Tijuana Straits (19 page)

F
AHEY WAS
quiet when they left the pier, as if the visit to the unfortunate monument had turned him inward. Magdalena let him be. She had her own demons to contend with. The news of the murdered factory girl accompanied her like a cloud, shadowing her thoughts. What new evil was this? she wondered. And how long would it go on? How many more girls would die before someone put an end to it? She was mindful of the deaths that haunted Juárez, the other great city of the border, where in recent years, literally hundreds of factory girls had been murdered, where authorities looked on with apparent helplessness as the body count mounted, as the web of mystery and deceit, of lies, false leads, forced confessions, and general corruption that surrounded the bodies of the innocents grew more impenetrable by the hour. Was Tijuana now destined for something of the same? The thought rested in her mind like a splinter, poisoning her resolve. To do just one thing, she thought, to rid
the city of just one evil . . . was that too much to ask? She stared into a coloring sky, a dusty orange light above willow and marsh. Perhaps so, she thought, catching herself at an angle, reflected in the mirror on the door of Fahey’s truck. “Who do you think you are?” she asked, the question posed in silence, answered in silence, for there were none forthcoming from the quarters into which she stared—the valley beyond her window, as great a repository of bones and dreams as one was likely to find, and above which a flock of shorebirds broke suddenly from beaches beyond her sight. The birds rose in asymmetrical perfection before an immutable sky, their very existence a thing of beauty, yet if one fell to earth, the others would do no more than peck it to death on the beaches below and didn’t she know it.

She closed her eyes in the face of this observation, the tips of her fingers pressed into the center of her forehead as though she’d located her mystical third eye and might by such pressure bring it to bear on all such mysteries and speculations, and then proceeded to sit that way for some time, as though by adhering to the pose she was, in some way and at the very least, holding it all together, as if in the end, this was the most that one might ask of oneself, regardless of who one thought one was.

It was the jarring of the truck that eventually diverted her, giving her to understand Fahey had turned off pavement and onto dirt once more. She opened her eyes to find them at the southern edge of the valley, very near the fence and churning along through what appeared to be more of a dry riverbed than any kind of road and clearly not one of the routes by which they had gone to town.

Still, she said nothing. Her trust in Fahey had risen considerably since their first meeting, and Fahey drove on. They had gained in elevation. There was a view, across the scrub of Border Field State Park, toward the sand dunes and beaches, and Fahey was taking them higher still, the hot smell of burning rubber she took for his clutch drifting back to fill the cab. She was beginning to wonder if
his truck was up to the task he had set for it when he turned from the climb onto a patch of level ground and killed his engine.

The area was a kind of pie-shaped notch carved by the elements into the northern face of one of the mesas, no more than twenty yards deep, marked by a smattering of grass and three small pine trees of undistinguished character.

Fahey had still not spoken. He unfastened his seat belt and got out. Magdalena did the same. “Is this what you wanted to show me?” she asked.

“I thought you might like to see these,” he said. He was looking at the trees. “Bishop pines. Some people would probably think they were Torrey pines, but Torrey pines have larger cones.”

The cones on the trees before them were no bigger than the end of her thumb.

“The Bishops are indigenous. They think that about thirteen thousand years ago, there was a forest of them running from at least as far north as Santa Barbara all the way down the coast, on into Mexico. There’s still a little forest of them on La Purisima Ridge in Santa Barbara and some more down in Eréndira, in Baja. And there’s these, right here.”

They stood for a moment before the trees.

“Trees are kind of like animals. You leave them alone, they interbreed; over time they’ll form their own little subspecies. These trees are probably unique. Nothing else in the world quite like them. The trees are low because they get most of their moisture from the fog. Check the needles.”

He put his hand to the end of a bough, holding the tips of the needles across the palm. “See their shapes. Each is able to create a little vortex around itself, which allows it to hold the air just a little longer, to draw as much moisture as it possibly can from what’s available.”

Magdalena saw that her first impression of the trees would stand in need of revision. “You know the first thing I thought?”

“They’re not much to look at.”

“Maybe you should give tours of the valley. You could open a shop.”

Fahey gave her a look, then turned to the trees once more. “Yeah, well, there it is, the last of the great forest for two hundred miles in either direction. You disappointed?”

“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t have missed it . . . Everything that has happened . . . this makes it all worthwhile.”

For a moment they just looked at each other. Fahey shook his head. “You try to share, this is what you get.”

They walked to the edge of the little clearing, a good deal of the valley spread out below. They were almost even with the old bullring. The Tijuana lighthouse rose before it like a bone, hard-edged in the long rays of light.

“That’s where it happened,” she said. She was looking toward the fence where it entered the sea, just barely visible in the thickening coastal light, a mile from where they stood. “If I told my story on the Mexican side of that fence, the peasants would build a shrine—Our Lady of Las Playas . . .”

“For you?”

“For whatever it was that pulled me to shallow water.” She checked to see if he was listening. “You don’t believe that part, do you?”

“On the contrary.”

