Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel (13 page)

Despite his nervousness, Marvel giggled. Whenever any of the guys got down on him for looking like a gook, or having a gook name, he tried to giggle or smile. Sometimes he could pull it off and sometimes he couldn’t, but he always tried. But this was just too absurd, and he couldn’t let it pass. “American my ass! You don’t even speak the language without an accent.”

Gonzales leaned on the horn and careened past an oxcart loaded with watermelons. Marvel hugged his rucksack and stared straight ahead, but Gonzales didn’t slow down.

“What do you mean I’m not American, man? Cuba’s in America. Columbus been there, man! Korea isn’t America—neither is Hawaii.”

“What do you mean Hawaii isn’t America? Hawaii’s a state. Your Cuba—what’s it? Just a Communist country!”

Gonzales downshifted and the jeep shot past a family of four chugging along on an overburdened Honda motorcycle.

“North Korea,” he sneered. “The worst
comunistas
in the whole world have half your country, man, and you don’t care.”

“Fuck Korea.” Marvel didn’t giggle this time, but he smiled a nice, sappy, airhead smile and braced himself as Gonzales swerved to miss a chicken that was wandering dazedly in the middle of the road.

“Gonzales,” he said as the jeep slowed and turned off the Louc Ma Road onto the airstrip access road, “I hope you let Tiger do the driving on the way home. He can damn sure do better than you.”

Gonzales ran through the gears, then screeched to a stop right at the edge of the runway tarmac.

“Tiger?” Gonzales glanced over his shoulder. Tiger was standing up now, with his nose in the air and his tail curled as high and proud as a battle flag.

“That dog likes speed, man. He’s hardcore, eats corpses. That’s the trouble with you, man—you and Mopar both too soft. Always baby that dog. He eat bodies, man. That’s one hardcore little dog, that Tiger. He’s not afraid of speed.”

Tiger wagged his tail in affirmation. Marvel reached back to give him a farewell pat, then slung his rucksack over his shoulder and picked up his weapon.

“You take care of things, Tiger. Don’t let this crazy Cuban get himself killed until I get back.”

Tiger wagged his tail, wiggled his rear end, pawed the flak jacket he was standing on, and tossed his head playfully. But Marvel’s plane was already loading and he had to be on his way.

“I’ve got to run now,” he said. “You guys keep cool and stay lucky.”

“And you,” Gonzales yelled after him as he sprinted across the tarmac for his plane, “you win that Recondo dagger and you die alone, man. I don’t believe no superstition!”

Marvel paused just long enough to give Gonzales the finger, then ran on to his plane. “Ain’t no way!” he thought. “Ain’t no way I’m going to win that bad-luck Recondo dagger!”

He was determined to live at least a hundred years, and he wanted nothing to do with the Recondo dagger and its deadly curse.

Marvel Kim flew to Nha Trang with two PFCs from the artillery battery on Firebase Culculine. They had survived the ground attack without being wounded only to be bitten by a rat while rebuilding a bunker that had been destroyed by a NVA satchel charge. Now they were on their way to Nha Trang to receive a series of rabies shots, and no matter what Marvel said, he couldn’t shake their belief that they were in for an easy three weeks of rear-area ghost time.

“What’s a shot, anyway?” the guy who had seen McKinney take a burst across the chest said in airy dismissal. “Once a day we take a pinprick—then bam! We’re gone! Out to the beach. Down to the Air Force snack bar. Shit, we’ll be high every night, and old Dewfuss here,” he nudged his buddy in the ribs with his elbow, “old Dewfuss probably have to get a few more shots, ’cause he can get the clap just looking at a hole in the ground.”

“Ghost time, baby, good ghost time.” Old Dewfuss, who could get the clap just looking at a hole in the ground, grunted in affirmation.

Marvel smiled politely and decided to let them go on believing they were headed for a vacation. They’d find out soon enough. Everyone always did.

Mopar’s flight from Bien Hoa to California was much longer and should have been more comfortable than Marvel’s flight to Nha Trang. He flew on a real airliner, with adjustable seats, stewardesses, hot meals, and cheap headphones full of music. And as he was going home, he should have been high and happy and deliriously excited. But he wasn’t.

