Tijuana Straits (32 page)

He was aware of some of the men staring at Magdalena, this Indian beauty in the company of the gringo, hatless in a flowered shirt, and wondered if she would be asked to dance and wondered what she would do if she was. But on the few occasions when it looked as if someone might approach she would take Fahey’s arm as though they were together.

Fahey snuck a pill, drank more beer. They wandered aimlessly, killing time. The party swirled around them, waxing and waning, finding its own way, much as water will find its way among impediments, in obedience to the dictates of such principles as will determine that way to the exclusion of all others. But suddenly the band picked up its cadence and a new wave of energy coursed through the crowd, these peasants of Oaxaca, nary a one over five foot five . . . the men built like barrels or thin like spiders and their women built the same, a sea of Western-cut denim, boots, and cowboy hats white against the shadows, and the women in white, their dresses brocaded about the hems and throat, with sashes and shawls and black hair flying . . .

The accordion now moved front and center, cranking out a polka beat as though attendant to some Bavarian beer fest and the dancers moving in time—a step to the right and hop, a step to the left and hop, the women’s legs beneath lifting skirts. For a time the dancers danced in pairs but as the music grew both in tempo and in volume the people moved to form a chain, each person with hands on the hips of the person before him, winding across the hard-packed dirt amid cooking fires and sleeping dogs, sweeping up everyone still on their feet, pulling them along into the collective dance and on toward Magdalena and Fahey drinking in the shadows.

Fahey could see it coming, could see that they would be engulfed and caught up in it, and that some action would be called for. He was aware of Magdalena looking up at him, the hair swept back from her forehead, held by ivory combs, and these too coming from the trunk she had found, and he saw the hesitation in her eyes. He responded by taking the beer from her hand and setting it aside, along with his own, then getting her in front of him so that it would be his hands on her hips and not some other’s.

“How does this work?” she asked.

Fahey smiled. “Who’s the Mexican?” he asked.

She answered with a look.

“Just feel the beat,” he told her, as suddenly the dancers were upon them and they were one with the crowd. “Step to the right and rock your hip. Step to the left and rock your hip.”

And so they did, moving forward in a slow, rocking motion like riding the back of the elephant, down along the neck of the guitar and around the circle where the day’s events had transpired and back again toward the hacienda and the singer in the band and the people laughing and singing as well and Fahey and Magdalena rocking along in the line till the band, having brought them back to where they started, changed their tempo once more, downshifting into a slower, more romantic kind of rhythm . . .

Fahey and Magdalena were left facing each other. There was sweat upon her brow and Fahey could feel the sweat upon his own and the shirt clinging to his back and he saw that she was smiling in the wake of the dance and it seemed to make what happened next okay. He took her hand in his and put his other on her hip, and they began to dance once more, Fahey leading, Magdalena apologetic.

“This is a little embarrassing,” she said. “I guess I never took the time . . .”

But Fahey shushed her and it was a simple dance. Two steps to the left, a slight turn, then two to the right, sliding across the hard-packed dirt at their feet. He scarcely dared to breathe, much less to pull her close. Her hand was hot in his palm and for a time her eyes were downcast but at last she looked at him, asking where he had learned such dances for she would not have thought them of him, alone with his herd, then saw the answer in his eyes, for the response to that query was contained already in the story he had told her, and she looked away, and the question went unanswered.

He danced her to a corner, where they stopped to lean upon a fence and cool in the night. “I’m sorry,” he said, apropos of nothing. She rested upon his shoulder then noticed a man staring at her from across the old corral.

She experienced a moment’s vertigo, a sense of dread. She could not have told you why. Perhaps there was something familiar about the man, or something in his manner, a decided malevolence, she concluded. Still, she could not say that she truly recognized him and in the end she turned away.

“Do you know what they’re singing about?” she asked.

“Marijuana, the border patrol . . . I catch the occasional word . . .”

“Each song tells a little story,” she said, then undertook a translation of the song in progress, a tale of two drug runners, a man and a woman. “The man is an illegal, the woman a Chicana from Texas. They are smuggling marijuana from Tijuana to Los Angeles. After making the sale, the man informs his partner that he is taking his share of the money to visit his girlfriend in San Francisco, but by now his partner is in love with him. In a fit of jealousy she shoots him in a dark Hollywood alley and leaves with all the money.”

“There must be a moral,” Fahey said.

Magdalena smiled. She checked to see if the other man was still watching but found that he was no longer there. She was not sure whether to feel relief or concern. Fahey asked if there was anything wrong.

“There was a man. He’s gone now.”

“What kind of man?”

“I don’t know. One of the cowboys? I didn’t like the way he was looking at us.”

Fahey looked over his shoulder, but saw nothing. When he turned back to Magdalena he was in time to see her reaching for the fence, as though to steady herself.

“Maybe we should go,” Fahey said.

“I guess. All of a sudden, I got dizzy.”

“Hey,” he said. “We’ve seen what we came to see. It’s late and you’ve been through a lot. You should sleep now. It’s time.”

Magdalena nodded. Apparently he was still looking out for her. By this time tomorrow she would be back on her own, on her own side of the fence.

