Shelby said, “I already told the other guys, a taxi driver offered to take me to a whorehouse up in the hills somewheres. And when I got there three Mexicans tried to mug me. See these cuts on my hands and legs? I was lucky to get away. I was lucky you guys found me.”
“And how’d you know where to get through the fence?”
“I jist followed the shadow.”
“What shadow?”
“Jist a little shadow that went through the tunnel.”
“What tunnel?”
“It turned out to be a hole in the fence. A little boy jist went through it.”
“And what happened to the little boy?”
“He got lost, I think.”
“Did you ever see him again?”
“I never did. I hope he found his way home, is all.”
“We think you were carrying a load of drugs and got ripped off passing through Deadman’s Canyon. That’s what we think.”
“Is that what you call that place?”
“It’s what the Mexicans call it. The Canyon of the Dead.”
“Then maybe it was a ghost that took me in the tunnel,” Shelby said, and his eyes popped wide. “I think maybe it was.”
“What tunnel? You mean the hole in the fence?”
“Yeah. I thought I was going into hell when I went in that tunnel.”
“Then why did you go?”
Shelby Pate said, “I thought I belonged in hell.”
The Border Patrol agent left him alone then, and later said to his supervisor, “The guy’s whacked out on drugs, but I don’t think we really have anything. He probably got burned trying to make a drug buy, and did have to run for his life. What’ll we do with him?”
“He’s sober enough now,” the supervisor said. “May as well cut him loose. He’s obviously a nut-case as well.”
Shelby Pate called a cab to pick him up at the Border Patrol station. When he was delivered by taxi to Hogs Wild, he was mildly surprised that nobody had stolen the helmet off his bike, a common occurrence at that time of night.
There were still a few bikers in the bar, and two mommas having last call. He recognized one of the bikers, a little guy with a scraggly fringe of red hair down to his shoulders. The biker was trying to persuade one of the mommas to ride home with him.
Shelby interrupted them by tossing a gold Rolex onto the bar. “Gimme an eightball and five hunnerd bucks and it’s yours,” he said.
The biker picked up the Rolex and took it over to the broken sconce next to a jukebox rocking with the thud of heavy metal. The biker examined the gold bracelet more carefully than he did the watch itself, then said, “It’s genuine.”
“Good call,” Shelby said. “Deal?”
The guy handed back the Rolex and said, “I can give you a teener and two-fifty. That’s all I got.”
“Deal,” Shelby said. “Gimme.”
Ten minutes later, Shelby’s bike was roaring toward the pier at Imperial Beach. And twenty minutes after that Shelby was lying on the sand, sweating and shivering. The methamphet-amine made the crashing surf sound like the roar of howitzers. Shelby burrowed into the sand to escape the explosions and to find some warmth. He spilled as much of the meth as he snorted. He lay on his belly and rooted, licking the meth and tasting sand in his mouth.
He was like a giant crab burrowing on his belly on a mist-free night, when a dagger of moonlight inflicted agony on his sensitive eyes.
The Coronado pub was full of Navy SEAL team members who were trying to drink the joint dry before closing time, those who weren’t busy trying to pick up one of several young women who were there to be picked up by the strapping young sailors.
Fin and Nell took a table in the corner after ordering a cognac.
He said, “Here I am, dying of a mid-life crisis, and I have to pick a joint where everyone thinks aging is like AIDS: It can only happen to people who aren’t careful.”
“Wonder if Bobbie comes here,” Nell said. Then, “She’s a pretty good kid, I guess.”
“You sure didn’t seem to like her much.”
“I don’t know who or what I like lately,” Nell said. “This is a cruddy age, isn’t it?”
“I gotta admit, I’ve had a good week though. Getting to know both of you.”
“Both of us?”
“I know you a lot better than I know Bobbie.”
“It didn’t look that way.”
“Was I giving her coy glances?”
“You looked more coy than Princess Di. Middle-aged men who want a woman their own age are so rare they could get on the next Geraldo.”
“Having a young girl pay attention to me made me a little goofy.”
“It’s a cruddy age,” Nell said, patting his hand.
“You just touched me!” he said.
“Does this mean I get to wear your class ring?”
“Wanna go to the beach tomorrow?”
“Why the beach?”
“I wanna see you in a bikini. Got one?”
“A woman my age wears a one-piece,” she said.
“Okay with me. Wanna go?”
“Whadda you look like in a swimsuit?”
“It ain’t pretty,” he said, “but I can build a mean sand castle. I got lots of experience building castles, most of them in the air.”
“Okay,” she said, “let’s go to the beach tomorrow.”
* * *
They were drifting and floating away from him, all the dark shadows holding flickering candles. They were leaving him and he was trying to scream: “NO! NO! I’M ALIVE!”
He couldn’t get the words out because the dry acrid dust of Mexico was in his mouth and in his nostrils. He was slowly suffocating in a grave under a tall tombstone with a portrait of a boy on it. The boy was Shelby Pate, ten years of age. It was his tombstone!
Then a shadow figure approached. It was a woman in a shawl. She might’ve been the mother of the boy with ringworm. She looked down at his grave, and he tried to scream: “DIG ME UP! I’M ALIVE.”
All she did was shriek at him. His ears were full of the dry dust of Mexico, and she shrieked inside his skull. The unearthly shrieking!
Gulls shrieked and screamed and wheeled above him. He opened his eyes and stared at a sky inflamed, at a dawn red as blood. The sound of surf thundered in his ears and he gagged on the sand in his throat. He whimpered and sniffled, and clawed his way out of a dune of drifting sand.
When he sat up his hair and face were white with sand. He didn’t know where he was. A gull hovered in the sky above him, like the Holy Ghost. Shelby covered his eyes and sobbed, swallowing back his terror. It wasn’t until he spotted the remains of his bag of meth lying beside him that the phantasmagoria retreated and he knew he was still alive.
By the time Shelby Pate had snorted enough cringe to get control, and by the time he’d located his bike parked in a vacant lot close to a coffee shop, it was nine o’clock Sunday morning.
He was a fearful sight, with his loose stringy hair full of sand, with dried blood on his hands and on his face, from thrashing through the fence at the international border. He shuffled toward the coffee shop, and a street person loitering outside took one look at him and went scuttling away. After three cups of coffee, Shelby thought he was ready to go home.
Bobbie went for a jog along Coronado Beach in her shorts and T-shirt on Sunday morning. There were lots of hardbodies out, both male and female. It was a dry morning in that a Santa Ana was blowing in from the desert.
Coronado was Bobbie’s favorite beach. She started her run along the sand beside the Coronado Shores high-rise condominiums, a.k.a. Taco Towers because so many wealthy Mexicans from Tijuana owned condos there. She ran north past the Hotel del Coronado, zigzagging through sand dunes tufted with ice plant. She ran north all the way to the Naval Air Station golf course, beside which dogs were permitted to run free on the beach and play in the surf with their owners.