The Rescue at Dead Dog Beach (22 page)

I tore it to pieces and threw it in the garbage.

I went upstairs and lay on the cool tiles of the bathroom floor, trying to soothe my irritated skin and my frayed nerves. While I was lying there, frustrated and angry in the knowledge that I'd have to start another drawing soon if I was going to make my deadline, inspiration struck.

There it is. The drawing
.

It was like a light went on in my mind. I would draw the bathroom from my perspective on the floor.

Believing that things happen for a reason, I started to draw with renewed energy. Whenever I needed to peel away from company or I wasn't feeling well, I'd go lie on the bathroom floor and draw. Before too long, the drawing was done and I was on to the next. By the end of the holidays, my portfolio was ready to send to RISD.

A
fter weeks of silence, Melanie Shapiro and Nancy Guilford resurfaced.

“We heard that Susan Saltaro from Univision is coming down to do a follow-up report,” Melanie said in an early-morning phone call. “Nancy and I will be there with bells on.”

The morning of the interview, they showed up bright and early—unusual for them.

I did my best to ignore them both while Susan and the cameraman set up and miked me for the interview. When we were ready, I started telling Susan what had happened with the dogs since the last time she'd visited the beach. Then, out of nowhere, Nancy stepped directly in front of me and started talking to the reporter. Fortunately, it wasn't live, and Susan was able to change gears like a pro. She started interviewing Nancy without missing a beat.

I always said my work at the beach was all about the dogs, so I chose to bow out and let Nancy have the spotlight. But I couldn't help feeling annoyed and hurt at the way Nancy had commandeered the interview.

The piece aired that evening and again the following morning. I drove to the beach worried about a repeat of what had happened last time. I still wanted to believe that exposing the problem in the community would somehow persuade someone to hold accountable the people responsible. The memory of those dogs strung up in the boathouse was still vivid.

When I pulled up, the dogs were their normal, happy selves. I breathed a sigh of relief.

I spent the morning working on obedience training with my pack. Most of the dogs would sit and lie down on command. But almost all my commands were nonverbal. I figured dogs communicate with one another nonverbally—they read one another's energy, they don't converse. Besides, I didn't want to shout over the sound of fifty barking dogs, or draw unnecessary attention if there was a time I needed them to be quiet. At the beginning, I taught the dogs with a combination of voice commands and hand gestures, but I'd wean them off the voice commands as soon as possible. Once I'd gotten the alpha dog to follow my lead, the other dogs, one by one, fell in line. Eventually the majority of the pack was fully in tune with me and my every move.

I was so proud of my dogs. They had come such a long way since I'd found this place. I was feeling better, so I decided to celebrate and spend the afternoon paragliding with my friend Luca. Catching thermals high enough to see as far as San Juan and the neighboring islands put everything in perspective.

That evening when I picked Pam up from work, she was thrilled to see me happy for a change. Of course, it didn't last.

On the drive to the beach the following morning, I had a bad feeling. I kept having a sense of déjà vu. On the approach road, I slowed down and scanned the jungle on either side looking for anything out of the ordinary. I spotted a pile of plastic garbage bags. They weren't there yesterday.
Shit
.

I pulled up to see if it was just someone's household garbage. I could taste the smell of rotting flesh as I got out of the truck.

I pulled my machete from my side and split open one of the bags. I gagged as a wave of putrid air assaulted my senses. I tore the bag open a bit more and confirmed that it was indeed one of my dogs, a young mother who was a newcomer to the beach. She always had her three pups at her side. I cut the bag all the way open. The pups were there too. Someone had smashed in their skulls. The mom had a gaping wound on her neck.

I felt sick to my stomach. I had to keep it together to find out what was in the rest of the bags. I cut open the second bag and found two more mutilated dogs inside. The third and fourth bags were the same. Ten dogs dead.

