Lines and Shadows

by Joseph Wambaugh

  Until of late he had been the object of just about any speaking request made of the police department. He was good. But now there was somebody better. Chief Kolender and all the department brass had to pay attention because Manny Lopez could wow them. A natural storyteller, Manny was in his element up there, say before a Kiwanis luncheon, pointing his finger like a gun, eyebrow crawling and squiggling like crazy whenever any female caught his evil little eye. His hands flying all over the place as he dramatized how they handled this band of cutthroats in Deadman’s Canyon or that band of killers in Smuggler’s Gulch. And if they had another Chivas Regal handy, yes, he’d have one.

  Manny knew how to live: a Chivas in one hand, a Santa Fe Corona Grande in his mouth, dressed for these occasions like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. This police sergeant, not yet thirty years old, was a smash on the local lecture circuit. And for at least fifteen minutes after he got to the station in the afternoons he would, while sobering up, regale his scruffy, ragtag, flea-bitten, cactus-stuck squad about the scotch they practically poured down his golden throat at the luncheon. And of how the ladies loved his performance. And the Barfers would maybe get a little envious, but they admired him. Some of the younger ones like Joe Castillo and Carlos Chacon admitted that they worshiped him.

  The chief of police and other department brass had to notice that this Mexican-American sergeant wasn’t hurting the department image, not a bit. Maybe this experiment might turn into something halfway decent after all.

  Right around Christmas 1976, they met the border version of the Artful Dodger. One night the varsity—Manny Lopez, Tony Puente and Eddie Cervantes—were not in the canyons but walking in San Ysidro when an eight-year-old yellow Ford pulled up beside them. The car stopped and the occupants looked at the pollos, drove off, circled, parked on a side street and waited.

  The Mexican woman behind the wheel studied Manny Lopez, who wore against the cold his alien field jacket, a woolen cap pulled down over his balding head, two pairs of shiny dress pants, and plastic platforms which were breaking his freaking ankles.

  She said, in Spanish, “Do you know where Enero Street is?”

  “Oh, no,” Manny Lopez told her. “We’re not from here.”

  She smiled and said, “Where do you come from?”

  Pointing south, he said, “We’ve just come north.”

  “Do you have a ride?” she asked.

  “No, no ride,” Manny Lopez answered.

  “My mother will take you to Los Angeles,” the driver’s companion offered.

  “Get in,” the driver said quickly. “La migra and city police are all around.”

  The three cops jumped shivering into the Ford and she drove the residential streets of San Ysidro for several minutes, explaining to them that she was looking for two women and one man from El Salvador whom she had transported from Tijuana to the vicinity of the borderline at the Tijuana airport, where a guide was to bring them through the canyons. The woman had a forged passport which allowed her to cross legally.

  They were not able to connect with the Salvadorans. They drove instead to a home in San Ysidro where she had to make certain arrangements preparatory to taking them on to Los Angeles. She went into a modest house, leaving her daughter Olivia in the car with the three passengers. Olivia was articulate and spunky. When Manny Lopez asked her if she wasn’t afraid to be left alone with three strangers, she smiled prettily. Obviously she was not.

  She told them her life story. They had been smuggling aliens for about five years. She often rode with her mother around Tijuana during alien pickups. Olivia was a third-generation smuggler whose father and grandmother were still at it. Her father was living in Texas on parole for smuggling. Her grandmother was on probation, having been caught with a load of two dozen aliens. And alas, even her mother, now in the house exchanging money with other smugglers, had been the driver in that particular operation and was also caught.

  “Mamá must be very careful,” she informed them. “The hardest part of the journey to Los Angeles is the San Clemente checkpoint.”

  Manny Lopez, Tony Puente and Eddie Cervantes nodded soberly at this revelation and even more so at the next when she revealed more smuggler lore: “La migra and the San Diego police are on constant watch and they beat up prisoners!”

  She also informed the cops that the resident of the safe house had gotten rich by smuggling and had bought a restaurant, but had squandered his fortune in that business. Lousy restaurateur, good smuggler.

