Lines and shadows (40 page)

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!

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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.

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-themill 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.

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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,
cabrón
, see this partner of mine? He's a bad guy. You better give us the dime!"

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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.

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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 sundae 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
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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
.