Renee Camacho was squatted down. Renee Camacho wanted to stand up shooting. He wanted to shoot the son of a bitch to death. He wanted to blast the eel head before it murdered him. There was a nice big hole in the fence, a hole leading to Mexico and murder.
The bandits whispered to each other. The bandits took a good look at Renee and at the darkness and they walked away into the night. When Manny came running up, Renee's legs were still weak.
"What'd they say?" Manny asked.
"They wanted me to go over there. So they could rob me."
"Well, you shoulda done it!" Manny said.
Renee turned and looked his sergeant in the eye and said, "I'm not going across that line, Manny."
Manny looked back at him. He and Renee had known each other since they were players on the same high school football team. Renee and Manny went back a long way.
Manny said nothing and they went on to other business that night. It was the last night Renee would ever be faced with a bandit smelling like murder. He knew that the next bandit who even approached him with a stick in his hand would die. Therefore he knew that he had to quit.
Renee was dry-mouthed that night when he managed to corner Manny at the substation. He was of course expecting the kind of lambasting that Eddie Cervantes got. He was expecting lots of yelling. All of it: Chickenshit! Gutless! Pussy!
He was almost as tense as he'd been out by the fence with the eel-faced bandit. He asked Manny to come into the office and Renee closed the door.
Renee was very solemn. "Manny, I've done more than a year," he began. "And I have this. commitment to my wife. I. promised her I'd quit after the baby was born and. you know what, Manny? Well. I guess I'm just burned out, is all."
Then, after the most pregnant pause Renee could ever remember, Manny said, "I've seen it in your eyes for a while now. I understand, Renee. I understand."
And that was all. Renee couldn't believe it. No pussy? No chickenshit? No gutless? No puto? Just: "I understand." Manny was amazing.
At last the turning earth promised light and release from the shadows. But when Renee got back to uniform duty it was very hard for him to watch the Barfers getting ready to go out in the canyons. They were friendly of course, and Joe Castillo came to him and said, "You did the right thing, Renee. It's not worth it. You did the right thing."
They were friendly, and yet he too was an outsider now. The third to go.
One afternoon when the Barfers reported to work, they found that an anonymous writer had scrawled another acronym on their chalkboard. It seemed an eternity ago that the lieutenant had written B. A. R. F. for Border Alien Robbery Force.
This time it was different. And in their present state, it was the truest, most meaningful and profound acronym any of them had ever seen. When they went out to the canyons that night, the sorrowful truth of it was clanging in their heads like a gong. The acronym once again spelled BARF. But the words were different:
Beaners Are Really Fucked CHAPTER NINETEEN
LAST HURRAH
NEWSPAPER ARTICLES IN SEPTEMBER MADE THE DRAMATIC announcement: SAN DIEGO POLICE MAY GO HOLLYWOOD!
It had to happen. Hollywood hit the border. The Barf squad was courted by a motion picture company. Manny Lopez was of course going bonkers and so were they all. The wives were more excited. Everybody started casting the picture. And even Barfers knew that as far as Hollywood was concerned there was no such thing as a Mexican actor, so it was De Niro and Pacino. And Burt Reynolds might be able to play a Mexican. But how about a blond? Goddamn! If you lace his granola with angel dust to make him look like a lunatic, guess who could play King Kelly? Only Robert Fucking Redford!
They wondered if Coppola would direct? And how about music?
When Hollywood showed up, the Barfers were ready to "do" lunch. Ray Wood, the National City lawyer and writer of death documents, was to "take a meeting" with people whose Third World gardeners dressed better than he did.
Ray Wood got his suit pressed that week and tried to wear matching socks and shaved the lint balls off his shirt collar with a razor. Ray Wood had to do a deal! The Barfers gave Hollywood an "option." The Barfers fell in love with the Hollywood folks and took them home and threw a big party with all the beer and tequila you could drink and the wives made snacks and sandwiches and everybody was just dying because maybe Warren Beatty or somebody could pass as a Mexican. This was some kind of a week.
