Lines and Shadows (1984)

by Wambaugh, Jospeh

  They smoked silently for a moment and the first one said, "Give me some money for a drink."

  "I only have a little for my journey north," Manny said in his diffident alien voice, and that was all it took.

  The second man grabbed Manny by the collar of his jacket, placed a blade to his spinal cord and said they would be requiring either his money or his balls.

  The robbery attempt was not unusual except that it presaged an unusual turn of events. Whether the Barfers' growing legend had something to do with it or not, the robbers were definitely eschewing foreplay. They were leaping immediately into armed attacks.

  This particular robbery presaged something else-an attitude on the part of Manny Lopez toward imminent deadly threat. With the blade literally at the nape of his neck, there in the darkness-smelling what? garbage?-his right eyebrow squiggled into, the most perfect question mark his partners had ever seen. Manny Lopez rolled his eyes in mock terror and said, "Please, sir! He has the money!" pointing to Tony Puente, who was squatting three feet away.

  At the moment when Tony Puente and Eddie Cervantes and Fred Gil were pumping adrenaline by the gallon it didn't mean much. Not until later. Because they could almost see the freaking mischief in Manny's little eye under that eyebrow. A guy was about to separate a piece of body rope that could turn him into a dangling puppet, and Manny was not just figuring a way out, he was trying to get a laugh.

  Of course, after the bandit bought Manny's act and rushed at Tony Puente, Manny Lopez said, "Sabes que, motherfucker?"

  The last thing the bandit heard clearly was "Barf!" Because then he was being pistol-whipped, stomped, slugged, handcuffed, arrested.

  The boys had a giggle after hours that night telling what Manny had said. It was good for a chuckle until one thought of it soberly. In Deadman's Canyon in the dark of the night? With a blade at his spinal cord? Manny can go for a yuk? He had to be as scared as the others. Didn't he?

  Toward the end of the month when the weather was very tolerable, Patricia Ramirez decided it was time to go north and find work. She was twenty-four years old, without skills or education, and reasoned that she was too old to be barely feeding herself in Tijuana. If she was to have a chance in life she had to go. Patricia Ramirez, like most of the others who crossed the canyons at night, wanted more and was brave enough to try for it.

  It wasn't difficult to find traveling companions on the streets of Tijuana, and it would be foolhardy for a woman to attempt the crossing alone. She barely knew the two pollos she found herself with that night. One was a Tijuana transient and the other, from Jalisco, looked like a campesino. They were about her age and seemed strong, and she hoped they might provide her with protection if a guide or, God forbid, a bandit should try to take advantage.

  At twilight they were near the borderline about a mile east of the point of entry. There was the unusual carnival atmosphere in the canyons on this clear night as the army of aliens prepared to cross. The three young people stood tensely by a bustling grocery store near the border debating whether they could afford to waste their money on a strawberry soda pop, since mouths got very dry waiting for darkness.

  Patricia Ramirez saw four men watching them. One of the men smiled at her. She didn't like his smile, not one bit. They didn't have the docile look of pollos. The smiling man approached and asked if they had any marijuana.

  Of course they did not, but the man, still smiling, said, "Then give me some money, little sister."

  Just like that. And they weren't even in the canyons yet.

  They hadn't set foot on United States soil. They were on an unpaved street in their own country. These bandits weren't playing the game fair and square. They were supposed to wait until the pollos were in the United States before they ambushed them.

  Patricia Ramirez had exactly 4 U. S. dollars to get her to Los Angeles for some kind of work. She hesitated but gave the man one of her dollars, avoiding his eyes when he touched her. Then he asked her two male companions for money and they silently gave him a few of their wadded U. S. bank notes.

  The sun dropped behind the hills. It was time to go. Pollos kissed friends and family and yelled nervous farewells. Patricia Ramirez had not gotten five hundred yards into the darkness when she saw the smiling man again. He was blocking a trail. He had appeared in the night like a ghost. He was still smiling when he said, "Now give us everything."

  Then the smiling man's three companions jumped down onto the narrow trail and she got shoved away from her companions. Hands searched her expertly in the darkness while she tried not to cry. She felt her wristwatch going. It had cost her 30 American dollars, months of saving. She felt the necklace slide from her neck. It had cost her $6 in Tijuana, money she felt was squandered frivolously. And of course they took her last 3 U. S. dollars. So now she thought she had nothing of value. Nothing they might want. She was not quite correct.

