Lines and Shadows

by Joseph Wambaugh

  But nobody else followed him. Not yet.

  “I used to feel real bad after I left,” Fred Gil said. “They sort a hung me out to dry. The others didn’t quit. Then I used to read about something they’d done and I’d feel real bad that I shoulda been there with them. I got real angry with myself for quitting.”

  Old Fred Gil—thirty-seven years of age, judo champ, Vietnam vet, Barf survivor with a bullet in his hip—he figured he’d finally proved the man right. He’d proved it to a father who hadn’t raised him. He had quit. Old Fred Gil wondered if he was a mama’s boy after all.

  Renee Camacho hadn’t gone home that night he shot one of Loco’s bandits. He had called Sharlynn and said, “I can’t come home just yet.”

  She said, “Renee, why don’t you come home and let’s talk about it.”

  “I just can’t,” he told her. “I just can’t come home.”

  She said she understood. She told him to come home when he was ready.

  “She was a pretty good wife,” he said. “A pretty good cop’s wife.”

  Renee Camacho drove to the home of a police friend who lived in El Cajon, but he never found satisfactory answers to all the questions he posed as he and his friend passed the entire night at a kitchen table.

  Renee Camacho told his friend: “I really felt like I was gonna get killed. And it scared me and here I shot somebody with the shotgun and I don’t know if I killed him and I feel good about it. And … and that’s not good! That’s the worst thing of all. And after I shot him, he went down and I ran up and I took out my thirty-eight and I wanted to find him and shoot him some more and I just wanted to kill him and now I have anger and awful guilty feelings about it and …”

  The friend had served as a Green Beret in Vietnam and tried to reassure Renee that his anger and guilt were normal. But the next burst of questions wasn’t quite so easy to deal with.

  Renee said, “But am I doing the right thing? Is this all worthwhile? Is this whole job we’re doing the right thing or the wrong thing? Am I on a macho trip or what? Should I just go back to being a regular cop where I’m sure that I’m doing the right thing? Is this worth it? Why am I out there doing these things?”

  Renee Camacho longed to feel pure remorse, but couldn’t. Anger kept getting in the way, and the fantasy of sticking his snub-nosed gun in the face of a man he shot, and firing five rounds.

  And then the boy tenor began asking himself the most difficult questions of all: Am I learning things about myself that I never should have learned? Who am I, really?

  It was on such a day, when all of life was out of sync and he felt like a record playing at the wrong speed, that one of his former friends from patrol passed him at the substation and said, “Nice job on the crook you brought in the other night. Guess he needed a transfusion after you beat the shit out a him. I’d be in the joint doing that to an arrestee, but I guess there ain’t no rules for the Barf hot dogs, is there?”

  Finally, Herbert Camacho looked at his tortured child during one of the trips to the barbershop, and said, “You must only do this job if you believe in it, Renee. You’ve helped people who were being hurt. But you must believe in what you’re doing or stop.”

  Renee Camacho adored this man, who was perhaps already secretly starting to die. Renee said to his wife: “My dad thinks I’m brave. I’m being brave for my dad.”

  He stayed. And then one fine night at summer’s end when they were actually on the proper side of the imaginary line, a group of three bandits tried to rob the junior varsity walking team with knives and clubs, and Renee Camacho, after the arrest went down, found himself running across the canyons after one of the robbers. Running hell-bent for the fence.

  There was no moon. They were both falling. The bandit hit the fence hole but did not flow through as bandits usually did. He snagged his pants on the wire. Renee dived through on top of him. The man was kicking and punching, and clawing and biting like a rabid coyote. The man, of course, smelled like death.

  Renee Camacho was yelling, “Barf barf barf barf, GODDAMNIT!” and punching at the bandit and missing and getting punched, and he got his gun out and the bandit smacked the gun sending it clattering into the rocks, and now Renee was himself snarling like a coyote and slamming his fists into the face of the smaller man, who was weakening. And suddenly a car pulled up on the dirt road and the men fighting hand-to-hand in the dirt were lit by headlight beams. Renee looked up and saw red and blue lights.

