Lines and Shadows (1984)

by Wambaugh, Jospeh

  "Look out! A fucking snake!" somebody yelled, and they almost started shooting.

  "Don't say 'look out,' goddamnit!" Manny Lopez yelled. "Talk Spanish. Say 'Trucha!' or something."

  So somebody yelled, "Trucha! A fucking snake!"

  The mosquitoes were enjoying the balmy early summer evening. They were attacking in swarms and everyone was slapping and yelping. Their hands and faces were swollen before the fourth mile. They were wearing bulletproof vests and lugging all their armament, and Renee Camacho was carrying a shotgun. Manny Lopez wouldn't stop for a drink. He was a man possessed.

  At one point he told everyone he wasn't going to put up with any more bitching and moaning. It was eight miles to the ocean from where they started, in the black of night, sometimes not even on trails but on rock-hard clay, through cactus and thorn bushes. Carlos Chacon at a bloated 235 pounds said he was going to die, and just when everyone thought that God had abandoned them, Manny Lopez twisted his ankle and fell flat on his belly in a shallow pool of foul and fetid water.

  Manny could yell all he wanted, but it didn't do any good. All the little hardball turds, two of whom literally smelled like turds, were absolutely rolling around the ground. They were snuffing, cackling, squealing, hooting. There was no control whatsoever. The most feeble wino in Tijuana could have strolled through a hole in the fence and disarmed them all. It was another hour until they were wheezing and blowing and panting by the seashore, too exhausted to giggle at the thought of Manny Lopez going down on his pseudo-Armenian nose. They called it The Death March.

  At least Manny never lost his sense of humor during the dry spell. The next night, when they were on the west side near Stewart's Barn, a gathering point for aliens, they found fifty people hiding inside waiting for their guides. It was one o'clock in the morning and Manny wouldn't let them knock off early, even though they hadn't seen bandits for days. The aliens inside the barn were mostly sleeping by now and it looked as though their guides weren't going to show up.

  The Barfers took a breather and a couple of them snuggled down into their coats, sprawling on the ground and waiting for Manny's inner fire to go out. And while they sat, a guide happened in, stepping over sleeping aliens, looking for the party he was to lead. The guide looked down and saw a pollo glaring up at him. The pollo had a bandanna covering his balding bean which was so insect-bitten it looked a rotten mango. The guide looked curiously at the funny eyebrow on this glaring pollo which was sidewinding up among all the red bumps made by mosquitoes, ravenous sand fleas, and savage red ants.

  The guide squatted down and said to the pollo: "Who are you waiting for?"

  "Our guide."

  "You have to be careful in this barn," the guide said, looking around. "La migra makes checks around here and there's a bunch of San Diego cops running around dressed like you."

  "Is that a fact?" the pollo said.

  "They tried to beat me up one time," the guide said. "But I kicked their asses."

  The eyebrow suddenly started getting all spiky and the pollo said, "You did?"

  "You should let me lead you," the guide said. "Those bastards are afraid of me. I'm the meanest son of a bitch on either side of the border."

  By now all the Barfers were wide awake and listening with some interest. Pretty soon Manny yawned and scratched his balls and sighed and said to the guide: "Tell me, how can you tell they're cops when you see them?"

  "Easy," the guide said. "I just pat their pockets for the badge. These pussies got this chickenshit little gold badge and they can't go anywhere without it, the putos."

  Manny motioned for Renee to come closer and Manny put an arm conspiratorially around the guide and said, "Well, tell me, does the badge look like this?"

  It's doubtful that the guide ever saw the shield in Manny's palm, but if he wanted to see its imprint he'd only have to look in the mirror for the next three days or so. Because Manny, holding him behind the neck with one hand, slammed that badge right into the guy's forehead so hard it sounded like a rifle shot.

  The other aliens wondered why their guide went running from the barn like a cat on fire. And the Barfers started to forgive Manny for The Death March. Just when you started to hate the guy, he'd do something good for your morale.

