Lines and Shadows

by Joseph Wambaugh

  And that was all it took with these hardball, bandit-busting, worm-eating Gunslingers. Pussy-whipped? Oh, my God!

  In any case, Manny Lopez decided that Robbie Hurt, being black, could not be part of the walking teams and would always provide cover when they needed it. Manny told him how invaluable such a service was and how somebody had to do it and how they needed him to run in and save their asses when it got tough. Then Manny would invariably end the stroking of Robbie by dragging some groupies over and saying, “This guy saves my tail out there every night. He is one bad dude.”

  And Robbie would feel better and tell the groupie a few war stories too. And drink. Hard liquor. He’d seldom get home before the bars closed. And though he always drove himself home he sometimes couldn’t recall doing it. That also seemed macho to the young cop—alcoholic blackouts.

  “I don’t even remember driving home!” Why not? Gunslingers were entitled.

  His wasn’t the only marriage deteriorating at the time. There was Ken Kelly popping up at nearly every “unwinding” session at The Wing. Asking when oh when would there be an opening in BARF so he could join?

  He still offered pimping services. “Didn’t I tell that new waitress she could meet you guys at The Anchor Inn?”

  “But she was a witch! You said she had big tits.”

  “Zits. I said big zits. Okay, I’ll do better.”

  He tried to please them, but they’d become discriminating: “Goddamn, King! She had a neck like an elephant’s trunk!”

  “Okay! I’ll do better!”

  Manny Lopez warned Ken Kelly that being a blond white boy, he could no more walk convincingly in the canyons than could Robbie Hurt, but Ken Kelly said he didn’t care. He’d be Robbie’s partner. He’d be the other half of the cover team, freeing up one who could walk. He’d carry the goddamn toilet paper.

  And one night Ken Kelly got to prove his resourcefulness in the face of danger. A gaggle of waitresses showed up at the park on schedule. They were all there: Fat Mindy, Thin Mindy, Lana Banana, and another one.

  “She’s a ten!” Ken Kelly cried when she stepped out of Fat Mindy’s car. She was blonder than Ken Kelly, and she didn’t walk, she rippled, like a jungle cat. In fact she was like one, in an imitation leopard coat, with dagger fingernails and decadent cranberry lipstick.

  The drinking went on until two-thirty and then Fat Mindy made an announcement to Ken Kelly about the leopard girl. “She likes you. She wants to know if you’d like to get better acquainted?”

  “Is a frog’s ass watertight?” Ken Kelly screamed.

  Oh, how the Barfers envied Ken Kelly. She liked him! Even after the others had told her 101 exciting shoot-em-up stories, 100 of which were invented. Even though she knew that Ken Kelly wasn’t even a Gunslinger, but just aspired to become one.

  Since he was really smashed he pulled his long limp hair flat back on his head, and twitched his walrus moustache, and made his eyes buggy in his Jack Nicholson impression. Then he unscrewed the cap on a half gallon of wine saying, “What do you prefer, my dear? Red, white, or beige?”

  She said he was so fucking cute!

  “I’m all jiggles and wires!” Ken Kelly whispered to Joe Castillo. “I got the war department faked out. I told her I’m working overtime.”

  Except that another cop’s wife who happened to work at the same fast-food joint as Fat Mindy and Thin Mindy and Lana Banana had made a surreptitious phone call to Ken Kelly’s wife telling her where the boys and girls were going to be sometime after midnight.

  At 2:30 A.M. Ken Kelly said, “There’s a car coming.”

  And indeed there was. It was driving slowly through the park and up the hill to where they drank. “That sounds just like my Pinto,” he said. “The same clinky transmission … Naw, that couldn’t be my Pinto.”

  It was his Pinto. Driven by his wife, accompanied by their three young children asleep in the back seat. Ken Kelly yelped and made a dive for the bushes. His motorcycle was hidden behind a Barfer’s car. The Pinto stopped some twenty-five yards away in the darkness and the lights went out.

  The party was over and the Barfers started thinking about lipstick stains, and Ken Kelly was crawling on his belly like a tarantula, saying, “Wait! Don’t move the car! She’ll see my goddamn motorcycle!”

