Tijuana Straits (20 page)

He finished his beer and rose to get another. The beer helped. He snuck a pill while still in the kitchen. The odds improved. He could probably do it, go and come in an afternoon. No one would know. Except her, of course. She would know if he went and know if he didn’t. She would judge him accordingly and he would judge himself in her eyes. Who would have thought it? Thank God for Valium and beer. In sufficient quantities he might just pull it off, a fool for love in the city of the lost. It was classic Fahey—everything he had always been, and everything he had promised himself not to be, ever again, for all that it had gotten him in the past.

“I guess I’ll have to think about it,” he said finally. He was standing in the narrow doorway that separated the kitchen from the room she was in. “Maybe I can talk to the cowboys in the morning. They’re early risers.”

He went outside after that. She watched him go. The smallest of the two dogs ran out from beneath the trailer and bounced along at his heels, a white spot in the night. She watched as he stood at the side of his windrows. It seemed to her that he was there for quite some time. Eventually though he went into the shed and after a while she heard the familiar buzz of his sander and a boom box playing Chet Baker.

She lay in the dark, a blanket pulled up to just beneath her chin. She lay there without sleeping. The music and the sander went on for a very long time. At last she dozed, then woke near dawn and looked outside.

It was quiet. The yellow bulb still burned in the shed and for a moment she believed that he must be asleep. And then she saw
him, at the farthest reaches of the workroom light. He was out there in the dark with the board he had shaped, naked save for what was either a baggy swimsuit or boxer shorts. The board lay on the ground—a pale sliver against the dark earth—and Fahey stood next to it, apparently engaged in some kind of little dance. At least that was what it looked like. She watched as he cross-stepped, forward and back, with quick, almost dainty steps, then stopped, turning his shoulders, swaying at the hips. She watched as his arms rose above his head, exposing a bit of a paunch around his middle, yet she could see the rounded muscles of his back as well, their hills and valleys shaded by the faint light, as his arms drifted down till they were nearly parallel to the ground, rather, she thought, like a gull in flight, and she understood then what it was he was up to—this little dance at the side of the board. The bit with his hands had given him away. Fahey was surfing, or at least pretending to, alone in the dark, a good two miles from the nearest wave.

T
HE DEAL
was fixed on the Mesa de Otay, on a sweltering September afternoon, not fifty yards from where she had first appeared. Armando and Chico, together now, hunkered over beers in a corner of the body shop, squatting above the grease-spattered dirt like plungers at a game of craps, the slinking curs who guarded the place lying nearby, tongues lolling, snapping at flies, bellies pressed against dirt blacker than coal, the corrugated tin roof beneath which they had all come for shelter useless before a sun already low enough in the west to have come between it and the ground, igniting the polluted airs that lay between as though some angel of the Apocalypse had poured out his bowl upon the sea.

At the heart of their agreement was a simple plan. When she came again, Chico, who had some skill as a mechanic, would do something to her car, anything that would cause it to break down, but not in front of the factory, anywhere but there and hopefully
somewhere on the outskirts of town. Armando and Chico would follow in the red convertible. After the car had broken, when Magdalena got out to investigate, Armando would swoop down to grab her.

What he had in mind after that was more complicated, yet he had prepared a place to receive her, an old mining shaft east of the city, where her screams would go unheard, where even the witches of Casa de la Mujer could never find her. To what end she might come there, or rather by what circuitous paths she might reach it, for he reckoned the ending was known well enough, would have been harder to predict. Still, he’d spent long hours alone in this pit, lost in the meticulous arrangement of those articles he’d deemed appropriate, many pilfered from dumps or stolen outright from places he’d gone in performance of the jobs that Chico so envied, trinkets to which their owners could no longer lay claim. He brought candles in abundance and pieces of cloth, brightly colored. To these were added all manner of ropes and chains and assorted bric-a-brac, including a stuffed owl in a rusted birdcage, the former dressed as a child’s doll with a lace doily upon its head. And there were other things too, things he had carried on his person for as long as he could remember—a photograph of Reina taken on the day of their wedding, a scrap of paper from the hospital in Reynosa upon which a doctor had written something he could not read but that he guessed was about his son and this crumpled as an old bill, as was the photograph itself. He arranged these by candlelight, affixed to beams amid walls of dirt so that over time this hole had come to resemble the burial site of an ancient king, or perhaps the gathering place for flagellants, secrets, whose ceremonies in their minutiae were hidden even from the builder of their chapel. What he knew for certain was that some ceremony would take place there, a ritual of blood, in whose performance particular events could be assigned their rightful place in the economy
of a universe that was none but his own. He knew this and one thing more. It was a ceremony in which her attendance would be required.