  The wounded Barfers, Fred Gil and Joe Castillo, had been back to duty for some time by now. Joe Castillo had had talks with his doctor about more things than the damaged nerves and tendons which refused to give his fingers normal feeling. He talked with the doctor about the canyons and what they were doing out there. The physician, who had served in Vietnam, said, "You might find yourself pulling your gun before you should. You might be too fast now. Or you might be too slow and maybe that's worse. I don't know. This isn't war; it's police work. I don't know what to tell you."

  Joe Castillo tried to explain it to the doctor by saying, "I think I'll be okay as soon as I can build my mind back up to a state of frenzy. Then I'll be ready to work the canyons."

  Police work? Requiring a state of. frenzy?

  Meanwhile, old Fred Gil was having his own little crisis. Ever since he had come back to duty he hadn't been able to relax during the role playing. Whenever potential robbers approached and Fred was squatting down acting subservient, he was ever prepared, with his hand on his gun and the adrenaline practically lifting him to his feet. It was hard to stay down while Manny or someone talked to bandits. It was hard to keep that gun inside his clothing. Fred didn't know it, but almost all the Barfers by this time also had their guns half-drawn at the mere approach of a human being in the darkness.

  On Fred's first night back from the wounding, Manny took him on a walking tour to where the shooting had occurred. The bloody bandages and gauze wrappings were still on the ground.

  Are they testing me? Fred Gil wondered. But he never asked. He covered up the anxiety with a joke. He had always done that in Vietnam. Cover it all with a joke.

  His hip didn't always work exactly right, especially when descending steep slopes. Once he had to roll painfully down a rock-studded embankment when the others were running from some potential bandits in the hide-and-seek manner of aliens. They would hide but not too well. And he didn't like it at all when Manny started breaking them into two-man walking teams instead of three or four, so as to cover more ground when action was scarce. One night when he was walking with Renee Camacho, they encountered what looked like a mass exodus of Tijuana, as far as the eye could see.

  What if this tide of aliens thought that he and Renee were bandits and stoned them to death? There must have been hundreds marching, silent as ghosts. They passed in the night on the little trail without a word.

  Fred Gil now preferred to work on the east side, because there was less brush and shrubbery, and the better terrain let you see the silhouettes approaching in the darkness. Not like the west side, where they'd come right at you from the brush, the only warning being the smell of garbage a split second before you saw them. Specters plummeting. Right at you.

  One night on the westside, they had to cross through a canyon right next to a sinking sand pit. There was a natural little tunnel in the canyon formed by the brush itself, a tunnel of brush and mesquite. They had to get through by crawling inside that natural tube on their hands and knees. Fred Gil was crawling halfway through before he discovered that now he liked confinement even less than usual. In fact, it was suffocating him.

  This was a night when two bandits with big clubs had attacked Renee. After the Barfers arrested them and were trying to get them through that tunnel of brush, they saw fifteen silhouettes on top of the gully, and voices began ordering the cops to release their socio. The shadows ran alongside the gully as they dragged their screaming prisoners through the blind and black tunnel of brush. They were sweat-drenched, bloody, slippery, beating their prisoners into submission and dragging them, and imagining fifteen specters plummeting. Feeling fifteen machetes and knives hacking through the mesquite, hacking through them. Just as it looked as though the shadows were g
oing to swoop, they were gone. They disappeared without a sound.

  Fred, Gil had never been so aware that he was the oldest Barfer. He had never been so aware of impending middle age. He started looking for liver spots.

  Ku Klux Klan created a little media stir for a while by gathering at the border, having decided that some good old vigilantism was needed to stop the flow of illegal aliens into California. The San Diego police chief announced that the Barf squad would be out there to deal with any violence, and the implication was clear that Chief William Kolender, the first Jewish police chief, wasn't fond of the Klan. A Mexican newspaper did a very funny cartoon showing a group of sheet-covered Klansmen who had discovered a spy in their midst. When the headsheet is pulled off the spy by the Grand Dragon, the spy is none other than you-know-who with an evil grin saying, "Sabes que?"

  Renee Camacho, the boy tenor, heretofore the jolliest, warmest and most sensitive Barfer of them all, began to lose his sense of humor. So did they all. There wasn't so much fun and games at lineup anymore. They'd have a somber little briefing and out they'd go. In the past, Renee used to entertain them with mime and impressions.

