Tijuana Straits (41 page)

Fahey had brought them to a place he’d done his best to avoid, even in thought, for more years than he cared to remember and yet so had events conspired—a chance meeting and all that followed, an ending upon the polluted beaches he’d known since boyhood with a length of line and two plastic jugs. Of such incidentals was a man reborn and such were Fahey’s thoughts, standing by the truck that held the migrants, as Magdalena and the patrolman went forward to meet a small group just now emerging from the tunnel’s mouth, a border cop and two paramedics, one of these with a stretcher beneath his arm.

The moment left little time for good-byes. Still she came to him as the migrants were led toward the border. The young girl was taken first, carried away on the stretcher. The others went under their own power, even the man with the broken rib, walking bent at the waist, and each of them pausing long enough at the foot of the cliff to seek out Fahey and to raise a hand in parting. Fahey waved in return. He was very much aware of Magdalena, holding back, standing at his side.

“I know a place,” she said. She said it was south of Ensenada on the Pacific side, so there were waves, and a small hotel opening to a beach that was rarely crowded and that the owners were friends of hers. She was thinking that she might go down there. She was thinking about a little rest and relaxation. “It would be nice,” she said, “if you came too.”

Fahey hardly knew what to say. In the end he muttered something about the farm, the necessity of looking in on the herd, or what might be left of it, though in truth the glow of dying embers could be seen even from where they stood, a red stain upon the sky.

Magdalena saw it as well as he did. “I told you,” she said, “you’re like me. We both have to start over.” And while it was true that in Magdalena’s case she would indeed take up the cross once more it was also true that she would do so in perfect ignorance of the fact
that she had already, in the course of this night, done what she had always aspired to do, that is save a single life. In fact she had done more, for in the undoing of Armando she had no doubt saved more than a few and in the death of Chico she had rid the mesa of its cowboy in the red convertible, the same who had killed already and would no doubt have killed again. She knew none of it as she stood with Fahey at the borderline. Her thoughts ran only to the fishing village on its crescent of sand, to its small hotel and its sparkling waves. She could see no farther than that and would not have promised otherwise. But that was okay, at least to her. She was alive and so was Fahey and she could not see why they should not buy out a little time and share it, just the two of them. And really, when one thought about it, she did not see why they should not go on together then and there, with momentum in their favor, and it was what she argued for, then and there, with the valley at their backs and the crossing before them . . . “There’s that cowboy,” she said. “That friend of Deek’s . . . yours too . . . I bet he would look in on those worms. I bet he would watch the whole place, at least until you came back . . .”

Fahey smiled and went to the patrolman’s truck. He found a pen and a pad of paper. He passed them to Magdalena. “Tell me how to find you,” he said.

Magdalena just looked at him, but wrote on the pad—the name of the hotel and a pair of phone numbers. The others were waiting for her now and there was no time for that, and yet she had to admit to some puzzlement at Fahey’s reluctance to drop everything in favor of such breathless spontaneity. It was, after all, the thing he’d once argued for, in the confines of his tiny trailer, in his insistence upon life in the ever-holy moment, and she would no doubt have done more in trying to persuade him had the clock not been set against her and the lives of the migrants placed within her keeping.

In the end she pressed the scrap of paper into Fahey’s hand.
“This is where I’ll be,” she said. She started for the passage then stopped cold and looked back, as something both obvious and revelatory had at just that moment taken hold. “It’s not the farm,” she said. “It’s the waves.”

Fahey smiled once more. “There may never be another chance.”

“There are other waves, other places.” But these words rang false even as she spoke them. “I’m afraid,” she said, finally.

Fahey looked into the dark mouth of the tunnel, where the others had gone, where the lone border cop waited for Magdalena. “There’s no need for that,” he told her.

She walked back to him. She put both hands on his arms then rose on her toes to kiss him once on the mouth. And then she was gone, back into that world from which she had come.

Fahey and the border patrolman waited until the sirens had sounded on the other side of the fence and these were answered by the yowls of coyotes, both in the valley and beyond, for to these creatures one side of the fence was the same as the other, and to their voices were added the dog packs of Tijuana.

They were getting back into the patrolman’s truck when Fahey caught sight of something atop one of the mesas in the valley, on the American side—what appeared to be a naked man engaged in a kind of dance. “What the hell?” Fahey said.

The patrolman laughed at him. “You’ve never seen him before?”

“I guess I would have remembered.”

“We see him now and again, guys out on patrol. They call him the naked runner. No one’s ever gotten close enough to hear his story. Though I guess there’s probably one there to tell.” Fahey said that he guessed there was and when he looked again, the man was gone.

