Tijuana Straits (33 page)

F
AHEY CUT
westward through the valley, Chet Baker on tape, faint yellow light seeping from the illuminated face of an ancient radio, the numbers etched in plastic worn to illegibility . . . “I thought surfers listened to some other kind of music,” Magdalena said. “You know . . . ‘Wipe Out’ . . .” She was trying to make light of things, to end with a smile.

Fahey just looked at her. “Not on your life,” he said. They had arrived at the farm and Fahey stopped the truck to get out. Magdalena touched his arm. “I meant what I said at the rodeo.”

Fahey could not quite bring himself to look her in the eye. He guessed at what might be contained there and it was not anything he wanted to see. He watched the dogs on the other side of the fence, then nodded and got out of the truck. He swung the gate wide on rusting hinges and drove them inside, after which he parked and went back to the gate one more time to lock them in.

She was out of the truck, waiting near the trailer as Fahey walked back across the yard. He had nearly caught up with her when he heard something in the darkness at the edge of the fence. The dogs, circling at his heels, heard it as well, Jack taking off at a dead run, Wrinkles going stiff-legged some ways behind. It was too dark to see more than a stirring in the night, yet Fahey went with some instinct latent within him, taking Magdalena by the arm, steering her into shadow, for she had been standing in the light where it pooled at the foot of the steps. He had no sooner done so than a bullet hit the trailer door—the crack of gunfire at one with the appearance of a black, puckered hole. He saw the muzzle flash of the second shot, and then the old hound, dropping like a sack of flour. More shots and the terrier blown sideways, tumbling across hardscrabble dirt like a paper sack torn asunder, caught upon the wind, white against the blackness of the yard. Bullets peppered the trailer, head-high. These were accompanied by the sounds of breaking glass.

Fahey made for the corner of the room he had built at the side of the trailer. Magdalena went with him. The trailer was longer than the room by a good ten feet, raised upon concrete blocks, with space beneath it.

“Roll under,” he said. They had rounded the room and were kneeling at the side of the trailer. “Crawl to the other side.”

She did so and Fahey behind her. They emerged in darkness, beyond the reach of bullets. Fahey went to the butane tanks at the trailer’s tongue, on his stomach in the brittle grass, straining to see—some hulking shape out there in the dark, and then a sound, cutters at work on the fence, the twang of snapping steel. They would be in quickly, and Fahey’s gun still behind the seat of the truck on the far side of the trailer, halfway to the fence where the men were coming through.

He was aware of Magdalena at his side, her breath a stifled sob.
Were he alone, he might have risked a mad dash to the truck, ending it one way or the other in a single stroke, at which point it occurred to him that he could not remember if he had ever reloaded the shotgun after killing the dogs. In the absence of such surety all such notions were at once made null and void and yet even if this were not the case, even if he knew for certain that the gun was loaded, the odds would still stand against him and he had her to think of now—twenty-three years old, all beauty and life unlived and one false move on the part of Samuel Fahey enough to end it here and now, to place her at the mercy of such creatures as were already cutting their way through his first line of defense.

Fahey took quick stock of his options. There were but two gaps in the fence that surrounded them—the gate already lost to them, and the old outbuilding that had come with the land, ten by twenty, set longwise at the very edge of the property so there had been no room to run the chain link behind it. They’d run it instead to either end and so made of the building a part of the fence but the structure had been old even then—single-wall clapboard and much of the wood warped and cracked from the years of sun and sea air, its interior a repository of old farming tools red with rust but suitable, Fahey reasoned, for the busting out of enough clapboard to make good their escape, and surely, he thought, a better option than attempting to scale the fence before men with guns, or to face them barehanded among the windrows of his farm.

He saw no good reason to believe the men who had come for them would not see them enter the barn, or hear them at work on the wall. Still, Fahey reasoned, if they could just get clear of the property they might stand a chance, for it was his intention to do as every other migrant, drug runner, and fugitive in hopes of eluding capture had done before him; he would make for the river and he would hope to outfox them. He would make for the mouth among canopied trails because it was there the river was most treacherous
and once upon the beach the tide would be in their favor. He had Jack Nance to credit for that, or at least for his knowing it. For in tracking the swell he’d tracked the tides and he offered in silence a word of thanks then felt in his pocket the book of matches from Woody’s at the Pier. With these came a rude plan that he guessed might just afford them some head start in this race to the sea, and he’d no sooner settled on it than he felt her hand as it touched his arm. His course set, he moved back from the tanks and turned to face her. She held his eyes with her own, but any such questions as she might have asked were already contained therein as were the answers contained in his and so left unspoken.

They had for the moment the old trailer still between themselves and the invaders. A metal storage shed sat back of the trailer as well, a few yards away, closer to the fence, and there were a few barrels of worm tea stacked out in front in steel drums that gave off a dull shine in the light of the moon as it snaked among the branches of the trees. Fahey told her to get between the shed and the fence and to wait there in the shadows, then went to his elbows and knees, crawling back to the front of the trailer, where he severed a hose with a pocketknife. The act was followed by the hiss of butane upon the bone-dry grass. He rolled away, struck a match, lit the book, tossed it beneath the tanks, then ran to join her.

