Tijuana Straits (31 page)

They rode in near silence back though town and into the valley that lay beyond it. In an odd way the place had begun to feel like home, though tonight she knew her home was over there, beyond the fence.

In time they came to the unnamed dirt road she had learned to recognize even in the dark and turned down it but as the trailer drew near she came to realize just how much she was dreading being there. It was more than confronting the files still scattered across the living room floor. There was what had transpired there, herself in Fahey’s arms. A kind of spell had been wrought and yet the evening had undone it and it was the absence of that which she did not want to face, not just now.

The trees came into view. In the light of history they appeared as gallows and she supposed he had told her more than she would have wanted to know. And yet again she supposed that he had been right, right to tell her and she could not say that she was without respect for his doing so for surely he had guessed what the story would cost. Still, the trees came on, and now the fence . . . A lonely night yawned before her—Fahey in the shed, herself alone in the old trailer. She heard the whoop of Fahey’s terrier, the low bark of the old hound, whereupon she remembered the day of the week
and something to go along with it. She remembered the Mexican rodeo and the cowboy’s invitation. Her hand went to Fahey’s arm. They had not spoken since town.

“What would you think about going to a rodeo?” she asked.

She felt him study her in the dark.

“Deek invited us. He said it went on all weekend.”

Fahey stopped in front of the gate, headlights falling across the windrows, the cast-off appliances, the fence of faded surfboards. To Magdalena’s eye it was as though some great ship had broken up here and gone down, swallowed by the earth, and these were the things that had risen. It was how she had come to see the place, as an assemblage of wreckage in the wake of some terrible catastrophe.

“You don’t think it’s a little late?” Fahey thought no more of Garage Door Tijuana than he did of Mexico in general and for similar reasons.

“He said it goes on day and night, from Friday till Monday at dawn.”

Fahey looked out across the ruins of his farm. “You know Deek’s not there, that his trailer was burned.”

“When?”

“A day or two after he looked in on you. I ran into Jack Nance in downtown I.B. at the little market . . . No one’s quite sure how it happened. He’d been stripping some cabinets in order to refinish them and they think maybe he left some rags inside that combusted in the heat. He hasn’t been around to ask.”

“He wasn’t hurt then.”

“Not so far as anybody knows. Guy’s a loner, comes and goes pretty much as he pleases, but Jack’s worried. He thinks it’s a little weird, even for Deek.”

“Maybe he’ll show up,” she said. “It is Saturday night. Maybe he’ll come back for the rodeo.” She felt a slight tremor in her voice and wondered if Fahey had heard it. She watched the set of his jaw in the
pale light of the dash, his hands upon the wheel. She guessed they both knew she was pushing it. She guessed they both knew why.

In the end, Fahey put the truck into reverse and backed them down the road upon which they had come. He did it without a word. She guessed they were going to the rodeo, in Garage Door Tijuana. It seemed appropriate enough. She was just a little drunk and she had begun to think once more about her failed Quinceañera. Perhaps it was the dress that had provoked the association. She’d never worn a prettier one, although the color was wrong. The celebration was one of purity. It was demanding of white. But then the night itself was demanding and she too had been found wanting. She should have been some Holy Mother, chartered to hear his confession. She supposed one could only deliver so much. And it was like her to have things a little turned around. Church was to have come before the dinner if this were her Quinceañera, and after it the dance. Clearly their timing was a little off. Still, she thought, it was only the shank of the evening, and the dance was yet to come. “You never know,” she told him, “it might be fun.”

T
HEY RODE
amid a strained silence and words left unspoken. Fahey cut through the valley, along roads of dirt and gravel where the dust of their passing rose in a lambent cloud among the branches of eucalyptus, tamarisk, and sandbar willow. He had thought to come into the compound off paved road by way of Saturn Boulevard but found that entrance blocked by a variety of cars and trucks—enough to suggest there was indeed some celebration still in progress—so he circled around to the dirt road that bordered the compound to the south.

The combined mass of Spooner’s Mesa and the Border Highlands rose up before them, the lights of the great fence spooling out from behind their shadowed brow, running south into darkness at the edge of the sea. On one side of this road was the compound, on the other a crop of Italian lettuce where scarecrows stood slanted on pointed stakes like miscreants hastily impaled and beyond them the
skeletal remains of a few avocado trees that marked the entrance to Smuggler’s Gulch, the remains of an old grove condemned by the opening of the Rodríguez Dam and the same floods that had taken the mother of this woman now seated at his side, wrapped in a silence he scarce dared to touch, though he supposed he would never see these trees again and not think of her, and of this moment and of what had transpired and of what might have been.

