Free Rubicon Beach by Steve Erickson Page B

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