Lines and Shadows (1984)

by Wambaugh, Jospeh

  It was the first time he had had a date with another woman since his marriage. He was suffering what the cops called the Secret Service Syndrome. He was looking all around the theater for someone who might know Yolie. He was a wreck and was trying to work out an alibi instead of watching the show, which had cost him plenty. He couldn't very well tell a spy she was his sister, could he? He didn't have his eyes on the stage for three minutes at a time. He decided never to do that again.

  Robbie was feeling so guilty that he ran right out and bought two more tickets to The Wiz. The seats were even more expensive. He took Yolie, and when they got to the part where Dorothy and her dog go to Emerald City and the Wiz sings his solo, Robbie said, "Wait till you hear this part! This guy can really."

  And he just hung there in mid-sentence with his mouth agape. And sure enough, Yolie said, "How do you know?"

  "I been reading about it," Robbie said. "It's in all the papers!"

  It was too complicated, so he decided not to continue this. He wasn't cut out for it. He wasn't sure he was in love with the bartender anyway, except he was absolutely sure of it whenever he was with her, because whenever he was with her he'd sit and guzzle a pint or two, and it made his romance glow with a hard gemlike flame, or whatever.

  Robbie was driving a 260Z Datsun at that time. It was a hot car, but he wanted a Porsche. The young man had expensive tastes. Once he had to have the car pulled out of the mud near Monument Park when he was there at three o'clock in the morning telling a wide-eyed little lollypop all about Gunslinging in No-Man's-Land. Another night when he was leaving his lady bartender, he was caught on a flooded road after a heavy rain and had to say adieu to the Barf squad for nearly two weeks because he almost took down a telephone pole on San Ysidro Boulevard. He woke up in the hospital, where he spent the next ten days, but after the gash on his head healed up and the eye started working again, he was ready for BARF. And more drinking. He was also trying to be as macho as any Mexican cop.

  For the first time his wife started criticizing the boozing. It made him cranky. "You won't drink with me," he said. "We get so little time together and you won't even sit and talk and have a taste. You make me go out to do it. It's not my fault."

  And then, if Yolie would go off and cry or something, Robbie would go banging out the door yelling, "Okay, you don't wanna have a good time. I'm going to The Anchor Inn!"

  And he did the right thing with the insurance money he got from the totaled Datsun. He bought the Porsche 924 he'd always dreamed of. It was much faster.

  Yolie Hurt decided that it was time to have a life of her own. She liked to dance and he didn't. He liked to drink and she didn't. She worked for a company that manufactured contact lenses, and she made some friends there. She wanted him to meet them. He tried a time or two. He'd sit and listen to them and wonder where they were really coming from, these lizard-shit civilians. And what did they know about anything?

  Robbie Hurt was not just a member of a minority group. He was a minority within a minority within a minority. An outsider within an elite force within a police force. He started to think he had nothing in common with any civilians, Yolie included.

  One night he got home at 4:00 A. M. and said he'd worked late. He'd parked his car under the lights in front of The Anchor Inn, unconsciously hoping she'd see it, since they lived nearby. She had. She accused him. He said, "Well, you caught me. So let's call it a day. I don't want you anymore." Then for good measure, he said what he knew was a bald-faced lie. He said, "Besides, I think you're screwing around, you and your girl friends from work. So why shouldn't I?"

  She slapped him. He slapped her back, the only time he had ever struck her. She cried for days. He felt like a low-down dog. He had to get out of this before it killed him. He moved out. He moved back. He couldn't understand what was happening inside his head. The move back was halfhearted.

  Robbie Hurt was getting macho, very macho. He demanded a swimming pool. She couldn't swim. He had to have a swimming pool to be happy. He wanted dogs and got them, a Doberman and a Labrador. It took her two days to clean up after those monsters. She worked ten hours a day at a good job as a lab tech supervisor, but there was never enough money for him. She was losing so much weight she was looking like a half-starved alien. The other wives noticed it at the many Barf parties Robbie threw at their house.

