Lines and Shadows

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “They wanted to teach in the poverty areas,” a Barfer said, “so they came to San Ysidro to save the little Mexicans. I never knew there were people that naïve about life.” And then he added: “Except us.”

  Perhaps the strangest of the groupies was a new one introduced to them by Fat Mindy. She’d been out of circulation for a while because she’d fallen in love with a border patrolman. He was in love with her, too. He wanted to leave his wife for her, but it all turned sour. He tried to OD on pills a couple of times which she thought showed he wasn’t serious, because if they’re serious, cops always shoot themselves, don’t they? The Border Patrol finally had to transfer him to El Paso because the guy got really goofy over her.

  She fell out of love then and immediately into love with Ken Kelly. She liked macho guys and the King was muscular and chewed cigars a lot. There was always a bit of tobacco leaf clinging to his orange-rind walrus moustache. But it was probably his Jack Nicholson impression that got to her, with him pulling his scraggly blond hair back on the sides of his head and looking all cobra-eyed like the actor, except that Ken’s eyes were blue. The new groupie couldn’t resist him, and another groupie assured all of them that this girl was an all-time, world-class comer.

  She’d come if you touched her with your toe, the fascinated Barfers were told. Or your knee. Or your goddamn elbow!

  She looked like those aristocratic girls up in Northern Division, moist lips, moist eyes, orthodontic smiles, bodies pearly or buttercup in the sun. Girls with skis strapped to their BMWs. But she said she liked pot and ludes and uppers and none of the Barfers used anything but booze, so this made them nervous. Nevertheless, the King, who was frustrated by being forever a spear carrier, was ready for some action. For the “ultimate experience,” as advertised by Fat Mindy.

  “Sex, drugs, rock ’n roll!” Ken Kelly screamed, looking all demented. “Bee bob a doo bop, a bam bam boo!”

  Ken Kelly got boiled on vodka for courage and showed up at Fat Mindy’s apartment as ordered, and sure enough the new girl was waiting for him. Eating a peanut butter sandwich.

  She was dressed like a Gainsborough portrait, or maybe Little Bo Peep, and when she said, “Have some peanut butter?” it sounded like the movie he saw on television where Gregory Peck asks Ingrid Bergman if she wants ham or liverwurst and when she answers it sounds like a goddamn symphony. Liverwurst! Peanut butter!

  And then as he was reclining on the sofa thinking he may have overdone it with the booze, she blindsided him with: “Do you believe in God?”

  “Sure,” Ken Kelly shrugged. “I’m a Lutheran. Why?”

  And suddenly she began to tremble and edge away. She got slanty-eyed and cold. She was turning to ice before his eyes. This very same number who could reportedly get off by touching your fucking elbow!

  And she said, “I worship the devil.”

  “I like to raise a little hell myself,” Ken Kelly giggled.

  “No, I mean it,” she informed him, licking her peanut butter with the darting tongue of a serpent. “I adore the Prince of Darkness.”

  Now Ken Kelly had his turn to squirm a bit and he tried to think of something to change the subject, because this kind of woofing wasn’t as funny as she probably thought it was. His walrus moustache was twitching like mad and he knew it.

  Then she swallowed a capsule, and since drugs could get him fired from the police department, he wasn’t thrilled about that either. Then she said, “I belong to this … society. We like to fuck.”

  “Now you’re talking!” Ken Kelly cried. “Most a my friends also like …”

  “On altars. In real churches if possible. Or when necessary we can re-create an altar.”

  Ken Kelly suddenly started going into his Jack Nicholson impression without even trying, because he also does it when he’s scared. He started raking his limp blond hair back over the top of his ears, the moustache flapping like crazy.

  “Do you do acid?” she asked. “Or maybe peyote?”

  “No, I drink beer mostly,” Ken Kelly said, and his blue eyes darted toward an ominous closed door. He wondered if there was a guy behind it dressed in an iron bra and leather mask! He was getting very sorry he wasn’t wearing a gun.

