Tijuana Straits (8 page)

F
AHEY DID
as the cowboys had suggested. He parked on the American side then walked across. Tijuana produced Betadine and Cipro. As a prudent measure he added Valium, Vicodin, and Percocet, and these for himself. He walked out of the pharmacy as broke as he’d entered Fish and Game to collect his bounty.

Panic attacks started amid the blue steel piping of the great cattle chute by which pedestrians were funneled back across the border, where apparently even the foot traffic had gotten bad since 9/11, sweating it out for an hour and a half amid the reek of humanity, the exhaust of passing cars. At his back an obese woman had fainted. Two men ahead of him were busted by border police and hauled away. It happened in utter silence, a scene from
The Twilight Zone
. Imagining intrigue beyond his wit, Fahey inched forward, broke cold sweats, crossed the border trailing water.

For the next forty-eight hours she was sick as a dog. Fahey carried her from the bed to the bathroom and back again. He opened and closed windows. He bathed her cuts in the solution the cowboys had prescribed. He fixed ice chips in a bowl and heated cans of low-fat chicken broth that she would not touch till the evening of the third day, after which she slept through the night. By morning she was feeling well enough to thank him for his troubles.

“You’ve been very kind,” she said. She was sitting up in his bed. Her hair was tousled and fell to her shoulders, black before the pale walls of his old trailer. It occurred to him that she had about her some aspect of a beautiful child wakened from a bad dream. He had given her a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants to wear and the shirt hung from her slight frame, settling about her waist like the folds of a tent. Blankets covered her legs. So wrapped she might have been made of sticks but Fahey had just spent the better part of three days caring for her and though he’d done his best to give her as much privacy as he could he had noted in spite of himself that she was a long way from skin and bones—long-limbed in spite of her height, delicate and yet sinewy beneath a rather startling expanse of copper-colored skin. In truth he found her rather exotic though it might also be noted that he harbored a weakness for things injured, for the bird with the broken wing, for wild things found hurt in the valley. It had always been so. And yet he had not always been successful in saving such things and there had been a time, with this woman, with her face on fire beneath his palm, her long lashes fluttering upon the flushed skin of her cheek, when he had wondered if he had not made a mistake in agreeing to care for her, though now that her fever had broken he was beginning to feel like maybe it had been okay, that he was off the hook, and he told her of his fears. “I was beginning
to wonder if I’d made a mistake,” he said, “in not taking you to the hospital.”

“You did the right thing,” she told him. “Believe me. You did.” She turned to the window at her side, its louvered panes thick with dust, patched in duct tape. The window looked out on a small, ragged garden—yellow chrysanthemums, waist-high above a stand of weeds.

“How long?” she asked.

Fahey told her, then watched her hand tighten on a corner of the blanket.

“And I’m behind in my work,” he added.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It must be my fault.”

“I don’t need much of an excuse. But today? The buck stops here . . . as they say,” Fahey’s idea of banter. Christ, he thought. Christ almighty. But then it had been a long time since there had been a woman in his bed and there followed a moment of awkward silence. “Listen,” Fahey said finally. “Maybe you’d like to come out to the porch. I could fix you a chair.”

He watched her smile for the first time.

“That would be nice,” she said.

Fahey carried pillows to one of the old redwood loungers he kept in the little room he’d built along one side of the trailer. The room had begun as a deck. Over time he’d added plywood walls with large, screened windows and a tin roof. He helped her to the chair, fixed a pillow for her head, and put a blanket over her feet.

“You can watch me bring in the herd,” he told her.

She narrowed her eyes against the glare, looking out across Fahey’s land. “What herd?” she asked.

Fahey went to one of the white boxes stacked beneath a screen just outside the room. He came back with a handful of black, moist soil in which a number of reddish worms could be seen wriggling in his palm. “These guys,” he told her.

Magdalena looked at the worms. “I see,” she said.

There followed several hours of hard work: Fahey on the farm, the Gull’s three acres, shoveling red worms into the motorized harvester he’d bought used from a woman in Perris.

The harvester was six feet long, cylindrical in shape, and reminded Fahey of an amusement park ride—some small version of the hammers and loop-the-loops he’d ridden in supermarket parking lots as a boy, a noisy, rotating amalgamation of metal and mesh. It was comprised of three separated compartments. Into one he shoveled the contents of a windrow. The windrows, now three feet high and looking like no more than long lines of black dirt, had begun as shallow rows of cow manure into which the worms had been planted. As the worms fed, reproduced, and defecated the windrows had grown. The worm shit was known as castings. The worms were referred to as a herd. The roundup consisted of separating the castings from the herd. The harvester did its thing—sifting the contents through screens that would leave castings in one compartment and worms in another. Each could then be sold. The castings went principally to nurseries. The worms went mainly to individuals. Some owned bait shops. Some wanted to begin worm farms for themselves, others wanted to populate a garden. Fahey operated his own website. People ordered through it. The castings went into bags. The worms went into white, wooden boxes, along with a certain amount of soil. Fahey produced a third product as well—a substance known as worm tea, a mixture of water and castings allowed to simmer in the sun in large metal canisters the size of beer kegs. The worm tea could be placed into plastic bottles and sprayed over gardens or lawns. Fahey had explained these things to Magdalena. He had gone so far as to draw her a diagram of the harvester on a pad of ruled paper so she would know what went where. He had imagined that if she could follow what was going on, it might prove therapeutic. She could take a break from her devil in
the mesa. Fahey had devils of his own to contend with. He knew about diversionary tactics.

