Lines and Shadows (1984)

by Wambaugh, Jospeh

  "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 about 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 clich,: "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 of 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 human 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.

  But nobody else followed him. Not yet.

  "I used to feel real bad after I left," Fred Gil said. "They sort a hung me out to dry. The others didn't quit. Then I used to read about something they'd done and I'd feel real bad that I shoulda been there with them. I got real angry with myself for quitting."

  Old Fred Gil-thirty-seven years of age, judo champ, Vietnam vet, Barf survivor with a bullet in his hip-he figured he'd finally proved the man right. He'd proved it to a father who hadn't raised him. He had quit. Old Fred Gil wondered if he was a mama's boy after all.

  Renee Camacho hadn't gone home that night he shot one of Loco's bandits. He had called Sharlynn and said, "I can't come home just yet."

  She said, "Renee, why don't you come home and let's talk about it."

  "I just can't," he told her. "I just can't come home." She said she understood. She told him to come home when he was ready.

  "She was a pretty good wife," he said. "A pretty good cop's wife."

  Renee Camacho drove to the home of a police friend who lived in El Cajon, but he never found satisfactory answers to all the questions he posed as he and his friend passed the entire night at a kitchen table.

  Renee Camacho told his friend: "I really felt like I was gonna get killed. And it scared me and here I shot somebody with the shotgun and I don't know if I killed him and I feel good about it. And. and that's good! That's the worst thing of all. And after I asked him, he went down and I ran up and I took out my thirty-eight and I wanted to find him and shoot him somemore and I just wanted to kill him and now I have anger and awful guilty feelings about it and."

  The friend had served as a Green Beret in Vietnam and tried to reassure Renee that his anger and guilt were normal. But the next burst of questions wasn't quite so easy to deal with.

  Renee said, "But am I doing the right thing? Is this all worthwhile? Is this whole job we're doing the right thing or the wrong thing? Am I on a macho trip or what? Should I just go back to being a regular cop where I'm sure that I'm doing the right thing? Is this worth it? Why am I out there doing these things?"

  Renee Camacho longed to feel pure remorse, but couldn't. Anger kept getting in the way, and the fantasy of sticking his snub-nosed gun in the face of a man he shot, and firing five rounds.

  And then the boy tenor began asking himself the most difficult questions of all: Am I learning things about myself that I never should have learned? Who am I, really?

  It was on such a day, when all of life was out of sync and he felt like a record playing at the wrong speed, that one of the former friends from patrol passed him at the substation and said, "Nice job on the crook you brought in the other night. Guess he needed a transfusion after you beat the shit out a him. I'd be in the joint doing that to an arrestee, but I guess there ain't no rules for the Barf hot dogs, is there?"

  Finally, Herbert Camacho looked at his tortured child during one of the trips to the barbershop, and said, "You must only do this job if you believe in it, Renee. You've helped people who were being hurt. But you must believe in what you're doing or stop."

  Renee Camacho adored this man, who was perhaps already secretly starting to die. Renee said to his wife: "My dad thinks I'm brave. I'm being brave for my dad."

  He stayed. And then one fine night at summer's end when they were actually on the proper side of the imaginary line, a group of three bandits tried to rob the junior varsity walking team with knives and clubs, and Renee Camacho, after the arrest went down, found himself running across the canyons after one of the robbers. Running hell-bent for the fence.

  There was no moon. They were both falling. The bandit hit the fence hole but did not flow through as bandits usually did. He snagged his pants on the wire. Renee dived through on top of him. The man was kicking and punching, and clawing and biting like a rabid coyote. The man, of course, smelled like death.

  Renee Camacho was yelling, "Barf barf barf barf, GOD-DAMNIT!" and punching at the bandit and missing and getting punched, and he got his gun out and the bandit smacked the gun sending it clattering into the rocks, and now Renee was himself snarling like a coyote and slamming his fists into the face of the smaller man, who was weakening. And suddenly a car pulled up on the dirt road and the men fighting hand-to-hand in the dirt were lit by headlight beams. Renee looked up and saw red and blue lights.

  And suddenly he realized where he was: over one hundred feet south of the imaginary line. Two car doors slammed and Renee jerked the bandit up and got the man's neck in a choke hold and the robber started wheezing and gasping.

  Just as one of two Tijuana policemen said, "Let him go!"

  "I'm a San Diego police officer!" Renee Camacho yelled. "He just tried to rob me! He's my prisoner!"

  The taller of the two said, "Let him go. He'll come with us as our prisoner. You're on Mexican land."

  But Renee began backing slowly toward the fence, dragging his prisoner with him, holding the bandit around the neck.

  The Tijuana cops began-looking at each other and advancing slowly, and there was no doubt this time on whose soil they stood.

  And Renee was using the bandit as a shield and he could only repeat with a mouth as dry as the Tijuana River: "Now, I'm a San Diego policeman! Now, I'm a policeman! You know that. You know that!"

  Of course the Tijuana policemen knew that, and knew that this San Diego policeman had also known Chuey Hernandez and Pedro Espindola were policemen when he helped shoot them full of holes. They knew all of this. And they moved ever closer and looked at each other again.

  To Renee they looked like soda pop interludes, or cattle prods in the nuts. They looked like tags on his toe. In Spanish. And Renee kept backing slowly, toward America. Going home.

  Just then Renee heard the fence rattling and thought he was
surrounded. He heard footsteps padding up behind him! But it was Manny Lopez, who yelled, "Go call your supervisors if you have a problem! This man is our prisoner and we're going back with him!"

  Renee Camacho looked at the waffling cops. And back at Manny. And picked up his gun from the ground. And back to Manny. And at the two cops, who were thinking about it.

  And he expected to hear it any second, the most horrifying words in the language of man: "Sabes que?"

  Manny whispered in English: "If they draw, ice them."

  The Tijuana cops did not draw. They stood silently by the fence and let the two Barfers drag their prisoner through the hole back to American soil, beating him into submission.

  Renee Camacho was soaked from his head to his crotch. They'd won another game. A game of inches. But in this lunatic game, the odds of winning were getting longer and longer and longer. And what if Manny was unconsciously saying the prayer of the compulsive gambler? Dear Lord, please let me. lose. They'd cash in with him!

  Manny Lopez told them a story about personal fear. He said that one night, for no apparent reason, after having been out of the field for a number of days, he was walking through the canyon wearing a brand-new bulletproof vest and even more heavily armed than usual, when he saw a large group of aliens rise up as though from the land itself. Manny said that there were fifty or more in the group and that suddenly they were just there. A few yards in front of him coming his way, Manny said that his knees began to tremble. He was wearing two pairs of pants like an alien, and his legs were buckling and shimmying so much he had to look down because he was afraid Tony Puente and Eddie Cervantes might see. He said he thought he was going a little crazy because of those shaking trembling buckling knees. He said that as the aliens trudged silently past, his legs began to steady themselves and he was able to continue. He said he never felt anything that bad again and could not figure out the why of it. He told them the story to illustrate that just because they felt overwhelming fear on a given night, it didn't mean that they would feel it every night.