Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel (11 page)

Before the clouds over J. D.’s last Recon Zone lifted, before Pappy Stagg could present Wolverine’s case to the major, it was time for Mopar to go on his extension leave and Marvel to go to Fifth Special Forces Group Headquarters in Nha Trang for Recondo School.

“Well, that’s that,” said Wolverine. “Looks like J. D. and Wilkinson and the boys’ll have to stay officially undead a month or so longer, and then we can see about finding their bones for the insurance companies.”

Mopar was extremely unhappy with this state of affairs. The thought that J. D. and Wilkinson and the other guys were out there next to one of those trails, their body parts scattered by animals, their legs and torsos rotting into the plants and feeding the worms and glowing at night like so many beached creatures of the dark, deep sea—just the thought of this was enough to put a crimp in the good mood he should have felt about his leave.

It was a definite bummer, going home with this pall of unresolved horror hanging like burnt shit and diesel smoke over the platoon, and the night before he was supposed to go back to the Administrative Rear to process for leave, Mopar felt so low-down, antisocial, and contemptuous of all tradition that he got drunk on Wolverine’s Jack Daniels, smoked three bowls of Project Delta Red all by himself, and neglected to brush and groom that shifty little scoundrel, Tiger the Lurp Dog. This last was a most fortunate oversight on Mopar’s part, for if he had gone looking for Tiger—brush in hand, cooing his kind intentions—he would have been sorely disappointed.

There had been no peppery tang of bug spray to alert him, no trace of nervous sweat in the air to clue him in that someone was leaving in the morning, so Tiger had taken out on his own shortly after sundown to patrol the base-camp dump and see what his nose could turn up in that incredible wealth of refuse.

T
HE NEXT MORNING, WHILE
Marvel Kim sat impatiently gunning the engine of the jeep, Mopar went off to search for Tiger. He looked in all of the tents and down in the operations bunker. He peeked into the other bunkers, the protective bunkers that only Tiger ever bothered to crawl into, but again—Tiger wasn’t to be found. Mopar checked down by the chopper pad and called over the fence toward the Cav mess, but there was no answer from Tiger.

“Come on, hurry up!” Marvel Kim called from his seat in the jeep. “If you keep fucking around you’re going to miss your plane!” Marvel Kim was always punctual, and his normal benign patience always deserted him when there was a plane to catch or some other deadline hanging over his head. “If you hadn’t been sulking last night, you would have brushed Tiger and clued him in that he should stick around to say goodbye in the morning. Come on! That little bitch Fifi down at the personnel tent is probably in heat and Tiger took off to get a piece of ass. Are you coming, or do you want to miss your fucking plane?”

Mopar climbed reluctantly into the jeep.

“That mutt!” he sighed. “He’s like the rest of us—gets a chance at a piece of tail and forgets all about his buddies. That Tiger,” he said with an affectionate shake of his head, “he’s one cockhound of a Lurp Dog if I ever did see one!”

Marvel Kim put the jeep in gear and drove out of the compound. Almost immediately Mopar’s dark mood returned.

“I tell you one thing,” he said, “if I get hassled by any peace-creeps, I’m gonna try and reason with them for about three and a half seconds. And then I’m gonna start kicking ass.”

He glanced right and left, just in case a wandering peacecreep had come over for a firsthand look and had managed to sneak onto the base camp. It hadn’t happened yet, but Mopar didn’t want to get caught half-stepping if a peacecreep did show up.

“I’ll stomp them into the pavement. Smash!”

He brought his boot down on the floor of the jeep.

“One for J. D.! Smash!” He brought his other boot down, even harder than the first. “One for Wilkinson! Smash!”

Marvel Kim hoped he wouldn’t keep smashing all the way to the airstrip. Mopar knew enough dead guys to get him at least as far as the access road, but Marvel wasn’t sure the floorboard of the jeep could take that much punishment.

“What are you going to do if you get back and discover that your Sybill Street has become a peacecreep? You going to smash her too?”

Mopar was horrified at the idea of smashing Sybill Street. The thought of her having become a peacecreep was almost as horrible, but not quite.

“Sybill Street a peacecreep?” Mopar pondered for a second, then shook his head. “Nah, that’s impossible. She’s too much of a snob to ever become one of them demonstrators. She’s got a lot of self-respect—for a woman.” He shifted in his seat and reached for the pack of Marlboros on the transmission hump, shook out a cigarette, and lit it with his engraved Airborne Ranger LRRP Zippo lighter.

“Anyway, it don’t really matter that much. Women are always full of contrary bullshit. But it don’t take much for a man to turn them around to some basic good sense.”