Magdalena waited. One could see the streets of Las Playas from this elevation, windswept and vacant, basking in light the color of old brass.

“But I don’t think it was a lady.”

Another moment passed. “I think he’s still out there somewhere,” Fahey said. “I think I saw him once. I think he lives among the homeless in Tijuana. But I think he passes back and forth, at night through the canyons, or maybe out at the beach.”

As she realized what he was saying, she experienced an actual shiver, like a child listening to a ghost story. Because she thought it might be true? Or because this was what he believed? “Hoddy Younger,” she said. “You think he’s still alive?”

“He’d be around eighty . . .”

“You’re not serious?” But of course he was and she saw that her words might have offended him. She touched his fingers with her own, almost taking his hand but not quite. She could see that Tijuana was not the only place where folktales might hold sway in the light of day. “Then maybe we should make a shrine on the American side,” she said, “of whalebones and driftwood.”

“The whalebones would be hard to come by.” A faint smile turned the lines of his face, the long rays streaking his hair with light.

She saw that he meant to go and this time she took him by the wrist. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “I mean there was somebody.” She took a long breath. “But now I need to ask you something.”

His countenance darkened considerably. What she saw there reminded her of what she had seen the night she had awakened him in the shaping room, with the need to contact Carlotta. It was the look of someone who’d just been told the house was on fire, or something like it. Still, she had come this far . . . She saw no reason not to carry on. “A favor,” she said. And she told him about the files, in Casa de la Mujer, in Tijuana, in Mexico.

H
E WOULD
not say yes or no on the mesa. He simply walked away. Magdalena followed. They drove in silence to the farm, where Fahey commenced to dampen his windrows and check their pH factor. Keep it between six and seven. They dined on canned tamales, tortillas browned in a skillet.

“I don’t know, about this Tijuana thing,” he said, as if more than two hours had not transpired since she’d ask him about crossing the border.

They were seated on the deck, the last of the dinner in paper plates held on their laps. Crickets sang in the darkness. There were bats in one of the cottonwoods and from time to time she would see them. They appeared as black, erratic shapes upon a Halloween sky.

“I’ve got the worms to think about. And there’s this guy waiting on that board I’m making.”

“I could help you with the worms,” Magdalena said, “you tell me what to do.”

Fahey looked unhappily into the dark yard.

“I think you could do it in an afternoon, two or three hours, really.” She understood this to be an exaggeration, adding that she could not go herself, because of the amparo, which was not an exaggeration. “It would mean so much,” she said, finally. “If we can build a case against just one of these foreign factory owners . . . It would mean so much . . . to so many people.”

He would not look directly at her, but drank his beer, staring thoughtfully into the night.

“I might be able to figure out who tried to kill me,” she said.

“That would be in your files?”

“Maybe, in some way, yes.”

Fahey nodded.

“You don’t much like it there, do you? Mexico, I mean.”

“Not much.”

“Do you want to talk about why?”

Fahey looked at her for the first time. The booze was aging him, she thought. Booze and this life he led.

“That might take a while,” he told her.

She supposed it was like asking why he no longer surfed, or who the woman was on the photograph in his workroom.

“Maybe I should just put it like this, helping people has never been something I was very good at.”

“Ah, yes, the irony of human action.”

“You could say. And you would have to be alone while I was gone, here in the valley.”

“Is that so bad?”

“You don’t know the valley,” he said. “Not really. And not at night.”

“This is night.”

“This is a little oasis, with a chain-link fence, dogs, and a bad reputation.”

“Then I should be all right.”

Fahey shrugged, looked away. “Maybe,” he said.

“It would only be for a few hours.” She knew she was pressing it.

“Longer, I get stuck in traffic.”

“You pay attention, I can teach you a shortcut.”

“That’s what they told the Donner party.”

Magdalena leaned forward in the wooden lounge chair, her hand moving to touch his forearm. “Lives are at stake,” she said. And yet hearing herself say it she wondered if this was really the case, or only what she wanted to be true. For the news of the murdered factory girl had called her into question, herself and her work, all that she was about in the world. It was a gut feeling, she knew, running over reason. Yet the girl had died on a night like this. Who could say that in the morning, there would not be another—some discarded bit of human refuse at rest among the weeds, on the morning to come and on every other morning from now until time indefinite, while Magdalena studied her paper trails and factual reports?

And yet surely, she thought, someone had tried to kill her. And maybe the files would suggest an answer. Maybe it was only her own life that hung in the balance, and she wondered briefly if that was enough.

Fahey sat with her hand upon his arm, for some time, watching the yard in which there was little to watch. But in the end he turned, he let his eyes find hers. He knew it was a mistake. Yellow lamp light from inside the trailer was running along the edge of her jaw, the fine straight line of her nose. “I guess I could have the cowboys look in on you,” he said finally, hearing his own words, not quite believing that he was actually saying them. But then he could hardly tell her the truth, or at least could not bring himself to do so, that even
going to Tijuana for the meds had provoked such panic attacks as he had suffered in the maze and this on a trip that had scarcely taken him beyond the gate.