Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel (12 page)

Sergeant Johnson always laughed at officers’ jokes. He chuckled and slapped his knee. But Tiger was sensitive to tone of voice, and he was not amused. He flipped back over on his belly, gathered his legs beneath him, and stood up haughtily. He shook himself to get the blood moving, stretched his forelegs, and favored both the lieutenant and Sergeant Johnson with a bored yawn, then sauntered back into the night with such a fine show of offended dignity that even the lieutenant had to chuckle.

Marvel Kim was cleaning magazines by candlelight when Tiger came nosing into the tent for the third or fourth time since sunset. Before him, on a towel spread over his footlocker, was a neat row of ten magazine springs, and in front of the springs, in a corresponding row, were ten empty magazine shells. The Lurp hat on his bunk was full of ball ammo, and there was another, much smaller, pile of tracer rounds on his neatly folded jungle blanket. When he saw Tiger, Marvel whistled softly and called him, but Tiger didn’t come. Instead, he sniffed the legs of Mopar’s empty cot, paced a tight circle, then collapsed with a resigned sigh on the ground, rested his head on his forepaws, and looked up at Marvel with big, sad eyes.

“Look at Tiger,” Marvel said. “He’s been fucked up all night, and now he’s figured out why. He misses Mopar.”

Tiger’s ears perked alertly at the mention of Mopar’s name and his own. He lifted his head and cocked it slightly in Marvel’s direction, his eyes gleaming and his tail tense and ready, but it was Gonzales who spoke next.

“He don’t miss nobody. That dog is drunk. You saw how he was this morning. He’s still drunk, man.”

“Drunk?” Marvel remembered Tiger’s swollen belly, but that wasn’t unusual at all. Tiger was a dedicated glutton, and he was known to overeat. “You’re out of your mind, Gonzales! You remember the time we gave him some beer in a canteen cup? It fizzed in his nose and he wouldn’t touch it after that, right? How do you figure he’s drunk?”

Gonzales cracked his knuckles and smiled one of his rare, sly smiles. Tiger lowered his head and closed his eyes. His ears twitched expectantly, then drooped with disappointment and boredom when he realized that Gonzales was no longer talking about him.

“In Cuba, just after the
comunistas
come, I see it all the time. Drunk dogs everywhere then, man. The
comunistas
kill so many people. Everywhere you look, man, they got dead bodies. And before everybody get so hungry they eat the dogs, the dogs got so hungry they eat the bodies. That’s how dogs get drunk.”

“Human bodies?” Marvel remembered asking Tiger if he’d fucked Fifi to death and eaten her body, but he’d been joking. And anyway, Fifi was just a Pekinese and could hardly even be considered a dog.

“Sure. How else a dog going to get drunk?”

It had been at least a week since Marvel had heard Gonzales say anything about Cuba, and even though that last time he’d also managed to work the
comunistas
into the conversation, he hadn’t said anything quite this outrageous.

“What the fuck are you talking about? Are you trying to tell me Tiger’s been out feeding on corpses?” Marvel didn’t know whether to laugh or stay indignant.

Gonzales shrugged. Tiger might not have seemed so drunk now, all forlorn and lonely, curled up under Mopar’s cot, his ears down, his tail tight against his body, and his nose between his forepaws, but he’d damn sure been drunk in the morning. And even well into the afternoon, he’d been staggering around with a bloated belly and a strange, dopey look in his eyes, just like he was drunk.

“You the one said he don’t drink beer, and we know how he looks when somebody been blowing pot his way. I see it before in Cuba, man, before we get out. That dog was drunk today. When you get the
comunistas
killing people in Hawaii you’ll see a lot of drunk dogs. I see it before, man, and it don’t bother me a bit.”

It bothered Marvel, though, and he refused to buy a word of it.

“He misses Mopar, that’s all,” he said, not even trying to grin or giggle or act like the idea of Tiger feasting on a corpse didn’t make his scalp crawl with revulsion.

“Okay, man.” Gonzales was getting tired of talking in English with someone who refused to admit that the
comunistas
could cause such perverse and unnatural changes to come over a friendly dog like Tiger. “You’ll see. If not here, then when the
comunistas
come to Hawaii. Be a lot of drunk dogs then, you’ll see.”

And with that he blew out his candle, dropped his mosquito net around him, and went to sleep.