There were a bunch of jokes flying around to the effect that the producers should get the bald guy to play Manny, just like in that other Manny Lopez story. The "bald guy" was Sean Connery. The other Manny Lopez story was The Man Who Would Be King.
The Hollywood contingent was warm and congenial and the Barfers couldn't believe that bigshots like this could be such regular guys, and the Barfers were trying to impress them with all kinds of macho charades, because what the hell, they wanted to do a movie about hardball Gunslingers didn't they? And being the amateur drinkers they really were, the Barfers proved it with a contest involving tequila shooters. They did the whole business: tequila, lime sucking, licking the salt off the wrist, all of it. The Hollywood producers went along like troopers and had a few, but didn't try to match the boys shot for shot. And the Barfers got blotto and fell in love with everything about these movie guys, and wallowed in some of the most glorious word pictures ever painted which took on the hue of tequila gold.
The Barfers learned about motion picture "points" and got dizzy trying to figure out how much their points would be worth if the picture grossed, say, 30 million!
Some of the Barfers ran out and bought swimming pools. And for referring a fellow Barfer to the swimming pool builder, each of them got a hundred-dollar discount.
They did all this after receiving $250 each for their option.
The Barfers, like most cops, were cynical in the ways of street people, and doubtful as to the innate goodness of mankind, but they hadn't any idea about Hollywood and were unaware that in Hollywood there were people who looked about as macho as Mr. Rogers or John Dean and yet were more ruthless than Loco on his meanest day.
The producers went back to Hollywood and Truth, which was: Whoever made money on a movie about a bunch of beaners? There's only one goddamn role for a white man for chrissake! Two if you count the big Okie lieutenant. What the fuck were you smoking when you got this dumb idea?
The Barfers never saw the Hollywood producers again. They had to go to the police credit union to borrow enough to pay for the swimming pools. All that background music in their heads-just fades away.
October went bust. There wasn't much doing in the canyons and the brass uptown kept pulling them out to work a burglary or robbery series in various parts of San Diego.
November was cold at night but a bit more active in the canyons. They arrested a group of bandits in Washerwoman Flats who had shot at a fleeing alien and beaten another half to death. There were the usual minor injuries: sprains, cactus infections, lacerations. Carlos Chacon got beaned by a rock thrower and had to spend a night in the hospital for observation. The closest they got to some nurturing publicity was when they did a Gunslingers versus Bandits re-creation for public television.
As their second Christmas approached, the Barf squad finally got one replacement: a veteran cop named Gil Padillo. Small, salty, he was an aggressive type whose thrusting head, they claimed, entered a room five minutes before his body. He despised Manny Lopez at once, but never got the chance to fear him because time was running out on the BARF experiment.
It did seem sometimes that the Barfers attracted trouble wherever they went. On the 9th of December they were assigned uptown to help with the armed robberies that take place every Christmas season. And on that particular day there was a pair of very busy robbers at work in the San Diego area.
At two-thirty in the afternoon in National City, two young black men wearing pearl earrings committed an armed robbery, firing one shot from a .357 magnum and escaping in a white Chevrolet pickup truck.
> An hour later they pulled a robbery at the FedCo store in San Diego near Fifty-fourth Street and Euclid.
At seven o'clock that evening they did it again at the College Grove shopping center, and fired at one of the robbery victims as they fled.
A few minutes later they appeared at the Big Bear Market on Federal and snatched a woman's purse, punching her around for good measure. They popped a round at a potential hero who came to the rescue. They had missed all their victims with the powerful handgun, but it wasn't because they weren't trying.
A few minutes after their last robbery of the evening, they were spotted by two San Diego reserve cops driving south on Forty-seventh Street. The reserves followed them without broadcasting that fact and without using emergency lights and siren. It was probable that they were a bit shy or uncertain, as reserve cops are wont to be, but while caravanning down toward Market Street they passed a patrol car containing a pair of regular officers who weren't shy, as well as a "cool" car containing Barfers Carlos Chacon and his partner Joe Vasquez.
