The Rescue

6

Bettina sits in her window cubicle at the Coastal Eddy offices in Laguna, looking out at Coast Highway. The last paragraph of her story on the rescue of Felix is done. The winter morning is bright and cool and the Pacific glimmers like a mirror. The cars on the highway glide.

Felix lies in a patch of sun beside her desk. He seems less fretful than yesterday, and slightly more curious about his new human.

Jean Rose, Bettina’s editor, bustles into the cubicle. “Betts, incredible — we put up the dog story two hours ago, and the views are incredible! Coastal Eddy has never seen this kind of engagement before. Messages still pouring in, and pictures of other dogs that look like our hero. Great work on the print story too.”

“I’m glad you like it.”

“Just a few questions.”

Jean Rose is a bright, optimistic woman, mid-sixties and always dressed more up than down. Tasteful jewelry, light makeup and lipstick, hair casually perfect. She treats Bettina as a promising, in-the-rough underling, but in a gracious and helpful way. She offers Felix a treat from the jar on Bettina’s desk and the dog politely takes it. Jean sits opposite her reporter.

“I had standard poodles in my dog days,” she says. “I miss them.”

“Get another one, Jean.”

“Too much work.”

“Get a lazy one, like a retired greyhound or something.”

“No, I like my freedom. Now, your print story — what about the boy who saved Felix? Can we name him?”

“Not a good idea if cartels were mixed up in Felix getting shot. Dr. Rodríguez didn’t get the boy’s name. The doctors didn’t even have time to thank him. Because of how serious it was.”

Jean Rose nods, purses her lips. Bettina thinks that she’d someday like to have what Jean has: brains and class. To be an arriver, not a striver. Arriving at yourself and liking what you find.

“I’d like to go back down there, find the boy, and get his story,” Bettina says. “I know where the shoot-out happened and I can ask around. Someone will know who he is. I’ll keep his name out of it. No pictures.”

“You know, Bettina, that’s worth pursuing at some point,” says Jean. “But first I’ll need the council wrap, and your summer festival preview. And, of course, the calendar. We are a community newspaper, after all. Not an international one. Which, I think someday would be a good place for you.”

Bettina thanks her, and Jean smiles, but Bettina feels her usual annoyance with the boring city hall stuff, the puff pieces on Laguna’s several art festivals, the tedium of the weekly entertainment calendar. Just as she told Felix during their long wait at the border yesterday, Bettina likes stories that matter.

She follows her boss’s gaze out the window, to where LBPD officer Billy Ray Crumley is pushing his patrol e-bike toward the Coastal Eddy front door. He’s got on his helmet and his navy-blue Bike Team uniform: shorts, a shirt, and a blue LBPD windbreaker.

“Here’s Billy, right on time.” Jean Rose winks pleasantly and rises.

Bettina hears him out in the lobby, greeting Marin, the receptionist. Billy has a pleasantly forceful voice and he’s a talker if there ever was one. She can’t hear his words, but she tracks his movements just by their sound: first a greeting to millionaire Coastal Eddy publisher Herb Sutton in his private office; then brief newsroom chatter with the city editor, the sports and business writers, then the arts and entertainment editor, Bettina’s own Jean Rose. Bettina’s cubicle is down the hall, on advertising row, because she’s the latest hired and the editorial newsroom was full. Which to her was a good trade for the views of the city and the snippet of ocean beyond.

Billy works his way down advertising row and spends extra time with Allison, whom Bettina believes is secretly crushing on him, and finally, he’s here, balancing his bike on her cubicle partition as his soft brown eyes behold the dog, who wags his tail.

“I just got to meet Felix, Bettina.”

“He doesn’t care for strangers, but sure.”

Billy Ray, tall and rangy, balances his patrol bike against the cubicle wall, hangs his helmet on a handle bar, covers the space in two strides, and kneels in front of the dog.

Felix sits and looks him in the eyes. It’s an interesting face-off; then it’s Billy, not the dog, who cocks his head. Then the dog goes closer and lets Billy pet him. Bettina watches his fingers working the dog’s throat and chest. Felix squints with pleasure, leans into it.

“He likes you,” says Bettina with a twinge of jealousy. Wonders if gregarious Billy Ray Crumley likes that everybody likes him.

Billy gets one hand behind each ear, jiggles them gently, flaps relaxed and flopping. Felix aims his pleasure-squinted eyes into Billy’s.

