Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (24 page)

And she was Jubilee’s sister.

Sumer became the mother of the seven puppies Ice had given birth to in 1957. Year
zero Anno Canis. In October of that year, the mother and her children had entered
the area around the Mexican-American border. They had been brought in to serve as
guard dogs on the property of a certain prominent Mexican-American who ran an orchard
there. That wasn’t all this man ran, though: the Don, as they called him, was the
head of a family with another, secret face. He was the boss of a criminal organization
that specialized in smuggling. His partners in business all lived on the other side
the border, to the south…in Mexico. Or at least they did in the 1950s. Time passed.
By now the Don was the old Don, and Sumer had lived out her allotted years. What happened
to the prominent family’s secret trade? And what happened to the dogs?

First, their trade. In the 1970s, the old-style mafia, with its ideal of “rustic chivalry,”
was in the process of collapse. A new generation of underworld organizations was coming
to the fore, attempting to supplant their predecessors, and among these the most prominent
were those that dealt in “dirty” businesses such as the drug trade. The prominent
Mexican-American family, having itself experienced a changing of the guard, rode that
wave. The new Don was a man of the new generation. He had thoroughly revised the family’s
business operations, identifying drugs as the principal source of their future income.
By 1975, he had grown the organization’s total business dealings to a figure eight
times what it had been two decades before. They controlled about half the inflow of
drugs from south of the border. Indeed, it was the enormous investment of capital
this family had made during the 1960s that had allowed the Mexican drug cartels to
expand in the first place.

They were known in the underworld as Texas’s “La Familia.”

Next, the dogs. The dogs were used as tokens to strengthen the bonds between members
of La Familia. The first eight—Sumer and her seven puppies—had understood this from
the moment they were presented to the old Don. They had to shine as guard dogs and
to pledge their unfailing loyalty to the Don. Their old owner, the man with the boxcar
in the switchyard where Sumer had made their nest, the man who sent them off to work
in La Familia’s orchard, had commanded them to do their best, and they had. The Don
was pleased to see how seriously they took their work, how loyal they were. This was
the kind of dog La Familia needed. And so he treasured them. He didn’t let them mate
with just any dog. He only “wed” them to purebred Dobermans, collies, Airedale terriers—proven
animals, with personalities, looks, and the skill set a good guard dog needed. The
seven siblings had looked completely different from one another to begin with, and
as they continued to mate they produced a monstrous elite. Dogs have, on occasion,
been referred to as “shape-shifters” because the various breeds look so different,
and the dogs in this lineage pushed that potential to the limit. Not all of them were
involved in this, however. Even as a few of the dogs were carefully mated with the
cream of the crop—with Dobermans, collies, and Airedale terriers who could accurately
be described as “totally the best, Don”—a few others remained under strict guard,
a sort of birth control.

Why?

Because, as has already been said, the dogs had a role to play in strengthening the
bonds among members of La Familia. For the most part, they remained within the boundaries
of the orchard. But whenever a new member “joined the family,” so to speak—joined
the Texas-based criminal organization La Familia—he would be presented with a dog.
This living gift had become the custom in the 1950s with the old Don, and the current
Don inherited it. Only the men who had been granted one of the dogs from this special
line belonged to La Familia’s inner circle. Only they had been recognized by the Don
as “family.”

The dogs were the evidence of this.

The dogs showed that La Familia was as tight as family.

And here we come to Cabron. A male dog, great-great-great-grandson of one of the seven
dogs Sumer had adopted. He was living, now, far from La Familia’s orchard on the Mexican-American
border, far to the south of La Familia’s territory, in Mexico City.

One dog on the twentieth parallel north.

One dog in Mexico.

And the other, on the twenty-first parallel north.

Goodnight. What were you up to?

