Renee Camacho, who was included with the varsity that evening, hated the idea when Manny made the announcement at lineup.
Manny said, "The border marker is actually a few feet south of the south end a that little tunnel. Guess what we're gonna do tonight? We're gonna sit in that tunnel!"
The reason Renee Camacho wasn't thrilled was that he detested the very idea of sitting in a tunnel that was thirty-six inches in diameter. He'd detest,the idea of sitting in a tunnel that was thirty-six feet in diameter. He, like Fred Gil, hated confinement of any kind, but machismo forbade overt expressions of something as normal as fear, so he kept his mouth shut and went along.
The plan was that if bandits should approach from the north-that is from the U. S. side-the Barfers sitting in the south end of the pipe would leap out their end and cover their partners through the international fence. And vice versa.
The pipe was twenty feet six inches long. Manny Lopez decided to take his position close to the southern end, closest to Mexican soil. Eddie Cervantes was to sit a few feet north of him. Then Tony Puente. And, thankfully, Renee Camacho got to sit closest to the opening on the north. Still, he would be inside. He would be confined.
Carlos Chacon was brought along as an afterthought and told to position himself in a nest of sagebrush a few yards north of the tube on the U. S. side where he could observe any bandits approaching from that direction.
The Barfers discovered they were in for total misery from the moment they arrived. The drainage pipe was full of garbage, glass, dank urine, human feces. To endure this? And for what? It was a thousand to one they'd catch Loco or anybody else. Manny Lopez was becoming a madman. But Manny Lopez was also the luckiest madman any of them had ever met.
Outside the pipe it was dusk. Dusty light, seldom hard and clear in those canyons, revealed a coyote, innocent as a house cat, stalking its own shadow among all the shadows in the canyon. Just like them. And silver puddles of light, heavy with pollution particles from the swarming Mexican city, reassured them. Beautiful polluted light, like storm light. And then it was night.
Renee was carrying the shotgun and the Handie-Talkie under his alien jacket. He whispered into the radio every fifteen minutes that all was quiet. He was also being brave by confronting his claustrophobia head-on. He was drenched with sweat and freezing on a warm night. In his words, he was a wreck.
There was a moon. It was a fine summer night-a good bandit night, Manny reckoned. He had no doubt whatsoever that Loco would show. If not tonight, soon. He'd sit there through the winter to get Loco. They were in that foul and dreadful pipe at 7:30 P. M., squeezing into something like fetal position after their legs had gone to sleep and their necks and backs had gone from pain to numbness to pain. They had to keep exercising their fingers to help the circulation. Furry spiders kept creeping around the walls of the pipe, making a man shudder from his tailbone to the top of his head. It was absolutely black within the pipe, and one started to imagine things: a lazy fat tarantula dangling like a hairy-legged corpse from the tunnel roof, suddenly leaping to attack! Spider eyes burning, spider teeth clicking like bandit rocks.
They stared straight ahead as time stopped. It was like looking at the inside of your eyelids in a coffin. Renee kept turning to either end of the pipe for a glimpse, for reassurance that there was another world somewhere. He got it from the shuddering wail of a jackrabbit dying in fear. Then the screech of a hawk triumphant. Then silence.
A lone cricket's chrip sounded like a handcuff's ratchet. Another farther off sounded like the scrape of a footstep. Then the shrill of mosquitoes passing through. Then silence.
It was more than an hour, but seemed like three, when a man was heard approaching the south end of the pipe. Imaginations were overripe: Images of a slavering bandit "With black gums and jagged teeth, smelling like garbage, concealing his hands."
It was just a man. A pollo, perhaps. He looked inside and saw Manny. He asked what they were waiting for. Manny said they were waiting for a guide. The man nodded and moved on.
Another hour crept by. Time moved as slowly as the black furry spiders. There were only the sounds of crickets and faint music in the distance and sweat plinking on their shoes. There was more than one Barfer thinking about having a very serious meeting with Manny. There was only so much that one could be expected to give to the police department and the good people of San Diego. Somewhere lately they had gone far past that.
They were thinking thoughts along these lines and thinking how magnificent a cold beer was going to taste and wondering if the smell of urine and human feces would ever leave their clothing and their nostrils, when Manny Lopez disappeared. Vanished! Up in smoke. Now you see him, now you don't.
The Barfers who had been in the pipe told the story to detectives and their colleagues later that night.
Eddie Cervantes, who was sitting closest to Manny and who had been looking north for just a second, said, "It was all of a sudden! There was nothing going on! And all of a fucking sudden LOPEZ IS OUT! He's out, man! Out!"
Renee Camacho said, "Do you understand what happened? He was there and then HE WAS GONE!"
Tony Puente said, "Just like that. Manny vanished?"
It is clear when you talk to each member of the Barf squad, those who were in the drainage pipe and those who weren't, that this moment marked a turning point in the very ambivalent feelings each member of that experiment had toward his leader, Manny Lopez. Regardless of what they may have felt prior to the moment that Manny vanished, it is clear that the feeling would be either altered or intensified from that moment.
Manny disappeared like smoke because his adversary, who was just Manny's size and age, was a shockingly strong man. Manny Lopez was, like the others, sitting silently and enduring the stench and the misery and the darkness when a shadow appeared in the mouth of the tunnel. Manny hadn't heard a thing. A shadow was just there. Then a human head. The human head wore a ski mask. The human head smelled like garbage.
Manny didn't have time to snap his fingers or hiss to Eddie Cervantes. He didn't have time to draw his revolver. He didn't have time fully to comprehend to whom the head belonged when the head whispered: "What's happening?"
