Tijuana Straits (12 page)

He still might have killed the old man, in spite of everything. It was a possibility. But pills and booze had pretty much done the trick by the time they let him out—diapers and a straw in the old folks’ home in Escondido. Within the week Lucian Fahey had drowned in his Gerber’s when a Filipino orderly high on smack ran the feeding tube into his remaining lung instead of his stomach. Samuel Fahey got the farm. He could not say he hadn’t anticipated the inheritance. He could not say he didn’t want it. The time in county had done what four years in Safford could not, left him feeling old and scared and ready to be good.

He tried to find Hoddy. They told him Hoddy was down with the Alzheimer’s, wandering the valley in pee-stained khakis. He thought he saw him once. He’d taken the job for Fish and Game, was trailing some feral cats at the edge of Border Field, and caught sight of a shadowy figure, dressed in rags—had called out to no response, followed a few faint tracks to a hole in the fence at the
bottom of Yogurt Canyon, written it off to some derelict from the other side . . . This before the tracking job became federal, ruling out known drug runners and convicted felons. Dark days followed. Panic attacks in the unemployment lines in downtown San Diego. In the end he settled on worm farming like the old man before him and two years of any shit job anyone was willing to give, staying alive while he cleaned up the farm, reading everything he could find on vermiculture, the road to riches. And over time . . . a windrow here, a harvester there . . . Add a website . . . Observe the Nike ad: Just do it . . . So he keeps on reading. He visits a worm farm in Perris, California, to see how it’s really done. The years click by. And now look . . . One more year and Sam the Gull Fahey may just break into the black, on a legal enterprise for the first time in his life. God knows what then. He can’t see that far. His last parole officer, a certain Mitchell Bovie, a decent man with whom he has kept in touch, says one foot in front of the other. “Inch by inch,” Mitch proclaims, from an office no bigger than a coffin, feet propped on a desktop littered with doughnut crumbs, rolls of Tums, and dirty Styrofoam cups. Fahey follows Mitchell’s advice. He takes it a day at a time. Sometimes he climbs to Spooner’s Mesa to smoke dope and watch the waves. In the absence of rains, when the water is cleaner, he takes the old ten-foot rhino chaser from the straps in his living room. It is the same board Hoddy left on his porch all those years ago, and he paddles the length of the straits by moonlight in the absence of any swell just to see what it feels like, to keep his paddling muscles from disappearing altogether. He might do six miles a night in the summer. Once in a while he will go to the surfer’s website Jack Nance has taught him to use, tracking the storms that will generate waves in distant parts of the globe that he will not ride. And now he hears talk of another El Niño forming in a distant quadrant of the sea and wonders if he will see the Mystic Peak break again and wonders what it will be like if he does, and what he will
do, if he is still young enough to do anything at all. He reads the magazines, chroniclers of a sport in which he might have been somebody, if this, if that, if only . . . He thinks about the life Hoddy once had here. He thinks about what might have been, and of what is. Age adds a new wrinkle: He leaves the valley and he gets dizzy. His heart palpitates. What in God’s name is that all about? Jack Nance invites him longboarding, but he thinks surfing is something you earn. He thinks he has blown his chance. Pills and beer hold the memories at bay. He sleeps with the lights on. The last thing he needs is trouble.

B
EFORE THERE
was a third eye tattooed in the bald spot at the back of his skull, indeed, long before there even was a bald spot, before the factories of Tijuana, before the hospital in Reynosa or the shallow graves at the edge of La Mesa de Otay, Armando Santoya had dreamed of becoming a fighter. It began at the age of fifteen, in Mexico City, seated on an overturned oil drum in a tarpaper shack belonging to his mother’s sister, where he saw his first and only movie. The story featured, among other things, a handsome fighter in love with a beautiful prostitute. Later, on a street in the city, some boys had taken him to a gym where, through cracks in a wooden fence, he’d watched two men gliding about a ring. The men were kickboxers and used both their hands and their feet. Their bodies were corded with muscle, streaked with sweat. Armando, still under the influence of his first and only movie, could imagine nothing finer.

It was a somewhat unusual dream for a boy from Tierra Blanca, where the
corridos
that spilled from the cheap plastic ghetto blasters and funky dives sang the praises of
mota
and the principal shrine was that of Jesús Malverde, the patron saint of
narcotraficantes
. Still, Armando began. He soaked his face in brine and hardened his hands on the fence posts that ringed the old corral. He called himself El Diablo de Sinaloa. His stepfather called him a dick and a clown, for which Armando beat the old drunk till he couldn’t stand, stole what money the family had managed to save, and left for Tijuana in complete ignorance of just about everything.

