Free Tijuana Straits by Kem Nunn Page B

maelstrom above—another of Hoddy’s tricks. And afterward there was the swim, rolling sets . . . Christ, he must have made land halfway to Rosarito, then walked home, frozen to the bone . . . Tacos and cerveza from the Mexicans who knew . . . And finally, Hoddy himself, waiting at the border, to shake his hand, for after all, Sam the Gull Fahey had ridden the Mystic Peak. He’d gotten a single wave of his own before Hoddy’s monster had gotten him. And yet he had glimpsed something more. He had seen his mentor, dwarfed by the mountain he had ridden, the wave face turned to silver in a misty light—a vision by which to steer—and it had seemed to him on that morning, shivering on the beaches of his own home break, there was no end to what he might accomplish.

    In the course of the next few winters, he and Hoddy had surfed Outside the Bullring twice more, neither so glorious as the first, yet with none but themselves for company . . . and such were the gleamingpaths he trod now in waking dreams, shoveling his earth and worms—one thousand to the pound, sweating out the beer in the noonday sun, hosing down the boxes to keep them wet. On a good day he could find a groove, a crease in time that was neither quite here nor quite there. On a good day he could still imagine himself on a wave like Hoddy’s. He could still mind surf Outside the Bullring, body English turning his shovel, hips swiveling in the direction of the turn. On bad days, his rhythm was off and the groove eluded him. Money worries and the advance of years dogged his heels . . . Images of Hoddy in pee-stained khakis, when the city was done with him and the house gone, his beloved beaches lost to pollution, wandering the valley. Or how about the time the staph infection almost took his leg, pumped it up like some African boy with elephantiasis, putting him flat on his back for the better part of a summer—all heat and fever and memories like the living dead? And when he got down to shit like that and the Island Express it was time to add the pills because the beer wasn’t cutting it.
    But he was hoping it wouldn’t come to that, at least not today, what with the first female companionship he’d experienced in more years than he cared to remember watching from the porch as he stacked up the last of the boxes then hosed them down and himself too, then hosed down the windrows as well, water pulling rainbows from a blaze of sky, and the feeling came to him that on this particular day, it would all be okay. And when he’d gotten a towel out of the truck and wiped his face with it he went up onto the porch at the side of the trailer and found that she was fast asleep.
    The ruled paper with its drawing of the harvester had fallen to the floor by her side and Fahey picked it up. He saw that she had turned a page and done some writing of her own. The writing was in Spanish and might just as well have been Sanskrit for all Fahey could make of it. On another page, however, he saw what appeared to be a list of names together with accompanying dates. And finally,in the center of a third page, a drawing. It was a rather crude drawing of what Fahey took to be a disembodied eyeball. It struck him as the sort of thing with which schoolboys might decorate their sweatshirts and he looked once more at the sleeping woman, her mouth open just enough to show the tips of her teeth, her eyes clamped shut, their lashes like crescent moons. He supposed his enactment of the roundup had not proven as therapeutic as he had hoped and he considered once more the childish drawing in his hands. In fact, he did not seem quite able to put it down. This bothered him. You would, he thought, really have to be losing it, to find it spooky.

6

    M UNICIPAL POLICE had investigated the fire in Carlotta’s offices, with predictable results. Nada. Still, the lead officer turned out to be a young man Magdalena had gone to high school with in Mexicali. Like Magdalena he had been born