Except that it was too late. She was immersed ten fathoms deeper than John the Baptist. And in the holidays just past, she said she didn’t want a Christmas tree in the house because it violated the dogma of her new faith.
So he immediately went out and bought a Christmas tree about the size of a California redwood. He had to saw half the limbs off the goddamn thing just to get it in the door. He was going to show her a Christmas, all right. He was going to hang mistletoe and holly and colored lights in the john, for chrissake!
But despite a Christmas tree sticking out half the windows in the house, despite more lights than the San Diego airport, Christmas was a bust. They argued; she cried; he felt guilty. Christmas sucked.
She had to suppress and humble herself to be pleasing to God, he was told.
“But I spent half my life trying to better myself!” he told her. “I wanted you to have more than my mother, married to that drunken Mexican!”
“Lately I think I’ve been married to a drunken Mexican,” she informed him.
“BARF’s finished. I’ll stop drinking so much,” he promised.
She read the Bible for two hours each night and there was nothing he could do about it. And really, when he dared admit it, there was something creeping into his hatred of her church. He despised her new religion, all right. But if someone needed to believe in something, what could he offer? He still remembered the white priest: “Your husband’s dead, Mrs. Puente? I’ll come at once … for a seventy-dollar donation.”
He didn’t know if he believed in anything supernatural, so what could he give this girl who needed something more than he had?
Well, maybe things could improve now that BARF was over. Now that he was once again in uniform doing regular police work. Maybe he could work a day shift? Then with the drinking cut out of his life, things would get better. Maybe she wouldn’t need her new Bible-banging pals so much. Maybe he could wean her away from them.
So it was back to ordinary, dull, boring, sane police work. And then, on his very first day back to ordinary dull boring sane police work, he received a radio call. Later, it didn’t seem possible. He wasn’t sure it was happening while it was. It was like when he woke up drunk after the nights of boozing. What happened? What was real? What wasn’t?
The radio call was given to him in broad daylight. There was a family disturbance. There was a fifty-nine-year-old man fighting with his sixteen-year-old son. No big deal. It was a middle-class white neighborhood. It was his very first radio call after leaving the insanity in the canyons.
“I can’t reason with my dad,” the boy said to Tony Puente when he opened the door. “He’s getting more senile every day!”
He was just your run-of-the-mill sixteen-year-old, all fuzz and zits, patched blue jeans, a T-shirt. Just bitching about his “senile” old man with whom he shared the house.
Just like a teenybopper to call the old man senile, Tony Puente thought, wondering when his kids would call him senile.
Tony Puente looked at the man standing in the living room in his bathrobe, enjoying All My Children or something on TV. He was fifty-nine years old, too young to be senile.
He was senile.
He said, “Hello, you!” and brought out a little gun and pointed it right smack at Tony Puente’s shiny badge, which he’d taken the trouble to polish this first day back in uniform.
“I don’t know shit about guns,” Tony Puente later said. “At first I didn’t think it was real!”
It was real. It was a very cute derringer, a magnum derringer. Tony Puente squinted through his glasses. He homed right in on that funny little gun in the man’s hand. It was looking more and more real all the time.
Tony Puente had a strange thought the whole time he was in that room. In fact, he couldn’t think of anything else for what seemed like an hour but was really only a few minutes. He had never worn the bulletproof vest during the ninety days in the hills. The thought was this: My wife’s gonna get mad at me. She’ll say I died because I wouldn’t wear that goddamn bulletproof vest!
“I think All My Children’s a groovy TV show,” Tony Puente said. “Don’t you?”
“I’m not watching All My Children, you dumb son of a bitch,” the man said, making little circles with the derringer.
“I sure like As The World Turns,” Tony Puente said, sweating buckets. And just that fast, his glasses were fogging.
“I don’t have to take your shit!” the man told him.
“No, sir!” Tony Puente said. “So maybe I better just boogie on out and let you enjoy your …”
“Don’t move!” the man said. “I think I should kill you right now.”
