Tijuana Straits (28 page)

“They’ve admitted to that, too?”

Magdalena shook her head. “Not yet. But they’re from Mexicali, that’s where this group is based. There were two men on the road that night. There were two men who tried to firebomb Casa de la Mujer . . .”

They sat with this for a moment in silence.

“Carlotta seems to think these are the guys. She says if I come back to Tijuana, maybe I can identify them . . .”

“Surely the Guardians of Christ the King consists of more than these two guys.”

“Sure. But the group’s been identified. Their actions are out in the open. Even if the guys who came after me on the road are a different pair, it’s unlikely they’ll try anything else, not with two of their members in jail.”

“I don’t think you should go back,” Fahey said, “not yet. How about e-mailing Carlotta? She can find out if either of these guys have tattoos.”

Magdalena responded by kicking one of her boxes. Factual reports and old case studies slid across Fahey’s carpet like spilt entrails.

“You don’t like the idea?”

“Sure. Right. We’ll send the e-mail.” She shook her head. They sat for a moment in silence. “You don’t get it, do you?” She looked up at him, her face flushed. “Don’t you see? I thought I was getting somewhere with all this.” She picked up a handful of papers, twisted them in her hand then let them fall. “I don’t care about the Guardians of Christ. History will dispose of the Guardians of Christ. I want to make a case against the owners of one of these dumps, make them clean it up, so maybe the other owners will be spooked into cleaning theirs up as well, so maybe, just maybe, some lives will be spared.” She shook Carlotta’s e-mail in his face. “I thought I was on to something. I thought finally . . . I thought some big shot was out to get me. I thought I could use everything that’s happened to me to help nail him. It’s all just stupid,” she said finally. “A stupid waste.”

“You still don’t know that for sure. And all this work you’ve done”—he waved his hand to include her great heaps of paper—”it’s good work. I mean, it could pay off at any time . . .”

“One gets tired of waiting,” she told him. She tossed Carlotta’s message to the floor, then leaned down, her forehead upon the heel of a hand.

“That’s what happened to my lamp?”

“I slammed the door. It fell over. I’m sorry . . . Truly . . . It was practically the only thing you owned that wasn’t broken . . .” She stopped talking when it became apparent that Fahey was smiling at her.

“I could make you a list.”

“Of what?”

“Things that still work around here.”

She wondered briefly if his list would include himself.

“Forget the lamp,” Fahey told her. “When you’re surfing—you know how you get outside, on a big day?”

Magdalena just looked at him.

“You have to want it. Oh, you try to read the water, to choose a path. You try to use your head. But mainly you just really have to want it. So you put your head down and you paddle. Your mouth goes dry. Your lungs burn. Your arms turn to rubber. But you keep on paddling. And in the end . . . you do that long enough, and hard enough . . .”

Fahey got to his knees on the floor beside her and went about collecting her papers, arranging them in a stack that he placed by her side. “You’ll get there,” he said. “You’ll get one of these guys. You’re smart and you’re persistent. And you want it.”

Magdalena sighed. She turned to the window, giving him her profile—the thrust of her chin, the delicate sweep of her jaw, the fine straight line of her nose. He could see the pulse at the side of her neck. Her hair fell across her brow, hiding many of the little cuts left by the accident. His impulse was to touch her, to let the tips of his fingers draw the hair away from her face. He wanted it in a way he had not wanted anything in a long time, with a longing to constrict the heart. He would never have done it. Suddenly, however, she turned and leaned against him, her head pushing in upon his chest. He could feel the warmth of her tears through the fabric of his T-shirt, caked with dust. And then, very slowly, because he had not done anything like it in a very long time, like the Tin Man gone to rust yet recalling a gesture from a time before, his arm moved to circle her shoulders. My God, he thought, she was no bigger than a child. He let his head bow down, the tip of his nose touching the part in her hair, smelling her skin, afraid to move.

“You must think I’m a fool,” she said.

Fahey stroked her hair.

They stayed that way for some time, their breaths coming and going together, her tears upon his skin, the scent of her hair in his face. She draped an arm across his chest and put a small, warm hand upon his arm. Now you’ve done it, Fahey thought. Days and nights of unbearable loneliness that would surely follow in the wake of her passing appeared before him, stretching out as far as the eye could see. His knees ached, sending little spears of pain up into his legs. But still he held her. Anyone would have. He wondered for a long time if there was something he ought to say, rummaging about in his head like a blind man searching for something in an empty room. He was afraid of appearing pathetic.

“Will you try to ride these big waves?” she asked.

Neither of them had spoken in a very long time. Fahey would have had the time last longer. “I don’t know,” he said.

He felt her sigh.

“I guess we should send the e-mail,” she said. “You are right, of course, that’s the way to do it. Carlotta can find out about the tattoos.”

The words stabbed at Fahey’s heart. He felt in them the beginnings of her long absence. Dumb shit, he thought, it’s only what you get. “We’ll do it,” he told her. “And then we should celebrate.”

She turned her face to his.

“I’ll take you down to the pier,” he said. “We’ll drink a beer, or two, or three. We’ll eat fish tacos and watch the swell. It should start coming in sometime tonight. We’ll watch it by the light of the moon.”

She put her head upon his chest once more. “It would be kind of like you were taking me out,” she said.

Fahey sat with this one. Seconds passed. “I guess it would,” he said finally. He was watching the light outside his window. “It would be kind of like that.”

