The Rescue at Dead Dog Beach (20 page)

I sat staring at the men through the windshield for a long moment before deciding it would be best to back the truck up and leave. The men looked relieved to see me pull away. I was scared to death, but I must have scared them more. I didn't feel triumphant.

I drove toward the end of the jungle on the other side of the beach where I knew the other dogs would be hiding. I was out of sight of the men for now, but I needed to hurry up and get the hell out of there. The dogs had an intricate maze of places to hide in the jungle, so I knew they'd be safe for the time being.

I pulled over and got out of the truck. Scampi needed to be with the pack. I felt horrible when I opened the passenger side door. She didn't want to get out. I picked her up and shut the door behind me with my foot. If I didn't, she'd try to get back in. I set her down on the sand. Her eyes locked onto mine. God, I loved this dog. How could I do this to her? We weren't allowed to have dogs at the house we were renting. We'd be evicted, for sure. Our landlady had a caretaker who watched everything we did and reported back to her. I held Scampi's face as I told her, “I'll be back for you. I'll get you off this beach if it's the last thing I do. You just have to hold on a little longer, sweetie. Please don't give up.”

Once again, I found myself crying as I drove away.

That evening I called Nancy to tell her what had happened. I got her voice mail. I tried Melanie. Voice mail. Then Martha. Voice mail.

What else was new?

M
y rage was spilling into the rest of my life. The morning after the dog was torched, Pam and I were talking once again about how I needed to be more careful.

“Steve, I'm serious. I better not get a call telling me you're dead,” Pam said, with a new sternness I hadn't heard before.

I promised I'd try to rein myself in.

I exited the freeway in Juncos and was making my way through town when I had to slam on the brakes at an intersection to avoid hitting a car that ran a stoplight. It was a close call. And then all of a sudden a guy pulled a slingshot maneuver to get past me on my left, but he didn't have enough room because of oncoming traffic so he lurched back into my lane. I had to crank the wheel to the right and step on it to avoid being sideswiped as he pulled in front of me.

I felt my blood boil. I honked the horn and flipped him off. He punched his brakes, nearly causing me to bump into the back of his car. I honked again. This time, he gave me the finger. Without a thought, up came mine as well.

“Steve, you're making a big deal out of nothing. Calm down,” Pam said from the passenger seat next to me.

“He started it! He nearly hit us!”

The offending car had pulled into the left lane, and I started pulling into the right lane to make the turn. As I did, the car swerved into my lane again. I blared the horn and screamed.

“Stephen! Leave it alone!”

“I just want to drive you to work, Pammie. How is this my fault?”

I jockeyed for position until I was side by side with the other car, which was slowly edging closer in the dense traffic. He was going to scrape right by me if I didn't get out of his way, but I had nowhere to go. I felt twinges of fight-or-flight coursing through me. Pam was still telling me to take it easy, but I wasn't really listening anymore.

“Stop lecturing me! I'm going to let him pass, okay?”

As the traffic began to move, the car moved over to the left again. The moment had passed. I started rolling forward in the right lane and I'll be damned if he didn't try to move over into my lane again. I lost it. I leaned on the horn and didn't let up until the driver got out of his car. He put his hands on the roof of his car and screamed at me in Spanish. I kept on the horn. I guess he didn't like that. He reached into the back of his car and pulled something out. He started walking around his car toward me. That's when I caught a glimpse of his machete. Before Pam could stop me, I was out of the truck with my own machete in my hand.

“You really want to mess with me, dude? Come on!”

He stopped in his tracks.

When I turned to get back in the truck, I looked quickly over my shoulder and saw that he was coming after me.

“Get in the truck, Stephen!” Pam yelled.

I shut the door. I wanted to stop him before he came any closer. I moved toward him until he retreated to his car. When I jumped back in the truck, Pam was furious.

I started to roll forward, and this driver aggressively cut in front of me again. I steered up alongside, reached out my window with the machete, and whacked the roof of his car. It made a hell of a sound and probably a hell of a dent.