  And suddenly he realized where he was: over one hundred feet south of the imaginary line. Two car doors slammed and Renee jerked the bandit up and got the man’s neck in a choke hold and the robber started wheezing and gasping.

  Just as one of two Tijuana policemen said, “Let him go!”

  “I’m a San Diego police officer!” Renee Camacho yelled. “He just tried to rob me! He’s my prisoner!”

  The taller of the two said, “Let him go. He’ll come with us as our prisoner. You’re on Mexican land.”

  But Renee began backing slowly toward the fence, dragging his prisoner with him, holding the bandit around the neck.

  The Tijuana cops began looking at each other and advancing slowly, and there was no doubt this time on whose soil they stood.

  And Renee was using the bandit as a shield and he could only repeat with a mouth as dry as the Tijuana River: “Now, I’m a San Diego policeman! Now, I’m a policeman! You know that. You know that!”

  Of course the Tijuana policemen knew that, and knew that this San Diego policeman had also known Chuey Hernandez and Pedro Espindola were policemen when he helped shoot them full of holes. They knew all of this. And they moved ever closer and looked at each other again.

  To Renee they looked like soda pop interludes, or cattle prods in the nuts. They looked like tags on his toe. In Spanish. And Renee kept backing slowly, toward America. Going home.

  Just then Renee heard the fence rattling and thought he was surrounded. He heard footsteps padding up behind him! But it was Manny Lopez, who yelled, “Go call your supervisors if you have a problem! This man is our prisoner and we’re going back with him!”

  Renee Camacho looked at the waffling cops. And back at Manny. And picked up his gun from the ground. And back to Manny. And at the two cops, who were thinking about it.

  And he expected to hear it any second, the most horrifying words in the language of man: “¿Sabes qué?”

  Manny whispered in English: “If they draw, ice them.”

  The Tijuana cops did not draw. They stood silently by the fence and let the two Barfers drag their prisoner through the hole back to American soil, beating him into submission.

  Renee Camacho was soaked from his head to his crotch. They’d won another game. A game of inches. But in this lunatic game, the odds of winning were getting longer and longer and longer. And what if Manny was unconsciously saying the prayer of the compulsive gambler? Dear Lord, please let me … lose. They’d cash in with him!

  Manny Lopez told them a story about personal fear. He said that one night, for no apparent reason, after having been out of the field for a number of days, he was walking through the canyon wearing a brand-new bulletproof vest and even more heavily armed than usual, when he saw a large group of aliens rise up as though from the land itself. Manny said that there were fifty or more in the group and that suddenly they were just there. A few yards in front of him coming his way.

  Manny said that his knees began to tremble. He was wearing two pairs of pants like an alien, and his legs were buckling and shimmying so much he had to look down because he was afraid Tony Puente and Eddie Cervantes might see. He said he thought he was going a little crazy because of those shaking trembling buckling knees. He said that as the aliens trudged silently past, his legs began to steady themselves and he was able to continue. He said he never felt anything that bad again and could not figure out the why of it. He told them the story to illustrate that just because they felt overwhelming fear on a given night, it didn’t mean that they would
feel it every night.

  Ken Kelly said privately that it simply illustrated that Manny Lopez on occasion had a lucid moment. He was, by now, utterly convinced that the Barf sergeant was psychotic. But very soon Manny Lopez was going to be saying the same thing about Ken Kelly and they were going to have Ken’s head shrunk to prove it.

  The upshot of Manny’s story was that not a Barfer believed Manny Lopez. To a man they did not believe that their leader ever felt the emotion they knew as an average run-of-the-mill explosion of terror, and horror of being murdered. And this knowledge, more than everything else, instilled more fear. Fear of him.

  Renee Camacho said, “There was something about the man. He’d make you think, somehow he’ll get me if I cross him. Maybe not now, maybe later. Somehow. He’s an in-timidator. Manny the Intimidator. He’d make you look over your shoulder and think: What the hell’s this guy up to?”

  It was simple for Manny to deal with his protégé, Joe Castillo, even after disenchantment with Manny’s methods led the young cop to stop wearing gold chains and pinky rings and disco suits. When Joe Castillo once had a few too many in a local saloon and threatened to quit, Manny simply said, “Okay, you got it. I’ll have you back in patrol by tomorrow.”

