Tijuana Straits (38 page)

The bullet entered Chico’s side near the bottom of his rib cage and came out through the front, where a broken piece of bone now pierced the skin for all to see and the cowboy stood looking down on it before letting go of the girl and staggering toward the water. He came with his face exposed to the moonlight and that simple organ twisted around such interpolations as were bound to go both unasked and unanswered, for the next shot issued from the barrel of Fahey’s riot gun, taking the cowboy atop the head, and he fell with the skullcap blown mostly away and the contents spilled upon the mud, and the dance ended.

“The cowboy had a dirty mind,” Armando said. He’d found it necessary to switch weapons one more time, apparently having discharged the handgun more times than he’d imagined, quite possibly in the slaughter surrounding the bog, where Nacho had fallen. In any event, the pistol now lay in the mud at his feet and it was the shotgun that he brought to bear upon Magdalena.

Still, with only such minor setbacks as those already enumerated, things appeared to be working out after all. He was a moment in contemplation, not only of his success but of his options as well. He could shoot her here. He could cross the river. She was his for the taking. In the desert, on the outskirts of Tijuana, the mineshaft waited.
“En la casa de mi Padre,”
Armando said,
“muchas moradas hay.”
And didn’t he know it. He had prepared the place. He would receive her home.

On the opposing bank, Magdalena heard these words, spoken it would seem to no one in particular, to the night itself. Their effect was as a cold wind in an empty room, a room in which she was finally alone. She staggered but retained her footing. She drew herself upright. She faced him across fifteen feet of soiled water, the shotgun pointed at her breast.
“En nombre de su esposa, Reina,”
she said. She might have said,
“En nombre de tu esposa . . .”
but this would have been a less formal way of invoking his wife’s name.
“En nombre de su hijo, Immanuel . . .”
She could only hope that she had remembered the name of his son, that she had gotten it right.
“En nombre de toda lo que ha perdido. Por Dios, ¡piense! ¡Piense lo que está haciendo!”
It was not the first time she had so implored the peasantry, admonishing them in the use of such minds as God had given them. Reason had been always been her ally, or so she had imagined. On the night in question she was not altogether certain that reason alone would suffice and so went looking amid the farthest reaches of memory, and in these were contained the rustling of ancient muslin, stiff with time like death itself and the scorched scent of old
metal, in cave-dark vestries the half-remembered verse . . . And always, the city hovering at the edge of this darkness, Mexicali, sun-blind pesthouse of afflicted humanity . . .
“Te pongo delante de la vida o de la muerte,”
she said finally,
“o bendición o maldición.”

The words came to her from somewhere among the pages of the Old Testament—such blood-soaked labyrinths now seeming to her quite appropriate, in both time and place. And hadn’t he invoked the Word of his own volition? She had quoted a fragment but in another moment she would remember the text in full: “I do take the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you today, that I have put life and death before you, the blessing and the malediction; and you must choose life in order that you may keep alive, both you and your offspring.” It had always seemed to her a simple-enough choice.

C
ERTAIN TOXINS,
once inhaled, absorbed, or otherwise ingested, are thought by some to be stored in the fatty tissues of the body, released back into the bloodstream during periods of intense activity. A wide variety of psychotic disorders might well ensue, including both visual and auditory hallucinations. Among such toxins one could list benzene, toluene, xylene, and Varsol—known to the workers of Accessories de Mexico as yellow glue. Amphetamines would of course have their place on this list as well, as would alcohol and cocaine, together with certain opioids, sedatives, and anxiolytics, none of which were missing from Armando’s considerable arsenal.