  Yolie noted that Manny Lopez had to show who was boss even at the parties. If someone started hitting the bottle, Manny would hit it harder. Once he outdrank everyone and spent the night at Robbie's house on the bathroom floor. Manny Lopez would not let himself be bested by his macho cops, not even at a party.

  And Yolie listened to the merciless wisecracks these Barfers directed toward each other. She knew that Robbie was getting more sensitive than he'd ever been about ethnic jokes.

  "You can't be on a walking team, Robbie. Who'd rob a spade? It's the other way around."

  Or, "Whaddaya call two brothers in a twelve-room house? Burglars!"

  But if Robbie was obviously offended by something, the Barfers would just say, "Go pout, Robbie. Christ, you remind me a my wife!"

  Yolie recalled those days with Robbie, saying, "I hope I never know anybody as well as I know him. Not as long as I live. It's like having a twin. I knew just how he was going to react to everything."

  Of all the Barfers, she liked Big Ugly, Joe Vasquez, the best. She admired the way he was devoted to his wife and lived a quiet life. And since they too were childless, she liked to talk with Joe and his wife, Vilma, about adopting children.

  Then Robbie's running got so blatant that it was apparent he wanted to get caught. He wouldn't bother to clean the makeup off his clothes:

  He'd actually started giving his phone number to Barf groupies, who would call and hang up when Yolie would say, "This is his wife. Can I take a message?"

  One called back to say how sorry she was, because Robbie had sworn he was single. On weeknights Yolie would always get these calls and hang-ups.

  One girl called and said how sorry she was, but Robbie needed lots of sympathy, since he felt bad about being black, and the caller, being white, could help him.

  Another said she was a student at San Diego State and knew Robbie was married, but she was desperate to talk to Yolie because Robbie was lying and cheating. Not on Yolie, but on the student.

  Yolie Hurt by now was getting as crazy as a Barfer in the canyons. She made a date to meet this distraught student and was surprised to see that she was a pretty black girl. They met in a Cantonese restaurant and Yolie sat through a tearful lunch discussing Robbie. While they were talking, Robbie strolled in the door looking like a bandit about thirty seconds after Manny Lopez says "Sabes que?"

  There they were: Robbie, his girl friend, and his wife. The girl begged Robbie not to lie and cheat on her anymore. Yolie, for the first time, started getting her head straight. She simply said, "There's only one thing for us to do. We should make a soap opera out a this."

  And that was that. The marriage was, for all intents, finished. They didn't get a lawyer. They did their own divorce. She gave him everything.

  "I'd spoiled him all the way," she said. "No sense stopping."

  One night Robbie was pacing on a hillside by the Chevy Suburban with Ken Kelly. They both seethed with frustration because they'd heard three gunshots off in Spring Canyon and could not reach the walking teams by radio for nearly thirty minutes, during which time they both had their GI tracts eaten full of holes by stomach acid until they found out the shots were not fired at or by Barfers. On this night Robbie slipped and fell down a hill, spraining his ankle. He wore a temporary cast for a few days, and when he hobbled into a cops' bar on crutches, there happened to be a clutch of groupies drinking with some detectives and patrol cops.

  Someone pointed out the arrival of the Gunslingers, one of whom was on crutches, and the next thing Robbie Hurt knew, he was regaling three wide-eyed lollypops with a story as to how he got his "wound."

  "It's a jungle o
ut there, ladies!" he found himself saying. "Yes, we had to shoot a few bandits tonight. And I got hurt chasing one who almost escaped back onto Mexican soil."

  And so forth. The astonishing thing was that he was starting to believe it. It was amazing what it could do to your head, this job. He tried to stop his own mouth but couldn't. They were gathered around him. They admired him. No, they worshiped him.

  Ken Kelly said, "It was like having something very special in your back pocket. I could pull it out when I needed it. Robbie Hurt pulled it out all the time."

  Robbie never stopped calling Yolie for sisterly advice. She was the only person he could talk to, even after the marriage was over. He said that his ex-wife was the finest human being he had ever known in his whole life. He always said he should have cleaned up his act and saved the marriage. He said the loneliness after they parted made him think of suicide. He said he wept out of loneliness.