He stopped and jumped out of his car again. I did the same. He looked startled that I wasn't backing down. He screamed at me and swung his machete through the air.

“Enough!” I yelled, and slammed the machete edge down onto the back of his car. There was a loud pop as beads of safety glass flew from the rear window. The man looked stunned. I hit his car again on the trunk and gestured as though I was coming for him next. He finally got back in his car and pulled away.

I was standing in the middle of the street in a very rough town with a machete in my hand, having just had a major confrontation with a guy who probably lived here. Reality kicked in.

I got back in the truck, put it in gear, and stepped on it. Just when I thought I'd lost the guy, I saw him a few cars back chasing us down in the middle of the road.

The gate at the entrance to the manufacturing plant closed behind us just as he pulled up.

As Pam got out, I said very little. “Bye. Love you.”

“You're out of control, Stephen. Are you going to be all right?” I knew she was pissed at me for losing my temper but keeping it to herself for now.

I slinked out the gates looking carefully in both directions before proceeding back out to the streets of Juncos. I drove the rest of the way home wondering if I'd be killed because of a stupid traffic dispute. I was definitely losing my grip. I needed to settle down and clear my head. But I knew the dogs were waiting for me.

T
hey're shooting the dogs,” I said to Pam a few weeks later.

I'd been finding CO
₂
cartridges in the sand, and the dogs were turning up with splotches of paint on them. Someone was using them as paintball targets. When I tried to clean the paint off their tender skin, the dogs would wince and whimper in pain. Up close, I could see that the spots where they'd been hit were swollen and red.

Then I noticed that some of the dogs had what appeared to be infected insect bites on their necks, scalps, and other areas of their bodies. They could hardly sit still, twitching and gnawing at themselves. On closer inspection, it looked like ticks had burrowed under their skin. I managed to get one dog to hold still long enough to let me investigate. I picked and squeezed at the angry bump until a silver pellet popped out. Someone was shooting at the dogs with lead pellets from an air rifle too.

Whoever was behind this was upping the ante. A few weeks later I started seeing entry and exit wounds on the dogs' legs and shoulders. I found .22-caliber shells on the ground near the boathouse.

Over time the dogs had learned that the food I put out for them was the only safe food, and they avoided food put out by strangers at the beach. I was grateful for this, since it made life a little less perilous for them.

But they didn't stand a chance against a bullet.

Day after day, week after week, I had become hyperaware of imminent danger, to the point where I looked for it even when it didn't exist. So it came as a complete shock when danger came barreling at me from something as mundane as a toothache.

An old filling had been acting up, but with everything else going on, I just learned to live with the ache and chew on the other side of my mouth. Then, one Friday afternoon, I bit a piece of ice and a sharp pain tore through my jaw.

I tried to ignore it over the weekend, hoping the pain would subside, but by Monday morning I was in agony and I decided to go see the local doctor at the shopping center in Palmas del Mar. He seemed like a nice guy. During the preliminary small talk, he told me that he was originally from the States but had moved to the island after medical school to be near his family.

He took a look at the tooth and felt the glands in my neck.

“There could be an infection in the root. We need to do something before it gets any worse.” He made a joke about the local hospitals as he wrote me a prescription for antibiotics and a painkiller. “Call me if the pain doesn't get better.”

Tuesday night I was standing at our barbecue grill making supper when the skin between my fingers and toes suddenly became so itchy I couldn't stand it.

“Maybe it's an allergy to the grass in the backyard?” Pam suggested. I'd washed and folded my kite-surfing gear on the lawn earlier in the day. “Why don't you jump in the pool?”

She didn't have to ask twice. The swim helped.

We ate dinner and relaxed with a glass of wine by the pool. We had family coming to visit in a few days, and we were pretty excited, making plans for the upcoming holidays with them. My brother Barry, my mum, my stepdad, Blair, my daughter, Bethany, and her boyfriend Ryan were all on their way. Finally, we had something to look forward to.

