At three o’clock on November 17, 1975, local time, having crossed to the east of the international date line, the cargo ship picked you up. When you started barking at the prow, the sound brought the Hawaiians at the stern back to their senses—they, too, had been driven by extreme hunger into a state of delirium. For a moment they had simply gaped at the sight of hope moving across the ocean, there, right in front of them, and then they had started whistling, waving their arms. You didn’t wave, but you did wag your tail. The ship’s crew noticed you, and your thirty-eight-day nightmare voyage came to an end.
It was over. And where, Goodnight, were you now?
The cargo ship was on its way from the American mainland to a point on the fourteenth parallel south that was itself one of the United State’s unincorporated territories. The ship was headed for American Samoa. It would be taking on a large shipment of canned tuna on Tutuila, the main island in the archipelago. Approximately thirty percent of the American Samoan labor force worked in the canneries, packing and sending can after can of South Pacific tuna to the mainland. Shortly before the date changed from November 17 to November 18, the three men, now identified in the ship records as “survivors,” were taken ashore at Tutuila, after the ship docked in Pago Pago Harbor. The records noted, too, the presence of one dog, also a “survivor.” She was a German shepherd. You, Goodnight. You looked like a bag of bones. You were exhausted, both physically and spiritually. You were a dog of the fourteenth parallel south now, though it would take a few weeks for you to realize this. For the time being, you still had the illusion that you were adrift in that canoe on the wide, wide sea, exiled from Oahu island, exiled from your home on the twenty-first parallel north. But you weren’t. You had become a Tutuilan dog. A dog of the fourteenth parallel south. From the American state of Hawaii to the central island in the American territory of Samoa. The two islands were separated by a distance of 2,610 miles, and even so you had simply moved from one place to another within “America.”
Even after thirty-eight days adrift on the ocean.
The three survivors didn’t discuss the details of what they had endured. Those three pure Hawaiians would not divulge the inside story of their thirty-eight days at sea. They had violated various taboos. They had hallucinated. What were they supposed to say? And so, in the end…they said very little. It was a hellish trip, they said, and fell silent. One man added that he’d never get in a canoe again. Then they boarded a plane at Pago Pago International Airport and flew back to Hawaii.
They did. But not you.
They intentionally left you behind. The Hawaiians were terrified of you and insisted there was no need to take you back. They looked at you with horror in their eyes, as if you yourself were the embodiment of a taboo, and they abandoned you. You made no effort to follow them. Those three men who had lived until the end, gathered at the stern of the canoe, were not your masters. If anything, they had been serving you, because that was the ritual. Because the livers, the penises, the testicles had become the custom. And then, later, the innards of the fish they caught. You had no master, no new master appeared, and all you had to show for the horror you had endured was a mistaken memory. MY PUPPIES! FRUIT OF MY WOMB! And now here you were, and here you stayed, from November to December 1975.
The fourteenth parallel south. Tutuila Island.
No one took you in as a pet, and yet you were fed. Days passed. At first they kept you on the grounds of the government office. You still resembled a bag of bones. “Hey, dog! You’re alive! Eat!” the Samoans who worked for the local government called to you, tossing you scraps of taro and fish. More offerings…the same custom, you thought. You began to put on weight, but you were still living in a daze. You stood out on this island, a single pure German shepherd among a Tutuilan population made up entirely of mongrels. You had style. The local dogs felt it. And so they avoided you. You went out on the beach. You gazed at the ocean. At the horizon. The horizon, the horizon, more horizon. I’M ADRIFT, I’M LOST, THIS IS A CANOE IN THE FORM OF AN ISLAND. You felt it. Coconut crabs scuttled on the shore. Slowly you grew accustomed to the stench of rotting coconut. An island. You felt it. From the second week of December, you began to understand that the island was an island. THIS PLACE IS…AN ISLAND? You were incapable of understanding that this island lay on the fourteenth parallel south. The island had been home to an American naval base until 1951, and as a dog who had served as a sentry until just ten months earlier, you could sense that history, sense the lingering base-ness of the place like a scent buried just under the surface of the earth, and it confused you. There was too much rain here for it to be that other island on the twenty-first parallel north.
