Tijuana Straits (26 page)

“What happened, Sam? There are other waves in the world besides the Mystic Peak. You talk about surfing. You love it, but you don’t do it, not really, not anymore . . .” The directness of the inquiry surprised even her. Fahey looked for a moment as though he’d been struck, then turned away. “That’s a tough one,” he said.

Magdalena sighed. The sight of him peering without apparent hope into the depths of his beer seemed to have momentarily eviscerated her gratitude. The lapse shamed her. Who, after all, did she think she was? She was trying to fashion some response by which to reclaim their conversation, but already he was on his feet. She watched as he took the rest of the six-pack from the refrigerator—three cans dangling by the plastic nooses that bound them together as though they were some ornament to be used in ritual—then stood with them in the tiny kitchen at the side of his tiny door. “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” he said. “I really do. I hope you win.” After which he went outside.

She saw him through the window, through the dirt and grime, the strips of silver duct tape, walking toward his work shed with its ever burning yellow light, the cans trailing from his hand as it swung from his arm. She saw him open a door and go inside. In time she heard the jazz, and finally the sander, its piercing, high-pitched whine drowning out all else.

N
O ONE
knew there was a dead man in the trailer. But then the locals were engaged in high living. The week was ending and a rodeo was coming to town. The women cooked outside on their grates over open flames. Armando and his companions camped beneath the stars in front of Chico’s cousin’s shack. Armando had never seen the world from this side of the border. He was reminded of the old corral where the Río Mayo made its way into the Gulf of California. In the ghetto sprawl of Tijuana, it was a place he had not been reminded of for a long time.

None of the Oaxacans seemed to know anything about a man with a worm on his cap. But that was okay, for the moment. It was a small valley. He could not be far. And in the meantime there was the approach of rodeo. There was beer and food. There were women in dresses who showed their legs when they danced. And there was more. Chico’s cousin had been a fisherman on the peninsula, where
he had begun to traffic in sea turtles. The turtles were an endangered species and catching them was illegal. But Chico’s cousin had found that there was a market for them among the roving gangs of drug runners moving up and down the coast. At first the drug runners paid in cash, later, after Chico’s cousin had gotten a taste of what it was they were moving, they paid in crack.

The man went from fisherman to crack addict in less than a month. Half the village went with him. Their yield went down accordingly. Drug runners took everything they had in trade. They stole their fish, raped their women, set fire to their boats for sport when the local turtle population had dwindled. Chico’s cousin packed up his habit and crossed the border. He landed in Garage Door Tijuana, out of which he worked in the fields as far north as the Coachella Valley but got his stash right here at home, in the parking lot of the Palm Avenue 7-Eleven, from a kid with a head shaped like a peanut and a hoop through his nose.

Armando, Nacho, and Chico sampled his wares, stayed up days running, right into rodeo, where they staggered about like drunken novitiates amid costumed gallants, where they ran in foot races, boxed, ate, danced, and fucked, or at least jerked off, and for a time, forgot even among themselves the dead man in the trailer.

Come the dawn of their fourth day in the valley and Armando was running on fumes, harsh yellow light that tolled the morning slashing though scattered clouds and a sky that smelled of the sea. Armando was wobbling across what was left of the quarter-mile track, barefoot in the churned dirt, high as a kite, when he noted the Indian checking out a window in the cowboy’s trailer.

“Hey, compadre,” Armando said.

The guy looked at him.

“What gives?”

“Something smells,” the guy told him. “I think it’s in here.”

“You don’t say.”

“Check it out.”

The man turned to the window.

Armando walked up behind him. “Check this out,
cabrón.
”

He stabbed the man in the kidney, then stepped to his side and stabbed him in the liver. The man looked him in the eye, his own beginning to glaze, their question left unformed.

But Armando leaned just a little forward and whispered in the man’s ear,
“Hijo de la chingada.”
It was perhaps the most melancholy of Mexican curses for it was more than the sum of its parts and was also the registry of a people, or so Armando had always imagined it, for the people so indicted were none but his own.

“Son of the fucked,” was what Armando whispered to the dying man. But he might just as well have spoken to himself.

