Lines and Shadows

by Joseph Wambaugh

  This was how they described it more or less that night when poor old Fred Gil, the eldest Barfer, reamed out the tube. He was leading the walking team and playing the role of alien guide, staying several paces ahead, stopping frequently to tap stones together or snap his fingers. All at once when he looked back he saw that instead of three shadows there were five! He had picked up two real pollos who decided to tag along for the safety in numbers.

  Just then a Border Patrol helicopter spotted them and swooped down, and sure enough, the Barfers were so into character they began running with the two real pollos straight toward the tube. Fred Gil was the first one into it. The tube was full of human excrement. Fred Gil had a weak stomach anyway. He started gagging. The other pollos, real and bogus, were pushing in behind him. Fred Gil was slipping and sliding in all the feces and yelling out in Spanish and English. Fred Gil’s eyes were burning!

  Then, after they were all tucked inside, they heard the hovering chopper communicating with a Border Patrol jeep via loudspeaker, and some headlights moved in and the pollos emerged from the tube one by one and were encircled by jeeps.

  Before they could warn him, a border patrolman ran up and grabbed Fred Gil and said, “Aw, shit!” It was all over him.

  Then, while the real pollos and border patrolman stared in confusion, the other Barfers got hysterical. These little hardball, worm-eating bozos started slapping each other and shrieking and hooting. They staggered around for almost five minutes because poor old Fred Gil had reamed out the fistula.

  Later that night, Fred Gil was told to take a crime report from an old Mexican woman at Southern substation. When she caught a whiff of him, she said she’d come back tomorrow and ran out the door. Fred Gil got the Best Dressed Award at the next Barf party.

  One wondered later what the hell Chano B. Gomez, Jr., the tamale vendor, would have thought of this action from his vantage point on the hill, and if maybe he could figure out what was going on out there in those loony canyons where the assholes of America and Mexico passed their turds.

  Fred Gil was also starting to wonder whether a man approaching middle age was too old to be doing such things. It wasn’t just that the job could be hazardous to his physical health; that was only part of it. His home life was a mess. Fred Gil had spent a lifetime proving something or other. Like several of the others, Fred Gil was a product of a broken home and had to be raised by grandparents.

  His father had been a U.S. Marine who served at Iwo Jima during that bloody campaign when the Marines did their damnedest to take no prisoners. He gambled and drank and taunted his son. Even after Fred Gil grew bigger and stronger than his father and (much like Carlos Chacon, who had those violent dreams) ended up defending himself by punching the man to his knees, guilt-stricken because this was his father—even after that his father would say to him: “You’re still a mama’s boy. Nothing but a mama’s boy. You could never make it as a Marine.”

  Fred Gil hated the father who abandoned him. Fred Gil of course joined the United States Marine Corps.

  He’d spent half a lifetime proving that he wasn’t a mama’s boy. He was an all-Marine judo champion in the open class for monster Marines, though he weighed barely two hundred pounds. And the young man who spent most of his life proving something to a man he hated found himself on a very rigorous proving ground in South Vietnam.

  Fred Gil’s fire team was once temporarily cut off by swift-moving Viet Cong during a Da Nang monsoon. There were five of them on an ammo truck and they thought they were sure to be killed or captured, with most betting on the former.

  Until they finally hooked up with their outfit, Fred Gil kept thinking: If I survive this, I’m going to find my father and tell him. Tell him what?

  He had always been terrified of the man. Too scared even to show his fear. Before Vietnam he wondered: Would he run away like his father said he would? Would he fight? Would he, God forbid, show fear?

  In Vietnam he was lucky. Once while he was headed to Hong Kong for R&R, the plane in front of his crashed and sank in the sea. And while he was gone his unit was hard hit and lost several men. Well, it seemed to run in their family, this kind of luck. His father had survived the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the slaughter at Iwo Jima. In Vietnam his younger brother took three .50-caliber rounds in the back and not only survived but remained a career Marine.