  The older man grabbed her by the front of her sweater and dug his hand down inside her bra. He was brutal and it hurt but she didn't whimper. The younger one then laughed and made a remark about how many pairs of pants pollos wear and he put his hand on her body and unbuttoned her long pants.

  Then she started to cry. The bandits really got a kick out of it because, sure enough, she wore two pairs of long pants, one to strip away to make herself presentable after arriving from her journey. She wept when they peeled down both pairs of pants and put their hands inside her underwear.

  The other bandits were quick and practiced. They used their knives to cut the shoelaces off the terrified companions of Patricia Ramirez. They searched the shoes for money. They made them remove all their clothing, every layer of it. One of the pollos told the bandits that he didn't have any money. Then he, too, began to cry when the oldest bandit smiled and walked up to him and placed a pistol at his temple and said he was going to do something bad to him for lying. Then he stripped the pollo of the few pesos and dollars for which he was risking his life.

  The bandits told them to take their clothing and shoes with the cut shoelaces and go barefoot through the canyons. And told them to watch out for bandits-except for Patricia Ramirez, who was standing in the arms of one with her pants down around her knees, crying like a child. He began rubbing her vagina while her companions walked north, avoiding her eyes. They had to live, didn't they? What could they do? They only wanted to survive.

  Before the bandits could enjoy the use of Patricia Ramirez, they heard some voices off in the darkness. Someone stumbled and said, "Oops!"

  And then someone, who was Manny Lopez, said, "You dumb fucker! Don't say 'oops'!"

  Then a voice said, "What should I say, goddamnit?" And Manny Lopez said, "Say 'oops' in Spanish!"

  "I don't know how to say 'oops' in Spanish!" Of course the bandits didn't understand all this chatter off in the night but they understood someone yelling "Oops!" And "Oops!" didn't come from a pollo's mouth, so they knew they were in trouble.

  Patricia Ramirez was spared, and while she tried to dress herself and catch up with her fleeing companions, who had run into a couple of Barfers on the trail, the bandits were hotfooting it back to the hole in the fence, where they ran smack into some more Barfers: Manny Lopez and Ernie Salgado.

  Two of the bandits, one of whom had the gun, didn't like the looks of two pollos squatting by the fence hole, so they hightailed it east toward the next hole. The would-be rapist with a bar of iron chose to tough it out and take the shortest distance to Mexican soil, right through the squatting pollos, one of whom happened to be wearing a red bandanna over his head to keep off the mosquitoes which were turning his balding noggin into an insect fiesta. That night Manny Lopez was also wearing a Pendleton shirt, and so he looked more like a bandit than a docile pollo.

  The would-be rapist held a knife beside his thigh and said, "Hey, socio, what's happening?" in the familiar bandit greeting. Then he bolted straight for the fence hole swinging his iron bar.

  And someone started yelling "Barf! Barf!" and the fight was on
.

  The would-be rapist got pistol-whipped and stomped and was led battered and handcuffed toward a waiting police car later that evening, at which time he had only one thing to say to the uniformed cop who was to transport him to a doctor and jail. He looked gratefully at the San Diego police uniform and said, "Help!"

  "We'll take them down hard," Manny Lopez always said to his men. "Fists, saps, gun butts, whatever it takes. Until such time as the guy's dead or pretends he's dead. Or flat-ass surrenders unconditionally."

  Patricia Ramirez had to return to Tijuana but was very grateful to be undefiled and alive. And the Barfers had foiled yet another rape, which was good for a few newspaper stories. In fact Manny had to have someone call the press for him, since his arms were too banged up to dial a phone that night from The Anchor Inn in San Ysidro.

  That was the night when three passably foxy school-teachers, one of whom wore a size 40 E-cup, came in and asked if this was where the border "Gunslingers" hang out. That was a very late night for several of the boys.

  It started getting serious about then-the arrival of groupies, that is. And why not? Weren't they doing television reenactments of their exploits? Didn't all warrior bands deserve camp followers?