M
AGDALENA WAS
up early on the following morning. She had not slept especially well, replaying her conversation with Fahey throughout the night. She did not doubt her own part in it, for she had chosen her path. Given the circumstances of her childhood it was difficult to see how it could have been otherwise. The battle, after all, had been brought to her door. Still, she had overstepped her bounds. There was some wound in the man and one needed to be mindful of it, for it was a thing time had not worked to heal. His battle was not so much with the world at large as with his own past and such demons as it had spawned. And yet it was also her judgment that all this isolation was not good. He was too alone here, too cut off from the rest of the world with nothing but the past and his worm farm to occupy his mind, and these things had not brought him to a good place. The man’s business could break into the black nor not, Sam Fahey was hanging on by just a thread.

Such were her thoughts as she went about what seemed to have become their domestic routine. She would rise before him, or at least before he had made any appearance at the trailer, make coffee, then go outside to see where he was. He was generally up, either attending to his worms or working on the board.

On the morning in question she found him doing neither, but seated in the shed, hunched over his laptop in an attitude of such intense concentration she simply stopped in the doorway and stood there for some time in silence for fear of disturbing him.

A chemical odor she would later learn to recognize as the scent of fresh resin hit her full in the face. It was strong but not particularly unpleasant. Still, her work among the factories had led her to associate any such odors with suffering and decay.

This morning’s fumes seemed to issue from the surfboard Fahey had been working on and it appeared that he must have worked throughout the night for the board seemed finished and still wet, its freshly coated fiberglass surface shimmering in the light that streamed from the open doorway at her back.

Fahey, intent upon his computer screen, had still not seen her.

“Sam,” she said, finally. She held a cup of coffee in each hand, one for herself and one for him.

He still did not turn.

“Sam,” she said once more.

“Come look at this,” Fahey said.

She put her own cup on the workbench and took the other to where he sat, perched on an overturned five-gallon drum, the computer resting on another such drum before him. She touched his shoulder with her hand, looking over it. “What?” she asked.

“This,” he said. “It’s a storm.”

She saw before her a colored screen, shades of blue and green superimposed over what appeared to be a map.

“Jack Nance’s been telling me about this,” he said. “I started tracking it last night.”

After their conversation, she thought. “You’ve been working on your board too,” she said.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Fahey told her.

“Nor could I.”

If her remark registered he did not show it. “This is a big storm,” he said. “It will generate some very big waves, waves that will reach the straits.”

He made some adjustments with his mouse. The map shifted. “It started moving off the coast of Japan, six, seven days ago. It seems to have peaked over Hawaii, then turned toward Alaska.” He brought up another screen, a graph with numbers. “Buoy readings,” he told her. “They are already posting small-craft warnings up and down the coast.”

She was more interested in him than in the screen. His face, she thought, was slightly flushed, fixed with an intensity she had not seen there before, not even on that first morning, on the beach, when he had killed the dogs, and she saw that it was not their conversation that had kept him awake, it was this, the map on the screen and the prospect of waves, though perhaps there had been something in their conversation that had made him want to look, as opposed to dosing himself with pills and going to sleep, or in his case, what passed for it.

“Will it be as big as before?” she asked. “When you and Hoddy rode Outside the Bullring?” She felt compelled to participate in the moment.

“We rode Outside the Bullring more than once. But that first time, that was the one.”

“When Hoddy got his wave?”

“When Hoddy got his wave.”

“Will it be like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“And will there be rain?”

Fahey shook his head. “There’s high pressure inland. I believe the rain will all be to the north.”

She stood for a moment in silence.

Fahey turned from his computer.

“You said it was twenty years ago.”

“I guess.”

“It was an El Niño winter?”

“I don’t believe we called it that then, at least I didn’t. Why do you ask?”

She made a little shrugging motion with her shoulders. “Twenty years ago . . . A rainy winter . . . It’s quite possible at least some of those waves you rode came with the storm that killed my mother.” She hardly knew what had inspired her to say it.

Fahey had no idea how to respond. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Magdalena shook her head. “I guess that’s not really anything you needed to know. I don’t know why I said it.”

“It’s okay,” Fahey told her.

“I just had this feeling . . .” which in fact she had. It had come upon her suddenly and continued to linger. One might say it was a premonition. “I brought you your coffee,” she said. It was only then that she noticed her hand had been shaking badly enough to spill some of it, and that she had burned her fingers.