Tijuana Straits (17 page)

“That’s rather ingenious.”

“Hoddy Younger,” Fahey said. “The man I told you about. He was the real pioneer, the guy who figured it all out, as much as it could be figured . . . There’s a fourth break out there too. Way out. Lots of the old-timers called it the Mystic Peak. Hoddy called it Outside the Bullring, because that far out, none of the lineups work anymore, and that, Hoddy would say, was when the straits were really the straits, meaning that if you chose to go for it, you were always going to be in harm’s way. You blow it that far out, it’s still no joke. But in his day . . . before wet suits and leashes . . . It was Hoddy who gave the place its name.”

Fahey looked at her and laughed. “He rigged up this contraption once, fifty feet of line, an engine block on one end, a weather balloon on the other, rowed it out to where he thought the lineup might be for the Mystic Peak, and heaved it overboard. The next big swell washed it all away. There’s still no real way to know if you’re in the right spot or not. If you’re too far outside, which is almost impossible, you can’t catch the wave. If you’re too far inside, you’ll get nailed.” He shrugged. “Not that anyone still cares.”

“They built this,” she said. “What happened?”

Fahey looked out across the beach. You could see the ocean from where they stood, a narrow band of blue whipped by the wind. “The waves are still there. The water got bad. It’s surfed on occasion, but no one’s ridden Outside the Bullring in more than a decade.”

“It hasn’t broken?”

“Not clean. Not epic. There’s a lot of elements that have to come together, the right storm, the right tide, the right weather pattern. You might get it like that two, three years in a row, then not see it again for another decade.”

“But you’ve seen it? You’ve been there?”

Fahey nodded.

“Is your name here then, on a plaque?”

“No.”

“But you’ve surfed the straits?”

“I grew up surfing the straits.”

“And you did it well.”

Fahey gave this some thought. “In the world of surfing there is the concept of the waterman. I don’t know if these kids coming up now think much about it anymore, but there was a time . . .” He paused. “Let me put it like this. Surfing is just one thing. I mean it may be the jewel in the crown, but it’s still just one thing. Being a waterman was about more than one thing. It meant you not only surfed, you swam, dove, sailed, fished . . . It was about a life lived in harmony with the sea, with all of the elements, really . . .” He went to one plaque in particular, as if he’d been there many times before. The plaque bore a single name. “Hoddy Younger,” he said. “Now there was a waterman.”

“In his house of sticks and bones.”

“Driftwood and whalebones, with a roof of palm fronds. It was pretty cool, really. And he rode the Mystic Peak, as big as I’ve ever seen it.”

“You were there?”

“I was with him. I was sixteen and it was the first time I’d been that far out. I caught one wave. Smaller than Hoddy’s, but still . . . It was Outside the Bullring.”

“Then your name should be here too,” she said. “You should have your own plaque.”

But Fahey just shook his head. “I surfed well,” he said, and his voice had a kind of faraway quality about it, as if he was speaking as much to the ghosts of the men whose names lay at his feet as he was to her. “But I didn’t live well.”

He led her among the gaily colored stems and arches that seemed to her to have acquired a rather more somber cast in the course of their passing, then nodded in the direction of the pier. “Phone,” he said. He took a roll of quarters from his pocket and placed it in the palm of her hand.

She left messages at each of Carlotta’s three numbers then called the women of Casa de la Mujer, where she spoke to a woman named Rosetta, a former factory worker turned activist, learning to her great relief that Carlotta had gone to Mexico City for a conference, that she had left several days ago and would not be back for several more.

“But what happened to you?” Rosetta asked. “We heard about your car. We were all worried sick, Carlotta most of all . . .”

“Too much to tell,” Magdalena said, then told her some of it anyway—a truncated version of recent events.

“Holy Christ,” Rosetta said.

“What I really need are my files. My laptop and my files . . .”

“Why not come here?”

“I feel safe where I am. I need time to mend, and to get my bearings. I would like to know who was behind this before I come back.”

“You may never know.”

“I can try. I will also need another amparo. Mine was lost. Carlotta can help me with that when she comes back. In the meantime, if I had my files, I could work right here, uninterrupted.”

She heard the other woman sigh. “You may be right,” she said. “Not to come back so soon. Another factory girl has been killed.”

“When?”

“The night before last. The same as the others.”

Magdalena felt the news in the pit of her stomach.

There was a moment of silence on the line, the buzz of a faint static. “But then your files are so many,” Rosetta said. “How can you ever get all of them?”