  “You’d have to get used to some of it, King,” she said. “Especially the killing part.”

  “The killing part,” he said. “What killing part?”

  “Dogs. We kill dogs and drink their blood while it’s hot and fresh. Does this shock you?”

  “Oh, hell no!” Ken Kelly cried. “This is probably just the tame stuff, right? Shit, I’m not shocked!” And then he started looking up at the ceiling and his blue eyes got so bughouse she said, “What’re you looking for?”

  And he answered, “Oh, nothing. I’m not looking for anything. JUST A FUCKING LIGHTNING BOLT IS ALL!”

  And that was it. He was as flaccid as fetuccini. World-class comer or not, this romance was over before it began. The Barfers just couldn’t be as devil-may-care as people wanted them to be.

  Ken Kelly spent the remainder of the night driving around and thinking about what had become of his young life. Dragged through the courts like a criminal for assaulting a number one prick asshole. Worrying every moment about his mother’s terminal cancer. Living with a good woman in a marriage gone sour. He felt lower, meaner, sorrier than alien turds. He probably deserved a blood-drinking puppy drowner. And then the frustration every night, sitting in the darkness with Robbie Hurt, both full of fear and tension like the others, but worse than the others, because they didn’t know what’s happening out there, and they didn’t get the release by being part of it. They never knew anything. And then hearing gunshots in the night and running helter skelter, and no release for the adrenaline rush. Never.

  “I felt like an unexploded bomb with a jiggly fuse,” he said.

  He got home at 9:00 A.M. His wife asked one question: “Where’ve you been?”

  “We had a tough night,” he said. “I drove to Tecate because I just couldn’t come home and sleep. I finally got tired and had to pull over beside the road. I just woke up.”

  Joyce didn’t bother to answer. She kicked him out on the spot, clothes and all. He draped the clothes on the back of his motorcycle. He looked like a ragman on two wheels.

  He moved in with another cop who, they said, ran a home for wayward policemen and was always taking in strays. The other cop had been drummed out of the vice squad because they decided he wasn’t macho enough to kick ass and take names. In fact, he was so “sensitive” that the rumormongers decided he might be a fruit, but Ken Kelly said he didn’t care if the guy had his legs waxed and carried a designer gun. Being a pansy seemed pretty normal, given his experiences these days.

  He had been married for ten years. Joyce was a Japanese-American girl he’d known since the seventh grade. He was in love with her and he loved his kids, so what was he doing with people who killed dogs and hated Lutherans? It was the first time Ken Kelly suspected he was losing his mind, and that maybe this Barf job didn’t cause it but it certainly wasn’t making it any better.

  He only went home after Manny Lopez had a telephone conversation with Joyce. Manny Lopez wasn’t much of a marriage counselor, but Ken Kelly was afraid of him.

  Manny Lopez said, “Listen, fucker, you can screw around all you want, but you gotta go home! Understand? Go home!”

  So Ken Kelly went home. Things didn’t get better for a long time. They couldn’t, not while he was out there in those canyons at night with at least a middleweight head problem.

  If any of the Barfers had something hot going, Manny would usually oblige. “You owe me, fucker,” he’d say when giving the night off and covering if a wife called. “You owe me!”

  They’d leave him a bottle of Chivas Regal or a handful of Santa Fe Corona Grandes by way of thanks.

  So they had them: schoolteachers, nurses, waitresses, blood drinkers, gerontological dummy floggers. They had them all. And the marriages suffered accordingly. Most of the
boys staggered home at dawn, slept all day, got up, failed to shave or shower and went back to the canyons. And the next night the cycle was repeated.

  But while a few of the Barfers had to “stretch their legs,” as they called it when they got kicked out of the house by mama, some of the others stuck it out and reaped the whirlwind.

  Tony Puente was a sensitive fellow, in tune with other people’s feelings but quiet enough to keep his to himself. Because he was the oldest, next to Fred Gil, they sometimes called him Pops and took a few of their problems to him. Nobody took problems to Manny because they figured that in the first place he wasn’t interested in personal problems, and in the second place he couldn’t care less.

