Tijuana Straits (30 page)

T
HE SUNLIGHT
was all but gone as they drove down Ocean Boulevard toward the pier in downtown Imperial Beach. Fahey had thought to watch the sunset from the pier itself but saw now that he had mistimed it. Still, the moon was rising above the Mexican mesas and the evening was shot through with a delicate beauty, the great dome of the sky going from some deep shade of midnight blue in the east to ashes of rose over the black and craggy shapes of the Coronado Islands—an airbrush job of epic proportions, hot-rod art writ large as if Big Daddy Roth had been permitted some say in it.

The swell Fahey had predicted had indeed begun to show, the pier shuddering beneath their feet as they walked its length toward the small restaurant at its far end, Woody’s at the Pier. To the north lay the tip of Point Loma—a deep black landmass from which a few yellow lights had begun to shine like planets in the night sky. Three
miles to the south were lights marking the end of the border fence, where it entered the sea, and beyond that those of Las Playas.

Magdalena pointed to the lights of Point Loma. “You’ve got to wonder,” she said, “if any of those are his.”

Fahey assumed she was talking about Hunter, the owner of Reciclaje Integral.

“I mean, he lives somewhere in the county. What if he can actually see the lights of Tijuana from his house? Could someone do that? Could they look at the lights in Mexico and know what they had left behind was killing the children of this little town?”

“People find ways,” Fahey said. “They find ways of letting themselves off the hook.”

“Or they just don’t care.”

“Or they just don’t care.”

“You think I’m naive.”

Fahey shook his head. “I read somewhere that by the time people are about five years old, they’ve asked all the important questions. They’re the questions that can’t be answered.”

They arrived at the restaurant and went inside. It was small and cheaply appointed, something just shy of a take-out joint but somehow warm and cozy nonetheless with views of the lights and sea in all directions and the aroma of cooking food.

“This place is not much to look at,” Fahey told her, “but the food is good.”

A man came out from behind the bar to slap Fahey on the back. “Sam the Gull,” he intoned, and seemed genuinely pleased to see him. “I’m glad to see you still get out. I thought you’d forgotten us.”

Sam introduced him to Magdalena. His name was Bob. Bob brought complimentary beers. “Any friend of Sam Fahey’s,” he said. He looked at Magdalena. “A bona fide local legend.” He left them with menus and went back to his kitchen.

The place was pretty well filled with people. She could feel some
of them looking her over, her and Fahey. The walls of the tiny restaurant were covered with old photographs of the town and the surrounding beaches. Among them she saw many old black-and-white photographs of men on surfboards. “They like you here,” she said.

Fahey pointed to a photograph not far from where they sat, a grainy black-and-white in which a dark-haired man who looked as if he might have been chiseled from stone and who rode what appeared to be a long, wooden surfboard glided with apparent ease across the face of a long, rolling wave.

“That’s him.” Fahey said. “That was Hoddy Younger.”

Magdalena looked at the photograph. She looked at Fahey, looking at the photograph. Something made her want to touch his hand.

They ate fish tacos, beans and rice. They drank the beers and ordered two more. Below them the big waves continued to crash against the pilings. Fahey looked often into the night. “I had a girlfriend once,” he said. The comment came out of the blue as he had been watching the waves but he turned now to face her. “She was a Mexican. I saw you looking at her photograph in the shaping room.”

Magdalena was not sure what to say.

“She used to translate for us sometimes, making deals in Baja.” And he told her about the Island Express, about running drugs in the valley, about getting busted and doing time. “When I got out, we started seeing each other again,” he said. “She was clean by then, going to some kind of college . . . But I talked her into coming back, a one-shot deal, translate for me on a meet in T.J. The Mexicans had the pot. I had the buyers.” Fahey paused to look out the window. “A dozen crooked
federales
came down on us, took
everything . . . I thought they were going to kill us too, but they didn’t. They let everybody go but the girl. They kept the girl.”

There was a long pause, the chatter of other customers, the crash of waves.

“We left her up there in that canyon.”

Magdalena looked at him, a long beat of silence spooling out between them. She had come to think of his eyes as the color of the sea and the judgment had pleased her, till this moment, when the comparison seemed to fold back on itself, evoking little more than a cold and melancholy waste.

“The men had guns.”

Fahey shrugged. “They were soldiers.”

“What could you have done?”