  But there was something about the canyon crawling that was very different from war. For Fred Gil, war had been mostly incoming and outgoing rockets and mortars. Formless enemies, shapes sometimes, flashes in the distance. No more. It was terrifying, but it was not … personal. He had discussed it with Ernie Salgado. Both agreed that this was not like war.

  Fred Gil said that in Nam when they were hit by the Viet Cong, they wouldn’t walk into it point-blank saying, “Here we are!”

  As senseless as it was, war made more sense than seeking out armed men in the darkness, never acting, only reacting. Ernie Salgado hinted that it was the intimate side of this that made it so different. In Nam they didn’t really see their enemy except when they counted the bodies. Only once in thirteen months did Ernie see his enemy face to face. His squad was sitting in the jungle at night waiting to move out, and two V.C. stumbled into them. The V.C. got within a few yards before ten Marines shot them to bits. They were living men, face to face. Not movements, forms, muzzle flashes, but men armed with AK-47’s, young men like themselves. And still it was not the same as the canyons.

  During the months to come something similar to this would be articulated by other Barfers who had not been to Vietnam and had no basis for comparison. And if one listened long enough as they tried to describe it, what finally became clear was that along with ordinary terror there was an added element here: horror. Because when human beings face violent death, ordinary terror is without another fearsome element: the primordial despair and outrage you feel at looking into the face of another human being who intends to destroy you with malice aforethought. The terror and archetypal horror of being murdered.

  On the afternoon of March 23rd, Fred Gil got ready for work as usual. Which meant cleaning house and cooking dinner for his wife and family prior to his leaving for the police station. And after his wife, Jan, got home they had their daily ration of bitter arguments. They had decided to stick it out only until the kids were old enough to cope with divorce, a mistake many a cop family seemed to make.

  Jan Gil was three years older than Fred and was his exact opposite. She was a woman who looked larger than she was, with sorrel hair, hazel eyes, and a long face. Some of the Barfers noted that at times she resembled actress Lily Tomlin and that Fred rather resembled a diffident version of golfer Lee Trevino. Therefore they were called the celebrity couple.

  There was a ton of guilt and recrimination weighing both of them down. There were serious emotional problems involving her son, whom Fred had legally adopted. They argued about that. And she didn’t keep the house clean enough to suit him so he took over housecleaning and cooking before he went off to his police duty at night. There were minor things which had become unbearable given their dilemma. She liked to drink and smoke and party and could swear a streak. It embarrassed him. She was as outgoing as he was private.

  She could lock eyeballs with anyone. He still avoided eye contact whenever possible. If there was ever a mismatched couple it was this one, but the children begged them to hang in there.

  “He changed,” Jan Gil remembered. “Before he joined BARF he was always a very gentle guy. He was insecure and felt inferior to most people and was gentle. I don’t mean candy-ass. I mean gentle. He used to cry and feel bad about himself, that he wasn’t going anywhere in life. I started noticing a change after a few months in those hills. He still didn’t drink with the others, but he started to get a little bit macho for the first time. He thought BARF was gonna give him a chance to be someone. He changed and we fought even more.”

  It might be debated whether or not Fred Gil was getting more macho on the night of March 23
rd, but if he was, he was definitely not more macho after that night.

  That night, the varsity, with Renee Camacho as the fourth walker, was about one hundred yards above Deadman’s Canyon at dusk. The junior varsity, consisting of Carlos Chacon, Joe Vasquez, Ernie Salgado, Joe Castillo and Fred Gil, were walking in Deadman’s Canyon. Robbie Hurt and Dick Snider provided the cover, with Robbie still wondering how long he could stand being one-who-waits, enduring all the tension and stress without any of the release the others got when something happened. Dick Snider was telling him quite accurately how valuable his job was, and how he must be ready when the others needed him to charge to their rescue. But it was frustrating.

  The five junior varsity Barfers were sitting beside a dry creek bed which was six feet wide and no more than three feet deep. Ernie Salgado was on one end of the creek bed and Joe Castillo was carrying the sawed-off shotgun under his coat. The others were in a row except for Carlos Chacon, who was sitting across the gully facing them, with his legs hanging down. It was not only a quiet night but a very still one. There was scarcely a breeze and not much clicking of alien guides and bandits signaling with stones in the darkness.

