Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (27 page)

“We’re at war.”

In next to no time, the estate in Mexico City was transformed into a fortress. Preparations
were made so that when the hit men came for the Hellhound, they’d be ready. And you,
Cabron, were holed up in the fortress with your master. You held the fort together.
Your master, by the way, had had to give up on his wrestling for the time being. This
meant you no longer had the pleasure of traveling from one arena to the next, going
from city to city, growling and glaring at your master’s trading partners. You no
longer even got taken out for walks. Someone might kidnap you and use you to get at
your master. You were your master’s alter ego, so if he was going to be stuck in one
place for a few months, so would you. There was a difference, though, because while
your master could always bring in women from outside to satisfy his sexual urges,
you didn’t have that option. No matter how horny you got. And you got very horny.
You were frustrated, the frustration built up, until you wanted to explode. You noticed
that bitch in the fort. That drug dog, the Labrador retriever with the firm round
butt. But she gave you the cold shoulder. You, Cabron, were supposed to be a lady-killer,
and yet she was ignoring you. You put the moves on her, turned on the charm, to no
avail. It was worse than that: she used her police-dog training to tell you to go
to hell.
Buzz off, mutt!
She knew how to fight—in fact, she was at least as good as your master, with his
surefire moves like the Top-of-the-Head-Dog-Bite. You’d yelp and retreat, instantly.
But you were still horny.
WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO
?
C
’
MON,
you pleaded.
LET ME DO YOU
. Again and again, you pleaded.
I WON
’
T SPLIT AS SOON AS WE DO IT
,
I PROMISE
,
I WANT TO HAVE KIDS WITH YOU
,
I WANT TO MAKE YOU MY WIFE
!

Uuuuuuurrrr…wooooof!
you barked sadly.

It was love. Melodrama. What’s up, Cabron? your master asked, laughing. Can’t get
her in bed? What the hell happened to you, stud? He didn’t even try to help. So what
did you do? You followed her around, trying to make her like you. You groped for a
solution to the problem. You tried hard to seem interested in the things that interested
her. You didn’t see the point, but you tried.
OKAY
,
I
’
LL LEARN TO DO THE SAME TRICKS
!

There in that closed fortress, you poured all your energy into realizing a dream.
You were absolutely determined to have sex with that bitch.

Three months later, your master was staring wide-eyed, calling his bodyguard over.
“Hey! Look at that! Just look!” “What’s up, Boss?…Huh? Wait a sec, he’s…isn’t he?”
“I know! It’s incredible! Cabron actually found the marijuana—just look at him, scratching
the bag like that with his paws!” “Like a real police dog, huh?” “Seriously.” “He
can tell the difference…that it’s not cocaine.” “Wow.” “That’s that trick magazine
with the drugs in it, right? And he found them with no problem!” “Wow, he’s totally
turned—” “Into a drug dog.”

Ah, the power of love. Love had helped you memorize the scents of different drugs.
You taught yourself, and you made it to the more advanced stages. You could differentiate
among various levels of purity, to a limited extent. Generally speaking, in order
to be employed as a professional by the police or any other organization, a dog had
to have started specialized training between its fourth and seventh months. Once you
got to be an adult, it was too late. So the trainers said. But you proved them wrong.
You, Cabron, had pulled off the impossible. It was quite a trick. All on account of
love. Finally even the Labrador retriever was moved by your attentions and stopped
snubbing you.

CAN WE DO IT NOW
? you asked.

She proffered her rear.

In June 1975, as the siege continued, the Labrador retriever gave birth in the basement
of the estate-turned-fortress. You had recognized her as your official wife, and you
watched over her as she bore your puppies. It took hours, testing your powers of endurance.
More than half the day, in fact. Why? Because the litter was astonishingly large.
Eleven puppies, each one different from the others. Their father’s mongrel blood had
shown what it could do. Your master was stunned when he saw how many pups there were.
“Man, Cabron, your sperm must be like jelly, huh?” he said. “He hadn’t done it for
a while, Boss,” the Samoan said. “I saw some, actually, and it was yellow, not white.”
The Samoan named one of the pups. Overall his coat was brown, but he had six narrow
black lines on his left side and a black spot on his haunch that made him look vaguely
like a stringed instrument. His appearance made him stand out from the rest. The Samoan
called him Guitar.

