Carlos Chacon emptied a gun. Joe Vasquez emptied a gun. Joe Castillo loosed a shotgun round, and Fred Gil, who was standing closest to the bandit with the pistol—just a microsecond before the first explosion or a microsecond after—went for the bandit. Perhaps it was all the years of martial arts, perhaps not, but Fred Gil could clearly remember wanting to drive the bandit down to the ground. He did it just as the bandit was hit by the tremendous blast. And then Fred Gil was blown clear off the bandit’s body during that rattle of explosions and he was lying on the ground and the bandit was lying there on top of him, crumpled between his legs, and Fred Gil kept saying over and over to himself: Be cool be cool be cool be cool. DON’T GO INTO SHOCK!
Because he knew he was shot, but didn’t know where.
And during all this they were still shooting and Carlos Chacon thought he saw a gun in the hand of the second bandit (you see strange things out there) but they never found one and the second bandit began to run and then he began screaming “Aye! Aye! Ayeeeee!”
And through all this someone kept yelling, “Barf! Barf! Barf!” and the noise was deafening and then Joe Castillo clearly heard Fred Gil yelling, “I’m hit! I’m hit!”
Joe Castillo had tried to grab the bandit after he fired the shotgun blast and he felt a tremendous shock in his wrist when he reached for the bandit. And the first thing he did was kick the bandit who was lying on the ground. And after he kicked him he wanted to cry, not because he felt sorry for the bandit but because he was feeling excruciating pain, and he had to sit down and say, “It hurts! It hurts!”
And they were still firing, and yelling, “Barf! Barf! Barf!” And the second bandit was running in total panic by the creek, with Joe Vasquez and Carlos Chacon chasing and firing at him. And Carlos Chacon, clearly the Barfer with the most vivid fantasies, remembers another one at that moment: ducks! Plink the little duck, he told himself. Plink the little duck. And the second bandit, who was younger than the first, cried out, “Aye! Aye! Ayeeeee!” and fell in the cactus screaming.
Then Carlos was on him, kicking him, and Joe Vasquez was kicking him and he was still screaming. And Joe Castillo was yelling, “It hurts!” and Fred Gil was yelling, “I’m hit! I’m hit!” and Ernie Salgado ran up to Carlos and Joe Vasquez and screamed, “That’s enough!” because everyone had lost control, every shred of it.
Joe Castillo was flat on the ground, his wrist shot through and through. The bullet had nicked a nerve that supplies feeling to certain fingers. Those long, graceful, fluttering fingers would never again feel certain sensations. At first Joe Castillo thought he had shot himself. But he wondered how he could have done it with the shotgun. And why wasn’t his whole hand blown off if he’d somehow fired with one hand and reached in front of the muzzle? And God, it hurt!
By now the varsity had found them. Tony Puente came running up, squinting myopically without his glasses, dropping compresses all over the putrid, sewer-fouled gully, and Joe Castillo was moaning, “You don’t know shit about first aid! Gimme it! Put that surgical pad …”
But suddenly his fingers shot straight out at an angle, all by themselves! And then they curved into a claw, all by themselves! And he thought for sure he was going to cry, and started yelling, “It hurts! Oooooh, it hurts!”
Still, the oldest Barfer had not budged. Because he couldn’t. The bandit was lying across Fred Gil’s legs and he felt something like paralysis in his lower body. Fred Gil didn’t want to look at himself to see how badly he was hit but he couldn’t help looking at the body lying across him. The bandit was in pieces. His fingers were blown away and Fred Gil could see the glistening splinters of bone. Shards glinting in the moonlight. In addition to this, the bandit had suffered bullet wounds to the right shoulder, left lower chest, left side of the back, upper spine, left elbow, and two over the right clavicle. He was motionless and his clouded eyes stared at Fred Gil.
Unlike Joe Castillo, Fred Gil was not in much pain. He was numb. He thought maybe he was hit in the thigh, but still he would not look. Actually, the wound was much higher—in the hip, as it turned out. He was only feeling extraordinarily weak and he kept talking talking talking. He hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.
