Tijuana Straits (14 page)

Back in Tijuana, Armando could no longer find work. Because he had complained about the conditions in the factory, because he had thrown a stone at the manager of human resources, he was blacklisted. In spite of their multinational character, in spite of the diversity of their products, the factories hired managers from the same pool, and the managers were, for the most part, all in the same club. They kept lists. They named names. Reina kept her mouth shut and was hired almost at once. She went to work in a factory owned by the Japanese, where conditions were not so bad as at Accessories de Mexico.

Armando stayed home. He slept during the day. At night he went in search of beer and glue, the colored lights blurred by pain. He asked Reina to bring glue from the factory but she told him there was none to be had in the new plant. She encouraged him to find work, any kind of work. He walked the streets instead, as if in search of something he had lost. He wandered the alleys of El Centro, past hookers—many of whom he now recognized as factory workers moonlighting to make ends meet in the new Tijuana.
Sometimes he walked the mesas, waiting for Reina, watching as the shifts changed in the factories, watching the armies of women. He did so with a mounting anger, for he had begun to think of the women as so many whores, in their fancy undergarments beneath their little blue smocks, selling themselves to the bosses while their men waited at home or loitered in the streets—the world as he believed it should be stood on its head to pay the piper. For her part, Reina did little to assuage these pangs of resentment. When she was not working extra shifts she seemed to have little time for Armando’s attentions. She was one of them now, one of the employed, and Armando was back on the other side, once more in league with the unwashed multitudes.

From the street kids he learned the knack of pouring a little paint thinner into a soda can then carrying it with him at all times—little whiffs now and again to ease the pain. He was tormented by images of his son. He became increasingly suspicious of Reina, of the extra shifts she insisted upon working. He began to accuse her of various transgressions. He began to blame her for what his life had become. He might, he concluded, have been a great fighter after all, El Diablo de Sinaloa. Regret dogged his boot heels, midnight ramblings at the edge of the mesa, lone
penitente,
the lights of the city arrayed at his feet like valuables fallen from his pockets—the glories of a life not lived. The nights became indistinguishable, one bleeding into another, black on black, Armando on pathways always descending . . . till that moment of dim illumination by which he dared to hope once more, this now spectral medium, his dreams held in trust, for a second son conjured of fumes. He rushed home to inform Reina, invoking scripture. Why, even the Son of Man had come once to suffer, once to suffer and once to rule. Armando would train the boy himself. Years from now their progeny would make them rich. His wife recoiled in horror. She bore her memories like a crown of thorns. Armando was insistent.
So was she. Armando had no choice. He claimed his due by force, on this night and others like it, till the night she clubbed him with an iron poker, fleeing on foot from their shack on the hillside. Armando took up the poker himself, from where it had fallen to the dirt floor, and gave chase. She lost him somewhere near the mouth of the canyon, where the lights of a new convenience mart fired by a belching and farting generator, for there was no electricity yet run to this quarter of the city, burned above a barren lot and a crew of miniature cholos who crouched there like rodents over marbles on the ground and who, when asked if they had seen a woman, barefoot and running, had erupted in a cacophony of laughter and insult, digging stones from the hardscrabble ground, turning him from the chase.

Armando was the better part of a week in finding her. It took a man he’d known from the factory to direct his steps, a fellow casualty in this new incarnation of war between the sexes. The first thing Armando needed to understand, the man assured him, was that Reina had not conspired against him unaided, for so had it been with his own wife, and he told Armando of a group of women in an old part of Tijuana, in a house known as Casa de la Mujer.

The man had an address as well and by sunset of the following day Armando had found it, on a narrow side street, in a neighborhood of houses that actually looked like houses, with stucco walls, iron gates, and bars on the windows.

He’d stood in the street for a quarter of an hour, stymied by the walls, proclaiming his presence with insults and lamentations till a number of women had come out to confront him. It was then that he had seen Reina, in the arms of some Madonna, wrapped in a shawl as though she were no more than a child. The sight had inflamed him further and he had charged the gate. The women of
Casa de la Mujer had driven him back, hammering him with broomsticks as might some coven of witches while Reina, unmoved, remained huddled in the arms of her Madonna, in the shadowed arch of a door.

The noise of battle brought neighbors into the street and Armando had fled, fearing the arrival of police, but he had not given up. Night after night he stalked the neighborhood, occasionally shouting at the barred windows, hoping for a second opportunity to confront Reina outside the walls. But he did not see her again. In the end it was the Madonna herself who met him at the gate, where standing thus, he saw her for what she was, scarcely more than a child in her own right, yet straight and fearless behind her iron bars.