  When the girl’s mother returned, the deal was struck. She normally charged $250 a head for O.T.M.’s and $200 for Mexicans. In the spirit of the holidays she offered the boys a ride to Los Angeles for $150 apiece, and she was suddenly very surprised to see the shield of a San Diego police sergeant in the hand of Manny Lopez. Olivia followed in the footsteps of two generations by getting busted.

  Normally, wildcatting arrests were okay for the stats but not worth an officer’s report. This one was, because of Olivia and her life story. It was two days until Christmas and the cops were feeling sentimental. And perhaps they were a bit smitten by her looks. She did, after all, have a beautiful smile and eyes like a jackrabbit. And she was just slightly larger than one, this very artful dodger. The littlest smuggler was ten years old.

  This particular arrest was at least mildly depressing to one of the Barf squad who put it this way: “I was bummed. I watched Oliver that year on TV and all of a sudden it sucked. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me till I started thinking about that little smuggler Manny and the guys brought in. I switched off Oliver to Donnie and Marie or something, that’s how bummed I was. I kept asking myself what kind a job is this? What’s it mean out there on that border? What is this alien business all about? Does it mean something? Is it some kind a weird comedy? Why wasn’t I laughing?”

  There were only six unsensational newspaper stories about BARF during the month of December. They were only two weeks from their ninety-day moratorium. They faced imminent disbanding and at least one of them had said he was more than ready to move back to real police work. The border patrolmen and U.S. Customs officers were gone in any case. Dick Snider needed a sensational bandit arrest. Or a public relations miracle. Something to bolster flagging media interest. He still believed totally in his experiment. He knew that given time he could curtail the bandits and save many people much anguish and death.

  And he got what he was looking for: a goddamn exploitable Christmas miracle, they called it. At least one person would for the rest of her natural life believe that it was a real one.

  It was twenty minutes till midnight on the night of December 27th. Manny Lopez and fellow varsity members Tony Puente and Eddie Cervantes were freezing and flapping their arms and blowing steam as they walked on the American side of the Tijuana highway, which was separated from the United States of America at this point by the sorriest, hole-riddled, Erskine Caldwell wire fence they had ever seen. In fact, the fence was an insult. They figured that for a country that could put men on the moon, no fence would be infinitely more dignified than this one, for chrissake.

  It was cold; it was damp; it was boring. Only one thing made any sense at all. Pick up some brews and scotch and pack it in early. In fact, maybe pack it all in. Dick Snider was about the only police lieutenant any of them had ever really felt affection for, but let’s face it, what were they doing that they could point to and say, “Look what we accomplished”? They might as well be writing parking tickets.

  It may have been a downbeat Christmas season for the Barfers but nothing like what it was for Rosa Lugo, who stood trembling on Monument Road holding the hand of her thirteen-year-old daughter, Esther, looking wistfully toward the land of silk and money. It was no doubt very difficult for Rosa Lugo to keep her teeth from chattering, because not only was it cold but also she was wrenched and frozen by fear. She had chosen this night to offer her daughter Esther a chance in life. They were going to cross, and maybe Christmas of next year would be a di
fferent story.

  One thing sure, it took more than a little nerve just to be there in the darkness on the highway, owning nothing but the skirt on her body and a nondescript faded poncho, shivering in the sudden gusts which perhaps blew hard enough to make her hip-length braid shoot out like an arrow, an arrow pointing north like an omen.

  The logical place to cross was through a big drainage pipe five hundred yards east of the intersection of Monument Road and Dairy Mart Road on the U.S. side. The tunnel was a popular place for pollos to duck across the line, which was slightly more than imaginary at this place because of that dilapidated wire fence. The tunnel was a place where human beings squatted, hunkered, crawled, waited, urinated and defecated from fear and tension and sickness.

  And where bandits lurked.

