Lines and shadows (5 page)

phase. A
growing
experience. She needed
something
on those lonely nights. It seemed okay that she read the Bible two hours a night. Better than TV when I was off doing police work, I figured."

At this time in his life the faith of Tony Puente was moribund. It had never been the same really since his father died a death hastened by alcohol abuse. The Puentes called the nearby rectory for the priest to come. A white priest told them he'd be glad to oblige—for seventy-five dollars.

Tony's mother then called a Mexican priest, who came at once without mentioning money. Nevertheless, Tony Puente's faith was severely shaken, and in fact was never restored. As he tried to explain the profound, irrevocable change in his marriage and life, he put it this way: "I said okay to her new religion but nixed the bulletproof vest. If I had it to do over I'da wore the goddamn vest to
bed
if she woulda shined-on the God Squad. But how could I know what would happen?"

The oldest cop among them was Fred Gil. He was an ex-Marine drill instructor who had served in Vietnam and hence was expected to assist with the quasi-military training. Fred Gil was thirty-six years of age, even quieter and more soft-spoken than Tony Puente. Fred Gil was known for a shy smile with a sense of humor buried deep. And he was perhaps the only ex-drill instructor in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps who used epithets like

"heck" and "goldang." He was one of the poorest Spanish-speakers among the MexicanAmerican cops, and was so diffident with superior officers that he avoided eye contact and file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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frequently put his hand in front of his mouth when talking to anyone above the rank of sergeant.

Fred Gil's passiveness seemed at first rather astonishing, in that during his service days he had been All-Marine Judo Champion in the open class for heavyweights. And at two hundred pounds this was not easy, since he had to compete with monster Marines. Fred Gil was pleasant, likable, physically fit. Many cops were surprised that at his age he'd join this outfit to run around in the cactus and lizard shit, freezing in the night. But it was personal with Fred Gil. He was affected by the brutality of the bandit gangs in the canyons. Dick Snider's pictures of pathetic alien victims made an impression on old Fred Gil. Perhaps he and Dick Snider had lived long enough to know something about unfulfilled dreams and to empathize with those who had none. Perhaps he was approaching mid-life crisis. At thirty-nine years his wife, Jan, was probably into hers. They fought most of the time. Their marriage was miserable.

Joining the task force was
his
idea, he said. He was going to do something with his police career before he was too old to bother.

"After Vietnam, I just didn't
strive
at much of anything," he said. "I was just so glad to be
alive
it was enough for a long time. Ordinary police work seemed peaceful after the war. Just living without the daily fear of someone trying to kill me." So Fred Gil found himself in the task force, but he didn't want to
lead
anyone anywhere. The tallest of them, Ernie Salgado, was their weapons expert. Like Fred Gil he was an exMarine who had been in Vietnam at the beginning of the Tet offensive, and in Da' Nang with the 7th Marines. He had been an infantry squad leader and had seen his share of combat during his thirteen months over there. He often wondered if the canyons at night would make him flash to Nam.

Ernie Salgado hailed from Marfa, Texas, population 2,600. It was mostly a Mexican town with some whites and no blacks. He had lived with anti-Mexican sentiment most of his life and decided to settle in San Diego after being stationed there in the Marines. But even with five years of police service, city life was still not completely comfortable. He was the only one of them who didn't like to join the beer busts after work. He might sip a brew if the peer pressure got to be too much, when they ragged him endlessly about Marfa, Texas. Where, they said, your ordinary evening was spent watching cement harden. He made the mistake of telling them about his hometown one night after he'd had about one and a half cans of suds, which loosened his tongue. He would endure Marfa jokes from that night on. file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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Ernie Salgado had a long face, with a jutting chin and protruding overbite. Wisecracks about his teeth and jaw would come to get on his nerves more than the gags about Marfa, Texas.

