Lines and shadows (20 page)

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 file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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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 file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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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.

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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."

It was his Pinto. Driven by his wife, accompanied by their three young children asleep in the back seat. Ken Kelly yelped and made a dive for the bushes. His motorcycle was hidden behind a Barfers car. The Pinto stopped some twenty-five yards away in the darkness and the lights went out.

The party was
over
and the Barfers started thinking about lipstick stains, and Ken Kelly was crawling on his belly like a tarantula, saying, "Wait! Don't move the car! She'll see my goddamn motorcycle!"

Ken Kelly's wife would turn on the headlights every few seconds and catch them with the beam as they squirmed. Finally, Fat Mindy spoke into the thorn bush that contained the body of Ken Kelly, who by chance was wearing a camouflage army jacket. She said, "Can we smuggle you out somewheres?"

"No! Just leave me alone!" he whispered, and everyone said a fast good-night to Ken after he cried, "Jesus! My off-duty gun! I
know
she has my off-duty gun!" The last thing they heard him say was: "If I try to haul ass she'll run me down for sure. You don't
know
her!"

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So he didn't try to haul ass. He bellied out of the brush in concealment and managed to coast the motorcycle down the hill—a rocky, eroded, unpaved hill. He was so bagged he was seeing two Pintos, four headlights, two wrathful shadows in the front seat. When he made it to the bottom he was sweaty, freezing, thorn-raked. But he'd gotten to the street undetected. He was considerably more sober when he fired up that bike and hauled ass. When he got home close to dawn she was awake. He was full of coffee and cleaned up and had his stringy hair combed.

"Hi!" he said. "Waiting up for me? I made a hell of an arrest. Been doing reports for hours. Wanna hear about it?"

The Barfers had to admire a resourceful guy like Ken Kelly. And he wanted to be part of their squad
so
badly that they all wanted him.

"I'd like to have you, King," Manny Lopez told him. "But I can't get them to up my personnel quota." Then he grinned and said, "You'll just have to wait till one of us gets shot."

And as a matter of fact Ken Kelly would make the Barf squad before the month ended. Because
two
of them would get shot.

DRAGONS

ON ANCIENT MAPS, CARTOGRAPHERS OFTEN BORDERED renditions of known territory with a warning: "Beyond There Be Dragons."

There was something odd happening inside the heads of some of the Barfers toward the end of March. It was as though the few square miles of canyons, heretofore ceded to cutthroats by the United States government and the city of San Diego, was
their
territory, their turf, their bloody little patch of land on which they would prove… what? They weren't even sure by now. And indeed each man seemed to be out to attain something of value for himself. They didn't necessarily spend a great deal of time during the month of March pondering what it was; they were too busy trying to discover what their leader was up to.

Manny Lopez was driven, restless, searching, probing, praising, scolding, chiding them. He wasn't above humiliating a man publicly for a screw-up in the canyons. One way in which a Mexican-American differs from a real Mexican hardly at all is in the code of file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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machismo
. It used to be that the vilest, most insulting epithet in the language had to do with being a
puto
, or
maricón
, "queer" being an unforgivable slash at one's manhood. Simply saying "
Eres un puto
!" had in bygone days resulted in many a fight to the death. In modern times one man could call another
puto
or
maricón
, but even now it's not
that
easy to accept being called, in English, "a pussy"—not if beneath it somewhere is a
real
challenge to one's courage or manhood. "Faggot" was okay, since there was no truth in it. They were always calling each other "faggot." But "pussy"? If Manny Lopez called Joe Castillo "pussy," with the right tone, Joe Castillo might easily risk crushed nuts by vaulting over parking meters. Ditto for Eddie Cervantes eating woolly worms. When things got dicey in the canyons he could make his bandit busters do just about anything by a direct challenge to their
machismo
. And since only he had actually shot someone, and was getting so much media attention for it, deep inside their little hardball hearts they were getting more than a bit jealous of their sergeant.

But he could still keep them quiet by telling them that they were a baaad-ass bunch of hardball motherfuckers. Look out, banditos! Here comes the Cleveland Wrecking Company!

Once when both the varsity and junior varsity were walking on the upper soccer field at dusk they decided to join the throngs of pollos preparing for the night's crossing. They were utterly in character that evening, mingling with the madding crowd, listening to tales by twilight campfires, stories of prior crossings laced with hopes and dreams. Stories of fabulous jobs and great wealth, which in answer to specific questions meant half the pay of a San Diego policeman. In fact, one robbery victim, when he learned that Manny Lopez was really a San Diego cop, had said sincerely, "I pray to one day become
rich
. Just like you."