I got the plastic tarp out of the back of the truck and slid the bags onto it. I tied the tarp to the trailer hitch and drove slowly to the burial ground. The pack began to filter out of the jungle and follow along beside me.

By this time, there were so many dead dogs, I had to dig trenches rather than individual holes. If I could, I laid the dogs that hung out together in life next to each other. Companions in life, companions in death, I thought. They deserved the honor in death that they never received in life.

After I'd buried these latest casualties, I did a head count. Several dogs were still missing.

I drove over to the metal storage containers to prep the food and get the dogs settled, then started to walk the area. Half the pack came with me. I walked through the boathouse and out the far side, stopping occasionally to whistle and listen for any dogs in the distance. Nothing.

I walked the paths through the jungle. I was the only person who came back here with the dogs.

I found footprints in a dried-up mud puddle and followed them until I arrived at what looked like an old campfire in a small clearing. There were bones and tufts of curly white fur among the charred bits of wood. I leaned in closer and moved the remains around with my machete. The dogs stood quietly by my side. There were two corpses, two dogs who had always been inseparable at the beach. I didn't want to disturb their bodies, so I decided to bury them there. I retrieved a five-gallon bucket from the truck and hauled sand from the beach back to the clearing to cover their bodies. The pack followed along, back and forth, until I was done.
Is this another dream? Why can't I wake up?
I couldn't keep my thoughts clear anymore.

It was harder than ever to leave the dogs that night.

When I got home, I showered, poured myself a tall glass of scotch, and went to sit by the pool to make the usual phone calls. I left a message on Melanie's voice mail, another on Nancy's. “Please, can we talk about how to get more dogs off the beach sooner rather than later?” I said. I was a little surprised to hear how shaky my voice was. “Please call me back.” While Melanie and Nancy worked hard to find homes for Puerto Rico's strays, it was frustrating to watch the suffering of my dogs.

I needed to calm down. I was starting to feel light-headed, but it wasn't the scotch. I hadn't had enough to drink yet. I started to feel itchy and saw that I was breaking out in a rash. Was it the stress? The grass I sat in by the beach? Was the penicillin still in my system?

I stripped down and jumped in the pool. The cool water soothed my skin.

I finished my drink and went upstairs. I downed a couple of Benadryl and climbed into bed. Silently I begged my mind to take me to a happy place. I needed to escape the hell I was feeling. I curled into a ball and cried myself to sleep.

The next morning, Pam told me that I had talked and cried in my sleep all night long. I gave her the broad strokes of what had happened, but she could tell from my silence that it must have been bad.

Before she got out of the truck at her office, she turned to me and took my face in her hands. For the umpteenth time, she said: “I love you. And I don't want to lose you, Stephen. Please, be careful.”

It broke my heart, and yet I was helpless to stop.

I had been at the beach for a couple of hours when I got a return call from Melanie.

“I just listened to your message. I'm so sorry! Are you okay?”

“Thanks, I'm all right.” I didn't really feel like talking. I just wanted to be alone with my dogs.

“I'm going to talk to Nancy about doing another run down there.”

“I'd be grateful, Melanie. Please make it happen. I'll contribute to the vet bills.”

As it was, Pam and I were now spending between two and three thousand dollars a month on the dogs, depending on how many dogs were there at any given time. Since we'd first arrived seventeen months earlier, we'd increasingly given the dogs medical care at the beach, since island vets were disinclined to do so. Once we started sending the dogs to shelters stateside, we had no choice but to enlist professional veterinary help, which came in the form of Dr. Ramos in San Juan, the vet Nancy Guilford had taken some of the dogs to previously. However, the vet was expensive, so I continued to do as much as I could myself to keep the medical bills down while still making the dogs closer to ready for adoption—administering vaccinations and deworming, giving them medication, performing blood draws to check for heartworm, treating skin conditions. We'd also been chipping in to help pay for expenses after the dogs left the beach, once the rescue groups started taking some of them away. On average, it cost about $250 per dog for a checkup with Dr. Ramos and travel documents; this assumed we'd find a travel companion to fly the dog for free. On occasion, one of the dogs would have a serious complication that could add significantly to the cost.