A
SIGN
at the end of a dirt road read
MEET THE PICKERINGS.
The sign had two little birds—long-billed clapper rails, if you knew what you were looking at, carved at the top of it, one in either corner. The birds had names, Dot and Don.

Don Pickering was well into his seventies, still able to mend fence and track the feral animals that from time to time found their way onto his land. Dot was nearly the same age, a little crippled with arthritis but still able to tend the garden. They’d lived in the Tijuana River Valley for some fifty-odd years. They’d raised four sons and two daughters, an unknown number of chickens, horses, and cows, though in recent years the land had gone mainly for crops, Brazilian lettuce and organic strawberries.

Having lived in the valley for such a long time, there was not much that had gotten past them. They remembered Lucian Fahey and his notorious farm. They’d known his son as well, for their own
boys had grown up surfing near the mouth of the river and from them they had learned of the exploits of Sam the Gull Fahey and his strange mentor, one Hoddy the Dog Younger, out there on the beach in his shack of driftwood and whalebone, and considered each a bad influence from day one. Sam Fahey had visited their farm on several occasions, in the company of one or more of their sons, and they remembered him as a skinny, towheaded boy with a defiant look and little to say. Their opinion even then was similar to that held by Deek Waltzer, whom they also knew; they found it hard to believe that any good would ever come from the likes of Lucian Fahey and so believing had not encouraged his son’s presence among their own.

Later, when the ridiculous submarine sank off Rosarito Beach, when the math teacher put a bullet through his head and the stories about the Island Express were filling the local papers, the name of Samuel Fahey prominent among them, and when the same Samuel Fahey was sentenced to prison and gone from the valley, they felt their suspicions confirmed and were glad they had nipped that boy’s friendship with their own sons in the very beginning, before further harm could be done. And later, when old man Fahey died and left the worm farm, by then little more than a garbage dump, to his only son, fresh from his second stint in the penitentiary, they were not inclined to roll out any red carpets. As far as they were concerned, the sooner he failed with his worm business and went away the better off the valley would be, for surely, they thought, no good had yet come from the presence of a Fahey in their midst, any Fahey at all, nor could they imagine this was likely to change anytime soon.

The Pickering property was less than a mile from the Fahey worm farm, near the middle of the valley, within sight of the river, and
over the years the Pickerings had been made witness to many strange things. They’d seen entire families running through their fields by moonlight pursued by men in flying machines and on horseback. They’d seen drug runners of every ilk, shape, size, and disposition. They’d lost untold nights’ sleep to gunshots and cries for help, to the barking of dogs gone mad, with grief or rage, none could say. And come mornings they’d often found the leftovers of what they’d heard in the night. They’d found the bodies of men tortured and slain. They’d found women robbed and raped, wandering shoeless on bloodied feet through fields of mud. They’d found stashes of drugs, marijuana mostly, left where they had fallen upon the ground, or ditched among the brush. Once they’d found a backpack filled with marijuana, a severed hand still clutching to one of the straps.

It might also be said that life in the valley had taught them to recognize trouble when they saw it, so that when Don Pickering looked out of his front door late one afternoon in the even later autumn, the sun already beginning to smear colors across a western sky as though some child of God had been loosed among the reds, pinks, and yellows, and saw there two strangers arrayed before him, like figures come for trick or treat on the wrong day of the year, before the sun had even a chance to set, he knew that something was amiss.

He rose from the chair he’d been seated in, crossed the living room floor to retrieve the shotgun kept standing and loaded in an umbrella rack just inside the front door, and went out onto his porch to meet them, life in the Tijuana River Valley having conditioned him to a certain degree of self-reliance. Nor would this be the first time he’d been called upon to send strangers packing.

Yet even Don Pickering, never known to his neighbors as anything but a hard case, was a bit nonplussed by such characters as now confronted him. They were two in number, and one, a ragged scarecrow of a man, fixing him with a silver smile that had no
warmth or humor in it, with eyes sunk deep in their sockets and threads of thinning hair hanging down on either side, long enough to touch the uppermost bones of his chest; and the other standing nearby, enrobed in a garish cowboy shirt that he wore unbuttoned, and nothing under it save the Aztec sun tattooed across the ribbed muscles of his naked abdomen. In point of fact it had been some time since he’d encountered such rough trade and the old man was vaguely aware of the dull throb of his heart and supposed that he’d been remiss in not having called out to Dot to phone the border patrol, of which his own son was now a member, or at least to watch his back, and this even before it occurred to him that no dog had barked, nor had any workman raised a voice from out near the gate that by this time of day ought to have been shut and locked. Still, he had come this far and he knew better than to show weakness in the face of such rabble, so he came onto the very edge of his porch and down the three wooden planked steps to stand in the dirt, the rifle pointed slightly down, held loosely in the crook of his arm, and said in perfect Spanish to the men arrayed before him, “What can I do for you, boys?”

And though he would never have guessed what they were after, he could not say he was surprised when the scarecrow he took for the leader launched into some manner of tortured inquiry with respect to a big man with a worm on his cap. And he might have answered straightaway just to be rid of them, for there could only be one to fit such a description, and he could not think of a single reason to say otherwise. But it was in just that moment when he was about to speak that he caught sight of something in one of the trees near the entrance to the drive. So stunning was the sight he could not immediately be certain his eyes were not playing to his paranoia, that there really was a dog, one of his own, hung there by its leash among the shadowed limbs.