  Tony Puente had his own big problem over and above all the other ordinary ones, such as feeling anxious about murder. He had the most formidable rival for his wife’s devotion that any man ever had—God. She read the Bible no less than two hours a night, and that was in addition to services and meetings, and dispensing religious tracts, and other missionary duties in the neighborhoods of San Diego.

  When their arguments would rage, she had an irrefutable position. “Why should you complain? All you do is go to work, come home drunk, sleep all day and go to work again.”

  Joe Castillo said, “She was always real nice to us when we carried Tony home drunk. She fed us baloney and mustard sandwiches. Just like they make at the jail.”

  That would be all she would ever remember about the BARF experiment, Tony coming home drunk.

  Dene Puente had immersed herself in a religion that espoused the suppression of self and worldly acquisitiveness. It made Tony goofy because as a Mexican he’d spent his life trying to better himself and acquire all the material things his family needed or wanted. Yet he never thought he should have married another Mexican. It was clear to everyone who knew him that he was utterly in love with the woman he married when she was sixteen.

  The BARF job became obsessive, even after the Puentes started having troubles with an adolescent son. It was easy to make mistakes with the boy when the only reality seemed to be out there in the canyons at night.

  And then Tony would come home totally boiled, and stinking of the canyons and aliens and stale booze, his brain still sizzling, overflowing with needs of every kind. And naturally she’d be asleep and he’d start thinking.

  He’d lie there and want to shoot them down like bandits in the canyons, her fellow religionists. Next Christmas he was going to buy a tree so big they’d have to bring it in on a sixteen-wheeler. He was going to have a crane set it up in the front yard and he was going to say “There!” to every goddamned deacon or elder or minister or priest or whatever they called them in her church. “THAT’S WHAT I THINK ABOUT A RELIGION THAT DOESN’T LIKE CHRISTMAS TREES!”

  But then Tony Puente would have to get himself quieted down because he tended to want to weep in frustration over this. Beneath his quiet ways he was a very emotional man. And what could he offer her for depriving her and his kids of a husband and father while he chased a fascination in the canyons at night?

  And it was then that a very subtle and fearful thing started happening inside his own heart. He never admitted it to anyone, especially not his wife, but he was, despite every instinct and wish, starting to, well, admire what she was doing. He had lost his own belief in priests and church and there was an emptiness. She seemed fulfilled and he was scared to admit he envied that part of it. Faith was what he was lacking at this time of life. Faith in something. She had a ton of it.

  But how could he admire what he also despised? And how could he anxiously want to get out in the canyons at night and at the same time hate it? It was too much to figure out. But he was an intelligent fellow, and unconsciously they remained in his head, these questions.

  Then one night, with a skinful of hooch, he decided to have it out once and for all. He was going to meet his rival head-on. They had a terrible row. He fogged his glasses with all the screaming and it ended with her in the living room crying her eyes out.

  Tony Puente was going to show her. He was going to show the whole world. He was going to destroy. He gathered up every religious tract and book and Bible she owned. He had armfuls of the stuff. If this was devil’s work, so be it!

  Tony took all the religious literature to the kitchen and turned on every burner on the gas range. Moments like this demanded grand gestures. He threw a few pamphlets on the fire, intending to burn them one piece at a time, defying her wimpy, lizard-shit God to do something about it.

  And as Tony was staggering around the living room realizing he’d had more booze than he thought, and Dene was crying so hard she could hardly breathe, he happened to turn around. The goddamn kitchen was an inferno!

  Only the proximity of the sink saved the house. But after he finished throwing pots of water on the fire, he wasn’t through. He grabbed armloads of her clothes. He threw them out the back door. Then he threw her out the back door and locked it.

  He staggered into the bedroom and fell into bed. When he woke up with a hellacious hangover and a luau in his liver, he figured to find her in bed next to him. He was alone. He went into the living room expecting to find her asleep on the sofa. She wasn’t.

