Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

by Hideo Furukawa

  History revealed itself almost prophetically. On September 3, 1969, Ho Chi Minh died. Just like that, the personal relationship he and Mao Zedong had cherished was over. And by then Vietnam had already made its move. It chose to leave China, move closer to the USSR. Fully fifty percent of the aid that poured into North Vietnam from communist countries in 1968 came from the Soviet Union. This aid didn’t only take the form of weapons; the USSR actually put feet on the ground. It sent military advisors to the Indochina peninsula, to the front. The series of “Sino-Soviet conflicts” in March and June 1969 led the Soviets to include a large number of officers from the Border Guard among these specialists. The men on the ground weren’t only specialists in fighting, they were specialists in fighting and maneuvering against China.

  And so a certain Russian KGB officer found his way, that summer, to that spot.

  Or could it be…that it was your history, dogs, that called him there?

  Could it be?

  Dogs, dogs, where will you bark next?

  Woof, woof!

  1975: one dog was in Hawaii, one was in Mexico. To be precise: one bitch was on the island of Oahu, at the twenty-first parallel north, and one male was in Mexico City, at the twentieth parallel north. Their names were Goodnight and Cabron. Goodnight was a purebred German shepherd; Cabron was a mongrel whose father had been a purebred boxer—who had sprung, that is to say, from boxer seed. Goodnight’s origins have already been discussed. Her brother, DED, died in 1968, underground, on the Indochina peninsula, at the seventeenth parallel north. His neck had been torn open by a dog belonging to the PLA Military Dog Platoon, a dog descended from Jubilee. Jubilee had been the aunt of Goodnight and DED’s great-great-great-grandfather, five generations earlier. Okay. What of Cabron, the mutt in Mexico City? Where did he spring from?

  It’s complicated.

  Cabron wasn’t descended from Bad News. But if you were to trace his line back through his mother’s side, you would find that, in a way, he was directly descended from Bad News. Four generations earlier, Cabron’s great-great-grandmother had had six maternal aunts and uncles. Cabron’s great-great-grandmother’s mother and her six siblings—a litter of seven in total, each dog entirely different in appearance from the rest—had basked in the love of two mothers. The first was their birth mother. She had suckled them for the first half month of their lives. Their second mother was the one who raised them. She, too, had suckled them for a few weeks, until the time came for them to be weaned off her milk. Their birth mother’s pregnancy with them had been her fourth. Her name was Ice; her father had been a Hokkaido dog, her mother was a Siberian husky, and one of her grandmothers had been a Samoyed. The Hokkaido dog was Kita, of course. Their adoptive mother had given birth several times before she took charge of the seven puppies, but after that she never gave birth again. She was a lovely purebred German shepherd, and her name was Sumer. She was Bad News’s child.

  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 techni
ques, 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.

  Secretly built in California, it had been transported to Oahu in July. The humans had gotten into a dispute. Since the techniques for navigating long sea voyages had not survived in Hawaii, a Micronesian—a man from Satawal, an atoll of the Central Caroline Islands—had been brought in to steer the vessel. There was a faction who disapproved. The first project was being led by a California-born surfer and professor of anthropology, but he had a competitor: a researcher who was jealous of him. Who was, in addition, a wealthy brat. At the same time, another navigator turned up asking to be chosen. He was a Polynesian from Rarotonga, one of the Cook Islands, and all he wanted was the fame.

  Thus, a group of people angry with the Polynesian Voyaging Society made up their minds to break away, to try and beat the original adventurers at their own game.

  Indeed, the wealthy researcher decided that he would go a step further and outdo the professor who made him insanely jealous. To crush him once and for all. Long ago, when the first sea voyagers immigrated en masse to Hawaii, they had taken twenty or thirty plant species along with them for cultivation. They had also taken pigs, intentionally, and rats, unintentionally. And chickens. And dogs.