Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (26 page)

Once again, two.

The public face, the hidden face.

His father was assassinated by a competing organization in the winter of the Hellhound’s
twenty-second year. The Hellhound took over the leadership of the cartel. Of course,
even then he didn’t retire from the ring; the Hellhound remained his public face.
Two
. He was now the second man in his family to run the cartel. For two years, he struggled
to keep things going, both in public and behind the scenes. By then everyone he worked
with as a luchador—from his manager to his handlers, his drivers, everyone else—belonged
to the organization. They made certain that security at stadium entrances was very
strict and took extra precautions to prevent information relating to the Hellhound’s
true identity from being leaked. The Hellhound’s underworld doings kept him so busy
early on, when he first took over, that he competed in matches only in Mexico City
and the small cities nearby. Even so, he managed to appear in 150 matches a year.
At the same time, he worked hard to keep his other business thriving as it had when
his father ran the organization. He found ways, little by little, to get in with corrupt
state police officers and buy off tax officials, gaining a reputation as a promising
newcomer in the world of North and Central American drug trafficking.

All this in order to be recognized by La Familia.

To convince the Don to give him a dog like the one his father had received.

That, ultimately, was his dream. That was the future he could hardly wait to make
real.
Then I’ll be just like you, right, Dad?
He heard no answer from heaven, but he knew that if only he could get that dog, he
would be number two. The second leader, a powerful presence in the underworld with
a dog, an alter ego, as a symbol of his status.

He turned twenty-four. At last, he was presented with a dog. The Don sent the Hellhound
a male pup, three months old. The dog’s father—his seed—was a boxer, and something
about his features brought to mind a bulldog. Young as he was, he had incredible fighting
instincts. When you got him going he would rear up on his hind legs, looking as if
he were really getting ready to box. At the same time, he obviously had more than
boxer blood; the traces of his mongrelization were unmistakable. Traces, that is,
of everything he had inherited from his mother. That dog was you, Cabron. You.

The dog on the twentieth parallel north.
You
.

Here you were at last. You had made your way south from Texas to Mexico City. As a
pup, you weren’t known by the name Cabron. When you lived on your family’s original
territory, on the Mexican-American border, people had called you by a different name.
The Hellhound had used that same name until you were a year and three months old.
But then he renamed you. He christened you Cabron.

Cabron
meaning “male goat.” Not, of course, that he would have preferred your being a goat
or anything like that. In Spanish, the word
cabron
was used as slang in various senses, all negative. You could call someone
cabron
when you wanted to point out that he was a fucking shit, or a pathetic loser, or
to ridicule him for letting another man sleep with his woman. This last meaning was
the meaning the Hellhound had in mind. You were the cuckold. Not that anyone had slept
with your wife. That had happened, not to you, but to your master.

La Familia was impressed with your master. They anticipated that in time, he would
become an even more capable boss than his father. So they invested in him. In his
future, his promise—his youth. When La Familia presented a man with a dog, as it had
presented you to your master, it showed that he had been recognized as “one of the
family.” Your master got more than just you, however. The Don also sent your twenty-four-year-old
master his eighteen-year-old second daughter. You and his new bride had both come
down from Texas at the same time, to Mexico City, to the twentieth parallel north.
Naturally, the Hellhound was delirious with joy. Now he and La Familia really were
family! The Don was his dad, and the Don’s wife was his mom! And to top it all off,
his new wife was a pretty piece of work—not exactly the slim big-breasted type he
usually preferred, but he certainly had no complaints.

The Hellhound was happy. He threw himself more wholeheartedly than ever into his work—his
secret work, that is—and into his wrestling. His new wife couldn’t believe it. She
had been looking forward to immersing herself in the delicious, melting joy of newlywed
life, and instead just look at this guy! What was he thinking, going off and leaving
her like this, packing whatever time was left after he finished dealing with business
into that silly pro wrestling, and taking it so seriously? His new wife was Mexican-American,
not a true Mexican, and she had no sense of the significance of
lucha libre
. Her husband’s side of their double bed was often empty, and so naturally she began
bringing in a lover to share it with her. This had been going on for a year when her
husband found out.