And the cop flinched when he heard the word. He was desperately trying to avoid any statement, sentence, phrase, word, anything that included terms like shoot, kill, or …
“Dad, don’t kill him!” the kid screamed suddenly, and Tony Puente flinched again and wanted to scream back at the kid: “DON’T SAY KILL, YOU ASSHOLE!”
Instead he said, “Well, now, your dad and me, we’re just gonna talk. Hell, we probably have a lot in common and …”
“I hate niggers!” the man said.
“That lets me out!” Tony Puente informed him ecstatically. “I’m a Mex …”
“Dad, he’s not a nigger! Can’t you see?” The kid was screaming it. “He’s a cop, Dad! And he’s a Mexican! You’re a Mexican, ain’t you, Officer?”
“Uh, could you just let me handle this, my boy?” Tony Puente said to the kid, who was jumping up and down and tucking his hands between his knees and under his arms. But then the kid shrieked, “You can’t kill a cop! He’s wearing a uniform! He’s a cop, Dad! Don’t kill him!”
And Tony Puente’s shirt was soaked, and he realized the horrible truth of the situation. The kid was a banana! Bonzo. Loonier than his old man. He was alone in a house with two psychos, not one!
The kid started spinning like a top. The old man started babbling something else about niggers. Tony Puente was thinking how he’d survived three months in the hills and canyons with nothing worse than a fading scar on his ass from falling on a rock with his badge in his hip pocket.
He had to think! He thought of inching his hand closer to his Handie-Talkie, of keying it open. He thought of going for his gun and leaping to his left, since right-handed people usually jerk rounds to their left. He couldn’t swallow the spit in his throat.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t kill!” The kid kept screaming it, and Tony Puente was starting to hyperventilate and could think of only one thing: to take that fucking kid with him when he died!
Then the man got tired of all this screaming and yelling and jumping around, and he strolled over to a chair and made himself comfortable.
And Tony Puente leaped on his head. And, true to form, the kid leaped on Tony Puente, yelling, “Don’t you hurt my dad, you son of a bitch!”
“I didn’t know anything about guns,” Tony Puente later said. “I especially didn’t know anything about derringers. I had hold a the gun with one hand and managed to get my radio out with the other. And there I was with maniacs hanging all over me, and scared I’d shoot myself with this nutty little gun, and I somehow get a screaming call out to communications. And the communications operator said: ‘Is this urgent?’”
That evening an inspector came to the station to ask about Tony Puente’s encounter with the father and son, who were both in custody and would no doubt be treated like what they were—nuts. The inspector didn’t ask him many questions. He said he was glad no one got hurt. The sergeant thought it was kind of a funny deal. Ditto for the lieutenant. Nobody seemed to care very much or notice that Tony Puente was having trouble keeping his mouth moist.
He realized he couldn’t even tell his wife about it. She’d get mad about the goddamn bulletproof vest. Tony Puente thought he might as well be back in the canyons. Things were no more real and explicable out here in the city. He came home very late that first night back in patrol. He did the sensible thing.
He went to a cop’s bar and got smashed.
PARADISE REGAINED
IN MID-JANUARY THE NEWSPAPERS ANNOUNCED THAT BARF had been disbanded. Dick Snider was disconsolate. Manny Lopez was frustrated. Some of the men had mixed emotions. Felix Zavala said he had no desire to return even if the department should change its mind. He was gone for good.
They were flea/chigger/mosquito-bitten, cactus-stuck, kicked, punched, threatened by scorpions, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, men. Some of the newspaper stories were getting dubious as to whether BARF was ever a sensible police experiment to begin with. Letters to the editor complained about the waste of taxpayers’ money to protect illegal aliens. There were newspaper stories such as DOUBTFUL TACTICS. And, BORDER FORCE TERMED EXPERIMENTAL.
But then suddenly, very suddenly, other newspaper stories started appearing: GANG STABS, ROBS YOUTH AT BORDER. And, MAN ROBBED NEAR BORDER. And, ILLEGAL ALIEN STABBED AND ROBBED.
