The Rescue at Dead Dog Beach (5 page)

I laced my fingers through the rusting fence and held on, waves of nausea swelling up from my belly. It wasn't just the smell that was making me feel ill; it was the sight of my friends' broken bodies. I could only imagine the fear they must have felt as they were chased and tortured so brutally. I was overwhelmed with a fierce mixture of sadness and anger that made me dry heave.

The dogs behind me whined and paced anxiously. I slid down the fence onto my knees. The dogs nudged my elbows, trying to lift my arms to pet them.

I gathered myself and stood up. I needed to bury my dogs. They deserved in death the dignity they had been denied in life. But they were decomposing fast in the tropical heat, and there was no way I could carry them someplace appropriate to bury them. I walked back along the path again until it rejoined the main road to the beach. I turned into the entrance of the parking lot and made for the boathouse, figuring there might be something there I could use to carry sand from the beach. I found a five-gallon pail and returned to the beach to fetch sand. It would take a number of trips to bring enough back to where the dogs lay motionless. Leo and the others followed me as I trudged back and forth. It took more than an hour to bury my friends.

Burials would become part of my daily routine at the beach. Every morning I'd find new dogs, and every morning I'd go in search of missing members of the pack. Every time I found another dead dog, its corpse was a heap of severely broken bones or had been cut into pieces and stuffed into plastic buckets or garbage bags. It was usually the dogs that had been less cautious of humans. I buried at least one dog every day.

The dogs would watch quietly as I buried their friends. Despite all the things humans had done to them, the pack continued to trust me.

We had been living in Puerto Rico for about three weeks when my friend Brandon, a nineteen-year-old whom I'd met at an indoor climbing gym in Rhode Island the previous winter, came to visit.

The prospect of having some fun with a fellow athlete and adventure seeker, was just what I needed. Pam was having a tough time adjusting to her new life. She was feeling a bit homesick, under a lot of pressure at work, worried about my frequent visits to the beach and my growing involvement with the dogs. Frankly, I also needed a break from the heart-rending things I'd seen since moving to the island.

The morning after Brandon arrived, we made plans to go snorkeling at Seven Seas Beach, which was about forty-five minutes from the house. But first I asked him if he'd like to meet my dogs.

“Whoa, man, there are a lot more here than I expected,” he said as we pulled into the parking lot near the boathouse. The pack had nearly doubled since I'd first described it to him.

The dogs, with their uncanny sixth sense, immediately pegged Brandon for a good guy and bonded with him right away. We spent the morning hanging out with the pack, and Brandon helped me name a few dogs that I hadn't been able to come up with appropriate monikers for yet. Then we hit the road.

I'd never been to the place we were going, and the incomplete, cartoonish road map Pam and I had gotten from the car rental depot in San Juan was no help whatsoever. Most of the roads we needed to travel weren't even on it, and Brandon wasn't much help since he'd never been outside the continental United States before. So we tooled around Fajardo, the community near where the Seven Seas Beach was supposed to be located. After several wrong turns through some questionable neighborhoods, we found our spot, a beautiful crescent-shaped bay begging us to get in and explore.

We parked on a side street, grabbed our snorkeling gear, and made for the far end of the beach on foot, knowing there'd be better snorkeling by the reef. Since it was a weekday, there were just a few folks walking the shoreline. We would have the water to ourselves.

In the distance, waves were breaking over the barrier reef. We jumped in and swam out to where the action was. We spent a good hour snorkeling through the intricate paths of coral mapped out on the sea floor, using the gentle surges and currents to propel ourselves through the valleys of undersea architecture. Every few minutes, we surfaced to compare notes.

“Dude! Did you see the sea turtles back there?”

“Amazing, man! Or the big manta ray?”

“I know, so awesome!”

“Let's keep swimming, man!”

We seemed to be seeing and thinking the same things. It was fantastic.

Then we noticed some men spearfishing on the reef closer to shore. We weren't anywhere near them, so we didn't give them another thought, focusing instead on the incredible theater below.

The next time we surfaced, the men were standing on the reef right over us, homemade tridents and spearguns in their hands.

“Hey, how's it going, man?” we said, and gave them a friendly wave. The men said nothing; they just stared at us coldly. They didn't seem to be fishing anymore. I had that foreboding feeling I'd had many times in the past, right before things went south. Something wasn't right.

During my short time on the island, it had already become apparent that Puerto Rico was struggling between two worlds. Since it's an unincorporated territory of the United States, the residents are American citizens, but they don't have all the same rights that Americans living in the States do. They can't vote for the president and aren't even represented in Congress, but they
can
be drafted into the military. Approximately half the islanders want to be independent from the United States, and the other half want to be the fifty-first state. The former group tends to be pretty hostile to non-Puerto Ricans living on the island. Anti-American demonstrations weren't uncommon during our time there. The international school in Palmas del Mar, where we lived, and another in San Juan were shut down due to bomb threats more than once.

Living in this strange limbo has taken its toll on the Puerto Rican people. The crime rate was already high, but got worse when the military shut down its bases on the island. During the twentieth century, there were as many as twenty-five different installations, but the Air Force and Navy left, leaving just the U.S. Coast Guard and Puerto Rico National Guard facilities. Those bases had been a boon to the local economy, as were big companies like the one my wife was working for, but they were starting to shut down their local facilities too. For all the protests about the weapons training facility that had been located on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, when the military pulled up stakes there and elsewhere in the early years of the millennium, a lot of residents felt it in their pocketbooks. The median income in Puerto Rico is about half what it is in Mississippi, the poorest of the fifty states.

But the vast majority of people don't react by threatening visitors. The spearfishermen might have been pissed off that we invaded their locals-only space, but I had a feeling there was more to it than that.