The new wife left the compound. The Hellhound couldn’t just rub out the jerk she’d
slept with because she had the upper hand. “Listen,” she told him, “if you kill my
lover, I’m going to have my great-uncle cut you out of La Familia’s business.” And
so, in an instant, the Hellhound was plunged into despair. That was when he decided,
rather masochistically, to rename his dog Cabron. Your master was fond of you, Cabron.
He kept you constantly in his presence. And he took a sort of bitter, self-mocking
pleasure in talking to you, addressing you by your new name.
Hey, cuckold, how about it, cuckold? Don’t you agree, cuckold?
At the same time, the Hellhound wasn’t the sort of simple young man to do this simply
to vent his emotions; the new name was the result of careful thought. If someone in
the business ever happened to call
him
“cabron,” even as a joke, he might fly into a rage and shoot the guy dead before
he even realized what he was doing. That would be really bad.

But what if that word were also the name of his constant companion, this dog?

What, your master thought, if it were
your
name?

“It’s okay,” he could tell himself then, “he’s just talking to my dog.”

And so you became Cabron. Three months into your second year. Your master was twenty-five.
He was still emotionally malleable. Day after day, as he talked to you, called you
by your name—
Cabron! Cabron!
—he began to forget his pain. Hey, what’s the big deal? It’s a dog’s name. And though
his wife had now run off with another man, he remained as tight as ever with La Familia.
No, please
, the Don said,
call me Dad, just like before
. Your master had been “bought,” as it were, as a promising young leader in the business,
and his position in La Familia didn’t change. He was still free to come and go as
he pleased in the orchard in Texas. He was family. And there was someone there who
tried to comfort him as best she could. “I’m sorry my sister was such a bonehead,”
the girl said. She was the Don’s third daughter. Thirteen years old. “Don’t let it
get you down. I think you’re great.”

Huh? Me? You do?

Six months later, he had recovered.

So that was your master’s story. The melodrama of your alter ego’s life until 1971.
But you, Cabron, you were living your own melodrama. From the time you turned eight
months old and spilled seed for the first time, you rarely had a problem getting it.
Who could resist you? As long as your alter ego had his private face on, no bitch’s
owner would ever refuse to let you have her. And when he wore his public face, they
let you have their bitches because of the love and desire they themselves felt for
the Hellhound—they were more than happy to let the Hellhound’s dog knock up their
pets. And then there were the strays who knelt for you, overwhelmed. You mated with
this bitch, took that one, littered all of Mexico City with your progeny. You…you
betrayed your name. You were no cuckold; you were a lady-killer. But then, toward
the end of 1974, everything changed. You fell in love.

Love. Melodrama.

Your master had gotten involved in something big. His bodyguard had brought him the
lead. The bodyguard was a huge dude from American Samoa, upward of six foot two and
a champion underground boxer. He had an astonishingly thick neck, fat arms, and a
massive stomach. Samoans and Tongans were legendary among professional boxers. Lucha
libre wasn’t real fighting, of course, but this only gave the Hellhound greater respect
for true strength. He was still a fighter, he told himself, even if he wasn’t much
of one. And what point was there in being protected by bodyguards weaker than he was?
He had first been introduced to this guy, whose arms and torso and thighs were covered
with traditional Samoan tattoos, by the nephew of the Don’s wife, a producer. The
introduction alone wasn’t enough to convince him to hire the Samoan. If the bodyguard
was going to be with him all the time, he had to be totally sure he was trustworthy.
The Samoan had two other characteristics that made him attractive. One was that this
towering giant, who spoke Spanish with a Samoan-English accent, was a twin. “You mean
you’ve got a brother
exactly
like you?” “That’s right, man. An identical twin.” “That’s so
cool
! It’s like having a fucking alter ego!” It turned out, furthermore, that the older
twin—the bodyguard—was also a devout Christian. “Are you kidding? The Samoan Islands
are Catholic?” “Sure, man. The first missionaries came to Samoa in 1830, so what do
you expect? Sometimes when I hear a hymn I get teary.” “That’s terrific!” “My brother,
though, he’s Muslim.” “He’s a…but why?” “Lives in Asia. Went there to work. Does the
same kind of shit I do, in Indonesia I think it is. Or maybe it’s Pakistan? He swore
to obey the Koran in order to get in good with the people there.” “That’s awesome!
That’s the kind of dedication I like to see in this line a work!”

