Suddenly the chief of police looked exactly like Pontius Pilate in a Hart Schaffner & Marx.
PHANTOMS
THE BARF SQUAD HAD DONE A NUMBER ON THE BANDITS. They’d really knocked down the alien robberies on the streets of San Ysidro. Street thugs couldn’t miss the publicity generated by the Barfers. Even though all of the shootings had taken place in the canyons, there had been some pretty good thumpings administered in San Ysidro, so there were easier ways to make a dishonest buck, the hoodlums decided.
As to the canyons where the real bandits plied their trade, even they were not unaware of the Barfers’ celebrity. Not that the bandits were ever going to stop being bandits, but no one wanted to get shot to death by these canyon-crawling San Diego cops who were maniacal enough to burn down Tijuana Municipal Police if they got in the way. At least that was the word filtering back through the alien grapevine.
The real bandits from the south were survivors though. They began to alter their tactics and rob aliens right at the line. This was riskier because the judiciales didn’t like crimes taking place on Mexican soil. Still, the Barf squad was making them do it, at least for now. The robberies began occurring within a few feet of the tumbledown cyclone fence—where the fence even existed. And where it did not exist, which was in most areas patrolled by BARF, the bandits became acutely aware of such things as concrete monuments and other man-made markers which defined an imaginary line.
As dangerous as it was to commit what the judiciales considered an enormous crime, namely armed robbery on the soil of Mexico, the bandits had decided that it was safer for now to risk the wrath of the Mexican lawmen than to encounter the Barf squad.
So the Barfers found they were working themselves out of a job. The number of significant bandit arrests after the shooting of the Tijuana policemen plunged. And actually, there were a few Barfers giving silent thanks for this turn of events. But Manny Lopez was going bonkers.
The Loco shootout, followed within days by the international shootout, had been powerful stuff and had produced even more changes in Manny Lopez: “I felt I could do anything out there.”
There was much more driving him than the publicity, which the Barfers believed was his sole motivation. Manny Lopez was starting to feel some seductive and overpowering emotions that many a man before him had felt down through history: Alexander, Bonaparte, Hitler, Dustin Hoffman. Manny Lopez was beginning to feel omnipotent.
Since the mountain wouldn’t come to Mahomet, Manny was going south. When he made the matter-of-fact announcement in the tiny little Barf squadroom one night in later summer, several Barfers said that it was like the captain of a jumbo jet announcing that the next sound you hear will be the bomb exploding in the cockpit. Or maybe getting a call from Lana Banana saying, “Gee, fellas, I’ve started getting these little sores and the doctor says I should call every one a my friends and …”
It was that kind of announcement. People wanted to speak right up, but nobody could even talk at the moment. People wanted to say a whole lot of things to Manny Lopez but everyone was waiting for someone else to begin. There was a certain amount of machismo required just to be a cop, of course. And there was about eighty-seven times as much required to be a Barfer nowadays. And even by being of Mexican blood, thereby culturally programmed with enough machismo to get yourself in all sorts of trouble all your life, there are certain things you do not do. Not for duty, not for glory, not to prove God knows what to God knows whom. And one of the things you don’t do is go south.
What Manny Lopez was telling them was that since they couldn’t catch any bandits on American soil these days, maybe they should, you know, just fudge a little? Just trip on down past that imaginary line or, where that beat-up little old fence is standing, just slip on through one of the holes? And walk on the south side. Only a few paces, you understand. Therein fooling the shit out of these smartass bandits who were frustrating them with their new tactic. And just think how many good bandit busts they could make before the robbers got the word. A regular blitzkreig! Can you dig it, fuckers?
Manny was showing his impish grin when he said it. His gap-toothed boyish smile was just full of fun and his eyebrow had squiggled and locked into the question mark as he envisioned shocking the crap out of some robbers right down there on the dirt belonging to the Republic of Mexico.
There were so many things wrong with this idea that everyone was dumbstruck. Not the least wrong was that word had already come back from pretty reliable sources that some judiciales and Tijuana police wanted revenge. There were even rumors that Mexican lawmen had put together a few pesos and promises. That it would be given to anyone who returned a favor. Bring me the head of Manny Lopez! And by implication, his men.