“Yeah, boy,” says the Texan. He breaks his gaze with the dog to look up at Bettina. Billy Ray has this way of looking right into her, and Bettina takes it in. She’s pretty sure she looks into him too. He’s always pleasant. Always here. Some of the Coastal Eddy staff tease her about him. He’s dark haired and good looking and five years older than Bettina. He’s rumored to have left a bad marriage back in Wichita Falls, Texas, but he’s never once shown any interest in seeing Bettina other than right here, on his Coast Highway Bike Team rounds. So she might just be part of the furniture.

“Bettina, this is one fine dog. You did good. Your video is going crazy, so now this little street dog is famous.”

Billy stands and gets a kibble from his windbreaker pocket — lots of dogs in Laguna — and lures Felix back to his place in the sun with it.

“Well, Bettina, it’s really fine to see you again.”

“And you, Billy.”

That look of his.

“Rain later this week,” he says. They always note the weather.

“Cool too.”

“Spring’s just a couple of weeks away.”

“That means orioles on my bird feeders, and tourists crowding into town,” says Bettina.

He puts his helmet on, leaves the strap undone, and rights his bicycle, its saddle knocking against the gun holstered high on his hip. He tips the helmet visor with one hand, like a movie cowboy, which Bettina finds funny.

“I’ll drop by tomorrow, if that’s all right.”

“I have interviews in the morning.”

“Afternoon, then.”

As the man with the Bike departs, Joe smells the familiar scents of men’s shoes and socks and the sweet, attractive smell of gun oil and leather. Hoppe’s is not in Joe’s vocabulary, only in his immense, evolving encyclopedia of smells. It’s the same gun oil Dan uses. A sweet, comforting smell. He wonders if Dan knows this guy.

He thinks that her name is Bettina and his is Billy.

After grinding out the calendar and city hall stuff and setting up some Festival of Arts interviews, Bettina uses her work computer and Coastal Eddy’s fast internet to get the Tijuana newspapers.

Tijuana is a big city, awash in newspapers and tabloids. There’s Frontera, La Crónica, El Sudcaliforniano, La Voz, Razón, Zeta. There are dozens of online publications, too, from Restaurant Week to the Gringo Gazette.

Her favorite is the daily Sol de Tijuana, for its handy translation button and good archives.

She goes back to the second of February, the day after the boy took Felix to the clinic, but the story of the shoot-out happened too late to make the edition.

But there it is on February third, the lead article:

Bettina knows that Tijuana was the murder capital of the world just two years ago, and is on track to regain its title in this still-young year.

The Calderón shoot-out pictures of the dead are unpublishable by US media standards — bodies shot to ribbons, blanched and bloody in the camera flashes. Two on the street. Four in the factory. The details aren’t great, but four of the men are dressed in street clothes and two in military-looking tactical wear.

Zumbaya himself is a grim-faced man with fierce black eyes and pockmarked cheeks. His coat lapel is studded with stars and decorations.

She reads on:

Bettina figures that the police found no drugs or money, because the victors took it all away in the white van. She wonders, with her reporter’s suspicion, whether Juan Calderón had been questioned, and how Captain Zumbaya knew it was the New Generation ripping off the Sinaloans, and not the other way around. Did it matter?

Bettina finishes the article, but it says nothing about a dog or a boy.

She has no better luck with La Crónica, El Sudcaliforniano, or Frontera.

Nothing anywhere about a boy and a shot dog or a veterinary clinic.

Which makes sense to Bettina: Why would the boy talk to the press about a cartel gun battle? The cartels are famous for killing and disappearing witnesses to their crimes. Running through the streets with Felix, the boy was probably scared, but maybe even more so as he lay in bed that night and thought about what he’d done.

She calls the Veterinary Clinic of Saint Francis of Assisi, and gets Dr. Lucero.

“He came home late last night,” she says in her rapid Spanish. “He was never taken to the police station. He was held in a small apartment in Agua Caliente. He was interrogated and beaten and driven to Chapultepec Park, where they let him out. He was disoriented and got lost in the forest. He was mugged, but finally someone gave him a ride home.”

It takes Bettina a moment to process and organize her words in Spanish. Wasn’t all this violence at least partly her fault, for taking Felix from the clinic, right under the noses of the policemen? Maybe she should have just kept to her gringa business and stayed here in Laguna to do her city council and calendar stories. Stories that matter? Such as a veterinarian who saves a dog’s life and gets beaten by the police? Yes, Bettina thinks. This is exactly a story that matters. A lot.

But at what cost? Her voice is a trembling whisper. “I am so sorry. I’m so sorry. Is the doctor okay?”