You never went to the Indochina peninsula, to the seventeenth parallel north. Having
done a fine job during his six weeks of special training on Okinawa, your brother
DED was sent into the midst of the Southeast Asian conflict as a specialist anti-Vietcong
fighter. You, however, had failed to make the cut. You had been judged unfit for service
on the front lines of the Vietnam War, and in June 1967, you left Okinawa for Hawaii.
At the time, incidentally, Okinawa was under the administration of the US government.
The Hawaiian Islands, for their part, had been annexed in 1898 and were elevated to
the status of a full-fledged state in 1959. These historical developments meant nothing
at all to you, Goodnight, but the point is this: you were born on the American mainland,
in California, and you were raised and had lived your life until then as an American
military dog, moving from place to place within the vast expanse of “America.” You
had never passed beyond its borders. Not yet. You had been sent to Oahu, where you
worked at Wheeler Air Force Base as a sentry dog for approximately eight years. In
all that time, you had been exposed to real stress on only one occasion: the day you
had come face to face with a spy of unknown provenance, and you were shot. The bullet
passed right through you, and you completely healed in three weeks. You had, however,
saved a human life, and so you came away from the trauma with the canine version of
two medals: a purple heart and a silver star. This meant you were assured a lifetime
pension (money for food) even after your retirement. The man whose life you saved
was a lieutenant on security patrol; you had taken the bullet trying to protect him.

After that, you were respected by everyone on the base, not only the humans but the
other dogs as well—you did have two medals, after all—and your life as a sentry dog
became even more relaxed than it had been.

That was how you passed the eight years since June 1967.

And then it was
the year
. 1975. It began in February. At long last, you were released from your position as
a military dog. You were retired. A family had volunteered to take you in. They lived
in the suburbs of Honolulu. The father was a retired officer—the very man whose life
you had saved. That same lieutenant. Or rather, that same former lieutenant. He himself
had retired from military duties when he turned forty—just six months earlier—and
now worked in tourism. He was originally a mainland
haole
, but during his time on Wheeler Base he had fallen in love with Hawaii and decided
to settle permanently on Oahu. He would start out fresh here—it would be a whole new
life. He moved his elderly parents from Ohio to live with him. They had kept a young
dog as a pet, a bitch. Naturally, she made the move from Ohio as well. Then, finally,
he had brought you in. You completed the picture.

“Here we are,” the former lieutenant said. “This is your family.”

MY FAMILY
? you thought. Looking up, you saw four faces: a human, a human, a human, and a dog.

The other dog was a beagle. She had a compact build and an extremely mild disposition.
She sensed immediately that your master felt indebted to you and didn’t try to challenge
you.

Yes, you were the dog that had saved your master’s life. And for that reason, your
old age, your retirement, should have been as placid and peaceful as it gets. One
hundred percent stress-free. You had no title, you were just an old German shepherd.
But although you were nine years old, you were still vigorous. Your family played
with you a lot. You did a lot of sightseeing. The former lieutenant, thinking to repay
you for what you had done, took you all over Oahu. You walked through Waikiki with
your aloha-shirted master. From the beach into town. From the backstreets to the canal.
The scents of Chinatown bewildered you. All those Asian spices, the mounds of Chinese
medicines in the market. You climbed to the tip of Diamond Head crater, 232 meters
above sea level. You visited Pearl Harbor. And you saw something. You gazed at the
chalk-white memorial. It was out in the harbor, just over the remains of the USS
Arizona
, submerged twelve meters in the muck. The battleship had been sunk by a Japanese
plane on December 7, 1941. That had inaugurated the Pacific War. A surprise attack
by the Japanese military. To this day, the bodies of 948 men lie sleeping within the
body of that battleship on the sea floor. The boat is a grave. You gazed at the grave,
Goodnight, at the sea that was a grave, and you felt nothing. You were staring out
at the place from which your history, the history of your tribe, had begun. But you
felt nothing.

It never occurred to you that it was all on account of the battleships that sank there
that three Japanese military dogs and one American military dog had been thrown together
on the Aleutian Islands, in the Arctic regions of the Pacific.

