Tijuana Straits (24 page)

Deek would have preferred to know what had happened to her and why she was here but it was not his nature to pry if the information was not volunteered. “You mean what happened to make him late?”

“No, I mean what happened in a more general way, to him,” she said.

“You would be better to ask Jack about that. I believe he has a theory on the subject.”

“That’s your partner?”

Deek nodded.

“Sam said there were two of you.”

“That’s right, Jack and me. And Jack and Sam were friends.”

“But not you and Sam?”

Deek squirmed on one side of the small L-shaped couch that filled the small room. He sat on one side of the couch, Magdalena on the other.

“I knew some things about his father,” Deek said at length.

“What about him?”

Deek thought about that for some time. The truth as he knew it made for an ugly story and in the end he guessed that he was not the one to tell it, nor, he felt, was this the time or the place. He shifted his weight yet one more time on the tiny couch. He looked at his watch and finished his beer. “I should say that I heard some things,” he said.

Magdalena sat waiting. “Yes?” she asked.

“I heard he was a bad one,” Deek said.

An hour later saw him back on the road, window down to catch the wet scents of greasewood and sage, to blow away the feel of Fahey’s trailer. She’d pressed him some on the subject of Fahey’s father, but the look on her face as she asked made him wish that he had not brought it up in the first place. In the end, all he had said was that the man had a bad reputation among the Indians, that he was known as a liar and cheat, and his farm a place to avoid. And even this news, general as it was, seemed to darken her mood. So he’d done his best to lighten things with tales of the Mexican rodeo. He told her about the music and some of his favorite parts. He told her about the mounted horse roping, how the caballero would sit astride his own horse, sixty feet of rope coiled about one open hand, the rope looped once about the horn of the saddle, the leather smoking as the line paid out, as the wild horse on the other end of the rope galloped toward the far end of the guitar, where it would pull up before the fence, then make a circle of the big part of the guitar before the event was called and all the while the caballero seated on his own horse, holding position in the center of the ring, enveloped in the rising smoke and the horse he sat upon dancing to the music of the musicians that would be there dawn till dusk, with their guitars and guitarrones, their fiddles and accordions. And when he had told her about the rodeo and finished the last of his beer, he’d asked her if she wanted him to stay longer and she had said no, that she would be okay, to which he’d asked if she was sure and she had said that she was.

He’d invited her to the rodeo, her and Fahey too, standing in the foggy dark, in front of the trailer, the little dog jumping at his leg, the old dog lying off somewhere in the black shadows of the trees.

“They last all weekend,” he’d told her. “Starting Friday afternoon. But Sunday is probably the best. If you want to come.”

“Maybe we can,” she said.

Deek thought she meant it. “You sure you’ll be okay now?”

“I’ll be fine. There’s the fence, and the dogs.”

To which Deek had smiled. “That old dog’s about as much use as I would be,” he’d told her, which struck him now as a perhaps overly self-deprecating thing to have said, flummoxed no doubt at such unadorned beauty.

“I’m sure he’ll be home soon. I’ll tell him you came.”

And Deek had nodded, not wanting to tell her he had no interest in Fahey’s gratitude. “Okay,” he said. “And don’t forget the rodeo.”

She said that she would not. She thanked him again for coming. He left without ever knowing what had brought her there or why she seemed to harbor some affection for Sam Fahey. It was funny, he thought, driving away, and thought about it again just now, how some people seemed drawn to that man . . . his partner for one, and now this girl. But then ruins were like that sometimes. And there were women, and men too, who were just not happy unless they had some wreck of a human being to fawn over and look after, and if that was the case with this Madonna in rags, then Deek supposed she had come to the right place.

In time the smell of the corrals found its way into his window and soon after he could hear the horses in their stalls though neither were visible in the fog. He found the entrance to the driveway by senses other than sight and turned down it, the wheels of his truck grinding over rutted gravel till the siding of his trailer rose up before him, as broad and white as the forehead of a whale. He killed the engine, which ran on for a few seconds anyway, suggesting a
manifold leak he supposed he would have to attend to at some point in the near future, then got out with his spare six-pack tucked beneath an arm.

The door of the trailer was open to the night. This did not surprise him. He’d been stripping some wooden cabinets in the kitchen and he’d wanted to air the place out. He had no worries about doing such a thing in Garage Door Tijuana. The Indians he lived among were honest people who had never given him a day’s trouble and indeed he felt safer here than in just about any other place he might have named.

