Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

by Hideo Furukawa

  At the time, the oldest dog fossils that had been unearthed on the Hawaiian Islands dated from sixteen hundred years earlier.

  That was exactly when the ancient Polynesians were thought to have immigrated.

  Well then, why not include that element in the experiment—in this essay in experimental archaeology? That would really prove that it could be done!

  Yes, the wealthy researcher thought, stunned by the brilliance of his idea. A dog.

  Hey, dog!

  This time you didn’t bark in response to the call, you just cocked your head.

  The wealthy researcher was moved, now, by the engine of his ambition. He knew a dog that wouldn’t be afraid to cross the sea in a canoe. And the dog was a strong, healthy, purebred German shepherd. And it had gotten friendly with everyone on the project, the entire crew. And…and…

  Your owner immediately agreed to let him have you. The negotiations occurred in October. “Are you serious? That’s quite a promotion,” the former lieutenant said. “He’s really going to be an important player in this project, part of the great Hawaiian Renaissance?” The researcher assured him you would with a terse, “He will have that honor.” And that was all it took to sell the former lieutenant. “Oh my god! Oh my god oh my god I can’t believe it!” he yelled. “The honor! The glory! I was a military man, you know, and so was she! Well, she was a military dog. Honor above everything! Right? Isn’t that right, girl?” he asked you. “Besides, she really likes to go out and enjoy the ocean. I’m sure she’ll love it, I’m happy to let her go. What an adventure! Go out and bring us something back to show for it!” he told you. “A third medal! You know what I’m saying? You understand?”

  Though your master didn’t mention this, his family had grown too large. There were too many of you. The beagle’s pregnancy had been entirely unexpected, and in the past six months the four puppies had grown almost into adult dogs. The family had been unable to find anyone to take them. That, ultimately, was what mattered. You were a burden, so he got rid of you. He didn’t have to feel guilty, and he got a $500 reward to boot.

  “I hear in Tahiti,” your master told you at the end, “they’re going to welcome you as a hero, back after 1,600 years, and you’ll live out the rest of your life as a canine king.”

  October 11. You set out from Oahu. A crew of sixteen men and a dog sitting in the double canoe. You were riding the great, wide sea. You, Goodnight, were no longer a dog of the twenty-first parallel north. You were headed south of the equator. But the Polynesian navigator you were all counting on was, it turned out, a fraud who had only joined the crew to get his name in the newspapers. “If worst comes to worst,” he thought, “someone will rescue us with whatever modern equipment they’ve got.” He hadn’t totally mastered the traditional navigation techniques, which were by then being passed down in Polynesia only in secret, to a select few. He was all bluster, just like the researcher. Still, when night fell the sixteen human members of the crew gazed up at the sky. They read the stars. During the day, they watched which way the birds flew. You, Goodnight, didn’t look up at the blue sky; you kept your gaze trained rigidly on the flat horizon. By October 12, you were already growing homesick. You missed the little beagles. Those four puppies you had mothered, and whom you had kept caring for even after they were grown. Your teats tingled. Five pairs of teats that had never lactated.

  1975. And the other dog—the male on the twentieth parallel north? Cabron, in Mexico City. He had acquired an alter ego. An alter ego that was simultaneously human and canine. But only when his face was covered; then, and only then, was this man transformed into a dogman. He was thirty years old, a mestizo, and they called him the Hellhound. That, at any rate, was the name he used in the ring. The Hellhound was a luchador.

  The Hellhound was active in entertainment wrestling, known as lucha libre, “free fighting,” a sport that had been practiced in Mexico since 1933.

  Of course, he donned a dog mask in the ring and fought as a dogman. His special maneuvers were the Dog-Hold and the Dog-Bite, the latter delivered to the top of his opponent’s head. He also did a torpedo kick called the St. Bernard.

  The numeral two had a special meaning for the Hellhound. He had two faces, for instance: his outer and his inner face. In the 1970s, there were approximately two thousand luchadores in Mexico, seventy percent of whom wore masks. A certain number of these wrestlers maintained a policy of total secrecy and lived without revealing their true names or places of birth. The Hellhound was one of these. From the time of his debut, he had paid the company that created his mask a huge sum to keep all information regarding his countenance, his unmasked face, under wraps. Two faces: one outer, one inner. The vast majority of luchadores, eighty percent of whom also had other jobs, treated their everyday, unmasked faces as their public faces; the masks were the hidden identities they assumed only in the ring. The Hellhound was different. For him, the masked self, the dogman, was the public self.

  The reason for this was obvious: he appeared without his mask, his ordinary face exposed, whenever he had underworld dealings. He had a position in one of the two cartels competing for domination in Mexico. And not just any position—the Hellhound was the boss. He had a special token to prove it. A dog. The dog on the twentieth parallel north. Yes, that’s right, the mongrel Cabron was his. The Hellhound, in other words, was Cabron’s alter ego. The Hellhound looked after Cabron—he owned Cabron, he was owned by Cabron—and so, for precisely that reason, he was acknowledged throughout the underworld, from North America all the way down into Central America, as an official member of La Familia. Texas’s La Familia. The family.

  Once again, two. Having an alter ego, being an alter ego.

