Tijuana Straits (37 page)

The other man jogged to meet him, in apparent ignorance of Fahey’s presence—a mud effigy not unlike Fahey himself, coming at a half trot on the opposite side of the river, following its bank, passing the flats white as snow. A broad belt crossed his chest, in caricature of a Mexican bandido, but his head was encased in some manner of outlandish helmet, for Fahey could see its black, shining surface cut into sharp angles, glinting in the moonlight. In other circumstances the man’s dress might have been comical. In the present situation it suggested dementia and other unpleasantries. Fahey watched as the man broke stride, drawing something from behind his back. Moonlight struck the shortened barrel of what Fahey could only imagine as a Mossberg riot gun, lifted no doubt from behind the seat of his own truck where it sat on the farm, still smoldering in the dark well of the valley.

He stared into the darkness from which the man had come but there were none following and he guessed that the men who chased them had indeed crossed paths with the men on dirt bikes, that gunfire had marked the encounter. And if such was the case then it must be that Fahey’s plan had worked already and needed only for Fahey to show himself to ensure its completion.

And though Fahey had come to the place he’d aimed for and the final trap was all but set, his thoughts turned to Magdalena among the dunes, to their intended walk, to a parting at the border. He imagined these as things already transpired the better to indulge them, then set about his little act—feigning panic, calling out for Magdalena to run though she was already well sheltered from any line of fire.

He watched as the man came to an abrupt halt, snatching the outlandish helmet from his head as though it was suddenly an
impediment to his sight, moving toward that narrow part of the river, and Fahey not thirty feet beyond it, raising the gun as he came.

Fahey showed himself a moment longer, surprised at his own daring before diving for cover. Yet he had nearly played the part too long, for the shotgun’s report shattered the night even as he dove and buckshot grazed his shoulder. In fact, he’d managed to get himself shot.

He lay facedown on the floor of a crater, crusted in salt. He waited for a second report but there was none forthcoming. He examined himself for injuries—two pellets that he could feel, on the outer part of his shoulder, hard beneath his fingers. His heart thumped upon the ground. It was answered by the pounding of the surf. Cursing his insouciance, he called out from the prone position, in what little Spanish he’d managed to retain, a handful of insults from his youth and the Island Express. He was answered with silence. He belly-crawled to the far end of the crater, shadowed in a stand of cattails. The growth offered cover and he rolled into a second crater then chanced a look. The man had come to the very edge of the water, where he stood peering into the shadows, and Fahey saw him clearly for the first time.

In the absence of any helmet Fahey saw moonlight on a balding skull and beneath that pale dome a physiognomy of such haunted intensity as to set him, at least momentarily, upon his heels in simple wonder, like someone who had come face-to-face with first things, in a time before words, yet found in their presence the shock of recognition.

Time passed. The men were only yards apart. Armando stood in full view, washed in moonlight at the river’s edge. Fahey remained in shadow, where, once the initial shock engendered by such a countenance as Armando’s had begun to wear off, he wondered yet again at such motives as had driven this man from across the border.
For in place of something better, he was willing to believe that he was one of the men who’d set upon Magdalena in Tijuana and that she had been badly advised when told such men were no longer a threat. If this were the case, it might also be true, as Magdalena had originally surmised, that the man did not act of his own accord but came in the service of another to whom failure was not an acceptable outcome. It was difficult, however, at just that moment, for Fahey to imagine the owner of such a face as that hung opposite him, as though provoked from the very darkness, as indentured to any save what demons were entirely its own. And yet whatever the reasons, for those were superfluous to the moment and might be considered at some later date, the man had come, his prey now close enough to smell, his thoughts transparent as a child’s. For he was studying the river before him and even as Fahey watched, the man squatted, extending a booted foot, tapping the placid surface with his toe, about to take the first step, when Fahey’s attention was caught by some movement upon the salt pans just east of where he lay, on his own side of the river.

He turned out of bleak necessity for there could be nothing there he wanted to see. And indeed by time he had done so a second man had risen fully formed from the salt pans and cordgrass and was coming at a fast trot, a figure even more befouled than Fahey himself yet with just enough of a garish Western shirt visible in the moonlight for Fahey to make some guess as to his identity, for he remembered there had been a man at the rodeo, a cowboy Magdalena had found reason to fear, though if in fact this was that man, and if so by what machinations he had been delivered here, Fahey had neither the time nor inclination to ponder, for already the man had seen him and called out, in rapid-fire Spanish. He was answered in kind by the man on the far bank—discourse of which Fahey could understand not a word and at the end of which the man gave out with a hoarse cry and launched himself into the flats, a rusted
machete gripped in both hands and raised above his head, a grenadier from among the deranged.

Fahey’s grand plan having made him for a fool, he had little time now for improvisation. In his efforts to ensnare the man on the opposite bank, he’d ensnared himself and Magdalena as well and the best he could hope for was that he might buy her some time. The first man was trapped by the river. If Fahey could best the second man, or at least slow him down, Magdalena might still outdistance him to the border.

Such were Fahey’s thoughts as the man cleared the edge of his crater in a single leap, landing on one booted foot and one bare, the whites of his eyes visible above a toothless grimace and such skin as was not blackened with mud dyed to the color of tropic seas as though its owner had come in mad flight not from the rodeo at Garage Door Tijuana but rather from some darker and more ancient ritual, a thing infused with debauchery and the sacrifice of innocents. The machete was held aloft in both hands, the rusted blade rushing to sunder Fahey’s skull.

