Tijuana Straits (36 page)

They made no effort to track here. The way to the beach was clear enough. Moonlight made their lanterns superfluous and these they abandoned in favor of speed, following upon the main body of the
river, pressing hard for the dunes and the sand beyond. They had by now learned the knack of where to step in order to avoid the deepest mud and the cordgrass swayed and bent with their passing. Armando broke into a run and Chico behind him, cursing as he ran, and it was in this fashion that they came upon the last of the three dirt bikes they had seen among the trees but forgotten about upon the discovery of Nacho and his ultimate demise. And yet here it was before them, sunk amid a swath of darkening grass like some failed aerodyne fallen from the sky and near to it a rider.

The man was sitting bolt upright in the grass, one leg bent beneath him at an unreasonable angle, a puckered hole below his collarbone leaking blood. But he was still alive and there was a weapon in his hands and before Chico and Armando could do more than register his presence he had fired, and upon the report Chico staggered backward, clawing at his face, his hands going blue with some substance Armando at that time and place was willing to take for Chico’s blood, perhaps more toxic than even his own. Chico ran blinded from the scene of his own shooting. He went for some short distance calling out for mercy and forbearance then tumbled headfirst into the main branch of the river, taken whole beneath its vitiated waters.

Armando had not yet gotten off a shot when a burning point of flame erupted somewhere in the vicinity of his own sternum, giving him to understand he too had been hit, and he shot back in return. The phantom rider toppled into the grass and Armando stood looking down at himself in amazement. His chest was as blue as Chico’s face. He went forward to examine the weapon that had produced this wonder. It was, he concluded, not really a gun at all but a device for shooting paint balls and was indeed little more than some elaborate toy. Nor was the murdered rider old enough to be properly called a man. His face was marked beneath the eyes with greasepaint after the fashion of television commandos and sitting
slantwise upon his head, a black plastic helmet as might be found amid the
Star Wars
paraphernalia in a toy store catering to the rich. In fact the helmet had come in a box, with a sticker attached that Armando would never see, reading Made in Mexico. And indeed the same could be said for much of the rest of his outfit and that included a plastic scabbard, a fancy belt, and a Day-Glo watch. It was the stuff of the maquiladoras, as might be said for Armando himself.

He removed the helmet from the boy’s head, which was very nearly severed from the rest of him, as the blast had not taken him dead center but had hit off to one side of the throat yet killed him dead enough all the same. Armando guessed he was no older than seventeen. In fact he was an officer-in-training from a local high school, dead in an incident that would lead to a banning of the ROTC program at that institution, though like the sticker that had accompanied the helmet, this too would go unknown and for Armando the boy and his costume were bound to remain as he’d first perceived them, one more enigma brought forth from the American night.

The helmet was covered on one side with blood and little pieces of flesh and bone and Armando knelt at the bank of the river to wash these away then placed the helmet still dripping upon his own head. He took the boy’s plastic scabbard and the belt to which it was attached. He placed the farmer’s shotgun into the sheath then looped the belt across his chest with the gun and scabbard at his back. The pistol he’d brought from across the border was still thrust into the waistband at the front of his jeans, and so bedecked he set out once more, at a steady lope, much as he’d once run the streets of the old red-light district, in his days of training as a fighter above El As Negro, the river at his side.

T
O
F
AHEY
’
S
eye the dunes had never risen at such a distance from the last of the willows, nor had the salt marsh lain so flat and brightly lit beneath what at best was only half a moon. A hundred yards into the estuary they again heard the report of guns. Surrounded by vegetation no higher than their calves they feared for themselves as easy targets and so came to the sand on hands and knees, as still more shots rang from the darkness at their backs.

They heard the distant wail of a siren, the beating of a helicopter, and took some hope in these things, but the sounds came no closer to where they lay, at last dissipating altogether, and when the sounds were gone they got to their feet and passed through the last of the dunes, which seemed now as battlements before the onslaught of the sea. The beaches they found littered with patches of foam and uprooted kelp and these arranged in positions that might have passed for bodies of the slain. A heavy shore break pounded the
sand and across the black faces of waves there were flashes of light, blues and greens, fun-house colors of a delicate luminescence culled from the mysterious deep.

Lines of white water were visible a hundred yards out and these gave evidence of both the swell’s direction and of such waves as were marshaled in its coming. And those waves broke unseen, thundering like heavy artillery, and Fahey was eager to put the river between themselves and any who might be following. For even though the beach seemed shaken to its core, the tide was as he’d called it, still low enough to permit a crossing, and he took her by the hand and told her what it was they were going to do.

He’d brought her back to the beaches that had nearly claimed her and he could read the fear in her eyes. He took her hand in his, felt her fingers tightening around his own. “You have to trust me on this one,” he told her. “I’ve done this before. I know how it works.”

Magdalena could do little more than nod, but she guessed that at this very moment, if she was going to trust anyone, she would trust Sam the Gull and she got to her feet, for she had been kneeling on the flank of a dune, and Fahey rose with her and led her down.