The pickup truck made a sudden U-turn over Highway 805 and reversed its direction, and a full-scale lights and siren pursuit was commenced through holiday traffic on up town streets. While the pursuit was heading east on G Street, the first patrol unit was shot at twice by the robbers. When they got to the U-junction with Boylston Street, two more shots whanged off the asphalt with some mighty big muzzle blasts lighting up the night.
One patrol cop returned fire twice from his pursuit car and then a couple of police units tried paralleling the pickup truck on the next street. After a lot of squealing and careening, the robbers were tooling on down Boylston right toward Carlos Chacon and Joe Vasquez, who were out of their car and waiting.
As the robbers whizzed past Carlos Chacon, he fired five shotgun rounds and Big Ugly fired six revolver rounds, blowing that pickup truck all over the street. The robbers had enough, right then and there, and coasted to a stop peacefully.
Carlos Chacon-with those incredibly expressive eyes which could show hostility, joy, rage, fear during a conversation on the relative merits of shave lotion-was by far the Barf squad's most prolific Gunslinger. He had nearly out-slung Manny Lopez.
Carlos had lived a violent childhood, first with a man who beat his mother and beat him. He had shot his best friend to death in a moment of carelessness. He had shot two of his fellow Barfers in a moment of canyon combat. He had shot Chuey Hernandez. When Carlos carried the shotgun out in the canyons and was ready to use it, they would all hit the deck.
"I was worried that I was crazy and dangerous," Ken Kelly said. "Carlos thought he was sane and in control and he was a hundred times more dangerous."
Whether or not Carlos Chacon was "dangerous," one thing was for sure: this very young Gunslinger did not shrink from violence. And he wasn't through shooting.
The squad was running out of gas in more ways than one. Manny Lopez was getting administrative chores and was sometimes staying in the station all night or having to run uptown for some meeting or other. He was still kept busy with speeches and interviews, but not nearly as many as before.
Despite vows to put down his wife's fellow religionists, Tony Puente did not make good his vow to buy a Christmas tree so big they'd have to bring it on a crane. In fact, the tree was smaller than any tree he'd ever gotten before. And this year when he decorated the house he didn't try to prove anything. The decorations were sparse. And he even started asking her questions about her religion. He was getting tired.
The night of January 25th promised to be chilly and damp. Walking with Manny that night were Tony Puente, Joe Castillo, Carlos Chacon and Joe Vasquez. Robbie Hurt was with Ernie Salgado on the cover team. The new Barfer, Gil Padillo, had the night off, as did Ken Kelly.
Ken Kelly and Joe Vasquez, the Barfer Ken liked best, were about the only ones left with enough energy to entertain the squad. Big Ugly liked to get dressed in a medical smock, so Ken dubbed him Doctor Violence. They'd do make-believe examinations of drunks brought into the substation.
Joe Vasquez, holding a little knee-banger mallet, would say in a Viennese accent: "I'm giving zis man a free psychiatric checkup."
And Ken Kelly would invariably reply, "That's awfully white of you, Doctor."
And Joe Vasquez and the other Mexican cops would say, "Hey, watch it, watch it!" to Ken Kelly.
But all the laughs were forced. There weren't even many smiles left in them anymore.
That night they were dragging themselves wearily toward the border after having done a whole lot of walking. Actually, they were tired all the time, it seemed. Some were secretly trying to line up transfers to new jobs, and even Manny Lopez was getting sick of what he perceived to be the lack of appreciation of everyone around him. His Barfers nowadays were bitching and complaining about everything. He was starting to dread what he used to love most, the news stories about the squad, because if only his name was mentioned the snide remarks would start.
The new Barfer was good at snide remarks, and it seemed that every week or so some brass hat uptown would make Manny defend their existence, with the inevitable admonition that if someone got killed, BARF was all over.
So even Manny was getting tired as he led them up a hill that night looking for an early moon and seeing very few aliens and wishing they had gloves because their hands were already getting cold.
All the boozing was catching up with them too. Robbie Hurt was the worst, but several of the others were bloaty and swollen like bullfrogs. In addition to their ordinary fear of being murdered, they had that kind of paranoia peculiar to excessive drinkers. There were demons riding each back, clawing at their throats, breathing hot in their ears. Whispering fearfully. It was like a bellyful of cold earth.
