Tijuana Straits (40 page)

The pellet wounds in his shoulder ached for a while as did his head, but in a short time each was numb and he swam and he dove until the shore break was a thing of the past and he was swimming in a great cauldron, amid darkness and flashes of moonlight, swimming in one of the rip tides that Hoddy had taught him to use. For with all that water moving in there had to be places for it to move out and knowing how to find such currents and how to use them was an old surfer’s trick.

He was somewhere past the peak at Second Notch when a broad shaft of light came streaming from the shore—the halogens of the patrolman’s truck—and it appeared that the man must have gotten his truck farther up on the dunes as the light seemed now to issue from some altitude, hitting the water another hundred yards out, and he turned toward it, breaking from what was left of the rip, angling toward the waves of Third Notch.

A trio of waves broke in front of him as he made his approach, one after the other. They were big open ocean waves it was necessary to elude. He was still pretty far out on the shoulders of the waves yet each seemed to take him deeper than the last. The dives brought cold, an utter blackness, and with each descent came a strange, almost overwhelming urge to dive deeper still, to push farther into the void, as though the blackness were a thing he might strike through. It was spooky little game, yet each time he came back and each time he was farther outside with the sea grown calmer, able to raise himself upon his homemade buoy to get his
bearings, steering by the lights that streamed from the shore until at last he was swimming among pieces of wreckage and came finally upon the first of the migrants, a man in his thirties, already spitting blood.

The man was clinging to an orange seat cushion and Fahey was glad to see it for he had been counting on at least two things. He knew enough of these outings to know that at some point the migrants would have been planning to swim to shore and so might be expected to have at least some ability as swimmers. He was also counting on their having acquired something in the way of flotation devices, if nothing more than bits of the wreckage itself. In truth he had gambled his life on these two items, for without them he would stand little chance of making a rescue and a very good chance of being drowned in the attempt. The plastic jugs would not, by themselves, be enough to do the job. Still, he had wanted them. They served the theory that in any rescue, the rescuer must instill within the victim the belief that help has arrived, thereby gaining a psychological advantage. And so did Fahey hope to make use of the things he had brought. He imagined that they would not only make it look like he knew what he was doing, but would act as a rallying point as well, for it was his intention to gather such survivors as he could find into a single group. It was the theory with which he had begun and he was not about to abandon it now. He pushed the plastic jugs toward the man with the seat cushion then reached him in a stroke.

The man regarded him with rolling eyes. “Lifeguard,” Fahey said. He was astonished to find that he had lost the Spanish equivalent. The man flailed about. Fahey got the bottles under the man’s arms like a pair of water wings.

“¿Cuántos compañeros?”

The man vomited.

Fahey tried again.
“¿Cuántos compañeros?”

“Seis,”
the man said. He spoke between chattering teeth.
“Seis.”

Fahey nodded. Already there were two more, a man and a woman, splashing toward him. He arranged these around the man with the cushion and bottles. He found another man a short distance away, trying to keep afloat on a scrap of wood too small to do the job. Fahey saw his head go under. He swam quickly to the spot, pulling him to the surface by the nape of his neck, then floated him toward the others. He felt certain they were beyond Third Notch, and he prayed that his luck would hold, that he might assemble his group before the Mystic Peak could fire again. He had four already and in another few seconds he had the last two, a boy and a girl, the girl a teenager, the boy younger. These had also found seat cushions and he grouped them with the others—everyone assembled around the man with the bottles—and he bound himself to them by the use of his line, to make of them all one great floating ball of humanity that the white water might drive toward shore, and he was no sooner done with this exercise than he heard it come, a deep thundering from out of the darkness, and in another moment he saw it—white water like the vanguard of a mountain in ruin—yet the act was done and they were bound for good or for ill, knit by flesh and line and the desire to live, and so were they conformed as the white water hit them.

The impact was tremendous and they were driven down and slammed and spun and Fahey could feel the combined weight of them all lashed about his neck from which issued a variety of weird popping and cracking sounds, leaving him to wonder if that extremity would hold or give way altogether, but he held to people he could no longer see with both hands and they to him and all of them holding on as Fahey had instructed before the white water could hit. For by such efforts would their combined buoyancy return them to the surface and so it happened, all seven heads, and Fahey’s among them, breaking into the light. After this wave there
were more, though of diminishing power, and in time the migrants were able to see what Fahey had in mind, and to mark their own progress, and so held to one another of their own accord, pushed steadily toward the inside sandbars to arrive at last puking and chilled to the bone upon the shores of America, where the border patrol was waiting.