  At one of their drinking parties someone ate the worm out of a bottle of mescal, and someone was always eating a jalapeno chili like a macho Mexican. Shit, that was, nothing. Eddie Cervantes topped everybody by picking up a big fat woolly black caterpillar. That sucker was the size of a breakfast sausage, and even the hardest of the hardballers had to cringe when Eddie stuck that wiggly squirming animal between his lips and started crunching it into his grinding molars.

  He did it because Manny dared him to. Just as young Joe Castillo responded to a Manny Lopez dare to leap over parking meters while they were staggering down the street from one gin mill to another at one o'clock in the morning. The young Manny Lopez clone would vault those parking meters no hands, nuts first, because Manny challenged him. Literally willing to bust his balls for Manny. Oh, he could be a ballbreaker, this Barf sergeant, but hardly anyone noticed yet. They were too busy coping with what the media said they were.

  So kick open the swinging saloon doors! Stop the tinkling piano. Keep your lizard-shit civilian small talk to front-pew level because you lizard-shit civilians are in the presence of the last of the hardball, cactus-stuck, worm-chewing, chili-sucking, skull-crunching, bandit-busting, ball-clanging Gunslingers in the West.

  And maybe that was it. Does America cherish her philosophers, statesmen, artists, scientists? To a point. But America mythologizes her men of action. Her Gunslingers. America names airports after John Wayne. Could a journalist resist? Think of it: ten little hardball lawmen, shooting down Mexican bandits where they stand, out there in the cactus and rocks and tarantulas and scorpions and rattlesnakes, in a no-man's-land implicitly ceded to the bandits by the U. S. government. If that wasn't a John Ford scenario, what the hell was it? These ten were embodiments of an American myth. And after them, there would be no more.

  They had come back nearly a century after the world thought them extinct. These were, by God, The Last of the Gunslingers.

  How Ken Kelly wanted to join them. The blond cop would try to show up at nearly every after-hours soiree at The Wing or The Anchor Inn or any other cop's saloon where the Barfers might congregate after duty. There were the regulars: Manny Lopez, dressed like John Travolta with maybe some Merthiolate on his face where he'd been kicked by a robber (groupies absolutely died over visible wounds). And maybe his fists damaged from punching out bad guys. "Could you hold that glass of Chivas Regal up to my lips, my little kumquat?"

  And of course right next to his sergeant, young Joe Castillo, ditto for the disco duds but with more gold chains, getting his share of attention because he was the best-looking and had an athletic build and this cute way of talking with his whole body: shoulders hunching, hips swaying, long, graceful hands clenching, unclenching, waving, fluttering. He could have been a mime or a dancer, this young cop.

  What a pair: the head Gunslinger and his protege. Eddie Cervantes was also drinking pretty heavily by now, as were Tony Puente and Renee Camacho. But perhaps the heaviest drinker of them all was the outsider, Robbie Hurt. And whenever Robbie was putting a move on some groupie, it always seemed to be Eddie who would say, "Whadda you know about it? You're back where it's safe."

  And Robbie would sulk. With good reason. He'd love to be out there with them. He'd give his Porsche dream to be out there with the varsity or even the junior varsity. As it was he was close enough sometimes to hear them screaming "Barf! Barf! Barf!" And had to run in circles with a shotgun and radio, only to find the voices echoing around the canyons and confusing him. And to end with his heart beating holes in his eardrums, and the adrenaline building without release because he didn't even know what was happening out there in the dark. It was making him goofy. And then to come to the booze parties at the local saloon only to have Eddie Cervantes say, "He's our water boy." Well, it was getting unbearable.

  At first Manny let Robbie walk a few times with the junior varsity, but twice, potential robbers who were feeling them out backed off because they had never before seen a black pollo out in the canyons.

  Once, when a potential bandit group questioned them, and were seemingly satisfied by a story from Carlos Chacon that Robbie had come from Central America where there were lots of blacks, they backed off nervously before committing themselves.

  When Manny Lopez heard that the bandits had almost come close enough to make the necessary threat and demand for money, he said something to the young cops that surprised them. He said, "Listen, fuckers, don't you ever do that again!"

  When they looked puzzled he said, "Don't you ever let someone you know is a bandit get away with that shit!"