There were all sorts of rumors of this kind flying around. And whether or not the rumor of a price on Manny’s head was true, just common sense told them that if they were caught by some Tijuana lawmen on the Mexican side after what they’d done to Chuey Hernandez and Pedro Espindola, well …
When they left the briefing that night—and everyone looked like a bat had sucked his blood, and not a word was spoken, not a peep—Ken Kelly made a remark that absolutely no one found funny. He said maybe they should start carrying cyanide capsules in their teeth.
It was during these weeks of walking south of the imaginary line, more fearful of Tijuana lawmen than they were of bandits who smelled like murder, that they began to talk among themselves, and with wives, and best friends. After being properly lubricated, of course, because hardball macho Gunslingers don’t talk about such things while sober. It was about this time that they began talking about Fear.
And any discussion of Fear necessarily included a discussion of Manny Lopez. Not as to whether each man feared him; that was absolutely against the code of machismo to discuss openly, although it is virtually certain that they did, with the possible exception of Big Ugly. The reason being that Joe Vasquez respected and admired and even liked Manny Lopez too much to fear him as the others did.
Big Ugly put it this way: “Maybe we should a got more credit out there, but the thing is I always knew Manny wouldn’t make us do nothing he wouldn’t do. And I knew that whatever it was, he could probably do it better than any of us. Thing is, Manny was born to lead. I never came to hate him like some a the other guys.”
Fred Gil said, “Manny gave you the feeling that you wouldn’t want to cross him and not have him on your side.”
Ernie Salgado said, “I worked for a lot a sergeants and lieutenants when I was in Nam. I saw them come and go and die. But I never met a leader like him. The nearest thing I can say is I started to feel like I felt toward my D.I. when I was a Marine recruit.” And that could be interpreted easily enough.
The outsiders like Robbie Hurt and Ken Kelly, who were not raised under the cultural code of machismo, were more direct.
“We were scared of him. Period,” Robbie Hurt said. “Whatever it was Manny felt, that he called fear, it wasn’t what I felt, what I called fear.”
It no longer did them any good at all to know that Manny Lopez would never ask them to do something he wouldn’t do. That was the trouble. They knew he’d do it, whatever he asked! Manny was a family man with bright handsome children, yet each Barfer came to the inescapable conclusion that Manny Lopez simply did not know self-preserving fear. And that knowledge became the most frightening thing of all.
“It’s like the way you’re scared of psychotics,” Ken Kelly said of their fear of Manny. “Unpredictable, dangerous, lucky psychotics.”
Manny had them always looking over their shoulders: Is he just a spot on the horizon, or is he about to land on my head like a falling safe?
“I knew they were scared a me,” Manny Lopez was quoted as saying. “It had to be that way. We weren’t doing regular police work.”
Regular police work? Not even close. When Eddie Cervantes got back from his vacation in Fresno, having heard the news of the international shootout on television, he was surprised to feel no ambivalence ab
out the most publicized shooting yet. He thought he’d be envious not to have been there. He thought he might feel left out when the others talked about it because he had been the most vocal about Manny Lopez hogging the headlines.
Strangely enough, he wasn’t jealous at all. He couldn’t escape the notion that it was a miracle one of them hadn’t died that night. And if he had been there, fifteen pounds bloated from all the drinking he had done as a Barfer, he might have just filled up that one little pocket of empty air which forty-plus police bullets whizzed through harmlessly. He just might have been the one who died out there that night.
He had been thinking a lot about little pockets of empty air with bullets whizzing through, and about near misses to a human artery when knives flashed past, and all kinds of other mind-diddling games like that. And every man had to laugh that year when, in the baseball playoffs, an announcer uttered the inevitable cliché: “Baseball is a game of inches.” They could tell the dumb shit about a game of inches.
