Tijuana Straits (29 page)

Once verified, the sight seemed to affect him as might a blow,
sapping the strength from his hands, so that the gun seemed not to rise smoothly as he brought it to bear but to swing at the ends of his arms as though it were an instrument for finding water and thereby subject to powers not altogether his own. In fact, the entire world seemed altered somehow in the arrangement of its parts, and yet if he knew just one thing with any kind of certainty at all, it was a thing he had known in the abstract since the day he’d heard about that accursed worm farm and the ex-con coming home to claim it, that the presence of a Fahey in the valley, any Fahey at all, would never spell anything it had not spelled out already many times over. The thought rifled through his mind even before he saw the third man, the size of a goddamn water buffalo, coming around from the side of his own house, not six feet from where he stood, rooted, the shotgun in his hands not yet parallel to the ground and the man already mid-swing with that rusted old machete he’d left out by the toolshed, meaning to either get rid of it for scrap or take it to be sharpened on his next trip into town, which he saw now was apt to be a long time coming.

T
HE EVENING
so decided, it occurred to Magdalena that she didn’t have much of anything to wear for dining out. She’d been going about in either the flannel shirt and sweat clothes that Fahey had provided or the jeans she’d come in, but these were torn and stained. The sweater she’d worn was beyond use altogether.

“We’re going out to the pier,” Fahey told her. “You can probably get away with the jeans and sweatshirt.”

“But it is a celebration,” she told him, and she was doing her best to see it as such. “It would be fun to do better than ‘get away with.’ ”

Fahey appeared to give this some thought. “I think there are some clothes in the house,” he said finally. “I believe they were my mother’s, but I’m not sure. And I don’t know what kind of shape they’re in, but I know where they are. There’s an old cedar chest in one of the bedrooms. We could look.”

“Are you sure you want to do that?”

Fahey shrugged. “If that doesn’t work we could find a strip mall somewhere. But this would be quicker.”

“And what about the bees?”

Fahey said he thought these were confined to the front porch and living room. He also believed they were worse during the day, which was just about gone, and that he was willing to risk it.

He’d not set foot in the house for more than a year. In truth he had not lived in it since he was a boy. When his father had died, leaving him the land, he’d purchased a trailer from the owner of the stables where Deek now lived and gotten Jack Nance to help him drag the thing across the valley and set it up at the edge of his holdings. He had concluded there were simply too many associations with the old farmhouse, which was no more than three bedrooms and a bath, for him ever to feel at home there, and he guessed that one day he might have the money to gut it of its sordid history and remake it in some new image that was more to his liking but had never done more along these lines than to convert what had once been an enclosed back porch to his shaping shack. The rest of the house was as his father had left it and there were even his father’s clothes with dust on the shoulders of old sports coats and a single suit with frayed cuffs and the little holes made by cigarettes smoked thirty years in the past and shirts thin as palimpsest shaped to the hangers upon which they hung. There were old ties dangling from hooks like things killed and hung to dry and old dress shoes that seemed to contain in them the very essence of old age so that in looking at them one thought almost immediately of old men on park benches. There was a shoehorn made of bone or perhaps the horn of some animal with a brass knob at one end with a short leather strap through it—some little bit of finery purchased in some no doubt illusory moment of happiness.

He passed a dresser and mirror that caught his reflection upon smoky glass before he could turn away. He saw cuff links and a long-handled comb beneath a brass lamp whose shade contained a map of the world. He went among these things in utter silence and with great effort, which was really the effort not to see them at all, for each was more than the thing itself and in each lay the starting point in such concatenations as could only end in feelings for which he could find no proper name.

There were three bedrooms in the house; one for each of them and one for the mother who’d not lived there for more than a month but whose room had been left as she had left it herself and which Fahey had not seen since he was a boy. For in the musty air of these sad rooms he felt that he had come to the place of his own beginnings, that in some measure he was made from these things and all the sadness and darkness that had come with them was carried still in such chambers of his own heart where thought and feelings dance their Sabbath.

