the fruit just outside Town Four. The drinking water was virtually gone. Catherine was also hungry and tired, but he could tell by looking at her that she was nowhere near his point of exhaustion; compared to him, she appeared refreshed. He knew she had dozed here and there, fooling him with that sleeping trick of hers. Also, he didn’t understand how she could have been so unscathed by the mosquitoes and the vines of the trees.

At the end of the fourth day the river came to a sudden stop. It was in the middle of a clearing, framed by the jungle but with a distinct circle of sky above them, as though they were in a crater. The sun was shining through, not in fluttering rays of light but in a big soft ball. Coba began to laugh. He couldn’t quite tell where the river went from here, unless this was a lake; he didn’t care if it went nowhere. He was delighted with the clearing and the big soft ball of sunlight. Hole in the river, he said, laughing at Catherine.

She just blinked at him and held the knife.

We’re through it, he said with satisfaction, though to where they’d come he didn’t know. He looked at her and had half a mind to risk the knife and get rid of her, just so he could get some sleep. Maybe later go into the jungle and see if he could find something to eat.

Then he feIt the slow swirl of the boat beneath him and noticed the landscape beginning to inch past. Then he noticed the river was beginning to move again after all. At about the same time he noticed these things, a rapierlike flight of pain launched itself from his thigh. He was horrified to think he might look down and find himself bitten by a snake that had, unnoticed, slithered on board. Instead his leg had a small pink mushy puncture, out of which an arrow still quivered before his eyes.

Another arrow sliced past his cheek, and he had barely distinguished the sound of a third when a new flight of pain took off from the side of his belly. Again he looked down; he had now been shot twice.

He flung himself into the cargo hold out of a rain of arrows. The river was picking up speed with frightening velocity; the new blur outside reminded him, rather foolishly, of subways in Europe and the way underground walls flew by. The sound of the arrows was like that of countless orifices of the jungle each taking in a quick breath. The river was flying and yet the arrows kept coming, which meant the banks were filled with barbarians; there must be miles of them, he thought to himself. The pain of his thigh had grown cold while the pain of his belly leaked a flood of red. Between the cold below his waist and the fire above it, he expected he would divide in two.

The next thing he knew, everything was still again. The sound of the arrows had stopped. For a moment he thought he had dreamed, but he still had an arrow in his side and an arrow in his leg; now all of him was cold. Nothing was on fire. He wanted the feeling of being on fire. He didn’t like feeling this cold. He feIt as though he were lying at the bottom of fear, waiting for someone to lower a rope. Then he realized something seemed sequentially missing from the last few moments; he realized he had passed out. For a moment he feIt great alarm at having slept, then great relief. He knew she was lying at her end of the boat in a torrent of red arrows; if nothing else he had outsurvived her. At least that, he said. He was wrongly cold. He wanted to go to sleep.

He looked up to see her walk around the corner of the cargo hold, stand over him and look at him.

There wasn’t a mark on her. Like the mosquitoes, like the vines. Fever inflamed him. She wasn’t smiling or superior. She was waiting. Ile looked again and she wasn’t there for a moment, and then she was. Damn witch, he cursed her; but it wasn’t that she disappeared and then reappeared, though that was the effect of it. He looked again, and then he saw it.

It was like the puzzles he remembered doing as a child, in which one tries to find a hidden picture in a larger picture: you look and look and suddenly you see a cat in the wall, clear as can be, though a moment before you hadn’t seen it at all.