So the Hellhound hired the Samoan hulk—who was simultaneously an older twin and a
championship underground boxer—as his bodyguard, and the two survived several bloodbaths
together, and the Hellhound came to see that he could trust the Samoan absolutely,
and then to regard him as his right-hand man. In 1974, this right-hand bodyguard was
one of the main movers in a major incident: he helped lead the Hellhound to attack
an officer in the Mexican Federal Police. “This dude’s
bad
, man,” the Samoan had muttered. “And I mean
bad
.” “Is he?” the Hellhound asked. “He’s building his own secret organization, Boss.
Fixing it so he has access to all the confiscated drugs, building ties with the Colombians,
putting all the department heads in Customs in his pocket.” “What the hell? Are you
kidding? That
is
bad. I was thinking the paperwork guys in Customs seemed kind of unfriendly lately—so
it’s this guy’s doing, huh?” “It is, Boss.” “How’d you figure this out? Who snitched?
One of the little guys in the state police?” “No one
snitched
, Boss. More like I got him to talk. Gave him a hook to the jaw, smashed the bone.
Brraahahahahah!
It’s hard work getting these guys to talk, Boss.” “Hilarious.
Hahahahah.
” “You know that business we got going on in Cabo San Lucas, dropping drugs from the
sky? I got wind someone was trying to interfere, so I had ’em tie him up and bring
him to me. And let me tell you, when that guy started talking, boy did he start talking.”
“So what’s this plan you got for me?”

This officer in the Federal Police lived in a port city on the Gulf of Mexico, and
that was where he had his storehouse. They attacked the storehouse. The officer had
been put in charge of all the confiscated drugs, and he often went out on busts himself.
He had commandeered the best drug dog in the force, a member of a true super-elite,
essentially turning her into his own private dog; no one tried to stop him. He would
take her to airports and up to the border and have her sniff out only the purest drugs,
which he would seize. It would have been hard to find a worse instance of a man abusing
the authority of his position. And once he had the drugs, he would sell them back
at very steep prices to the Colombians. “You go too far,” the Hellhound told him.
“You’re
too
bad.” He punched him, kicked him (with his torpedo St. Bernard Kick), put him in
his mighty Dog-Hold. He got all the information he needed and then, just like that,
had his bodyguard kill him. They cleaned out every last packet of shit in the storehouse.
They’d brought a four-ton truck for that purpose. No one interfered as they carted
the stuff out, but there was this dog barking its head off. A Labrador retriever.
A bitch. The officer’s drug dog. “Well, look what we have here,” the Hellhound said.
“Want me to shut her up, Boss?” the Samoan asked. “No, no, no. You should never kill
unless you have to, not when it’s a dog. Besides, this bitch is the force’s number
one drug dog, right? The one everyone talks about? She’ll come in handy. She can sniff
our shit, tell us how good it is.” “Nice thinking, Boss. Very nice.”

So they ended up taking the Labrador retriever.

And where did they take her? To the twentieth parallel north. To the estate in Mexico
City. And there you were. It was December 1974, when your master brought her in and
introduced her to you, Cabron. “Hey there, boy,” he said, beaming. “Look who’s come
to visit. The best
perro policia
in all of Mexico.” What did you feel then? Nothing, at first. You weren’t hot for
her then, it wasn’t the season, and besides you had all the bitches you could want.
So you just glanced at her and thought,
HMM
?
A NEW FACE
? The fact was, she was a very beautiful dog. A purebred Labrador retriever, only
two years old, with an iridescent, jet black coat and a nice muscular ass. Before
long, Cabron, you would be creeping around, whining up a storm, pining with desire
for that ass—but for now, you barely noticed her.
A NEW BLACK FACE
? you thought, and that was it. You watched as your master tested her, had her sniff
a bunch of drugs and pick out the heroin, cocaine, crack, marijuana, speed, and all
kinds of other shit, and tell him how pure they were.
WHAT KIND OF TRICK IS THAT
? you wondered. Two days later, though, the situation changed. All of a sudden, things
were different. The Hellhound was in a fight with a Colombian cartel. That business
with the officer had deprived the cartel of one of its transport routes, and they
were pissed. A gang of South American hit men turned up in Mexico. Your master realized
right away what was up. He said, “This isn’t good.” “Sure isn’t,” replied the Samoan.