  Across the little gully a huge pile of mesquite soared. The mesquite was nature shaped in the form of a reclining buffalo. It was on such nights that they liked to lollygag right there in bandit country and make cracks about fellow Barfers, or maybe about Manny Lopez, especially if he wasn’t around. Big Ugly—Joe Vasquez—was best at the wisecracks. If they were ragging Joe Castillo, who wasn’t known for his quick wit, he’d say things like: “Joe’s got a candle missing from his cake,” or, “His elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top,” or, “There’s a dot missing from his dice.” And then somebody would chime in with: “Yeah, there’s a brick missing from his retaining wall.”

  And though it wasn’t that funny, pretty soon they’d be lying there snuffling and giggling under a towering moon-swept sky, hoping the bandits wouldn’t hear them out there in the night.

  And then a newlywed like Carlos Chacon might say, “I gotta call my wife with a good story if we’re going to The Wing tonight.”

  And someone would invariably say, “She ain’t gonna be home, dummy. The U.S.S. Kittyhawk’s in port.”

  And then everybody would fall back down on the greasy clay trails, or onto dry mud cracked into shards, or right down on the rocks and cactus. When people were unbearably tense, some very lightweight jokes got very funny.

  Sometimes they’d just settle back on the eroded hillsides and watch flying insects the color of fire. And look at stellar light over Mexico. At dots hanging in the moonlit sky: nighthawks searching forever.

  Sometimes when they were too comfortable they’d discover they had snuggled down among some scorpions, or near an occasional rattlesnake so lethargic it wouldn’t even bother slithering away unless you landed in its nest—which happened once to Robbie Hurt, nearly giving him a heart attack on the spot.

  Sometimes they’d lie back and listen to voices singing mournfully from somewhere south of that imaginary line. It could make you want to cry if you were in the mood, the achingly lonely music coming from the squalor of the Mexican city. Unless you were Manny Lopez, who would just be off somewhere, pacing, pacing. Looking for action.

  On the night of March 23rd there by the dry creek bed with their legs hanging down in the gully, the darkness was not velvety black as yet. And it was so quiet after the giggling that someone asked old Fred Gil if he was going to ream out the tube for them again. He was always falling in shit, but for all the times he inadvertently sat or stepped in excrement, Fred Gil never once came out smelling like a rose.

  Ernie Salgado heard footsteps. He saw two shapes coming toward the huge hairy bush that looked like a reclining buffalo.

  All of the canyon brush was hollowed out because people nested there while traveling north. The two figures stopped by the buffalo brush and squatted down in the hollow nest to peer across the little gully at the covey of silent pollos sitting with their feet dangling. One of the figures was later identified as a heroin addict by the name of Morales. He was twenty-two years old, the same age as Carlos Chacon. And in silhouette Carlos Chacon was the first to see that the young stranger was carrying a pistol.

  The second figure was later identified as a man named Madrid, and he was carrying a knife with an eight-inch blade. Carlos Chacon made a motion to his partners across the gully. He pointed his finger like a gun and of course all sphincters slammed shut.

  Almost all the Barfers were carrying two guns by this time. Carlos Chacon had a two-inch Smith & Wesson in a shoulder holster and a two-inch Colt concealed in the small of his back. He began reaching very slowly toward the Colt, but the young man with the pistol stepped out from behind the buffalo brush and pointed his pistol and said, “Everybody, hands up! Give us your money or I’ll shoot!”

  The second bandit kept his knife low and jumped across the gully, circling behind the squatting Barfers. Ernie Salgado said to him, “Let me get my money for you.” Both bandits smelled like garbage.

  At this time the varsity wasn’t having much luck. They were on an arroyo overlooking Deadman’s Canyon and Manny Lopez was griping about what a quiet night it was and that with so little alien activity they probably wouldn’t be finding bandits. Renee Camacho remembered that Manny’s bitching was interrupted by one sound: KAPLOOM! The shotgun! And then PLOOM PLOOM PLOOM PLOOM. Then BOP BOP BOP BOP BOP BOP! And then all the muffled and unmuffled explosions ran together and it sounded like a battlefield.

