Lines and shadows (21 page)

During firelight conversations with other pollos, the Barfers mostly had to listen, since only Manny Lopez, Eddie Cervantes, Carlos Chacon, and possibly Ernie Salgado spoke Spanish well enough to fool anybody. But the others understood, and it was sad to listen to the pollos. It also caused things to happen inside their heads and more than once a Barfer would catch himself wanting to tell an alien of certain realities in the land of silk and money.

Sometimes the guides would warn them of San Diego cops who prowl the canyons at night dressed as pollos, about how bloodthirsty these cops were and how they beat and killed pollos just for trespassing on their land.

"They're madmen," the guide said. "They must take them from an insane asylum and bring them out here."

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That evening there were at least three hundred people on the soccer field. There were a dozen guides happily jumping from group to group offering their services. There were vendors selling tacos as all waited for the orange fireball to drop behind the hills. There were peddlers selling soda pop and coffee. There was a man with a guitar singing mournfully of the land he was about to leave. There were five motherless daughters saying good-bye to their father and they were
all
crying.

Easily the most sensitive and sentimental of the Barfers was Renee Camacho. And because of this and his boy-tenor voice which became a soprano singsong when he attempted to talk like an alien, the others called him
maricón
and said he was in love with his pal Joe Castillo. Renee was usually jolly and fun loving and could give it back as well as any. On this particular night as they waited for the curtain of darkness to fall on Deadman's Canyon, he sat by a fire with some pollos and had never felt sadder about all of it. Their role. His role. The entire drama or melodrama being ritualistically played in those canyons at night.

He wondered if it was the season. Spring had brought the desert flowers—purple and white, red as sunset—surprisingly delicate in the harsh canyons, the colors flickering in dusky silver light. Cadaverous, skin-twitching dogs circled the campfires warily. The ground was scabbed up with dropped food and brought the animals, baring their gums in ecstasy.

"I'll never forget it," Renee Camacho said. "This young man, my age, telling us how it was."

"I love my little
pueblo
," the alien told Renee Camacho. "I love our country, but I must make a home for my children."

Eddie Cervantes was a chatterbox who liked to ask questions. Not entirely familiar with the peso exchange, Eddie asked the alien how much his weekly earnings would buy in his
pueblo
.

The answer was: enough tortillas and beans to keep four children from getting sick. He could buy one scrawny chicken, but only on a good week.

Renee Camacho was deeply affected and even confused. It seemed so hopeless. It made him start to think: what if his grandfather had not got caught up with the nonsense of Pancho Villa and migrated north? He looked around at the soccer field, at the women with babies. At the elderly men and women who were unable to resist the lure of America. He looked at the man beside him and was ashamed. The man was frail, with uncut scraggly hair. He smelled putrid like all the others. Nobody had suitcases. They rarely had bundles. Renee realized something startling from talking to them: first, that they were the bravest of Mexico's poor, to come in the first place. Second, very few
wanted
to come north. They dreamed of making enough money to return to their homeland.

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Some had two or three dollars and that was all. Some had several hundred. Renee Camacho always said he never met a mean one, and he kept asking himself, how can
anyone
be cruel to these people?

And after that, when he encountered aliens who had been robbed or stabbed or raped and terrorized, he began to feel what
they
felt. And he wasn't the only one. They all started
to
feel
the poverty and fear. It made funny pains in the stomach, they discovered. It made them sigh a lot. Finally it made them mad, but the anger was without direction. And this produced
more
funny pains in the stomach. Renee Camacho, for one, was beginning to change in his treatment of bandits.

Even as a group, odd things began to happen to them. For instance, when the Border Patrol helicopter would make a low-flying pass over a group of aliens, sometimes the Barfers too would begin to run in panic.

"What're we doing?" Manny Lopez yelled one evening when they were doing just that hightailing it just like aliens. "Why're we running?" he asked them in utter bewilderment.

"We're armed to the fucking teeth. We're on duty. We're the good guys. Why're we running?"

But of course they figured it out without consulting Lee Strasberg or the Screen Actors Guild. It's just not that easy for a performer to jump in and out of character. And then they talked of how aliens felt like that
all
the time.

Manny would tell them: "It's okay to feel sorry for them, but remember that everyone else is scum. Their government's corrupt. Their cops're corrupt. Don't mix things up or you'll end up dead."

Once, when they were in fact near their substation, starting for the canyons by climbing through a two-strand barbed wire fence, they were surprised by a voice behind them saying, "Okay, motherfuckers! Freeze!" The voice belonged to a border patrolman sneaking up.

The strange part is they threw their hands up and answered in
Spanish. "Somos policías!

Somos policías
!" They were
into
character.

They also had a few laughs on the upper soccer field. Someone made up a name for a little tamale vendor with the chin whiskers of a goat. They called him Chano B. Gomez, Jr. And on a few occasions some of them actually bought tamales and
ate
them, which Manny Lopez said was the most daredevil act he'd yet witnessed out there, and that it made his gunfight look pussyish.

Chano B. Gomez, Jr., had a transistor radio strapped to his belt and carried some maracas and shook them to the Latin beat from a Tijuana radio station;
cha cha, cha cha cha
!

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Sometimes he sold
churritos
, fried sticks of bread dough and chili. And of course a couple of those hardball chili-sucking bandit busters also risked parasitic paralysis by buying and eating the
churritos
. Just like pollos.

Chano B. Gomez, Jr., had an eye for the ladies and he'd skip from group to group hustling his tamales and playing his ghetto blaster and shaking his maracas at any little cutie who caught his eye:
cha cha, cha cha cha
!