  He said all of this, but there was something he was up against that was so seductive, so irresistible, so overpowering that he couldn't cope. He was up against something that had overwhelmed many a man older and wiser than Robbie Hurt. This something was a Bitch. And the sinister Bitch had a name. She was called Celebrity.

  Chapter THIRTEEN

  LINES AND SHADOWS

  THE BARFERS WERE BECOMING CONSUMED BY THE PUBLICITY blitz. They were spending their time giving interviews (that is, Manny Lopez was) and speeches (also handled by Manny) and the others were starting to feel like the character actor who never gets the girl. Some of them, Eddie Cervantes especially, were dying to become leading men.

  "Hey, I can't help it if they wanted me at the Rotary luncheon," Manny Lopez would say defensively. "Listen, fuckers, you're free to make speeches or go on television or hire press agents if you want. Come with me next time."

  But they never did, except once when Tony Puente tagged along to a Kiwanis speech. He was awed by the way Manny played to the audience. Tony became convinced that Manny could become police chief, or mayor of San Diego, or governor of California, for chrissake. Dick Snider may have dreamed up the idea, but BARF was Manny's baby. He shaped it, he sold it, he represented it, and if it ever died it would be he who killed it.

  Eddie and the others might bitch and complain all they wanted about Manny getting the publicity, but a few of them had to concede that none of them could begin to do what Manny could.

  Someone said, "Imagine Joe Castillo or Big Ugly having to address the Rotary Club? Sure. Like pulling teeth. Your own."

  Manny had natural gifts. You only had to watch him sometime, up there in his disco suit and gold chains, the witticisms tumbling out of his impish, gap-toothed mouth, his pseudo-Asian eyes darting around the room to lock in on every chick short of menopause, his droopy moustache jumping under that pseudo-Armenian nose, and that eyebrow squiggling and crawling up his forehead into a perfect question mark. As he pointed his finger like a gun and told them how he drew one from the shoulder holster and one from the belt and smoked them down in Deadman's Canyon.

  He could make them gasp or make them laugh as he chose. All you could hear was the click of ballpoint pens as local politicians started making notes about getting this little hardball son of a bitch on the campaign committee. There weren't any movie stars in San Diego and only a few big sports stars. And there sure as hell wasn't a genuine mythic hero before this dude came along. Who cared if he was a Republican or a Democrat? This freaking Mexican was the last of the Gunslingers!

  In April their activity report showed that Manny was spending his thirtieth birthday re-creating bandit busting in the canyons for various television crews. The Barfers were in fact actors now, in more ways than one. But an actor better by God get in proper character when he's doing real-life bandit busting or somebody might get hurt. It was on their minds, but except for Eddie Cervantes and sometimes Ernie Salgado, they didn't argue very much with Manny Lopez about what made copy and what made sense.

  Once they were in character, back to playing the pollo parts, a smuggler actually told them there was very little bandit activity in the hills these days because of one Sergeant Manny Lopez and his San Diego cops who were scaring the hell out of everybody.

  When things got slow out there on warm spring nights, the other Barfers were grateful for the respite. It was on such nights that they liked to lie on a hilltop and listen to the music from the Mexican side, and crack jokes and try to get back some of the camaraderie they were losing as they came to fear each other's guns and Manny's restless, driven ways.

  They'd talk about bandits shot full of holes who lived. And then: "If I get grazed in the ass I'll probably bleed to death." Or, "Joe Castillo don't gotta worry, long as he gets it in the head." Or, "Manny's okay if it's a heart shot." And so forth.

  But if they started griping too much or began to lose interest, Manny could always figure a way to entertain them for a while. For instance, one afternoon while they were loafing there in Deadman's Canyon, feeling bummed and mean, they happened to observe a small party of women passing on the greasy clay trail. It was still daylight and the young women were scared and moving in a hurry. Pretty soon a group of lowlife Colonia Libertad play-smugglers came finger-popping along the trail, signaling for the women. The leader said to the Barfers: "Did you see some little pollitas walk this way?"

  And Manny, who was bored, said, "Why do you want to know?"

  And the guy giggled and said, "They think I'm going to guide them to San Ysidro. But we're taking them down in the canyon."