  One night Renee was slugged by a bandit. He put his gun at the assailant's head and it was all he could do to keep from killing the guy. He'd never felt like this before. He went out with the boys and got good and drunk that night.

  Another time when he was taking a bandit into the substation-a robber who had scared the crap out of him- the bandit began calling him obscene names. The robber was handcuffed. Renee leaped on him and got him in a headlock and began hammering his face with a fist, all the time saying, "You think you're bad? You're a puto! Here! You rape women? Here! You terrorize children? Here!"

  And he was hammering the screaming bandit's face into hamburger when he looked up and saw a uniformed supervisor watching him. The bandit was covered with blood and Renee was absolutely positive that he was going to suffer the fate of Ken Kelly, becoming the second San Diego policeman indicted and convicted in a civilian court for criminal assault.

  He looked at the supervisor as if to say, "Well, I'm busted." And maybe deep down he was relieved, because this proved he wasn't fit to go out there anymore. But the supervisor turned and walked away as though he hadn't seen a thing.

  Renee couldn't believe what he had become. It didn't seem possible.

  It was happening to all of them. If they encountered potential bandits who, because of the growing Barf reputation, decided after a few probing questions to let them pass, Manny might just say, "Sabes que?" And they'd jump on the bandits and beat them up just for drill.

  "Teaching the crooks that there was a price to pay for operating in the canyons," Manny called it.

  Renee didn't like any of it anymore. He went to see his best friend, Herbert Camacho, and told his father that maybe someone should take a look at the Barf squad because maybe they were turning into weird guys out there in no-man's-land.

  Then they began to run into an old nemesis: El Loco. The bandit in the ski mask was getting on everyone's nerves after six months of eluding them. One dark night the junior varsity encountered him near his favorite hole in the fence by E-2 Canyon. They saw a man dressed in black wearing a ski mask. He faded into the shadows. They saw another man with a rifle. He looked as though he was putting a round in the chamber.

  The junior varsity hit the ground behind a mound of earth and a voice called out: "You take care of business on your side and we'll take care of business on our side."

  When they hooked up with the varsity later that night, Joe Castillo told Manny Lopez what had happened and Manny was beside himself.

  "Listen, fuckers," he said, "why didn't you pop a few caps in their direction to show them we mean business?"

  Pop a few caps? Just like that? Well, why not? This wasn't police work anymore and they weren't policemen. They were some kind of untamed bug-eyed little canyon crawlers, and everyone-other cops at the station, their wives at home, their neighbors, everyone-was looking at them like they'd just crept out from under a rock, and that's because on any given night, they had.

  So what the hell, pop a few caps and maybe get in a big shootout with some bandits and maybe wake up the town, allowing the newscasters to say, "Border shooting! Film at eleven!"

  Then one night Manny Lopez got to talk to Loco once again. They were walking near E-2 Canyon trying to make contact with the elusive bandit leader when they heard a voice. Manny recognized it as the voice he had heard once before when he passed a cigarette through the fence to the man in the ski mask. A voice, coming from someone who could have seen them only as silhouettes, called out: "Oye, Lopez! Is it you?"

  And after they hit the deck, Manny yelled back, "Come on over, Loco! Let's talk."

  But Loco answered, "No no, Lopez. I like it here in my country. Why don't you stay there and I'll stay here. And why don't you just let me have a little of your territory? I require very little and you don't need it!"

  But Manny wasn't in the mood to screw around with Loco. He wanted Loco worse than tomorrow's headlines. He went bonkers and yelled, "You motherfucker, I'm gonna get you! You understand, puto? You're mine!"

  But Loco wanted only to be reasonable and yelled back, "I got no problem with you, Lopez. I don't want to fuck with you. Leave me alone!"

  Then he was gone and Manny was screaming his head off at empty darkness.

  The following night Manny was rampaging around the little briefing room with a big cigar in his mouth, scrawling something on the chalkboard in letters two feet high: TARGET: EL LOCO!

  Bandits they had captured described El Loco as being about thirty years old, and in fact he was just that age, two months older than Manny. They knew Loco to be about 5 feet 9 or 5 feet 10 inches tall and about 170 pounds, making him about Manny's size. It was said that he was bearded but was almost never without his ski mask, and nobody knew exactly why.

