Tijuana Straits (42 page)

Jack Nance was up early that day as well, though he had no interest in seeing off the gang at the pier but made directly for the top of Spooner’s Mesa. It was his intention to be up there for as long as it took and he went with two freshly rolled joints, a breakfast burrito, a quart of beer, and one pair of industrial-strength binoculars.

His only regret that morning was that his old partner Deek Waltzer was not around to join him. In fact the old cowboy’s whereabouts were still a mystery and would remain so for the next six months until a team of fence-hole diggers sent in by a county work program would find his grave on the outskirts of Garage Door Tijuana.

Jack was at work on the burrito when the jet skis put in their appearance. He could see them powering across the backs of waves at Second and Third Notch, white trails of churned water lying in their wake and the fumes of their exhaust risen even to the level of Spooner’s Mesa upon which he waited. The sky was yet fairly dark and there was ground fog in ragged patches throughout the valley and a great band of it out past Third Notch, hiding the Coronado Islands.

The waves at Third Notch were well in excess of twenty feet by that time and Nance watched as one of the crews towed in. The waves were classic straits—big, open ocean waves, perfectly shaped upon a low tide with a light off-shore wind brushing their faces—and the surfer rode them in great carving turns, top to bottom. Finally the second team towed in as well and this surfer rode as though a carbon copy of the first and after the rides the surfers were retrieved by the skis and hauled back out to the break and this went on for some time before it occurred to Nance that something was wrong with the picture. When he got it, he laughed out loud. “They think that’s it,” Jack said, to no one but himself. For a second or two he wondered if this was right but the crews continued to circle at Third Notch and he knew it to be so. With no real
understanding of the lineups, the crews believed themselves to be riding the Mystic Peak, and yet clearly they were mistaken. They were still too far north and too far inside, even at three quarters of a mile out.

Jack got out of his truck and seated himself upon its roof, his boots upon the windshield, knees drawn up to hold his elbows to steady the big glasses, his cowboy hat tilted back above his sun-beaten face and him grinning like the demented sidekick of some cowboy matinee idol as the thing he had so recently foreseen had in fact begun to unfold, and Nance himself its lone witness . . .

It began with a wipeout on a big wave at Third Notch, the rescue ski moving in for the pickup, the second crew, together with the photographer and his pilot, circling in behind the first ski, intent upon the action, and so never picking up on those subtle hints which might otherwise have tipped them off—the eerie whistling sounds, let’s say, that are said to emanate from the ocean floor, attributable to movement among the great heap of stones that lie there, gathered by time from the mouth of the river, or perhaps the sudden disappearance of the Coronado Islands, suggesting that the sea was on the rise, evidence that an outside wave of gargantuan proportions had begun to build. But then the noise of the machines would no doubt have drowned out anything so sublime as the singing of the stones, and the islands were already lost to them in the fog. What they were about to experience was the straits in all of their mystic finery, and it would have taken a Hoddy Younger to have plotted their escape. But Hoddy Younger was a long time gone from that lineup. The Riders on the Storm were alone with the roar of their machines, and this was enough to mask even the distant booming which, in the absence of all else, might at least have provided them with some hint, however belated, of what was to come. As it was, the circling crews were still fighting for purchase in the oceans of foam that lay across the water, feet thick, in the aftermath of the wave at Third Notch when the fury of the Mystic Peak came
down upon them—a churning wall of white water fifteen feet high, exploding from out of the fog, chewing up everything in its path, and that, by this point in the game, was bound to include themselves, both skis and riders alike, and there was little they could do save dive for deep water, hoping at the same time to distance themselves from the heavy machinery that would in fact be thoroughly trashed and rendered useless for the rest of the trip so that new stuff would have to be brought in, causing them to miss a good deal of the swell, which was peaking earlier than expected, as evidenced by the avalanche now upon them.

Yet even this was only a fragment of the story, just as the white water was only that part of the wave already broken. The unbroken part ran on for another hundred yards, twice the size of anything they had yet ridden, though of this wonder they were afforded but a glimpse. And some saw it not at all as they were in the midst of their dives. But for those still on the surface, it was a vision they would carry to their graves, for such were the lives they had chosen, and such was the grandeur of what greeted them. The face of that immense wave was turned to the light of a still-rising sun and was in and of itself a vast enough surface to capture such light, even amid the fog that was already beginning to thin, as though it had advanced only to mask the approach of the wave, and to cast that light back, so as to imbue those morning airs with the ambient radiance from which a solitary rider was only then seen to emerge, in full trim, surfing in from Outside the Bullring, and drawing there such lines as would please the eye of any so schooled and of neophytes as well, for that was the degree of artistry exhibited—a thing little seen now, even in those watery quarters of the world where such feats do not go unnoticed. And he rode at times with his arms at his side, as though what he did required no effort at all, and at other times with these same arms outstretched, rather, one might think, like a gull in flight. On the high ground of Spooner’s Mesa
Jack Nance executed a little dance atop the hood of his truck, such as would have him removing dents for the next six weeks, while among the brush and stunted pines overlooking Yogurt Canyon a second man stood in mute observation, a spectral figure, dressed in rags, one arm outstretched as if in salutation.