  "For what?" Manny asked, and the guy looked at Manny like he was a festered pimple and said, "To fuck them, stupid."

  "Maybe they won't like that," Manny Lopez said ominously.

  "They'll learn to like it," the guy grinned.

  And by now the other Barfers were looking at Manny, and that eyebrow had locked in and the little eye beneath was really looking evil and he walked over real friendly to the would-be rapist and said, "Well, 'mano, I do happen to know where the girls are. They're hiding right over there."

  And all the Barfers got to their feet to follow Manny, who led the would-be rapist along the grease-slick trail to the edge of a gully so that when he fell he might just break his neck, and Manny said something like: "I think now you should grab your balls and cough."

  And when the puzzled Mexican asked why, Manny said, "For old times' sake. The next time you feel for those nuts you'll need a catcher's mitt to find them."

  And then he didn't bother to say "Sabes que?" and the would-be rapist probably felt like his balls were sailing clear to the bullring when Manny kicked them for a field goal and the other Barfers started beating up his rapist pals for good measure and everyone was running in all directions. They eventually walked the limping rapist cradling his wounded glands over to the Mexican judiciales, since evil intent in America is not a crime.

  The judicial in charge didn't like rapists any more than Manny Lopez, so when Manny told him the story he decided the guy needed one more, and POW! He knocked the guy cold, and said, "That's for having impure thoughts."

  If Manny didn't keep them grimly entertained, they tended to get wilder out there in those lonely hills. Once they decided to build a fire of their own, like the pollos do. They tried setting fire to an old tire, and for a tense thirty minutes the whole goddamned canyon was in danger of going up in a conflagration.

  Another time they were listlessly walking along the border fence on the west side of 1-5 when some Tijuana kids started throwing rocks at them. They started throwing rocks back and pretty soon there was a first-class rock-throwing melee going on, until some Mexican citizen got sick and tired of rocks banging off his roof and called the Tijuana cops, who showed up and fired a shot at them. Which sent them running like hell into the darkness, deciding that they take rock throwing seriously down there and maybe they better quit dicking around so much.

  And they weren't the only people getting goofy in those canyons. The U. S. Border Patrol, with one of the most thankless and fru
strating jobs of all time, also had its share of head problems. One evening when the Barfers had to arrest a group of pollos who got in the way, of a possible bandit ambush, they called the Border Patrol and delivered the pollos to them. One of the aliens happened to be wearing a scruffy old U. S. Army dress jacket complete with insignia, pins and badges. The border patrolman receiving the prisoners went absolutely bonkers. He made the baffled pollo stand at attention in front of the jeep headlights. He pulled each little pin and infantry badge off the jacket and snapped them in half like he was breaking a saber.

  "This man never served in our armed forces!" he shrieked. "He has no right to wear these!"

  The Barfers at first thought it was a gag, and Big Ugly started to do a drum roll on the jeep until the border patrolman showed them eyes ten times more nutty than Ken Kelly's. And they knew this guy was serious.

  The pollo never for a minute thought this migra wasn't serious, and he started shaking when the border patrolman pulled out a pocket knife and cut off the brass buttons.

  As summer approached they were doing well enough- that is, they were arresting a few bandits here and there, nothing worth talking to a Kiwanis luncheon about, but guys with knives and icepicks who only scared the living shit out of them. Guys who smelled like garbage. Nothing worthy of mention on the eleven o'clock news. And one particularly warm evening, Manny decided that they were going to hit those canyons and they were going to walk until they got robbed. He was sick of this peace and quiet. They loaded up, all of them, and were dropped off by Robbie Hurt and Ken Kelly in the vicinity of Airport Mesa. They started walking west toward the sunset. Toward the goddamn ocean! Manny Lopez wouldn't stop.

  Old Fred Gil sure enough slipped and fell in a pile of shit. Ditto for Renee Camacho, who that night was wearing high-heeled leather dress shoes such as the aliens wear in their pathetic attempts to get dressed up. His ankles started swelling after the first two miles. He was limping after the third. Manny wouldn't stop. They walked down the gullies, up the escarpments, clear to Interstate 5. They heard rattlers just after dark.