Tijuana Straits (34 page)

Two sets of trails ran through the valley, some north from the border, others west toward the sea. The north-south trails were narrow and winding and were used by smugglers and migrants. The east-west trails were wider and straighter and these had been cut by the border patrol, laid out to intersect the smaller trails and open
enough to accommodate both horses and quads alike, for rarely did the border patrol pursue on foot. And such were the trails Fahey now thought to use. He would use the border patrol trails for speed, the migrant trails to vary their course, but in general he would follow the winding path of the river and he told her how it would be . . . “We’re going to move fast,” he told her. “Zigzag, south to north, then east to west, then back again, over and over . . . Just stay with me. Step where I step. Turn where I turn. Stay up, right on my heels, all the way out to the beach. We’ll use the ocean to cross the river . . .”

“The ocean . . .” she said, but Fahey stopped her, his hand on her shoulder. “It won’t be like it was before,” he told her. “I’ll be with you. If we can put the river between us and them it will be very difficult for them to follow. Trust me to know how.”

There was little she could do but nod some form of assent and afterward they were off once more and she tried to do as he had said . . . stay hard on his back, the flowers of his Hawaiian shirt moving in and out of shadow, the mud sucking at her sandals, particularly when she misstepped, for in no time at all she could see that this was something he had done before. He kept to what lines of vegetation he could find at the edge of the muddy bank, pickleweed and cordgrass, and she found that when she stepped as he did, the footing was firmer and the speed was greater and the speed was their friend . . .

It was never so dark in the valley that she could not see where to step. There were too many lights on the high ground all around them, the great urban sprawl of San Diego County becoming one with the disaster that was Tijuana to the south and on this night there was a moon as well so that the valley was dusted in light. It tipped the leaves of the trees and lay upon the blades of grass like a jacket of frost. It came in shafts through gaps among the branches, even upon the canopied trails, and when by chance they broke into
some clearing, they were afforded views of the river’s tributaries—like cords of braided silver or the tentacles of a living thing crawled from the depths to search among the marsh of the great wetlands. And even deep among the willows it was never so dark as to lose sight of one’s hand in front of one’s face or of the ground beneath their feet and though this absence of complete darkness would aid them in their speed, she knew that it would aid their trackers as well.

And so they went, Fahey holding to his plan, navigating these two sets of trails. The migrant trails were sometimes barely there at all, narrow and twisting, close among the branches of the willows, among castor bean and giant cane like stalks of bamboo growing in dense clumps and once, breaking from one such trail and onto a broader road, they encountered an entire family of migrants, perhaps a dozen in number, and these came on in utter silence. They ran barefoot in this foul place, their shoes and other belongings carried in plastic bags over their shoulders, and Fahey and Magdalena passed right among them as though they had entered upon a gathering of lost souls set to wander, and not a single word was spoken one to the other and within seconds the migrants had vanished among the cane and Fahey and Magdalena were alone once more, on a westerly path made downright brilliant in the moonlight, and they followed this for as long as Fahey thought wise before cutting back toward the reek of the river and the black shade of the willows.

As for Magdalena, the border patrol trails were more to her liking and each time they broke upon one she would hope to encounter at least one, if not more, of its makers, but each time the trail was empty and they would follow it for some short distance before turning back toward the hateful water.

It was roughly a mile and a half from the farm to the sea and they
moved through this terrain by stops and starts, now at a dead run on hard-packed dirt, now at a slow crawl among the brush and the branches that tore at their clothing and the skin beneath, and down along the riverbed, where the bats came for insects and the shadowed dark made the footing more treacherous. And from time to time Fahey would stop in one of these locations and look back and it seemed to him that the men were indeed following, coming by some instinct for tracking latent within them as within any such beasts of prey, and once he heard their voices raised above the soft rush of water and once he saw them plainly, a hundred yards back upon a border patrol path, and saw to his consternation that two carried lanterns and cursed beneath his breath, for such light would facilitate the tracking and cursed too at the very brazenness of it, here, where no migrant or smuggler worthy of the name would risk such a display, and he guessed that the luck of the unrighteous came with them. Either that or there was other mischief about, in other quarters of the valley, and the attentions of the country’s guard petitioned in more places than one.

They went on. In places the air was thick and sweet with the abundance of plant life close to water and in others rank as the exhalations of a feculent swamp and always the wheeling firmament above their heads, appearing as might the starry bottom of such canyons as the living trees had cut from the sky, as though the world they traversed was a world inverted, but there was little time for such observations. For the most part they went in silence, in single file, till that place where Magdalena’s shriek pierced the air and Fahey stopped in his tracks to find her tumbling away from him, the red dress dragging across the mud and her with it, for she had been spent even before this chase began and in her weariness her foot had slipped from some bit of vegetation and into the mud and from there had shot from beneath her as surely as if planted on ice . . .

She hit the ground on her hip, sliding down the last of the
embankment as though it were the tilting floor of an amusement park ride, feet first into a kind of bog where she could no longer say where the earth ended and the water began and sank almost at once to her waist in this reeking sediment, unable to struggle free, indeed, sinking further with each new effort.