Eddie Cervantes, with his sad down-turned eyes and Tex-Mex cadence, had enough machismo and anger in him to confront Manny Lopez, and he started doing it without letup. About everything. He used the word okay excessively, and it would sound like this: “Okay, Manny, you know I ain’t afraid to do nothing okay and since I’m the smallest guy everyone out in those hills picks on me okay and I had my share a shit out there okay but there ain’t no sense doing stupid things out there okay cause there ain’t no sense dying for this since nobody appreciates it anyways. Okay?”
And Manny Lopez would say to Eddie Cervantes, “What’s the matter? You chickenshit?”
“You think so?” Eddie Cervantes would say, getting madder and madder. “Just because you’re a sergeant okay I don’t need to take that shit okay. I think you’re fucked! Okay?”
“Well, I think you’re a pussy if you don’t wanna do your job,” Manny Lopez would answer.
“Well, you want a piece a my ass, I ain’t afraid,” Eddie Cervantes would say.
And then everybody would jump in and break it up, because if someone actually hit Manny, it might be like hitting the Pope or something, and they’d all die on the spot.
Then Manny Lopez would say, “If someone’s a pussy or a puto, then stay in the station! I’m going out there and kick ass! And Eddie Cervantes, whose balls are big as Carlos Chacon’s ass, is gonna be right beside me!”
And Eddie Cervantes’ sad down-turned eyes would drop a foot lower and he’d say, “We’re gonna go out okay and kick ass. Okay.”
“You fuckin Aries.” Manny Lopez would grin with an arm around the shortest Barfer because Eddie was born on April 4th and Manny Lopez on April 3rd, two years earlier. “I knew you wouldn’t quit.”
And out they’d go for another fun-filled night walking south of the imaginary line. One night when the junior varsity was on just such a fishing expedition they heard an eerie voice from the shacks on a hill in Colonia Libertad. It sounded like La Llorona, the weeping woman from ancient Mexican legend who roams the land at night looking for her children. Or maybe they figured it was Chano B. Gomez, Jr., yelling from the upper soccer field.
It was a spooky voice that froze them in their tracks. Then the eerie moaning stopped. Fear blew and rattled through the canyon like balls of mesquite. They heard only distant voices in the night: men, women, babies, dogs.
Then a voice like a knife in the guts. Every man flinched or crouched. Every man looked for the shadow of death to the south. A voice belonging to whom? A bandit? A judicial?
Who was it? And how could the owner of the voice have possibly known that the shadows walking south of the line were San Diego policemen? It was impossible!
A voice cried out: “Sergeant Loooooo-pez! Is that you?”
Renee Camacho couldn’t escape the feeling of dread. Nothing helped anymore. He spent much more time talking to his father, Herbert Camacho. The barber told his only child all the comforting things, and he told his father how he couldn’t rid himself of the urge to shoot approaching bandits before they had a chance to pull a weapon.
“I feel like doing it that way and putting on paper what should have happened,” Renee confessed. “I’m even getting disappointed in Snider. Maybe he should step in and get the men rotated out a the hills, or maybe someone should monitor our emotional condition. I think some a the guys are getting to be weird guys!”
Dick Snider was the kind of white guy Herbert Camacho admired, one who spoke Spanish and knew the culture, an emotional man, the barber said. He remembered telling the BARF lieutenant: “You take care a my son. You take care a him now!”
But Dick Snider had been pushed further and further out of it, and Renee Camacho told his father it seemed hopeless. He had lots of talks with his father.
Other Barfers were noticing the change in the happy-go-lucky young fellow that Renee had been. He, like many of them, started to seem distant and even unfriendly to other cops at Southern substation. Barfers didn’t talk in the locker room. They sometimes didn’t seem to hear a greeting. Other cops thought they were wallowing in elitism and publicity. They didn’t know the truth.
Barfers started fearing improbable things: that the bandits might lie in wait for them, to rid the canyons of these San Diego cops who had so hurt business. They started in terror every time a jackrabbit rustled the underbrush. A slinking coyote became a man waiting to murder them. Shapes of stunted oak flew at them in the shadows. A groaning tree could take the breath out of a man. Their guns were never out of their hands now. Their guns were getting rust-pitted from sweaty palms and aching clenched fingers.