Then something happened that astounded Fred Gil. At first he thought he was slipping into shock and hallucinating. He saw Carlos Chacon come close. After assuring himself that Fred was not vitally wounded, Carlos leaned over the bandit. Fred Gil looked at the face of Carlos Chacon in the moonlight, at this young man only twenty-two years old. At those astonishingly expressive eyes. Eyes of a young man with a violent childhood and violent dreams.
Carlos leaned over the torn and bloody and ragged body of the bandit and began to grin. Fred Gil couldn’t take his eyes off Carlos. The very white lupine incisors glistened in the moonlight. Carlos Chacon reached slowly down and poked his finger in the open eye of the bandit. Still grinning wolfishly, he poked the eyeball a second time with the tip of his index finger. Then he looked up at Fred Gil like a character from Bram Stoker and said, “He’s deeeeeeeead!”
When Carlos got up and walked away, the bandit gurgled and a little foam spewed out his mouth. Carlos, assuming it was a death rattle, turned disgustedly to say, “What a pussy! Can’t even die like a bandit!”
Then it was definitely time to get the hell out, because people were pouring from the shacks in Colonia Libertad and someone was setting fire to the old tires on the hillside and rolling them down on their heads.
Manny Lopez arrived, yelling, “Barf Barf Barf!” to keep from getting shot as he ran headlong into the pandemonium. The sheriff’s helicopter was also zooming in with its props going WOP WOP WOP and blowing dust and debris all over them.
By now the second bandit was handcuffed and lying face down on the ground. He’d been shot through and through the left side of his neck, causing minor damage. He had what the Barfers thought was an interesting leg wound. A bullet had entered through the bottom of his shoe while he was running and traveled up the leg and out the shin-bone.
He was also shot in the other leg. The neck wound was from a shotgun pellet, and Manny Lopez, who looked about as rabid as one of the dogs that prowled the canyons, shone a light and saw the pellet protruding from the flesh of his neck. So he stood on the neck and said, “You shot my guys, you motherfucker!”
And while Manny was trying to see how loud the wounded bandit could scream, another miracle occurred in Deadman’s Canyon. The bandit who was lying across Fred Gil, a bandit literally blown to bits, spoke. He said, “Heeeeelp me!”
They couldn’t believe it. Carlos Chacon said, “He’s alive! You can’t kill them!”
When the sheriff’s helicopter, which looked like the old military bubble-tops, finally got landed on suitable ground, Manny Lopez was ministering to this bandit, trying to talk him into dying before they loaded him up. Manny was saying things like, “Fucker, you shot my guys! You cocksucker, you’re dying! You got a million holes in you! You’re bleeding to death!” Then Manny would look over his shoulder at the approaching sheriff’s deputies and slap the bandit, who couldn’t have felt a hammer blow, saying, “Listen to me, asshole! You’re dying! Goddamnit, hurry up!”
He was so shot up that a slug fell from his blasted body onto the hospital bed. But he didn’t die. He walked into court looking like utter catastrophe. He was in a body cast from the waist up and his shattered arm was raised and casted, with fingers gone, left there in Deadman’s Canyon for the dogs. He eventually got sentenced to a couple of years in jail and Carlos Chacon tried to get him to pose for a scrapbook picture.
The detectives weren’t thrilled about getting called out to these godforsaken canyons where they rarely had to venture before Dick Snider dreamed up this stupid BARF idea. They were heard that night to mumble things like: “You guys’re more trouble than you’re worth.”
And who could blame them? What with trying to protect the scene and recover evidence while a bunch of kids from Colonia Libertad were having a gre
at old time trying to set the gringos on fire with burning tires. And yelling things in English like: “Motherfuck you!”
The detectives’ investigation proved two things of interest that night: first, the bandit Morales did not have a real gun. His weapon was a starter’s pistol, and other bandits would notice that it was getting mighty risky to pull robberies with play guns these days. And secondly, it was probably Carlos Chacon shooting across the gully who wounded both Joe Castillo and Fred Gil. The wound of Joe Castillo was through and through with no slug found. The slug in Fred Gil was better left alone according to the surgeons, so they never recovered it. But everything indicated that the shooter was Carlos Chacon.
Fred Gil would shrug and jokingly began to call Carlos “Cop Killer.”
And Carlos would call him “Ironsides” or “Lead Bottom.”