  Everyone was running in circles, confused by the sounds of echoing gunfire, and Robbie Hurt and Dick Snider were having the usual fits and convulsions and adrenaline rush because they didn’t know what was happening. During all this a voice came screaming over the Handie-Talkie, a crackling voice interrupted by static.

  Then Robbie Hurt and Dick Snider were both screaming into their own radio, and finally heard the garbled message: “Two down! Two down!”

  And Dick Snider yelled, “Officers? Two officers down?”

  “Suspects! Two suspects down!” the voice cried.

  Thank God! But then: “Two suspects down! And officers! Two suspects down and two officers down!”

  Carlos Chacon would later say, “I could see the pistol in his hand. He was looking right at me when I went for the gun I kept in the small of my back. I thought I was dead.”

  Carlos had just started wearing a bulletproof vest. Several of them were wearing vests now. Nobody thought it was unmacho to wear a bulletproof vest anymore. And then Carlos Chacon had a fantasy. It was almost as real as the violent recurring dream, where the assailants are stabbing his sister in the stomach and the blood is jetting everywhere, and he takes the knife away and stabs the assailant in the throat and enjoys the spurt of blood.

  In his fantasy, time slowed down just as it had for Manny Lopez in the shooting of the Mexican immigration officer. Carlos Chacon had a slow-motion fantasy of a projectile leaving the bandit’s little pistol. The pistol was aimed at the face of Carlos Chacon, who, like the others, had been caught unaware with his feet dangling helplessly in the dry creek bed. Carlos could see the lead projectile cracking into his own face. He could see the slug breaking his jawbone. He watched the splinters leaping from his face. Splinters of lead. Splinters of bone. He actually heard the hissing gristle in his face tearing. He listened to the bone shatter. His blood splattered all over his friends. He thought: I hope it doesn’t hurt too much.

  Carlos Chacon believed that the others on the bandit’s side of the gully came out shooting an instant before he did, perhaps while he was fascinated with the gristle and tendons in his own face being ripped and torn bloody. Carlos also in that instant saw that the other bandit was carrying a two-foot machete. It proved to be a knife with an eight-inch blade, but as Carlos later said, “You see strange things out there in Deadman’s Canyon.”

  Joe Castillo had his long, fluttering, graceful hands clenched around the sawed-off shotgun
under his alien rags. Joe Castillo, ever since he had squatted beside his mentor Manny Lopez and seen a gun aimed at his face, had taken to arming himself rather well. In addition to the shotgun, Joe Castillo wore a gun in a shoulder holster. He carried another in a hip holster, and for good measure he wore a third revolver in an ankle holster. He wore bullet holders stuffed with extra ammo all around his belt. Even so, after this night he would exchange one of the revolvers for a 9mm pistol so that he could have eight in the magazine and one in the chamber. Joe Castillo offered an embarrassed smile when questioned about the arsenal. He would only say, in a masterpiece of understatement, “I’m sort a heavily armed.”

  It was probably Joe Castillo who fired first, with the shotgun under his coat. He had one thought: Carlos was in his line of fire sitting across the gully. Then he saw Carlos moving to his right. Then he noticed for the first time how vile it smelled in the gully, a dry creek that sometimes carried raw sewage from the Mexican side.

  He just stood up, and realizing that the action of the shotgun would probably get jammed by his clothing as it did on the pistol range, realizing that he probably had only one shot, he removed the safety.

  “It sounded real loud,” he said of that little click.

  He pointed the shotgun at the belly of the bandit holding the pistol and unleashed a fireball.

  Then it sounded to him like one long burst. First like an automatic weapon, then like one echoing explosion. And instantly there was the unforgettable smell of gunpowder which jetted in his nose and seemed to burn his brain. He felt the gunpowder clear to the base of his skull. And he was being hit in the face by lead fragments and muzzle blasts. One long explosion.