Then the head had an arm, and the arm reached inside the pipe and grabbed Manny's arm like a vise, and Manny Lopez was jerked from a sitting position right through the opening of that tube. And he was gone.
It took a strong man to do that. Manny found himself flying through the night, crashing down onto glass and boulders and jagged rocks. Tumbling, dragged, crashing down a gully in the grasp of Loco himself. Manny Lopez came to rest in the country of Mexico on a warm and moonlit Mexican night with only scattered clouds overhead.
What Manny saw was this: a bandit standing to his left pointing at his face a rifle which turned out not to be real. A second bandit standing in front pointing a handgun which was apparently very real. A third bandit standing to his right pointing what looked like a handgun which was apparently very real. And there was Loco's hand, clamped on to Manny's gun arm like a bear trap, holding a knife in his free hand. Manny Lopez was on his knees surrounded by four bandits looking down at him. All smelling worse than garbage. Renee Camacho, Tony Puente and Eddie Cervantes by now had come alive and realized that Manny Lopez was gone, and Renee heard Manny in his alien voice crying out: "Don't hurt me! Please don't hurt me!" It is unknown what the four bandits saw or thought during the next ten seconds, when all hell broke loose, but one can imagine there might have been a little curiosity at this bruised and battered little pollo who, cowering in the grasp of El Loco himself, cried out, "Please don't hurt me!" while his right eyebrow squiggled back toward Chula Vista.
The incredible, terrible, horrifying fact of the matter, as far as all the other Barfers were concerned, was that with four armed bandits standing over him, Manny Lopez had them exactly where he wanted them.
Manny got his hand to his waistband while Loco still held the arm. Then he jerked free and drew, firing from left to rig
ht.
Renee Camacho heard BOP BOP BOP BOP BOP! "AAAAYEEEEEEEEEEE!"
Manny's first shot was at the man with the rifle. The next at the bandit with the pistol. Then one into Loco point-blank. Then two more at the fourth man, who was holding an unknown object. Then his five-shot revolver was empty.
Eddie Cervantes was out and shooting and Manny was screaming, "Barf barf barf barf !"
Renee Camacho scrambled out the north end of the pipe, firing the shotgun at a running figure, and Carlos Chacon heard KAPLOOM KAPLOOM! and leaped up in time to see a man on the Mexican side scream and tumble down a hill into a gully.
Tony Puente couldn't get out of the goddamn pipe because Renee Camacho was frozen there blocking his exit, still firing the shotgun.
Tony could hear muffled pistol shots and hear Eddie Cervantes screaming, "Get cover! Get cover!"
Then Renee Camacho dropped his shotgun and snapped off five pistol shots: BOP BOP BOP BOP BOP! and someone kept screaming, "AAAAAYYYEEEEEEEEEEE!"
Two things happened later that night. One, a man staggered into a Tijuana hospital with his legs torn apart by #4 buckshot, which consisted of 27 pellets of .25-caliber shot. He was arrested by judiciales. Second, a man shot through the chest joined a party uninvited in a little house near the Mexican border. He dampened the festive spirit by crashing through the patio, his chest covered with blood, scaring the hell out of the partygoers, only to stumble out again, never to be found.
Eddie Cervantes had fired one round and raced after a bandit for half a block into Mexico, firing a last round at the fleeing robber before turning and running like hell back toward the border.
Renee was yelling, "Where's Manny? Where's Manny?" and someone was hollering at him over the radio and Carlos was standing by the fence on the north side screaming, "Where's Lopez?"
Then they heard Manny yell, "I got Loco! Gimme some help!" Manny Lopez and El Loco were at the bottom of the gully beating the living shit out of each other.
Then PLOOM PLOOM PLOOM PLOOM!
Four shots were suddenly fired at the Barfers from the darkness, wanging off the border fence and sending them flying in all directions. Loco fought and resisted all the way back down the fence line to the nearest hole, even though badly wounded, even as Manny pistol-whipped him and dragged him through. Loco was feeling the shock of real pain by now and was screaming curses.
Tony Puente heard a BOP! and WANG! as another small-caliber slug ricocheted, and overhead the Border Patrol helicopter was roaring in.
Then Carlos Chacon heard four more rounds fired in their direction from the darkness south of the border.
When all the pandemonium had subsided a bit and Loco was safely back on the U. S. side and the cover team and junior varsity were rushing into the canyon, they all gathered around the wounded bandit, who was flat on his back feeling the full impact of Manny's bullet, which had broken his thigh and lodged in his hip. Someone shone a flashlight in Loco's face and Manny jerked off the ski mask for them all to take a look.
He was dirty and bearded and hairy. He cried out in agony every few seconds. And if it had been a western movie, the victorious Gunslinger might at this point have expressed a little compassion for a fallen adversary. But Manny Lopez wasn't much for westerns except maybe The Searchers, where John Wayne scalped his fallen foe.
Manny Lopez, with all the compassion of a Mafia car-bomber, knelt over the writhing bandit, saying things like: "I hope you die of gangrene. I hope it broke bones. I hope it hurts like cancer."
A few interesting things occurred after they got Loco to the hospital. First, they found out why he always wore a mask. His name was Sanchez and he was a bit shy about being recognized because he was an escapee from the California state prison at Lompoc. He didn't want any trouble with American lawmen looking for fugitives.
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?
Chapter FOURTEEN
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 disappoint
ment.
"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.
Lines and Shadows (1984) Page 22
