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