  It might be music to half a dozen other ears in that bar, but to Joe Castillo it was a shell burst. The young cop said, “Who’d you get to replace me that fast?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Manny Lopez said. “Lots a guys wanna join BARF.”

  “But I been with you since the start!” Joe Castillo cried, and then several other boozy voices jumped in and said things like: “Hey, Manny, don’t you have any loyalty to your men?” And, “You can’t dump on Joe like that!” And so forth.

  Five minutes later Joe Castillo was vastly relieved that he was still a Barfer, and Manny had his arms around Joe and Renee, saying “I love you guys!”

  And Ken Kelly said, “I wonder what kind a background music oughtta be played behind this love story?”

  Maybe a suitable musical score could come from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as they trooped out to the canyons the next night, wondering if Manny Lopez had diddled their minds once again.

  The Barfers were getting just about goofy enough for kidnapping about then, and one afternoon before the sun went down, they did it. They were resting on the hill just over Deadman’s Canyon waiting for dark, and except for Manny, they weren’t in any hurry for it to come. Just then two urchins came toddling over the rise. One of them was about five years old and the other was maybe a year older. They were accompanied by a muddy, colorless, bag-of-bones little mutt.

  The six-year-old was a huero, fair-skinned with big gray eyes, and he strode right up to the group of pollos sprawled on the ground and said, “Where are you guys going?”

  “Los Angeles,” Manny Lopez answered.

  “You got a guide?” he asked, and of course all the Barfers were eye-rolling and poking each other and generally suppressing giggles, and Manny said, “No, we don’t.”

  And the kid replied, “We’ll take you to San Ysidro.”

  And now the Barfers were really busting a gut and Manny said, “How much?”

  And the little kid said, “A dime!” Which was no doubt the prearranged tariff the little wildcatters had decided upon. And after getting the dime they’d probably turn and run like hell with their mudball pooch back to Colonia Libertad.

  So Manny stood up and strolled over and looked down at the barefoot vagabonds with burrs and stickers in their hair, and clothes that might never have been washed, and their little dog that surely had never been washed, and Manny reached his hand slowly inside his jacket and got hold of the piece in his shoulder holster, and turned to the Barfers with his eyebrow all squiggled in place, and with a wicked little grin said to them: “¿Sabes qué?”

  And they simply exploded. Everybody was squealing and snuffling and cackling and howling and the little kids got very pissed off with this weird bunch of pollos laughing at them when they were trying to do serious business, and the oldest one very indignantly said to Manny: “Hey, cabrón, see this partner of mine? He’s a bad guy. You better give us the dime!”

  And Manny said, “Get the fuck out a here!”

  So the baby bandits did that. They got the fuck out of there. They retreated about ten paces, which was still within range of their skinny little arms, and they picked up a pile of stones with their grubby little hands, and the next thing the Barfers knew, the baby bandits were throwing stones at them. Point-blank.

  And the next thing the Barfers knew, the stones were bouncing off them!

  And Manny Lopez started screaming, “Hey, you little assholes, this ain’t funny no more! Knock it off!”

  But the baby bandits just kept it up. Bing! Bing! Bing! Stones came ricocheting off their shoulders and knees. The little bastards were deadly accurate. So Manny went thundering over to the mudball pooch just sitting there wagging his mud-caked tail and taking in all the action, and Manny grabbed the mutt before he could hustle away.

  “Knock it off, you fuckers!” Manny screamed. “Or I’ll kidnap your dog!”

  The little crooks were unstoppable. Manny got his answer: Bing! A stone came sailing through the air and skimmed off Manny’s balding bean and he screamed, “That is it!”

  And while the tiny bandits stood there wailing and crying, Manny Lopez started highballing it back to the cover team with the whining little mud hen in his arms and the Barfers tagging after him.

  One of the baby bandits cried, “Give us back our dog, you bastard!” and Manny yelled back, “This’ll teach you to rob helpless pollos, you little fuckers!”

