Lines and Shadows

by Joseph Wambaugh

  While Loco was at the hospital, he made a statement to one of the Barfers which everyone thought was unintentionally hilarious. Loco said, “Just because you got me, don’t think it’s going to stop. Tell Lopez he can’t stop it.”

  The Barfers got to release quite a bit of stress and tension when they heard about that one. It was the funniest thing they’d heard lately.

  Someone said, “Did you tell the dumb bastard that Manny Lopez doesn’t give a shit if they murder every pollo from here to Yucatan? Did you tell the dumb bastard that Manny’s already on the phone with a press release? Did you tell him Manny never wants it to end?”

  A thing they discovered then was that they had been mistaken when they thought that bandits smelled like garbage. It became clear in the substation when Manny was pointing at the ulcerous needle marks and pustules on the arms of a bandit junkie brought in by the junior varsity. This bandit was horrible to look at, with a low feral forehead and mucus-clogged cavernous nostrils, with mossy scattered teeth and rotting white gum tissue. He had to cough balls of rusty phlegm every few minutes and they could look at the yellow fingernails and drum-tight jaundiced flesh and imagine fly’s eggs. He smelled deathly.

  Then Manny accidentally poked one of the flaming needle abscesses and the abscess popped and pus shot all over him. The smell of putrefied gas and decay filled the room. That’s what bandits smelled like. In that so much of the tissue of their bodies was infected and abscessed, they smelled of putrefaction. Flesh dying or dead.

  So now there was another little nightmarish notion. As Manny Lopez led them toward the next headline, they could do a little mind fucking with this brand-new idea: Bandits even smelled like death. Bandits smelled like murder.

  And there was something else to contend with, something crazy and confusing that night. Manny Lopez was sitting there chatty and cheerful, getting ready for the reporters. Eddie Cervantes, Tony Puente and Renee Camacho were bumping into things, trying to sort out all kinds of emotions, having just shot people and nearly been shot after having witnessed the incredible horrifying moment when Manny vanished. In short, they were responding to enormous stress in a normal fashion. But Manny Lopez looked as though he’d just been to a good football game and his team had kicked a field goal, at the gun.

  His response to all of this wasn’t human, they said. And worse than that, they were starting to believe that somehow the bastard was invulnerable. They began to get nightmarish ideas that they were all going to be murdered and there he’d be, chatty and cheerful, like he’d got the date with the homecoming queen.

  It was pretty hard for some of them to admit it, given the demands of Mexican machismo, but despite claims to the contrary it was latent in every utterance concerning Manny Lopez from that night on. They didn’t know why for sure, but they came to fear him. Not the way they feared murder, but real fear nonetheless.

  There was yet another mind bender on the night Manny vanished, something to fry your brain over. The way it looked down there in the Mexican gully. Loco and Manny, the two of them. The same height and weight, born just days of each other. Separated in life by an imaginary line. Sanchez and Lopez. Under a Mexican sky: thrashing, moaning, cursing each other in the same language. Looking like twins in the darkness, twin silhouettes. Forcing you to think, what if Sanchez had been born north and Lopez south of a shadowy line. Would it still have ended like this? Was a choice made somewhere? Or was it all decreed by the Drawer of Imaginary Lines?

  EXORCISM

  ANXIETY DREAMS ARE RAMPANT AMONG POLICE OFFICERS. In the dreams the cop is shooting at a gunman who refuses to die or fall or even drop his gun. The cop keeps firing but the bullets have no effect. However, very few cops have the dream come to life.

  On the night of Loco’s capture, Renee Camacho had fired the shotgun twice at a bandit who was aiming a gun at him. The bandit dropped but got up and pointed it again. Renee fired a third time, and then fired a fourth when the man turned and ran.

  It was disturbing, but not as disturbing as what Renee Camacho felt when he heard that the man he shot was alive in a Tijuana hospital. He felt profound disappointment. Then fear for himself for feeling such disappointment.

  “What’s happening to me?” he asked his father, friend and confidant, Herbert Camacho.

  “Renee, I know you think it’s not right for a policeman to have such feelings,” his father said as they shared a beer in his little barbershop at Thirteenth and Market Streets.