Melanie sometimes muttered about how hard it was on her getting the dogs to the airport for shipment to shelters stateside. I usually let it slide, but I thought I should address the issue now.

“Melanie, I don't want to hear later that you're pissed off because you feel like you're doing all the work with the dogs once they leave the beach, okay?”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Clearly, she'd decided to get angry now rather than wait till later.

“I appreciate what you and Nancy do. I need your help down here. But I don't think you guys understand what I do with the dogs, you know?”

“I know you and Sandra feed and water the dogs every day, and I—”

“Are you serious?” I said, cutting her off. “That's what you think I do here seven days a week?”

“I know it's more than that. You're being sensitive. Let's talk about it later, okay?”

“It would be like me calling you a taxi driver for the dogs rather than a rescuer. You come to the beach, I put the dogs in the crates and load them in your vehicle. You drive them to the vet's office to be looked after. When they're healthy and ready to go, you transport them to the airport for someone else to take care of. This probably sounds a little insulting to you, doesn't it?”

“You know full well we do more than that! We're making calls—”

“I know you do more than that, but so do I. How do you think the dogs become such well-mannered, sweet animals?” I said, cutting her off again. I had never been so rude to her before, but I was tired of my work with the dogs being minimized. “I'm the guy training them and treating their health problems. I pay for the food and medical supplies. I comfort them when someone kills members of the pack. I bury the dead ones. So please show some respect for what I do.” My voice was trembling with frustration.

“I'm sorry, Steve. It wasn't my intention to make you feel bad.”

“As I see it, we're all an important part of the full picture. None of us could do this without the others.”

The tension seemed to lift.

“I get it, Steve. I'll call you tomorrow after I speak with Nancy.”

When I next spoke to Melanie, she had something other than a beach run on her agenda. Apparently she and Nancy and Martha had reached out to several people from various animal rights groups on the island about meeting with the mayor of Yabucoa and some of his people, as well as some of the local hotel owners, in hopes of coming up with a plan of action to make long-term changes for the stray dogs and other animals in the municipality.

Then she told me that one of the activists planning to attend the meeting was a manatee expert who wanted answers about the dead manatees that had washed up on shore. I found that odd, considering the fact that no one had done a damn thing about it back when I'd reported the occurrence weeks before. Evidently the bodies of the huge animals had taken a while to wash ashore; until then, the authorities and even the animal welfare groups had taken what I'd reported with a grain of salt. But it was hard for tourists to ignore a thousand-pound corpse peppered with crossbow arrows rotting on the beach.

“We felt that, in light of the television coverage and the hangings, a bit of outside pressure might motivate him to finally do something.”

The idea was to present the mayor with the concept of using Yabucoa as a pilot program that could be an example for other communities.

“Given my experience with the mayor and his people, I'm skeptical.” I had not forgotten the way the mayor's office had dismissed my complaint about the hotels' killing of the dogs. I had been back there a number of times since, always to be turned away.

“The mayor was apprehensive at first, but he finally agreed to hear what we have to say,” Melanie told me.

“I guess it's progress that he agreed to sit down at all.” I was open to putting a little more pressure on the officials, but I was nervous about what increased exposure might mean for the safety of my dogs.

“There's just one thing,” Melanie said. “We think that, in light of your past interactions with the mayor and the police, your presence there might antagonize him.”

“But shouldn't my voice be heard too? A bunch of people who have never even set foot on my beach speaking on behalf of my dogs and me? That's wrong and you know it!”

“I'm afraid that's all they'd hear, Steve,” Melanie said.

She probably had a point, but it bothered me that I had to stay out of a meeting that could affect the problems I was facing daily. These other people only made guest appearances on the beach, but now they were taking control.