  They were reduced to dognapping. Eddie Cervantes took the pooch home and called him Migra for the border cops. But happy endings weren’t in the cards, it seemed, for any creatures of the canyons, The little dog just couldn’t adjust to baths and flea powder and nutritious chow. He moped around and didn’t like America much at all. One day he took off. Heading south. Rehabilitation just wasn’t as easy as some folks thought.

  And once, in Deadman’s Canyon a clutch of bandits approached the entire group, varsity and junior varsity alike. They didn’t choose the small men of the varsity for some reason. They walked right past Eddie Cervantes and Tony Puente and Manny Lopez and went at the bigger men, Carlos Chacon and Ernie Salgado, and tried them with a knife. The Barfers of course all jumped on the robbers and beat the crap out of them and threw them down and disarmed them and handcuffed them. But suddenly a group of thugs poured out of the shacks on the hillside, heaving rocks down on the Barfers as the bandits screamed, “¡Socios! Help!” to their pals.

  Then a strange thing happened. Another significant crowd of people came out of their shacks. Not bandits, not addicts, not smugglers. Just people. Just the poor people of Colonia Libertad. And they started yelling at the thugs to stop throwing rocks. In fact they became hostile to the thugs, and the rock throwing stopped.

  Then a very strange thing happened. The crowd of people, the poor people of the border, began hollering things at the Barfers. They started yelling, “Shoot them! Put them in jail! Drive them away forever! And we thank you!”

  They knew who the Barfers were, for sure. It was amazing. Then they started putting their hands together. Then they began applauding! There were lots of weird things happening in these canyons but this was one of the weirdest to the beleaguered group of cops. In this strangest of all amphitheaters, with the Barfers and the bandits performing on the floor of Deadman’s Canyon and the people of Mexico up on the hillsides, they were applauded.

  But of course, being a cynic like most cops, Tony Puente had to undercut it by saying, “Maybe that’s just a rival bandit family glad we’re getting rid a competition.”

  There were occasions when Barfers saw things that weren’t there. One night Ernie Salgado was screaming at everyone to watch out for a fleeing bandit who was hiding in a bush. Everyone surrounded the bush. There was no bandit. It was like Carlos Chacon se
eing a gun that wasn’t there. You see phantom shapes in the canyons at night. Sometimes if you’re not careful you can see a phantom in the daytime.

  You might just go to Thirty-one Flavors for a butterscotch sundae and grab a number from the ticket machine because there’s a big crowd waiting for ice cream, and maybe you’re thinking that it’s just two hours from the time you have to report to lineup for this little appointment with some murderers in the canyons. And the kid calling out the number for service is talking to you and you don’t notice and he says, “Your number’s up!”

  And you’re suddenly panting and sweating ice drops, and the kid’s saying something like: “What’ll ya have? Hot fudge? Strawberry ice?”

  Or how about a double scoop of hot lead? How about icing down your tonsils with some cold steel? The kid behind the counter becomes a leering death’s-head bandit. And you can smell the rotting flesh. You leave the store without your butterscotch sundae. Trembling.

  You start to think you’re crazy, but if you try to tell Manny he’ll just call you a pussy and say, “What the hell, Jimmy Carter saw a killer rabbit, and he’s only the fucking President.”

  On the outskirts of just about any city in America is a place like National City, just a few minutes from uptown San Diego. Nasty City, the residents call it. It’s the kind of place that reassures you if you’ve been getting paranoid about America’s impotence. When you begin to think that the Cuban Coast Guard might just decide to capture everything south of Illinois.

  National City will take care of that for you if you just walk into any saloon on the boulevard, where you’ll notice that people can file steel on their whiskers and that most of them resemble Willie Nelson or Johnny Cash. If you’re feeling suicidal, you don’t have to do anything terribly stupid like dumping on the U.S. of A. Just try poor-mouthing the San Diego Chicken.

  If you watch and listen to the image makers and communicators in the media centers of New York, Washington and Hollywood, you can get a crazy head from an impression of America gone soft. But just travel to the outskirts of the big city and discover that it hasn’t all gone the way of mud flaps and running boards.