You took shelter from the rain in the shade of a banyan tree.
You were facing the road.
You watched the road.
You stared at it as you had stared at the horizon. Your eyes were blank. You weren’t looking at anything in particular.
The road had two sides: a far side and a near side. Your empty gaze lingered on three dogs standing on the far side. A father and his children. You were new to the island; so were they.
The three dogs were about to cross the road, from that side to this side. To cut across it at an angle. The road was narrow. It wasn’t a highway. But still it had two sides, a near side and a far side, and to get from one to the other one had to cross it, like a river.
Seconds before your listless gaze took in the car, your ears had picked up the roaring of its engine. Then the car itself entered your field of vision. It was an expensive car: a Jaguar. The first sports car on the island. The driver, and owner, was a thirty-seven-year-old man who had made it big in the United Arab Emirates. He had paid for the car in US dollars and brought it ashore the day before, and now he was driving it in as flamboyant a manner as possible, showing off. Right now, he was pushing seventy miles per hour. Driving like a nut. You saw what was coming. Those three dogs were about to be run over. The father and his children. Three dogs, just like you.
Suddenly you were up and running.
Your premonition was confirmed by a noise. A shift in the sound of the engine. A sudden slamming of the brakes.
Something was moving you. CH…you were thinking. CH…CHILDREN!
The father was hit. So was one of the puppies. The two dogs were thrown together six feet into the air. The third dog was dangling by his neck from your mouth. You were on the far side of the road; you had run, and you had made it. You had…you had saved the puppy. You had been taught how to survive on a battlefield. You had almost been sent to the front lines in Southeast Asia, to fight the Vietcong. You had been awarded two medals for your outstanding service as a military dog: a Purple Heart and a Silver Star. The puppy you saved was smaller than his dad, but at six months old he was heavy enough. But you had saved him. An instant later, he would have been dead meat.
You shuddered. Somewhere inside, Goodnight, you were barking your pride.
There on the far side of the road, you set the puppy on the ground.
He was less a puppy, really, than a young dog. He was an odd-looking thing. His coat was brown, but he had six thin black stripes on one side and a black spot on his haunch. He looked a bit like a guitar. He was paralyzed with fear by the sudden catastrophe. But then he started walking. Gingerly, unsteadily. His father’s body, and his brother’s, lay sprawled on the asphalt. The Jaguar was long gone, of course. The driver didn’t hang around to pay his respects to the two dogs he had killed. He didn’t come to apologize to the child he had orphaned. Soon enough the dogs’ owner and his bodyguard would track him down and beat him half to death. But that was still several hours off. The time for that hadn’t yet arrived.
Right now, it was just the young dog who looked like a guitar peering down at two dead bodies. Tragedy. Trickling blood. It had happened so suddenly, this…death. The shock of it. The guitar dog had
been through this once before. Only this time around, the number of dead had increased—doubled. This time it wasn’t just one dog stretched out on the ground, it was one plus one. It was two.
He backed away.
He sensed that he was losing them. He was scared. Terrified. He was being pushed back to his earliest memory, his first experience of fear.
He stepped back off the road. Onto the ground.
And there you were. You, Goodnight, were waiting. As the guitar dog backed away step by step from the bodies, he pushed slowly up against your warm body. Your fur was short, and under it was your skin. It was warm. Soft. The young dog was afraid of things that were cold and hard. And there you were.
He collapsed into you. Bam, just like that. He cuddled desperately against you. He needed to feel safe…truly safe. He nuzzled for your teats. He had responded in the same way to his mother’s body, but this time the infantile impulse was even stronger. You had teats. Five pairs of them, ten in all. They had never produced milk. But as he moved from the first to the second, the third, the fourth…each teat he tried exuded warmth. Living warmth.
So he pressed desperately against you and kept sucking.
And you understood.
I’M A MOTHER.
You felt it.
I’M SUCKLING HIM. HE IS MY CHILD.
