Tijuana Straits (21 page)

Chico said she was drowned. There was no other way, he said. His voice sounded as though he were talking from the bottom of a drum, the Madonna having broken his nose. But then Chico had said the car would break much sooner as well. All Armando had needed was to get her away from the factories. But the car had gone on and on, to the highway above Las Playas, where they had nearly lost her to a head-on collision, Armando pounding the dashboard with his fist, Chico bug-eyed with fear, visions of future paydays destined to make him a wealthy man crushed upon the highway.

But she had survived the crash. Chico had reached her before Armando, an oversight for which Armando would be a long time in forgiving himself. And then came the second truck, and Chico losing her. Christ, he should have taken her arm himself. Eager to show his worth, the cowboy had shown his weakness instead. Imagine having to grab your nose just because it was broken. Imagine how far that would take you among the fighters above El As Negro!

The driver of the truck had proven to be obnoxious and Armando had been forced to shoot him, had shoved a belly gun into that soft spot below the buckle and blew chunks of the man’s
spine across two lanes of Mex One, after which they had given chase, right down to the line, then watched, helpless, as she ran into the sea, her head vanishing below the water not fifty feet from the great fence.

And yet Armando could not quite believe that she was dead. Her luck ran too good. With the coming of morning he moved into the rafters of the old bullring then hunkered there as if fixed in stone, shit on by pigeons, joints on fire, eyestrain running through his head as if electrodes were what held his eyes to the base of his skull, peering though stolen binoculars by the hour, sweeping the valley below.

Chico said he was crazy. He wanted the rest of his money.

Armando told him to go fuck himself.

Armando stayed in the rafters. He supposed that he had been lucky in his choice of viewing glasses. What he knew of binoculars could be written on a stamp yet these had come from the rear of a Mercedes limousine, black on black, as were the glasses themselves, with printing upon their parts that was in neither English nor Spanish. They were only slightly smaller than a toaster oven and through them he saw wondrous things. He saw the border patrol chase down
pollos
. He saw birds raiding nests, a weasel fighting with a snake, coyotes on the prowl. He saw a naked man, of no more substance than a scarecrow, engaged in a kind of dance at the top of one of the mesas.

Chico made repeated visits. He wanted his money.

“I don’t know that she’s dead,” Armando told him. “And anyway, even if she is dead, she didn’t die right.”

“If she’s dead, she’s dead.”

To which Armando said nothing.

Chico stood below him, sullen, shouting up into the rafters. It was the third or fourth time that he’d been there. He saw that Armando was eating a hamburger. He thought about the distance
to the nearest eatery. He tried to imagine Armando’s coming down and found that he could not. He tried to imagine Armando’s having a friend. This was equally difficult. There was no point in asking. He had discovered that Armando could say nothing for hours at a time.

Still, Chico redoubled his visits. The results were predictable. And then he screwed up. He was there when Nacho brought the food and this was how they met, not exactly the meeting Armando had fantasized, but Chico went mute as a stone nonetheless. And who could blame him, taken unawares by such an apparition—that great bald dome, save for a few stray tufts of hair, bobbing among such shafts of light as fell from between the bleacher seating of the old bullring. In fact his appearance was no doubt augmented in this setting, wherein the slatted light found not only his great, thatched head but the metal stars upon his shoulders and these affixed to the epaulets of a leather jacket which might have contained the hide from an entire cow and beneath this a myriad of chains and church keys and sharpened screwdrivers swinging in discordant harmony as might the accoutrements of an old-fashioned cooking wagon.

Armando made introductions from fifty feet above their heads. “Nacho takes care of things for me,” Armando said. “You’ll get your money when the woman is dead. You want it sooner, talk to Nacho.”

Chico declined. It was time for him to go. Armando thought that perhaps he had seen the last of him but Chico was back the next day, albeit more subdued. Armando owed him money. Armando had connections. The cowboy would wait it out. An uneasy alliance held sway in the shadows of that aging arena, as among desperadoes beneath the eaves. “For the love of Christ,” Chico asked one day. “Where did you get him?” His voice was cast upward, as if calling out to the Almighty himself, and Nacho nowhere in sight.

“Where do you think?” Armando asked, for in truth there could be but one such place.

“Colonia Subterráneo . . .”

And so it was. Whatever name his mother had given him was long forgotten by the time they met. Or perhaps there never had been a name. What he went by was Nacho, which meant little one, still a boy and already in excess of three hundred pounds. Armando had come upon him in a vacant lot by the rail line, where the youth had managed to ignite his face while filling his mouth with lighter fluid then spitting it at matches. The trick had gone awry and Armando found him rolling in the dirt, howling in pain and terror while a dozen other children of lesser size looked on with apparent nonchalance, as if this too was a part of the act and not to be interfered with.

Armando had used his own jacket to smother the flames and Nacho had taken to following him about like a lost dog. The flames had left him scarred. Whiffing fumes had left him simple, but he was built like a water heater, strong as an ox, loyal unto death. “You could learn some things from him,” Armando told Chico.

