Hideo Furukawa - Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

“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.