Tijuana Straits (15 page)

They were drinking coffee from cracked mugs, the eastern sky shot through with a sickly yellow light, or so it appeared to Magdalena. Perhaps, she thought, something had broken over there on the Mexican side of the fence, some great piece of subterranean plumbing, like a severed artery pumping tainted blood to stain the sky. She elected to share the observation with Fahey, this and others like it, elaborating upon her view of the maquiladora industry as a parasitic organism attached to her country, sucking away its life’s blood.

Fahey looked toward the sunrise. His face was puffy in the bad light. There were white shavings in his beard and hair, stubble on his cheekbones where his beard was in need of trimming. He stared into the mesa for some time without speaking then rose to get more coffee. The maker from which he produced refills, like pretty much everything else on the property, save for the hula girl lamp, was held together with duct tape.

Magdalena watched as he poured. He was wearing a T-shirt. His arms looked tan and strong yet she detected a slight tremor of the hand, the latter eliciting some reflection upon her earlier enthusiasm. She was beginning to think that his aid might be more difficult to enlist than she had heretofore imagined. She was thinking too about what he’d looked like, in the dead of night, waking in something close to a blind panic, though she supposed some measure of the blame for that condition was her own. She’d begun by tapping at the window with her fingertips, then slapping it with the flat of her hand till a small piece of glass had fallen from a corner to break upon the floor. Fahey had come bolt upright at the sound, hitting his head on the sawhorse with enough force to dislodge his work in progress then casting about with a wild-eyed look she would just as soon not have seen before finding her at the window. She’d looked away as he struggled from the bag then heard his voice through the damaged pane, a single word. “What?” he’d asked. She had found his face within inches of her own, his hands cupped about his eyes. “I need a phone,” she told him.

Which was when she learned that his was broken, though he did not say how just then, but motioned her around to a door and let her in, asking if a computer would serve, pulling boxes from beneath his workbench, not waiting for a reply.

Magdalena had taken the opportunity to examine the photographs on the walls. Many had been cut from magazines but others had not and many of these, like the one in the trailer, were
photographs of Fahey himself, for she recognized the muscled shoulders, the flowing hair, the positioning of the arms. In a corner of the room, just above the light switch, there was another photograph that caught her attention. It was a picture of the young Fahey—that is, the Fahey of the waves. A young woman stood by his side and between them a grinning dog. Fahey and the girl were standing at the back of a pickup truck. The dog was seated in the bed. The picture appeared to have been taken at the side of a road, at some elevation, for below and in the distance one could make out a strip of white sandy beach and beyond it a turquoise sea very nearly indistinguishable from the sky above it. The color scheme suggested Baja, though the photograph had obviously been on the wall for some time, exposed to the elements, and its colors had taken on a delicate, milky hue that made their original intensity difficult to judge. Still, there were the faces of Fahey and the young woman, the grinning dog. One might have written “happy campers” somewhere beneath it. The other thing about the photo that caught Magdalena’s attention was the girl. She was lithe and dark and quite obviously a Mexican.

She was still considering the photograph when Fahey announced that his computer was ready for use. She turned from the picture to find that he had cleared a place on his workbench where an ancient laptop now sat among more tools and shavings, its keypad black with an accumulation of dirt and grit.

Fahey sat on the floor, pulling on sandals while Magdalena typed out her message to Carlotta. He never asked what it said. Some of it she told him anyway, that it was extremely urgent she communicate with a friend in Tijuana, that quite possibly it was a matter of life and death, which is why she had taken it upon herself to wake him in the dead of night and for that, together with the breaking of his window, she had apologized profusely. He’d received both her story and compunction in silence, with nothing more to say till she
was done, and they were left facing one another at the center of the cluttered room. It was an awkward little moment, ended by Fahey when he asked her about the coffee, namely if she would like some.

“You’re not going back to sleep then?” she asked, the words no sooner out of her mouth than she was struck by the absurdity of the question.

Fahey said that he was not.

She said that she guessed she wouldn’t either and they had repaired to the tiny kitchen, where everything was broken, then come outside to watch the sun rise above the mesa, for it had proven to be later than she had imagined, sitting for the most part in silence, though from time to time Fahey would direct her attention to the call of a particular bird, a clapper rail, a least tern, a western flycatcher . . .

“That’s what you were doing on the beach,” she said. “You were yelling about some bird.”

“Snowy plovers,” he said. He told her about their dwindling numbers, the delicate nature of the nests.

Magdalena listened. Her memory of the snowy plover was not an altogether pleasant one. “I don’t think I’ve ever been shit on by a bird before,” she said.

“It’s how they defend themselves,” Fahey told her. “Imagine the experience if there’d been a hundred instead of half a dozen.”

“Thanks. I think I’ll pass.”

“That’s what the coyote said to the fox.”

Magdalena smiled. “You’re quite the expert.”

Fahey shrugged. “It’s the valley,” he said. “I know this valley and what’s in it. You get me outside somewhere”—he waved toward the distant mesas as if the entire outside world was contained therein—”I don’t know shit.”

“What I know about is all over there,” she said, and she told him
a little about what she did. She told him about Vista Nueva and the boy who had died of lead poisoning.