It was not until he was inside that he sensed something else was going on. There was an odor he could not name, a felt presence. These things were followed by a sound—a kind of rummaging in the kitchen. And yet even then he was not overly alarmed. His faith in his neighbors was absolute. In place of subterfuge he was inclined to suspect some foraging animal, or at worst a local youngster, too green to know better. It was really not until he’d come through the living room and seen the back of a grown man going through his cupboards that he realized something very much out of the ordinary was happening to him and the bad feelings began. Perhaps it was the disembodied eyeball tattooed in the bald spot at the back of the man’s head.

Deek put the six-pack on the floor at his feet and lifted one of the bottles by the neck. He could feel the pulse in his hand, against the glass. “Excuse me,” he said.

The man turned to look at him.

Deek thought, Christ Almighty.

A floorboard squeaked at his back. And something struck him from behind—a good deal harder than anything had struck him in a long time. The entire Milky Way galaxy danced before his eyes. He believed he must have fallen because the next thing he knew he was on his back and there was a man looking down on him—
from a dark place Deek had not known about—and he suddenly found himself thinking about his good friend and partner, Jack Nance, and that thing he used to say about Sam Fahey, reprobate, the part about endless night . . .

M
AGDALENA WAITED
throughout the night, without recourse to phones. Near dawn she dozed on the couch, wrapped in one of Fahey’s flannel shirts. She woke hours later to the sound of his truck, looked through cracked glass to see him at his gate. A feeling of relief washed over her. Thoughts carried her back to her arrival at the farm and how she had looked upon him just there, at the gate, and her in the seat of his truck, too weak to move, yet filled with dread, taking him for some denizen of the streets, possibly deranged. Funny how time had changed things, for she watched him now with some measure of affection, this Fahey, with his shaggy hair and broad shoulders, his impossible past.

She was waiting for him in the yard. She could see the boxes containing her files in the bed of his truck. Fahey slipped from behind the wheel, his hair combed back wet as if he was not long from a shower. Their eyes met. He held up a hand before she could say a word. “It’s a long story,” he said.

He told it in the kitchen, as she was cooking eggs. She listened, grateful for the women of Casa de la Mujer, but grateful for Fahey as well. Clearly, things had not gone as smoothly as they might, though she guessed he was omitting a few details. Still, he was back and the files were with him.

When he had said about as much as he wanted to, he took a beer from the refrigerator then sat with it at the tiny kitchen table, watching as Magdalena began to chop tomatoes and green onion.

“Those are from the valley,” he told her.

“You just wash them first,” she said.

They ate on the deck. There was a nest of sparrows in the branches of one of the tamaracks. Eggs had hatched in the course of Fahey’s trip to Tijuana and the morning was filled with the chirping of tiny birds, the hot damp smell of vegetation, like something ripe seeping up out of the ground at their feet. Fahey’s irrigation system was in play above the windrows and the air in that quarter of the farm sparkled with tiny rainbows.

Fahey looked out over the narrow lines of castings and moist earth. “I could break into the black this year,” he told her.

He went on to say that with the advent of his larger-than-life red worms there were already several bait-and-tackle shops scattered around the bay waiting for shipments. And he’d recently connected with a big organic farm on the outskirts of Julian looking to buy his topsoil and their own worms for recycling. He pointed to a number of the white boxes he used for shipping.

“Those are for the folks from Julian. And there’s the wave of the future, worms for composting and recycling.”

“I didn’t know you thought about things like that,” she said. She was half joking with him.

“Things like what?”

“Recycling. The future.”

“Oh, I think about the future now and then.”

“And what do you think about, when you think about the future?”

Fahey finished the last of his eggs. “Sometimes I think about the waves. I wonder what would happen if it broke big again, Outside the Bullring.”

Magdalena remembered the sight of Fahey half naked, mind surfing in the darkness, at the side of his board. She wondered if that was the kind of wave he had ridden then, Outside the Bullring.

“I was under the impression that you didn’t surf anymore.”

“I go out there sometimes at night, on a full moon, paddle the length of the valley, from I.B. to the border, keep my swimming muscles in shape.”

“Surely there’s more to it that that.”