“He is angry and humiliated but he is fine.”

“May I speak with him?”

“Surely.”

“Buenos dias, Señorita Blazak,” says the doctor, his voice soft but resolved. He says the police were interested in two things: Who had adopted the shot dog that the clinic treated in early February, and which sedatives and painkillers was he dispensing at the clinic perhaps for people, not animals? Of course, the veterinarian explains, he is not a drug peddler. And he told them nothing of Bettina and the dog. He destroyed the adoption forms as soon as he got home. But the doctor plays down the horrors of last night, sounding more embarrassed than anything.

“I am honored you gave him my name,” he says.

“I’m so moved by what you did. And the price you have paid.”

“It was a terrible thing,” he says. “But maybe a small good came of it. When they were beating me and asking questions, I tried to ignore the pain. Let my mind go free. And when they asked again about the dog, I remembered that you wanted to write an article about the boy who brought him in. And through the pain, I remembered the boy told me he lived on Coahuila Street, across from Furniture Calderón. Surely you could find him, but you must now realize how dangerous it is to do anything in Tijuana. Anything, even good things. If you write about him, you and the boy could both pay a large price for a small story. You should consider not writing it. I would not write it if I were you.”

Bettina Blazak — always up for a fight when told what she can and cannot do — feels a familiar spark beginning inside her. She’s had that spark ever since she can remember. She likes it. Considers it a genetic plus, a Polish-Irish thing. And it can become a flame in the blink of an eye. Then a fire. The fire that made her fight her brothers when they turned on her, the fire that forced her to outshoot everybody on the trap range at the Olympic team tryouts, the fire that sends her down Coast Highway on her road bike at forty miles an hour, that makes her paddle hard to drop in on a hollow five-foot wave at Brooks Street beach in Laguna. She likes the fire.

But she knows that Rodríguez is right: she’d be putting the heroic boy in danger if he were seen talking to her by the wrong people.

“Yes, I understand,” she says.

“How is he, Felix?”

“He’s warming up to me and his new life. I think he likes me a little more than he did yesterday.”

“I saw your video. It is very good.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“You and your dog will be wonderful together. Tell him Dr. Rodríguez says hello.”

Before leaving the office, Bettina checks her Coastal Eddy mail and media feeds again, sees another batch of Felix look-alike pictures. Some are from Mexico, but most are from the United States. She had no idea how many “relatives” her Mexican street dog has.

Also, scores of messages. Many of them are accounts from other dog rescuers. Many say how lucky the dog was; others how lucky Bettina is. Some congratulate her. Some warn her about the terrible diseases that street dogs often carry. Others say she should adopt more animals and bring them to the United States for adoption. Some tell her she should have left the dog south of the border, where all Mexicans belong. There are plenty of American dogs that need help.

And an interesting email from someone calling himself Teddy Delgado:

Bettina thinks before answering. That last sentence from the boy is among the most beautiful and — given Teddy’s circumstances — saddest she’s ever read. On the other hand, what if he just made this story up? He could be an adult, a bad actor, delusional. Or just mistaken. Look at all the look-alikes! But his story really is fantastic.

Bettina would like to hear more of it.

Teddy gets right back:

Teddy’s mention of the death of his mom and dad is much more than just sad and intriguing to Bettina Blazak.

It’s a powerful, mainline connection to Keith, her youngest older brother, dead at age twenty from a fentanyl-laced vape pen. Jobless and homeless. Living under Highway 163, near the zoo in San Diego. An achingly sensitive boy and man. Once a writer of poetry. Former student, former bass player, former horseman, former janitor, former dishwasher, former carpet cleaner, former drug dealer. Once described himself to Bettina as a “former human.” Prone to bad decisions, alcohol, and strong pharmaceuticals.

Older than Bettina by thirteen minutes.

Her beautiful, quiet, tortured twin.

Beena and Keefo: their names in their small, private language.

Which their mom, an English teacher, called cryptophasia, and forbade in the Blazak home, warning that it would slow down their English language development.

Which of course Beena and Keefo found extremely funny, given that their English was just fine.

Sitting in her office on Coast Highway, Bettina gazes out the window and remembers when they were five, Keith saying his book, Turtle Splash! Countdown at the Pond, was way better than her book, “Let’s Get a Pup,” Said Kate.

There was another book back then, in the You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You series: Very Short Stories to Read Together. They agreed it was very good and read the stories to each other.

She smiles slightly. Six years ago, when Keith left on his next journey, Bettina made a deal with him and herself: she would remember only his goodness, not his pain.