Tijuana Straits (16 page)

She was still pondering such questions when she realized that he was sneaking glances at her as he drove, possibly in anticipation of some response, and she cast about for a moment or two, trying to remember exactly what it was that he had been telling her—something about the world’s largest red worm. So she asked him why. It was the best she could come up with.

“To corner the bait market,” Fahey told her, a satisfied smirk on his dusty face.

Magdalena nodded. “Of course,” she said.

They rode in silence.

“So tell me about all those surfboards,” she asked, “the ones you’ve built your fence out of.”

Fahey shrugged. “My old quiver. I wasn’t sure what else to do with it.”

“Quiver?”

“Different boards for different waves and conditions.”

“You must’ve been really into it,” she said.

Fahey drove on, the truck rolling above ruts, marsh grass, and weeds, vegetation she could not name rising up ten feet high on either side of them, white dust floating in their wake.

“Yeah,” he said. “I was.”

“I saw your pictures. They’re very nice. They seem to be of professional quality.”

Fahey nodded.

“Were they taken here, at the river mouth?”

“Some were taken in town, by the pier. Some are from Mexico. A few from Hawaii. I guess you don’t want to know any more about worms.”

She looked to see if he was smiling, but it was hard to tell. He was watching the road.

“I guess not right now,” she said. “Do you mind if I ask how you got the photographs?”

“I surfed in a few contests one year. I traveled a little. I got some attention. It was a long time ago.”

He seemed unwilling to elaborate without further coaxing. She was tempted to ask about the photograph of the woman and the dog but thought better of it. She did not doubt there was a story there to tell, but she was still a little gun shy in the wake of her ordeal and she worried that the story might not be good for her. She could imagine the subjects of Fahey’s photograph ending like Fahey’s phones, one damaged, the other lost.

They drove on, a certain amount of the fine white dust raised by Fahey’s tires finding its way into the cab. Magdalena cracked a window. A light breeze caressed her cheek. The dust swirled about. The sky burned hot and blue above the chalk white road, which must, she thought, have spent at least part of the past winter doing service as a riverbed, for it was littered with stones and articles of junk and old tire casings and these of a uniform color, caked in
dried mud like articles borne on water and arrived here from someplace else.

“I’ve always wondered what that would be like,” she said, finally.

“What what would be like? Growing worms?”

“Surfing,” she said.

A roadrunner darted from the brush then ran on in front of them, the sun at its back, its body slanted longwise into its own shadow, nearly parallel to the ground before vanishing as quickly as it had appeared, back into the dusty vegetation.

“A greater roadrunner,” Fahey said. “A kind of cuckoo, actually. You don’t see them here as often as you used to.” He slowed a bit, starring into the brush where the bird had gone, then added as a kind of afterthought, “There’s nothing else quite like it.”

“Nothing else like what? Worms, surfing, or roadrunners?”

Fahey smiled. “You pick,” he said.

She studied his profile in the dusty cab. “So I guess your bumper sticker is right . . .” for she had seen the old decal on the stern of his trailer. “There really is nothing a day of surfing won’t fix?” She thought this a clever remark that might engender further comment, but watched instead as the smile faded from his face.

“Yeah, there is,” Fahey told her. “It took me a while but I found it.”

A
T SOME
turn in the road they were afforded a fresh look at the mesas that marked the southern edge of the valley, a perspective from which one could see the cars winding their way along Mex One, tiny dots of color shimmering above the steel arc of the fence with its gridwork and bracings.

“It looks like a carnival ride,” Magdalena said.

Fahey glanced to see what she was looking at.

“The cars, the fence. You ever think that?”

“Maybe. I guess.”

“I almost died up there.”

“You almost died in the ocean.”

“And then there were the dogs. That’s three. You believe in nine lives?”

“I believe whatever happens happens.”

“I forgot one,” she said. “I almost died in Las Playas, where the
fence runs into the ocean. It broke when I hit it . . . Do you know how many people have drowned there?”

Fahey maintained his usual silence in the face of such questions.

Magdalena studied the fence a moment longer, vanishing into the west, and upon whose ending she’d so nearly seen herself impaled. She noted too the trucks of the border patrol, perched in various nooks and crannies atop the mesas. She called the trucks to Fahey’s attention. “What about them?” she asked. “Do we still need to worry?”

“Most of them know my truck,” Fahey told her. “They’re not going to come down for it. If we happen to run into someone, I’ll just tell them you’re a friend. Your English is so good I doubt there will be any question . . .”

“If they ask for identification?”

“It’s back at my trailer?”

“If they insist on going to look?”

“Then we’re fucked. But I don’t think they will.” He looked up at the green-and-white trucks. “They’ll sit there all day, till their shift changes. The action’s all at night, less of it now that there’s the fence.”

“And yet many people die because of it.”

Fahey said nothing.

“But I crossed without trying,” Magdalena said. She couldn’t quite leave it alone. “The fence just crumbled away . . .”