Fahey came after her. Heedless now of any sound his voice might make, he called out, telling her to be still, that to struggle was to speed the descent, as farther up the bank he sought frantically for some means by which to free her, for the time would come quickly when she was too deep to save and the earth would have her, and in all likelihood Fahey, too, for he was determined to pull her out or sink in the attempt.

He slid down the muddy bank, one leg thrust before him like a runner taking second base and one tucked beneath him in an effort to control his slide, at the last moment catching hold of a low-lying branch he’d glimpsed from above, trusting the article to hold, gambling that he would come close enough for her to reach. And indeed the branch took his weight with a low groan, bending downward so that Fahey’s legs came within her grasp and there was no need to tell her what to do.

She took hold of his ankles and began to pull herself from the mud that sought in turn to keep her for itself. But she pulled hard and Fahey pulled too, hand over hand back along the branch and the branch held until at last they lay panting like spent lovers, so caked in mud, one might think the stuff in which they lay was the stuff from which they had been formed—the primeval couple. And it was from just this vantage point, one atop they other, that they looked into the shadows and saw the horse. And each in turn lay speechless, for such was the sight of this doomed beast, already up to its shoulders in a far corner of the brackish pond that was one with the muddy bog into which she had fallen. The animal was dark with white markings on its face and they could see it looking back
at them, wide-eyed but silent, as though it was the ghost of the animal already gone that watched them from the gloom.

“My God,” Magdalena said.

Fahey wondered how long the animal had been here and what had become of its rider, if indeed there had been a rider, for the horse was without bridle or saddle and at this stage of the game one would need a crane to rescue the beast and perhaps the horse reckoned this as well for the animal maintained its stoic silence in the face of its own end. When he had thought about these things long enough, he took Magdalena by the hand and helped her to her feet and told her that they had to go on.

She did as Fahey asked but she continued to stare at the horse till they had lost it among the shadows and stared at it even then in her mind’s eye, and guessed that she would stare at it often in that cloistered place—this creature with whom her bones had so very nearly been mingled had not Fahey saved her yet again. Though to what end he had saved her was hard to say for between her screams and his shouts they had made a good deal of noise and the mud had taken her sandals and left her barefoot as any migrant. But Fahey sat on the ground and took off his own shoes and gave her his socks and told her to put them on, as they would be better than nothing at all. He added that he would give her the shoes as well but that these were too big and would only slow her down even more. She came to his side on the ground but had no sooner added the socks to her costume than some new wonder was visited upon them and the entire bank bathed suddenly in a brilliant light.

The roar of engines came quickly upon the heels of this display. Fahey’s first thought was that the border patrol had come at last. Still, he thought it best to be certain and flattened himself to the ground, whispering for Magdalena to do the same, and each of them still so covered in mud it was unlikely that anyone would have been able to tell them from it at a glance.

Which in fact was a good thing, for the machines in question were not the machines of the border patrol but two-wheel dirt bikes with Day-Glo accessories and the riders came dressed in army camouflage and wore such helmets as might be found on the sets of movies and these decorated with skulls and crossbones and naked women with pendulous breasts and they carried weaponry slung low on their thighs in fancy plastic sheaths and diving knives strapped to their calves and the engines roared and the tires blew chunks of mud like bullets and before such grotesqueries Fahey and Magdalena lay silent as mud dolls. Only when the riders had passed did they dare to move, slithering like water moccasins deeper among the trees and finally into the arm of a narrow tributary cut among the cane. They followed this for some distance then waited for signs of pursuit. And for a while this seemed almost a possibility as the engines continued to roar in the general vicinity, without moving on. Nor, on the other hand, did the engines get any closer to where they lay.

“Vigilantes,” Fahey whispered.

“Would they help?”

“It’s impossible to say.” Local high schoolers had been known to engage in such extracurricular activities, ROTC students from San Ysidro, Chula Vista, or National City, relatively benign. But so had assorted meth chefs and drug runners been known to traverse the valley, as well as racists in search of fragile prey. Fahey had a woman in tow, lovely and just about half dressed in the aftermath of the mud. Who could gauge the minds of such men? Who would count on their help?

In the face of such uncertainty the counsel Fahey elected was his own and his choice was to move on. A good deal of the valley was already behind them and in another few minutes of following the muddy little stream they came to the very edge of the trees and the last of the sheltering vegetation. Ahead of them lay the cordgrass of
the great estuary, ending among salt pans and marsh grass and beyond these the dunes white as snow-capped peaks and past the dunes the beaches where it had all begun, the beach and the mouth of the river, and Fahey knelt now in the mud and looked out over this last stretch of ground that separated them from the sea, roughly half a mile in breadth.

Magdalena knelt at his side and he told her what to look for as they made for the dunes. “You see there are patterns in the grass, patches of light and dark. Where it’s dark the ground will be firmer. Where it’s light, the mud will be even worse that what we just got out of.”