Lines and shadows (39 page)

It was a spooky voice that froze them in their tracks. Then the eerie moaning stopped. Fear blew and rattled through the canyon like balls of mesquite. They heard only distant voices in the night: men, women, babies, dogs.

Then a voice like a knife in the guts. Every man flinched or crouched. Every man looked for the shadow of death to the south. A voice belonging to whom? A bandit? A
Judicial
?

Who
was
it? And how could the owner of the voice have possibly known that the shadows walking south of the line were San Diego policemen? It was impossible!

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A voice cried out: "Sergeant Loooooo-pez! Is that you?" Renee Camacho couldn't escape the feeling of dread. Nothing helped anymore. He spent much more time talking to his father, Herbert Camacho. The barber told his only child all the comforting things, and he told his father how he couldn't rid himself of the urge to shoot approaching bandits
before
they had a chance to pull a weapon.

"I feel like doing it that way and putting on paper what should have happened," Renee confessed. "I'm even getting disappointed in Snider. Maybe he should step in and get the men rotated out a the hills, or maybe someone should monitor our emotional condition. I think some a the guys are getting to be
weird
guys!" Dick Snider was the kind of white guy Herbert Camacho admired, one who spoke Spanish and knew the culture, an
emotional
man, the barber said. He remembered telling the BARF

lieutenant: "You take care a my son. You take
care
of him now!" But Dick Snider had been pushed further and further out of it, and Renee Camacho told his father it seemed hopeless. He had lots of talks with his father. Other Barfers were noticing the change in the happy-go-lucky young fellow that Renee had been. He, like many of them, started to seem distant and even unfriendly to other cops at Southern substation. Barfers didn't talk in the locker room. They sometimes didn't seem to hear a greeting. Other cops thought they were wallowing in elitism and publicity. They didn't know the truth.

Barfers started fearing improbable things: that the bandits might lie in wait for them, to rid the canyons of these San Diego cops who had so hurt business. They started in terror every time a jackrabbit rustled the underbrush. A slinking coyote became a man waiting to
murder
them. Shapes of stunted oak flew at them in the shadows. A groaning tree could take the breath out of a man. Their guns were never out of their hands now. Their guns were getting rust-pitted from sweaty palms and aching clenched fingers. Sometimes they'd hear a few rounds of gunfire just across the border. Once they heard a burst from an
automatic
weapon and Manny wanted to stroll on over and check it out. They were halfway there before every man, talking triple time, persuaded him to STOP!

And tics? There were Barfers developing blinks, stammers, headaches, indigestion, back pain. Ken Kelly said the place was ticking like Switzerland.

The pressure at home was becoming tremendous for almost all of them. "Border shooting. Film at eleven!" It was uttered once too often by television news readers and the girls were file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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all getting a little loony too. Sharlynn Camacho had made Renee promise a hundred times that after the baby was born…

He
couldn't
get his mind off that baby. What would it be, a boy or a girl? Would it look Mexican, or white like her? Would it be tall or short? Then of course, would he ever
see
his baby?

And as though he could read minds, Manny Lopez one evening took Renee Camacho aside and said, "Renee, you're one a the guys I
really
depend on. I know
you'd
never let me down."

The talk among themselves was now on one subject:
quitting
. They weren't talking about groupies anymore, or partying after work, or scrapbooks or Manny hogging headlines. They were talking about
survival
. And then they started talking about it at lineup, in the presence of their sergeant.

Eddie Cervantes started things out by saying, "I guess you heard, Manny, that I got a chance okay to transfer to the school task force. Okay?"

"Why don't you just say it," Manny Lopez answered, as his eyebrow locked in.

"Huh?"

"School task force, my ass. You're getting scared."

"Scared? Me?"

"Yeah, you."

"I was scared, I'd a quit long ago."

"Ralph Nader oughtta recall your balls! You wanna be a
pussy
? Go ahead, quit!"

