Read Lines and shadows for Free Online

vest!"
    file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009
    dummy1
    Page 20 of 256
    "I hope you get shot, then!"
    "I'd rather get shot than hear it!"
    And so forth. In the end of course his mother told him she didn't mean it. Still, he would rather get shot than wear it, he said. This was in the early days of the experiment. He didn't know so much about getting shot.
    When all else failed, his wife wept. "You're not gonna die and leave me with three kids. You have to wear it!"
    And this did get to him. Grievously. He believed he had robbed her of her youth. Dene was fifteen years old when they married. He was an eighteen-year-old Marine. It seemed to him that he had always been taking care of women and arguing with them. He was an eldest child with five younger sisters. It was never apparent that he was as bright as he was. He was shy and soft-spoken. He graduated from high school before his seventeenth birthday and joined the Marines with his mother's written consent. He couldn't wait to get away from home, away from an alcoholic father who embarrassed him. The embarrassment was the worst possible kind because it was laced with guilt and remorse. The old man used to humiliate him by coming to the Little League baseball games to watch him play for a team sponsored by the San Diego Police Department. The team was managed by police detectives, and young Tony Puente imagined that they had probably arrested the drunken man sitting in the stands cheering him on. Lots of policemen had booked him for being drunk. Tony Puente would forever be easily embarrassed and quick to feel guilt.
    The Marine Corps was not an escape. He was beside himself when the Cuban crisis broke in 1962. The Marines were going to Guantanamo! He couldn't wait. But he and his teenaged girl friend had already set the date. He went to his commanding officer to see what he should do.
    "Should I bug out to Guantanamo or should I do the right thing ?" the young Marine asked his officer.
    The answer was of course implicit in the question. He did the right thing, as usual. He got married and served his three-year enlistment in Santa Ana, California, a short drive from home. They had three children, and would have a fourth before the border experiment was over. He had robbed her of her youth, he believed, so that when she warned that he was not going to be shot dead and leave her alone to raise the children, he almost agreed to wear the vest. He would later change his mind about machismo and bulletproof vests. In some ways Tony Puente looked more Mexican than any of them. His face was rather flat with small Indian eyes peering out through rimless glasses. When his hair grew long and file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009
    dummy1
    Page 21 of 256
    he sprouted a Zapata moustache, he looked like the classic renderings of Mexican revolutionaries. But he spoke Spanish very poorly when recruited for the task force by Dick Snider and Manny Lopez.
    He had other things to offer, such as experience. At thirty-three, he was next to the oldest man recruited, and he had seven years of police work. He had never gotten to Guantanamo Bay. He had never gotten anywhere. But at least he was getting out of uniform duty, whether Dene liked the idea or not. And he wasn't going to be wimpy and wear that bulletproof vest.
    Yet there was something he did not, could not, deny her. And it was something that came to be more crucial to every aspect of life than a thousand bulletproof vests. Dene became immersed in a fundamentalist church. Her life, and his more than hers, would never be the same again.
    "She was a young woman with kids," he would say gravely, trying to describe the religious crisis that would soon consume him. "Here I was off at night doing police work and she was forced to raise the kids herself. It seemed to me at first that the new religion was a…
    phase. A growing