Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

by Hideo Furukawa

  1962.

  No. Year 5 Anno Canis. I’ve focused too long on the human perspective. Dogs, where are you now? You, Anubis, closest to the origin of the new era. Where are you?

  You were getting close. At last.

  Yes, Anubis. You still had your erections. You were an old dog now, on the cusp of your tenth year, but your spirit, your vigor, was undaunted. MY DESTINY AWAITS ME, you barked. All along, you kept your nose to the ground, following the scent. The odor of that glorious bitch whose blood, coursing through her veins, was wilder and more powerful than the rest. It was there, you felt it. Your nose led you on. And so, Anubis, you kept heading south. You had faith in the impulses stirring within you, and you continued south. Or perhaps that’s not quite right; it was less impulses in the plural than the lingering trace of a single impulse. Its echoes. That summer, you had felt something gazing down at you from the vastness of the sky. In year 3 Anno Canis. And you had understood. YES, you thought. I MUST PURSUE THAT GAZE.

  Therein, you understood, lay the evolution of the canine tribe.

  Woof! you barked.

  I’LL SIRE THE STRONGEST BLOODLINE!

  Your mind was made up; your penis was hard.

  I WON’T DIE. MY SEED WON’T DIE. IT WILL LIVE…AND LIVE, FOREVER!

  MY FUTURE WIFE! you barked.

  Year 5 Anno Canis. At long last you arrived, your massive penis straight as a flagpole. Stirred by the sensation of that gaze from outer space, you had run to the very ends of the earth, and now here you were in the distant outliers of the Soviet Union. Here where the USSR hit up against South Siberia and Mongolia. You were in the west of the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Grasslands and squat mountains as far as the eye could see. You emerged from a forest of white birches, and there you were.

  The KGB Border Guard had set up its breeding grounds in these grasslands.

  The facility, administered by the Committee for the Purchase and Rearing of Guard/War Dogs, was the largest anywhere in the USSR. It was outfitted with equipment for training inexperienced dogs before they were assigned to their units. During the past two years everything had been updated. Because there was a new man in charge. And because the five remaining children of those two dog heroes, Belka and Strelka, had been welcomed to the camp. They were no longer puppies. They were fully mature. Already they were creating the next generation. Getting pregnant, making others pregnant. The puppies were Russian laika, of course, but the facility head decided to mate them with different breeds. For the future—to create a corps of dogs loyal to the homeland. They would draw on these bloodlines, on the bloodlines of those five puppies’ parents, to establish a corps of the mightiest dogs on the planet. They had gathered magnificent males, magnificent bitches. These dogs contributed the use of their wombs, their sperm. A third generation of heroes was being brought into the world, litter after litter.

  The space dogs’ grandchildren.

  Woof! you barked.

  I’VE ARRIVED! you announced.

  Inside the breeding grounds, 213 dogs froze in their tracks. Dogs with standing ears raised their heads; dogs with floppy ears raised their tails. WHO HAS ARRIVED? they were saying. LISTEN TO HOW STRONG THAT VOICE IS! WHO IS IT WHO IS IT WHO IS IT? Each dog felt that the other dog, the one that barked, had been calling to her, or to him. YOU, YES YOU.

  I’LL HAVE MY WAY WITH YOU! you barked.

  I’LL MAKE YOU PREGNANT! you barked. You, Anubis, you barked.

  TO LIVE!

  And the dogs were afraid. Each time you barked in the breeding grounds, the dogs broke into a commotion. Some were struck with terror. Some suddenly went into heat. The bitches got wet between their legs, while the males leapt at their handlers’ legs and waists, at nearby poles, and simulated intercourse. People hurried this way and that, unsure what was happening. Woof! you barked again. And again: Woof! At last, you were almost there! But you weren’t yet inside. You were outside the fence. You stood three feet away. The fence was electrified. You had sensed that, of course. You were clever. You saw danger before it struck. You had made it this far, after all, from the Arctic Ocean. You had come, what’s more, by way of Alaska. And you had another strength too: you could read the workings of destiny before it became manifest.