You were near the middle of the Pacific now.

And all you thought, there on an island located at the twenty-first parallel north,
was
HOW BEAUTIFUL THE OCEAN IS
.

You liked the sea.

You liked the beach.

You were always frolicking at the water’s edge.

In April, something changed in your family. It emerged that the young beagle was pregnant.
She had been knocked up somewhere, probably in that holy land of doggie free sex:
the leash-less park. In May, the beagle gave birth to four healthy pups. And you,
Goodnight, found the sight incredibly moving. You had never had puppies of your own,
but still you found the little ones irresistible. You helped the beagle raise them,
as if you and she were sisters, maybe cousins. Naturally, you were careful not to
go too far, to do anything that would be too much for their mother. But they were
adorable! Your maternal instincts cried out within you:
HOW CUTE
!
HOW ADORABLE
!

Beagle puppies milling about their beagle mother’s teats.

You couldn’t nurse them yourself since you had no milk, but you were enthralled.

When you weren’t helping to look after the puppies, you played on the beach. In July,
you discovered something unusual on the one you frequented most often. A boat. A double
canoe. It had two masts, two sails, and it was a little less than twenty meters long.
It was totally different from an ordinary canoe.

Humans, both haole and pure Hawaiians, had clustered around the double vessel and
were learning how to operate it. They came back the next day and the day after that,
and since the beach had essentially become part of your territory, you watched them
as they worked. You mingled with the people, wandering among them. When a man patted
you on the head, you licked his hand. Good dog, he said. Good dog, they said, again
and again. They remembered you, just as you had remembered them.

“You know what I heard,” one haole
announced to the party in English. “Seems this guy was a military dog! Heard it from
his owner. Could have knocked me over with a feather! He’s got two medals. Real medals!
He had a showdown with a spy, and the spy shot him, and he didn’t even flinch. Incredible,
huh?”

Wow! Cool! the humans cried. In recognition of your distinguished career, they let
you onto the boat. The view from there was amazing. You stood at the prow.

The people could see you liked it.

Then one day in September, one of the crew members, excited, called out, “C’mon, girl!”
He was inviting you to accompany them on a short practice sail, just forty or fifty
minutes. The time had come.
Woof!
you barked. And you jumped up with them.

You weren’t at all afraid.

Indeed, you were excited to see another face of the sea.

You didn’t get seasick.

The peculiar double canoe was the embodiment of a dream. An embodiment of the thrill
of the Hawaiian renaissance and its effort to revive ancient Hawaiian culture. The
West had its first encounter with the Hawaiian Islands in 1778 when the explorer James
Cook landed there in the course of one of his voyages, and from that point people
puzzled over the question of how humans could possibly have reached the islands, which
were completely isolated—set down plop in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, near no
continent. And when Cook arrived, the Hawaiians didn’t have the technology necessary
to set out on long trips across the sea. What they had was a legend, an old chant
that said, “Our ancestors came from Tahiti.”

Tahiti was south of the equator.

Far, far away, in the South Pacific.

Could this be true?

A group of people decided to try and find out. Decided to demonstrate that before
it was polluted and degraded by the influx of Western civilization, in its very earliest
years, Hawaii had possessed a sophisticated culture of its own. The Polynesian Voyaging
Society was founded in Hawaii in 1973. Its goal was to build a replica of a prehistoric
Hawaiian voyaging canoe, and to sail it all the way to Tahiti. The project was intended
as a sort of experimental archaeology. It was also an adventure. They would set out
for the South Pacific relying only on ancient navigation techniques, reading the position
of the constellations, the wind, the tides.

In Hawaii, the Polynesian Voyaging Society project was made part of the US’s bicentennial
celebrations.

The boat you rode on its trial run, Goodnight, was not, however, the replica the Polynesian
Voyaging Society had created.

It was a replica of the replica.