  Ken Kelly’s wife would turn on the headlights every few seconds and catch them with the beam as they squirmed. Finally, Fat Mindy spoke into the thorn bush that contained the body of Ken Kelly, who by chance was wearing a camouflage army jacket. She said, “Can we smuggle you out somewheres?”

  “No! Just leave me alone!” he whispered, and everyone said a fast good-night to Ken after he cried, “Jesus! My off-duty gun! I know she has my off-duty gun!”

  The last thing they heard him say was: “If I try to haul ass she’ll run me down for sure. You don’t know her!”

  So he didn’t try to haul ass. He bellied out of the brush in concealment and managed to coast the motorcycle down the hill—a rocky, eroded, unpaved hill. He was so bagged he was seeing two Pintos, four headlights, two wrathful shadows in the front seat. When he made it to the bottom he was sweaty, freezing, thorn-raked. But he’d gotten to the street undetected. He was considerably more sober when he fired up that bike and hauled ass.

  When he got home close to dawn she was awake. He was full of coffee and cleaned up and had his stringy hair combed.

  “Hi!” he said. “Waiting up for me? I made a hell of an arrest. Been doing reports for hours. Wanna hear about it?”

  The Barfers had to admire a resourceful guy like Ken Kelly. And he wanted to be part of their squad so badly that they all wanted him.

  “I’d like to have you, King,” Manny Lopez told him. “But I can’t get them to up my personnel quota.” Then he grinned and said, “You’ll just have to wait till one of us gets shot.”

  And as a matter of fact Ken Kelly would make the Barf squad before the month ended. Because two of them would get shot.

  DRAGONS

  ON ANCIENT MAPS, CARTOGRAPHERS OFTEN BORDERED renditions of known territory with a warning: “Beyond There Be Dragons.”

  There was something odd happening inside the heads of some of the Barfers toward the end of March. It was as though the few square miles of canyons, heretofore ceded to cutthroats by the United States government and the city of San Diego, was their territory, their turf, their bloody little patch of land on which they would prove … what? They weren’t even sure by now. And indeed each man seemed to be out to attain something of value for himself. They didn’t necessarily spend a great deal of time during the month of March pondering what it was; they were too busy trying to discover what their leader was up to.

  Manny Lopez was driven, restless, searching, probing, praising, scolding, chiding them. He wasn’t above humiliating a man publicly for a screw-up in the canyons. One way in which a Mexican-American differs from a real Mexican hardly at all is in the code of machismo. It used to be that the vilest, most insulting epithet in the language had to do with being a puto, or maricón, “queer” being an unforgiveable slash at one’s manhood. Simply saying “¡Eres un puto!” had in bygone days resulted in many a fight to the death.

  In modern times one man could call another puto or maricón, but even now it’s not that easy to accept being called, in English, “a pussy”—not if beneath it somewhere is a real challenge to one’s courage or manhood. “Faggot” was okay, since there was no truth in it. They were always calling each other “faggot.” But “pussy”? If Manny Lopez called Joe Castillo “pussy,” with the right tone, Joe Castillo might easily risk crushed nuts by vaulting over parking meters. Ditto for Eddie Cervantes eating woolly worms. When things got dicey in the canyons he could make his bandit busters do just about anything by a direct challenge to their machismo. And since only he had actually shot someone, and was getting so much media attention for it, deep inside their little hardball hearts they were getting more than a bit jealous of their sergeant.

  But h
e could still keep them quiet by telling them that they were a baaad-ass bunch of hardball motherfuckers. Look out, banditos! Here comes the Cleveland Wrecking Company!

  Once when both the varsity and junior varsity were walking on the upper soccer field at dusk they decided to join the throngs of pollos preparing for the night’s crossing. They were utterly in character that evening, mingling with the madding crowd, listening to tales by twilight campfires, stories of prior crossings laced with hopes and dreams. Stories of fabulous jobs and great wealth, which in answer to specific questions meant half the pay of a San Diego policeman. In fact, one robbery victim, when he learned that Manny Lopez was really a San Diego cop, had said sincerely, “I pray to one day become rich. Just like you.”