He parked in the dirt and got out to open her door. She let him do it, as though this were still a date and not some sad facsimile thereof. She was luminous in the night and his heart clutched in his throat. Her skin was the color of copper and the dress as she stepped from the truck was the color of flame and was in itself an object of great mystery, like some artifact from a world of dream as it had come from among his mother’s belongings—this woman whose very name was lost even to him, her firstborn, and yet the old man had kept these few things, hidden like her name even to his own son, and he must, Fahey thought, have sat with them from time to time, in the midst of his long decline. For why else would he have kept them, alone with such thoughts as were now difficult even to imagine? Though in point of fact Fahey supposed that he knew them well enough after all, that in the end they were no more than the thoughts that came to all men caught in the jaws of such traps as they had made of the world, their own and the greater one in which all others were so contained. And from there it was no great leap to imagine some future aspect of himself, come into yet one more darkened room, alone before his own collection of artifacts and talismans and this dress now among those, having passed from one set of failed dreams into another and him taking it to his own face as that wizened old man must well have done before him—a diorama too grim even for contemplation, so that he set about leading her down a narrow causeway between the backsides of trailers and clapboard fencing, where they passed amid the sweet smell of
growing onions and the rank stench of manure and the more distant scents of smoking fires, of seasoned pork and chicken on iron grills over open flames, and he began to talk as they went, regaling her with arcane facts, snippets of history, anything really that came to mind . . .

He spoke of Smuggler’s Gulch, where it cut between the mesa and the highlands, naming it as the route by which the fabled Serra once made entrance into the region on his way to founding the mission at San Diego, adding with a poetic flourish that on a night such as this, one might still imagine the ghostly rattle of armored riders, the indigenous Kumeyaay looking on, their fated ending laid bare as the riders drew up their mounts in admiration of the fine pastureland and pleasant river so noted in the diaries of the old priest. Though it now seemed to Fahey that all such reveries rang false, even as he engaged in them, that recent events were too calamitous, the blight upon the land too complete, that any vestige of spirits so removed must surely have long since been swept away by the multitudes coming in their wake, and he went so far as to share this observation as well, for he was determined to hold forth against this silence and might have run on even longer had she not put a hand on his arm, stopping him mid-sentence in the midst of yet one more inane proclamation.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “Really. You’re a good man.” Fahey stood stock-still, mute as a wax dummy in a Hawaiian shirt. In a moment they went on. They went now in silence, past chicken-wire fencing and a pen of ostriches feeding upon heaps of moldy tortillas. The birds looked up, naked heads swaying on the long stalks of their necks, gawking feeble-eyed while others slept, heads enfolded beneath their wings, and in the dark these looked like rocks sunk in the muddy, putrefying soil. An ancient Texas longhorn, kept there for as long as Fahey could remember, marked their passing, the lower part of a bony white face shoved between the
blades of a sorry wooden fence while the horns floated above the fence’s uppermost edge in such a way as to make it appear as if the animal was composed of parts ill-fitted and the whole apparatus raised to an unnatural height for it was not the ground upon which the animal stood but rather the aforementioned manure Fahey could remember his father remarking on as a boy, complaining even then that the old Mexican who owned this place had not removed a single shovelful, nor had any been shoveled since. The truth was that much of Garage Door Tijuana was built upon these layers of dung, trailers parked upon it, animals roosting, fence posts sunk slanting at crazy angles . . . They came now among the crops of onions in great wooden bins covered in plastic sheeting, the night air filled with their sweet reek, and finally between walls built up of old tires stacked one upon the other like bricks, ten feet high, drawing close together in a final narrow passage that opened at last upon the event for which they had come, this secret
charreada,
beneath palm and eucalyptus, the incongruent lighting of a dozen tiki torches flaming in the night.

They came first upon the wide curve of the guitar where a pair of drunks ran in circles with a weary bull so that it was impossible to say in just what manner the chase was configured. The bull was missing its tail and sported bloodstained flanks still glistening in the moonlight, and one drunk ran shirtless, clutching to the neck of a bottle, and the second lumbered barefoot with what Fahey could only imagine as the animal’s tail held aloft, whooping as he went, drunken celebrant, like a winner at bingo.

Which is to say that for the most part the rodeo events were over for the day and the party had moved from the guitar to a wide yard before an old hacienda in sight of that part of the compound where the ruins of Deek’s trailer sat half charred, tires melted by flame,
undercarriage conforming now to the idiosyncrasies of the earth itself and rushing no doubt to become one with it for it was unlikely that anyone would ever think to haul the wreck away but would go on living with it till it was like the manure and old appliances and countless other bits of refuse left here to form the soil upon which the community rested.

A band held forth in front of the house, done up in the cowboy finery typically associated with mariachi. They were a guitar and guitarrón, a trumpet, an accordion, and a lead singer, his voice high and nasal, amplified by way of a sound system hastily arranged.

A hundred weary revelers were scattered across this open space. The rodeo was done and the horse races and the footraces and fistfights that had no doubt followed, so that what remained was more eating, and indeed flames still flickered in the odd corner where women cooked over iron grills, but mainly now the party was made up of dancing and drinking though of course the drinking had been going on for the better part of two days so that Fahey and Magdalena had some catching up to do, if, that is, they wanted to enter into the spirit of this event they had driven to attend.

Fahey bought them beers fished from a barrel of ice and they walked about with the glass bottles cold in their palms and when these were done they drank two more. Fahey stood to one side as Magdalena inquired of a resident if anything had yet been seen of Deek, the owner of the trailer that had been burned, then translated the woman’s answer for the benefit of Fahey, which amounted to no more than he already knew, that Deek had not been around.