Destiny was doing its work, and you were confused, you were reconstructing your memory. You had given birth to this child with the guitar-like stripes—he was yours. That was how you remembered it now. And so you told him: GO ON, SUCK. You gazed down at this mongrel who looked nothing like you, a purebred German shepherd, and you told him: GO ON, YES, DRINK MY MILK. In 1957, on the American mainland, another dog in the same situation had spoken those same words. At the edge of a highway in Wisconsin, another German shepherd had told seven mongrel puppies, monstrosity embodied, the same thing. You had no idea of this. No knowledge of that fact, no ability to grasp the connection.
You understood. MY CHILD HAS COME TO ME.
This scene took place in December 1975. Soon 1975 turned into 1976, which turned into 1977, which turned into 1978, which turned into 1979. And in December 1979, we come to the other big event. The second of the two strikingly similar wars that took place in the second half of the twentieth century. In April 1975, Saigon fell. That’s what had happened in Southeast Asia. The capital of South Vietnam was taken. The United States gave up supporting South Vietnam. And so, that same year, the first of the two limited wars, the one that has come to be known as the Vietnam War, came to an end. And so we move to Central Asia. December 1979: the USSR sent its army into Afghanistan. It decided to initiate “direct intervention” in a nation torn by civil war. The Soviet Union’s own ten-year quagmire had begun.
The Afghan War.
The fuse blew on December 25, 1979.
Another limited war, another offshoot of the Cold War. Obviously.
War number two.
And so, dogs—mother and child, as you had now become, incognizant incarnations of the circularity of time—where were you, four years later?
Woof, woof, woof!
A bright red, gaudily painted truck barreled along the highway that headed west out of Peshawar, the old capital of the North-West Frontier Province. It was a mile out of the city, then two, three, four, five miles. A gate appeared. A checkpoint. This was not a national border. Through this gate lay the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Administered by the Pashtuns, the Tribal Areas were home to two and a half million people belonging to a number of tribes, each of which lived in accordance with its own Pashtunwali, an ethical code prescribing notions of warfare, loyalty, bravery, revenge, hospitality, the isolation of women, and so on. The land was populated by men with beards and veiled women. It was a region of steep hills whose major industries were the manufacture of weapons, smuggling, and farming illegal drugs. The truck drove into a village. It stopped. A dog leapt down from the bed. A second followed.
The first dog was about twenty-six inches tall with sinewy muscles and a fierce glitter in his eyes. His thick, short coat was brown, and he had a striking guitar-like pattern of stripes on one side. He had inherited the texture of his hair from his mother, a purebred Labrador retriever. His father’s father had been a purebred boxer. He himself belonged to no one breed, however. His blood was so mixed that all one could really say about him was that he was a mutt. Still, he had an air of tough, masculine power. Of unity…the odd sense of balance one feels when confronted with a monstrosity. Indeed, this dog had more than one mother. There was the mother who had given birth to him, and the mother who raised him. The dog who had jumped down out of the truck after him was his second mother.
She was a purebred German shepherd. She was twenty-two inches tall and already thirteen years old. Not that you could tell it from looking at her. Her coat had lost its luster, but that was about it. She was steady on her legs. She looked at the world calmly. She had dignity. And, above all, she had love.
The first dog was Guitar.
The second was Goodnight.
Two men got out of the truck. One was the Hellhound. Another was a Samoan. This was not, however, that Samoan—not the Hellhound’s bodyguard and right-hand man. He was a towering giant, six foot two, but he wasn’t that towering giant. He had the same face, but the tattoos on his arms, torso, and thighs were a little different. This Samoan was a devout Muslim who prayed five times each day without fail and spoke English with a Samoan accent and Urdu and Pashto with an English-Samoan accent. He had never once stepped into the boxing ring, but he was American Samoa’s top wrestler. He had even been invited to join a sumo stable in Japan. This Samoan was the number two, as it were, of that Samoan. The other Samoan’s alter ego. His twin brother. He was here in Central Asia serving as the Hellhound’s bodyguard, just as his older brother had. His older brother had stayed in Mexico to run the business while the boss was away. The Hellhound had expanded his operations into Asia. The summit in Samoa had been a success, and four years earlier the Hellhound had teamed up with the organization over here. Then, without any warning, the Asian organization’s boss died. It had happened two years earlier: one day, he got into a rage about some disagreement with a Chinese-Malaysian organization and he suffered a heart attack, and that was that. The Hellhound had pretty much taken charge of the dead boss’s territory—he had mollified the Chinese-Malaysians by helping them make some very profitable connections in the Nuevo Mundo. It was inevitable that the Samoan—the younger brother, of course—would become his local representative. And so the Hellhound had two right-hand men, both more or less identical in appearance: one to the west and one to the east of the Pacific Ocean. Two men. Two places. The past four years had seen other additions to the two theme as well. When the Hellhound succeeded in expanding his operations, La Familia’s Don sent him a second beautiful wife. A slim woman with very large breasts.