Joe Castillo had a lithe athletic build and was the kind of young cop the groupies might ogle. And did he
ever
appreciate that. He was twenty-five years old and by his own reckoning was still in the "black glove" phase. That is, the period of street adjustment when young policemen feel the enormous weight of the new shield on their chests. When some cops quite literally find it imperative to buy and wear

black leather gloves, and would probably carry a riding crop if the department would approve.

Joe Castillo was a poor report writer and had some fear of Manny Lopez' reputation for being the kind of sergeant who was strict on reports. Still, the task force seemed like it might be a stepping-stone to some
good
plainclothes job. Maybe he wasn't a bookworm, but anything physical was his cup of tea, he figured. Like Fred Gil he spoke lousy Spanish, but in the beginning he thought: What the hell, How much Spanish do you need to jump out of trees, or whatever, onto the heads of a bunch of Tijuana junkies and kick their strung-out asses? Joe Castillo was
extraordinarily
macho.

In the months to come, when the camaraderie was to take a few unexpected twists and turns, Joe Castillo frequently gave vent to frustration and rage. He was wont to say to his colleagues: "You don't like it? Let's step outside!"

Unfortunately, it sometimes caused hoots of laughter from all hands when Joe Castillo would momentarily forget that they were
already
outside. Carlos Chacon finds himself suddenly confronted by horror. His sister is being attacked by three men. They force her to the ground. One of the assailants is trying to stab her. Carlos goes for them. One of them raises a long knife. Carlos Chacon runs forward but he's too late. The knife is plunged into the belly of his sister, who begins screaming. The scream is for pain, for help, and a cry of
outrage
at being murdered. He's screaming too, so loud he can't hear her anymore. He lunges at the heap of bodies. He pulls the knife from his sister's heaving belly. It sucks from her guts and splatters blood all over their faces. There's a lot of blood.

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Now
he
is the assailant and the three men are fighting for
their
lives. He's relentless, without pity.
They
scream. He holds the heavy knife. The knife feels like… justice. He man cannot even cry out. He just looks at Carlos in horror and accepts his fate. Carlos is big, weighing well over two, hundred pounds. He is twenty-three years old. The second assailant is no match for him. He plunges the knife into the throat of the man. Up to the hilt. The man does not even
try
to scream. The third assailant gets away. Carlos' rage is unspeakable, worse than anything he has ever experienced.

He wakes up. The dream is one of many that recur. He dreams of violence a lot.

"My mother was a
real
wetback," Carlos Chacon liked to say. She had four children in the Republic of Mexico when she was still a young girl. She crossed into Texas by way of the Rio Grande—hence, a
real
wetback. But she had only three children with her on that crossing. Her husband gave one of them away, a daughter. Carlos' mother would eventually have four more daughters and two more sons. She would raise nine children and think about the one left in Mexico.

She settled in Brownsville, Texas, close to her native land, and got a job washing and ironing for American G.I.'s. She met and married a man named Chacon. Among her children was Carlos, who always wanted to become a policeman.

"I was delivered into this world by a cop," he said. "When my father was in jail. I never met my father."

Carlos Chacon was one of three task force members who spoke good Spanish, growing up as he did with Spanish as the language of life, and dream, and fantasy. His mother took her children and migrated to the San Diego area.

"I always appreciated the Richard Pryor joke,"—he grins, showing wolfish white incisors—

"where the kid says, That's my
mom
you're beating up,' and the man says, 'That's my
woman
, kid.' "

His mother lived with a man named Geronimo who used to beat her regularly, and Carlos as well. But the boy inherited some size from the father he never met. Carlos was growing quite large and finally Geronimo found himself outmatched. He was beaten by the boy. When Carlos went to sleep that night, having just successfully conquered a man he so feared, he dreamed of violence. He was awakened in the middle of the night uncertain whether he was still dreaming. The face of Geronimo was grinning at him. Leering, really. Geronimo began wiggling his crooked finger for the boy to come. Geronimo was holding a machete. Carlos leaped screaming from bed and grabbed a metal bar he had lately kept file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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beside his bed for protection. Geronimo was a bully and a coward. He fled cursing, taking his machete with him.