So they were weary and feeling old, these young men. Dick Snider said they were aging before his eyes and he worried what his experiment had wrought.
There had been reports of a gang of bandits in that canyon who'd been walking up to parties of aliens and stabbing the nearest pollo without warning, just to get the attention of the survivors. This was on the mind of Manny Lopez as they climbed, and for a flash he thought he saw human silhouettes on the skyline. Then the shapes were gone, but not the thought of stabbing bandits. Suddenly dark shadows loomed above them. Then the shadows plummeted.
The other Barfers were traversing the canyon's edge. They saw the shadows bearing down quickly at a forty-five-degree angle. Manny started snapping his fingers like an alien guide, but it wasn't necessary. All of them were watching the shaggy specters take shape and the Barfers began to fan out in a line five abreast. These shapes were approaching too forcefully, with too much purpose.
Manny was first, then Tony Puente, carrying the alien tote bag containing flares, radio and first aid kit. Then Joe Vasquez. Then Joe Castillo with his malfunctioning hand, standing next to Carlos Chacon, the man who had shot that hand and was hated for it. Whenever Carlos was next to Joe Castillo in a potential confrontation like this, he had two things on his mind: the bandits, and whether Joe was crazy enough to make good the threats of revenge he made when drunk.
Every man there knew this was a robbery for sure. Each was snapping finger signals back to the next man. They didn't squat pollo-style when the three shapes got close. The shapes belonged to three young men in their twenties, three heroin addicts as it turned out. Three bandits.
The three bandits didn't skirt around them as pollos would do. They didn't send one man up to talk politely as pollos would do. The three walked right up and blocked their way and one said, "Where are you going?"
"That way." Manny Lopez pointed.
Tony Puente pretended he was out of breath from the climb, and he was, but not as much as he pretended. Tony began sucking at the air and wiping his brow and he put down his tote bag as though to rest. So as to have his hands free when Manny said Sabes que?
Another of the bandits said, "La migra is over there. You better not go that way. You better rest here."
&nb
sp; And Manny Lopez started going into his pollo routine and said, "Oooooooh? La migra? Thank you."
Tony Puente started squinting at one bandit, then the second, then the third. He was not wearing his glasses. They were all on a path over the canyon. If a man would move a few steps in the darkness you could just about lose him, and everyone's head was jerking this way and that, and people were starting to perspire, and then an extraordinary thing happened. The first time it had ever happened out there in the night.
"Sabes que?"
What the hell? We're not ready! They haven't threatened to rob us! They haven't asked for money! They haven't shown weapons!
Tony Puente looked down the line. Who said that? We're not ready, goddamnit!
Joe Vasquez saw who said it. The remarkable thing is that while looking right at the bandit who said it, Big Ugly, the most malleable and obedient Barfer, more than any of them a product of training, actually got ready when the bandit inadvertently gave the code words.
Manny Lopez thought: Hey, asshole! That's my line!
The bandit repeated it. "Sabes que?" You know what? Then he told them what. He laid the old, we're plainclothes cops story on them which they'd heard a dozen times out there.
"We're judiciales," the bandit said. "And we're going to need a little of your money before we can let you go on."
Tony Puente decided to move a few steps to get between the nearest bandit and the border.
The bandit perhaps didn't like him moving, because it happened. Very very fast. The bandit lunged for Tony Puente. He grabbed Tony, and Tony grabbed him. Then everyone made his move.
Joe Vasquez had been told earlier that if he ever had to drop someone quick without the bandit's motor reflexes coming into play, he had to take off the back of the head.
Joe Vasquez in that microsecond saw something that Tony Puente, being partially night-blind, did not see. And Big Ugly jumped on the back of the bandit who had grabbed Tony Puente. In this bizarre nightmare instant the young men embraced in a three-way bear hug there over the chasm. They did an eerie little bear-hug dance, in the moonlight, on the edge of the precipice.
Lines and Shadows (1984) Page 31
