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 some 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.
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 l
ight, 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 póllution 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 right.
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.
Lines and Shadows Page 22