  So you waited.

  For something…SOMETHING.

  Barking all the while.

  Barking. And it came.

  Riding a horse.

  A human.

  “So you’re the one barking,” he said in Russian.

  Woof! you answered.

  “You want to go inside?” he asked. “Caught the scent of our bitches?”

  Woof! you answered.

  “You’re male?” he said, appraising you. “And I see you’re erect,” the young man who was in charge of the facility said, still atop his horse, impressed.

  OF COURSE, you said.

  The young man lowered his Kalashnikov automatic rifle, took aim.

  But no gun was going to scare you off.

  I’VE ARRIVED! you barked.

  “You seem,” the young man continued in Russian, speaking entirely seriously even though you were a dog, somehow maintaining his dignity as a commissioned officer, “to be saying that you’re the dog, the breeder male, I’ve been waiting for. What confidence!”

  I’VE ARRIVED! you barked.

  “Is it true? Have you really come?”

  IT’S TRUE! you barked.

  “You’re built a bit like a wolf,” the young commissioned officer said. He had dismounted by now. You stood facing each other through the fence, which buzzed with electric current. “You’ve got wolf blood in you? Is that it? Did you know how close wolves are to German shepherds? You know about German shepherds? A breed created just sixty years ago, specifically to fight in war? They’re war dogs through and through. People wanted the perfect build for war, and they made it. That’s what a German shepherd is.”

  Woof!

  “Are you a natural…ideal?”

  Woof! you answered.

  “If you want a bitch, I’ll let you have one. She’s good. Young animal from a good line. But she’s not complete. She’s missing something. She’s not a soldier. You understand what I’m saying? I want a dog with a soldier’s pride. I’m waiting for puppies that have that. How about it? I’ll let you have her, see what happens. Shoot your sperm into her. I can see you’re special. I see that erection of yours. All right.”

  The young commissioned officer had given you his permission.

  It had happened.

  “My passion brought you here. It’s true, I can see that. Take them. The second generation of heroes, and the third. If the puppies you sire are as good as I expect, I’ll name them as the true successors. The males will all be Belka, the bitches will be Strelka. That will be the mark of their legitimacy. The sign that I approved of them. The proof.”

  Woof!

  “Come!”

  You understood that command. You leapt the fence. Jumped right over. Just like that. And you became a Soviet dog.

  “Woof!”

  The Boss began by sending three “bullets.” He shipped them off from Toyama Port on a fishing boat late one night, and from there they transferred mid-ocean to the cargo vessel that carried them to a port in the Primorsky Krai. After that, he sent seven more bullets. Trained assassins. Up to this point, they were all new recruits, youngsters. Show us what you can fucking do for the organization, boys, he’d told the new recruits, all barely in their twenties. Think of it as a sort of hustle. Go pop a few of them fuckhead Ruskies for me.

  He had done well, he thought, put some fear into them. Can’t have ’em fucking besmirching the old escutcheon now, can we? And in fact, the young guns had brought in a whopping sum. A cool forty mill
ion yen per head. Japanese yen. Even when you factored in “transport fees” for illegal entry and the various other little presents they had to distribute, and even if you offered the bullets—or their families, in some cases—a reward for seeing their jobs through to a successful conclusion, the profits that came streaming into the organization were still unfuckingbelievable. And of course, the Boss mused, it wasn’t just that nice cash reward; I also set it up so they could spend the eve of the attack whooping it up with beautiful white chicks. Sexy Slavic sisters. Blond-haired blue-eyed supermodel-class hotties, fuck yeah. Some harem. Bet they knocked themselves out, lucky pricks. Then I had ’em batten the hatches with vodka and caviar. Very nice indeed. Shows what a fucking tenderhearted yakuza daddy I’ve been.