  What’s more, the Hellhound was the second generation in his family to work in this business. He had taken over from his father, who had changed the course of his life. His father had been the first to initiate a relationship with La Familia, and he’d had his own dog. A mongrel the Don had given him. The dog’s father—his seed, that is to say—had been a giant St. Bernard, incredibly brave, fabled throughout the region for having saved no fewer than seven lives. The Hellhound had been born in 1945; his father’s dog joined the household in 1949. Almost as far back as the Hellhound could remember, the dog had been there. The Hellhound had loved to pet the dog, and he would ride him—he had gone in for dog-riding, you might say, not horse-riding—and he would sleep with his head pillowed on the dog’s fluffy, roly-poly stomach, tug on his ears, and pet him some more. The Hellhound had hardly any childhood memories in which this dog did not figure. When he grew older, he used to grapple with the dog, pretending to fight. It was a sort of pseudo- wrestling and also a sort of pseudo-dogfighting. Dogfighting, incidentally, was big in Mexico too. As a boy, the Hellhound had never once managed to get the upper hand on his mongrel opponent. Of course not. The mongrel was a master. On the night of his seventh birthday, frisking around with the dog on the patio, he realized that he would never win. He shed tears of humiliation at his weakness, but at the same time he felt a new respect for the dog welling up within him. From now on, he decided, the dog really would be his master. Master!

  Ever since he was a boy, the Hellhound had tended to run with his passions. If he wasn’t as good as the dog, he would learn from the dog. And so his relationship with the mongrel La Familia had given his father deepened; the dog became his family, his teacher, his closest friend. It was during those days that he perfected his killer St. Bernard Kick. The Hellhound had always been an outstandingly physical child, ever since he was born, and he was always landing flying kicks in his classmates’ stomachs at school whenever he flew into a rage. He’d been doing this since almost the first day, even attacking the older tough-guy types.

  At the same time, going to school introduced a new worry into his life. Until then, he always assumed his family’s business was perfectly above board, but now it bega
n to dawn on him that the activities they were involved in were criminal. His classmates’ parents weren’t involved in organized crime. What? You mean we’re doing illegal things? Drug dealing and stuff? Killing people? But…isn’t that…isn’t that bad? The boy began to be tormented by moral qualms. Then it was 1957. The year the dog died. The boy’s family, teacher, and closest friend—gone. The boy was twelve, and it hit him hard. He felt as if a hole had opened up in his heart. He visited the local Catholic church every day to pray for the repose of the dog’s soul. Then one Sunday three months after the dog’s death, something happened. During the sermon. The pastor, as it happened, had spent the previous night with a cousin who had come up to the city from their hometown, and since the two men hadn’t seen each other for four-and-a-half years, the pastor imbibed a bit too much tequila. So he wasn’t doing too well. His voice, as he stood declaiming from the pulpit, was so toneless that most of the congregation started nodding off. The boy, too, felt himself falling under a sort of spell, as if he were succumbing to hypnosis. Only in his case, it wasn’t hypnotism of the You’re getting very, very sleepy type. He was having an actual hallucination. Hearing a mysterious message. First, he heard a voice. A male voice: “Hello? Hello? Hel-low!” It was an adult voice. What? Who is that? The boy glanced around the church, then froze. Up there behind the priest, a little to his right, at the rear of the pulpit, the statue of the crucified Christ was moving its lips. Their gazes met. And BAM, a bolt of spiritual lightning slammed through his body.

  “Hey!” Jesus Christ’s voice bellowed in his brain. “Don’t you think you’ve got some things to take care of before you come here to pray for a dog? What about all this immorality you’re part of? You gotta make amends for that stuff first!”

  All at once, just like that, the boy felt the hole the dog’s death had left in his heart close up, plugged by the wisdom he had been granted.

  Whoosh. In it went, just like that.

  Bear in mind that the Hellhound had always been unusually passionate. He was particularly susceptible to hallucinations. Physically prepared, you might say, to receive the word of God.

  Age fourteen. The young man made his first appearance in the ring. He was a luchador now. He had spent the last two years training four hours daily, and expectations were high for this newcomer able to pull off impeccable high-flying moves. In Mexico, fourteen was not considered a young age to debut as a wrestler. And of course lucha libre was the preeminent form of popular entertainment. People watched, captivated, as the struggle between good and evil played itself out in the ring. Cheering for (or jeering at) the luchador who stood for goodness and jeering at (or cheering) the luchador who stood for evil offered a means of letting out the stress that accumulated in day-to-day life. Wrestling was a world of fantasy. And so the boy entered the ring. Watch me. Be happy!

  This was his solution to the moral dilemma that plagued him.

  His family’s business was evil. Well then, he would serve the public by becoming a luchador, showing his audiences a good time!

  Thus he assuaged the prickings of his conscience.

  His ring name was the Hellhound. He had chosen a dogman as his character, obviously, out of respect for his father’s dog—his family, teacher, and close friend. The various techniques he had picked up horsing around with the dog as a child played an important role in his fighting, albeit in more refined forms. That was how, at the age of fourteen, the Hellhound became the Hellhound. He was transformed from an ordinary human into a human capable of turning, at any moment, into a dogman.

  The Hellhound was never, however, exclusively a wrestler. He continued attending school until he turned sixteen, and then he started helping his father. By then he had already found his way out of his moral quandary. He was doing good as a luchador, so even if he was involved in organized crime, and organized crime was evil, that was okay. By giving himself over to these two different aspects of his life, he achieved a kind of balance.

  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?