Tijuana Straits (11 page)

She slipped easily into the sandals Fahey had provided and went outside once more, still a bit woozy, crossing the intervening fifty feet or so of weed and rock till she had come within reach of the yellow light and the structure that contained it, little more than a crude afterthought to the rest of the house—an old porch, perhaps, tin-roofed, enclosed in plywood that might have been salvaged from the valley itself—all of it, roof and siding alike, painted in the same drab shade of olive green to which the entire dwelling had been made subject, as though the U.S. military had taken some hand in it. Holes had been cut from the side of this shanty into which a pair of cheap aluminum-framed windows were fitted at angles not quite square to the line of the roof, their glass clouded with dust and time. She came close enough to feel the coolness off one such mottled pane upon the skin of her brow, and peering through it, found the room beyond pressed into service as a kind of workshop. At the room’s center was what she took for a surfboard in progress—a large chunk of foam cut to a rough shape resting on a pair of sawhorses and all around it walls papered with surfing photographs which, judging from their condition, had been there for some time, as many were torn, their edges frayed and peeling, their colors bleached by the sun. Tools hung suspended from metal hooks. Others lay scattered across a high table. She looked in upon all of this for several seconds before some movement beneath the surfboard in progress drew her eye to the remnants of foam heaped upon the floor and she saw that Fahey was contained there as well.

He could have been easily overlooked, in the midst of sawdust and shavings, but there he was, her benefactor, swathed in a ratty
sleeping bag, in the fetal position, a six-pack of beer and a small plastic pill bottle situated near his head. It had not been her intention to spy, yet she continued to stand at the window, transfixed, as he twitched one way and then the other, suddenly shouting in his sleep and flailing about. A hand scuttled across the floor, crablike, in search of something it could not find before retreating into the folds of the bag. She could hear the occasional burst of snoring, rattling through the thin panes of glass, then stood there another ten seconds before putting it all together . . . the lights she had seen through the trailer window, no matter the hour, the figure supine before her . . . “My God,” she said, half aloud, surprising herself with the sound of her own voice. “He sleeps with the lights on.”

F
AHEY
’
S FINEST
hours were, in retrospect, rather short lived. In the years that followed he would mark their passing by a single incident. In Tijuana, Fahey had become friends with a family who wanted to emigrate, albeit illegally, to the United States and he had offered to help. The farm was still his home, though he was rarely there. He often slept on the beach in those days, rising early to catch the morning glass, going to school, or not, as the spirit moved him. No one seemed to mind, certainly not his father. Weekends were spent lifeguarding in Rosarito, where Hoddy had contrived to establish a training program for Mexican lifeguards, and that was how Fahey met the family in question, dragging their dog from the shore break on a Sunday afternoon as a big south swell swept the beaches at a dangerous clip. The plan was hatched later in the day, amid beers and tacos in the People’s Park overlooking the river valley.

The family would have to make its own way out of Tijuana but once in the valley, Fahey could offer the farm as safe haven. Later, he would help them to move farther north. He cleared the plan with the old man, who claimed not to give a rat’s ass, joking that all he wanted for his hospitality was a bottle of good tequila, meaning some particularly objectionable brand of rot-gut, chocolate-flavored shit most likely banned in the States but sold in Tijuana to anyone foolish enough to buy it and for which, in the midst of his decomposition, the old man had developed a taste. Fahey had gotten it for him himself, of course, given it to the family to bring with and was up at midnight one week hence to meet them in the old avocado grove at the mouth of Smuggler’s Gulch. He could, to this day, still see them there, beneath those darkened limbs—mother, father, assorted offspring and relatives, all smiles and open arms, the tequila in a brown paper bag, walking to America, emerging from the ground fog like the ghosts they were soon to become, because in America, Lucian Fahey was waiting.

Drinking heavily and down so long it was beginning to look like up, the old man had conspired with thugs to betray them all. And just as Fahey could still see the family, an even dozen altogether, not counting the pet he had hauled from the currents, he could see his father as well—a wizened figure, gaunt and unshaven, white hair falling to his shoulders in the moonlight, flanked by men with guns and trucks and not a thing for Fahey to do but shower the old man with the slings and arrows of a righteous indignation, receiving for his troubles a butt stroke to the jaw. The resulting injury had left him taking meals through a straw for the next six weeks. The last he had seen of the family were their bent shapes in the beds of the pickup trucks, vanishing into the darkness from which they had come.

It takes some men longer than others to find themselves. For Lucian Fahey it took some fifty-odd years but once he’d come into his own, he did so with a reckless abandon, cutting deals with street
punks and coyotes alike to do what his own son had done for free, lure pilgrims into his web. It was hard to know now just how many there were over the years. On the night in question Fahey had taken his unhinged jaw together with what possessions he could carry and left for good. Threats of death and dismemberment had followed him into the night. He had believed every one.