And many a time his evil eye would be observed by some father/husband/brother who didn't like his action at all. But Chano B, Gomez, Jr., would just wiggle his goat whiskers at them and play his hissing maracas and skip off as surefooted as a goat on those hilltops. Someone said, what if he was in cahoots with the bandits and was marking them with his little maracas act? You for rape, my pet. You for robbery. You, pollo, for
death
. Shaking those maracas which sounded like rattlesnakes.

Anyway, they came to make jokes about old Chano B. Gomez, Jr., the goatish tamale vendor, and imagined that he was marking them as they stepped off into no-man's-land:

"Beware, beware! Of fiery breath, the monster's lair!"

This was the night that Manny Lopez finally met El Loco face to face. They were walking E

-2 Canyon by the hole in the fence. There was a clutch of shadow figures standing on the Mexican side. When five of the Barfers straggled by, they saw clearly that one of the silent shadow figures was dressed all in black and wore a red ski mask!

The man in the ski mask spoke to them. He said, "Do you have a cigarette?" Manny walked to the chain link fence and got into character and passed a Fiesta cigarette through to the man in the mask. "Do you have a match?" the man asked. Manny produced an appropriate book of Mexican matches, and when the sulfur flared he looked at the eyes and mouth which were all that showed and he wondered why in the hell a mask.

"Where is your group going?" Loco asked.

"To Los Angeles," Manny told him.

"I might be able to help you," he said. "I have contacts. I work with the
judiciales
as a friend. Why don't you come through the fence and we'll talk?"

"No, senor," Manny said. "We're afraid to go back over there. Why don't you come over here and we can tell you our travel plans?"

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And Loco smoked, and seemed to smile but it was hard to tell. Finally, he blew a cloud of smoke and shook his head and said, "On your way, pollos. I don't think I can help you tonight."

Within seconds he had vanished back into the darkness on the Mexican side. And when the others saw Manny up close, they couldn't
find
his right eyebrow. "I
want
that bandit!" Manny said. "That sucker's
mine
."

Then someone suggested knocking off early and getting some beer and they even offered to chip in for a bottle of Chivas Regal for Manny, but he said they needed a good bandit bust and he put them in the tubes. And that was good for a few yuks. The "tube," or tunnel, was one of the drainage pipes that ran under the earth from the American side of the fence to the Mexican side. Though the Barfers weren't given to metaphor, it was easy to see that the tube was an absolutely perfect symbol for the international dilemma. The countries of Mexico and the United States were asshole to asshole, and these little alien turds were just rolling out of that tube into the United States, and sometimes the little alien turds just rolled back the other way when the U.S. of A. was feeling diarrheic. And the bandits knew whereof the countries shat, so they'd wait by the assholes of America and Mexico and search for pearls among the turds. This was how they described it more or less that night when poor old Fred Gil, the eldest Barfer, reamed out the tube. He was leading the walking team and playing the role of alien guide, staying several paces ahead, stopping frequently to tap stones together or snap his fingers. All at once when he looked back he saw that instead of three shadows there were five! He had picked up two
real
pollos who decided to tag along for the safety in numbers. Just then a Border Patrol helicopter spotted them and swooped down, and sure enough, the Barfers were so into character they began running with the two real pollos straight toward the tube. Fred Gil was the first one into it. The tube was
full
of human excrement. Fred Gil had a weak stomach anyway. He started gagging. The other pollos, real and bogus, were pushing in behind him. Fred Gil was slipping and sliding in all the feces and yelling out in Spanish and English. Fred Gil's eyes were burning!

Then, after they were all tucked inside, they heard the hovering chopper communicating with a Border Patrol jeep via loudspeaker, and some headlights moved in and the pollos emerged from the tube one by one and were encircled by jeeps.

Before they could warn him, a border patrolman ran up and grabbed Fred Gil and said,

"Aw, shit!" It was all over him.

Then, while the real pollos and border patrolman stared in confusion, the other Barfers got hysterical. These little hardball, worm-eating bozos started slapping each other and shrieking and hooting. They staggered around for almost five minutes because poor old Fred Gil had reamed out the fistula.

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Later that night, Fred Gil was told to take a crime report from an old Mexican woman at Southern substation.

When she caught a whiff of him, she said she'd come back tomorrow and ran out the door. Fred Gil got the Best Dressed Award at the next Barf party.

One wondered later what the hell Chano B. Gomez, Jr., the tamale vendor, would have thought of this action from his vantage point on the hill, and if maybe
he
could figure out what was going on out there in those loony canyons where the assholes of America and Mexico passed their turds.

Fred Gil was also starting to wonder whether a man approaching middle age was too old to be doing such things. It wasn't just that the job could be hazardous to his physical health; that was only part of it. His home life was a mess. Fred Gil had spent a lifetime proving something or other. Like several of the others, Fred Gil was a product of a broken home and had to be raised by grandparents.

His father had been a U.S. Marine who served at Iwo Jima during that, bloody campaign when the Marines did their damnedest to take no prisoners. He gambled and drank and taunted his son. Even after Fred Gil grew bigger and stronger than his father and (much like Carlos Chacon, who had those violent dreams) ended up defending himself by punching the man to his knees, guilt-stricken because this was his
father—
even after that his father would say to him: "You're
still
a mama's boy. Nothing but a mama's boy. You could
never
make it as a Marine."

Fred Gil hated the father who abandoned him. Fred Gil of course joined the United States Marine Corps.

He'd spent half a lifetime proving that he wasn't a mama's boy. He was an all-Marine judo champion in the open class for monster Marines, though he weighed barely two hundred pounds. And the young man who spent most of his life proving something to a man he hated found himself on a very rigorous proving ground in South Vietnam. Fred Gil's fire team was once temporarily cut off by swift-moving Viet Cong during a Da Nang monsoon. There were five of them on an ammo truck and they thought they were sure to be killed or captured, with most betting on the former.