“I could have found someone else to translate that night. Failing that, I could have fought to save her.”

“And died.”

“It was an option. They say you are made by your choices.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“We tried. Some Mexican cops. Mainly they just wanted to know what we were doing there. They were fucking with us. I began to envision whatever happened to her getting hung on us. I started thinking about life in the prison at La Paz.”

“So what happened?”

“We ran. They were trying to get us in a car, but there were three of us and two of them. One of them was on his car phone. It sounded like he was calling for backup. We knocked his partner on his ass and we ran, got back to our car, ditched it out by the beaches, and crossed through this old storm drain I knew about. I had an apartment in I.B. but I never went back to it. I fell in with some guys who were cooking meth on the Otay Mesa . . .” And he told her the rest of it. He told her about his father and the scattered bones. He even told her about how he got busted, something he’d never told to another
living soul . . . He wanted her to know it all, every ugly little thing there was to tell, that he’d failed even at cooking meth, that everything he’d told her the other night, all that stuff about Dora and the wave . . . that wasn’t what he was about. What he was about was being scared, scared of age and scared of failing, scared of things he couldn’t control, scared of going back. “Every guy I did time with is dead or back in,” he said. He stopped to laugh, but it wasn’t pretty to listen to. Some unspecified amount of time went by, just the thunder of the surf, the interior lights finding their reflection in the glass. “I was planning to kill my father,” he said at length. “I mean really planning it, then I got out and saw him. Time had pretty well done the trick. But you know what? He left me that land. And that land has been the difference, the difference between me and those guys that are dead or back in . . . Because I had this one thing to hang on to—this one crappy little piece of shit in the middle of nowhere to build on, to watch the waves from . . .” He paused for the last time, still looking out the window. “The waves,” he murmured. He turned to face her. It was hard to be certain in the room’s dim light but it looked as if maybe he had begun to cry. “And here they are.”

She supposed it was what she had been asking for. And now she sat with it, speechless as a loon, in her red dress, in the restaurant on the pier with the crash of the surf and the aroma of cooking food. She should have been a nun, she thought. Maybe then she would have known what to say.

“And the girl’s family?”

Fahey seemed to collect himself. “She lived with an aunt,” he told her. “I didn’t really know her. I thought about trying to find her, to tell her what had happened . . . but then, in a way . . . I always figured maybe she was better off . . .”

Magdalena nodded. She would have liked to look him in the eye but found that she could not. She was beginning to feel just a little sick.

They sat for a while longer in silence, drinking the last of the beers. Fahey paid. Bob told him not to be a stranger. Magdalena found another photograph of Fahey on the wall of the restaurant, this too in black and white and Fahey as thin as she’d ever seen him, hair bleached white by the sun. He was standing side by side with Hoddy Younger. The men had surfboards laid out in the sand before them. Hoddy was older in this picture than in the surfing photo. The black hair was a little more ragged, graying at the temples. The deep-set dark eyes appeared somehow troubled, peering out from beneath a scowling brow. She was tempted to say there was something just vaguely familiar in that dark visage, in the way the older man held himself. She remembered Fahey’s story, his belief that Hoddy was still out there somewhere. Yet in the end she said nothing. There was another photograph of Fahey, surfing. This picture was in color. The colors were the colors of the photograph on Fahey’s wall, the colors of Mexico.

They left the restaurant in silence, walking back now along the pier where lights high as street lamps let down pale shafts to pool upon the white water as it broke against the pilings, swirling about their mussel-encrusted trunks, razor-sharp shells glinting black amid churning foam while farther out, away from the pier, great black mounds could be seen moving to and fro—dim, primordial shapes, as if some menagerie of caged beasts had been freed there to roam.

“It’s not a pretty story,” Fahey said at length. “But I wanted you to hear it.”

Magdalena nodded. She might have said something about understatements but she didn’t. She touched his hand with her own, but neither made an effort to keep it there. Tomorrow she would ask him for a ride, as far as the border. Carlotta would meet
her at the crossing. The files would go as well. The two men in the Tijuana jail would have tattoos or they wouldn’t. She had waited as long as she was going to wait. It was time to go home, time to get back into the fight. She looked into the lights of Point Loma. Some men let themselves off the hook. Some men didn’t care. Fahey at least had suffered.

“I think you should try to find that girl’s aunt,” Magdalena said. “I think maybe she would like to know.”

To which Fahey said nothing at all.