Tijuana Straits (3 page)

T
HE SHOTGUN
held five rounds. Fahey had wasted one trying to scare the woman away from the birds. He watched now as one of the pit bulls, a no-neck brute with dull eyes and a dirty white diamond shape beneath its throat, dropped to its stomach. Two more dogs hunkered down as well. The collie remained standing, a short distance behind the others, shifting its weight, skittish, the weakest of the pack.

Fahey, who had not been called upon to hit a moving target for more than a year, took a step closer to the woman. He hooked a thumb into the gun strap slung over his shoulder and very slowly allowed the strap to slide down his arm, at the same time, bringing the gun to bear. He spoke to the woman without looking at her.

“Can you walk?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

He could scarcely hear above the rush of blood in his ears. The
prospect of bringing down the four dogs with four shells for a man in Fahey’s delicate state was a daunting proposition. Nor were the conditions in his favor. The rising sun had yet to penetrate the willows and the trees were even thicker near the water, the muddy bank upon which the dogs waited dark with shadow, the entire setting shot through with a musty green light, together with the reek of whatever it was that flowed from the mesas of Tijuana with their myriad of polluting, foreign-owned factories, from her hills and canyons where the huddled masses waited.

Fahey felt a pain in his left wrist. It snaked its way up his arm and into his jaw. Christ, he thought, I’m having a heart attack. He appeared to be viewing the animals before him from within the confines of a Lava lamp. Still, it was his belief that the dogs would be reluctant to charge two adult humans. He believed that if he could get the woman to her feet, that if they moved slowly, they might back toward the beach, where his truck was waiting. With luck, perhaps, the dogs might follow at a distance. With real luck, Fahey thought, he might even get a shot at them from the safety of his cab. The woman, however, was slow in rising. Fahey slid his eyes in her direction, in time to see that she was favoring an ankle. When she tried to put weight on it, the ankle gave way altogether. She let out a little gasp then sank to the ground. Fahey made a lateral movement, put out a hand to steady her. She took him by the wrist in an icy grip, surprising in its strength, but she was already going down and Fahey, caught off balance, shuffled to keep his footing. All things considered, he imagined it an unfortunate display, and when he looked again, the dogs were coming.

Fahey wrested his hand from the woman’s frozen grasp, sank to one knee, and began to shoot. The dogs came in low and fast, bouncing like hailstones, tongues on fire, trailing drool. Fahey took them head on. In the end, he supposed, it was a question of time. The last of the pit bulls went down not ten feet from where he knelt.
Had the collie been as eager for blood his time would have run out and she would have reached him before he could fire again. As it was, Fahey found her standing maybe thirty feet away, circling, spooked, wild-eyed in the silence that followed in the wake of the shooting, the loss of the pack. This time he took aim, shot, and missed. The animal stared in dumb wonder then made for the river, yipping plaintively, a tiny plover in hot pursuit.

Fahey lurched to his feet, light-headed, sucking wind. He stared at the gun in his hand, as full of dumb wonder as the dog itself. The dead pit bulls were staggered across the ground in the order he had shot them, gaping holes already drawing flies. Fahey stared into the shadow of the willows after the departed dog then turned to the woman. He found her shivering on the ground, covered in the ragged canvas tarp she had apparently acquired somewhere in the course of her journey, for he was at this point imagining that she had come to him by way of Yogurt Canyon—a popular route of passage whose entrance to the valley was near the beach and so named for the frozen yogurt stand that stood at its head in Las Playas de Tijuana on the other side of the fence.

“It’s okay,” Fahey told her. “It’s okay now.” It occurred to him that he was speaking as much to himself as to the pilgrim before him.

The woman pulled the tarp from her head, brought herself to one elbow, and looked around. He could see now that she had been badly beaten. There were fresh bruises on one side of her face together with a collection of tiny cuts still oozing blood. Beneath the tarp were the remains of a sweater, a dirty pair of jeans and a single Nike running shoe. The clothes were wet, caked with sand. The woman continued to shiver in the cool light. He supposed that she had been the victim of bandits. Perhaps there had been others in her party, now dead or scattered. He wondered how far she had come and if the bandits were still in the neighborhood. Bandits in the valley might be from either side of the fence, though most often
they were comprised of gang members from the neighboring towns of San Ysidro and Chula Vista. The shotgun in his hand was now empty. His truck remained unattended on the beach, subject to both miscreants and a rising tide. Fahey consulted a watch then went to his haunches at the woman’s side.

“You want to try again?”

The woman threw a frightened look across one shoulder in the direction of the country from which she had come then tried to stand. Fahey rose with her. Standing, she was a head shorter than Fahey, slight and dark. He watched as she worked with her tarp, rolling it about her head and shoulders, holding it to her chest. The article was long enough to trail on the ground and done up in it she was once again the biblical figure he had glimpsed from the beach, a daughter of Lot at the edge of the plain. He waited till she had arranged the material to her satisfaction then turned to the dunes. The woman responded by fainting dead away. She went to the sand amid the folds of her tarp much like a collapsing circus tent, the maneuver accomplished in total silence.

Fahey looked on, aghast, at the entrance to the trees. The blood was still pounding in his temples but having survived the dogs he was beginning to believe that he would probably outlast the drugs as well. He had, after all, outlasted them in the past. Having arrived at this observation, others followed in its wake. He had been two days without sleep. Back at the ranch his windrows would be in need of water. The dogs he had killed would have to be delivered to Fish and Game to fetch their bounty, then taken to the animal shelter for disposal. Fahey considered the rag heap before him. On the one hand she had led him to the dogs, albeit unwittingly. On the other hand she might well be involving him in some drama, the likes of which he’d spent most of his life trying to avoid. He supposed it was no less than one should expect, in violation of the Prime Directive.