MY CHILDREN
, you thought.

MY LINEAGE
,
MY CHILDREN
.

Right from the start, the next generation was faced with a problem. There were eleven
pups. Dogs have only ten teats. Worse still, the top two don’t produce milk. The bitch
could only raise seven or at most eight puppies, so inevitably there was competition
for her teats. “Man, I know it’s great to have lots of kids, Cabron,” your master
grumbled, “but this is ridiculous.” Still, he had a servant prepare bottles of milk,
and he and the bodyguard fed the puppies that had been left at loose ends, as it were.
“Shit, just look at this little cutie-pie,” said the towering Samoan as he cradled
a pup in his arms. Your master went so far as to consult a veterinarian. On her advice,
he mixed powdered milk with cow’s milk to thicken it so it would be better suited
for puppies. The two men couldn’t look after those loose-enders twenty-four hours
a day, though, and during the first two weeks of July two pups dropped out of the
game. They couldn’t survive.

Another died in the last week of July, as the bitch started weaning her puppies. The
lack of adequate milk in the first days had taken its toll.

Then it was August 3, the first Sabbath of the month. Men armed with light machine
guns and howitzers forced their way into the fortress where you and your master were
holed up, shattering the peace of the Catholic world. Obviously these were the hit
men the Colombian cartel had hired. Expecting the situation to come to a head soon,
your master had tripled the number of guards stationed around the estate since the
previous year. Each guard had an automatic rifle. The shoot-out began. Sometime later,
your master would describe this day to his second wife as “Bloody Sunday.” The blood
was not only human. You and your wife and your children—the eight surviving puppies—were
holed up in the estate as well. Ten dogs in total. Of those ten, only one shed blood.
Your wife. Because your wife, Cabron, was a police dog. She had been trained to respond
to gunfire—to burn with righteous anger. It was tantamount to suicide to react that
way. She dashed up out of the basement, eager to find the villains, and ended up caught
in the gunfire, shot through.

Intruders stomped on two of the puppies.

When the shooting ended, seven dogs were left. You, the father, and your kids.

Guitar was alive. Guitar had made it through the first test—the competition for his
mother’s teats—managing to live because the Samoan had kept an eye on him, encouraging
the mother to let him suckle or giving him a bottle if he was pushed out of the circle.
Then there was “Bloody Sunday,” which Guitar survived by staying put, not scampering
this way and that through the landscape of hell which the estate had been transformed
into. He didn’t lose his wits in the sudden explosion of violence—or rather he had,
but he didn’t let his terror lure him into making the same mistake as his siblings,
who ran around in a panic, barking their heads off. Instead, he hid in a kitchen cabinet
until the noise stopped and only then ventured out in search of his mom. He found
her immediately. A bullet had left two holes in her body: one at the top of her skull
where it entered, the other in her neck where it exited. There she was, sprawled in
the hallway that led into the living room. His mother’s corpse. Blood had pooled around
her. Red blood, starting to congeal. Maybe Guitar understood something as he inhaled
the smell of that blood; maybe he didn’t. He whined, nudged her stomach with his little
nose.

He felt how cold she was.

How stiff.

He sensed that he was losing her.

Guitar was too old to drink his mother’s milk now, but he groped for her teats, nuzzling
them one by one. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. The last
two had never meant anything. But now, even when he sucked the others, no milk streamed
forth. There was no warmth.

He sucked furiously.

Twenty minutes later, Cabron, you stumbled upon the scene. There, in a corner of the
hall surrounded by the tumult of an estate still in chaos, was your wife, the bitch
whose ass you had pursued with such passion, stretched out in the solemnity of death,
with one of your children, a puppy with stripes like a guitar, beside her—beside her
body, trying to suck her teats. You stood stunned, you hung your head. Soon another
of your children padded over, and a second, then three more. They all, one after the
other, followed Guitar’s lead, clustering around their cold mother’s teats, to suck.