And there was more.
The Hellhound had a new dog as his alter ego. The second generation.
The exchange would be taking place at the village meeting place. A group of Pashtuns, none of them Pakistani citizens, was waiting there for the Hellhound and his associates. And for the dog. They were holding automatic rifles and a sample of the product. The latter wasn’t out in plain view, it was inside a metal briefcase. The dog would be able to evaluate the quality of the drugs through the metal. The Pashtuns hadn’t believed the rumors until they actually saw the dog do its stuff. They had lived all their lives in the hills, and the only dogs they were familiar with were strays and half-pets that they treated like strays. As far as they were concerned, dogs were unclean. It was as simple as that. But not this one. This dog had huge power over their livelihoods. When he growled, he might as well have been speaking in dog language: THIS IS INFERIOR, WE CAN’T BUY SHIT LIKE THIS. He had never once made a mistake. He noted the slightest declin
e in purity, whether it was an intentional effort to play fast and loose with the Hellhound and his group or not. He noted it and pointed it out.
In dog language.
They had learned their lesson. You couldn’t fool this dog’s nose.
The Hellhound greeted the Pashtuns. The Samoan greeted the Pashtuns. He was interpreting for the Hellhound. The men sat down in a circle in the meeting place, and the Samoan conveyed his boss’s words to the Pashtuns. An old Pashtun whose beard was going white nodded.
Guitar padded over to the briefcase and sniffed it.
Four years earlier, on Tutuila Island, the Hellhound had lost his first alter ego. Cabron, the mongrel the Don had given him as proof of his status as a member of La Familia. He had lost the dog, but not his mongrel seed. Cabron’s six-month-old son had survived. He had emerged unscathed from the accident that instantly killed both his father and his brother. The Hellhound hadn’t been on the scene of the accident. He had sent the dogs out on their own to get a bit of fresh air after the successful conclusion of the summit. “Go on, boys,” he said. “You were the stars of the show. Take a break.” He thought they might like to go to the beach and horse around, a father and his two sons doing the “dog family taking it easy in the South Seas” thing—what a scene, just like a postcard. But it had ended in tragedy. Fortunately, there had been a witness, so he was able to learn in detail what had happened. The Hellhound rushed to the scene and burst out wailing. At least one dog had been saved, though—that moved him profoundly. It was a miracle: according to the witness, a German shepherd that had been wandering around in the area had sprinted over and saved Cabron’s son in a manner that was all but suicidal. The German shepherd had recently been rescued. She’d come from Oahu, up in the North Pacific, and ended up adrift on the ocean…The puppy and the dog who saved him were still there at the scene of the accident—or rather just beside it, at the side of the road. The puppy, the son of now-dead Cabron, was pressed against his savior’s stomach, and the German shepherd was letting him suck on her teats. Oooaaoo, aaoooooh, the Hellhound moaned. The scene tugged almost violently at his heartstrings. It was a miracle, a true miracle. He was convinced of it. A dog who had drifted across the sea from Hawaii had saved the child of his alter ego, here in Samoa? Without realizing what he was doing, he was kneeling on the ground before the German shepherd, crossing himself. “I swear to you I’ll never forget this!” he cried. “So long as I live!” And he kept his promise.
Belka, Why Don't You Bark? Page 26