  There were twenty men waiting in that drainage tunnel for a guide who never came. It was not just a cold night; it was a clear night, not velvet-black but hard-black. Sea wind blew away the Tijuana smoke and San Diego overcast, and the night sky shone down on crossing aliens, making life a bit easier for the Border Patrol. It was one of those nights when the moonlight in the canyons and hills, and on the west side of I-5 here by the asparagus field, made shadows hard-black like anthracite. And the drainage tunnel was so black inside that it was easier to smell the presence of another human being than to see him. And that was possibly the most fearful thing. To be there inside the pipe, in the darkness that was far blacker than the night, and to smell another human being you could not see, could not hear.

  Rosa Lugo of course wanted to turn and run from the tunnel the moment she smelled the first human beings. But she was undeniably brave, and though her hands were no doubt drenched, she held her daughter’s ever tighter and crept forward into the black void toward the smell and hot breath of human beings.

  It turned out that there were twenty pollos in there who had not connected with their guide. Some of them were later very hard-pressed to explain what they did and did not do in that tunnel after the arrival of Rosa Lugo and her daughter Esther. This was the beginning of an attempt by some of the Barf squad to understand a terrible and tragic phenomenon that recurs throughout time. The Innocents/Hostages/Victims say to the conscienceless sociopath: “You won’t dream of hurting me when you see how submissive/meek/obedient I can be!” But of course the victim has no more understanding of the sociopath than does the average citizen. That is, the victim cannot really believe in the existence of a true sociopath, let alone fathom the fact that they are everywhere, some antisocial, some not. Sociopaths, who often are attractive, intelligent, sane, and utterly without a sense of guilt, or superego—call it what you will.

  And if the average citizen knew anything about the omnipresence of sociopaths, and the mentality of Innocents/Hostages/Victims, they would never play brain-numbing games like What I Would Have Done Differently at Auschwitz.

  And so forth.

  The fact is that the most meek and docile and submissive people of Mexico were not among the aliens in the tunnel. Those remained in despair. The boldest came, and one cannot doubt their courage. Man for man, the children and grandchildren of Mexican aliens have accounted for more Medals of Honor fighting for the United States than any other ethnic group. It’s just that the aliens in the tunnel responded to sudden naked violence and force with an instinct to submit, and to win over the aggressor through docility. Like millions of Innocents/Hostages/Victims before them.

  Rosa Lugo and Esther were already too deep within the bowels of darkness to retreat when the five intruders burst into the other end, smashing into the covey of waiting pollos with curses and kicks. There was glass smashing. There were dull thuds and cries of pain. And threats to shoot and cut and maim if the pollos did not submit at once.

  And twenty pollos, except for one who fled in terror, did submit, and still the beatings and screams continued. Just for good measure, or for fun. And Rosa Lugo pressed her daughter back against the urine-splashed tunnel walls and dared not breathe and prayed that the violence would stop, and that the assailants would not press forward in the darkness. Whoever they were.

  Five of these pollos would later make a police report. These five men ranged in age from eighteen to thirty years. They were just average run-of-the-mill aliens who had been fighting the night cold by enjoying fantasies of jobs paying, say, $15 a day, and trying to keep their bowels in check when the intruders exploded into the tunnel. The intruders absolutely cowed and terrified these campesinos, though these wiry men could lift and pull and push like worker ants and were far stronger than the average American of comparable size. They thought at once that the intruders were bandits but hoped they were not like the bandits from the canyons who, they’d heard, would shoot you in the knees or slash or hamstring you just to intimidate the rest of your party. Bandits who had killed Juan or Ernesto or Julia, or whoever, in the stories passed around campfires at night. But these intruders were not even men.

  They were boys. Teenage hoodlums from the Tijuana streets. They could have been eaten alive by the many strong men in the tunnel that night but they had an enormous advantage over these pollos and they knew it. They were mean and aggressive and violent, without a trace of compassion or pity. They were exactly unlike these older stronger men; hence they were perceived as overwhelmingly powerful. To be obeyed without question.

  Their leader said, “We have guns and knives. Who would like to feel our knives?”

