Tijuana Straits (25 page)

“Once you surf, you surf . . . Smaller waves are more about timing and flexibility . . . In big surf, if you’re in good enough shape to get to the waves, and you know the spot, know how it breaks . . . You’ll get a wave.” He looked at her and smiled. “At least that’s what I tell myself.”

“So you would really try?”

“You only get so many chances at a place like the Mystic Peak.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You’re not going to tell me you wouldn’t be taking a chance, that it wouldn’t be dangerous.”

Fahey shrugged. “I think everyone would like to leave some mark on the world, something that said you were here, something only you could do.”

Magdalena gave this some thought.

“It’s funny,” she said. “That particular way of making your mark on the world. It’s a very different way of seeing one’s role on the planet, different at least from what I’ve grown up with.”

Fahey just looked at her.

“I can imagine the Sisters of the Benediction saying that riding big waves is just about you.”

“Maybe that’s the point.”

“And what about everything else? What about the rest of the world?”

“You mean the ills of humanity?”

“You wouldn’t deny them.”

“I guess I always figured that I’m something I can actually do something about.” Though as he said it, it struck him that he’d not really done very much about it so far, unless one considered adding to the world’s already vast supply of turpitude an accomplishment.

They sat for a moment in silence. Fahey drank his beer. “Windrows are in good shape,” he said. “You did a good job.”

“You did too, Sam.”

Her words seemed to give Fahey pause. “I don’t think anybody’s called me Sam since my father died. Except he liked to stick an
h
in there and call me Sham. I believe it was his idea of a joke.”

Magdalena thought about what the cowboy had told her. “I’ve never heard you mention your family,” she said.

“There was not much of it to mention. Me and the old man.”

“What about your mother?”

“She left when I was young. My father never spoke her name. I no longer know it myself.”

“You’re kidding me,” she said, then judged by the look on his face that he was not kidding her at all and was sorry she’d said so. “And what did your father do?”

Fahey looked at the floor. “That’s a difficult question to answer,” he said. Time passed. He saw that she was still waiting. “It’s difficult for me to talk about,” he added. He might have told her that his father had failed at everything except killing Mexicans but he decided against it. He kept that one to himself. When they had finished breakfast Fahey went to his shaping room and worked on his board.

The next couple of days passed in a pleasant haze, different than anything Fahey had experienced in some time. He continued to work on the board for Jack Nance, shaping it the way Hoddy had taught him to, for the big, open ocean waves that came from Outside the Bullring. Magdalena looked through her files, searching for names. They seemed to take some pleasure in one another’s company. They shared meals, walks in the valley. Fahey took her to the top of Spooner’s Mesa to show more about how the waves broke at the straits. “The Mystic Peak has never been photographed,” he told her. “In the old days, not that many guys shot from the water and it would have been hell getting out there with a camera. You’d just about have to shoot it from a helicopter, and the kind of guys that do that are all over in the Islands, shooting the outer reefs, or working for Hollywood. No one thinks about this place anymore. The water scares them away. People know about the Mystic Peak, but since no one’s ever photographed it . . . There’s probably not more than a dozen people in the world at this moment who really know what it’s all about.”

They were standing close together, their arms almost touching. She could not help noticing he’d trimmed his beard, that he had brushed the shavings from his hair. He studied the swell lines beneath them from behind Ray-Bans patched with duct tape. She noticed, however, that the tape was new. When they turned to go his fingers brushed the back of her hand.

That night he sat with her in the living room, which she had turned into an office, as he had done on the previous two evenings, drinking his beer, watching as she worked before going to bed in the old work shed. It was almost, Magdalena thought, like they were a couple. A couple of what would have been harder to say.

“What are these?” Fahey asked. He had taken at random a thick sheaf of paper from one of the boxes near where he sat.

Magdalena looked at the box to see how it was labeled. “Factual reports,” she told him, “on deserted industrial sites along the border.”

“Like the place you told me about, the old battery plant.”

“The recycling plant, exactly. That place is owned by a man named Hunter, an American. There’s a point of American law known as Minimum Contact. If I could discover that he was still doing business in Mexico, he could be prosecuted, here in the States. He could be forced to clean up the mess. That’s more or less what all this is about, making a case against him, or someone like him.”

“You getting anywhere?”

Magdalena shook her head. “I don’t know. Someone tried to burn our offices. Someone tried to kill me. Why? I keep thinking the answer is somewhere in these files . . .” She looked over the papers scattered around the floor. “If it’s not, then why am I here?”

Fahey had no answer for that. “So where do you start?” he asked, finally.

“My car was tampered with outside the battery factory. The men on the road were Mexicans. I’ve been looking over everything we have on that case, going back to the original inspection reports, getting as many names as I can, supervisors, workers, whatever . . .”

“But you don’t know the names of the men on the road.”

“No, but I believe I could identify them. They had tattoos. That much has come back to me. One had an Aztec sun across his abdomen, the other an eyeball on the back of his head. I’m sure of it. And if I can get some names for Carlotta, she can go to the police. We have at least one friend there.” She was thinking now of Raúl, the man who had taken her to lunch, willing, for the moment at least, to reconsider him as an ally. “He knows the streets,” she said. “He might be willing to see if any of the names go with the tattoos . . .”

