Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel (15 page)

Cubby Cardiff raised his canteen cup and proposed a toast. “To Vietnam!” he said. “It ain’t much of a war, but it’ll do till something better breaks out.”

All three men drained their cups and the bottle went around again. Pappy Stagg poured himself a good three or four ounces. Now that the first drink was out of the way, he’d be able to sip at his leisure.

Wolverine, on the other hand, only wet the bottom of his cup. He was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable about leaving Tiger in a camp full of dog-eating Yards, Cambodes, Viets, and Nungs. And on top of that, he could remember hearing a few bad things about this Cubby Cardiff character’s eating habits. Jake LaGrange used to swear he’d seen Cardiff dig the liver out of a freshly killed VC and take a bite out of it, just like some goddamn deep-mountain cannibal.

Pappy Stagg and Cubby Cardiff were reminiscing about Panama, playing the old remember-when game.

“Yeah, that was some full-blown asskickin’ bitch of a party we had after that trip to wherever the fuck it was we went to train that Ranger battalion. Where the fuck was that, anyway, Stagg? Honduras?”

Pappy Stagg swallowed a respectable slug of Jim Beam. He shook his head. “Naw, Nicaragua maybe. Or—no wait—it was Chile. Damn it, Cubby, you old ape! We’re gettin’ old if we can’t remember that!” Pappy Stagg laughed and ran his hand over his closely cropped gray hair. “Time to buy that plot of land in Florida and invest in some fishin’ gear, I guess.”

He drained his cup in three big gulps and reached for a refill. It was good whiskey—cheap but good—and if he was drinking too much, too fast, so what? Wolverine was sipping like an old grandma, and he could drive home if it came to that.

“Nice drink you got here. I always said Beam’s as good as Daniels, and a damn sight cheaper to boot, eh?”

Cubby Cardiff belched and waved his hand disparagingly and allowed as how he preferred Jack Daniels himself, but couldn’t persuade that skinflint young West Point captain commanding the team to spring loose the few extra bucks for it.

“Every time that young captain—or the buck sergeant we got for a junior medic, for that matter—every time one of ’em goes out on patrol for more’n a day or two … why hell’s bells, Stagg! They ain’t got a bit of consideration for an old man’s liver. By God, they don’t!” He turned a baleful gaze on Wolverine for a few seconds, then belched again and reached for the bottle to refill his canteen cup.

“These young studs comin’ up now ain’t got enough sense to lock their bottles away. If it weren’t for old goats like you’n me, Stagg, why hell, they’d all be a bunch of fuckin’ alcoholics, if it wasn’t for you’n me an’ the likes of us!”

Pappy Stagg chuckled and topped off his canteen cup. “It’s a responsibility, for sure,” he allowed. “Don’t nobody give a damn about them but us,” he added with a solemn nod of his head. “That’s why I come to see you today. We’ve been around, you and me, eh? And we’ve had it pretty good. But these kids now, we gotta watch out for them, ’cause ain’t nobody else gonna do it.”

Cubby Cardiff looked into his canteen cup as if searching for something—an insect, or perhaps some portent of the future—in the sediment that washed back and forth in the bottom when he tilted the cup and held it in the light. Didn’t make any difference how often you scrubbed a canteen cup, the damn things never came clean. Finally he found whatever it was he was looking for—or gave up the search—and put his cup down on the card table and reached over to pick up a cigarette that Wolverine had left smoldering in the ashtray. He took a drag on the cigarette then stubbed it out and sighed.

“Stagg,” he said, exhaling a thin stream of smoke from the corner of his mouth, “just what’re you gettin’ at? Speak clear, man, so I know what the fuck you’re tryin’ to say.”

Pappy Stagg lit a cigarette of his own and looked down at Tiger, curled up and sleeping with his head on the instep of Wolverine’s boot. Poor little dude looked so trusting and peaceful, it was a shame to have to leave him here with all these strangers and dog-eating indigenous personnel.

“I want you to take in old Tiger here for a couple of weeks. We got a rabies scare back in the base camp and the general’s got the MPs shooting all the pets. If you just put him up till the heat dies down … He won’t be any trouble. He don’t eat much. …”

“Eat much?” Cubby Cardiff stood up and slapped the side of his head in amazement. “Hell’s bells, Stagg! You know what I got in this camp? I got forty-two hungry Nungs. Couple hundred Cambodes and Yards, and more dog-eatin’ Viets than you can shake a snake at. I seen how that dog come in here—all shakin’ and tremblin’ from smelling them indigenous personnel out there. Problem ain’t gonna be what he eats it’s what eats him.”