The riskiest part of Armando’s plan was the apparent necessity to execute it in broad daylight. But then he had seen the logo of Casa de la Mujer on handbills attached to telephone poles all over the mesa, handbills alerting him to the candlelight vigil. It was better than anything for which he might have hoped and he rushed to inform Chico, at work on a six-pack, in the stifling heat of late afternoon. “Tonight’s the night,” Armando had said. And they had finalized the last details of the plan. “And after this, there will be others,” Chico said, their business concluded.

Armando shrugged, rising from his haunches. “We will see,” Armando told him. “We will see how you do.”

Chico grinned, watching as the other man walked away. He was certain he would do just fine, though he had little interest in this Madonna, as Armando liked to call her. That she was pals with some attorney even made him a little nervous. But he had seen the rolls of bills in Armando’s hands, spread between those grease-blackened fingers with their bitten and splintered nails, and when thoughts of the attorney made him uneasy he would try instead to imagine the halls of the drug lords, exotic animals pacing in jungle-like settings behind walls thick as those of the Alamo. And he would make sure that after tonight, after this thing with the woman, there would be other more lucrative partnerships and that he would begin to make his way among at least some of those men now immortalized in song.

For his part, Armando could see the gears working through the holes in Chico’s head. The truth was that he had no intention of partnering up with Chico for more than a night and fully intended
to rid himself of the man as soon as the job was done. For in essence the cowboy was like too many he’d known already, just one more child of the streets, quick and mean, less trustworthy than a jackal. His skill as a mechanic and his car, these were the things that made him valuable, and if, in the end, he was more difficult to be rid of than Armando had heretofore imagined, he might just feel compelled to make a particular introduction, and in fact began to take such perverse delight in that imagined confrontation that by the time he had returned, later that afternoon, to the old factory, where he had intended to nap, he went instead to work, clearing a place among the piles of debris to make way for the red convertible.

What Chico failed to appreciate was that Armando survived by knowing how to be silent. The men who hired him knew where to find him and it was they who came to him when they needed something done, never the reverse. They set the price. Armando never questioned it. He never pestered or begged. Chico had not yet helped out on a single job and already he was a pain in the ass, already asking for more. And then of course there was the other part of the equation, the thing the young cowboy could hardly be expected to know, that Armando was already in possession of a partner, when such a partner was needed, a partner who would never ask for more, who would not wish to meet the men from whom the money flowed, about whom the men would never know—Armando’s secret weapon, strong as a bull, faithful as a hound . . . Armando had already taken steps to see that he would be waiting at the mine shaft to meet them, ascending from that black hole as though provoked from the very depths, face scarred to the point that it appeared only half formed, as if its owner was a piece of work still in progress, yet damned even so, like some junkie’s child, born to addiction and thereby censured prematurely, sharpened
screwdrivers and rusted church keys dangling from silver chains . . . Armando caught in his mind’s eye, as though it were a thing already transpired, the exact look on Chico’s face as he saw it coming, this denizen of such menageries as the cowboy had not yet thought to name, the instrument of Armando’s will, for such had he become and so was he likely to remain, till such time as comes to all men, when each is reclaimed by darkness . . .

Still, it was just Armando and Chico the night she got away, following in the old convertible, the instrument of Armando’s will, together with such introductions as were sure to follow, scheduled for a later date. But later never came.