Read Online Lines and shadows by Joseph Wambaugh - Free Book Online

where an old Mexican squatter used to live and do her laundry in the dirty trickle flowing through the U.S. canyons.
    The unbelievable tableau: the throngs, the multitudes, the masses! They were everywhere: huddled by campfires, squatting, playing, buying tamales, selling soda pop, chatting, laughing, swapping clothing, exchanging money with guides, singing, weeping, getting ready . The nightly army of aliens was readying itself to come. All of this only several hundred yards across the canyons. All of this just north of the invisible line, on U.S. soil, in the no-man's-land tacitly relinquished to them by the United States government, which had decided that its border patrolmen would avoid these few square miles of miserable earth and wait farther north, on more accessible land.
    Even through binoculars it looked for all the world like an enormous sprawling picnic. There was a game of baseball in progress. There was an astonishing number of women and children among them, not to bid the men farewell. They were coming too. Perhaps they had tried it last week and been caught? Or been turned back? Or robbed? Or raped?
    Perhaps they had tried it many times.
    And there were pregnant women coming for the sole purpose of giving birth to their babies in the home of some barrio midwife. To have a child who is a U.S. citizen, entitled to all the rights and privileges accorded same. To register the birth and perhaps return with the child to Mexico, that child's future guaranteed should things get worse.
    "I couldn't believe it the first time I saw it," Renee Camacho said. "And I'd lived in San Diego all my life. It was like… did you see the old movie Exodus ?" file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009
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    So the task force assembled across the canyons and chose their observation points, from which they would support each other, observe crimes, arrest bandits and corral victims. And they would look at one another in wonder when hundreds of other aliens suddenly materialized in the dusk. Human beings of all ages would rise up as though from the earth itself. People who had been invisible—resting, sleeping, eating, praying. Up from the mesquite and the rocks and the skeletal oaks. They would simply rise up. And then it was dark. Just like that.
    The hills began to move . The masses began to surge northward on their journeys to the land of plenty. It was dark. Darker than they dreamed it would be. Dick Snider had told them over and over how dark it was in the canyons, but Jesus Christ! This was dark . Could an ordinary night get this dark? There was even an early moon. But it was dark . And they weren't alone, not by a long shot.
    The Star Trek lights attached to the sawed-off shotguns were of no value whatsoever and were quickly removed. The radios were faulty in the canyons. The starlight scope was seeing only shapes. They saw what looked like a guide meeting a group of fifteen. Some looked like children. They saw what could be three bandits waiting behind a rock pile. Then the shapes disappeared. Then the rocks disappeared. It was not quiet but it seemed quiet. There were the ever-present dogs barking in the canyons, delirious with joy at the scraps left by the aliens beginning their march. The kerosene lamps were glowing all over the hills to the south, which was Colonia Libertad, home of bandits and smugglers and drug dealers and addicts. What looked sordid in the day was beautiful by night. The kerosene lamps flickered. The squalor was transformed. The music began, radios mostly, but they could hear some live voices singing, all from the hills south of the imaginary line, from the shacks and cantinas of Colonia Libertad. Then they started hearing the clicks . At first it scared the hell out of them. The safely Being taken off shotguns? The bandits have shotguns? No, castanets! That's all it is, castanets. What the hell's this? Somebody's doing flamenco