While we were sitting there, I noticed my fingers and toes starting to itch again. Now the roof of my mouth and the inside of my ears joined in.

“Try another swim?” Pam said.

It was late, and I was getting tired. I had to do something to calm my skin or I'd never get any sleep. I took her advice and then hit the hay. I was out cold in no time.

I woke up around 1
A.M
. to go to the bathroom. The itch was back, and the soles of my feet were uncomfortable now. Back in bed, I couldn't get comfortable and drifted in and out of sleep. I lost track of time.

At some point during the night, I was dimly aware of something lying on my face, like a pillow. I reached up to remove whatever the hell it was. When my hand touched my cheek, I jolted awake.
What the hell?
I couldn't open my eyes. They were swollen and sealed shut. My hand against my face felt like water balloons touching.

Fear and panic flooded over me. I was wide awake now. I did a quick assessment of my body. My hands and arms were hugely swollen and puffy. My feet and legs were the same. I couldn't tell if my face was swollen, because I couldn't feel properly with my hands. I couldn't see, and my ears were filled with a ringing sound.

I lay there, trying to calm down, but then I started to have trouble breathing.

I'm in trouble
.

I reached over to shake Pam awake, but she was unmovable. I tried to speak, but my tongue and lips were like bratwurst sausages. I shook her again, more aggressively this time.

“What are you doing? I'm trying to sleep!” she grumbled, rolling away from me.

“Pammie, I need to get to the hospital. Something's wrong,” I said as calmly as I could. I felt bad for waking her up and didn't want to freak her out. It was probably a false alarm and I was going to look like an idiot for overreacting.

Half awake, Pam was on autopilot when she slid out of bed and made her way to the shower without looking at me, and I was too preoccupied with fear to even think of telling her to skip the ablutions. It seemed like an eternity passed while she was in there. My breathing became more labored. I got out of bed to see how much longer Pam would be, but my feet were so swollen now it was painful to walk. I crawled to the bathroom.

When the shower shut off, I called out, “Pammie!”

She opened the door and looked down at me sitting on the floor. Panic swept over her face. “Oh my God! You look really bad, Steve.”

“I told you I need to go to the hospital,” I said, annoyed that she had taken so much time to get ready. Did she think I was kidding?

“Can you get yourself dressed and downstairs?” she said, kicking into high gear. “I'll be ready in a minute and I'll help you out to the truck.”

While she finished getting ready, I got myself downstairs. She came flying after me in a frenzy of disorganized thinking.

“I don't even know where the hospital is!” she said in full panic mode.

“Let's just head toward San Juan and follow the hospital signs on the freeway.”

After a hair-raising drive in what turned into rush hour traffic, we finally found the correct exit for the hospital. We had tried to call a couple of our expat acquaintances to see if anyone had proper directions, but my fingers were too swollen to punch the keys on the cell phone, and Pam was too frazzled by the driving to be of much help.

And then we had to wait endlessly in the emergency ward to see someone, first in the waiting room, then in a dingy back hallway. I was covered with a rash and running a fever now, and the air-conditioning was cranked so high that I was freezing.

Finally, a doctor came to take my blood pressure.

“Why are you so swollen?” he asked.

“That's why we're here. We were hoping
you
could tell
us
.” Pam gave him the background about my tooth. “He's taking penicillin, but he's missed a dose.”

The doctor looked at me, perplexed. “Go ahead and take the next pill. I have no idea what's causing these symptoms, but I'd like to keep your husband for observation.” He ordered Benadryl and an IV and said he'd back to check on me later. A nurse found a wheelchair for me until a bed could be made available. The medicine made me groggy and I drifted in and out of sleep.

We waited the entire day for the doctor to come back.

“You're looking much better,” he said. “How do you feel?”

The only obvious improvement was that I was breathing a bit better.

“Great. You can go home.”