Tijuana Straits (39 page)

Magdalena now turned her attention to Fahey, taking stock of his wounds. There was a cut across one arm where the machete had gotten him and another shallow cut near his collarbone. The
wounds were more like deep scratches than cuts, already lined with crusted blood. He’d taken a couple of pellets in the same shoulder and these would have to be gotten out and there was a knot near his temple and bruises across one side of his face. “You’re like I was,” she told him. “We’ve switched places.”

“It’s true,” he said. “You saved my ass.”

Chico lay close by, mouth agape, staring blindly into the night and none now left to sing his song. Fahey turned away but Magdalena looked long enough to see the Aztec sun tattooed upon his naked abdomen where the fancy Western shirt had fallen away. “That was him,” she said. “The man from the road . . .” She looked toward the mouth of the river, the endless lines of white water crisscrossing in the night. “He must have been the other one,” she said. “Armando. The one whose face I never saw.”

“You knew him.”

“He used to come to the center. He thought we had performed an abortion on his wife.”

“That was why he followed you, all this way? It was why he came?”

Magdalena was some time in replying. “It’s a sad story,” she said.

Fahey could only nod, wondering aloud if in the end he might have tried to save him, but Magdalena put a finger to his lips and would not hear it. “You’re hurt,” she said.

“Not really.”

“What about the water, the mud?”

“You live down here you keep up on your shots. I get home I’ll take some of the Cipro.”

“And your head?”

Fahey shrugged it off. “I can still count to ten,” he told her. He walked along the bank of the river, studying its surface. Magdalena walked with him. She guessed that he was still looking for some trace of Armando. “He was beyond your help,” she said. “Yours or anyone else’s, for a long time now, I would imagine. I got to know
his wife. I know something of his past. He could not have been long for this world. Believe me. The end for which you would have saved him would have been worse than the one he has endured.”

Fahey continued walking. He did not ask to hear the man’s story or to what end he might have come, then or at any other time, and would in fact go to his own grave without knowing it, for by his own measure the world was composed of sad stories and he saw no reason to learn another.

It was while they were still walking along the bank that a dark object, large enough to have been a man, was swept past them and into the sea. They caught no more than a glimpse, but in looking back along the way they had come, they could see that the banks had continued to crumble and that Chico was no longer there. He’d gone, it would seem, on the heels of the man who had killed him, a headless tracker set to wander, yet Fahey imagined the sea both wide and deep enough to sustain the chase.

“We should go on,” he said. And those were the only words to attend Chico’s final appearance in the land of the living.

They were by now standing on the beach, at the very mouth of the river, closer to the border than to the farm, or what might be left of it, and he was trying to decide which destination made more sense and to what exactly they should go on to when a pair of headlights broke suddenly onto the beach from somewhere back of the dunes.

Above these headlights burned a rack of halogens more brilliant than the moon. The lights were coming toward them and Fahey raised a hand to shield his eyes from the glare and saw that still one more light had been added to this display. The new entry appeared to be handheld and was trained upon the sea, apropos of some drama no doubt unfolding out there in the watery dark.

Magdalena shrank back but Fahey assured her the lights could be none but the border patrol’s. “The cavalry,” he said, “right on time.”

Having nothing any longer to fear from such encounters, Fahey and Magdalena walked to meet the truck. It had come to a stop by the time they got to it and there was a young man standing at its side, a Mexican-American in the uniform of the border patrol, and he was indeed holding a spotlight and training it upon the sea.

Fahey and Magdalena were nearly on top of him before he noticed them and when he did his hand dropped to the pistol at his side but Fahey held up both hands, palms out. “It’s okay,” Fahey told him. “I live here.”

The man did not seem immediately reassured.

“Really,” Fahey said. “What do you see?”

The patrolman studied them a moment longer, then nodded in the direction of his light, and they followed its beam, which seemed at first to have found no more than the mist of an agitated sea, and this swirling within its narrow track like the coming of snow. In a short time however, they saw there was more. They saw what the light had found—a small boat swinging wildly among the huge ground-swells within a quarter mile of the shore and each knew it for what it was, a smuggler running migrants, and each could envision only too well such ragtag pilgrims as any boat of its kind was bound to contain, of any and all ages, their worldly goods in plastic bags, afraid for their lives, in the face of a night beyond their reckoning.

“The next outside wave will swamp them,” Fahey said.

The border patrolman cursed softly in Spanish then switched to English. “What do they think?” he asked. “On a night like this?” He was looking from Magdalena to Fahey and back again, as though either might provide him with an answer. When none was forthcoming he shook his head in some combination of disgust and sorrow.
“Loco,”
he said. “They don’t think.” He went so far as to wave a hand in their direction, as though warning them to move farther
out—a meaningless gesture born of frustration, for the situation had gone way beyond anyone’s ability to control it—and even as the patrolman spoke, there came a deep booming that could be heard even above the general roar of the surf. The white water came within seconds, a roiling wall itself ten feet high, a quarter mile in length. The boat was set broadside to the impact and seemed to come apart even as they watched it. The patrolman groaned. Magdalena put the back of her fist to her mouth. By the arc of the patrolman’s light, small figures could be seen spilling from the boat, vanishing in darkness.