The third trial continued through the rest of August and into September. Slowly your
children began to die. The reason was simple: their mother was gone. The shock of
her sudden death was more than they could bear. By the last week in September, only
two puppies were alive. It wasn’t as though you weren’t trying to help—you were doing
everything you could. Ever since “Bloody Sunday” you were spending all your time looking
after the puppies. You were unbelievably careful. You never let them out of your sight,
you kept watch over them twenty-four hours a day. You had, in fact, started raising
them yourself. Even though you were a male dog, not a bitch.

MY CHILDREN
, you thought.

MY RIGHTFUL DESCENDANTS
.

LIVE
.
STAY ALIVE
.
LIVE
.

Of course, you weren’t tending to them in the right way. You couldn’t call on your
“motherly instincts” because you didn’t have any. Half of what you did was just horsing
around. Though even then you were serious. The other half was education. That’s okay,
you can do that, don’t do this, remember. You did all you could. And what sort of
education did you pour most of your energy into? Into the very same trick you had
devoted most of your energies to learning. In order to impress their mother. That,
naturally, you
had
to teach them. You gave them an elite education. Your children, still under three
months old.

Learn to smell the difference between these drugs.

Learn to identify their purity
.

You taught them all the tricks a drug-sniffing dog needed to know. Almost as though
you were engraving their mother’s memory onto their minds.

In November, the last two puppies were alive and well. Guitar was one of the two.
One day, the Samoan shouted to your master, his eyes wide with surprise. “Hey, Boss!
Boss!” The Hellhound, your master, practically shrieked when he realized what was
happening. “What the hell are you hollering for…huh? Wait a sec, he’s…
OH MY GOD
!” “Amazing, huh, Boss? Look at Guitar there, scratching at the shoe with the marijuana
hidden inside, just like his old man, Cabron.” “Looks like a real police dog, huh?”
“Seriously. And look, his brother is doing it too!” “He…he can tell the difference
between the marijuana and cocaine!” “They’ve totally turned into drug dogs!”

Your master turned and stared at you. He was moved. “Incredible…raising them all on
your own, without their mother…and you taught them to do this?”

You sensed that he was praising you. You barked confidently.

Woof!

In the human world too, the same amount of time had passed since that first Sabbath
in August. Three months. During that period, as the two puppies had learned how to
be drug dogs, similarly momentous changes had occurred in the two-legged world as
well. First of all, the conflict with the Colombians was over. So much blood had been
shed on “Bloody Sunday” that one of the bosses in Panama, unwilling to stand by and
watch the carnage, stepped in to mediate. The conditions of the truce weren’t bad.
So a bargain was struck. For the first time in ages, the Hellhound’s Mexico City estate
went back to being just that—an ordinary organized crime boss’s compound, not a fort.
The security detail was reduced to a few men, though they still carried light machine
guns and ammunition belts at all times. Now that there was no need to man the fort,
the Hellhound lost no time in flying off to Texas. He wanted to pay his respects to
the Don. “I’m real sorry, Dad. Quite a commotion I caused.” “You idiot! You idiot!
You idiot!” the Don said, berating him a touch too dramatically. “You sure as hell
caused a commotion! You gotta be sharper than that, right? Listen, I want you to remember
this. World War II is long over. This is 1975, there are no ‘gangsters’ anymore, not
like they used to have ’em in the old days. You’re part of the new generation. I invested
in you, right? You’re part of the new guard in this business. So you gotta learn to
be a businessman. Wise up. Learn to make it look legal, okay?
Look
legal.” This exchange with the Don left the Hellhound feeling kind of blue. He hadn’t
just been told off, of course—the Don had been trying to impart some serious knowledge—but
he hadn’t expected to be bawled out. Not at all. Maybe I’m just not cut out for this,
he thought glumly as he stood in the courtyard of La Familia’s compound, chucking
bread to the dozen ducks bobbing on the pond. Just then, he heard a bright voice at
his back. “Hey, it’s my favorite brother-in-law! Long time no see!” It was his ex-wife’s
younger sister, the Don’s third daughter. She was eighteen now. He hadn’t seen her
for three years because she had been sent to get an education in Vienna when she was
fifteen. The Hellhound gasped. She had grown into quite a woman. A real beauty. A
beauty of the slim, big-breasted type.