After another hour or so of watching Marvel clean and reload his magazines, Tiger’s head began to swim with the terrible smell of cleaning solvent. He rose and sneezed and left the tent in an indignant huff. Once out in the fresh air, he felt better. He stretched and yawned, made one more round of the compound—pissing in all the appropriate places—then headed off for the bunker line and the perimeter.

The moon was hidden behind a thick shroud of clouds, and while Tiger had no trouble picking his way through the concertina and trip wires, the darkness hid him from the troops passing their watch on the closest bunker. After crawling on his belly to the tall grass, Tiger stood up and stretched contentedly, then trotted off in hopes of flushing a rabbit or panicking a family of mice.

The grass and scrub outside the perimeter was littered with flare parachutes, burnt-out flare casings, expended brass, and soggy scraps of paper. Crickets chirped in the bushes, frogs croaked and splashed in the flooded craters of forgotten fire missions, and an occasional snake slithered away in the grass, but Tiger flushed no rabbits and panicked no mice. Suddenly the frogs and crickets fell silent. Tiger eased down on his belly, sniffing, and switching his ears to keep them in the wind. He could hear two men—gooks, from the scent of them and the sound of their voices. They were moving parallel to the perimeter, just a short distance from Tiger’s front, and though he bristled and wrinkled his lip, ready to attack the first ankle to come within reach, the men passed on, unaware that he was there.

When the men were gone, Tiger got up and followed their scent trail to the south and east, through a patch of well-tended gardens and across the rutted, muddy Louc Ma Road to a broad and hard-packed rice-paddy dike. After only a little way, the scent trail led off the dike into the paddy water, but Tiger didn’t bother to follow it, for he wasn’t fond of flooded rice paddies. Instead he followed his nose down a thousand meters of paddy dike and up a grassy embankment into a dark and sleeping hamlet.

Padding soundlessly on his light, well-cushioned feet, Tiger investigated every water barrel, wicker basket, and doorway in the hamlet before moving on to size up the henhouse. The henhouse was an old and rickety affair of bamboo, dried mud, and chicken wire, with a roof made from a sheet of flattened beer cans that had been salvaged from the base-camp dump. Tiger had no trouble sniffing out a hollow under the wire that was large enough for him to squeeze through. After finding the hollow he backed off to lay dog for a moment in the shadows, then, when he was sure the hens were all asleep on their beds of wet straw, he crawled forward, eased on under the wire, and came up silently inside the henhouse.

Stiff-legged and bristling with anticipation, he tiptoed across the carpet of chickenshit and feathers, paused for a second or two to choose his prey, then sprang forward and sank his teeth into the feathery back of a fat young brood hen. The hen woke with a terrified screech, but it was too late to do her any good. Tiger locked his teeth and crushed her spine, then tossing his head for good measure, he retraced his steps to the hollow and backed out tail first.

The hen in his mouth was now too dead to struggle, but the henhouse behind him seemed to explode with clucking, cackling, flapping, and panic as the other hens woke to see Tiger’s eyes flashing gold and green as he struggled to pull the dead hen under the wire behind him. For just an instant, Tiger hesitated, tempted to crawl back inside and run wild, killing the stupid hens. But then he heard someone shouting and cursing in a nearby house, and he bolted so fast he left one wing of his brood hen hanging, in feathers and shreds, on the bottom of the chicken wire. Barely managing to keep his head up against the weight of the chicken in his mouth, Tiger fled down the back trail, around a bamboo fence, and away from the henhouse and the shouting, cursing farmer.

Hiding in a safe place among the bushes next to the trail, Tiger ripped the brood hen open, gulped down her sweet, wet intestines, and gnawed his way up through her stomach, her heart, and her lungs. But before he had time to peel back the feathers and skin to her flesh, he was forced to abandon his meal and flee once more, for the farmer was on his trail, brandishing a flashlight and a hoe, and smelling of rage.

Tiger left the hen with little regret—he had already eaten the best parts. He escaped the farmer with little trouble by doubling back to lay dog in the shadows and watch him recover what was left of his chicken. Then, when the farmer was gone, he rose and stretched, and started back for the base camp by a different path and different dike than he’d traveled coming in.

Somewhere off to the west, a helicopter gunship fired into a dark hillside, but Tiger ignored the distant swoosh and crump of rockets as he padded down the trail that led over the dike. The paddy water on either side of the dike was dark and still, the wind had died, and the moon was still hidden, high up in the sky. Tiger sat down to gnaw at a leech on his foreleg, then rose and continued on his way. The wind had picked up again now, but Tiger kept his nose to the trail and hurried along, interested only in the path ahead of him.