  During firelight conversations with other pollos, the Barfers mostly had to listen, since only Manny Lopez, Eddie Cervantes, Carlos Chacon, and possibly Ernie Salgado spoke Spanish well enough to fool anybody. But the others understood, and it was sad to listen to the pollos. It also caused things to happen inside their heads and more than once a Barfer would catch himself wanting to tell an alien of certain realities in the land of silk and money.

  Sometimes the guides would warn them of San Diego cops who prowl the canyons at night dressed as pollos, about how bloodthirsty these cops were and how they beat and killed pollos just for trespassing on their land.

  “They’re madmen,” the guide said. “They must take them from an insane asylum and bring them out here.”

  That evening there were at least three hundred people on the soccer field. There were a dozen guides happily jumping from group to group offering their services. There were vendors selling tacos as all waited for the orange fireball to drop behind the hills.

  There were peddlers selling soda pop and coffee. There was a man with a guitar singing mournfully of the land he was about to leave. There were five motherless daughters saying good-bye to their father and they were all crying.

  Easily the most sensitive and sentimental of the Barfers was Renee Camacho. And because of this and his boy-tenor voice which became a soprano singsong when he attempted to talk like an alien, the others called him maricón and said he was in love with his pal Joe Castillo. Renee was usually jolly and fun loving and could give it back as well as any. On this particular night as they waited for the curtain of darkness to fall on Deadman’s Canyon, he sat by a fire with some pollos and had never felt sadder about all of it. Their role. His role. The entire drama or melodrama being ritualistically played in those canyons at night.

  He wondered if it was the season. Spring had brought the desert flowers—purple and white, red as sunset—surprisingly delicate in the harsh canyons, the colors flickering in dusky silver light. Cadaverous, skin-twitching dogs circled the campfires warily. The ground was scabbed up with dropped food and brought the animals, baring their gums in ecstasy.

  “I’ll never forget it,” Renee Camacho said. “This young man, my age, telling us how it was.”

  “I love my little pueblo,” the alien told Renee Camacho. “I love our country, but I must make a home for my children.”

  Eddie Cervantes was a chatterbox who liked to ask questions. Not entirely familiar with the peso exchange, Eddie asked the alien how much his weekly earnings would buy in his pueblo.

  The answer was: enough tortillas and beans to keep four children from getting sick. He could buy one scrawny chicken, but only on a good week.

  Renee Camacho was deeply affected and even confused. It seemed so hopeless. It made him start to think: what if his grandfather had not got caught up with the nonsense of Pancho Villa and migrated north? He looked around at the soccer field, at the women with babies. At the elderly men and women who were unable to resist the lure of America. He looked at the man beside him and was ashamed. The man was frail, with uncut scraggly hair. He smelled putrid like all the others. Nobody had suitcases. They rarely had bundles. Renee realized something startling from talking to them: first, that they were the bravest of Mexico’s poor, to come in the first place. Second, very few wanted to come north. They dreamed of making enough money to return to their homeland.

  Some had two or three dollars and that was all. Some had several hundred. Renee Camacho always said he never met a mean one, and he kept asking himself, how can anyone be cruel to these people?

  And after that, when he encountered aliens who had been robbed or stabbed or raped and terrorized, he began to feel what they felt. And he wasn’t the only one. They all started to feel the poverty and fear. It made funny pains in the stomach, they discovered. It made them sigh a lot. Finally it made them mad, but the anger was without direction. And this produced more funny pains in the stomach. Renee Camacho, for one, was beginning to change in his treatment of bandits.

  Even as a group, odd things began to happen to them. For instance, when the Border Patrol helicopter would make a low-flying pass over a group of aliens, sometimes the Barfers too would begin to run in panic.

  “What’re we doing?” Manny Lopez yelled one evening when they were doing just that, hightailing it just like aliens. “Why’re we running?” he asked them in utter bewilderment. “We’re armed to the fucking teeth. We’re on duty. We’re the good guys. Why’re we running?”

  But of course they figured it out without consulting Lee Strasberg or the Screen Actors Guild. It’s just not that easy for a performer to jump in and out of character. And then they talked of how aliens felt like that all the time.

  Manny would tell them: “It’s okay to feel sorry for them, but remember that everyone else is scum. Their government’s corrupt. Their cops’re corrupt. Don’t mix things up or you’ll end up dead.”