“C'mon, man, let's get outta here!” I said to Brandon.

“Naw, let's keep swimming, dude!” He clearly wasn't getting the bad vibe I was from our new neighbors.

“Brandon,” I said a little more urgently, “we need to get back to our stuff.” We'd left some gear and our towels on the beach.

He quit arguing, and we started making our way back to shore through the maze of coral. But after just a few minutes, we looked up and saw the men standing on the reef right next to us again.

“Aw, shit,” I said under my breath. Brandon had continued swimming and was a short distance away from me now, still exploring the reef. “Brandon! We need to go . . . now!”

I felt something sharp poke my lower back. I pretended not to notice. I put my snorkel in my mouth, dropped my face into the water, and started to swim.

A harder jab this time, on the back of my surf shorts. I looked up to see one of the guys with a trident towering over me.

“How's it going, bro?” I said. “You catch any fish yet?” I smiled and waved. “Have a good day, man!”

Brandon was starting to catch on, and we swam away as fast as we could, slipping through narrow coral pathways we normally would have avoided. But these fishermen, or whatever the hell they were, obviously knew the reef much better than we did. At every turn, these assholes were right behind us or alongside us.

We put our heads down and made a last hard push to get to shore as quickly as possible. As we sprinted out of the water and looked around, the men were gone.

“Where the hell are they?” I said, catching my breath from the swim.

And that's when we noticed that our stuff was gone as well. They'd taken everything, even our shoes and towels. Fortunately, I had stashed my truck keys under a rock a few yards from where we'd left our things on the beach. Otherwise, we'd have been screwed.

“Aw, man. They took all our shit,” Brandon said.

“Forget it, man. Let's just get the hell out of here.”

We hightailed it down the beach toward the truck, wondering if the guys were going to jump us along the way. The beach was hot as hell and covered in pebbles and small shells, tearing and cutting into the soles of our feet. At the entrance there was a small park and a lookout area with benches. Sure enough, the ass-hats were sitting there, waiting for us.

“Amigos! You looking for something?” They said something else in Spanish, but hell if I knew or even cared what it was. One of the men held up my gear bag, a big shit-eating grin on his face.

“What are you going to do, man?” Brandon asked me, as if I were actually going to take on a couple of guys carrying spearguns.

“Not a goddamn thing,” I said.

I'd learned before we even moved to Puerto Rico that most robberies and thefts are committed against tourists because they're suspected of carrying more cash than the locals. Local thieves also know that foreign visitors generally don't pursue charges once they find out what's involved. In order to press charges or file a theft report, the victim must be willing to sign a contract with the police stating that if the criminal is apprehended, the victim will return to the island for the trial at his or her own expense. If for some reason the victim will not or cannot return to testify, the Puerto Rican government will issue an arrest warrant for the victim for failing to appear. And who's going to take the time and incur the expense of coming back for a lost camera or, worse, risk going to jail themselves?

In other words, I knew these guys were going to get away with it—and I knew they knew it too.

“We need to get to the truck fast, okay?” I said. “On three, you run your goddamn ass off. You drop something, you leave it behind. Am I clear?”

One of the other men waved more of our things at us, laughing.

Brandon and I looked at each other. “Three! Go! Go! Go!” I may have been a lot older, but I could still outrun a teenager when I needed to. The men stood up and raced after us.

I clicked the door locks open with the remote, and we jumped in and locked the doors behind us. Safely inside, the engine running, we realized the men had given up the chase about halfway to the truck. We should have been relieved, but we quickly realized we'd been outmaneuvered again. The road we were parked on dead-ended fifty yards up the road at the entrance to a lighthouse located at the end of the peninsula. There was only one way out. And not only were the men standing across the two-lane road in front of us blocking it, but they had evidently picked up a few friends.

“Let's see how they do against twenty-five hundred pounds of metal and plastic.” I put the truck in gear and floored it, heading straight for the human roadblock. “You up for a little bowling?”

Brandon was too scared to laugh and smiled nervously.

The human chain parted at the last second, and we flew through the gap. Gobs of spit splattered the windshield, and we heard the sounds of their hands slapping the sides of the truck as we passed. My heart was beating in my neck. Brandon's had practically stopped beating. Escaping hostile spearfishermen and bursting through human roadblocks weren't exactly the extreme sports he'd had in mind when he came to visit.

After we'd returned home and told Pam what had happened, she said, “What makes you think you'll be able to get away safely the next time something like this happens? This could have ended so badly, Steve. This just freaks me out.”

The stress of finding and burying dead dogs each day, along with tending to the sick, injured, and starving that were somehow still alive, was beginning to take a toll on me—and Pam was starting to question my judgment. She knew me too well.

E
arly one morning after Brandon left, I stood leaning on my shovel, looking out across the grassy field between the beach and the boathouse. It was the area I'd designated as the graveyard. An elderly local fisherman named Carlos and his wife, Dominga, approached me.

“Are you okay,
mi hijo
?” Carlos asked in his gruff voice.

Up until that moment I had been lost in thought and not really aware that anyone else was there. Apparently they'd seen me carrying one of the dogs across the parking lot to bury her.

“I'm okay, thanks,” I said, without really looking up.

“We've seen how you are with the
satos
, feeding them and taking care of them. You're a good man.” Carlos patted my shoulder. “I know it's hard when they die like that.”

By now I'd learned that
sato
was the local term for a street dog, which some Puerto Ricans tended to use with a dismissive sneer. It essentially translates to “street mutt,” and I never used it myself. I had come to think of the dogs at the beach simply as
my dogs
. At that point, I thought that no one else was willing to take responsibility for them, so they were mine.

“Be careful here, son,” his wife said. “There are people who come to this beach who could kill you if you get in their way, and they won't bat an eye at doing it.”