Magdalena felt a momentary despair, the likes of which she had felt that night upon the bluffs at the candlelight vigil for the boy. What good were her files in the face of this new atrocity?

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Rosetta asked her. “Maybe it was wrong of me to tell you about the girl. Maybe now was not the time . . .”

“No, no, I’m okay. Really. I was just thinking about the files.” And indeed she was, thinking about all that was there, trying to decide if she should wait for Carlotta, yet hating to lose the time, then catching sight of Fahey through one of the Plexiglas windshields that flanked the pay phone, for in the heat of the moment she had all but forgotten about him. Yet there he was, standing some ways out on the pier, looking south, faded print shirt and corduroy pants whipped by the wind. Magdalena watched him for some time. “Maybe I could send someone,” she said.

A
RMANDO AVOIDED
the scene of the crime for several days, an act of will he took as evidence of a fundamentally prudent nature. When he finally did return by the light of day, the house seemed different though he could not have told you how or why. Perhaps, he concluded, it was he who had changed. As for the body of his fellow worker, there was only some slight rust-colored smear along the wall of a building at the mouth of the alley to mark his passing and even this appeared as next to nothing in the harsh midday light. It was not even recognizable as blood, and might just as well have been some bit of shoe polish or the paint of a passing car. Such fluids as Armando had last seen pooling in the alley had been hosed down, or washed by rains, the body long gone, a footnote in some street cop’s ledger, one more nameless
naco
lost to the night. Armando was a moment in contemplation of this faint talisman, then put the story from his
mind and from the world as well, for there was none but himself to tell it.

He came again that night and once more on the following morning but neither of these visits bore the desired results. His wife was gone, as was the Madonna who had taken her.

Throughout this period he had continued to occupy the house on Reina’s
terrino.
But suddenly one morning, a man appeared, claiming to be the new owner. The man came with a paper in his hand and he did not come alone. There were others there with him, half a dozen altogether. The men wore work boots and carried pick handles, as if in expectation of trouble. Armando had little choice but to leave. He went with nothing but his knife and the clothes on his back, shuffling down a steep hillside among dust and tumbling stone, the canyon bottom yawning before him—this dark pit of refuse and toxic waste and no place on earth to receive his shambling ruins but the reeking stone corridors of Colonia Subterráneo.

Which is what the Tunnel People called it—that great network of storm channels that lay across and at times beneath the sprawl of the Zona del Río, the new Tijuana. His first night down he was forced to fight for his life—his training above the As Negro making itself truly useful for the first time. His opponent was eager but unskilled, and after the fight, Armando became something of a leader in the tunnels, a man of respect. In time he was doing what the Tunnel People did to stay alive, a little theft, a little extortion. Sometimes they robbed the freights where an American railroad ran close to the fence near the border crossing, leaping to the top of passing flatcars, off-loading whatever they could get their hands on. But there was no real pleasure in it. In a world where babies were born without brains, it was just natural that a man should want to do a little harm. At night he watched the factory girls of El Centro and
the Zona Norte as they boarded the buses for work, hunkering upon some cornice along the path of the river circumscribed in concrete, eyes burning like coals in their sockets, his face warmed by the butane lighter held to the bowl of the glass pipe in his hand, for he’d found that with a little money in his pockets, he could indulge in finer highs than beer and glue. In time, however, the American trains began to carry armed guards and were not so easy to take down. Armando left the tunnels and moved into a deserted factory on the edge of the mesa overlooking the Colonia Vista Nueva.

He’d heard about the factory from a man who sometimes came to the channels to traffic in stolen goods, a cowboy with a red convertible who lived next door to the old smelting plant at the rear of an auto body shop and so knew of its availability. And indeed the site was to Armando’s liking, with its piles of rotted battery casings, its rusted pipes and cinder-block walls. He cleared a place in a corner of the building where the roof was mostly intact and the walls were thickest and he hung there a hammock and he built a fire ring out of stone and covered it with an iron grate by which to warm his food and boil his water.

Also to his liking were the warning signs posted about the factory’s perimeter. The signs made certain of his privacy and those not scared away by such postings were soon enough scared away by rumors of the strange, gaunt man who had taken up residence there, in the midst of such poisons that he was declaimed by some as their very agent and by others as the devil himself. Still others took him for a criminal come up from the channels, a murderer in hiding or perhaps some recreant apothecary.