"Okay, I'll show you if I'm a pussy!"

"There's only one way to show anybody," Manny Lopez said dryly, "That's to go out there and kick
ass
."

"Okay, motherfucker," Eddie Cervantes said. "You know what? I ain't quitting okay? I'm staying!"

"I figured it was just your old lady fucking up your head or something," Manny Lopez grinned. "I'm buying the beer tonight!"

And then, four hours later, as he was squatting by some rock pile smelling sweat and fear and rot and human excrement, Eddie Cervantes would think one thought: I'm gonna get file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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killed. Tonight's the night. And all his friends were starting to say he was stupid. That no one
cared
about this border. That he would die for Manny's glory. Ernie Salgado was also speaking his mind even more directly on the forbidden topic. "You want somebody to say it," the Vietnam vet told Manny one night. "I'm scared. I'm especially scared to be doing crazy things like walking south."

"Sure, and your wife's pregnant," Manny Lopez said disgustedly.

"You know she is," Ernie Salgado said. "And you know she's had miscarriages and ...."

"Eeeeer-neeeee, get over here!" Manny Lopez mimicked the moment he would never let go, when Susan Salgado called to Ernie at the party.

"The thing I'm saying," Ernie Salgado continued, "is that I'm
not
quitting. But I
am
scared about how we're doing things now."

"Okay, you're scared," Manny Lopez sighed. "I always knew that since you wouldn't shoot that time."

Most were running to fat by now, bloated boozy coils of fat. Several were waking each night at the drinker's hour with night sweats and irregular heartbeats. Some reported nightmares of smothering, then a glaze of fog and mist, then awake. Once, when they were walking by a sinister wall of brush in Deadman's Canyon, the clack and clatter of wings drew three guns from their holsters. A dove scared the heart right out of three human beings. The dove went flaring off like the spirit of these young men. One admitted that he absolutely believed his heart was in a fatal stall. Flameout at zero feet sea level.

Fred Gil had lately begun asking himself a question for which there seemed to be no simple or even logical answer. It was actually the most complex and difficult and maddening question of his life: Why didn't I become a plumber?

And then one day all the Barfers more or less implied privately that if one of them would walk right in there and hang it up, the rest would follow. Old Fred Gil—with credentials, being one of the wounded, and the oldest—was a logical choice. He walked right in to Manny and said "heck" or "goldang" and did it. He quit and went back to patrol. But nobody else followed him. Not yet.

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"I used to feel real bad after I left," Fred Gil said. "They sort a hung me out to dry. The others didn't quit. Then I used to read about something they'd done and I'd feel real bad that I shoulda been there with them. I got real angry with myself for quitting." Old Fred Gil—thirty-seven years of age, judo champ, Vietnam vet, Barf survivor with a bullet in his hip—he figured he'd finally proved the man right. He'd proved it to a father who hadn't raised him. He had
quit
. Old Fred Gil wondered if he was a mama's boy after all.

Renee Camacho hadn't gone home that night he shot one of Loco's bandits. He had called Sharlynn and said, "I can't come home just yet."

She said, "Renee, why don't you come home and let's talk about it."

"I just can't," he told her. "I just can't come home." She said she understood. She told him to come home when he was ready.

"She was a pretty good wife," he said. "A pretty good cop's wife." Renee Camacho drove to the home of a police friend who lived in El Cajon, but he never found satisfactory answers to all the questions he posed as he and his friend passed the entire night at a kitchen table.

Renee Camacho told his friend: "I really felt like I was gonna get killed. And it scared me and here I shot somebody with the shotgun and I don't know if I killed him and I feel
good
about it. And… and that's good! That's the worst thing of all. And after I asked him, he went down and I ran up and I took out my thirty-eight and I wanted to find him and shoot him somemore and I just wanted to kill him and now I have anger and awful guilty feelings about it and…"

The friend had served as a Green Beret in Vietnam and tried to reassure Renee that his anger and guilt were normal. But the next burst of questions wasn't quite so easy to deal with.

