Tijuana Straits (22 page)

There were houses here if you could call them that—tin-roofed shacks of cardboard and chicken-wire mesh, sliding down from the
mesas above but inhabited nonetheless. A copious amount of water ran from the mesas as well. It gathered on the floor of the wash in a fast running little brook Fahey now sought to straddle with his tires. As he did so, a foul reek rose from the floorboards at his feet.

But all this was about to end, as dead ahead there stood a man in a spacesuit, bone white in the noonday sun at the side of a bone white truck with some kind of symbol on the door. The man held what appeared to be a small glass vial aloft in one gloved hand, peering at it as though it were a toy through which to see the light.

As Fahey watched, a fat woman with sores on her legs wobbled forward to spit on the man in the suit. The man did his best to ignore her. The woman circled like a buzzard, her jaws at work. Dogs and children played about the edges of the brook. Fahey could see the pack that had trailed him gaining ground in a hurry.

He had no choice to but stop. The dwarf dog with the head of a shepherd bit his tire. A throng of cholos in baggy pants, stocking caps, and chains seemed to appear out of nowhere, standing at what might have passed for a street corner, a barren patch of soil at the foot of the cliff, at the edge of the foul little stream.

Fahey sat behind the wheel of his truck. The cholos were checking him out, grinning like wolves. A number of women appeared before one of the houses. Two came forward to restrain the spitting fat woman. The rest stood in the yard of the house, a kind of leprous hut from whose outer walls great patches of stucco had fallen away to expose not only the framing, but the interior as well. The effect was that of a large-scale and derelict dollhouse—the plaything of maleficent giants.

Fahey’s clutch had begun to smoke. The engine was running hot. The gas was running low. The gauge was notoriously inaccurate, and at just that moment when he tapped it with the back of his
finger in hopes of producing a more favorable reading, the engine died out altogether. The dogs went wild with glee. The shorter animals yanked at his tires, the taller ones scratched at his doors. The cholos began to laugh. The man in the white truck had apparently gotten what he came for. He wanted out. And who could blame him? But Fahey’s truck was blocking the path. The man shouted in Spanish. Fahey grew nauseous.

“¿Habla inglés?”
Fahey asked through a crack at the top of his window.

The man stared at him through the plastic faceplate in the white hood that covered his head—a look of such naked contempt that Fahey was reminded of a long-ago girl left to her fate in a canyon much like this one. One more dope deal gone bad.
Federales
with guns had made them run but kept the girl for sport. The man’s face reminded Fahey of the faces of the soldiers, nothing but malice. One might just as well have appealed to the currents of Las Playas for mercy. Fahey had never seen the girl again. He’d broken cold sweats then, too, and run for the border.

The thought occurred to him that he might run just now, though at this precise moment he could not have told you which way the border was. The man in the spacesuit had begun to pound on the hood of his truck. The dogs swirled about the spaceman’s legs, bouncing as though held upon strings let down from the heavens, oblivious to everything save Fahey himself, in his truck, out of options, out of gas, out of luck. He played a hunch. He scooted across the seat. Beer cans tumbled to the floor. One sprang a leak, spraying the rubber mat. The reek of beer filled the cab. The dogs redoubled their attack. Fahey rolled down the passenger side window just enough to shout through it. He shouted at the women in front of the house.

“¿Dónde está Casa de la Mujer?”
Fahey shouted.

The women looked at him.

Fahey repeated the question.

A woman approached the car, wading through the dogs. She came to Fahey’s window.

Fahey repeated his question for the third time.

The woman looked at him, with some mixture of curiosity and pity. “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

The women were remarkably resourceful. One even had a can of gas in the trunk of her car. One shooed away the cholos on the corner. One drove away the dogs. Another actually got in beside Fahey and turned the truck around. The man in the spacesuit bolted. The woman with the sores on her legs threw rocks at the departing truck. But the immaculate vehicle was soon gone in the dust, a white speck at the red mouth of the canyon. The Valium and beer were coming on strong. The woman behind the wheel gave Fahey a long look. “I’d better drive you,” she said.

It was how Fahey arrived at Casa de la Mujer. He’d overdone it with the pills and booze. Two more women helped him inside—a modest home in an old residential district, at the corner of an alley. He rested on a couch, looking up at the array of small tapestries that covered the wall nearest where he lay. A woman was produced who spoke English. “My name is Connie,” she said. She knelt at his side. “We’ve been expecting you. You’re the man Magdalena said would come.”

Fahey said that he was.

Connie smiled at him. “She said you might have trouble finding us.”