  The man—the Boss as they called him—cast his thoughts back, agony written all over his face. The thing was, the bullets were just that. Bullets. They went out and didn’t come back. In the beginning, they’d had better than a fifty percent survival rate, but now it had sagged below twenty percent. Only one in five made it back alive, in other words. If that. But what choice did he have? He had to keep sending the poor fuckers in. Stormtroopers. He hunted around for hit men who wouldn’t just follow the money, going through one of his “brothers” from his time in the clink. He located four, trained ’em to do their work as bullets, and sent ’em off on a Russian transport vessel, this time from Niigata Port. He snuck ’em in without dicking around, no stupid paperwork. Next he picked up some fucking traitors. Dickheads who’d betrayed their gang and were lying low under aliases, trying to keep from getting caught in the wide net their old bosses cast. He sent off eight of them, one after another. Gave ’em good tools. A nice cache of pistols: Tokarevs; Makarovs; Italian-made automatics; M-16s that had found their way out of American bases, now equipped with 40mm grenade launchers; Uzis; and last but not least twenty-three hand grenades and seventeen sticks of dynamite. Plus some other stuff.

  These “soldiers” kept getting more flashy all the time, putting more bang into their work. One guy had gone into a nightclub the police ran jointly with the Russian mafia and shot the hell out of the place with a submachine gun. Miraculously the attacker managed to get out of the club alive, not that it mattered—they found his body in Nakhodka Port. Others had taken aim at two successive chiefs of police, both times bringing about a change in personnel. They slaughtered executives in a bank the mafia controlled. After the organization started using yakuza from outside, though, the bullets’ survival rate sank below ten percent. Soon, no doubt, it’d be grazing zero. Still, this little hustle had already brought in more than six hundred million yen in pure profit. How the hell could this be? the Boss wondered. What was going on? he asked himself. He didn’t know the answer. And he had no choice, he had to keep sending these fucking stormtroopers in. How could he refuse? They had his daughter.

  The client had his daughter.

  It doesn’t fucking make sense, the Boss moaned. How many months had his stomach been hurting like this? Sure, I expect to be threatened, used. But why are the fuck are they paying us these fees? He knew the Russian market. You could hire a hit man, some guy with no fear of death, for a lot less; you could take a zero or two off the figure they were paying him, even if the target was a policeman or a kingpin type. And you could do it domestically. What the hell was this client thinking? The Boss had lost twenty pounds over the past few months. He’d grown thin. Skinny, even. He couldn’t make sense of the situation. He had no idea what effect these dramatic attacks were having on the local population. No idea how a certain paper—a dissident tabloid specializing in yellow journalism—was fanning the flames. He didn’t even know where all this cash was coming from. Who was behind the client, funding him?

  Someone, he was sure, was behind the client.

  Shooting pain in his stomach. Blood in his urine.

  His daughter had been taken hostage.

  The Boss sent over three more bullets. The client kept making demands. ELIMINATE THE TARGET. I mean, what the hell? The Boss clutched his stomach with both hands. What’s the plan here, what the fuck are you trying to do? The information the client sent regarding the targets’ location, routine, and protection was always precise, detailed, and up-to-date. It’s better than a damned spy flick, for fuck’s sake! And the second we pop the target, the money comes through, wired into one of the organization’s underground bank accounts. What are we, businessmen? the Boss asks. Speaking to himself, of course, since there was no one else to ask. It’s just another kind of business. How many fucking ulcers have I got in my stomach now? Already the supply of yakuza-on-the-run was drying up; he was having to rely on non-yakuza. Fuckheads who had been drummed out of the criminal world forever by their own groups. And he had to hire these guys as bullets. Totally fucking against the rules. I’m no underworld daddy, not anymore. Forget underworld, this is just plain old hell. But who the fuck cares. I can’t fucking let it bother me. After all, the Boss thinks, becoming defiant, this is the best hustle ever!

  Until then, what little income the organization brought in had consisted of protection money from bars and restaurants, betting on baseball, underground casinos, black-market lending, various degrees of blackmail, ranging in size from tall to venti. They didn’t deal much in speed. The key, fuckers, is how much money you can launder, the Boss was always saying. Use your heads and fucking rake the shit in. The twenty-first century is right around the corner, and then it’ll all be business! Business! That’s what we’re aiming for with this Russo-Japanese joint venture!