  Once, when they were in fact near their substation, starting for the canyons by climbing through a two-strand barbed wire fence, they were surprised by a voice behind them saying, “Okay, motherfuckers! Freeze!” The voice belonged to a border patrolman sneaking up.

  The strange part is they threw their hands up and answered in Spanish. “¡Somos policías! ¡Somos policías!” They were into character.

  They also had a few laughs on the upper soccer field. Someone made up a name for a little tamale vendor with the chin whiskers of a goat. They called him Chano B. Gomez, Jr. And on a few occasions some of them actually bought tamales and ate them, which Manny Lopez said was the most daredevil act he’d yet witnessed out there, and that it made his gunfight look pussyish.

  Chano B. Gomez, Jr., had a transistor radio strapped to his belt and carried some maracas and shook them to the Latin beat from a Tijuana radio station: cha cha, cha cha cha!

  Sometimes he sold churritos, fried sticks of bread dough and chili. And of course a couple of those hardball chilisucking bandit busters also risked parasitic paralysis by buying and eating the churritos. Just like pollos.

  Chano B. Gomez, Jr., had an eye for the ladies and he’d skip from group to group hustling his tamales and playing his ghetto blaster and shaking his maracas at any little cutie who caught his eye: cha cha, cha cha cha!

  And many a time his evil eye would be observed by some father /husband /brother who didn’t like his action at all. But Chano B. Gomez, Jr., would just wiggle his goat whiskers at them and play his hissing maracas and skip off as surefooted as a goat on those hilltops.

  Someone said, what if he was in cahoots with the bandits and was marking them with his little maracas act? You for rape, my pet. You for robbery. You, pollo, for death. Shaking those maracas which sounded like rattlesnakes.

  Anyway, they came to make jokes about old Chano B. Gomez, Jr., the goatish tamale vendor, and imagined that he was marking them as they stepped off into no-man’s-land: “Beware, beware! Of fiery breath, the monster’s lair!”

  This was the night that Manny Lopez finally met El Loco face to face. They were walking E-2 Canyon by the hole in the fence. There was a clutch of shadow figures standing on the Mexican side. When five of the Barfers straggled by, they saw clearly that one of the silent shadow figures was dressed all in black an
d wore a red ski mask!

  The man in the ski mask spoke to them. He said, “Do you have a cigarette?”

  Manny walked to the chain link fence and got into character and passed a Fiesta cigarette through to the man in the mask. “Do you have a match?” the man asked.

  Manny produced an appropriate book of Mexican matches, and when the sulfur flared he looked at the eyes and mouth which were all that showed and he wondered why in the hell a mask.

  “Where is your group going?” Loco asked.

  “To Los Angeles,” Manny told him.

  “I might be able to help you,” he said. “I have contacts. I work with the judiciales as a friend. Why don’t you come through the fence and we’ll talk?”

  “No, señor,” Manny said. “We’re afraid to go back over there. Why don’t you come over here and we can tell you our travel plans?”

  And Loco smoked, and seemed to smile but it was hard to tell. Finally, he blew a cloud of smoke and shook his head and said, “On your way, pollos. I don’t think I can help you tonight.”

  Within seconds he had vanished back into the darkness on the Mexican side. And when the others saw Manny up close, they couldn’t find his right eyebrow. “I want that bandit!” Manny said. “That sucker’s mine.”

  Then someone suggested knocking off early and getting some beer and they even offered to chip in for a bottle of Chivas Regal for Manny, but he said they needed a good bandit bust and he put them in the tubes. And that was good for a few yuks.

  The “tube,” or tunnel, was one of the drainage pipes that ran under the earth from the American side of the fence to the Mexican side. Though the Barfers weren’t given to metaphor, it was easy to see that the tube was an absolutely perfect symbol for the international dilemma. The countries of Mexico and the United States were asshole to asshole, and these little alien turds were just rolling out of that tube into the United States, and sometimes the little alien turds just rolled back the other way when the U.S. of A. was feeling diarrheic. And the bandits knew whereof the countries shat, so they’d wait by the assholes of America and Mexico and search for pearls among the turds.