Geronimo blessedly left their lives for some time and the children settled down a bit, but one day he returned. He tried to resume where he left off, by beating Carlos' mother yet again. But now Carlos was a tenth-grader.

"This time I beat him up
bad
," Carlos Chacon remembered. "I was so big by then I was looking straight down at him. It was in the room where I used to hear my mother screaming."

They lived in Otai, near Chula Vista. It was a gang-ridden Mexican neighborhood. The people distrusted police, but Carlos did not. "The police came and they sided with me. I beat him
bad
."

The eyes of Carlos Chacon were not something to forget. He had well-shaped expressive brows, a low forehead, wavy black hair parted in the middle. He talked with his hands, a Mexican trait. But the eyes, well, they were so liquid as to be flowing. Perhaps Valentino had eyes like this, Son-of-the-Sheik eyes which can look startled, fiery and more, while he shows the lupine, very white incisors.

"My mom is the greatest ironer in the world," he liked to brag when he joined the Chula Vista reserve police.

She did her son's police uniforms just as she had done the uniforms of American G.I.'s many years earlier in, Brownsville, Texas. He had the sharpest military creases of any cop in San Diego County, reserve or regular. He also had a six-inch Colt Python, .357 magnum. He was twenty years old then, and like all the other young police reservists he was trying to master pistol shooting. Dry firing an hour a day was nearly as good as firing a hundred rounds on the target range, they told him. And who could afford a hundred rounds of practice ammo? To dry fire, one simply aims at a spot on the wall, small enough to simulate a bull's-eye at twenty-five yards. It is to condition the eye, mind and hand to a slow, gradual trigger squeeze, and not to jerk involuntarily while anticipating the kick of a handgun during actual firing.

Carlos had a best friend at that time. The friend's name was Michael Clarence Jackson. He was a high school classmate and they did everything together. Michael was black, but he had a lot in common with Carlos Chacon. For one thing, neither had known a father. Carlos once thought he was going to get to see his father for the first time, but the old man died just before the planned visit, cheating Carlos to the end.

They fantasized: Michael about going to law school and being a judge, Carlos about becoming a police chief.

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Michael also loved the .357 Colt Python and Carlos let him dry fire it whenever he liked. The action on the .357 magnum was satin-smooth. Carlos ordinarily opened the cylinder and threw the rounds into a box just before the dry firing sessions. There is controversy as to how it happened. Young men playing quick draw? Carlos said he was dry firing. If so, he obviously didn't look at his target, only at the beautiful Python. He squeezed off an imaginary round. A
real
round exploded from the Python's muzzle. Carlos Chacon remembers the next part vividly. Michael fell to his knees, his chest smashed open. He wasn't making any noise at first.

"I'm sorry!" Carlos Chacon cried to his friend. "I'm sorry!" Michael never answered. Finally he started moaning. The moaning sound is what made Carlos run to a telephone.

"He's dead," a deputy sheriff said to Carlos Chacon at the hospital. And that was it. An accidental shooting.

Carlos went with the coroner to the home of the dead boy who had dreamed of being a judge. Carlos insisted on telling Michael's mother himself. He kept saying, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" until the black woman swept him into her arms and then they both held each other and cried.

Carlos Chacon had another dream, It was a straightforward dream, virtually devoid of symbol. In the dream Carlos sits on the edge of very dark woods. Michael comes out of the woods to greet his friend. He says, "How you doin? Everything's
great
with me!" They talk about trivial things and Michael goes back into the woods. The dream is not unpleasant, but it recurs. It is always exactly the same.

Despite the accidental shooting of Michael Clarence Jackson, Carlos Chacon was accepted by the San Diego Police Department two years later. He was still a rookie when asked by Dick Snider and Manny Lopez to join the border squad. He enthusiastically accepted. Carlos Chacon would name his first son Michael, for his slain friend. But he still loved guns. And Carlos Chacon still had
lots
of violent dreams.