“It does that out there on the beach sometimes. The ocean is rough and the saltwater eats away at things.”

“But in Mexico, there are the names of the people who have drowned there, pinned against the fence by the currents.”

Fahey nodded. “If you had been trying to cross, it wouldn’t have happened for you like that. You would have been caught,” he said. “Or the fence would not have broken.”

Magdalena just looked at him. “Is that so?”

“It’s the way life is.”

“The way life is?”

“I believe it has something to do with the irony of human action.”

“I didn’t know you were a philosopher.”

“I’m a worm farmer.”

They kept to dirt roads, cut among a variety of grasses and tall reeds, the ubiquitous willow. Fahey called out various points of interest as they passed—a stand of wild radishes, eight feet high, a sandbar willow he thought to be of an impressive size and shape. They came to a place where the taller vegetation dropped away. In its place there was greasewood and sage then waving fields of orange poppies and a bright yellow flower Fahey named as sumac.

“This is quite lovely,” Magdalena said.

“You think so?”

“Yes, I do.” Across the undulating sea of flowers one might glimpse the tops of the dunes, sparkling white in the sun, and beyond these the craggy shapes of the Coronado Islands—blue shadows upon the horizon.

“Later I’ll show you something,” Fahey said. “Later on.”

She turned to look at him. His eyes were still on the road, his hands atop the wheel. The wind of their passing was in his hair, lifting it from his face, and she was reminded of the photographs she had seen in the trailer—the young Fahey, a blond Adonis on a board. It wasn’t a bad profile, she thought, you cut away some of the beard, you got rid of the dust from that board he was making, you scraped away the years and whatever it was that made him say that if she had been trying to cross she would have been caught.

“So what are you going to show me?” she asked.

“Just something.”

Eventually they came to paved road. They drove though tract homes that would have been nice for Tijuana but seemed quite shabby here, in California, in the Promised Land. She said as much to Fahey.

“Not down here,” Fahey told her. “This is the end of the line, the only beach town in California no one wants, where the sewage meets the sea.”

They drove down a main street anchored at one end by the No Problem Bar, and at the other by a bizarre collection of Plexiglas sticks rising above a number of stubby-looking benches that were shaped more or less like surfboards.

Fahey provided narration. The No Problem was a favorite haunt of the Navy SEALs who trained a few miles north, out of Coronado Island. “They used to train in the valley,” Fahey said. “Did a lot of stuff right at the river mouth, for years. But the pollution got worse and they began to drop like flies. The toughest of the tough. They were losing it to amoebic dysentery and flesh-eating bacteria. So they gave it up. They still come to the bar, though. This time of day the place is okay. You go in there after midnight with an attitude, you’ll be lucky to come out alive. It’s like a Western movie . . .” Fahey turned to look at her. “You know about Westerns?”

Magdalena just laughed at him. It was perhaps the first time she had done so in his presence and he was struck by the beauty of it. “Yes,” she said. “I know about Westerns. The Gunfight at the No Problem Bar.”

“More likes fists and knives, but that’s the idea.”

He parked near the colored Plexiglas.

“They call this place Surfhenge.”

“As in Stonehenge?”

“Unhappily, yes. It is intended as a tribute to the men who surfed the straits.”

“Where I nearly drowned.”

“You would not have been the first, believe me. I used to lifeguard here, here and in Rosarito . . .”

“You lifeguarded in Mexico?”

“For a while.”

Fahey pointed out a pay phone near some public rest rooms at the entrance of the pier. To reach them it was necessary to walk among the Plexiglas sticks. “What are these things?” Magdalena asked. She was standing beneath a brilliant, electric green arch.

“I believe they are meant to represent waves.”

“You seem dubious.”

“Well, Christ, look at the place. It looks like a fast-food restaurant, without the food.”

He had a point. She noticed a number of small bronze plaques scattered across the sidewalk at her feet. The plaques had names written on them in raised letters.

“And these?” she asked.

“The names of the surfers.” He ticked off several of the names on his fingers, a dozen or more, without looking at the plaques. Many had colorful nicknames and she asked him about these as well. Fahey paused to smile. “Surfers are like sailors,” he told her. “They love their stories. They love mythic waves and mythic characters, mysterious events that defy explanation. A good one enters the canon. It gets passed on.”

“What about this guy, Kayak Jack?” She was reading from a plaque.

“Of Native American ancestry, reputed to have ridden Third Notch in a kayak.”

“I see. And Third Notch?”

“There are basically three breaks out there. An inside break, a middle break, and an outside break. They call them First Notch, Second Notch, and Third Notch. The notches are canyons in the mesas.
But you get out there a few hundred yards . . .” He gestured toward the ocean south of the pier. “They look like notches. And you can use them to tell you where to wait for the waves by lining them up with the old lighthouse in Las Playas. On a small day, when only the inside is working, you put that lighthouse right in the first notch, and that’s where you wait; on a bigger day you move to second notch, and so on . . .”