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.
He felt how cold she was.
How stiff.
He sensed that he was losing her.
Guitar was too old to drink his mother’s milk now, but he groped for her teats, nuzzling them one by one. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. The last two had never meant anything. But now, even when he sucked the others, no milk streamed forth. There was no warmth.
He sucked furiously.
Twenty minutes later, Cabron, you stumbled upon the scene. There, in a corner of the hall surrounded by the tumult of an estate still in chaos, was your wife, the bitch whose ass you had pursued with such passion, stretched out in the solemnity of death, with one of your children, a puppy with stripes like a guitar, beside her—beside her body, trying to suck her teats. You stood stunned, you hung your head. Soon another of your children padded over, and a second, then three more. They all, one after the other, followed Guitar’s lead, clustering around their cold mother’s teats, to suck.
The third trial continued through the rest of August and into September. Slowly your children began to die. The reason was simple: their mother was gone. The shock of her sudden death was more than they could bear. By the last week in September, only two puppies were alive. It wasn’t as though you weren’t trying to help—you were doing everything you could. Ever since “Bloody Sunday” you were spending all your time looking after the puppies. You were unbelievably careful. You never let them out of your sight, you kept watch over them twenty-four hours a day. You had, in fact, started raising them yourself. Even though you were a male dog, not a bitch.
MY CHILDREN, you thought.
MY RIGHTFUL DESCENDANTS.
LIVE. STAY ALIVE. LIVE.
Of course, you weren’t tending to them in the right way. You couldn’t call on your “motherly instincts” because you didn’t have any. Half of what you did was just horsing around. Though even then you were serious. The other half was education. That’s okay, you can do that, don’t do this, remember. You did all you could. And what sort of education did you pour most of your energy into? Into the very same trick you had devoted most of your energies to learning. In order to impress their mother. That, naturally, you had to teach them. You gave them an elite education. Your children, still under three months old.
Learn to smell the difference between these drugs.
Learn to identify their purity.
You taught them all the tricks a drug-sniffing dog needed to know. Almost as though you were engraving their mother’s memory onto their minds.
In November, the last two puppies were alive and well. Guitar was one of the two. One day, the Samoan shouted to your master, his eyes wide with surprise. “Hey, Boss! Boss!” The Hellhound, your master, practically shrieked when he realized what was happening. “What the hell are you hollering for… huh? Wait a sec, he’s… OH MY GOD!” “Amazing, huh, Boss? Look at Guitar there, scratching at the shoe with the marijuana hidden inside, just like his old man, Cabron.” “Looks like a real police dog, huh?” “Seriously. And look, his brother is doing it too!” “He… he can tell the difference between the marijuana and cocaine!” “They’ve totally turned into drug dogs!”
Your master turned and stared at you. He was moved. “Incredible… raising them all on your own, without their mother… and you taught them to do this?”