  “I’ve never been in a situation like this, Dad!” Renee Camacho’s tenor voice quivered even as he recounted the moment.

  “You’re doing a very different kind of police work, mi hijo,” the barber told Renee, his only child except for an orphaned nephew the Camachos had raised as their own.

  “But I was sorry he lived!” Renee said. “Next thing you know, I’ll kill a bandit who’s only reaching to scratch an itch!”

  Herbert Camacho, who was perhaps already aware of a cancer which would kill him, said, “If these feelings make you shoot too soon, I’d rather have it that way. I’d rather have you kill someone and be wrong than hesitate and be killed.”

  Distilled to cop language: Better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.

  Renee had always been a lad quick to smile and be happy, but throughout the many troubled conversations he had with his father, there was seldom mentioned the alternative. The alternative was so simple and so complicated that not a Barfer could manage it.

  The alternative was to walk up to Manny Lopez and say, “I quit. I’ve had enough. I want to go back to uniformed patrol.” Period.

  It was sacrilege, a breach of the machismo code of both cops and Mexicans, and in this way they were very close to being real Mexicans.

  But there was someone who might have been thinking of it before any of them, that is, thinking of a way to deal with it before it happened. Manny Lopez began badmouthing the young cop who had left the squad after the ninety-day moratorium, which now seemed a generation ago. He said that cop was a quitter. He told them that anyone who quit BARF would quit anything, any challenge for the rest of his life. He told them how they’d hate themselves and never be worth a damn if they quit.

  There was not as yet much talk among themselves about fear. Only about those fears that it was possible to discuss, those that didn’t violate the code. For instance, Eddie Cervantes often talked about the rampant disease among bandits: hepatitis, venereal disease, tuberculosis, the overwhelming smell of decaying flesh and what it implied.

  “I’m scared,” he would say. But then would quickly add: “I mean, I’m scared to go home and kiss my kids.”

  Other little things were happening. When they’d go to the range to practice with the shotgun, Barfers who had previously been good shots began to experience difficulties with accuracy and loading. They would line up in a semicircle and fire on multiple targets with shotguns and revolvers, and the lead shavings would jump from the cylinders right into the next shooter’s face and the gunpowder would surge into the nostrils as Manny Lopez yelled target numbers to shoot.

  Robbie Hurt, who was right-handed, had a dominant left eye and they belatedly discovered that he could hardly shoot a shotgun at all, which wasn’t comforting. Ernie Salgado, who could, kept screwing up, and Manny Lopez started yelling at him. Renee Camacho by this time could hardly move, he had so many bullets stashed all over his goddamn body. He was nearly as much of a walking armory as Joe Castillo. And Joe had a dark secret he was not sharing with any human being. It was the same secret that Renee Camacho and Ernie Salgado and Eddie Cervantes and Fred Gil were also keeping to themselves. The secret was that they couldn’t shake a feeling of doom. Each one had it and thought he was the only one who did.

  They needed a murder hospice: We’re here to prepare you for a man who will appear in the darkness like a ghost. He will smell like death….

  Renee Camacho by now was always looking at his wife’s pregnant stomach and wondering what their child would look like
. He’d break into a sweat when a hot shiver swept over him. Then things started to happen: the sky did look bluer. Grass did look greener!

  Joe Castillo kept having a similar feeling. I want to enjoy life. I want to be alive. And because he wanted it so badly, he began drinking and carousing all the more and treating himself more shabbily. “I walked around not giving a shit,” is how he put it.

  They all started to have that feeling. I don’t give a damn. Who cares? What’s any of it worth? They all began feeling like a minority within a minority within a minority.

  They didn’t want any part of ordinary police chores. When they were assigned to a policing detail for a Mexican holiday, they resented it. “Why us? Why do we have to do it?”

  Manny Lopez said, “Because you’re Mexicans, you dumb fuckers!”

