Tijuana Straits (35 page)

But as they were about to move on, a series of gunshots rang out behind them and they went to their stomachs yet again, wondering at what this new racket might portend. There were two distinct bursts of shooting and when the second died away the valley fell silent once more, save for the pounding of the surf.

“What do you think?” Magdalena asked him.

It was Fahey’s guess that the riders had crossed paths with the men who chased them but there was no way of knowing this for sure and it was not his intention to investigate the outcome, or to wait long enough to see who, if anyone, would emerge from the trees.

With as much speed at they could manage they made their entrance into the short grass. And though the moonlight fell about their shoulders, the mud had rendered them as one with the night, and so they passed, little more than shadows, toward land’s ending, toward the mouth of the river and the waves beyond.

A
RMANDO HAD
thought the place simple. But in this he had been mistaken. The valley was a labyrinth, a trick done with mirrors. The lesson was learned early in the chase, revealed in the strategy of the worm farmer. It began with the blast, which he had to admit was clever and sent him diving for cover—a belly flop near the wheels of Fahey’s truck—and this the resting place from which he had glimpsed his Madonna, as Chico had so described her, a vision in red, running upon the heels of her companion straight into the gaping mouth of an old barn. He’d thought to trap them there but it was only the beginning of the worm farmer’s tricks, for by time Armando arrived, the wall had been turned to a doorway and both of them gone into the night. He’d followed for a short distance before seeing them once more, now fifty yards away, nearing the trees at the summit of a shallow embankment.

From there he’d sent Nacho back to the car for such lanterns as
they’d thought to steal from Garage Door Tijuana while he and Chico searched for the exact place where the others had vanished. His first guess was that they were trying to do no more than hide among the trees but with the aid of the lanterns he saw that once again he had underestimated the farmer. The lights revealed footprints, flattened grass, and broken bits of brush and he saw that in fact they meant to run, his Madonna and her farmer, in what appeared to be the general direction of the sea and he swore to himself that he had underestimated this man for the last time. He cursed aloud, making such oaths to himself and to anyone else willing to listen.

For Armando there was no question about how to proceed. He had her before him, in this place, in the dead of night. The very thought accelerated his sobriety. He would not lose her again. Chico expressed some concern about the border patrol, but Armando wasn’t hearing any. His blood was up. The chase was on and he would see its end. And though he would have preferred to have taken her to his site in the desert as he had planned, the labyrinth of the Tijuana River Valley would have to serve and so he went on, like a man possessed, which to some degree he was, driven by such devils as his life had thus far engendered . . . through brush and bog, moving at a fevered pace and the others following in his wake, from one trail to another in endless crisscrossing steps like the Day-Glo footprints he’d once tracked through some dimly remembered funhouse of his youth . . . and no fewer wonders contained in this dark place, amid the reek of sewage and the flurry of bats swung like kites on strings affixed to the hands of lunatics. Yet none of these wonders was more outlandish than that which at last presented itself to them on the banks of a stagnant pool somewhere, by Armando’s reckoning, at the very heart of this morass, halfway between the burning farm and the waiting sea, where a trio of gringos, dressed like Halloween soldiers, was engaged in trying
to pull a horse from a pool by way of ropes run to motorbikes whose wheels did little more than tear great holes in the muddy earth, spattering the night with immense gobs of reeking manure so that in entering into the arena of this absurdity he felt that he had stumbled at last into the very eye of the proverbial shit storm from which he’d always hoped to absent himself, and he brought the gun to bear.

It was a wonderful pump-action piece, this gun belonging to the worm farmer. There had been extra shells in the truck and he’d stuffed as many of these into his pockets as he was able to carry and he shot now if for no other reason than to clear his mind, for the chase was beginning to wear and he did not stop till pretty much everything in the clearing was dead and down, the horse included, then paused to survey the carnage.

He was by then holding the shotgun in one hand and the pistol in the other, for each had played a part. The horse had gone to its side in the murky waters like a boat capsized. One of the Halloween soldiers floated nearby, facedown in the pool. A second soldier lay gut-shot, spilling viscera across the foul mud. One of the dirt bikes had fallen into the pool and gone silent, though its headlight continued to burn and so lit a portion of this grim scene from beneath the water—an eerie light tinted to an unearthly shade of green, rising up into the hoary willows whose branches reared like the arms of supplicants in the face of such decimation. Another of the bikes was still running, its rear tire still throwing mud and the entire contraption wiggling in creeping half circles where it had toppled to its side like a crippled insect, and Armando reloaded and fired at this as well, discharging three rounds before the offending machinery ceased its infernal racket to lie in smoking ruins that, deprived of motion, sank slowly into the earth.

Armando had embarked upon this slaughter in the belief that some measure of silence was required for the collecting of his
thoughts. Clearly the farmer was leading him on a merrier chase than he would have thought possible and he was beginning to wonder if he had been mistaken in its undertaking. And yet he’d no sooner set about the consideration of such a conundrum and others like it when it occurred to him there was something else amiss in this hard-won silence. Whereupon he saw Nacho, or at least what was left of him, for the lumbering youth had somehow managed to fall into the same bog that had nearly taken Magdalena before him—though of this last bit of history Armando was still in ignorance.