  The aliens moaned and murmured and a man began to plead for his life, saying that he had eight children. One of the little thugs thought this was funny as hell and had a drink from a bottle of Russian vodka (anything can be had in Tijuana) and toasted the eight soon-to-be orphans. They were having a good old terrorizing time, these five hoodlums, who probably did not have guns and possibly did not even have knives, since the boy bandits learn very soon that a herd of thirty pollos will easily submit to three attackers armed only with rocks, if the attackers have big enough huevos. And these assailants were about to prove just how big their huevos were, because they could sense something new. A presence in the tunnel as palpable as blood: women!

  The oldest of the aliens was named Reynaldo and he had lived thirty years without ever feeling someone breathing liquor in his face in the black of a tunnel, talking about how a knife would feel slicing open his belly and throat. He later was terribly ashamed and remorseful and bewildered when he admitted that he was relieved when the band of boy bandits found the women and released him.

  Rosa Lugo made a decision to run, but it was too late. Rosa Lugo felt hands on her breast. Two pairs of hands. She screamed and someone put his hand over her mouth and began whispering obscenities. Her legs went weak. Then her legs went out from under her. She could hardly breathe.

  Rosa Lugo suddenly couldn’t see Esther! Her daughter began screaming. The child was being dragged through the tunnel away from her. They were dragging Esther away. The leader of the boy bandits was overjoyed. While rubbing and fondling the breasts of Rosa Lugo, whom he held by the mouth, he found twenty American dollars and two religious medals, maybe silver, that he could sell to the whores in the Colonia Coahuila brothels, since whores were mad about religious medals.

  He released her mouth when he found the money. There was lots of time. Rosa Lugo started pleading. She was calling to the bandits in the tunnel. She could see shapes. Terrible shadows. Her daughter was sobbing hopelessly, crying out for her mother. Rosa Lugo never asked for mercy for herself. She offered to submit to rape and even murder, anything if they would release her daughter. They thought this was really funny. What? Rape an old woman when there was this sweet little pollita? Maybe later, vieja. Maybe after.

  The rapist dragged the whimpering girl to the mouth of the tunnel. He pinned her against the wall with the weight of his body. Keeping her upright he worked with her long pants and his. The words of the rapist were transcribed later that night on a police report. He was heard by witnesses to say: “How pretty you are. You’ll like a cock once it goes
in. How pretty you are!”

  Then Rosa Lugo really began to scream. They might have heard her screams in the brothels just south. She shrieked at the beaten, cowed group of men around her.

  She screamed: “Somebody help her! Don’t let them do this to my daughter! Please!”

  But the rapist had Esther’s pants to her knees and was preparing to mount her from the rear, and now the girl was totally hysterical and was only able to whisper, “Mamá! Mamá! Mamá!” As the rapist was heard to say: “You’re going to like this fuck, you pretty …”

  Then Rosa Lugo did something extraordinary, something she later thought was unbelievable. She stopped pleading to the bandits for mercy and to the other alien victims for help. She spoke straight to God, ordering nothing less than un milagro. Perhaps, in that it was just two days since the birthday of Jesus Christ, she’d done enough pleading for the courage to make this journey. Well, she wasn’t pleading now. She was demanding. She was heard to say: “God, you must save my daughter! You will save my daughter!”

  And lo! At this precise instant, not a handful of yards away in the darkness, and not ten feet north of the Tobacco Road wire fence, there squatted three sorry, ragged, wild-looking little spectators with woolen caps pulled down over freezing little ears. With nothing hanging out anywhere but maybe a Zapata moustache or two, and Manny Lopez’ pseudo-Armenian nose, frozen red and dripping. The varsity was trying to see what the hell was going on in the freaking tunnel on the wrong side of the line.

  When they heard the words of the rapist, Tony Puente couldn’t believe it. He and Eddie Cervantes looked at Manny Lopez but the black woolen cap had been pulled so far down over his balding little skull that the only things showing were that droopy moustache and that dripping nose. He looked like Yosemite Sam in the old Bugs Bunny films.

  They couldn’t see it, but they knew that eyebrow was probably clear back to the crown of his skull about now and that his little eyeballs were laying on his cheekbones. He was eye-popping mad. That was Mexican soil over there and they were ordered never to cross, but …