  They felt so isolated, so elite (We who are about to die …) that they isolated themselves and acted elite. Whether or not the patrol cops resented the way they looked, dressed, behaved, their perception was that they were objects of resentment and jealousy. The homicide detectives clearly resented them, since homicide detectives quite understandably didn’t care to spend their nights in those hills because these vigilantes were shooting the canyons to pieces. Almost a law unto themselves, they remained the darlings and pets of the media and politicians—The Last of The Gunslingers.

  Once Fred Gil tried to make a stab at the old hardball, merciless kind of ribbing they used to do when BARF was new, when they were young, about a century ago. He found a pair of glasses and plastic teeth left over from a Halloween costume and he made himself up like Charlie Chan but, according to Manny Lopez, looked more like a Filipino bookmaker, so Manny gave a yell to Carlos Chacon, who was married to a Filipino girl.

  Manny said, “Hey, Carlos, your brother-in-law’s here!”

  And sure enough Carlos bought it, and came down the hall wondering what the hell his brother-in-law was …

  Then Carlos was looking at old Fred Gil in buckteeth and glasses with his eyes pulled back with Scotch tape, and Carlos bared his wolfish incisors, and his Rasputin eyes popped and he screamed, “FUCK YOU, GIL!”

  And poor old Fred Gil and all the others began to figure out that they didn’t even know themselves anymore, and much of the fun and fellowship was gone forever.

  They started to come to work looking like something that fell off a boxcar, or was pushed off by a railroad bull. They’d work in their yards or wash their cars or haul fertilizer or whatever, and they’d come to work. Rank. Unshaven. Eddie Cervantes, the gung-ho Marine reservist, let his hair grow way past the Halls of Montezuma and even stopped going to reserve meetings.

  They’d tell their wives and friends, and fellow cops who worked patrol and detectives, that they had to dress and look and smell like that. That out in the canyons they had to be aliens. That their performances might make the difference in whether they lived or died. Then they’d look at some ex-partner who had to wear a police uniform every day and follow rules of conduct suitable to the department and the city and the state and the U.S.A., and they’d say, “Aw, fuck it! How would you know?” The implication being that some cop brother who didn’t work BARF was, in the final analysis, the same as a lizard-shit civilian.

  All of their paranoia, a hundred times more potent than ordinary police paranoia, was realized when Joe Vasquez went uptown to central headquarters on some errand for Manny Lopez, and was challenged by a startled uniformed cop who took one look at the scruffy, rank, raggedy-ass canyon crawler with a bulge under his shirt and drew down on him, making Big Ugly grab some air and yell, “Hold it hold it hold it! I’m a cop, goddamnit!”

  Did it prove to them that Big Ugly and the rest of them had terrific wardrobes? Alas, it only convinced them they had nothing in common with their former peer group, and the steel ratchets tightened around this beleaguered little group and they turned inward.

  And then in would come Manny Lopez, fresh from a little speech to some students at San Diego State, and his thinning hair would be blow-dried and styled and he’d be still all excited, with his gold religious medal gleaming and his pinky ring sparkling and his disco duds immaculate. And he’d smell of Jade East or Brut or something, and start telling them about this little twenty-three-year-old gerbil that kept throwing her goddamn phone number at him, asking him if Gunslingers wear bikini briefs, because she was doing this survey.

  And Manny, with a Santa Fe Corona Grande stuffed in his teeth, would be giving them his impish grin, and then someone, usually Eddie Cervantes, would say, “How ya gonna walk tonight?”

  And Manny would say, “Whaddaya mean?”

  And Eddie Cervantes would look at Manny with those sad, down-turned eyes and say, “Well, we might get a few bandits to hit on us. But not unless you put on a wig.”

  “A wig? Whaddaya talking about?”

  “Well, you ain’t gonna pass for an alien smelling like an uptown whore, but maybe with a wig they might try to rape you.”

  And then Ernie Salgado, who by now also despised Manny Lopez, might say, “Hey, Manny, when do we get to go to a luncheon?”

  Manny found himself more and more on the defensive, so he’d say, “I told you a million times, come with me anytime! Remind me when ya wanna go. Remind me next time, fuckers!”