“He might?”

Magdalena shrugged. “Mexico wants to be a friend of business. They don’t care what the human costs are. I mean, what do you think you saw up that canyon the other day?”

“You mean the astronaut?”

“Exactly. The little river running through that
colonia
comes straight from the factories above. It’s filled with pollutants. The people in that canyon are all sick from it. And they complain. So some environmental protection agency sends out that guy you saw. Clearly he knows the whole place is toxic. He’s dressed for the planet Mars. He jumps out and grabs a vial of water to be analyzed. You want to guess what his agency will determine?”

“The water is safe?”

“To find otherwise might work some hardship on the factory. They might have to stop dumping whatever it is they’re dumping. They might have to clean up their wastes. They might think that’s too expensive. They might close their factory and move to another country.”

“A country even more friendly to business.”

“There you are. So anyone seeking to hold these people accountable is immediately seen as being opposed to progress . . .” She paused for a moment, then added, “Let’s just say the situation can make for reluctant officials.”

“And lots of enemies.”

“And that too. But now think about the guy that owns the battery place, where the car was tampered with. The cost of cleaning that up would be enormous. It might ruin him financially. He might go to great lengths to hang on to what he has, maybe even hire a couple of his old workers to take out the people responsible for shutting down the plant, for losing them their jobs—which is probably how they would look at it. Forget that the jobs were killing them.”

“I guess hiring hit men would pass for still doing business in Mexico . . .”

“If they could find one of these guys . . . And if that guy talked . . . That’s attempted murder. Screw Minimum Contact.”

“You’d like to nail this guy, Hunter.”

“You bet.”

“Of course it might not be him . . .”

She looked over the boxes filling the small room. She smiled. “No,” she said, “he’s just a place to start. There are lots of others.”

“Tell me about it. It took me an hour to load all this stuff, another hour to tie it down. I didn’t think the truck was going to be big enough.”

“That’s a good thing,” she said. “I’ve got you doing your part.”

Fahey smiled, but she was only half joking. He could read it in her eyes. He reminded himself that she had been raised by nuns.

“I’m serious,” she told him. “I mean, here you are. In this valley, where a man used to be able to live off the land . . . Where you used to be able to ride your waves . . .” Magdalena broke off. “I guess I’m proselytizing,” she said. She thought about her lunch with Raúl. “I can be a bore . . .”

“That’s not possible,” Fahey told her.

“It’s just that, usually, when I try to talk to you about what I do, you never have much to say, like you’re not that interested, and yet . . .” Her voice trailed away once more.

“Yet here I am.”

Magdalena just looked him. “Here you are.”

“Here I am,” he said. “At least there’s something we can agree on.”

“You’re making fun. But what happens if the valley gets any more polluted? Then where will you be?”

“And what if you give everything to this cause and never get anywhere? What if that’s your life? What if this thing you struggle with is just the sweep of some big evolutionary process . . . I don’t mean to say that makes it good, or desirable, just hard to do anything about.”

“And that’s a reason not to try?” It struck her that for the first
time since coming to the valley they were actually talking about something.

Fahey cracked a fresh beer. “One can try, I suppose. But one needs to be realistic. I mean you could fill your life with these battles. Next time someone messes with your car, you could die.”

She looked him hard in the eye. “To give up would be to die,” she said. “Giving up is letting them win, letting them take your soul.”

“The world is run by people for whom power is everything, that’s how they rise to the top. When evolution is on their side, it makes them hard to stop. But you can always ignore them.”

“Like you?”

“There was this surfer, Mickey Dora. He’s gone now but they’ve still got his name on the wall at Malibu, long live Da Cat. He had this riff about riding a wave, about the lip of the wave, the part that’s throwing out over your shoulder.” Fahey made a motion with his hand, as if he were flying across the face of a wave and the motion was meant to indicate that part of the wave so named. “That stuff in the lip, that’s everything that’s out to get you—cops, teachers, priests, bureaucrats, everything that would say your life has to be this or that, everything that would limit and define human experience, it’s all just going by, and you just keep on riding, keep tapping that source, ’cause that’s where it’s at, always was and always will be, life in the moment . . .”

She was trying to see if he was messing with her. In the end, she concluded that he was not. “But if everyone thought that way, there would come a time when there was no place else to go, when these power junkies you’re talking about would have it all . . . There are people in the world who feel that their life only has meaning when they are engaged in a struggle for it.”

Fahey finished a beer, tossed the can into the trash, and got another. “Well,” he said, “it’s your world, Magdalena. I’m just passing through.”

To which she balled up a piece of paper and bounced it off his forehead. “That’s the bullshit gong,” she said. “It just went off.”

Fahey smiled, but there was something sad about it.

“I thought we were having a conversation,” she said. “It was fun.”

“Fun?”

“Okay, nice . . . you pick a word.”

He answered by popping the top on a fresh beer, then sat looking at the hole he had made as if some deep truth were contained therein.