“You have to stop coming around here,” she told him. “You’re making a spectacle of yourself and your wife is gone.” Her black hair, fallen to her shoulders, framed the delicate angles of her face, the dark eyes from which she regarded him with a measured contempt to which he was no stranger. Yet still, he thought, her beauty only added to its sting.

“Gone where?”

“Gone. It was what she wanted. She’s had enough.”

“What about what I want? What about my son?”

“You should go now,” she said. “If you come again I will call the police.”

“I want my son,” Armando told her.

She stood in the doorway, a white peasant dress following the curves of her body, touching the floor, the bars still between them. “Your son is dead,” she said finally. She spoke softly then turned and went back into the house, the door closing behind her.

Armando had remained on the broken pavement, staring into the yellow light that spread from barred windows, imagining such rooms as lay beyond, inner sanctums of womanhood, distant as the moon . . . And then a voice . . .

“I can tell you her name,” the voice said. It issued from shadows at the mouth of the alley that ran along one side of the house. Approaching it, Armando caught sight of a blue light flaring beneath the bowl of a pipe, avicular features lit from below, bones like something blown of glass. Moving closer he saw that it was the man who had directed him, his compadre in loss. Armando’s first thought was that the man had followed him, but the man shook his head. “I come here too,” he said, and offered the pipe.

A single hit snapped Armando’s head around like a punch.

“They took my child as well,” the man said.

“What?”

The man waved toward the street where figures could just now be seen, approaching in the dark. Some carried torches or signs. Some were dressed in white, streaked with red. Still others carried children’s dolls impaled upon sticks. They came like ghosts from a lost time. Maybe it was the dope. The torches flamed like planets cast down. A mounted policeman rode nearby—the clip-clop of shod hooves echoing between the buildings.

Armando was aware of the man at his side, whispering in the dark: “See the Guardians of Christ.”

The marchers formed a line, chanting slogans in support of the unborn.

“There’s a girl in there tonight,” the man said. “They’ve found out about it.” He nodded at the marchers. “They’ve come to keep out the doctor.”

“The doctor?”

“The abortion doctor, fool. Why do you think the women go there?”

Armando stared into the face of his companion. The man’s eyes gave off a dull sheen. “You didn’t know,” the man said and the idea seemed to amuse him. “You didn’t know why the women came, why your own wife came . . .” The man laughed, his breath like
something already dead. At which point Armando punched him in the solar plexus, hooking from the hips. He never had liked a harbinger of bad news. He took the man’s works and smoked the rest of his stash right there on the street, a mounted cop not fifty feet away. The drug raised his skullcap to the stars. He felt the wind off the earth’s rotation through the bones in his face. The man clawed at one leg. Armando dragged him further into darkness then cut his throat with a cheap Tijuana switchblade. The blood spurted and pooled. A light steam rose above it. The cop never saw a thing.

He went that night to a place he’d found upon the western flank of Cerro Colorado, to a high place overlooking the city and the great national flag, luminous above blackened rooftops, and to the west a vast darkness he knew to be the sea though no feature of that august body could be in any way discerned for it was a moonless night and the sky a featureless waste. He had come to mourn the passing of his son, unnamed and unborn, to meditate upon the depths of Reina’s treachery and of those who had aided her; and he thought back over all that had transpired since coming to this godforsaken place, of two children already in the grave, and it seemed to him as though the wheels of that dark profundity beneath which he crouched had been set against him, as surely the moving pieces of that same profundity are akin to the machinery of a watch and so set against all men from the moment of their birth. And he felt that he’d come finally to the end of a long road, but that some new road lay yet before him. He did not imagine that what lay ahead would be in any way as varied or as long as what lay behind, for already he carried within him the signs of its ending and there would be none after it by which to continue. Of that he was certain and yet the road was not arbitrary. Its ending was in death and there was death as its marker. These things were as clear
to him as the youthful dreams that had drawn him forthwith. And while the former seemed now as fraudulent as a whore’s smile, the latter seemed both inevitable and irrevocable for it was part and parcel of the workings of justice and was in itself an aspect of that profundity he had so named and was endemic to its mysterious dispensations, and there issued from back of his parched lips the words to a prayer, the only one he knew: “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who changes the creatures.” And before that night was over he had used the knife, the same with which he had taken the life of the factory worker, to scratch her name into the flesh of his arm, this Madonna, so as not to forget it amid some delirium to come.

T
HEY SENT
the e-mail before dawn. Fahey’s main phone was broken and his cell phone lost.

“How does one break one’s phone?” Magdalena asked.

Fahey told her that he’d been sitting near the porch when last he’d used it, that he had placed it on the ground then run over it with his pickup. It was, she was beginning to see, a Fahey kind of story.