They decided to send him to a psychiatrist, making him the third member of the experiment to have his head shrunk in 1982. Dick Snider talked all about the BARF experiment. The examining physician was of the opinion that Lieutenant Burl Richard Snider suffered from "psychophysiological cardiovascular reaction and labile hypertension" and should not be continued as a police officer. And that this condition was definitely job-related. In other words, Dick Snider got a stress pension. And yet another was gone from police service.
Dick Snider was by now aware of mistakes, and felt guilt about not recognizing certain symptoms in his young men and felt sad about the bitterness some felt toward each other. Dick Snider was not a complicated or sophisticated man. He had the history of western America in his face. He was a son of the Great Depression, a believer in law, and his country, and fairness.
It had been a long time since a young border patrolman got an idea by looking out the window of the bridal suite of the hotel in San Ysidro, watching San Diego cops chasing aliens. The idea being: there is not a significant line between two countries. It's between two economies, The border patrolman had thought about the aliens a whole lot in order not to think of a young son dying-I couldn't save him!-and he had this idea that if a human being set foot across that imaginary line, that imaginary economic line, the person was entitled to be saved.
He had spent half a lifetime on the border and he knew the language and ways of the people, and admired them. They were not unlike himself in most ways. So perhaps it was natural that an uncomplicated man who believed so implicitly in the American way should try to do it American style. That is, if political hot air blows nothing but dust devils, send in a cleansing wind.
What did they accomplish finally? He couldn't say for sure. "We probably saved a few lives," he said. "Of course we also took a few." Then he added: "Well, there was that miracle."
And it was true enough. There is a Mexican woman named Rosa Lugo who saw her little girl in the nightmare of gang rape being saved by a host of wild angels. Try telling her it wasn't a Christmas miracle. There was that. Things like that.
But it had finally resulted in so much blood and bitterness and discontent, and ruined careers and sense of betrayal. So much psychic violence, which twice struck him down like a hammer and filled his family with dread.
At a time when Ronald Reagan was announcing economic recovery, and Miguel de la Madrid was clutching the sleeve of a teetering nation, and people were looking toward dangerous foreign enemies and crying quite correctly: "If Mexico goes, look out, America!" At this time in history, Dick Snider preferred not to think of his life on the border. He'd much rather sit at the organ in his little living room and play to relax, and to steady his heartbeat. He couldn't read music but he could play some songs by the numbers. His favorite went:
Sunny, yesterday my life was filled with rain.
Sunny, you smiled at me and really eased the pain.
Now the dark days are gone and the bright days are here.
He was fifty-two years old, his face a web of lines, and as he played, his slate-colored eyes squinted through the smoke of the dangling cigarette, and his big leathery farmer's hands were spread out over the organ keys. He looked up at a plaque on the wall.
It was a modest plaque, not presented at any formal ceremony and certainly not by the police department officially. It was given to him by a group of young men, some of whom were born about the same time as a child he had lost so long ago.
"It's the only one," he said in the ubiquitous drawl of country America. "There's only one a these."
The plaque read:
To Lt. Snider The person responsible for the formation and existence of the Border Crime Task Force.
Thanks always, B. A. R. F.
It was the one thing of sure and certain value his experiment had left him.
EPILOGUE
CHANO B. GOMEZ, JR.
DESPITE THE OVERALL SENSE OF BETRAYAL THAT MOST OF them reported, which stayed with them over the years, not a one of them could, with certainty, name their betrayer.
One ex-Barfer, given the advantage of time's passing, looked back and tried to fathom the nature of the experiment. He said he could not justify some of the things done during those forays into the canyons. Since Mexico had fallen on such hard times, the aliens were coming as never before. During one month in 1983, nearly fifty thousand were caught there in the Chula Vista sector. And with robbery, rape and murder proliferating like the cholla cactus in that rainy winter, he particularly felt the futility of it all.
The question was, what did they get out of it? What thing of value? The ex-Barfer pondered that and tried to be cynical but his face had too much disappointment in it. What did they get out of it? The answer was uttered like a question. With the saddest of smiles, he said, "A couple blow-jobs?"
It may be that the only one who totally understood the amorphous experiment in the canyons was the man who could see much of it from his vantage point on the upper soccer field, old Chano B. Gomez, Jr., himself. It might take a tamale vendor to figure it all out finally, about good intentions, and myth and legend, and the good and bad that goes into myth and legend.
As to the Barfers, these children of the working class had been honest and brave and loyal to their mission as they were given to understand it. Perhaps in his own way every man came to know unconsciously what that incredible mission finally was, though they didn't know who commissioned it, or if anyone did. It was to dramatize a dilemma of migration and exploitation so enormous that two governments, two economies, had despaired of solving it.
It would be ironic if the little tamale vendor with his goat whiskers and his maracas hissing like rattlesnakes wasn't really shaking those maracas at pollos after all. The final irony would be if those hissing maracas-Cha cha, cha cha cha!-were meant to warn not pollos but them, the Barfers.
Maybe it would take a foreigner like Chano B. Gomez, Jr., to know how typically American it was to thrust ten young men into a monstrous international dilemma with an implied mission to dramatize it. It made for many a good show down there in the natural amphitheater of Deadman's Canyon, if you were perched on a rock at the top.
They gave their nightly performances and almost everyone applauded. They did it the only way they knew-not ingeniously, merely instinctively-by trying to resurrect in the late twentieth century a mythic hero who never was, not even in the nineteenth century. A myth nevertheless cherished by Americans beyond the memory of philosophers, statesmen, artists and scientists who really lived: the quintessentially American myth and legend of the Gunslinger, who with only a six-shooter and star dares venture beyond the badlands. Beyond all charts. Even to the phantom line between substance and shadow. To draw against the drop.
Lines and Shadows (1984) Page 35