  When they asked what they should do he said, "Beat the shit out a them! Whip their asses and leave them. Maybe then they'll decide to do their stealing back in Tijuana. Maybe they'll start to learn that we're badder than the judiciales."

  There were some who didn't agree with the way things were going. Ernie Salgado for one. He lived near Manny and drove him to work in a department car. He didn't like the idea of turning into vigilantes. He barely took a drink and Manny and the other hard drinkers got on him pretty good for his temperance. They attributed it to his wife, since once at a Barf party when all the wives were present, Susan Salgado yelled, "Eeeeeeer-nie, get over here!"

  And that was all it took with these hardball, bandit-busting, worm-eating Gunslingers. Pussy- whipped? Oh, my God!

  In any case, Manny Lopez decided that Robbie Hurt, being black, could not be part of the walking teams and would always provide cover when they needed it. Manny told him how invaluable such a service was and how somebody had to do it and how they needed him to run in and save their asses when it got tough. Then Manny would invariably end the stroking of Robbie by dragging some groupies over and saying "This guy saves my tail out there every night. He is one bad dude."

  And Robbie would feel better and tell the groupie a few war stories too. And drink. Hard liquor. He'd seldom get home before the bars closed. And though he always drove himself home he sometimes couldn't recall doing it. That also seemed macho to the young cop-alcoholic blackouts.

  "I don't even remember driving home!" Why not? Gun-slingers were entitled.

  His wasn't the only marriage deteriorating at the time. There was Ken Kelly popping up at nearly every "unwinding" session at The Wing. Asking when oh when would there be an opening in BARF so he could join?

  He still offered pimping services. "Didn't I tell that new waitress she could meet you guys at The Anchor Inn?"

  "But she was a witch! You said she had big tits."

  "Zits. I said big zits. Okay, I'll do better."

  He tried to please them, but they'd become discriminating: "Goddamn, King! She had a neck like an elephant's trunk!"

  "Okay! I'll do better!"

  Manny Lopez warned Ken Kelly that being a
blond white boy, he could no more walk convincingly in the canyons than could Robbie Hurt, but Ken Kelly said he didn't care. He'd be Robbie's partner. He'd be the other half of the cower team, freeing up one who could walk. He'd carry the goddamn toilet paper.

  And one night Ken Kelly got to prove his resourcefulness in the face of danger. A gaggle of waitresses showed up at the park on schedule. They were all there; Fat Mindy, Thin Mindy, Lana Banana, and another one.

  "She's a ten!" Ken Kelly cried when she stepped out of Fat Mindy's car. She was blonder than Ken Kelly, and she didn't walk, she rippled, like a jungle cat. In fact she was like one, in an imitation leopard coat, with dagger fingernails and decadent cranberry lipstick.

  The drinking went on until two-thirty and then Fat Mindy made an announcement to Ken Kelly about the leopard girl. "She likes you. She wants to know if you'd like to get better acquainted?"

  "Is a frog's ass watertight?" Ken Kelly screamed.

  Oh, how the Barfers envied Ken Kelly. She liked him! Even after the others had told her 101 exciting shoot-em-up stories, 100 of which were invented. Even though she knew that Ken Kelly wasn't even a Gunslinger, but just aspired to become one.

  Since he was really smashed he pulled his long limp hair flat back on his head, and twitched his walrus moustache, and made his eyes buggy in his Jack Nicholson impression. Then he unscrewed the cap on a half gallon of wine saying, "What do you prefer, my dear? Red, white, or beige?"

  She said he was so fucking cute!

  "I'm all jiggles and wires!" Ken Kelly whispered to Joe Castillo. "I got the war department faked out. I told her I'm working overtime."

  Except that another cop's wife who happened to work at the same fast-food joint as Fat Mindy and Thin Mindy and Lana Banana had made a surreptitious phone call to Ken Kelly's wife telling her where the boys and girls were going to be sometime after midnight.

  At 2:30 A. M. Ken Kelly said, "There's a car coming."

  And indeed there was. It was driving slowly through the park and up the hill to where they drank. "That sounds just like my Pinto," he said. "The same clinky transmission. Naw, that couldn't be my Pinto."