It was already the middle of December, and dog meat was a prime winter treat.

“Aw, come off it now.” Pappy Stagg wasn’t about to let him get away this easily. “I known you how long? Eighteen years? If you can’t keep one little pup outa the soup pot, you sure ain’t the same Cubby Cardiff I used to know.”

“I don’t know …” Cubby Cardiff looked down at Tiger and shook his head. “He don’t look too smart to me. I got me an ‘A’ Camp to run here. And a whole passel of hungry Strikers. You know how they get when there’s a chill in the air; a taste of pup thickens the blood, they say. Like as not, I believe it myself.”

Pappy Stagg was drunker than he’d been in months. He stood up slowly, moving like a man with a bad back and a hundred years of hard living behind him. He smiled sadly and put his hand on Cubby Cardiff’s shoulder.

“I guess we all get cautious in our old age.” He sighed and shook his head. “Just never thought I’d live long enough to see it happen to you.”

Tiger lifted his head for a second and growled softly at something moving by outside the team house—a gook perhaps, or a chicken or pig. Wolverine dropped his hand to calm the dog, but he kept his eyes on the two master sergeants, shocked at how old they’d both sounded with all their talk of past adventures and dead or retired friends. And now they were talking about now, talking about themselves, and they sounded even older.

Cubby Cardiff hadn’t noticed Tiger’s growl. He was thinking about the Ashau Valley, remembering the worst day of his life. He turned his palms up and rolled his eyes toward Heaven, begging Mars or Odin—whoever was the deity in charge of old soldiers—to witness his travails. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. And then he gave in, for the sake of old times.

“Awright, awright damn it. I’ll hide your dog and try to keep him outa the soup pot. I ain’t promising nothin’, but I’ll give it my best shot.”

“That’s all I want,” said Pappy Stagg. He reached down to stroke Tiger’s back, then stood up and grinned. He looked down and then bent over to give the dog a final pat on the head.

“He’s a good dog, that Tiger. He might not look like much, but he’s a good dog even so.”

At the sound of his name, Tiger’s ears perked, and he thumped his tail against the ground. He accepted Pappy Stagg’s goodbye pat with a haughty tolerance, blinking his eyes because the hand was heavier than usual, and when Wolverine stood up and followed Pappy to the door, he scrambled to his feet to go with them. He almost made it to the door, but the leash suddenly brought him up short. He yipped in surprise, then whirled, took the leash in his mouth, and threw his weight forward, upsetting the chair to which he was tied and dragging it across the floor until he got as far as the doorway. But the screen door slammed shut in his face. He could hear Pappy Stagg telling Wolverine to ride shotgun and let him drive, and though he yanked once more at his leash, the chair was hung up between a footlocker and the legs of the card table, and wouldn’t budge. Frantically, he clawed at his collar and tried to slip it over his head, but before he was able to free himself, Cubby Cardiff had him by the tail and pulled him back from the door. The squat old master sergeant gathered Tiger up in his arms and sat down on his bunk.

“C’mon, my little friend,” he said with a gentleness he usually reserved for severely wounded soldiers. “There ain’t no use cryin’ about things you can’t control. They ain’t nobody doin’ nothin’ but what has to be done. He’ll be back for you. That old buzzard Tom Stagg came back to carry me out of the Ashau that time—I know he’ll be back for you.”

Tiger whimpered softly and curled his tail up against his belly, but even when Cubby Cardiff put him down to pour himself another drink, he didn’t try to get away. The important thing now was to stay close to the team house, close to familiar American smells, to eat enough to drive away the loneliness. There was no sense in escaping on an empty stomach.

F
OR FIVE DAYS RUNNING
the storm clouds rolled off the ocean, lashing the scrublands and rice fields with sweeping curtains of rain and turning the Louc Ma road into a river of mud. In the town of Louc Ma the sewers overflowed into the shops and houses, and outside the town the farmers shivered under their leaf hats and plastic rain capes as they watched their fields flood and their crops wash away.