Suddenly he stopped and cocked his head. A few paces down the trail, a thin, invisible trip wire was humming, ever so faintly, in the wind. Tiger leaned forward to investigate with his nose, then without more than a second’s hesitation hopped down into the water and splashed across the paddy to the next dike, where he scrambled back up to dry ground. Something was snuffling along the paddy dike he’d just abandoned, snuffling along on his scent trail. Tiger, ever curious, shook the water from his coat, then stretched out on his belly to watch in comfort.

Tiger knew what to expect. He had picked up the scent as soon as he lifted his head from the trail and cocked it to hear the vibrating trip wire. He was not at all surprised when at last he saw a big, dark, monkey-faced dog come sniffing and slobbering into view across the paddy. This was the same arrogant, sick-smelling dog that always stood by the side of the Louc Ma Road, barking and coughing with mad jealousy, whenever he rode past in the back of the jeep, and Tiger could not suppress the soft growl of loathing deep in his throat. But he was content to lay dog for the time being, confident that the other dog could not follow his scent trail through the paddy water.

The other dog was big, but thin and sick. His odor was strong on the wind now, strong with the stench of rotting teeth and disease. Tiger bristled his ruff and wrinkled his lips with hatred.

The big dog was striding along nicely now, sure of the scent, confident that his size more than made up for the fierce and healthy smell Tiger had left on the trail. He paused now to lift his head and sniff all around, but with his squashed-in monkey snout, he could not smell Tiger, downwind and a paddy away. The big dog’s luck was no better than his sense of smell. When he turned to put his nose directly into the wind, he hit the trip wire with his tail, and before he had time to yip or feel the slightest pain, he disappeared in a flash and a boom, then came down in pieces, splattering water and trail like a thousand heavy raindrops.

Tiger waited until his ears stopped ringing from the explosion, then stood up. He shook some water and pieces of dog flesh from his coat, yawned and stretched, then headed back for the base camp and the Lurp compound.

By morning he was back on station atop the operations bunker, lying there with all the aloof and regal dignity of a wet and muddy lion.

“Look at him, sir,” said Sergeant Johnson as he and the lieutenant strolled past on their way to the Cav mess for breakfast. “You can’t tell me that poor dog don’t miss Mopar, sir. Just look at him—he’s probably been lying around all night, just waiting for Mopar to come home. I tell you, sir, you’ve got that poor dog all wrong.”

G
ONZALES WAS A TERRIBLE
driver. As a child in Havana his family had had a chauffeur, and then after fleeing the
comunistas
and taking refuge in Manhattan, he had depended on subways, buses, and taxicabs for transportation. It wasn’t until he was in the Army, stationed at Fort Bragg with the 82nd Airborne, that he first sat behind the wheel of an automobile, and that had been a buddy’s Pontiac GTO, not an army jeep.

“Slow down, goddamn it!” Marvel shouted. “This isn’t Daytona Speedway! I want to get to Recondo School alive.” He hugged his rucksack to his chest and bit his lip as Gonzales veered around a slow-moving Vietnamese armored personnel carrier. The Vietnamese soldiers sitting on top of the APC jeered and flashed the “V” sign, and Gonzales flipped them the bird.

“Fuckin’ gooks drive like women,” he growled. Once safely past the APC, he let off the gas and downshifted so suddenly Marvel Kim was forced to reach out and brace himself against the dash to keep from flying forward and smashing the windshield with his forehead. In the back of the jeep, Tiger the Lurp Dog stayed curled up on an old flak jacket, as comfortable, steady, and unconcerned as a bag of cached rice.

“When I said slow down, I didn’t mean like that!” Marvel had not bothered to include traffic deaths in his figuring, and he doubted that his combat luck could carry him through firelights
and
jeep wrecks without cracking. “Do you want me to drive? You can pull over on the shoulder and change seats.”

“What the fuck are you trying to say, man?” Most of his accent was blowing away on the wind, and Gonzales sounded surprisingly like Mopar. “You saying I can’t drive?”

Marvel nodded silently.

“Well, I can drive good, man. Drive fast, like an Airborne Ranger—not slow like an old lady.” He began to speed up again, and in one sweep passed an entire convoy of refrigerator trucks and their gun-jeep escorts. “Sure I can drive, man. I’m more American than
you!”