  Only…was this the kind of business they’d wanted? No, no. The Boss had chosen defiance—that was the way to go. Just think how much his men had suffered trying to gather the fees they had to send to the main branch. How much fucking pointless suffering they had been through. This business was his reward for all that, as their underworld daddy.

  Or rather, their hell daddy.

  Shit. Hell…hell. Whatever.

  He tried to reason his way out of the dilemma. His stomach twitched. It hurt like fuck. He had diarrhea too. The client was using him, it was clear. That was one way of looking at it. He was just a piece in someone else’s game, a pawn, the king of the pawns. You could look at it that way. ELIMINATE THE TARGET. ELIMINATE. ELIMINATE. The three bullets he’d just sent over brought in more than a hundred million yen. Again. Business. What am I supposed to do, my daughter’s been taken hostage! My fucking hands are tied.

  I just have to keep sending over more bullets.

  He would send another.

  Recruiting even non-yakuza wasn’t easy anymore. Still he demanded that arrangements be made. Arrangements couldn’t not be made. They had his daughter. Though he realized, in some shadowy corner of his heart, that maybe this was just an excuse. Maybe all the spiritual agonies he was suffering, the blistering pain in his stomach, the boys the organization had sacrificed…maybe none of it had anything to do with his daughter.

  He clutched his stomach. Fuck, have I gotten skinny.

  Losing my imposing presence.

  He had a bad feeling about all this. And his instinct was right. The main branch registered its displeasure. They were scraping the bottom of the barrel, and they hadn’t yet found a taker. One of the main branch’s advisers came as a messenger. He implied, without actually saying so, that the Boss was guilty of actions at odds with the Way of the Yakuza. It was perfectly clear what the problem was. Perhaps, the Boss thought, he’d gone overboard in trying to find his bullets. The messenger told him of various other unpleasant rumors.

  Then, finally, he cut to the chase. “So you mean to start a war in Russia?”

  The Boss gaped. Had someone ratted on him?

  You’re sending hit men over, aren’t you? the adviser shouted. The main branch will not stand for out-of-control violence of that sort! He went on bellowing. It dawned on the Boss that they must have heard about the c
ash flowing in from the far side of the Japan Sea. Aha, he thought. So that’s it. They noticed how well we’re doing, so they did some poking around.…We made a bit too much, I guess.

  The messenger’s next statement confirmed his suspicions. “The main branch is considering your expulsion. Your territory would go right to the Chief. They’re ready to replace you. If you want to put things back in order, it’ll cost five hundred million. You’ve got the money, I’m sure. You’ve been making it hand over fist in Russia.”

  “Five hundred…million?”

  “That’s what the main branch wants.”

  They did their homework, the Boss thought. With our fucking coffers as larded as they are, we could send ’em five hundred million in a flash. And they want us to hand it over, just like that? Pay our dues? You must be fucking kidding, the Boss thought. The man they called the Boss, who had just been threatened with the loss of that title. My boys died for that money. The first guys I sent over as bullets were my own, you know, official members of this organization! They laid their lives on the line, all for my little darling. And you’re telling me to fucking cough up that money? Cash I got at the price of my boys’ lives?

  No boss would agree to that.

  Not even a hell boss.

  The messenger gazed coolly at the Boss. As if to say, So, what’s it going to be? You dick, the Boss thought. You think you’ve got me by the balls, and you’re laughing inside. You’re fucking chuckling. Messenger from the main branch, my ass. Think you can give me advice, do me the favor of sharing your great wisdom? Just trying to get your bit, you fuckhead. No sooner had this thought flashed into his mind than he put his hand behind his back, lifting his suit jacket. He kept a Beretta tucked into his belt for protection. He whipped it out. He fired. The gun. At the fuckhead.