It is also thought, or so it has been stated, that every man carries with him some load in this world that is his and his alone to bear, much as Jesus was said to have born the iniquities of the race. In the case of Armando Santoya the iniquities were mainly his own,
though it must be said in his favor that the world had given him little by way of succor and that whatever load had been consigned to him by whatever demiurge as would claim it must by now have reached to the heavens. And who could reckon its number, or otherwise imagine such ghosts and visitations by which the peasant from Sinaloa was at that moment beset, on the bank of the river that carried within its stream the very toxins he carried within himself, as though each had been made brother to the other and so united in blood? Sweat stung his eyes. The old valley was alive with geometric shapes heretofore unimagined, with afterimages and colors inappropriate to the time or place, and in the midst of which stood his Madonna, at the edge of the river, fearless in her beauty, in the face of his gun, able it would seem to walk upon water. The thought of shooting her and having done with it was never far from his mind, and yet her words fell upon him as might the invocation of a curate to some obscure order of which he was himself the lone petitioner, for they were secret words and carried within them the echoes of other voices, of times and places and things that were and things that might have been and the story they told was none but his own. She told him she was sorry for his son, though not the one dead unborn, but for the other one, whose name she had called forth, that tragic firstling, the poisons that would carry him away present even at the moment of his conception, in the blood of the parents, and that blood tainted like the very water at Armando’s feet. And she spoke of the factories as well, and named them as a great monster come to suck the life’s blood from that country beyond the fence, both hers and his, telling him that his life had been a tragedy, his and Reina’s together, speaking names that he had not heard uttered by another in so long he had begun to consider them features of his own devising. Yet finally it was these very names that prompted him to speak back, to challenge her story—this delegate of the black arts. But she stood against that charge and
others like it, telling him that he had gotten it wrong, even to the point of imagining a second son, a pure conjecture on his part for such had never existed save in his own mind and it was he himself that his wife had fled and the life she feared for had been her own. And she told him of her own mother, dead young, and of the flood that carried her to this valley, unknown and unburied, one of the disappeared . . . And that, she said, had been her struggle, to vindicate the life of a woman she had scarcely known, known no more of than Armando had known of his son. Yet each, she said, had been taken by the same agents of avarice and greed and it was against these very agents that she had taken up arms and she invited him to join her in this struggle, as it was his struggle too and before it all others were made spurious and of no account.

In fact she had made such speeches before, many times over, or at least variations thereof, each in accord with its own audience, and at times to none but herself, for such were her convictions, yet never at the wrong end of a gun, and the words came now in such a breathless rush she could scarcely make sense of them herself.

For Armando, however, the pace was dead on, lifting him to such vertiginous heights by which the world could be viewed in ways heretofore intuited though never beheld, holding him as if by spell, and before them he stood mute as a stone, gaping in simple astonishment as even the ground at her feet began to stir and his first thought was that some final reckoning was at last upon them and earth itself called upon to bring forth its dead. In another moment, however, he saw that it was none but the worm farmer. Having regained some measure of consciousness, he was now struggling to regain his feet as well.

Magdalena put a hand on the man’s shoulder, speaking to him in English. In fact she was telling him to stay down but he would not
be dissuaded. He rose by strength of will or simple confusion to stand tottering upon the bank, where he seemed to be trying to pull Magdalena away from the water, possibly in the direction of the dunes as the cowboy from Tijuana had done before him, and for Armando, the spell was broken. He allowed the barrel of the gun to drift in Fahey’s direction.

Magdalena saw and moved to shield him from the gun but Fahey wouldn’t have it. He moved along with her so that the two now stood side by side, facing the gunman from across the water, and so was Armando brought finally to a moment of choice. For in Magdalena’s story he’d found himself contained, yet he was contained as well in such corridos as were sung in his honor upon the Mesa de Otay, and of these also he had been made witness, and in such shrines as he had dreamed in his heart. And yet he saw these stories as things at odds, as are warring arrangements of history. Yet who would deny that one must be claimed and one found wanting, or that any such judgment would have no bearing on what came next? For in one of these tales he walked upright as a man and in the other was only the wreckage of such, a thing meant for suffering, a vessel of pain. Yet he wondered if these stories were not of equal weight and veracity and if in the absence of one there might not also be some absence in the heart and so made a real effort to listen to that beleaguered organ, to hear what it might have to say, for he’d heard it said that knowing was not always in the head. But in truth he could hear little more than the sound of the surf. He found, however, that he could feel the beating of his heart. It seemed to reside in the very tip of his trigger finger as though it was the heart’s intention to signal that appendage directly, by way of code.

And so he stood, as the seconds slipped away, as the gun drifted from one to the other, the woman to the man and back again. If she spoke again he did not hear it. His mind was fixed upon the enigma so encrypted, waiting to see what that appendage might yet do,
even though it was attached to him and so in theory was not its own master, but was subject to the exercise of will on the part of whosoever would claim it. Whereupon the inevitable confluence of a rising tide and incoming swell at last lifted the river above its frail banks, even as the sand gave way beneath Armando’s feet and he tumbled headlong into the water and sank beneath the surface and was swept to sea, just as Fahey had planned it.

H
E WENT
with the shotgun still clutched in his hands and no cry came from his lips, as the sand crumbled now on the southern bank and Magdalena and Fahey danced backward in advance of its collapse to stand looking toward that place where Armando had vanished. They looked downriver toward the mouth to see if he would regain the surface but the water rolled on unbroken and no trace was seen of him again, not then, and not in the days to come. For the body was never washed back to shore as so often happens along that stretch of sand. The sea had taken him and he was never seen again, not on the beaches of the Tijuana River Valley and not upon those of the country from which he had begun.