“More than trouble,” Fahey said. He told her about the canyon. “You’re the first good luck I’ve ever had in this town,” he added.

She looked at him, puzzled, then shrugged. “If the man from the environmental agency had not been there, there would not have
been such a scene. You would have simply turned around and driven back out. You would have found us in time.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. His head felt like a brick. “Coffee?” he asked.

The woman smiled. “In time. I think maybe you’d better just lie here for a bit.”

“Magdalena . . . She’s alone in the valley.”

“Is that so bad?”

“I asked one of the cowboys to look in on her.”

“A cowboy? Then I’m sure she will be in good hands.”

Fahey tried to imagine her in good hands. The tapestries danced about his head. “Maybe if I can just nap here for a few minutes,” he said.

The woman patted his shoulder. “You nap all you want to,” she told him.

Fahey slept like a dead man, beneath the tapestries that in fact were the work of Chiapas peasants, done for the great march on Mexico City. He slept on the couch, amid boxes and posters, the drawings of children. Eventually he dreamed about the girl in the canyon. The girl morphed into Magdalena, beneath the totems of Surfhenge, the bronze plaques at her feet. She seemed to be asking why his name was not written among the stars. “There are some things,” Fahey said, “you never come back from.” Then he woke with a start, drenched in sweat, to the wrong kind of light, to the image of Magdalena, alone in the valley.

U
NDER NORMAL
circumstances, Armando would only have taken Nacho to cross the border, but Chico, persistent as a case of the clap, proved useful one more time. He had a cousin on the other side, hiding out in a place called Garage Door Tijuana, right down in the river valley. You could see it from the rafters of the bullring—the garage doors, anyway. What lay behind the doors was a mystery—a dark labyrinth from which one might glimpse the occasional white plume of pampas grass, together with a few stunted palms.

And Chico also knew where to cross—an old concrete storm pipe recently excavated. The pipe was said to leave Mexico near Las Playas, running parallel to Yogurt Canyon, but opening farther into the valley, far enough beyond the line to have thus far escaped the attention of the border patrol. The pipe was old and dated to well before the fence, to a time when such secret routes of passage were
not so sought after. Even still, the pipe was said to have enjoyed a certain iniquitous history and was from early on a favored haunt of smugglers, right up to the coming of the new fence, when American engineers had found it and filled it in. But in recent months the pipe had been reopened—the work of drug runners using forced labor. The men who had done the work were rumored to be buried at its mouth in the Tijuana River Valley, on the American side. It was also said there was even a little track in the tunnel, like what you might find in a mine, and that on this track there was a cart with steel wheels able to move more weight than any man could carry and that the track and cart were, like the tunnel itself, artifacts from another time, but now pressed into service once more.

Sometimes the crankster gangsters who controlled the tunnel entrance on the Mexican side would let a few
pollos
cross if they had the money to pay tribute. Sometimes they would take the money then wait till the
pollos
were inside, cut their throats, and bury them with the men who had done the digging. Sometimes they would throw them in the river on the American side of the fence, on its way to the sea. It depended on how they were feeling. But Armando could pay their tribute. In the company of Chico he had negotiated a price. On the night of the crossing, he would take both Chico and Nacho with him.

He could not see where the Madonna and her man had gone. Those parts of the valley most exposed to his lookout beneath the bullring were the beaches and marshlands south of the river. When the man and woman had left the mesa they had done so in a rusty-looking pickup that had carried them inland, disappearing beneath the trees in a gathering dusk, and that was the last he had seen of them, but it was clear that she was alive, living somewhere in the Tijuana River Valley. And the Tijuana River Valley was not that big. There were only so many places one could hide. And only, or so one
might hope, so many caps like the one worn by the big American with the flowers on his shirt, perhaps even only one.

They made plans to cross on the evening of the following day. Near sunset they wandered the streets of El Norte and the old red-light district, within sight of the fence. As shadows grew so did the number of peasants hoping to escape the gravitational pull of the great land mass from which they had come, hoping to survive the crack addicts and thugs of Colonia Subterráneo, to outrun the border patrol, hoping to survive whatever assortment of bandidos, gang-bangers, and vigilantes the night might array against them, for the number of their enemies was legion. And so you would see them, scarecrows with frightened eyes loitering in the shadows of the fence, along the cement walls of the flood control channel, at the bottom of every gully, clear to Las Playas, where they huddled amid the reek of excrement in the shadow of the bullring at the edge of the old people’s park, fingering rosaries and counting out their luck.