Tijuana Straits by Kem Nunn

was the last time they would see each other. They stood in silence on a wooden deck, listening to the thunder of huge waves. The old man had brought a gift. It was the ten-foot rhino chaser Hoddy had shaped himself then ridden, Outside the Bullring, on the day of the epic wave. He left it on Fahey’s porch and never said a word. The Gull lay awake for the rest of the night, listening to the waves. By dawn he was expected on the beach at Rosarito, the math teacher having arranged to move a loadof hash in a two-man submarine hijacked from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography by some physics professor with aspirations to the high life. It was a troubling scenario, Island Express outings becoming more outlandish by the day. Fahey should have known. He should have listened to Hoddy. He should have followed his heart. Dawn found him on the beach at Rosarito. The submarine foundered in ten feet of water. The math teacher ratted out everyone with whom he’d ever done business. It was a federal bust, on the word of a snitch. Fahey lost everything he owned, did four calendars at Safford, Arizona, and got out with nothing. Too old now for the contests he’d once eschewed, still cocky after four years in minimum security, he waited out a year of parole then tried to get back into the game. But with the passing of the Island Express things had changed and before it was over he’d sunk to cooking meth on the Mesa de Otay, where he finally learned everything there was to know about the sins of the father, learned about the men robbed and murdered, the women sold into slavery. Because this was where it had all gone down, for the family he had befriended, for the countless others who had followed. And they said you couldn’t go home again. An old Mex meth chef even showed him the bones in the ground and he saw for the first time the enormity of what he had begun. He saw iniquities without end, as a procession of days, and to these he had added other and greater iniquities in which his father had played no part and of which he would not speak, neither then nor now, yet he knew himself for what he was, his father’s son, and he vowed to finish what he had started the night he’d gone to beat the truth out of the old man, if only to rid the planet of them both, for in this crime he had no concern with perfection. He sold a few rocks to a guy he’d done time with before it could happen. It was strictly from charity and the goodness of his heart. Unhappily, the man’s parole officer caught him with the needle still in his arm. He had to give up somebody.They nailed Fahey within twenty-four hours, smoking his own shit. The news was not all bad. So fucked up had he become and so far had he strayed from the old Mexican’s recipe, the stuff he had cooking in the sink could not rightly be identified as meth, or anything else for that matter. He told them he was making a sealer for the roof of his trailer. This time around it was a state bust, and in the end all they had him on was possession. The bad news was that the DA took a personal interest in the case. The man was so pissed about not getting more mileage out of a second offense that he kept Fahey in a county lockup for six months awaiting transfer and another six in what they euphemistically called bus therapy—that is, in constant motion, from one facility to another, all the way to Leavenworth and back again. He finished at Lompoc. In the end, he had done twenty-seven and change—a little over two years.

    He still might have killed the old man, in spite of everything. It was a possibility. But pills and booze had pretty much done the trick by the time they let him out—diapers and a straw in the old folks’ home in Escondido. Within the week Lucian Fahey had drowned in his Gerber’s when a Filipino orderly high on smack ran the feeding tube into his remaining lung instead of his stomach. Samuel Fahey got the farm. He could not say he hadn’t anticipated the inheritance. He