Tijuana Straits (4 page)

Fahey stopped at the fence. He glanced once more at the woman beside him, sleeping fitfully, her hands balled into tiny fists clutched to her chest, then slid from behind the wheel to pass through the morning’s heat. His own dogs were there to greet him, a pair of mongrels he’d acquired since returning to the valley, some kind of terrier mix he called Jack, and Wrinkles, an ancient hound nearly too old to stand. When he’d unlocked the gate he returned to the truck and drove inside, the terrier yapping at his tires. He parked before the ancient yellow trailer listing on blocks amid a stand of cottonwoods and poisonous oleander sown by his father before him then proceeded to sit there, astonished at what the morning had wrought, at his own reckless behavior. “My God,” he said aloud, “what have I done?” His eyes were fixed on the old bumper sticker pasted to the stern of his trailer—white letters on a field of black, pitted by the years, the sun and rain. Fahey wiped at his eyes, scratched raw as though the lids were filled with sand, staring at the sticker as if seeing it for the first time, as if he himself had not been the moron who’d put it there, in another life, on a day more rosy than the present.
THERE’S NOTHING
, the battered letters proclaimed,
A DAY OF SURFING WON’T FIX
.

H
ER NAME
was Magdalena Rivera. She came from Tijuana, Mexico. More precisely, she came from the
colonia
Cartolandia at the gates of the border. It was a place that no longer existed. The Zona del Río, the brightest and shiniest of the new Tijuana, had been built upon the bones of its inhabitants. A mother she could scarcely recall had been drowned there in the name of progress and it was for her that she’d taken up the cross. And now it had gotten her into trouble.

She watched with one good eye this man who had claimed her, saw him amid dust and a rising heat—what she could only assume to be the onslaught of fever. She watched as he opened the chain-link gate that had scared her at first but which she could now see was far too corroded with rust and grit to be anything official so maybe he was really going to help after all. He was going to help or he was like the men one read about, on the walls of post offices, an
abductor of women, an ax murderer, or a rapist. In which case she would be done for, done for on the American side of the fence as surely as she would be done for in Tijuana, should they send her back, without benefit of the amparo she could only guess had been claimed by a malevolent sea.

She waited as he finished with the gate then returned to the truck, a tall, broad-shouldered man, though apparently engaged in some losing struggle with gravity. She was reminded of the homeless she passed each day, on both sides of the border, for his hair and beard were tangled and unkempt and he had about him that permanently sunburned complexion she had come to associate with denizens of the street. All things considered, she could not take comfort in the sight. Her mind tilted toward the dark side. She was too exhausted for flight. She saw him as in a dream. This was where she had come, she thought, to this place, to this man. Whatever happened next would have to be left to karma. There was nothing more to be done, the light already playing tricks with her mind, carrying her like the current that had taken her from the beach, through realms of shadow and light, as if the sun were passing among clouds, though in point of fact, the sky was blameless and cobalt blue, reminding her of the desert, the orphanage in Mexicali, the Sisters of the Benediction . . .

It had begun routinely enough—the night that had brought her to this apparent hallucination without end. She had taken a light meal on the deck of her apartment overlooking Las Playas then driven across town to the Mesa de Otay, where the residents of Colonia Vista Nueva were holding a candlelight vigil for a six-year-old child who had died of lead poisoning.

The drive had taken her through the Zona del Río, past the new cultural center, the banks, and American-style shopping centers
with their fast-food franchises and decorative palms. As always, she had tried to imagine the place as it used to be, before Burger King and Ronald McDonald. The Scientologists said you had it in you to recall everything, clear to the womb if you did it right. Magdalena had spent the first two years of her life here. One might have thought she would have had more to remember now, inching her way through rush-hour traffic, caught among the absurd asphalt circles and bronze effigies that marked the Boulevard de Héroes. But as always, she came up short, which made her melancholy, filling her with nostalgia for a history beyond her reach—Cartolandia on the eve of destruction, the place of her birth.

The Americans called it Cardboardland. It had been the first thing you saw, crossing the border—a shantytown of cardboard boxes, makeshift houses, and abandoned cars. Yet Cartolandia had its own employment center, its own food cooperative and health clinic. Its history was no less colorful than its appearance, born of subversion, often violent, its first incarnation an organized invasion by veterans of the Mexican Revolution, in protest of foreign-owned land and lack of jobs.

