Ken Kelly said privately that it simply illustrated that Manny Lopez on occasion had a lucid moment. He was, by now, utterly convinced that the Barf sergeant was psychotic. But very soon Manny Lopez was going to be saying the same thing about Ken Kelly and they were going to have Ken's head shrunk to prove it.
The upshot of Manny's story was that not a Barfer believed Manny Lopez. To a man they did not believe that their leader ever felt the emotion they knew as an average run-of-the-mill explosion of terror, and horror of being murdered. And this knowledge, more than everything else, instilled more fear. Fear of him.
Renee Camacho said, "There was something about the man. He'd make you think, somehow he'll get me if I cross him. Maybe not now, maybe later. Somehow. He's an intimidator. Manny the Intimidator. He'd make you look over your shoulder and think: What the hell's this guy up to?"
It was simple for Manny to deal with his protege, Joe Castillo, even after disenchantment with Manny's methods led the young cop to stop wearing gold chains and pinky rings and disco suits. When Joe Castillo once had a few too many in a local saloon and threatened to quit, Manny simply said, "Okay, you got it. I'll have you back in patrol by tomorrow."
It might be music to half a dozen other ears in that bar, but to Joe Castillo it was a shell burst. The young cop said, "Who'd you get to replace me that fast?"
"Don't worry about it," Manny Lopez said. "Lots a guys wanna join BARF."
"But I been with you since the start!" Joe Castillo cried, and then several other boozy voices jumped in and said things like: "Hey, Manny, don't you have any loyalty to your men?" And, "You can't dump on Joe like that!" And so forth.
Five minutes later Joe Castillo was vastly relieved that he was still a Barfer, and Manny had his arms around Joe and Renee, saying "I love you guys!"
And Ken Kelly said, "I wonder what kind a background music oughtta be played behind this love story?" Maybe a suitable musical score could come from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as they trooped out to the canyons the next night, wondering if Manny Lopez had diddled their minds once again.
The Barfers were getting just about goofy enough for kidnapping about then, and one afternoon before the sun went down, they did it. They were resting on the hill just over Deadman's Canyon waiting for dark, and except for Manny, they weren't in any hurry for it to come. Just then two urchins came toddling over the rise. One of them was about five years old and the other was maybe a year older. They were accompanied by a muddy, colorless, bag-of-bones little mutt.
The six-year-old was a huero, fair-skinned with big gray eyes, and he strode right up to the group of pollos sprawled on the ground and said, "Where are you guys going?"
"Los Angeles," Manny Lopez answered.
"You got a guide?" he asked, and of course all the Barfers were eye-rolling and poking each other and generally suppressing giggles, and Manny said, "No, we don't."
And the kid replied, "We'll take you to San Ysidro."
And now the Barfers were really busting a gut and Manny said, "How much?"
And the little kid said, "A dime!" Which was no doubt the prearranged tariff the little wildcatters had decided upon. And after getting the dime they'd probably turn and run like hell with their mudball pooch back to Colonia Libertad.
So Manny stood up and strolled over and looked down at the barefoot vagabonds with burrs and stickers in their hair, and clothes that might never have been washed, and their little dog that surely had never been washed, and Manny reached his hand slowly inside his jacket and got hold of the piece in his shoulder holster, and turned to the Barfers with his eyebrow all squiggled in place, and with a wicked little grin said to them: "Sabes que?"
And they simply exploded. Everybody was squealing and snuffling and cackling and howling and the little kids got very pissed off with this weird bunch of pollos laughing at them when they were trying to do serious business, and the oldest one very indignantly said to Manny: "Hey, cabrC/n, see this partner of mine? He's a bad guy. You better give us the dime!"
And Manny said, "Get the fuck out a here!"
So the baby bandits did that. They got the fuck out of there. They retreated about ten paces, which was still within range of their skinny little arms, and they picked up a pile of stones with their grubby little hands, and the next thing the Barfers knew, the baby bandits were throwing stones at them. Point-blank.
And the next thing the Barfers knew, the stones were bouncing off them!
And Manny Lopez started screaming, "Hey, you little assholes, this ain't funny no more! Knock it off!"