They went out the way they had come in, along the neck of the guitar, past the circle where the bull that seemed to have vanished at the coming of the dancers had reappeared once more, minus both his tail and his tormentors. The animal stood motionless, then snorted softly as they passed as though to register some comment on the day’s humiliations. They passed among the trailers mounted on dunghills and the hole in the fence from which the longhorn had watched them come in and searched once more for that skeletal face hung upon the night air but could not find it, and came finally to the road and the dead grove beyond it and so to the mouth of Smuggler’s Gulch, where already a ground fog had appeared beneath the trees—a blessing to what pilgrims the night would bring, a curse to the border patrol sworn to stem their tide—a job now undertaken in the name of homeland defense though it was unlikely there would be any among this night’s sad offerings with darker agendas than food for their tables or a little something to send home to the ones who waited . . .

Fahey noted these things and made mention of them as Magdalena stood in the dirt roadway waiting as he unlocked the doors of the old Toyota then ushered her in and walked round to the driver’s door to get in beside her. He executed a three-point turn on the narrow road. The lights of his truck fell among that remnant of cadaverous trees, dead these twenty years, but he said no more about it and they rode on through the night and the valley that in one manner or another had begotten them both, each now alone
with such thoughts as they were wont to entertain, yet never knowing that as they went, another had observed their passing, a crab man at one with the shadows, in ostrich-skin boots whose rightful owner lay still warm, dead aboveground. He stood outfitted with cheap Tijuana bridgework and garish Western wear, his shirt untucked and only half buttoned, the loose ends of this article spreading apart as he climbed atop a fence post to see in what direction the truck had gone, and this movement enough to reveal the large Aztec sun tattooed across his abdomen—homage to such fierce progenitors as it pleased him to imagine, despoilers of virgins, with a taste for the still-beating heart . . . and which mark, if only Magdalena could have seen, she could have recognized, and the road she and Fahey would have chosen would have been quite different from the one taken. For that led not toward the lights of town, but deeper into the black heart of the valley, toward the old Fahey worm farm, a sight already noted for its dark excess, even here, in a land steeped in malfeasance.

T
HE FIRST
of the Pickerings had died quickly, more or less decapitated by Nacho’s stroke. They had tried torturing the second in hopes of obtaining information about the big man with the worm on his cap but the woman had been less conversant in Spanish than the man and seemed to have undergone a kind of seizure even before the onset of the inquisition. The entire episode had ended badly, ankle-deep in gore, and even Armando was eager to drive the details from his mind. A well-stocked liquor cabinet in the Pickering kitchen had gone some way toward satisfying this desire and in the end all three miscreants had staggered from the property, barely able to find their own car in the gathering darkness.

Once inside, it was decided, inasmuch as anything was ever decided upon within the ranks of Armando’s gang, to return to the rodeo. The light, after all, had failed them. Armando was drunk as a sailor, Chico a lover of the dance, and tomorrow was another day.
And so had Armando led his crew from the scene of the crime, never knowing that his Madonna had passed within shouting distance or that in driving the rutted dirt road in approach to Smuggler’s Gulch he was following upon her trail, or that in two hours’ time she would pass yet again, within the very bounds of Garage Door Tijuana, where Armando would lie in drink, at work in factories half remembered and half dreamed, yet the circles of their respective orbits drawing ever tighter, as if gravity itself had taken some hand in the proceedings.

He lay among the onions, affixing the leather covering to a steering wheel already coated with glue. The fabric of his shirt was drenched in sweat. His eyes burned, even in sleep, or what passed for it, the music of a hundred ghetto blasters rocking the very air he breathed. The wheel was uncooperative, its shape shifting even as he worked, the glue already setting up as suddenly he was aware of the women in the stitching area. He could smell their sex, wet beneath leather miniskirts and blue smocks as they looked on with eyes both aloof and painted, though indeed every eye in the factory seemed bent upon him at just that moment, as if he alone was responsible for its workings . . . as a hand began to rock him gently against the ground.

His eyes opened slowly. His head felt split in two. Yet even then it was his Reina he thought to see, the open doorway of their cardboard shack framing her with stars . . . or perhaps her face, anxious amid the polished hallways of the hospital in Reynosa . . . What he got was Chico, sequins winking at the tips of the little arrows that formed the pockets of his shirt caught in the light of a bare bulb somewhere overhead, and himself at rest in an onion bin, his head upon a scrap of tire, his body covered with a piece of plastic sheeting, which as he moved upright amid the reek of onions and cow manure slithered away as though bent upon escape, vanishing into
the darkness beyond his boots. He watched it go with no small degree of wonder before turning to this figure now squatting there before him like some jackass at the window, possibly of no more substance than such phantoms as had proceeded it, for such were the boundaries between his worlds. But the figure spoke to him by name. Fire lit the bowl of a glass pipe. The pipe found its way into his hands. He took a hit. A voice whispered in his ear, telling him that it was time to get right. It was the voice of the cowboy with the red convertible, his partner for a day.
“Es tu Madonna,”
the voice said to him.
“Está aquí.”