Dick Snider was desperately trying to convince his superiors that perhaps banditry had slowed because they were effective. Manny Lopez said the word spreads fast in Colonia Libertad and the bad guys had boogied because of BARF’s presence. Dick Snider could point clearly to the drop in reported robberies, so wasn’t that an indication of their effectiveness? They hadn’t made any big dramatic bandit arrests, but was that their primary function? Or was it to curtail alien robberies? If the bandit arrests they’d made persuaded the robbers to cool it, they’d done a job. Would it have been better if they’d shot down a dozen bandits in canyon firefights? They’d saved some people. Ask the mother and child at the tunnel.
“Saving people?” Manny Lopez said privately, shaking his head. “Helping illegal aliens? The police administration laughed at Dick Snider behind his back.” Manny Lopez puffed on a Santa Fe Corona Grande as he said it, and his eyebrow went sidewinding into the question mark. “When I was director of the San Diego Police Officers Association, I had to work with the brass and the politicians every day to get what cops wanted. I knew how to deal with these fuckers in the real world. You don’t talk about helping people. You talk about influencing the taxpayers. The voters. You don’t get things done helping illegal aliens. I talked about the media. About making the media love us. I talked about City Hall and how if we could reinstate BARF I’d guarantee we’d get the kind a press relations to make them give anything the department wanted in our next budget request. That’s how you accomplish your goals in the real world. I played hardball with these fuckers.”
Then the eyebrow of Manny Lopez settled down where it belonged and he said, “Dick Snider? He looks like he’d never fit in a business suit. They thought he was just some big old country boy who liked to run around those hills. They didn’t understand his fixation with helpless aliens. They never could understand that Dick Snider actually believed that everybody uptown was basically a nice man like himself.
“‘What’s he trying to do, Manny?’ they’d ask me. ‘Does this Okie mean what he says?’ They didn’t respect him and they didn’t like him. We all had our reasons for wanting BARF to start back up again. I had mine, and most of it had to do with ambition … and maybe something else. The fact is, I was starting to like it out there in those canyons. There were … strange kinds a payoffs. In your head. We all had our reasons, but only Dick Snider’s reasons were … pure. You had to love a guy like that. He stayed pure till the end.”
The efforts of Dick Snider and Manny Lopez to reactivate BARF were given some help by the bandits themselves. Very suddenly the newspaper stories told it: BANDITS STAB AND ROB AT BOBDER.
Whether or not the disbanding of BARF was known by the bandits—and it’s doubtful that it was—the robberies began in earnest. And they were violent.
City Hall was besieged by the media, who wanted to know if America’s Finest City was just going to concede the border canyons to the cutthroats in perpetuity. It could get uncomfortable for Mayor Pete Wilson, who was, in a few years, going to make a successful run at Washington, D.C., as a United States senator.
In less than three weeks everyone caved in. BARF was reactivated. Manny Lopez was back, but Dick Snider was ordered to keep himself occupied as a uniformed watch commander, indoors. Total control of BARF should be left to Manny Lopez, he was told.
Dick Snider never complained much. He was content to help and advise in any way he could. He would like to have been out in the canyons, but the fact that BARF was there was a great victory for the alien victims.
Yet he knew it would never be the same. Manny and the others kept him informed, and yet he was also starting to feel like an outsider.
Ken Kelly was having lots of domestic problems. As he put it: “I was running with this fast bunch a cops who went through a couple shifts a waitresses at our fast-food emporium.”
He was getting off at 11:00 P.M. and getting home at daybreak. Some of that “fast bunch” were Barfers. And they were very fast and the waitresses loved to hear the exaggerated stories of bandit arrests in Deadman’s Canyon. Ken Kelly could see that an aura was starting to form around these canyon hardballers with their funky alien rags and wild hair and moustaches and whiskers. God, he wanted to be one of them.
“Be nice to Lopez,” they all told him. “When there’s an opening we’ll talk for you.”
“But will he take a blond white boy?”
“We’ll talk for you,” they promised him. “He might.”