The cedar chest was as he had remembered it and he thought that anything in it was likely to be fairly well preserved though he saw too there were also a few articles hung in a closet like his father’s and a second dresser with articles scattered across the top, but he did not care to look at them. When Magdalena told him she thought there was enough here for her to work with he left her to see what she could find or would want and went back out through the house as quickly as he could, as though dogged by its very ghosts, and into his trailer, where he sorted out such things as he intended to wear, then went to the sink and removed his beard. After which he showered and dressed and went outside.

What she found was a red dress and a pair of ivory combs. In place of shoes she wore the leather sandals Fahey had found for her and
so added a slightly bohemian flair to the dress, which was vintage something and altogether astonishing—a summer dress of simple cotton with thin straps at the shoulders. She tied a scarf around the waist to pull it in but it all worked somehow and done up in it she looked like what she was, a beautiful Mexican girl dressed for fiesta and dancing in the streets. The simple fact was, she took Fahey’s breath away and he watched her cross the yard in changing light, as though some vast and apocalyptic fire was raging just beyond the gray-green shadows of the valley. The sky was the color of her dress, and standing, he was aware of the pitch of the earth beneath his feet.

Walking to meet him, she found herself trying to take some measure of exactly how she felt about what had so recently transpired, her head upon Fahey’s chest, his arm about her shoulders. The truth was, she was not so experienced in affairs of the heart as one might have thought. Raised by nuns, her life thus far had been composed of school and more school, of work and the cause. She had even missed her Quinceañera. It was what Mexican girls got when they turned fifteen—a coming-out party harkening to another age, an event, like the debutante’s ball, replete with dinners and dancing and expensive gowns. There had been a few dates since starting college, a brief and unsatisfactory sexual escapade with one of her professors that had left her gun shy for months to follow. The last man for whom she had felt some real attraction, as opposed to what she had felt with Raúl in the restaurant overlooking the valley, was a young lawyer out of San Diego with whom she and Carlotta had pursued a case. Physically, however, the attorney was very much like Raúl, nearly her own age, a handsome Mexican, trim and dark, with an easy smile. Fahey was nearly twice her age. He slept with the lights on. For some absurd
reason she found herself thrown back on Scripture . . . He was a man meant for pains and for having an acquaintance with sickness . . . And yet if that was what drew her, there were those aplenty in the country to which she was returning and she supposed it was a good thing that she was going there soon. Though perhaps, she thought, they would remain friends, she and Fahey. It was then that she caught sight of him walking to meet her. She saw him in the last light. He had showered and shaved. He’d put on a pair of white canvas trousers, a flowered shirt, socks and brown leather loafers. And as he walked, the wind lifted the sun-streaked hair from his face, and the years with it, so that for just that moment the Fahey she saw in the sunset yard was the Fahey of the photograph on the wall, the one she had gone about clutching with both hands. He would have been just about her age then, she guessed, in that picture, carving his turn from the base of the wave, triple overhead. He would have been something.

He escorted her to the truck. He opened the door for her and made a show of doing so. She clutched at a handful of the red material, lifting it so as to save it from being caught as she slid onto the seat and he closed the door behind her.

They went by dirt roads among deepening shadows, the light running before them. They passed the old Pickering place and the wooden sign with its long-billed clapper rails fashioned in wood and a lowered Pontiac on chromed rims parked off-road, among the trees.

Fahey noted the car. He noted the rust spots and California plates, the powder-puff dice, baby blue, dangling from a rearview mirror, and the steering wheel, fashioned of a silver chain. It could belong to none but a Mexican and so was attributed to one of the Pickering workmen. The old man was forever fiddling with his
property and Fahey guessed that someone was working late, which was not altogether inaccurate. It was the nature of the work in progress that escaped his imagination, much as the hanged dogs escaped his sight, for they were hung well back from the road, amid gathering shadows and, like all the rest of it, too dark to see.