He lived at first with a second cousin, in a room with half a dozen other
nacos
. The word denotes undisguisable Indian blood and carries with it the usual connotative aspersions—ignorant, irredeemable, mustachioed, and generally appalling . . . And if Armando had never exactly thought of himself as any one of these things before, then he would learn to do so here, in the Zona Norte, amid the colored lights and banda music, amid the hookers and slumming white boys, in this apartment with his coppery brethren.

The men in Armando’s apartment spent their days in the service of the Japanese, assembling televisions in one of the many factories that ringed the city. Some of them tried to talk Armando into joining them. Armando, not yet convinced that he was one of them, went on with his plans. He went in search of a gym where he might be discovered, for a lovely prostitute with whom he might fall in love. He did not have to go far. There was a boxing club around the corner and prostitutes aplenty, a block away, in the heart of the old red-light district. The club was located on the second floor of a crumbling wooden building, above a bar known as El As Negro, and it was here that he made the first in a series of unfortunate discoveries. He discovered that the other fighters were
tougher than he had imagined. They did something the fence posts around the old corral and his drunken stepfather had not, they hit back. And by the hard light of day, his nose packed with gauze, he made the further discovery that the hookers all were fat, many appearing to be dwarfs or hunchbacks. Still, he persevered. His nose refused to stop bleeding. In a strip mall replete with palm trees and a McDonald’s restaurant, a doctor removed the cartilage. At least he said he was a doctor. Armando learned from a nurse that the man’s specialty was injecting rich white women with live cells taken from the organs of sheep. The cells were meant as a kind of tonic, a fountain of youth. Armando was reminded of the execrable sex-strangler Goyo Cárdenas, reputed to have brought one of his victims back from the dead through the use of adrenaline obtained from the adrenal glands of another unfortunate. Armando would have liked to ask if this were possible. He would have liked to ask about the cells. The doctor, however, was short on time. He dismissed Armando’s curiosity with a brief grunt, a wave of the hand, then wielding an instrument that might have been used to shuck oysters, removed the boy’s cartilage without ceremony, after which conversation was all but impossible, took the last of Armando’s money, and sent him packing with half a dozen pain pills in a small white envelope.

Winter came shortly upon the heels of this humiliation and with it the rains. The city turned to mud. The canyons with their vast encampments of the homeless ran with raw sewage and the toxic waste of factories. Entire neighborhoods slid away overnight. The air stank. Training was difficult if not impossible. His money had gone the way of the cartilage in his nose. He no longer had any. He wandered down reeking, rain-slick streets, one more
naco
in jeans and a cowboy shirt. He walked the alleys of El Centro and Zona Norte,
drifted among the new high-rises, the banks and shopping malls of the Zona del Río. He walked the Boulevard of Heroes, among the fierce statues of the great chiefs, glorified in stone while their descendants did what Armando did, prowled the streets in cheap clothing with empty stomachs, the invisible multitudes. On every corner there was a sign:
Se Solicita Personal.
And in the end, he did what every other
naco
had done before him. He shined up his boots and rode the blue bus to the Mesa de Otay. He went to work in a factory that produced leather-covered steering wheels and gearshift knobs. Accessories de Mexico, owned and operated by Cline Technologies.

The company occupied a cavernous building in an industrial park on the outskirts of the city. The interior of the building was divided into workstations. Armando was put to work in the assembly area of the plant, where he stood at a table with thirteen other workers. The workers were like him. They came from Oaxaca, from Michoacán, from Sinaloa. They came from hard lives. They came from places that no longer existed. In Tijuana they applied themselves to the assemblage of televisions, of videocassettes, of leather-covered steering wheels, of Miss Piggy dolls, of a thousand other mysterious and superfluous objects. Some dreamed of returning to the villages that no longer existed. Some dreamed of moving north. No one planned to stay in Tijuana. Much of what everyone talked about was leaving. But few ever did. They stayed. And they worked.

Armando stayed too, covering his steering wheels, thirty a day. It was a simple mindless task. It was both easy and difficult. The plastic wheel was removed from the cardboard box in which it arrived and attached to a metal base. Next it was covered with yellow glue. The yellow glue sat on tables in open containers and was applied with a brush. There was also green glue and white glue, together with a powerful solvent, and these too sat on the tables in open containers.
The glue was applied to the wheel in short rapid strokes. When the wheel had been covered in a thin film of glue, Armando would place the brush on the table. He would take a piece of precut leather from a container at his feet, inspect it for flaws, then begin to pull the leather onto the wheel. This was the most difficult part of his task. The glue began to set up quickly and it was necessary to keep the leather centered in such a way that when it came time to stitch it the seams would wind up on the inside of the wheel. If the seams wound up in the wrong place the wheel was ruined. When the leather was in place, there was one last piece of business. It remained to clean any excess glue from the leather. This was done with a rag or sponge dipped in solvent.