Lines and Shadows (1984)

by Wambaugh, Jospeh

  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.

  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 heir 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 n
ot 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.

  Chapter FIFTEEN

  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 defuga 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 worthwhile.

  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.

  If the frontal lobes of the human brain anticipate events, and if in the right hemisphere we find sensitivity and the left we find critical and analytical processes, Manny Lopez had one task before him if the BARF experiment was going to satisfy his conscious and unconscious needs: he had to puree their frontal lobes and right and left hemispheres into something like Reddi Wip. Manny Lopez had to dive on down to the area of the brain where aggression lives, where one finds the impulse to follow leaders blindly. This might be called the cellar of the brain. They were, during these fearsome times, living in Manny's cellar.

  Forty-year-old Chuey Hernandez was a jolly sort of fellow. His gold incisor gleamed when he smiled, as much a status symbol in Mexico as a dental prosthetic. There wasn't always a lot to smile about in that he had a whole bunch of people to support, one child of his own and seven belonging to his wife from her former marriage, as well as his aging mother.

  He had served in the Mexican Army before being accepted by the Tijuana Municipal Police, and most of his adult life had been spent wearing a uniform. He had the equivalent of a grade school education.

  About the best thing that had happened to Chuey in a while was that President Lopez Portillo was coming to Tijuana for a visit and there would be a big ceremony at La Playa. Chuey Hernandez played cornet in the police band. He'd been playing the cornet for twenty-five years. He had loved la banda de guerra, the drum and bugle corps, all his life.

  This was quite an honor for Chuey Hernandez and he was up for it that afternoon of July 16 when he came on duty. First, he got the old horn shined by a guy with a polishing wheel. Then he started looking at his equipment. The uniform was brand-new, but Chuey Hernandez looked sadly at his hat.

  The hat was all beat-up and crushed, like in old Army Air Corps movies. Chuey Hernandez had a talk with another cop who was much slimmer but had the same head size. Pedro Espindola told Chuey Hernandez that he had a brand-new hat at home, and since he wore a helmet on duty, he offered to sell it. A tiny moment in life Pedro Espindola would come to regret as long as he lived.

  Pedro Espindola left his patrol car at the police station and they both hopped into Chuey Hernandez' patrol car and headed off to the Espindola home in Zona Norte while Chuey Hernandez worried about his upper lip. He believed that the upper lip of a cornet player will fall asleep without daily practice. He worried that his upper lip might decide to fall asleep when he was playing for the President of Mexico.

  Hard wind. Flitting shadow and iron sunlight. Blood-beaked birds of prey were driven down by hard wind. The omnipresent summer smoke at the borderline vanished. The varsity and junior varsity were mingled that evening, broken into two groups operating close enough to be seen by each other even after sunset. Manny Lopez, Tony Puente, Joe Vasquez and Joe Castillo were on one walking team. Ernie Salgado, Renee Camacho and Carlos Chacon were on the other. Manny's team was working by the heaps of rock and bottles and trash and debris where the drainage pipe empties north during the wet season. There was plenty of cover there behind mounds of earth and concrete, where they could watch the second team should some bandits cross from Mexican soil to rob them. The second team, the real decoy in this operation, was hanging around right beside the fence talking to some pollos who were getting ready to cross after dark.

  It was a pretty relaxed affair and the pollos were, like most, friendly and generous. They were getting up their courage with some tequila and they offered a drink to the Barters, who politely declined, conjuring images of Mexican contagion.

  The men on the south side of the fence asked the Barfers curiously why they continued waiting even after darkness fell.

  "La migra's pretty heavy tonight," Carlos Chacon told them, and a pollo said, "Well, maybe we better wait for a while, too."

  So they just stood by the cyclone fence and drank tequila and chatted.

  At 9:50 P. M. Ernie Salgado saw a car coming down the highway. The car slowed and Ernie began watching it.

  It had gotten dark suddenly. Chuey Hernandez saw some men loitering by the border fence. He stopped his patrol car and he and Pedro Espindola decided to have a look.

  Chuey Hernandez turned on the red and blue siren lights and stepped out of the car, saying, "What are you doing there? Get over to the patrol car!"

  Pollos almost always did what they were told and so did this pair. Chuey Hernandez took their bottle of tequila and broke it on the ground by the roadside.

  With the two drinkers in the back seat, Chuey Hernandez was about to turn off the blue and red siren lights and had actually started the car forward when Pedro Espindola said, "Hold it. I see people in the gully."

  Chuey Hernandez moved the car forward about twenty-five meters-it would later say in an official report. It was parked almost directly over the big drainage pipe where the cyclone fence is rolled and torn and stretched and rendered useless by the people of the night. The cyclone fence abruptly terminates at a point where tourists won't notice. It is a fence g
oing nowhere.

  Young Joe Castillo was crouched beside his mentor and idol, Manny Lopez. They were behind chunks of concrete which had been washed away by winter rains and replaced again and again. It was like a military bunker behind all that. Joe Castillo was whispering to his sergeant while Chuey Hernandez was arresting the drinkers.

  Joe Castillo later said, "We saw the Mexican cops shaking these guys down. We figured it for an extortion."

  Regardless of whether or not it was an arrest for public drinking or drunkenness, "extortion" was taking place on the south side of the fence, in the Republic of Mexico. And these Mexican cops were possibly the ones reported to be robbing and extorting pollos, sometimes on American soil. And if they weren't, they'd do it if they had the chance because all Mexican cops were crooks. To the last man. Such was the state of mind of the Barfers.

  Chuey Hernandez held the flashlight in his left hand, keeping his gun hand free, and walked toward the fence shining his light down into the gully. He remembered seeing an old dead tree uprooted by floods and reaching toward the sky, roots-first, like huge arthritic hands clawing heavenward. Then he saw the figures down behind the uprooted trees and broken concrete. The chunks of concrete were pale as gravestones in the moonlight. Chuey Hernandez drew his revolver and stepped closer to the fence.

  He yelled at the two figures. He said, "What are you doing over there? Get back here!"

  Manny Lopez yelled back: "Give us a break, chief! We already made it! Leave us alone!"

  The die was cast. It was preordained from that moment. Every step in the little border drama was inevitable.