He rolled clear at the last possible second, the blade striking the ground where his head had been. Shards of crystallized salt and pieces of earth cast up like broken crockery stung his skin. He spun on one hip, sweeping the ground with his opposing leg, catching the other man at the backs of his knees. The man loosed a guttural cry in keeping with his appearance, landing on his ass with enough force to bring forth small geysers of reeking mud from beneath the layers of salt. Fahey went for his throat, aware of the shotgun across the river, determined to keep the fight on the ground. But the man was quick. Fahey felt the bite of the old blade, catching him on the inner arm, thrusting forward to puncture the skin just above his collarbone. He drove it away with the butt of his hand. They had come
to a kneeling position. Fahey drove his weight into the other man. Momentum carried them over the rim of the shallow crater and into the sand, in the direction of the river. There was nothing for it but to keep fighting. Fahey pushed a thumb into his opponent’s windpipe. He was nearly blinded by salt and mud. The other man still held to the machete, which had on it a wooden handle and this topped by a kind of wooden knob like what you might find at the grip end of a baseball bat. Old man Pickering had made it so, fashioned it of hickory in his own toolshed when the first handle had come apart on him years ago, and fuck him for his craftsmanship, as it was this selfsame handle that at last made contact with Fahey’s head, catching him flush in the temple. It could not be said that he saw it coming. His face hit sandy ground baked harder than a brick. The impact loosened a tooth. His mouth filled with blood and grit. A light show played somewhere in the darkness of his skull then faded to black. He went with her name on his lips. He wished her speed.

S
O IT
was that Armando had come to the very edge of the river. And so it was that he had seen Chico come back from the dead, brandishing the rusted machete they had taken from the farm of the old people, clearly an act worthy of such songs as Chico was wont to imagine, and he wondered briefly if they had not all become worthy of song, both he and his companions, and went so far as to imagine what these corridos might be like, such storied exploits from north of the line. But then Chico had ruined it all by calling out for Armando to shoot the worm farmer. Until that moment, Armando had taken Chico’s use of the machete in place of his pistol as an act of machismo. But the other’s pleas now gave him to understand that the jackass had simply lost his gun to the river and Armando cursed him for a dick and a clown. Still, he sheathed the shotgun and drew the pistol, reckoning the spread of the former too broad to hit just one of the combatants, if that was what it came
to, but yelling at Chico even as he made the switch, telling him to use the fucking machete, for Christ’s sake. In fact, he wanted to see how Chico would handle himself in a real fight. He wanted to see this because he imagined that one day he might be called upon to fight Chico himself and was curious about the other man’s style.

Unhappily, it was a short fight, with Chico quickly upended but managing to club the other man in the side of head with the butt end of the machete, after which the big man lay still and Chico rose up over him, a pale apparition cloaked now in the salt of the flat and this adhering to clothes already caked in mud and wet from the river that had so delivered him, back from the dead. The machete dangled from Chico’s arm. He gasped for breath, one hand on his throat. He seemed to be collecting himself for some final act when a stone struck him full in the chest. Chico cursed and cried out. He was answered by a voice from the dunes.

Inexplicably the voice called to Armando Santoya by name, in his own tongue. He looked toward the sea, to a Madonna descending. Her dress was red before the whiteness of the sand. Her hair was wild about her shoulders and the moonlight was on her face. She had filled a pocket of her dress with stones and she was throwing these at Chico and she was calling on Armando and asking for his help. He responded to these wonders in dumb astonishment, not only to her words but to the spectacle that she presented. She threw the stones overhand with considerable force. They were not so easy to dodge in the darkness. Taking one to the head might prove detrimental to one’s health. A conclusion apparently reached by the cowboy, for once again he called out for Armando to shoot. When this did not happen he was ready to forgo the slaughter of Fahey in an effort to reach his attacker. A dive, followed by a shoulder roll, got him there. The move caught her by surprise and he had her by the arm. It was the way he’d once had her at the side of the road, above the beaches of Mexico, in Las Playas de Tijuana.

She fought now as she had fought then and for a brief time they whirled across the sand as if in dance. But she would not surprise him again. He was much the stronger of the two and as Armando watched, the cowboy released the grip on her arm and took her by the hair. He bent her back so that her throat was turned to the sky. His knee pushed the dress between her thighs and he slapped at her bare leg with the flat of his blade. In fact he had begun to toy with her. “See your Madonna,” the cowboy said. “Get some while it lasts.” He lowered his face toward her throat in the manner of a vampire.

Armando watched, fixated, beset by feelings of an immense complexity. Chico seemed ready to have her then and there, or maybe to stumble with her in the direction of the dunes and so remove her from Armando’s sight altogether. But thanks to some movement born of her struggles, or perhaps out of choice, Chico raised his head once more, his shoulders swinging briefly toward the river, his faced turned in the direction of Armando, who read upon that painted visage a look of such naked and contemptible lust that he elected not even to waste such time as it would have taken to cross the river but shot him where he stood and so kept his Madonna in full view, not to mention preserving her for such ends as were all his own.