The storm swept over the coastal flatlands and lost none of its fury battering the abandoned terraces in the foothills. Far to the west, in the mountains along the Laotian border, Lurp Team Two-Two found itself without communication just after stumbling across a well-guarded high-speed trail. After a brief firelight, Two-Two successfully broke contact with a white phosphorus grenade, then, grateful for the rain that covered their movement, they hit their Escape and Evasion route for Firebase Culculine. All night and all the next day they broke bush, alternately cursing the weather for interfering with their commo and turning the slopes into treacherous mudslides, and thanking that Great Ranger in the Sky for sending the rain and misty darkness that made it easier to evade the NVA patrols that were certainly out for them after the firefight.

They kept moving night and day, pausing only in the thickest of high-ground vegetation to catch an occasional short nap and run up a wire antenna in hopes of raising the relay team. By the seventh day of what should have been a four-day mission, they were so low on food and so exhausted that the team leader broke out his pill kit and passed around the dextroamphetamines.

On the morning of the eighth day they heard signal shots on a ridgeline to their southwest and answering shots very close—a hundred meters at the most—to their northeast. Alarmed to discover the enemy moving in on them, they cut due south, crossing three trails and a freshly swollen stream. They plotted the trails and stream on their map overlays, then jogged west along the contour of a defoliated hillside.

Here, they surprised and killed three NVA couriers. The couriers were carrying oilcloth pouches full of papers. The ATL stuffed the pouches into his rucksack, and the team leader decided to take one of the dead men’s weapons—just in case they might have cause to fire again and couldn’t risk giving themselves away with the distinctive sound of their own CAR-15s.

Shortly before noon of the ninth day the weather broke, and Two-Two made its way back to its prearranged Escape and Evasion route. The team was still a long way from Culculine, but now the clouds were lifting, and with a little luck and the help of a wire antenna they ought to be able to get the relay on the horn. They had the wire, but they didn’t have any luck in raising the relay team. They pushed on to the northeast, over one ridgeline, down a steep draw, and up another ridge.

By now the men of Two-Two were thoroughly exhausted. The skin between their fingers and toes was cracked and bleeding. Their hands, forearms, and cheeks were crisscrossed with thorn scratches and bramble cuts. The leech bites on their legs and necks and waists were beginning to fester. They now had one beef and rice Lurp ration and four cornflake bars to go around, and all of them except the ATL—who never touched the stuff—were coming down hard from the pills. Ever since killing the three NVA, they had seen and heard no sign of the enemy—no trails, no signal shots coming from the flanks—and now they were too tired to do anything but pull themselves up by vines and saplings and bushes, climbing hand over hand for the high ground where they could run out a wire and try once more to raise the relay team.

They were halfway up the slope when they heard a helicopter circling slowly, three or four kilometers to the west. Every man stopped in place to listen, and the team leader unhooked his headset from the loop on his rucksack strap where he’d been carrying it ever since losing commo days before. He put the headset next to his ear and reached back for the pole antenna.

Suddenly there was a crackle of static and then, very softly, Pappy Stagg’s voice came over the horn.

“Tacky Blinker Two-Two, Tacky Blinker Two-Two … This is Tacky Blinker Eight, over.”

Two-Two’s team leader grinned and handed the headset to his ATL.

“What did I tell you, huh?” he whispered. “I bet that old bastard had to hold a gun to the pilot’s head to get him to fly through this soup. But there he is. You gotta have faith.”

The ATL was grinning even wider than the team leader. They weren’t out yet—they still had to make it to an LZ, because even if the ship was rigged to drop McQuire harnesses and pull them up through a gap in the canopy, one ship could only carry three rigs, and it wouldn’t do to split the team with the weather likely to close in again before Pappy could get back for a second run. And for all anyone knew the NVA was still on their trail. But with Pappy Stagg up there helping them out, it shouldn’t be too hard to find some sort of LZ.

“Fuck a bunch of faith,” the ATL said aloud. He shook the tangles out of the headset cord and started to acknowledge Pappy’s transmission, then paused and handed the headset back to the team leader. “Let’s just let him collect some flight time. Now that we’ve come this far, I feel like humping all the way to Culculine.”

He didn’t mean a word of it. It just seemed like the right thing to say at the time. With Pappy Stagg up there looking out for them, they were as good as home.

M
ASTER SERGEANT CARDIFF WAS
wheezing and snoring his way through a dream about a forest of carnivorous trees. A raspy tentacle of vine had just begun to creep up his back when the young medic shook his shoulder. Cardiff woke with a start, sputtering and grabbing for his weapon, then realized that he was in his bunk in the team house, not in the carnivorous forest, and that his weapon was hanging on the wall, not lying at his side.