The most petite of the stewardesses was almost as tall as Pappy Stagg, and the youngest of them looked to be suffering from the first flashes of menopause and letting it piss her off. Mopar was horribly offended by the way they stalked the aisles, glowering like old-maid English teachers in a reform school, and he wished that Marvel was there to freak them out with his psychopathically goofy smile. There was no booze on the plane, at least none back where the enlisted men sat, so Mopar was forced to sneak off to the John every hour or so, to toke on one of the joints he’d bought in the replacement depot while waiting for his flight.

It was terrible dope. Despite their carefully cultivated image, none of the Lurps was really a stone pothead. They smoked only the occasional bowl of high-grade Project Delta Red between missions, an almost ceremonial thing—passing the pipe, talking about the war—and among themselves the Lurps took pride in the quality of their dope and scorned those who smoked great quantities of inferior weed. The Lurps were connoisseurs, and Mopar finally decided that it was beneath his dignity to sneak tokes on shitweed. Before the refueling stop in Anchorage, he flushed the last of his joints down the toilet and went back to his seat to look out the window as the dark and brooding Alaskan coastline came up under the plane.

He wondered if any Russian Lurp teams had ever inserted along that coast. The only way to avoid the Dew Line radar would be to come in by submarine and insert by rubber boats. But there didn’t seem to be any sort of beach, and judging by the lines of white surf breaking against the foot of the seaside bluffs, they’d have to launch six teams in hopes of getting one safely landed. Mopar was glad he wasn’t a Russian Lurp. They had good weapons, but their radios and compasses—at least those that they passed on to the NVA—were crude, unreliable, and heavy. According to Gonzales, who claimed to know such things, Russian reconnaissance codebooks did not contain the word “extraction.”

At Anchorage all the troops deplaned and filed, shivering in their tropical uniforms, across the tarmac into the transit lounge. While everybody else crowded around the stuffed polar bear or the towering Christmas tree, or lined up at the souvenir counter to buy Eskimo carvings and walrus-skin coin purses, Mopar stood alone by the windows with his cheek against the cold glass, looking out at the mountains, the stars, and the snow piled up next to the runways.

He tried to sleep all the way from Anchorage to California, and only when the pilot came over the intercom to announce that they were now descending for Travis Air Force Base did he give up his effort to follow Marvel’s advice and stop trying to dream a prophetic dream about Sybill Street.

The Leg Spec Five sitting on his right applauded the announcement, and when the plane touched down at Travis he cheered, put his hand over his heart, and said something about how good it was to be back in The World, but Mopar didn’t feel much like celebrating.

Marvel, Wolverine, Gonzales, Pappy Stagg, and Tiger were a world away, and Mopar suddenly missed them more than he’d ever missed anyone before.

After removing his earring to avoid hassles, Mopar cleared customs at Travis and found a seat on the bus for Oakland Army Base. There were no grenade screens on the windows of the bus, and with the exception of a beat-up Russian SKS rifle that a captain from the 1st Infantry was taking home to prove he’d been in combat, there were no weapons either.

Mopar had a window seat. Unlike everybody else on the bus, he refused to be impressed by the houses covering the hills, the gas stations by the off-ramps, and the colorful abundance of cars speeding by, bumper to bumper, in the fast lane. All those people in the houses and gas stations and cars had it soft and easy. They were half-stepping through life, growing cancers, getting fat, and worrying about the phone bill, and the closest they got to the war was watching it on TV. For the life of him, Mopar couldn’t understand why the other men were cheering and laughing and slapping each other on the back with joy at being back among all these dull and sluggish civilians. He hadn’t been expecting any brass bands at the airport, but he also hadn’t expected to see the other men from his plane—particularly those like the 1st Infantry captain, who’d seen some action—cheering the sorry lardasses who’d stayed at home.

For the first time since signing his extension papers, Mopar regretted his decision to go home on leave, like some no-class Leg draftee, rather than taking his thirty days in Bangkok or Taipei—someplace where the girls were cheap and sweet and pretty and knew how to treat a soldier like a man.

Before reporting to the warehouse building where returning soldiers were issued their green Class A uniforms, Mopar went off in search of a beer. There were free steak dinners available in the transit mess, but he wasn’t hungry and didn’t want any thin, greasy Army steak. He wanted a cold beer—a cold, foamy beer in a dripping aluminum can—and maybe a handful of pretzels to nibble on between sips. He found an NCO club, but there was a sign on the door barring all transient personnel under the E-6 pay grade from entering.