Fahey listened but did not speak, as if these subjects belonged solely to that world beyond the valley, the world of his professed ignorance, and were not washed by the same polluted sea or warmed by the same yellow star.

“Maybe we should have some breakfast,” he said.

He made scrambled eggs and toast. There were tomatoes and tomatillos mixed in with the eggs. He told her that the vegetables had come from the valley.

“From your garden?”

“Just from the valley. They grow here, if you know where to look.”

Magdalena blanched. “I don’t see how you could eat anything that grows here,” she said.

“They’re fine,” he told her. “You just wash them off.”

“They grow wild?”

“They come with the sewage.”

She just looked at him.

“The seeds pass through the people that ate them. They wind up in the river. The river brings them here. Tomatoes, tomatillos, squash, melons . . . This was great farming land for many years. There was a time,” he said, “when you could live off this valley. You could live here and this would be all you needed.” He told her about Hoddy Younger, his shack of driftwood and whalebone, his traps for lobster, his crossbow for game, the patch of ground he’d tilled to plant his garden. “You should’ve seen it then,” Fahey told her and so rhapsodic did he wax in the telling that by time he was finished she wished that she had and she was willing to say so, to which Fahey only shrugged. “Too late,” he told her. “You missed it.”

“I don’t know . . .” She was thinking that maybe she’d been rather harsh in her judgment of what the valley might produce. “It doesn’t seem so altogether bad. You live here.”

But Fahey wouldn’t hear it. He shook his head as the boughs of an oleander scraped at the side of his trailer. “This is nothing,” Fahey said, “It’s not even good leftovers.”

He did his dishes then went to work in the shed, where he said he was making a surfboard. Magdalena dozed on the porch to the sound of an electric tool.

By noon there had been no answering e-mails and she was beginning to worry. She went to the shaping room once more, where she found him still working on the board, covered in the white dust, head to toe, wailing away with a power sander.

“I need a phone,” she said.

Fahey said that his had been broken.

“Yes,” she said. “I know. You ran over it with your truck. And your cell phone’s been lost. But I have to make a call. Perhaps one of your neighbors . . .” Her voice trailed away. Deep in the cottonwoods and oleander it occurred to her that she had no idea whether there even were neighbors. It next occurred to her that if such neighbors did indeed exist, they were probably a lot like Fahey; their phones would have been destroyed or misplaced. It was that kind of place. It was, she thought suddenly, a lot like Mexico.

Fahey turned off the sander and hung it upon a wall. He used an air hose to blow away the dust, from both the board and himself, then spent a few seconds looking over his creation, lifting it, sighting down its edge as if inspecting it for flaws. “There’s a phone in town,” he said finally. “What do you think this is, some kind of backwater? I’ll look in on the herd, then we can go.”

She waited while he checked his windrows, feeling them with the flat of his hand, taking their temperature, adding water.

“You’ve got to keep the worm beds moist,” he told her, “but not soaking wet.”

He opened the passenger side door of the old rusted-out Toyota, clearing away the debris that seemed to have collected in the front seat since last she’d ridden there—a variety of newsprint, paper bags, empty beer bottles, the dried blossoms of pink oleander. When he was finished she got inside then watched as he walked around the front and slid in behind the wheel. He was still on about the worms.

“The pH is very important,” he told her; “you’ve got to keep it between six and seven. The better the conditions, the more the little beggars will eat. They can eat up to half their weight in a day—anything that was once alive and is now dead.” Fahey counted off several items on the tips of his fingers. “Paper, coffee grounds, table scraps . . .” As a parenthetical thought he noted the exclusion of meat or dairy products, then went on with his list, ending with mention of lawn clippings and manure from larger animals. “It’s funny what they like,” he said. “I talked to a woman out in Perris who feeds her worms crushed black walnut shells, says it makes them more lustful.”

Magdalena watched the yellow trailer and the rows of old surfboards shrinking in the mirror on her door. “Lustful is not a term I would have thought to associate with worms,” she said.

“Worms are hermaphrodites. In theory they could mate with themselves, but that does not seem to happen. They mate with other worms, romantic little bastards. Once impregnated, the female part gives off capsules, which develop into worms. What I’ve been into lately is trying to get a gray worm to mate with a red worm. The point would be to get a bigger red worm. Some entomologist out at UCSD told me this was impossible. So now I’m trying to prove him wrong. I’m experimenting with different combinations of animal manures, produce, feeds, supplements . . . Nothing so far, but
there is this amino acid I’m pretty excited about. My capsule productivity has risen by twenty-five percent.”

Fahey paused and Magdalena raised her eyebrows, making a shape with her mouth, nodding her head, hoping to appear interested, watching as the last of Fahey’s farm slipped from view. One bend in the road and the entire place was lost behind layers of vegetation, nothing to mark its location save the trees with their limbs of dust and spider’s webs, and if you did not already know what lay beneath them you would not think there was anything there at all. It was a place to hide, she thought, to hide from the world, and she thought of the worms, cozy in their hermaphroditism, at least in theory, each a little self-contained collection of opposites, not unlike the man who tended them. And that, it occurred to her rather suddenly, was what interested her. She was interested in Fahey and whatever it was that had gotten him here, from the waves to the worm farm, living small in his own little corner of the world.