M
AGDALENA SPENT
several days at the hotel in Baja, alone, watching the waves from the balcony of her room. The waves were followed by unseasonable rains. Her room leaked and she moved to another. In it she sat one evening by candlelight and arranged her hair as she’d worn it the night of the rodeo, fixing it with the combs that Fahey had given her. But Fahey did not come.

On the following morning she packed the combs away and left, a full week earlier than planned, driving the car she had rented back along the highway to Tijuana, passing the very place where she had collided with the cliffs above Las Playas. One might have thought there would have been some sign there to suggest the violence of what had transpired, burnt rubber or scarred ground, but the highway appeared unmarked and the face of the cliff where she had hit it no different than at any other point along the drive. She even turned around and drove back, then turned and passed it
again just to be sure, but there was nothing to suggest anything out of the ordinary had ever taken place. A handful of small, purple flowers were coming into bloom at the edge of the asphalt and above the beaches of Las Playas the sun had broken from the clouds and the sea was blue beneath it.

She was back at work within the week, seated at her desk in Carlotta’s offices, her face all but healed, her night classes resumed, her world acquiring its familiar shape. Upon leaving the hotel, she had informed its owners that there was a very slim chance a man would arrive looking for her. But there had been no word of his whereabouts, not from that quarter and not from any other. She was staring idly from a window when Carlotta appeared in her doorway.

“How you holding up?” the older woman asked her.

Magdalena said that she was holding up just fine.

“You’ve heard Luis Cardona got the appointment to PROFTA?”

Magdalena had heard. Luis Cardona was an academic, an environmental activist, newly appointed to the policy arm of Mexico’s environmental agency.

“A small victory.”

“Take what you can get, sister.”

Magdalena smiled. She supposed that in the long run, it was how things would proceed, if they were to proceed at all.

Carlotta continued to stand in the doorway then crossed the room to Magdalena’s desk. “Also, there was this,” she said. “I was wondering if you’d seen it.”

She held a San Diego newspaper in her hand. She turned it to an article about a surfer from Imperial Beach. The man had died of some obscure infection. The headline read:
BIG WAVE RIDER’S DEATH BLAMED ON WATER-BORNE ILLNESS
. Magdalena was some
time in picking up the paper. She sat staring at the headline. Carlotta stood above her. “I thought I recognized the name,” Carlotta said.

Magdalena crossed the border, by car, on Monday of the following week as a small ceremony was scheduled to take place in downtown Imperial Beach, at the sight known as Surfhenge. She went alone.

The day broke beneath coastal haze but by noon a stiff onshore wind had scattered the clouds, and driving along the eastern edge of the Tijuana River Valley she could see the ocean, a startling shade of blue flecked with wind chop. She exited the freeway on the Dairy Mart Road in order to see more of the valley and so came on paved roads, past the Oaxacan enclave known as Garage Door Tijuana and following closely upon the path taken by Serra and Piatro came finally into the town itself, wherein maybe a dozen people had gathered beneath the Plexiglas arches near the entrance to the old pier. Parking the car, she could see that a third of these were city workers come to jackhammer a hole in the sidewalk for the admittance of a freshly cast bronze plaque.

Jack Nance was there, recognizable as one of the cowboys, as was the border patrolman who’d driven them from the beach. The three stood together and exchanged a few words. Jack told them of the morning that had followed that night in the valley. He told them of having seen the wave from the top of Spooner’s Mesa. He also told them of having visited Fahey in the hospital. He had seemed, Jack said, to be of remarkably good cheer and was getting better. But then his fever had gone off the charts for reasons the doctors were still not sure of and he had died that same night, alone in his room.

Jack Nance had no sooner finished with this story than Magdalena was approached by a plump, gray-haired woman of
indeterminate age who seemed to have some interest in claiming her attention. Magdalena put her hand on Jack’s arm then moved off a bit to hear what this person might have to say.

The woman identified herself almost at once as the worm woman of Perris, the same who’d once sold Fahey the mechanical harvester of which he was so proud. It seems that she and her husband had received an e-mail from Mr. Fahey shortly before he ah . . . passed, in which he had offered them his entire worm farm, as he was planning to leave the valley. It seemed that their own farm had gone under, which was why they had been willing to sell him the harvester in the first place, leaving them more or less homeless, in a cousin’s trailer in the Coachella Valley. Fahey, of course, had known about all of this. It was not long after his amazing offer that they’d heard of his untimely demise and later still of this ceremony that was to be held in his honor though one would have been hard-pressed, the worm woman concluded, to actually call it a ceremony. “Sidewalk repair was more like it,” she said. Yet here they were, the woman standing plump and goggled-eyed in the midst of the gaily colored swizzle sticks while a man Magdalena took for her husband sat nearby at the wheel of a battered pickup truck and even from this distance appeared uncomfortable, as if the meager formality of the occasion together with his general surroundings in some way distressed him.