But Joe Castillo wasn’t making jokes. He said that Carlos Chacon was trigger-happy and dangerous. His right hand would never be the same and Joe Castillo began to hate Carlos Chacon for shooting him.
Something that all the Barfers would begin to hate was about to happen that night. The San Diego newscasters would interrupt regular programming to make a breathless announcement: “Border shooting! Film at eleven!”
And of course ten wives went totally ape-shit and the phones at Southern substation were ringing off the hook and nobody could even tell them anything until everyone got in from the canyons. How the BARF wives would come to hate it, and come to hear it in their nightmares: “Border shooting! Film at eleven!”
The patrol cop driving the ambulance that night was Ken Kelly. They could hear the hoot of the siren and see the flash of lights far off in the darkness from where Ken had to park. When he finally ran down to the arroyo and into Deadman’s Canyon he found them lying everywhere. Manny Lopez was screaming up at the kids who were rolling the flaming tires, threatening to kill them all and cursing all the crooked lowlife scum-sucking Mexican cops who weren’t there to stop the kids.
Ken Kelly could plainly see that his BARF transfer was imminent.
Manny Lopez had a couple of things on his mind about then, like calling the wives of Fred Gil and Joe Castillo. Jan Gil was easy. She had a tongue as sharp as Manny’s and they had been a good match for each other at the off-duty Barf soirees.
When she answered the phone he said, “Hey, Jan, it’s Manny!”
And she said what everyone says at such moments. She said, “Is he dead?”
Then Manny Lopez said, “No no, he’s not dead! He got hurt is all. He’s okay!”
And then Manny Lopez tried to think of jokes, and pretty soon Jan Gil was laughing in relief as Manny was saying things like, “Goddamn, he’s heavy! How do you handle it? Does he get on top?”
And Jan Gil said, “I just do my best, Manny.”
Calling Joe Castillo’s wife, Dorothy, was another story. She was a shy little Mexican girl, the prettiest of the BARF wives. He had to be very straight with her.
Then Manny had someone else to talk to. Aside from Fred Gil, the only Barfer not to shoot was Ernie Salgado. Manny Lopez didn’t waste time. He confronted the tallest Barfer in front of the squad, and said, “Goddamnit, why didn’t you shoot?”
“There were people in my line of fire!” Ernie Salgado said.
“I think that’s bullshit,” Manny Lopez said. “I think anybody that works this squad better have the balls to shoot or he better work someplace else.”
So, in addition to very bad feelings between Carlos Chacon and Joe Castillo, there was something bad developing here between Ernie Salgado and Manny Lopez, the car-pool partners.
Fred Gil had many vivid memories about that night in March. He remembered how they did everything wrong when they tried to get four wounded men out of those canyons. First, they put Joe Castillo on a gurney. Then they put Fred Gil on top of him. And that hurt.
Then they couldn’t carry the gurney up those rocky slippery trails, so they tried to carry Fred Gil by the belt. And that hurt.
Pretty soon everyone stopped being solicitous and sympathizing with Fred because everyone was sliding and falling on sharp stones and cactus and complaining about Fred’s weight and those little Mexicans were still rolling those tires down on them, and Manny Lopez was threatening to kill every Mexican in Colonia Libertad and wishing he had a fucking bazooka! But all that was nothing compared to what was to come.
When they got to the helicopter, the sheriff’s deputies made the mistake of trying to load what they thought was a dying bandit first, but Manny’s right eyebrow blew clear off his head and he was literally foaming at the mouth when he screamed, “Get that fucker out a there. Get him OUT!”
Manny wasn’t doing Fred Gil any favors. What he didn’t know was that Fred Gil had acrophobia and didn’t like high places. Not one little bit. An airplane was okay, but flying in a litter on the outside of a helicopter?
“Get that bag a puke out a the litter!” Manny Lopez kept yelling, and Fred Gil, who was getting weaker by the minute, croaked, “It’s okay, Manny. I’ll go in the ambulance.”
“You’re going by helicopter. Get that fucker OUT!”
“But he’s dying, Manny,” Fred Gil argued.
“Fuck him!” Manny Lopez yelled.
“Oh heck,” Fred Gil said, using his customary epithets. “Goldang it.”