“It looks to me like he’s doing that thing,” the patrolman said. “Tai chi.” And he laughed once more, and shook his head. In
another moment he started his engine. “I guess you’ll want to be checking up on your farm.”

Fahey just looked at him.

“She told me who you were,” the patrolman said.

The man took him as far as the intersection of Hollister and the dirt road that would lead to his home and from there, Fahey said that he would like to walk.

“You sure? You sure you’re okay?”

Fahey nodded. “I’m good,” he said, and so he felt. “I have some antibiotics. I’ll stay on them for a couple of days. I’ll get someone to look at my shoulder.” He opened the door.

“That was a hell of a thing you did tonight.”

Fahey shrugged.

“I mean it, man . . . that was one of the ballsiest things I’ve ever seen.”

“We used to say it was all in a day’s work,” Fahey told him. He got out of the truck.

“I’m sorry about what I said,” the officer told him. “Earlier, that crack about your place, I didn’t know . . .”

“Forget it.”

“I’m going to put you in for some kind of commendation . . . For what you did . . .”

But Fahey only smiled and raised a hand and walked off into the night, coming finally to the dirt road that led to his farm where he thought to bury his dogs and to see about what was left.

His first good look was through the hole Nacho had cut in the fence, and he was surprised to find that no more of it was gone. The trailer and a few trees were about all that he’d really lost, these and the fiberglass palings that had once been his quiver, now charred and broken like the teeth of dotards.

Not until he had entered the property, however, did he see there was something propped in front of the old house, some sliver of white among the shadows, and moving closer he saw that it was the gun he had shaped and finished for Jack Nance.

It would seem that a person, or persons, unknown had taken pains to save it, just in case the fire had spread, just in case someone might want to use it, saved it then placed it here, on the porch of the house, where Fahey was sure to find it.

He stood there for some time, in consideration of this occurrence, of the board at his feet, as the first shades of dawn broke from the summit of Cerro Colorado, on the Mexican side of the fence that divides the valley into halves, as quite suddenly and from out of the night there came a trembling in the ground beneath his feet, and within seconds he saw the horses. He took them for those brought in through Smuggler’s Gulch, the same the border patrolman had told them about. There were half a dozen. They thundered along the unnamed road bordering his property, nostrils flaring, heads thrown back, browns and whites, one with a diamond pattern upon its throat, one a chestnut roan. They went wild-eyed, with sweat on their flanks and heaving chests, like a wind out of Mexico, and were gone.

A
S MIGHT
be expected, Fahey was not the only surfer to track that great swell. Others had monitored its progress and by the dawning of the first day a group had assembled at the pier in Imperial Beach, not far from the memorial at Surfhenge, though few had any interest in the Plexiglas swizzle sticks or the names of the ancients set in concrete on the small bronze plaques and half of those spattered with the droppings of both seagulls and pigeons. These came with boats and Jet Skis and were part of a group of professional surfers who vied each year in something called Riders on the Storm Big Wave Challenge to see who would ride the biggest wave of the year anywhere on the planet and thus win half a million dollars in prize money.

They were on their way to Todos Santos, an island off the coast of Baja some sixty miles south of the border, but they knew of the Tijuana Straits, of the lore connected to them, and so thought to
take the morning for a tow-in session at what the old-timers had called the Mystic Peak, though none among them had done more than hear about it. Still, they were athletes with big-wave experience that spanned three oceans and reckoned a session at the straits a good warm-up for what they imagined to be the larger waves of Todos Santos—which waves they also imagined would be increasing in size, as the swell was predicted to gain in power over the next forty-eight hours, and so set off from the pier that morning on state-of-the-art 1200cc turbocharged Honda Watertrax jet skis, three abreast. One ski carried a pilot and photographer, the other two carried one pilot and one rider apiece, together with the boards they would ride, six-foot needle-nosed thrusters with lead weights set in their middles to hold the board into the waves, for it was not their intention to paddle into these giants but rather to be towed in and from there to ride them as they had never been ridden before, with such carving turns and down-the-line drives as would be made possible only by the short, highly maneuverable boards.

A certain amount of fanfare attended their leaving, with a turnout of lifeguards and local surfers together with their attendant girlfriends, scantily clad, and some smattering of the indigenous citizenry, all come to cheer and ogle at the weary grace of these riders on the storm, many of whom were tattooed and pierced with their heads shaved and the names of their sponsors written large on the gleaming sides of their jet skis and the decks of their boards, and they laid down a few big roundhouse turns charging over the tops of such waves as swept the pier, engines blasting and the spray off their wakes dusting the boardwalk to the delight of the hooting crowd, then angled off toward the south, in search of the Mystic Peak.