Ken Kelly was a hard-charging cop, and he was glib and articulate, much like Manny Lopez himself. He continued bombarding the sergeant with one-liners but he also wrote a persuasive officer’s report stating a host of reasons why he should be a Barfer. Manny was impressed by anyone who, like himself, could wield a pen as well as a sword.
“And then fate sprung the trapdoor and I fell in a vat a drizzly shit and almost drowned!” Ken Kelly wailed at the memory.
He was working night patrol and took a drive down by the U.S. Customs secondary inspection area. It’s the place where tourists pay duty on goods brought back from Mexico, or have their cars torn apart if it’s suspected that they’re carrying contraband. It’s the place where trained dogs sniff for drugs, away from the mainstream of traffic.
Ken Kelly was only an hour from getting off duty. He had a reserve officer riding with him, and as all regular officers do, he had a tendency to be a tour guide for the citizen cop. He was driving the patrol car south on I-5 by the old border check station when they saw a commotion near the bus circle where Tijuana tour buses and regular city buses drop their passengers. They could see some U.S. Customs inspectors milling around a gathering crowd in the darkness.
It turned out that a man had driven back across the border the wrong way on I-5. He tried to avoid the customs line and drove northbound on the Mexican side which was open only to southbound traffic. He was not stopped by the Mexican authorities, but the Americans halted him before he could get his car onto the proper side of Interstate 5.
He was not drunk. He was not carrying contraband. He just didn’t feel like waiting in the customs line. And he was screaming his head off at everybody within earshot. He was, in the words of Ken Kelly, “a real number one prick asshole.”
So Ken Kelly did what cops generally do to number one prick assholes who have committed a traffic violation they didn’t observe. He started looking for a violation he could observe. He found that the car’s left taillight was out and he began writing him a ticket, for failing the attitude test, as they say.
But this driver’s attitude didn’t improve. He kept chipping away. He had a big mouth. Ken Kelly started getting a tension headache like the one on television. He wondered if he’d ever get on the Barf squad. He wondered if he’d ever get away from number one prick assholes like this one. He’d rather be facing bandits in the canyons. He’d much rather be facing bandits in the canyons.
The man said he would not sign the traffic citation. Ken Kelly informed him that it was only a promise to appear and not an admission of guilt. The man said he still wouldn’t sign.
The man was told that he’d have to be arrested, rather than released on the promise. He signed. Then he wanted to void the signature. Then he relented. Then he didn’t want to take his citation copy. Then he changed his mind.
And suddenly his attitude altered miraculously. It was so sudden Ken Kelly couldn’t believe it. And shouldn’t have. The man took the ticket and began to apologize. He apologized more than profusely. He smiled and told Ken Kelly that he had been out of line and that Ken Kelly was one of the most professional lawmen he’d ever met. Moreover, he put out his hand and told Ken Kelly that he was one of the nicest cops he’d ever met.
And there are moments like this in every policeman’s life, when the adrenaline surge is simply squeezed off. When the tension instantly subsides and you’re not sure if you’re relieved or disappointed. When all that was wrong in your angry cop’s world becomes inexplicably right. In short, when some citizen cons the shit out of you.
He gripped Ken Kelly’s hand and said, “I mean it. You’re the nicest police officer I’ve ever met.”
And Ken Kelly just stopped being a cynical cop and reeled back on his heels and generally behaved like a dumb ass civilian, saying, “Well, that’s okay. Sometimes I do things I regret, so I understand. It’s okay and I’d like …”
But the man, continuing to hold the grip, cut him off by leaning closer. And he breathed into Ken Kelly’s face and told him something that all policemen have been told. It wasn’t the worst thing that was ever said to him by a citizen. It was just that, at this time in his life, he was vulnerable. The man leaned very close into his face and said something like: “You’re so nice that I wonder when you’re gonna stop fucking little animals, you slimy lowdown …”
Suddenly Ken Kelly was doing his deranged Jack Nicholson impression without even knowing it. And he saw the man tumble over backward and land flat on his back. The right side of the man’s head was gashed open and bleeding.
Why was everyone looking at him like he ate chicken heads? What was this guy yelling about?
Lines and Shadows Page 10