For the most part, the beaches at the edge of the valley were steeply banked, plunging almost at once into a deep trough and a powerful current, the direction of the current depending upon that of the swell. Fahey laid it out for her as they went. He said that beyond the trough there was a series of long, inside sandbars running the length of the beach but that at the mouth the bars were more plentiful, extending well into the break, and that even the trough grew shallow here, filled in with sand so that they might wade across it. Once through, they would pass on the bars, north to south, till they had rounded the mouth, where they would make for the beach once more. He said these things as they walked, until the white water was snapping at their feet, then Fahey stopped to
remove his shoes and Magdalena the socks she’d worn. She held them in one hand and Fahey in the other. The water rose to her waist. The current tugged at her legs. Memories of Las Playas came like the cold, running to her core. But Fahey was already on a bar. He gave her a pull and she stood beside him, suddenly in water no higher than her ankles.

They went out another twenty yards before turning south. They held to the bars, some more shallow than others, but never again in water beyond Magdalena’s knees. It was a simple-enough trick. All you had to do was know it, yet many had been drowned here who had not.

“You see how it is,” Fahey told her. He was fairly shouting to be heard above the roar of the sea. “If you fall, if you lose my hand, if you hit a deep spot, swim south. The waves will carry you in. Just don’t fight them.” But she had no intention of losing his hand. He led her in a wide arc, always south, through lines of white water made impotent by the shallow bottom, returning at last to the beach on the southern bank and the mud not even washed completely from their bodies.

“My God,” Magdalena said. She couldn’t stop smiling.

“What did I tell you?” Fahey asked.

Magdalena laughed out loud. She fell to the sand but Fahey urged her on. They covered ground not that far from where they had seen each other for the first time, with little thought to nesting plovers.

The dunes fell away near the mouth of the river then picked up again a short distance away and Fahey seemed eager to reach them. As they walked he looked steadily over his shoulder, following the silver bead of the river as it wound back among the salt pans and marsh and finally into the small grove of trees, where he had followed her on the first day, where he had killed the dogs, but the elevation was poor here and there was little to see save darkness.

When they had come to the first of the southern dunes they went up for a look. The view was better but neither could detect any movement between themselves and the trees.

“We’ve made it, then,” Magdalena said. They went up a few more steps. A red smudge appeared in the east, the tops of a few trees silhouetted before it.

For a moment neither spoke. “Your farm,” Magdalena said, finally. Her voice was soft. She put a hand on his arm.

“It might be no more than the trailer. You’d think if the house had gone . . . there would be more . . .” He paused, as if something else had just now occurred to him. “Your files were in the trailer,” he said.

“You did what you had to.”

“Maybe they were worth more than you thought. Maybe they would have told you who’s out there.” He nodded toward the valley.

Magdalena thought of the cowboy from the
charreada,
vaguely familiar. Did it matter if his name had been among the workers of Reciclaje Integral? There was no denying it. But the files were gone. “What now?” she asked.

Fahey was some time in answering, for in crossing the river it had occurred to him how simple it would be to just keep walking. Twenty minutes would take them to the border. The woman Magdalena worked for had come home. The amparo could be replaced, the battle rejoined on the other side. He said as much to Magdalena. He watched as she touched the back of her hand to her forehead. “That’s it, then,” she said.

Fahey declined a response.

Magdalena waited.

“Or,” he said. “We could also wait right here, see who shows up.”

“They have guns.”

“We would have to be careful. The trick would be to lure them in.” He pointed to a sandy bank not fifty yards away, where the river
narrowed, transcribing an elongated curve, the water like smoked glass. “It looks like a good place to cross, but it’s the worst place in the entire valley. The water’s fifteen feet deep, sucking out like a bastard. As the tide rises the banks will crumble. It’s a hell of a trap, you work it right.”

Magdalena was about to answer when she caught sight of something moving on the valley floor—a lone figure loping from among the trees. She was aware of Fahey at her side. She felt him start. “There’s only one,” she said.

“Maybe.” There was a long beat of silence between them. “You should stay here,” Fahey told her.

Magdalena just looked at him. “But we’re safe. He’ll never cross.” It was half statement, half question.

“He might try.”

“But it can’t be done.”

“Not unless he knows how to use the bars.”

Magdalena looked at the man, moving now among the long, dark lines of cordgrass and pickleweed. No good could come of it, she decided. The man was armed. He would stop at nothing. Time had shown it. Yet Fahey had already moved a few feet down on the side of the dune. “You said we could walk,” Magdalena told him.

Fahey stopped and looked back. “You still can,” he said. “If anything goes wrong. Do it.”

The words did little more than stir presentiments. A moment passed. “We were home free,” she told him.

Fahey stood just below her, the angle of the dune making them nearly equal in height. “They killed my dogs,” he said.

He left the dunes, jogging barefoot toward the sandy beach he’d shown to Magdalena. Along its southern border was a series of salt pans, some edged by clumps of bulrushes and cattails. The pans
themselves appeared as shallow craters sunk into the valley floor as though meteors had fallen here in a remote age, and he meant to use these as cover.