  Manny Lopez had many regrets about Loco. He regretted the night he'd passed a cigarette to the ski-masked bandit through the chain link border fence when Loco was uneasily trying to figure out if Manny was really a pollo.

  "I coulda got him that night," Manny would complain. "At least I coulda grabbed his fucking finger and broke it!"

  Manny was obsessed with the bandit, who reportedly controlled half a mile of E-2 Canyon. It made Manny Lopez crazy that some bandit called it his turf.

  One night Manny came very very close to catching Loco. That was a lucky night for Manny. Three bandits had tried to rob them with knives. A fourth was some distance away and when he came forward to join the robbery in progress, they saw that he wore dark clothing. And a ski mask.

  It was a night when the other Barfers suddenly found themselves fighting the bandits while Manny was hot after the one in the ski mask, yelling, "Barf! Barf! Barf! Barf!" which could be heard clear to Ensenada because Manny Lopez wanted this son of a bitch.

  It was a dark night and they ran blindly. Loco fell.

  Manny yelped with joy. Then Manny tripped and fell so hard that the cylinder of his gun popped open. Manny snapped it shut and resumed running. "Barf! Barf! Barf!"

  The sound of it made Loco run faster, driving hard for the fence. Manny got close enough to hear him pant, to smell him. Loco smelled like garbage. Manny saw a knife flash in a sliver of moonlight. Manny fell again. Loco hit the hole in the fence and dived through, black and sleek as flowing oil. Loco was in the Republic Of Mexico and vanished in the brush.

  Manny stood on his side of the international fence and yelled, "I'm gonna kill you, fucker! I almost got you! You lucky fucker, I almost got you!"

  Then Manny happened to look down at his snub-nosed revolver. It felt funny. He opened the cylinder. The bullets had fallen out when he fell. The gun was empty.

  "I'm the lucky fucker," Manny Lopez said later. "Lucky I didn't catch him."

  The last meeting with El Loco took place on the 9th of July and it proved to be the most unbelievable and terrifying moment yet. When it was over som
e of them weren't sure who or what to fear anymore. It was the night that Manny Lopez vanished.

  The weather was clear except, for scattered summer clouds that day. The temperature was seventy-five degrees. It was a perfect San Diego day. In E-2 Canyon, approximately one-half mile east of the-port of entry, there is, for the benefit of tourists, a chain link fence ten feet high with rolled concertina wire running along the top of it. Of course the fence ends a short distance farther east, and even where it exists it is ridiculously easy to defeat. But never mind, there it is.

  There is an unimproved dirt road that runs south of and parallel to the border from east to west, leading directly to the rear of a railroad yard by the international port of entry. The canyon runs north and south and at the bottom is a wash wherein excess water is accommodated by a thirty-six-inch metal culvert, which on the north side is partially obstructed by rocks and boulders and debris of all sorts. This drainage pipe runs under the international boundary to the south where it empties out into a steep wash or gully, which is also boulder-strewn and filled with rocks, old tires, broken glass, beer cans. The international border at this point is, by surveyors' reckoning, five feet south of the southern end of the metal drainage pipe. The hills are steep leading up to the shacks lit by kerosene lamps wherein reside the Tijuana poor who work where they can, as well as the smugglers and addicts and bandits who work in the U. S. canyons.

  The importance of the exact location of surveyors' landmarks was that Manny Lopez had strict orders never to venture south of the imaginary line, and always to know exactly where he and his men were. No one wanted to provoke the authorities of a country that owed billions of dollars to United States banks and that now, with the Mexican oil craze in force, might actually be able to repay the loans.

  The Barfers were on a fishing expedition specifically designed to catch the big one. They had received a report of fifteen aliens being robbed by a gang led by a ski-masked bandit who had scrambled through that culvert going south. Of course aliens had been robbed all over E-2 Canyon, but that drainage pipe was smack in the middle of Loco's territory and seemed a likely ambush site for the bandit to repeat. There was absolutely no one, with the exception of Manny Lopez, who liked the idea.