The patrolman lowered his light and turned to his truck. He was about to reach for something inside the cab when he caught sight of Fahey at the rear bumper, naked except for his shorts, engaged in loosening the canvas straps by which a number of large metal containers were lashed into the bed. His shirt and pants lay nearby, where they had fallen on the sand. The patrolman nearly stumbled over them in his march to the rear of the vehicle. “What the hell?” he asked. But by now Fahey had freed the strap. He appeared to be measuring it for length.

“I need some kind of flotation device,” Fahey told him. “Water bottles, antifreeze containers . . . anything that will float.”

The patrolman began to shake his head. “I’m not sure exactly what you think you’re doing but if you think I’m gonna let you go out in that, you’re crazy . . .”

“You must have drinking water . . .”

“Forget it. And I’ve called for backup. The Coast Guard was supposed to have dispatched a helicopter . . .”

“It’s not here,” Fahey told him.

The patrolman just looked at him.

“Listen to me,” Fahey said. “I’ve lifeguarded and I’ve surfed these beaches for thirty years. These people will die on your watch, mine too.” The two men were by now eye to eye. “I can do this,”
Fahey said. “If the chopper comes, great, it will be easier for all of us, but these people don’t have much time, not tonight, not in this kind of surf.”

For a moment neither man spoke. Their silence was broken by Magdalena.

“I found this,” she said. She was standing at the side of the cab, a plastic gallon jug of Arrowhead drinking water in her hand. “It was behind the seat.”

In another few seconds there was added to this a plastic antifreeze container of roughly the same shape and size. The bottles were emptied of their contents then recapped, the canvas strap from the patrolman’s truck run through the handles of each then looped about Fahey’s chest, armpit to shoulder.

The patrolman looked on, unable to escape the feeling that in the end, he had, in some way, been had. He supposed it was the woman, as remarkable a creature as any he could remember, and he was yet to even scrape the surface of what had gotten her here, in the dead of night, wet and ragged, in the company of this man about to throw himself into the sea. But with the loss of the boat the clock had been set against him and if he was certain of nothing else he was certain of this: The man would not be dissuaded and there were lives in the balance. There was also the man’s apparent confidence, together with his appearance. Deprived of his ragged clothes he had a solid-enough look about him to suggest he was at least up to the attempt, if not to its successful resolution, though given the conditions, that degree of surety would have been difficult to ascribe to any man. And yet the woman had chosen to back his play. Nor, finally, could the patrolman see any clear way to intervene in this adventure short of nightsticks and restraints and so busied himself with his truck’s phone, calling yet again for the helicopter
that seemed to have been detained, asking for backup, and all the while, his eyes on Fahey, on the beach, as he prepared to enter the water.

Magdalena stood nearby, rigid as a stone, one hand affixed to the open door of the truck. She took this as a necessary precaution, enabling her to remain on her feet, for she felt that in a manner of speaking her legs were gone, and it was this last bit that had done it. They had come so far, she thought, she and Fahey. They had bested the men who hunted them. They had come so close. Yet she did not trust herself to say any more than she had said already, in presenting him with the plastic bottle, in giving him her blessing, for she had doubted it as soon as it was given. She knew at once too much and too little, too much of his past and too little of what chance he actually had of making this rescue. She thought perhaps that if she could see his face . . . maybe there she would find a way to judge, but his eyes were turned toward her for no more than a heartbeat and even then he was asking the patrolman to swing his truck around and put the halogens on anyone he could find and failing that the wreckage itself and with that he was gone. She watched as he ran down the beach, pounding through the shallows. She saw him dive beneath a line of white water and vanish from view.

Fahey reckoned the boat to have broken up somewhere in the vicinity of Third Notch. What had gotten them was the Mystic Peak. One could not mistake its thunder. His hope would be to reach them before it broke again—at this point in the swell’s progress, an event that was difficult to predict. He was vaguely aware of someone shouting through a bullhorn as he ran into the shallows. He took it for the border patrolman. Perhaps he was trying to speak to the migrants. Perhaps he was trying to call Fahey back to reason. Fahey
never knew. He made his dive. The sea gathered him in, colder than it had been in recent weeks, made so by the winds that had driven the swell, and though he had not said so, another in this deck of cards now stacked against the people he would try to save. The power of the first wave drove him deeper than his dive. He felt a sandbar scrape his chest, and then he was clear. He came to the surface, his head ringing. He began to swim.