But the baby bandits just kept it up. Bing! Bing! Bing! Stones came ricocheting off their shoulders and knees. The little bastards were deadly accurate. So Manny went thundering over to the mudball pooch just sitting there wagging his mud-caked tail and taking in all the action, and Manny grabbed the mutt before he could hustle away.
"Knock it off, you fuckers!" Manny screamed. "Or I'll kidnap your dog!"
The little crooks were unstoppable. Manny got his answer: Bing! A stone came sailing through the air and skimmed off Manny's balding bean and he screamed, "That is it!"
And while the tiny bandits stood there wailing and crying, Manny Lopez started highballing it back to the cover team with the whining little mud hen in his arms and the Barfers tagging after him.
One of the baby bandits cried, "Give us back our dog, you bastard!" and Manny yelled back, "This'll teach you to rob helpless pollos, you little fuckers!"
They were reduced to dog napping. Eddie Cervantes took the pooch home and called him Migra for the border cops. But happy endings weren't in the cards, it seemed, for any creatures of the canyons, The little dog just couldn't adjust to baths and flea powder and nutritious chow. He moped around and didn't like America much at all. One day he took off. Heading south. Rehabilitation just wasn't as easy as some folks thought.
And once, in Deadman's Canyon a clutch of bandits approached the entire group, varsity and junior varsity alike. They didn't choose the small men of the varsity for some reason. They walked right past Eddie Cervantes and Tony Puente and Manny Lopez and went at the bigger men, Carlos Chacon and Ernie Salgado, and tried them with a knife. The Barfers of course all jumped on the robbers and beat the crap out of them and threw them down and disarmed them and handcuffed them. But suddenly a group of thugs poured out of the shacks on the hillside, heaving rocks down on the Barfers as the bandits screamed, "Socios! Help!" to their pals.
Then a strange thing happened. Another significant crowd of people came out of their shacks. Not bandits, not addicts, not smugglers. Just people. Just the poor people of Colonia Libertad. And they started yelling at the thugs to stop throwing rocks. In fact they became hostile to the thugs, and the rock throwing stopped.
Then a very strange thing happened. The crowd of people, the poor people of the border, began hollering things at the Barfers. They started yelling, "Shoot them! Put them in jail! Drive them away forever! And we thank you!"
They knew who the Barfers were, for sure. It was amazing. Then they started putting their hands together. Then they began applauding! There were lots of weird things happening in these canyons but this was one of the weirdest to the beleaguered group of cops. In this strangest of all amphitheaters, with the Barfers and the bandits performing on the floor of Deadman's Canyon and the people of Mexico up on the hillsides, they were applauded.
But of course, being a cynic like most cops, Tony Puente had to undercut it by saying, "Maybe that's just a rival bandit family glad we're getting rid a competition."
There were occasions when Barfers saw things that weren't there. One night Eddie Salgado was screaming at everyone to watch out for a fleeing bandit who was hiding in a bush. Everyone surrounded the bush. There was no bandit. It was like Carlos Chacon seeing a gun that wasn't there. You see phantom shapes in the canyons at night. Sometimes if you're not careful you can see a phantom in the daytime.
You might just go to Thirty-one Flavors for a butterscotch sun
dae and grab a number from the ticket machine because there's a big crowd waiting for ice cream, and maybe you're thinking that it's just two hours from the time you have to report to lineup for this little appointment with some murderers in the canyons. And the kid calling out the number for service is talking to you and you don't notice and he says, "Your number's up!"
And you're suddenly panting and sweating ice drops, and the kid's saying something like: "What'll ya have? Hot fudge? Strawberry ice?"
Or how about a double scoop of hot lead? How about icing down your tonsils with some cold steel? The kid behind the counter becomes a leering death's-head bandit. And you can smell the rotting flesh. You leave the store without your butterscotch sundae. Trembling.
You start to think you're crazy, but if you try to tell Manny he'll just call you a pussy and say, "What the hell, Jimmy Carter saw a killer rabbit, and he's only the fucking President."