“What’s that?”

“To keep your mouth shut and do as you’re told.” He supposed that he was a leader in spite of himself. He had acquired a gang.

On the fourth night there were shooting stars, the naked man dancing, a red dawn. On the fifth day he saw her, near sunset, on the rim of a small mesa. A man stood at her side. The big binoculars even showed him the scratches on one side of her face. The man wore a Hawaiian print shirt, corduroy pants with white dust on the legs, huarache sandals like those you would buy from the street vendors in El Centro. His hair was to his shoulders. The glasses were so good Armando could see what was on the front of his baseball cap—a bright yellow worm with a cowboy hat and dark glasses. The worm was sitting in a lounge chair and smoking a pipe. He had no idea
how far away they really were but when he lowered the magic glasses he found that he could still see them—no bigger to the naked eye than the candied lovers atop a wedding cake. He studied them for some time. He had no use for the glasses now. There were other ways of getting a closer look. One need only go to America to make it happen.

D
EEP IN
the heart of Tijuana, Fahey thought of a county jail. He was feeling rattled and could not, at just that moment, have said which one, yet in all other matters he could remember it quite clearly. He remembered it at the edge of a great plain. He remembered its five hundred inmates in their seven tiers. He recalled what it was like, trying to sleep in such a place, trying to exercise, trying to eat, trying to do anything. The noise never stopped—radios blasting, men crying, men having sex, men having nightmares, men talking shit at the top of their lungs, night and day . . . One of Fahey’s strategies for survival in such places had been to control his immediate sphere, that is check out who was next to him, who to watch, who he might speak to, offer a sandwich to—jailhouse issue, of course, peanut butter on white, no frills. The trick was to orchestrate one’s surroundings to one’s advantage, to find an ally—a man to take your back, and you his. Could you find
two? Could you trade sets of push-ups? Could you do a hundred? Could you stay in shape? Talk about one’s own sphere . . . Talk about control . . . One passes quickly though denial in such a place. One comes quickly to the realization that one is a speck of shit in a vast system. The system proceeds in accordance with its own architecture and law. A sane man could be nothing but an interloper, a particle adrift in the blood works of an unimaginable host, waiting only to be found out, waiting to be crushed.

It was how he felt upon crossing the border, each time, without exception. Mexico was like bus therapy. Things went bad in Mexico. They got out of hand. They descended into weirdness. Take that dog pack, for instance, the one that had been trailing him for the better part of an hour, and he looked once more into his rearview mirror . . . seeking in some small way to take the measure of his immediate surroundings, to control his sphere, because, well . . . maybe it was them. Maybe it was the dog pack that would in some way cause him to tip his hand, to force an error. Maybe it was they who had his number.

Only here of course could such carven beasts even begin to exist, wall-eyed mongrels every one, of indiscernible color, shapes born of genetic experiments gone badly awry. One dog had the body of a wiener dog, the head of a German shepherd. Another had what appeared to be a chicken bone sticking out its ass. They ran with the endurance of coyotes. Two miles or more they had trailed him, up whatever nameless canyon into which he had driven, in the execution of Magdalena’s errand, lost of course, her map ground into the floorboards at his feet, the tracks of his rubber-soled sandals all but obliterating whatever lines, street names, and numbers she had composed there for his edification, the shortcut that had led him here.

He found it hard to say now just where it had all gone wrong, quite possibly in the great traffic circle known as the Five and Ten,
where every road in Tijuana intersected with every other road in Tijuana, looking desperately for one called Agua Caliente, and/or the restaurant Carnitas Urapana, whichever he could see first, as one was the gateway to the other. And in fact he believed that he might actually have glimpsed such an establishment, at about that point where the sixteen-wheel garbage truck nearly crushed him, forcing him into a turn before he was ready, across two lanes of traffic, horns blaring, voices hurling insults in a foreign tongue. There was nothing for it but to keep going, down one-way streets, past junkyards and liquor stores, hoodlums on corners, dogs at a gallop, past crumbling stucco houses, their colors like the electuaries born of bad acid trips, trying to get back to the Five and Ten, but spiraling ever deeper into a gradually deteriorating urban landscape, across dwindling amounts of asphalt until the road had turned to hard-packed dirt. And finally even the dirt was gone, giving way to red rock and sand as though what he’d entered upon was a dried-out riverbed, a repository of blown tire casings and cast-off appliances, the skeletal remains of those vehicles unfortunate enough to have found these barrens before him, and which in so doing had found their ends as a part of the bargain.

The sun caromed about this harsh landscape with an intensity that was nearly audible, like clashing cymbals—in defense of which, the tape deck dangling from beneath his dashboard oozed Chet Baker. Fahey chewed Valium—ten-milligram blues, two at a time, washed them down with the beer held between sweating thighs, and these taken from the six-pack at his side. He used a forearm to wipe still more sweat from his eyes and saw the narrow box canyon into which he had driven ending in spectacle a short distance ahead.