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 qué?” 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 I-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 frustrating 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.
“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 snuffling, 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. T
he 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 west side, 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 going 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.
The 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 qué?”
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 th
is 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 qué?” 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.
Lines and Shadows Page 21