On the outskirts of just about any city in America is a place like National City, just a few minutes from uptown San Diego. Nasty City, the residents call it. It's the kind of place that reassures you if you've been getting paranoid about America's impotence. When you begin to think that the Cuban Coast Guard might just decide to capture everything south of Illinois.
National City will take care of that for you if you just walk into any saloon on the boulevard, where you'll notice that people can file steel on their whiskers and that most of them resemble Willie Nelson or Johnny Cash. If you're feeling suicidal, you don't have to do anything terribly stupid like dumping on the U. S. of A. Just try poor-mouthing the San Diego Chicken.
If you watch and listen to the image makers and communicators in the media centers of New York, Washington and Hollywood, you can get a crazy head from an impression of America gone soft. But just travel to the outskirts of the big city and discover that it hasn't all gone the way of mud flaps and running boards.
Ray Wood was a lawyer in National City, a young guy with busted teeth who looked like a beanbag chair and dressed like an all-night poker game at the Elks' Lodge. He looked like the kind of guy who checked the coin chutes of pay phones, and just automatically felt under couch cushions.
Ray Wood wasn't one of those uptight lawyers that cops distrust, one of those three-piece suiters forever checking to see if his fly's unzipped. Ray Wood never checked and it was never zipped. He slouched into his office at the end of a tough day in court, and literally hung his coat on the floor.
The office looked like one of those prefab Quonset huts in Tijuana where you can buy Mexican insurance to cover your booze-soaked Ensenada run. There was a sign on the wall saying: BLESS THE IRISH. The cops figured that anyone like this has to be straight, so they trusted him.
There were three people waiting for him one afternoon after Manny Lopez had decreed that the boys go south. It was extremely unusual for any lawyer to be doing this kind of business with healthy young dudes aged twenty-four, twenty-eight and twenty-nine years respectively. They were staring somberly at the lawyer, who could see that this prearranged meeting was going to be about as pleasant as a clap check.
The young men were Joe Castillo, Eddie Cervantes, and the lawyer's childhood pal Renee Camacho. They gravely examined the document the lawyer handed to each of them.
The document began: I, being of sound mind, a resident of San Diego, California, declare that this is my last will and testament.
Chapter EIGHTEEN
BARF
DICK SNIDER LURKED ON THE FRINGE. HE WAS STILL A Southern Division watch commander and still the godfather of the Barf squad. Sometimes he'd have a beer with the boys, and after a few, one of them might start hinting that Manny was having them do something that the department might not approve of.
But as Ken Kelly put it: "Lieutenant Snider would tell us that he'd have a talk with Manny. But he didn't really wanna hear bad things about Manny Lopez. He knew that nobody else coulda made BARF what it was, the biggest publicity machine the department ever had and the only protection the aliens had. And maybe Manny was another side a Burl Snider's fantasy life? Maybe Burl Snider was the superego and Manny was the id? Maybe."
Ken Kelly often spoke in psychiatric terms. He probably learned them firsthand. He was soon to have his head shrunk.
"I just never felt much purpose," Ken Kelly would say. "Neither did Robbie Hurt. There we'd be, sitting in the brush for hours, listening to rabbits and coyotes and skunks and rattlers crawling around us. Sometimes having people just appear out a nowhere, scaring the shit out a both of us. And they'd look at us ragpicking bozos and wonder if we were waiting for scorpion stings or what."
"The sound a gunfire used to make us psycho because we never knew anything till after the fact. When we got scared there was never a payoff. We just felt useless. No wonder poor Robbie became an alcoholic."
And what did Ken Kelly become, living with this frustration of being, and not being, part of the Barf squad? These two young men, one black and one white, who could not be part of it because of their color, were, as he put it, like a double shot of nitroglycerine.
This was just after the San Diego district attorney's investigator had a little conversation with the homicide leader of the judieiales in Tijuana. It seems that the judieiales were handling their own investigation of the shooting of the Tijuana cops. And the Mexican homicide leader told the district attorney's man that if their findings were such that the Mexican government decided to issue arrest warrants for Manny Lopez and his men, well, it would be the judieiales job to serve those warrants.