Fahey drank as he worked. Beer. He kept a case on ice in a plastic trash container next to the vats of worm tea. The sun rose above Mexico, and came on, the heat with it. Fahey removed his shirt. He drank steadily. When one can was empty he would toss it into a container next to the one that held the beer and take another from the ice. The beer both invited speculation and dulled thought. It evoked memories yet held them at bay, enabling Fahey to observe them as one might observe a parade of tall ships passing through a fog.

Fahey’s father had come to the river valley at the close of the 1960s, trailing creditors the way a dying animal trails buzzards, the last of his savings in hand, looking for an out and believing he’d found one, for by that time the Mexicans were not the only ones who wanted to develop the Tijuana River Valley. On the U.S. side, too, there were businessmen eager for development. There were also longtime residents, truck farmers and small-time ranchers in clapboard shacks and travel trailers set to blocks, who needed to be displaced before it could happen. In San Diego, the city fathers had requested federal funds to study the problem. They brought in the Army Corps of Engineers to recommend the channelization of the Tijuana River. Claiming an increase in land value, the city began to raise taxes on valley farmers, forcing many to sell. They sold to speculators banking on development. They sold to men like Lucian Fahey.

As in Mexico, this development did not go unopposed. Unlike their Mexican counterparts, however, the U.S. protesters eventually succeeded in demonstrating that the Tijuana Flood Control Project was in essence a thirty-million-dollar public subsidy for land
speculators who stood to earn over one hundred million in profit. It was also deemed to be an ecological disaster, the valley being home to dozens of migratory birds and the last great saltwater estuary on the California coast. In the end, the project was stopped in its tracks. The large-scale color relief maps faded with time. Architectural drawings of marinas and hotels and oceanfront condos cracked and yellowed, turned nicotine-stained edges in drawers and dusty bins while the valley itself, empty now of its old inhabitants, their trailers gone, their shacks dozed or abandoned, went to mud and marsh and sandbar willow, tamarisk and wild radishes and marsh grass, sage, poppies, and yellow sumac. In summer it blistered, bone dry beneath the Mexican mesas. In winter the same mesas, home now to Mexico’s burgeoning maquiladora industry, flowed with rain and toxic waste. These in turn mingled with the sewage and mud running down from the canyons, from the countless clapboard
colonias
erected overnight to house the peasants streaming north to work in the factories. It came by the ton, swamping the old Mexican treatment facility, joining itself to the Río de Tijuana, on its way to the sea, on the American side of the fence, so that after a few good rains the valley filled with mud and waste and was, for at least a portion of every year, an ecological disaster, though not of the type imagined by the people who had once battled the developers on its behalf.

The border patrol asked for high-risk pay. The Navy SEALs out of Coronado forsook the mud and empty beaches in favor of new training grounds, having lost too many of their number to a variety of exotic, flesh-eating bacteria. The migratory birds on the other hand seemed not to mind and the polluted ocean teemed with life. And of course there were still the immigrants who would stop at nothing, and the drug runners and bandidos, the handful of small-time farmers still clinging to their land, the cowboys, and assorted derelicts . . . And finally, there was Lucian Fahey, right down there
among them, one of the people, having leveraged himself silly to all but steal the land from beneath some aging worm farmer, and just in time to see the whole scheme go belly up and who in the aftermath of this calamity was left with nothing to show for himself but more bad debt, an absentee wife, and a scrawny, towheaded kid he would just as soon have fed to the fishes, or the worms, or the beaner wetbacks and burro eaters. In short, he never took it well. Unlike that old miner in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
when the gold dust blew to the four winds, Lucian Fahey wasn’t laughing. He was deep in Chapter 11, sitting on a worthless worm farm in the goddamn toilet of the Western world.

His back to the wall, Lucian Fahey elected to work the land. He read a mail-order pamphlet on vermiculture as the road to riches then spent what little money he had left trying to rebuild his stolen worm farm. As was usual for the old man and as would prove true for his only son as well, his timing was impeccable, if, that is, one took into account its appeal to the grotesque. Those were especially hard years for would-be worm farmers, the business teeming with miscreants and scam artists. An especially popular form of subterfuge in those days was the buy-back scam in which a grower, promising to buy back the offspring, sold worms to a mark. When the appointed time for this transaction arrived, however, the grower was generally somewhere in Mexico or Chapter 11 and the mark was left without buyers, alone with a herd too small to attract the attention of more serious clients. Appalled at once again finding himself the object of such humiliations, Lucian Fahey made yet one more disastrous decision. He decided to build the size of his herd, possibly hoping to engage in a buy-back scam of his own. He did it on the cheap, of course. He brought in garden-variety yard clippings and other forms of green waste because they were less costly than manure, piled it on too thick, and caused his windrows to combust. The image that followed was a haunting one and Sam Fahey to
this day could still see the gaunt figure of his father set before a patch of night sky turned to crimson by the flames of sizzling red worms and European night crawlers cowering amid the pall of his smoking windrows and bawling like a baby.