The ensuing struggle for the Tijuana floodplain seesawed back and forth over the decades that followed. Eventually, however, a consortium of businessmen and politicians eager for development was successful in persuading the Mexican government to reclaim the land as a national resource, to label the residents as squatters, even though many had purchased their lots through the Ministry of Agriculture or paid rent to the local banks. Residents responded by staging protests, filing petitions. And then came an El Niño winter of particular ferocity and with it the rains. There were rumors in Cartolandia that the opposition was planning to open the floodgates of the Rodríguez Dam. Some residents fled, others stayed to fight. On the twenty-ninth of January, the government issued a statement denying the rumors. On the thirtieth of January, the
floodgates were opened. A hundred people drowned that night, Magdalena’s mother and grandmother among them. Magdalena was found at dawn, on a set of box springs with the family dog, and raised by the Sisters of the Benediction in Mexicali. She was lucky. The orphanage was a good one. The mother superior took a special interest in her, arranging for her to attend the Catholic grammar School in Calexico, orchestrating transportation, providing her with the gift of English, and yet a price had been exacted. For six years she’d been driven back and forth, across the border. There had been little chance for friendships with her classmates outside of the school. She came from another country in the company of nuns, and these made of her a curiosity, a child set apart. By the time she entered junior high school in Mexicali she’d been more proficient in English than in Spanish. By time she finished high school she was accomplished in both, a marketable skill. It made the other things possible. She now worked for an attorney in Tijuana while going to school part time, taking night classes in environmental law at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, situated on the Mesa de Otay, within sight of the banks and shopping centers of the Zona del Río, the new Tijuana. It was what she had wanted. Each day was a reminder here, each commute a trip in time, a consorting with ghosts.

The sky had begun to color by the time she reached the mesas. The factories were changing shifts and she fell in behind a convoy of buses, which were ubiquitous. Day and night they chugged in and out of the mesas like so many gigantic blue insects with their loads of workers, from the
colonias
to the factories and back again. She sometimes thought of the foreign-owned factories as the parts of some monstrous organism dropped from the heavens, settling its tentacles into the arid ground, reaching deep into the heart of
her country. With the advent of NAFTA, the monster had grown stronger and fatter, with more factories, more pollution, greater abuse of the workers—the very things she had come to fight, in her mother’s name, in the name of the planet. She thumped the steering wheel with the butt of her hand, blowing her horn. The buses made no attempt to let her by. They lumbered on. Magdalena looked at her watch. She honked a few more times just for the hell of it then settled back, resigned, inhaling exhaust. It was all too perfect. While the buses fouled the road in their efforts to feed the monster, she rushed to join the residents of Vista Nueva in mourning what the monster had wrought.

The community in question occupied a tract of land at the foot of the mesa. Above it hunkered the remains of Reciclaje Integral, a deserted smelting and battery recycling plant. For years the residents of Vista Nueva had reported skin ulcers, respiratory ailments, birth defects. A number of children had died. Magdalena was proud to have had a part in getting the factory shut down. It was her first year at the university and the attorney she worked for was handling the case. And the case was going well.

When it became apparent that charges would be brought against him in a Mexican court, however, the owner, an American, simply filed for bankruptcy in Mexico, left the factory as it stood, and withdrew across the border, where he continued to prosper. Magdalena had never seen him face-to-face, only in pictures—a middle-aged man with silver hair. His name was Conrad Hunter. He lived in a million-dollar house somewhere in San Diego County while his deserted plant continued to poison the residents of Vista Nueva. And of course the government of her own country, always a friend of business, did not think it their job to pursue the culprit, or to clean up the mess he had left behind.

In tears, she had gone to the attorney she worked for, a woman by the name of Carlotta. They had taken coffee on the little patio
behind the office, sitting together in wrought-iron chairs as the sun crossed a corner of sky.

“There’s a story to make you crazy in every quarter of the city,” Carlotta had told her, “on every block.”

“Right,” Magdalena had said. “But what about this guy Hunter? We’re just going to sit here?”

“We are appealing to the CEC.”

The CEC was a secretariat of NAFTA: the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. The point of the appeal, as Magdalena understood it, was to expose the CEC as little more than a toothless lion. It was an exercise. She said as much to Carlotta.

“A necessary exercise,” Carlotta said.

“But still an exercise.”

Carlotta had arranged her fingers like the peaked roof of a tiny church then looked at Magdalena across their tips. “There is a point of American law,” she said. “It’s called Minimum Contact. It goes something like this: If we could establish a connection between this guy in San Diego and some other business here, in Mexico, it might be possible to go after him over there, bring charges against him in the States.”

“Then why . . .”

“Because it’s a difficult thing to prove. It’s time consuming. You need some kind of paper trail that will stand up in court.”

Magdalena had asked for the job.

“You got it,” Carlotta told her. “If you can build a case against Mr. Hunter, great. If you can’t, remember this: Reciclaje Integral is not the only game in town. So look around. Find me a case. Any case. If we can prosecute just one of these people, we’ve got a precedent to go after more.”