The worst was yet to come. Poor old Fred Gil was placed in the outside litter all right, and since it was cold and since he’d be flying for some minutes, they feared he might freeze. So they put him in a warm bag—a body bag. He hardly knew what was happening to him until he heard it, the most terrifying sound he’d ever heard in his life.
Worse than an armed bandit who smelled like garbage breathing in your face and saying, “Give me your money.” Worse than incoming and outgoing rockets in Da Nang. Worse than a drunken father saying, “You’ll never be anything but a mama’s boy!” Worse than all those sounds.
Fred Gil felt like one of those poor soggy tarantulas or scorpions that the Mexican kids jarred and sold to tourists. Once strong and venomous, the pathetic insects groped and pawed blindly, not for air but for freedom. They had all the air they needed in those jars but still they looked like they couldn’t breathe. Why did their dumb tarantula and scorpion brains convince them that they couldn’t breathe, just because their movements were …
Fred Gil couldn’t breathe! The worst sound of his life. He heard a zip. The ZZZIP! of a body bag. And he flashed to Nam. He went totally utterly completely bughouse.
He screamed: “WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT!”
“Wait for what?” Manny asked.
But poor old Fred didn’t know for what. He was so terrified and panicked that everything was all wrong—but he didn’t know why. And he couldn’t think fast enough to say anything at all except: “WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT!”
Manny Lopez, who had been talking with him all the way up the hills to keep him calm, figured that was it: he’d gone bonzo, some kind of shock or something.
Then Fred Gil—who couldn’t sit there and explain to all these dummies that he was absolutely in stark terror of being zipped up in a body bag because of someplace thousands of miles and several years away—said, “My vest my vest my vest! I can’t breathe!” And that was true enough because he was hyperventilating like crazy. So somebody opened up that freaking corpse bag to remove his bulletproof vest, and it hurt like hell but poor old Fred didn’t care.
And then Manny Lopez said, “There, is that better?”
But before Fred Gil could tell them how much better it was not to be zipped up inside that dead man’s bag, they did it again! ZZZZZZZZZIIIIIIIIP!
Only this time Fred shot past terror. Way past. The chopper took off.
“And my mind went on a little trip” is the way he told it.
Fred Gil had a Carlos Chacon-type fantasy, a Technicolor wide-screen hallucination complete with Dolby sound. He fantasized that he was outside his body and could see this poor cactus-stuck, hardball, worm-chewing, bandit-bust
ing, ball-clanging, hip-shot little bozo in a wire litter, hanging outside an old worn-out Italian helicopter, skimming over Deadman’s Canyon at about five hundred feet, and the wire basket detached itself. In slow motion it just slipped loose because those fools didn’t attach it right and why should they since they hadn’t done anything else right and he watched himself tumbling out of the sky, basket and all. Poor old Fred Gil, a raggedy hip-shot turd-in-a-basket, tumbling end over end down into the godforsaken canyon, maybe by some terrible quirk still alive when those miserable little kids rolled the hot burning tires down on top of his shot-up carcass.
But just then old Fred Gil came around from his little mind-prodding act. Because for real he could not breathe. He was five hundred feet above the canyons, and the rotors were causing such terrible turbulence that the body bag was snapping and popping in his face and his arms were pinned inside and the fluttering flap on the bag was sucking into his mouth! All because he hadn’t let them zip it all the way. Fred Gil was going to be the first cop in the history of San Diego, and maybe all of America, to be killed by a corpse bag!
He was starting to faint when they descended and slowed. They made it. To the wrong hospital. But Fred Gil didn’t care. They were on the ground. His face was fuchsia but he was alive. And the helicopter broke down just minutes after landing and they couldn’t even get it started.
Fred Gil looked at the stalled helicopter and said, “I’ve always been lucky,” to a nurse who thought he was nuts.
Another nurse thought he was an illegal alien. It was a natural mistake what with all his bloody alien rags and almost smelling like garbage himself and his wild-looking hair and not having shaved for a few days. She thought he was shot in the legs, so drenched was he by bandit blood.
When she started to undress him she discovered one of his guns, and screamed, “This wetback’s armed!”
Lines and Shadows Page 17