Renee said, "But am I doing the
right
thing? Is this all worthwhile? Is this whole job we're doing the right thing or the wrong thing? Am I on a macho trip or what? Should I just go back to being a regular cop where I'm sure that I'm doing the right thing? Is this worth it?

Why am I out there doing these things?"

Renee Camacho longed to feel
pure
remorse, but couldn't. Anger kept getting in the way, and the fantasy of sticking his snub-nosed gun in the face of a man he shot, and firing five rounds.

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And then the boy tenor began asking himself the most difficult questions of all: Am I learning things about myself that I never should have learned? Who am I,
really
?

It was on such a day, when all of life was out of sync and he felt like a record playing at the wrong speed, that one of the former friends from patrol passed him at the substation and said, "Nice job on the crook you brought in the other night. Guess he needed a transfusion after you beat the shit out a him. I'd be in the
joint
doing that to an arrestee, but I guess there ain't no rules for the Barf hot dogs, is there?"

Finally, Herbert Camacho looked at his tortured child during one of the trips to the barbershop, and said, "You must only do this job if you believe in it, Renee. You've helped people who were being hurt. But you must
believe
in what you're doing or stop." Renee Camacho adored this man, who was perhaps already secretly starting to die. Renee said to his wife: "My dad thinks I'm brave. I'm being
brave
for my dad." He stayed. And then one fine night at summer's end when they were actually on the proper side of the imaginary line, a group of three bandits tried to rob the junior varsity walking team with knives and clubs, and Renee Camacho, after the arrest went down, found himself running across the canyons after one of the robbers. Running hell-bent for the
fence
.

There was no moon. They were both falling. The bandit hit the fence hole but did not flow through as bandits usually did. He snagged his pants on the wire. Renee dived through on top of him. The man was kicking and punching, and clawing and biting like a rabid coyote. The man, of course, smelled like death.

Renee Camacho was yelling, "
Barf barf barf barf
, GOD-DAMNIT!" and punching at the bandit and missing and getting punched, and he got his gun out and the bandit smacked the gun sending it clattering into the rocks, and now Renee was himself snarling like a coyote and slamming his fists into the face of the smaller man, who was weakening. And suddenly a car pulled up on the dirt road and the men fighting hand-to-hand in the dirt were lit by headlight beams. Renee looked up and saw red and blue lights. And suddenly he realized where he was: over one hundred feet
south
of the imaginary line. Two car doors slammed and Renee jerked the bandit up and got the man's neck in a choke hold and the robber started wheezing and gasping.

Just as one of two Tijuana policemen said, "Let him go!"

"I'm a San Diego police officer!" Renee Camacho yelled. "He just tried to rob me! He's my prisoner!"

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The taller of the two said, "Let him
go
. He'll come with us as
our
prisoner. You're on Mexican land."

But Renee began backing slowly toward the fence, dragging his prisoner with him, holding the bandit around the neck.

The Tijuana cops began-looking at each other and advancing slowly, and there was no doubt this time on whose soil they stood.

And Renee was using the bandit as a shield and he could only repeat with a mouth as dry as the Tijuana River: "Now, I'm a San Diego policeman! Now, I'm a policeman! You know that. You
know
that!"

Of
course
the Tijuana policemen knew that, and knew that this San Diego policeman had also known Chuey Hernandez and Pedro Espindola were policemen when he helped shoot them full of holes. They knew all of this. And they moved ever closer and looked at each other again.

To Renee they looked like soda pop interludes, or cattle prods in the nuts. They looked like tags on his toe. In Spanish. And Renee kept backing slowly, toward America. Going
home
. Just then Renee heard the fence rattling and thought he was surrounded. He heard footsteps padding up behind him! But it was Manny Lopez, who yelled, "Go call your supervisors if you have a problem! This man is our prisoner and we're going
back
with him!"