To Magdalena’s eyes, they appeared as a circus act from beneath the sea, or perhaps some creature as yet unnamed, so absurd in its formation as to beggar description and moving forward with such locomotions as would befit its appearance, for in fact the survivors could not stop clinging to one another and some were still bound by Fahey’s line—an even half dozen altogether, not counting the man who had rescued them, so that in total they were seven, and five of these from the same family, a mother and father together with an uncle and two children. But as for now, all seven came on in the manner so described, crawling shell-shocked and half drowned, their arrival contained within the great glow of the halogens. And which lights, angled now from the dunes above, contained as well the sea spray of a thundering shore break, swirling upward within their broad beam as though the survivors had come ashore in the teeth of some tropical cloudburst though in truth the sky above was clear and dark, replete with moonlight, twin dippers, and the belt of Orion . . .

T
HE QUESTION
now before them was how best to care for the migrants. Procedure called for them to be arrested before they were treated but this was a dangerous way to go as most were approaching hypothermia if not there already and at least two were badly injured. One of these was the man Fahey had first come upon in the water, spitting blood, the apparent result of a broken rib. The other was the young girl, who seemed to have sustained some kind of head injury in the course of the rescue. She was moaning and nauseous, unable to bring her eyes to focus, and in the end it was decided that they could be treated most quickly were Magdalena to have an ambulance meet them on the beaches of Las Playas, only minutes away.

She made the call from the patrolman’s truck, which he admitted was irregular, but then he was a Mexican as well as an American and indeed had grown up in Tijuana and said that he would take
responsibility for the decision in order to save the lives of the people now huddled in the back of his truck, wrapped in such blankets and towels and other articles of clothing as could be found. Fahey said he knew of a place to cross and the patrolman saw no reason to challenge him. The man, he concluded, was on a roll.

The injured girl rode up front, draped across the laps of both Fahey and Magdalena, who rode side by side with the patrolman, Magdalena in the middle, cradling the girl’s head and shoulders.

“This has been the devil’s own night,” the patrolman said, speaking as he drove. “Let me tell you. There was a stabbing over there at Garage Door Tijuana. Then some fool tried to run a whole goddamn herd of horses though a hole up by Smuggler’s Gulch. Things have been running all over the valley and us chasing them. On top of that there was a fire at that lousy worm farm . . . what’s it called . . . the Fahey place . . . but then I guess we can live with that. From what I hear no one’s going to miss it.”

No one said much after that and for the most part they rode in silence, in approach to the great fence with its seemingly unending string of lights spooling out before them like a constellation in decline, though from time to time the patrolman would look over at Fahey, not without some degree of wonder, asking him if he was sure he was okay, and Fahey would answer that he was.

“I suppose you’re going to tell us you can still count to ten,” Magdalena said. She had one arm around the child in her lap. With the other, she was holding Fahey by the hand.

“No, but I can whistle,” Fahey told her. It had been one of the tests for hypothermia Hoddy had taught to his boys, back in the day, lifeguarding along these selfsame beaches, yet he made no effort to prove this was the case just now but was content to ride, Magdalena’s hand in his own, and to think back along such golden
chains of days as these beaches now evoked. For it seemed as if he was remembering them afresh after some long hiatus—days of offshore winds and bonfires crackling on the beaches, cooking up lobsters from Hoddy’s traps, and the beer fresh off the ice in the old dunemobile. And when the beer and the lobsters were gone and stories sufficient to the day had been told, there was at last the long ride back in the rear of that selfsame vehicle—the Dog’s forty-nine Merc with the seats gone and the trunk cut out and the roof too—steel posts now welded to the frame in support of a new roof, and this of bamboo and palm fronds, and the whole rig sitting up high on the airplane tires Hoddy’d managed to hustle from some engineer at Lockheed with a weakness for the straits. And they’d gone with the lights of Imperial Beach scattered before them, in those days faint as a child’s birthday candles above the grasses of the great estuary and the lights of Mexico at their backs . . .

Such were the images with which Fahey rode. From time to time he would hear Magdalena and the officer exchange a few words in Spanish and once he heard Magdalena mention his name. He was aware too that neither seemed able to keep their eyes off him for long, both looking at him in a way that no one had looked at him in a very long time and maybe never at all, save perhaps one, and that would have been the old Badlander himself, in a time before remembering.

In minutes they were nearing the fence and Fahey directed them. They drove inland on hard-packed dirt then off-road, a short distance to the foot of a mesa, among grass and brush and a few stunted cottonwoods, where the patrolman’s lights fell across the opening of the old pipe, nearly invisible among the vines that drew enough moisture from the cliff face to dangle across its entrance.

“I’ll be damned,” the patrolman said. They parked and got out.