Of course the Mexican lawman knew that he couldn't just stroll into the San Diego Police Department and throw handcuffs on Manny and the boys, and take them back to Mexico for trial. Yet there were ominous implications in what he said. The judieiales were working along the international border now, trying to arrest robbers on their side, the homicide leader said. And they might just run into the Barf squad.
When the district attorney's man asked if judieiales would really consider coming across into the canyons to kidnap the Barfers, the homicide leader said they would do what was required.
The Barf squad received the information but it changed nothing. Manny Lopez still had them walking south of the line. So there were cracks made about the judiciales hanging Manny by his heels like Mussolini and other such jokes that no one found funny. And, there were more Barfers pandering a last will and testament.
"This job just ain't dangerous enough," Ken Kelly said to Manny at lineup. "Why don't we milk rattlesnakes or jerk off tarantulas on our lunch break?"
One night the Barfers were walking in the drainage ditch near Monument Road and Dairy Mart Road, near the place where they had shot down Chuey Hernandez and his partner. The ditch comes across the border and during the rainy season spills runoff into a cow pasture near Stewart's Barn, often used as a resting place for illegal aliens on their nightly crossings.
Ken Kelly and Robbie Hurt were discussing the exact location of the Barfers in the drainage ditch. The others were possibly on the wrong side of the line, since the fence was damn close to being the actual boundary. But of course a few feet didn't matter if a squad of judieiales prowling the darkness suddenly ambushed them after figuring that real pollos wouldn't be hanging around that fence for so long, a fact that Chuey Hernandez found strange on the night he went to investigate.
Just then a U. S. Border Patrol chopper came roaring in out of nowhere and spotted the Barfers hiding in the ditch. The chopper hovered above them and lit them with a spotlight. The pilot started issuing Spanish commands over his loudspeaker. He started ordering this little group of bogus pollos to get their asses back to Mexico.
But Manny Lopez told his men to stay put, and he tried to raise someone on the Handie-Talkie which never worked properly out there beyond the pale. So, much like the Tijuana policemen, the border patrolmen in the helicopter started getting a little testy because this group of pollos there by the fence wouldn't run away and wouldn't obey. They were just staying put, which w
as very strange.
Meanwhile, Ken Kelly and Robbie Hurt were going bonzo because the Border Patrol helicopter was making such a commotion that cars were starting to stop there on the Mexican highway, and what if one of them was a Tijuana police car?
Ken Kelly and Robbie Hurt were doing their damnedest to get through on their own radios with no success, and finally the Border Patrol pilot had enough of this shit and he started blasting his siren and swooping down a little lower.
Ken Kelly was nearly in tears and was screaming all kinds of things that the F. C. C. wouldn't approve of over the radio, but nobody heard him and by now the pilot was getting just about as mad as Chuey, Hernandez got the night he was shot down. And he dived!
Ken Kelly stopped breathing because he was sure the chopper was going right in on top of the Barfers in a fireball, but this pilot was a hot dog, and good. He was also good and mad. He stopped his dive a few yards from the ground and blew up a cyclone of sand and brush and flying tarantulas, and the Barfers were all on their bellies protecting their eyes and faces and weapons and balls or whatever, and Ken Kelly started screaming hopelessly, "They're trying to cut our dicks off!"
And just then they saw a car slam to a stop on the highway and Ken Kelly was seeing phantoms and was positive it must be the judiciales. With Tommy guns!
Well, even the Barfers weren't yet crazy enough to shoot down a Border Patrol helicopter, and finally the pilot either figured out who these lunatic pollos must be, or he was called out of the area. He took off very suddenly.
Ken Kelly said, "I was absolutely sure that if it had been judieiales on the highway our guys woulda been executed on the spot. They woulda just disavowed all knowledge, like they say on Mission Impossible."
When it was over, his troops told Manny that it was time, definitely time, to "chase the elusive southern burglar."
There was always a burglary series somewhere, and to justify coming in from the canyons they would write in their daily activity report that they were working on a burglar, which meant they would jump into plalnclothers cars and drive straight to a fast-food joint or, on a night like this, straight to The Anchor Inn for a drink. And nobody was drinking beer this night; they needed tequila shooters.
Lines and Shadows (1984) Page 29