  He panicked. He had all the morbid fantasies that policemen have when they’re worrying about loved ones. He started thinking of her stumbling down the street at night and being picked up by a fiend, and looking like corpses he’d seen. The car! Maybe she was safe in a motel! He ran to the garage and found the car. She was asleep in the back seat.

  He was beaten. He spent the next three hours telling her how relieved he was and how sorry he was and what a total son of a bitch he was and all the other things that someone with an overly developed sense of personal responsibility and guilt says at a time like that. He carried all her clothes inside. He wanted to wash them and iron them. He felt like washing and ironing his goddamn tongue.

  When he got to the substation that night, this private taciturn fellow had to spill his guts. If he didn’t tell somebody, he might blow like a land mine. He told everybody about it, how he nearly burned the house down.

  The other Barfers loved it because it took their minds off their own domestic problems. Ken Kelly said it was fantastic, just like the big scene in The Exorcist but in reverse! It made Ken especially glad that he’d boogied on the devil diddler. “It just goes to show,” he said, “you can’t dick around with God.”

  For Tony Puente, so consumed by religious turmoil, his own as well as his wife’s, the canyon walks filled a void. His only reality, he said. Something like a ritual need.

  The BARF experiment had shifted into another gear. It was going somewhere and no one knew where and no one could stop it, or so it seemed to the Barfers. Only ten days after the capture of Loco, there occurred another incident which involved not just the Barf squad but the highest level of law-enforcement officers on both sides of the border.

  It would not be fully adjudicated by the civil court of San Diego for years to come. Of all the BARF experiences, this one would be the most controversial and bitter and divisive.

  THE CELLAR

  FOR THE LAWMEN SOUTH OF THE IMAGINARY LINE, LA mordida was a fact of life. One relied on mordida to feed a family, and it was ever thus, since the white men started shaking down the Aztecs like common thugs.

  La ley de fuga was also a fact of life south of the imaginary line. If someone were to flee from law officers, regardless of the crime, he ran a very real risk of being shot. Everyone knew the rules of the game which hadn’t changed for centuries.

  The Barfers got reports in the month of July concerning both facts of life. On one of the reports the Barfers were told by some pollos that they had been picked up by a team of Tijuana policemen who caught them crossing into the U.S. in the vicinity of Colonia Libertad, and that they were given a little tour around Tijuana in a patrol car until the officers made the point that they might be willing to forgo a visit to their comandante if the pollos would make it worthwh
ile.

  The pollos coughed up all they had, $40 U.S., and the policemen drove them back to the international fence and bade them a hearty farewell.

  The incident involving la ley de fuga affected them directly. It was nearly 11:00 P.M. when the varsity, joined by Joe Castillo, was walking just south of Monument Road. Ernie Salgado, who was providing cover that night, heard a gunshot from the vicinity of the drainage pipe and radioed the walking team to hop on over and check it out.

  When Manny and the others arrived, they saw a man holding a group of pollos at gunpoint. The man had a partner and that partner shined a flashlight beam on the approaching Barfers and ordered them to cross into Mexico at once. He also stated loud and clear that he was an immigration officer.

  The Barfers did not identify themselves to the Mexican officer. They took cover and pulled their guns and watched. The two men, plainclothes immigration officers, took their catch of fifteen aliens back into Mexico. When the Barfers were leaving the vicinity of the drainage pipe they happened on a man and woman hiding in a nest of mesquite. The couple, after the Barfers identified themselves as San Diego policemen, told them that when they fled from the immigration officers who had just arrested their companions, they were fired on.

  Indignation in the BARF report signed by Manny Lopez concerned the fact that the Mexican immigration cops were doing their thing on U.S. soil. The report said:

  It is felt that an extremely dangerous situation was created by the actions of the plainclothes immigration officers in that they entered the U.S. while armed with handguns and indiscriminately fired their weapons. The illegal actions of these Mexican immigration officers must be brought to the attention of their superiors in order to avoid an international confrontation and to prevent the needless shooting of an unarmed illegal alien in the United States.