Hoddy had taken him to get his jaw wired and for a while he’d tried living with his surrogate father. It was at about this same time however that a new city council had deemed the aging surfer too old to continue as captain of the guard. The charge was strictly bullshit. Hoddy could still have outswum, outsurfed, or outfought any man in town. It was the old Badlander’s rough and rowdy ways the city fathers had reason to find objectionable—visions of gentrification and increased land value in the wake of a recent California real estate boom dancing in their heads. Still, Hoddy lost his one and only job, together with the house that had accompanied it. Vandals had long since destroyed his shack on the beach and the valley had grown more dangerous. Hoddy took up residence in a fellow surfer’s converted garage—one room and a hot plate. He did his dishes in the bathroom sink. It marked the beginning of a long decline. Fahey spent a couple of strange and uncomfortable weeks on the old man’s floor, then struck out on his own.

In the end, the home Fahey found for himself was with the Island Express—an aspiring group of drug runners headed up by a math teacher from a local high school. The Express’s drug of choice was marijuana, and before they were done they’d moved it by the ton. They packed it on foot, through the valley and along the beaches. On big south swells they paddled hollow-bodied boards out of Rosarito and rode the currents north, sometimes off-loading in broad daylight at the Imperial Beach pier. The money rolled in. Fahey bought a modest condominium near the sand. He never knew for certain what had become of the family he had tried to
help. He drove out to the farm one night, by now little more than a garbage dump, with the intention of learning the truth. He would beat it out of the old man if it came to that, which it did. But then it wasn’t much of a fight and the old man lost consciousness before he could do more than issue threats, which in fact he made good on by the following week, sending thugs to Fahey’s apartment to break a kneecap. Neither could go to the cops of course. If one went up, the other was bound to follow.

In time the Island Express turned to cocaine and crack. Fahey sampled his wares. He said it was the knee that kept him out of the water. Some said he might have turned pro. Hoddy had driven him to a contest once, in Huntington Beach. Fahey had entered unseeded, won the trials, then advanced to the final heats, where he had finished in the top three, among the pros. Cutting his teeth at the straits made most of what California had to offer seem easy. Still, in comparison to what he could make with the Island Express, competitive surfing was a slow way to earn a buck. Hoddy tried to talk to him. Coked to the gills, Fahey told the old man to go fuck himself. Hoddy believed in a lifestyle already gone. Fahey could see it even if the old surfer could not. He developed a taste for speed. The Island Express facilitated his appetite. Hoddy wanted an heir. Fahey wanted to forget the life he had turned his back on, the family he had betrayed. Drugs made it happen.

Not long after that the Mystic Peak broke once more. Hoddy came to his house that night. It was the last time they would see each other. They stood in silence on a wooden deck, listening to the thunder of huge waves. The old man had brought a gift. It was the ten-foot rhino chaser Hoddy had shaped himself then ridden, Outside the Bullring, on the day of the epic wave. He left it on Fahey’s porch and never said a word. The Gull lay awake for the rest of the night, listening to the waves. By dawn he was expected on the beach at Rosarito, the math teacher having arranged to move a load
of hash in a two-man submarine hijacked from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography by some physics professor with aspirations to the high life. It was a troubling scenario, Island Express outings becoming more outlandish by the day. Fahey should have known. He should have listened to Hoddy. He should have followed his heart. Dawn found him on the beach at Rosarito. The submarine foundered in ten feet of water. The math teacher ratted out everyone with whom he’d ever done business. It was a federal bust, on the word of a snitch. Fahey lost everything he owned, did four calendars at Safford, Arizona, and got out with nothing. Too old now for the contests he’d once eschewed, still cocky after four years in minimum security, he waited out a year of parole then tried to get back into the game. But with the passing of the Island Express things had changed and before it was over he’d sunk to cooking meth on the Mesa de Otay, where he finally learned everything there was to know about the sins of the father, learned about the men robbed and murdered, the women sold into slavery. Because this was where it had all gone down, for the family he had befriended, for the countless others who had followed. And they said you couldn’t go home again. An old Mex meth chef even showed him the bones in the ground and he saw for the first time the enormity of what he had begun. He saw iniquities without end, as a procession of days, and to these he had added other and greater iniquities in which his father had played no part and of which he would not speak, neither then nor now, yet he knew himself for what he was, his father’s son, and he vowed to finish what he had started the night he’d gone to beat the truth out of the old man, if only to rid the planet of them both, for in this crime he had no concern with perfection. He sold a few rocks to a guy he’d done time with before it could happen. It was strictly from charity and the goodness of his heart. Unhappily, the man’s parole officer caught him with the needle still in his arm. He had to give up somebody.
They nailed Fahey within twenty-four hours, smoking his own shit. The news was not all bad. So fucked up had he become and so far had he strayed from the old Mexican’s recipe, the stuff he had cooking in the sink could not rightly be identified as meth, or anything else for that matter. He told them he was making a sealer for the roof of his trailer. This time around it was a state bust, and in the end all they had him on was possession. The bad news was that the DA took a personal interest in the case. The man was so pissed about not getting more mileage out of a second offense that he kept Fahey in a county lockup for six months awaiting transfer and another six in what they euphemistically called bus therapy—that is, in constant motion, from one facility to another, all the way to Leavenworth and back again. He finished at Lompoc. In the end, he had done twenty-seven and change—a little over two years.