He stood amid the buzz of insects, the reek of the river, the
sunlight finding its way among the branches to warm his shoulders, a victim yet again of his own vicissitudes. The second helicopter of the morning could be heard above the willows, pounding the sky, and it occurred to him that if he lingered here much longer he might well be forced to explain himself. At the very least he might expect a visit from any border patrolmen close enough to have heard the shots. Fahey knew a number of the officers by name and could show good cause to be here. Still, he was not anxious to make conversation in his present condition. He could imagine his appearance—the ruddy, sweat-streaked face of an amphetamine junkie, days without sleep. God knew what his pupils looked like. Fahey was not generally liked. And still there was the pilgrim to consider. She was not your run-of-the-mill pilgrim. Her English was far too good. Perhaps she was not even illegal, just some woman taken by bandits while walking in the valley. He looked down on the pitiful pile at his feet. She was obviously going nowhere under her own power. In the end, he gathered her to his chest as one might collect a pile of dirty laundry and staggered from the willows, through the dunes and back to the beach, where the plovers were waiting.

She rode by his side like a sleeping child as Fahey nursed the old truck through the soft sand at the foot of the dunes, the river mouth at their backs, a late south swell pounding like cannon fire along steeply banked beaches as empty as the moon. Seabirds scattered at their approach. A flock of white pelicans rose awkwardly into the blue before soaring on snowy wings tipped with black. Offshore, a number of dolphins were at play among the waves, primordial shapes suspended in translucent faces—such were the wonders of the Tijuana River Valley, where sights and sounds all but obliterated from the southern half of the state might yet be found—God’s script, written among the detritus of two countries.

The Toyota’s clutch was smoking once more by the time they reached the mouth of Monument Road at the edge of Border Field State Park. Above them loomed the Tijuana bullring and its attendant lighthouse, a bleached shinbone set before the morning, and beyond these the red-tiled roofs and gaudy pastels of Las Playas, one of the city’s few high-rent districts, home to her businessmen and drug lords. Fahey turned inland here, driving now in the shade of the mesas, where the great steel fence rode the hills like an amusement park ride.

His intention was to deliver her to the emergency room at the hospital in San Ysidro. Later, he would return for the dogs. The road was of hard-packed dirt and he’d just hit third gear for the first time since leaving the river when the woman opened an eye. “Where are you taking me?” she asked.

“For help,” Fahey said.

There followed a moment of silence, and then the woman’s fingers on his arm, as cold as they had been on the beach. He could feel the chill through the fabric of his shirt. Christ, he thought, she must be frozen to the bone.

“That won’t work,” the pilgrim told him.

Fahey glanced in her direction. She made for a somewhat alarming spectacle—one eye swollen nearly shut, the skin mottled and blackened around it, the white part gone to a rosy red. The other eye was wide with fear. It occurred to him that she was perhaps deranged.

“I need time,” she whispered, “time . . . time to think.” Her head rocked back against the seat then rolled from side to side. “Time to think,” she repeated.

“You need help.”

“No, no. I’m okay. Really. If you send me back, I’m done.”

To Fahey’s consternation, the woman began to weep. “You don’t know,” she told him, then lapsed into Spanish.

What little command Fahey’d once had of the language was now almost nonexistent but it seemed to him that she was talking about the devil. He heard the words
“el diablo,”
followed by some reference to the Mesa de Otay, but when he asked for a translation, she would only repeat what she had said, before slipping into some manner of unconsciousness once more.

So, Fahey thought, his first instinct had been correct. She was indeed from across the line, in hot flight from some devil in the mesa—a predicament to which he was not altogether unsympathetic. He drove on. To shelter this woman, if indeed she was illegal, was to invite calamity. Found in Fahey’s custody, she would surely place him at the mercy of his enemies. Yet he was suddenly spent to the core, believing that at this precise moment he hadn’t the strength to drive her much farther, even if he wanted to, certainly not as far as the hospital in San Ysidro, where he would be forced to negotiate morning traffic at the height of its mad stampede to the border. He would probably have done better in leaving her to the dunes, and still could, he supposed, indulging in ruthless speculation, but he made no move to stop or turn around. Nor did he push on with his original plan, which would have called for following his present course in an easterly direction, to a juncture with the San Diego Freeway. He turned instead upon a narrow strip of pitted asphalt marked as Hollister Drive. The road carried him away from the border and when he’d used it to cross the river he turned once more into the heart of the valley, in the direction of the sea.

He drove on dirt roads again here, and these without names, coming shortly to an opening cut among wild radishes grown ten feet tall on either side and the road itself so rutted and strewn with silt and debris one would have been hard-pressed to call it by that name. Yet he turned down it all the same, little more by now than spasm and sweat, coming at last upon the rusting chain-link fence that marked the edge of his holdings and beyond the fence, his
windrows, in their narrow black lines among cast-off appliances, rusted farming gear, plows and harvesters. And beyond even that his vats of worm tea percolating in the sun and a fence made of old surfboards, tail blocks sunk into the earth and set before his trailer like the faded shields of a lost people, and finally the house itself, which seemed of late to have been taken over by a hive of ill-tempered bees—in short, everything Fahey owned in the world, circled like wagons for what could only be taken as some proverbial last stand.