Sometimes they’d hear a few rounds of gunfire just across the border. Once they heard a burst from an automatic weapon and Manny wanted to stroll on over and check it out. They were halfway there before every man, talking triple time, persuaded him to STOP!
And tics? There were Barfers developing blinks, stammers, headaches, indigestion, back pain. Ken Kelly said the place was ticking like Switzerland.
The pressure at home was becoming tremendous for almost all of them. “Border shooting. Film at eleven!” It was uttered once too often by television news readers and the girls were all getting a little loony too. Sharlynn Camacho had made Renee promise a hundred times that after the baby was born …
He couldn’t get his mind off that baby. What would it be, a boy or a girl? Would it look Mexican, or white like her? Would it be tall or short? Then of course, would he ever see his baby?
And as though he could read minds, Manny Lopez one evening took Renee Camacho aside and said, “Renee, you’re one a the guys I really depend on. I know you’d never let me down.”
The talk among themselves was now on one subject: quitting. They weren’t talking about groupies anymore, or partying after work or scrapbooks or Manny hogging headlines. They were talking about survival. And then they started talking about it at lineup, in the presence of their sergeant.
Eddie Cervantes started things out by saying, “I guess you heard, Manny, that I got a chance okay to transfer to the school task force. Okay?”
“Why don’t you just say it,” Manny Lopez answered, as his eyebrow locked in.
“Huh?”
“School task force, my ass. You’re getting scared.”
“Scared? Me?”
“Yeah, you.”
“I was scared, I’d a quit long ago.”
“Ralph Nader oughtta recall your balls! You wanna be a pussy? Go ahead, quit!”
“Okay, I’ll show you if I’m a pussy!”
“There’s only one way to show anybody,” Manny Lopez said dryly. “That’s to go out there and kick ass.”
“Okay, motherfucker,” Eddie Cervantes said. “You know what? I ain’t quitting okay? I’m staying!”
“I figured it was just your old lady fucking up your head or something,” Manny Lopez grinned. “I’m buying the beer tonight!”
And then, four hours later, as he was squatting by some rock pile smelling sweat and fear and rot and hum
an excrement, Eddie Cervantes would think one thought: I’m gonna get killed. Tonight’s the night. And all his friends were starting to say he was stupid. That no one cared about this border. That he would die for Manny’s glory.
Ernie Salgado was also speaking his mind even more directly on the forbidden topic. “You want somebody to say it,” the Vietnam vet told Manny one night. “I’m scared. I’m especially scared to be doing crazy things like walking south.”
“Sure, and your wife’s pregnant,” Manny Lopez said disgustedly.
“You know she is,” Ernie Salgado said. “And you know she’s had miscarriages and …”
“Eeeeer-neeeee, get over here!” Manny Lopez mimicked the moment he would never let go, when Susan Salgado called to Ernie at the party.
“The thing I’m saying,” Ernie Salgado continued, “is that I’m not quitting. But I am scared about how we’re doing things now.”
“Okay, you’re scared,” Manny Lopez sighed. “I always knew that since you wouldn’t shoot that time.”
Most were running to fat by now, bloated boozy coils of fat. Several were waking each night at the drinker’s hour with night sweats and irregular heartbeats. Some reported nightmares of smothering, then a glaze of fog and mist, then awake.
Once, when they were walking by a sinister wall of brush in Deadman’s Canyon, the clack and clatter of wings drew three guns from their holsters. A dove scared the heart right out of three human beings. The dove went flaring off like the spirit of these young men. One admitted that he absolutely believed his heart was in a fatal stall. Flameout at zero feet sea level.
Fred Gil had lately begun asking himself a question for which there seemed to be no simple or even logical answer. It was actually the most complex and difficult and maddening question of his life: Why didn’t I become a plumber?
And then one day all the Barfers more or less implied privately that if one of them would walk right in there and hang it up, the rest would follow. Old Fred Gil—with credentials, being one of the wounded, and the oldest—was a logical choice. He walked right in to Manny and said “heck” or “goldang” and did it. He quit and went back to patrol.
Lines and Shadows Page 28