The fire spread quickly. He could hear voices on the far side of the trailer, raised in alarm, coming through the garden. He thought he heard the door of his truck, the popping of the driver’s door upon its hinges, and took this as a bad sign, for they would now have the gun he had been unable to reach.

“There’s half a tank of butane up front,” Fahey told her. “Fire gets hot enough, I believe it will blow. With luck, one or more of these bastards will be too close. Failing that, it might scare them off. Failing that, it will definitely get their attention.”

“Or bring the border patrol?”

“Eventually. But we’re not gonna wait around to find out. That thing blows, we make for the barn.” He pointed toward the outbuilding, thirty yards away, some of those yards screened by clumps of weed and cactus, head high, some exposed. Magdalena nodded.

They waited in the dark, Fahey counting off seconds, wondering which would come first, the explosion or the men, whereupon the tank went off. Flames shot fifty feet in the air, igniting the limbs of a cottonwood. Fahey put a hand in the small of Magdalena’s back and propelled her toward the barn.

They went among the weeds, came to bare ground and covered it at a dead run, the last fifteen yards, nothing but windrows between themselves and the fire and Fahey already knowing the artifact he wanted, the bloodred blade of an old plow he’d known since childhood . . . and then the boards, dry as old bones, coming apart as the blade struck through them, exploding outward in a shower of dust and flying splinters and Fahey out behind them and the girl with him.

They ran through a field of grass and weeds gone dry and brittle with the end of summer that crackled like sticks of kindling put to flame as they passed, stumbling on the uneven ground, the sharpened ends of broken weeds pulling at them as might the residents of nursing homes, reaching out from cloistered senility, half deranged, tearing at them with clawed hands till they had run free and come to the slight rise of an old levee erected by farmers in anticipation of coming floods and upon whose summit they went exposed for some short distance in the moonlight. From this vantage point they looked back in the direction from which they had come and saw the men clearly for the first time, the men who chased them. They were three in number and they came loping through the waist-high brush in the fashion of lycanthropes and now one looked up and saw Fahey and the girl and whooped and was answered in kind by at least one of his fellows and a shot rang
out, though where it passed by, Fahey could not say. There were not fifty yards between themselves and the men. Fahey pulled her among the trees and down along the muddy bank where the reek of toxic brew, as potent as one was likely to find, rose to meet them. Sweat beaded at his brow and ran into his eyes. He used the back of his hand to wipe it away. “Shoot away,” Fahey said. “Call the border patrol . . .” though he doubted even they would follow here and picked a path in the cloying dark, for by such ways had he eluded enemies more times than one could count, humping dope back in the day, and the trails not so different then as now. It was the stakes that had gotten higher, and he led her as far down the bank as he dared to go, until the black muck was sucking at their shoes, then turned to the west, entering almost at once upon a little clearing where the trees gave way and the river lay naked to the night, emerging from shadow as had they themselves, its wind-rippled surface shimmering with uncounted points of light as though dragging within its oily depths a third of heaven’s stars. For such was its poisoned beauty, the Tijuana River on its way to the sea.

H
AVING REACHED
the river, Fahey considered his options for the last time. They were two in number. One was to make for the mouth, as had been his intention. The other was to hide. Each had something to be said for it. They might try to bury themselves in the bush. Their hunters might pass them by. There were motion sensors scattered throughout the valley and somewhere upon the mesas the border patrol might well detect their movement, might have done so already, might in fact be on their way even now, by the four-wheel motorcycles they used, known as quads, or by horseback like the proverbial cavalry. It was, however, Fahey’s experience that the border patrol was much like any other unwieldy branch of government, unpredictable at best. Unwanted, they would arrive en masse. In need of help, one might well bask in their absence for hours on end. In short, the border patrol was nothing to bet a life on and if he and Magdalena attempted to hide and were caught,
they were done for. And then there was this: he had seen them kill his dogs and invade his land. It was more than fear that drove him. Anger drove him as well and there was a part of him that wanted these men at the river mouth, on the beaches of the Tijuana Straits, where some measure of justice yet might be brought to bear. At the very least, he thought, it suited his mood to try. Nor, if the truth were told, did he think himself physically capable of staying long in one place, of lying low in this muddy reek for what might prove to be hours on end while men with guns beat the bushes looking for them, perhaps even firing indiscriminately. No, he thought, he had been right at the farm. It was the headlong rush that was called for, the mad charge into some final reckoning . . . And he chose now as he had chosen then. He chose to run, to gamble at the river mouth on such skills as he possessed, if indeed it came to that, for in truth he would try to do both, to hide and to move at the same time. And so they pressed on, through the little clearing where bats now swirled like dust motes in a shaft of light above the black, moon-spangled river.

He led her among the willows and it was there he stopped to face her, to tell her of his plan. His breath came hard in this close place and hers as well, for he could hear it in the darkness, shallow and fast . . . Their faces were only inches apart and he could mark her features in the murky light. She’s yours, he told himself, yours to save or to lose, and it was not the first time in this life that he’d taken such counsel.