Ali And His Entourage

I counted the strides it would take to flee back to the fence—how could the gentle old man live here?—then held my breath, reached over a bush and rapped on a bedroom window. "Sarriiiiiaaaaa!" In reply came the asylum howl, the door thumping as if about to splinter, the flash of teeth and eyeballs and fur in the window. I ran back to the fence and had just jabbed a toe in the meshing when, weakly, beneath the fury, came a muffled human grunt.

Five long minutes passed. Giving up, I saw the rush of snarling black. I froze, then whirled, clawing to climb. "Negrita!" I heard someone call. "Ven! Ven!" The dog hesitated, charged again, hesitated. I looked back. The old man—thank god!—was reaching out to wave me forward.

His hands, splayed from long, long arms, were broad and black and powerful from years of hacking Cuban sugarcane. I remembered them, working endlessly up and down the smooth ripples of All's body, rubbing until he drifted off to sleep on the table and then rubbing some more out of love. His hands I remembered, but I could not remember him.

His shoulders hunched, his head poking turtlelike from those shoulders, Luis Sarria moved in hobbling increments toward the steps in front of the house. He sat, and the bottom of his puppy-chewed pantleg hitched up to show the swathes of tape that wrapped his left leg. It had been chronically ulcerated since he stepped on a sea snail while fishing as a boy, but now the wound had grown threatening. At the gym near his home, where he worked until a year ago when the leg became too painful, they wondered if the germs carried by the great pack of dogs inside his house were what kept reinfecting it; and they wondered how much longer the 76-year-old man would last.

His wife, Esther, a Jamaican with small, happy-sad eyes, came out and sat next to him. Sarria picked up the black dog and hugged it to his chest. "She is his favorite," his wife said, "because she never wants to come back in the house, and so he gets to lift her like a baby."

They are childless, she explained, and need money badly, barely making it each month on Social Security. The gentle old man can neither visit friends because of his leg, nor have them in because of his dogs. "They would rip people up," his wife said. "There are 25 of them."

"But why keep so many?" I asked.

She shrugged. "They say Liberace left 25 dogs."

"How could there be room for them all in your house?"

"They live in the living room and one of the bedrooms," she said. "We live in our bedroom now. We had to move all the furniture out of the living room because they were destroying it. They broke the record player chasing rats. They dug up Sarria's garden. Dogs eat pumpkins. Did you know that?"