The Rescue

4

Five years and three days before Joe was wounded and carried to the clinic by the boy, Joe’s sire — a nameless little street mutt — began another of his journeys from Tijuana to the McDonald’s in Otay Mesa.

It was a February Sunday, and Street Mutt was — as always — in search of food, water, and a mate. Early morning, still dark.

He followed his usual trail along the Tijuana River, swollen as it was by last night’s rain. Trotted through the towering, windswept Arundo reeds and swam across the wide cold current, shaking himself off on the other side and sniffing his way along the bank until he began to pick up the scents of one of his many food places.

He was very hungry, pushed by his memories and pulled by his senses. He smelled the coyotes not far from here and heard them yipping beneath a fading crescent moon. He went faster. The coyotes smelled big and he had seen what they can do to a dog.

The path led through the estuary to a tall rusting fence that ran along the brightly lit tarmac of Tijuana International Airport. The asphalt prairies of the airport stretched as far as Street Mutt could see, the big terminal glittering in the distance.

He stopped once to look through the chain link at the incomprehensible world on the other side. But only once and only briefly. He knew that movement means life and stillness means death. Such as when his friend the dark dog froze in the middle of the street and was hit by a white car. Or when the big dog stopped to fight the coyotes instead of running and they got behind him and tore at him. Street Mutt’s mind is a kaleidoscope of images going back nearly seven years. Thousands of them. Like all dogs, he had experienced his world through his senses but he had no words to communicate or to order his images. His memory is keen and the images reappear clearly when triggered by his senses, and sometimes when they are not, as in dreams.

Soon Street Mutt was back on his small-footed trot into the first light of a Sunday morning. There was some whippet in him — which made him sleek and built for speed, and gave him his expressive rose ears. But there were scores of other breeds in him as well: small terriers and pointers and spaniels. A trace of German shepherd from generations ago, a hint of Labrador, and golden retriever too. More small breeds than large, for sure: Chihuahua and Xolo and Parson Russell and toy poodle. Traces of everything. Beagle. Bichon frise. Greyhound. Akita. Collie. Dachshund. Papillon. Chow. In some ways, he had the best of all of them: whatever worked, whatever allowed him to survive.

He half circled the airport, keeping to the edges of things: the brush along the culvert, the dry tumbleweeds collected along the chain-link fence, the hedge of failing oleander. A huge bird boomed into the sky, climbing.

It wasn’t hard to follow his nose to the hole under the fence, well marked by himself and others. After crawling through, he sat and looked both ways for cars. Looked again. Then hustled across the road into a streambed, along the eucalyptus windbreak, around the brightly lit customs buildings and the inspection grounds, his hunger driving him into the new light.

As the sunlight grew, Street Mutt saw his familiar food place. He saw the yellow arches against the new blue sky, but the rest of the building was only shades of gray, black, and white. The scent all around him was overwhelmingly good and strong, mixed with the smells of exhaust coming from the cars in the drive-through line, of burning jet fuel, of standing water and eucalyptus, the oily gravel beneath his paws, bleach and disinfectant wafting from the open rear door, of the rat poison coming from the traps anchored along the walkway of the building. He has cataloged hundreds of smells and attached meaning to them. Many of them are food places.

As fragrantly demanding as the dumpsters were, Street Mutt knew he couldn’t get into them. So he learned long ago to employ humans to get what he needed. He found that he could stand just outside the propped-open rear door of the burger emporium, framing himself in the light from within, and give the humans what they wanted from him: ears up but not aggressively, tail wagging, his face calm and his eyes imploring. Eagerness. Friendliness. Compliance. All of which he’d learned early in life, from the human faces and tones of voice, and from their ensuing behavior. These were easy lessons because a human face is easy to understand, and because Street Mutt had always wanted to have a human of his own. He had that common dog need to give one human everything. But some dogs get humans and some do not. He had no word for love. Just as he had no words for being kicked, or being hit with sticks and rocks, or being left tied up and hungry.

