Tijuana Straits by Kem Nunn

where his family had left him some land and where he could ride his horse to work each day in the valley below. Deek lived in Garage Door Tijuana with the Oaxacan Indians in a thirty-foot travel trailer. He’d come to the valley so far down on his luck that the first job he’d taken was driving for Blue Line Cabs, a taxi company notorious for running illegals across the border in the seventies and eighties. In short, the cowboys, like Fahey himself, were representative of what the valley attracted, and one could not quite imagine things working out for them anywhere else.
    Jack Nance, who now was forty-two years old and still rode theoccasional wave, when he could find one small enough, on a long board off the beaches just north of San Diego, remembered Fahey from his days of drug running for the Island Express. And once at daybreak, on a huge winter swell now some twenty years past, he’d parked atop Spooner’s Mesa with a handful of friends and a bag of dope to watch the waves beyond the mouth of the Tijuana River—like rolling mountains of water, their peaks lost to the fog, somewhere out past Third Notch, and had seen both Hoddy Younger and his protégé, Sam the Gull Fahey, ride what just might have been the Mystic Peak.
    Deek Waltzer, thirty years older than Jack Nance, and not a surfer, knew Fahey only as a recluse and convicted felon, the proprietor of the Fahey Worm Farm, an establishment of such dubious reputation it was known even among the migrants he’d driven from the border, back in the day, and he missed no opportunity to disparage the man’s character.
    “That was the old man,” Nance would tell him. “Back in the day. Fahey’s different.”
    To which Deek would only shake his head, stating with dead certainty that to this day the name of Fahey was still maligned among the Indians and the farm measured as a place to avoid, if only to escape its restless spirits.
    But Jack was willing to dismiss such judgments with a wave of the hand. “Sam Fahey was a surfer, still is, if you ask me. There’s nothing out there to be afraid of now.”
    “Probably still a drug runner too, if he’s anything at all,” Deek might respond, at times going so far as to challenge Jack’s story at its very core. “Maybe it wasn’t even him you saw out there that day,” he’d say. “You ever think of that? Maybe that was someone else and Fahey just took credit for it because he’s a liar and a thief like his old man. And you were looking at those waves from a long way off. You’ve said so yourself.”
    But Jack would only offer up a sad smile and say that he knew quite well what he had seen. “It was him, you stubborn son of a bitch. It was the Gull and Younger. They rode the Mystic Peak and as far as I know no one’s done it since.”
    “Yeah, well, they’re not likely to either, now that the water’s all fucked up.”
    “They’re not likely to ’cause the guys that ride waves like that are all over in the Islands, or off in Tahiti, or up in Northern California, pulling each other into them on a bunch of fucking Jet Skis. It’s not like it was.”
    To which Deek was apt to reply that nothing was like it was and this would give both men pause, after which Deek would go on, “And I guess you’re going to tell me he’s not like he was either.”
    “No,” Jack would say, “he’s not.”
    “And what do you suppose happened?”
    It was the question many such conversations came to in the end and Jack had yet to answer it. “There’s some guys,” he would say, “they get all the gifts, and they piss it all away.”
    And that was about the best Jack could do and the older man knew it. “Yeah,” he said. “And some are just born bad.” It was generally his final word on the subject.
    “Some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to endless night.” And those were often Jack’s last words, the only lines of poetry he’d ever committed to memory, and these not taken from any book but from a