Mopar was prepared for this. He undipped the Spec Four emblems from his fatigue collars and attached the staff sergeant’s stripes he’d borrowed from Wolverine just in case something like this came up. He straightened his uniform and ran his hand along his chin to make sure he had a close, lifer shave, and then he opened the door and strutted into the club. Porter Waggoner, or one of the other hillbillies Wolverine liked so much, was singing something about Carrow County over the jukebox. Four or five truculent-looking redneck E-7s were sitting at the bar. Mopar ordered a shot of Wild Turkey with a beer chaser, just to be hardcore.

“You got any orders on you?” asked the bartender. He was in civilian clothes, but his haircut marked him as a lifer. “We don’t have any of you hardass Airborne types stationed here, so I know you gotta be a transit. I can’t serve no transits that don’t show me their orders. You’re about the youngest-looking E-6 I ever seen.”

Mopar smiled and decided to brazen it out without losing his temper. The redneck E-7s were watching him now, and they looked like they’d be glad to stomp his ass first and call the MPs afterward if he got too uppity, so he smiled and said something about a lot of guys getting killed, a lot of blood stripes coming down the Lurp platoon.

“We got one guy, this pineapple gook from Hawaii, who’s only eighteen, and he’s an E-6 already. Staff Sergeant E-6, same as me.

The rednecks were guffawing now, and the bartender was unmoved.

“I gotta see some orders, bud. No orders, no drink. No drink, and you ain’t got no business in our club.”

“They’re back in the barracks. I’ll go get them and come back for that shot and beer, so don’t go letting these dudes—” he nodded in the direction of the redneck E-7s, “go drinking up all the Wild Turkey. It’s an Airborne drink, and I don’t think these overweight Legs can handle it.”

One of the E-7s rose half out of his chair at that, but his buddies pulled him back down and told him to let it go, and Mopar, whistling merrily, tipped his hat to them, picked up his AWOL bag, and strolled out of the club. The first thing a man learns when he gets into a reconnaissance unit is to hold his fire and avoid contact when the odds aren’t on his side. Mopar was proud of his self-control—so proud that he whistled and hummed all the way to the uniform issue point.

He fell in line behind two Leg noncombatants who were bubbling over with gratitude for their steak dinners.

“That’s the best chow I’ve had since comin’ in the Army,” the chubby soul brother with the Support Command’s “leaning shit-house” patch on his shoulder declared.

“No shit!” his partner, a tall, chinless hillbilly, agreed enthusiastically. “I done ate so much they gonna have to charge me excess baggage to get on the plane home!”

Mopar smirked and thought of the Sunday steak and lobster dinners the Special Forces Mess Association in Nha Trang served. There was no way the cooks here could come up with anything that good, not cooking for people as dumb as these two.

Mopar moved up to the first window and drew socks and a tie. He had his own tee-shirt, a black Airborne tee-shirt, and he didn’t bother to draw shorts because he was no longer in the habit of wearing them. Underwear was one of the major causes of jungle crotch rot, and nobody in the Lurp platoon wore shorts. He passed the next window without stopping. They were issuing shoes and belts and caps there, but Mopar already had his. He had his jump boots, and they were nicely spit-shined, he had his Airborne cunt-cap with the gaudy red, white, and blue glider patch, and he had a tan NVA belt with a star on the buckle to wear under his jacket. He moved on to the next window and drew the rest of his uniform, then took out his stripes and patches and handed the whole mess to one of the tailors, with instructions to cut the pants for a blouse and have the LRRP tab sewn above the Airborne tab, above the unit patch. The uniform was ready when he got back from the showers.

Mopar dressed slowly and carefully. He pulled on his socks, stepped into his pants—one leg at a time, just like the officers—then wiggled his feet into his jump boots and laced them up tightly. He stepped in front of the mirror to check the way the blouse of his pants broke over the top of his boots, and while he was there, he flexed his biceps to make sure they still peaked up, lean and knotty, as they had before he lost all that weight humping the hills and living on cornflake bars and Lurp rations. Next he put on his black Airborne tee-shirt, and after a minute of debate decided to wear his bodycount rope with its twelve knots on the inside, where he could feel it next to his skin and never forget the men he’d killed. He stepped back in front of the mirror, replaced his earring in the lobe of his left ear, and tried to brush down his cowlick with his hand, but the hair wouldn’t stay in place.