  Manny Lopez was nobody’s fool. He was aware of the growing envy and resentment of him from the outside and within his own squad. He discussed it with superiors like Dick Snider, who by now was under strict orders to remain an ordinary uniformed watch commander and leave this BARF business to Manny.

  Manny Lopez had lots of opinions about Mexican-American cops, and when he expressed them, it was like one of his briefings. He pointed his finger like a gun: “There are minority groups and there are minority groups,” Manny Lopez reasoned. “The black cops speak as one. They intimidate. Not the Mexicans. We’re like fucking Arabs, always squabbling among ourselves. Mexicans’re aggressive policemen, very eager to please the whites, but Mexicans aren’t raised to cherish academic things, so they don’t tend to do well on written civil service exams. And since they’re not good communicators, they don’t do well on oral exams either. They become frustrated. They can accept a white guy making sergeant, or even a black guy. Just being a cop is stressful enough, but being a Mexican cop with all these problems? And if a Mexican cop like me just happens to be a good public speaker? They’ll never forgive you! And here I was the head a the whole goddamn police association! Mexicans’re the most jealous motherfuckers alive and that’s what I had to contend with in my own squad. I got so I hated to come to work, not because a bandits, but because of all the nasty looks and bitching about my publicity. I tried to give them credit. I didn’t write the fucking stories!”

  One day Manny Lopez, while off duty, happened upon a traffic accident and pulled a woman from a flaming car. He ended up in the newspapers once again. He came to work like Roberto Duran to a prizefight. He roared in and threw the newspaper on the table, saying, “Okay, fuckers, who wants to be first to start bitching about me stealing the glory WHEN I’M ALONE IN MY OWN GODDAMN NEIGHBORHOOD IN MY OWN GODDAMN CAR ON MY OWN GODDAMN TIME?”

  It all started reminding people of the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, where the gold prospectors start out as bosom buddies but pretty soon they’re watching each other like rattlesnakes. And it even got to that.

  Carlos Chacon took to walking behind Joe Castillo, always keeping someone between them when they were out in the canyons at night. Joe had made too many comments about Carlos having shot him, and about how Carlos should be shot so he might learn what it feels like. And after he had a few drinks he’d say it to Carlos, and he wasn’t joking.

  It had finally come down to the last reel of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. They were starting to fear each other more than the bandits.

  There wasn’t a wife who didn’t want her husband to quit. There wasn’t a marriage not suffering under the strain of it. But most of the Barfers were responding true to the code
of machismo; they were toughing it out with the help of the greatest ally a macho young cop ever had, booze. Occasionally one of them would fall in love for a few weeks, or so they were convinced during this loony period of their lives.

  And some of the camp followers who came looking for The Last of The Gunslingers were gems. There was one they called The Snake who was a reject groupie from another police department. She came to San Diego looking for greener pastures and a new bunch of cops. She was about thirty years old and wore cat’s-eye glasses twenty years after everyone but the actors on Saturday Night Live. The glasses kept sliding off her nose so she was always looking at you over the top of them, but she had a great body. She lurked in those bars that cashed payroll checks for cops. When she first started dating San Diego policemen, she had only two tattoos: one was a bunch of roses on her ass and the other was her kid’s name on her belly. Then she fell for a motor cop and had a San Diego Police Department badge tattooed on the tender flesh of her upper thigh.

  The first Barfer to go home with The Snake was dubbed The Reptile Curator by the others. He found the motor cop’s uniforms hanging in her bedroom and it made him nervous. The motor cop was a supervisor. The motor cop wore very big uniforms (We who are about to die …).

  Just when the Barfers started to think that The Snake had no redeeming qualities, they learned of some charitable work she did. It seemed that she worked in a county home for the elderly, and she would let the codgers “touch” her, because it made them feel younger, she said. In fact, she was discovered jerking off the old coots, but nobody complained. It beat the hell out of Geritol any day.

  There were also Barf groupies from solid professional backgrounds. There were nurses who worked at free clinics near the border: white, middle-class, educated. The Barfers made themselves especially larger than life with the nurses. And there were schoolteachers, also white and middle-class, just out of graduate school and looking like commencement night at Brigham Young. All clean-cut and eager.