A boy pushed a clattering wheeled bucket through the back door and stopped when he saw Street Mutt standing handsomely in the light. The dog had not seen this boy here before. His face looked friendly. Street Mutt sat and twitched the end of his tail twice on the cement.

“Who are you? You look like you snuck in. No collar. Do you bite?”

The boy — who in Street Mutt’s eyes was wearing dark pants and a light shirt and a yellow-and-gray hat of some kind — stood the handle of his mop straight up in the bucket and knelt.

The dog rose and wagged his tail humbly, walked over, and sat. Smelled frying oil and meat smoke and milkshakes. And the bleach on the boy’s shoes, and his body odors, and the soap on the boy’s hand as he licked it. The dog remembered a boy who once did this, then choked him. That was a long time ago, so now Street Mutt was able to control his fear and let the boy’s hand go to his throat and scratch. He was a good scratcher, this boy. Street Mutt stood and let the boy scratch, then pat his haunches. He would have been this boy’s dog if the boy wanted him to be.

“Wait here.”

Street Mutt sat and waited. He heard the big ceiling fans inside, the sudden uproar of boiling oil, and the people talking into the big box that had food pictures on it.

The boy came back with a black plastic dish and half a foam clamshell, which he put down.

Street Mutt was all over it. The half clam was just water, which he ignored at first, but the black dish was piled with bits of sausage and scrambled eggs and hash browns and pieces of bread. There was ketchup and salt and pepper.

The black dish skidded along the ground and the dog nosed it against the wall but the food was gone. Still, every lap of his tongue brought treasures to his nose.

He turned and looked at the boy, who was upending the wheeled bucket over a drain.

“More?”

The dog knew no English, of course, but he knew the word’s tone so he wagged his tail and sat again.

Two minutes later he finished his second big plate of scraps and felt the bloating satisfaction inside. He drank the water, then sat by the empty plate and looked at the boy with his very best, most hopeful, most friendly expression.

But the boy wheeled the bucket over, picked up the plate and the white clamshell.

“I got to go back inside. Don’t follow or you’ll get kicked. The manager hates dogs.”

Half an hour later, on his way back to Mexico, Street Mutt suddenly registered the distant scent of a female in heat. It hit him like an old friend, throwing that switch inside him. Next to food, this was his most important smell. His most primal. If he had words, he would have described it as urgent desire, pleasure, maybe even a quest to experience beauty.

It took him another few minutes to find her, following a shallow drainage ditch and narrowing her scent cone to the backyard of a house on Marconi Court. He saw her through the chain links of a tall fence, lying in a patch of sun on her patio. She was pale, much larger than he, and beautiful. A full-bodied beauty. The tag on her collar caught the sun.

He yipped, raking dirt furiously. Pale Beauty came over and paced, watching him. In less than five minutes, Street Mutt excavated a body-sized cavity under the fence. He dug with the efficiency and strength of a machine. Soon as he wriggled under, Pale Beauty bolted for the back door of her house, and when Street Mutt tried to climb her, she threw him off and raced around her home. Then around it again, and again. She was fast and cornered well. So Street Mutt reversed himself, crashing into her head-on at the doghouse entrance. She was heavy enough to knock him inside. He scrambled out and was on her tail again by the time she got halfway across the yard; then she cut and ran back across the grass. Suddenly she wheeled and nipped him, but quick and nimble Street Mutt was behind her in a flash.

Street Mutt finished in a dizzying rush, then got himself back under the fence and out the way he’d come.

He drifted toward sleep in the shade of a decorative hedge lining the McDonald’s parking lot. Lost in the same enjoyable haze he’s been lost in many times before. Dreamed of getting a good lunch when he woke up.

After a nap, Street Mutt went around to the back door again but it was closed. He put his nose to the air and started back for Mexico.

He hadn’t gone far when he picked up the scent of grilling meat and followed it to a backyard barbecue on Siempre Viva Road, hopes high.