Imagine a keyhole as might accommodate an old-fashioned key—a round hole up top, a longer somewhat triangular opening beneath it, for such was the configuration of this bit of topography. A stagnant pool formed the larger, triangular part. The bog was smaller and more circular in shape though each was joined to the other as has been described and existed amid a stand of ancient willows, half of them dead or bearded in some form of parasitic moss that hung like spiderwebs from decrepit limbs and all some yards from the main body of the river.

Nacho had fallen into the bog, early in the conflict it would seem, for the gunfire and roar of engines appeared to have concealed such cries for help as he may have uttered, and thus had he missed his chance entirely, for such cries were beyond him now. The mud had already engulfed the great tabernacle of his chest and much of his neck and there was little he could do by the time the others found him, save tilt that great head in one last effort to draw breath, so that as Armando and Chico reached the edge of the bog, all that actually remained of their companion was his face—as if that appendage had been flayed then spread upon the muddy ground in performance of a ghastly ritual. Or perhaps that scarred visage had been no more than a Halloween mask all along, fallen now in the aftermath of some reverie. But this sank too, even as they watched it, the mud closing over it, until all that lingered were
a few unctuous bubbles. And finally these too were gone and everything that had been Nacho was gone with them, taken into the earth even as the bubbles were taken into the air, yet to what depth and station of hell he might descend, there were none there to say with certainty.

The entire spectacle seemed to have worked some adverse effect upon Chico, who now went to his haunches, gibbering in the midst of this carnage, at the side of the foul bog. His speech was difficult to discern but it appeared to Armando as if he was asking to go home.

Armando slapped him on the back of his head with the flat of his hand. “How will they write your corridos,” he asked, “if you show weakness now?”

“How do you know she is still out there?” Chico said. The slap seemed to have gone some way toward clearing his mind.

“Where else would she be,
cabrón
?”

Armando squatted by his side, then noticed something upon the surface of the mud not far from that place where Chico had gone down. He rose, looking around till he’d found a dead branch with which to fish this object from the mud and when he had done so he saw that it was a sandal, too small to be any but hers.

Armando held it out for Chico to see. “Maybe this is what Nacho saw,” he said. “Maybe it was this he was trying to reach.” The news was both good and bad. Nacho was gone to his reward, but the girl had passed this way.

“Maybe she is down there too then,” Chico said. By which he meant the center of the earth.

“And the worm farmer?”

Chico nodded. “All of them,” he said.

But Armando swung his lantern among the shadows until he had found that place where Fahey had extended himself to reach her and he read such signs as were there to be read—the great limb,
close to the ground, every twig broken upon its surface, muddied impressions near the trunk of the selfsame tree. He interpreted these as men interpret Scripture, in accordance with the leanings of their own hearts. For the sandal that had held her foot was still in his hand. Leather that had touched her skin had now touched his own. He would not admit to her absence. “She fell here,” he announced, finally. “She fell and the farmer pulled her out.”

He began a frantic search of the general area until he’d found the place where Fahey and Magdalena had gone to their stomachs with the coming of the dirt bikes before crawling away, drag marks and flattened pickleweed to mark their passing. He followed these into the arm of the tributary, where all such traces vanished, but came shortly into the cane, where he picked up the trail once more, and by this route came finally to the end of the trees and so stood looking across the last of the valley, to the dunes beyond and the lights of Imperial Beach at the northern edges of the beach. “He’s going to town,” Armando said. And so he reasoned it. The farmer had used the trails along the river to slow them down, to disguise his true destination. Once upon the beach, it would be a straight shot for help.

Armando now studied the dunes and the flickering lights and gauged their distance one to the other and his own from each, and it was his considered opinion that Magdalena and her farmer were not so far ahead that he and Chico could not still catch them on the beach and in fact took some pleasure in this for he found in the scenario grounds for hope. If he could dispense with the farmer on the beach it would be an easy thing to simply reverse direction and cross into Mexico by way of Yogurt Canyon, possibly even taking the Madonna with them, as far perhaps as that place already prepared for her coming and so in the bargain be done with this valley altogether; he said as much to Chico, this and more, and goaded and chided and in the end they went on together.

This was not exactly to Chico’s liking. In truth he was afraid to go and afraid to stay. He was also afraid of going back to Garage Door Tijuana, where even to his own limited powers of observation it seemed that they had most likely worn out their welcome. In truth he could find no way out of this complexity superior to another so that in the end he did as Armando had asked, he sucked it up and soldiered on, at one moment gibbering at the prospect of some imminent demise, in the next insisting that he had never shown weakness, that his corridos would indeed be written and sung, of the women he had raped and killed and of other atrocities both real and imagined. And none of it with any claim at all on the attention of Armando, who was on the move once more, uppers in one pocket, downers in the other, and the resulting combination turning the valley to colors heretofore unimagined outside of desert raves. He might as well have been exploring canals on the surface of the red planet. Insects scuttled up and down his arms like passing trains. He viewed them as one having an acquaintance with such afflictions yet clawed at them nonetheless, and in so doing was viewed by Chico with mounting alarm, for he could see nothing about the other to illicit such antics and so suffered beneath the premonition that he would most likely die out here, on the wrong side of the border, in the company of a lunatic, and in that he was not altogether mistaken.

As if in response to Chico’s paranoia a helicopter appeared in the night, hovering it would seem above the ruins of the worm farm, but it came no closer to where they stood before veering off into blackness.