Marvel Kim sniggered. He admired Mopar’s spirit, but he’d seen a few of Sybill Street’s letters, and they were full of rot and nonsense about the Geneva Accords and Senator Fulbright. It was hard to imagine Mopar trying to put the moves on a girl who let Senator Fulbright creep into her letters, but then Mopar was full of that drive-on Airborne spirit, and he didn’t scare easily.

“Anyway,” Mopar went on, “she can talk all the peacecreep bullshit she wants—I won’t hear a thing ’cause her thighs’ll be covering my ears!” Mopar stuck out his tongue. “Slurping, Marvel. Can you dig it? I’ll be rocking that little boy in her boat. I’ll familiarize myself with every fold and crevice and curl, and drive that girl insane with love and my tongue! I’m gonna be one slurping Lurp!”

“Brave words,” Marvel Kim said with a laugh. He glanced over at the rice paddies to the left of the road. Here and there, a thin mist seemed to rise like smoke or steam from the water, and the winter rice shoots shone green as cheap jade in the morning sun. A young boy, lazing on the back of an enormous gray water buffalo, looked up and waved as the jeep went past, and Marvel Kim waved back wondering what the boy thought about all the foreign military traffic going past his field every day.

Mopar knew what the boy thought of them. “Little fucker’d put a lot more shoulder into that wave if he hadn’t left his hand grenades at home,” he said. All this waving to the kids and tossing them candy might have worked for those old farts back in World War Two, but it didn’t seem to do much good in Vietnam.

“Well, you’re almost home now,” Marvel Kim said when he pulled up between the Tri-Service AATCO manifest shed and the airstrip. There was nobody in the manifest shed, but the C-130 out on the runway was already feathering its props, and the loadmaster was standing by the open tailgate with a clipboard. When he saw Mopar get out of the jeep and pick up his rucksack, he began to wave his arms in the air. “Get the lead out!” he hollered through cupped hands. “We ain’t gonna wait for you!”

“Looks like I gotta run.” Mopar was suddenly reluctant to go. “When you get back to the compound, tell Tiger goodbye for me. And keep your own ass outa trouble. Don’t go winning that dagger in Recondo School, you crazy gook. You’re the one that says it’s jinxed. And if you say it, it’s true.”

“Moving out!” the loadmaster hollered. The tailgate of the C-130 was still open, but the engines were beginning to whine now, and the loadmaster was checking to make sure the jump doors were secure.

Marvel Kim grinned his goofiest grin and leaned across the shotgun seat of the jeep to slap Mopar’s shoulder. He didn’t know what to say, so he just kept grinning.

“Be cool, Marvel,” Mopar said. “Keep your ass down, and don’t go winning that dagger!”

It was certain death to win the Recondo School honor grad’s dagger, and Mopar trusted Marvel Kim to avoid it like an ulcerated pudendum. But it was necessary to warn him once more, just for form’s sake, just for the cameras.

Marvel Kim giggled nervously and turned away for just a second, embarrassed and surprised at how final this parting seemed. He’d never had to say goodbye to J. D. and Wilkinson, or any of the others, and even though he knew Mopar would be coming back in a month, knowing and feeling were two different things now. When he turned back, Mopar was already sprinting across the tarmac for his plane. Determined to get in the last word and at the same time chase away the sudden foreboding that had come over him, he held up the amulet bag he wore on a parachute cord around his neck and yelled for Mopar to remember to bring back some of Sybill Street’s pubic curls, as he’d promised.

The C-130’s engines were making too much noise now, and Mopar was running too hard to hear, but Marvel Kim was sure he wouldn’t forget.

They’d worked this one through together one night on radio relay, and they both agreed: There was nothing in the world more magic than a brown pubic curl from a good-looking white girl.

By the time Marvel Kim got back to the Lurp compound, the last clouds had blown away into the mountains and Tiger was sunning himself on top of the operations bunker. His stomach was swollen with rancid pork chops from the dump, his tongue lolled out of his mouth, and there was an expression of drunken contentment on his face. He opened one eye when he heard the jeep, and when Marvel Kim came by, he rolled over on his back, wagged his tail lazily, and stretched out for a belly rub.

“Holy shit, Tiger!” Marvel whistled appreciatively and reached down to scratch the dog’s belly. “What’d you do? Fuck that little Fifi to death and eat her?”

Tiger’s tail sped up, his back leg jerked spasmodically, and he closed his eyes and sighed with a satisfaction so complete that Marvel Kim couldn’t help wondering if maybe Mopar was right, that a dog’s life was better than a man’s, and the short, fast tour was more rewarding than the long, slow climb into old age and peaceful memories.

T
HAT NIGHT TIGER HUNG
around the Lurp compound until well after midnight. He took a nap on a pile of dirty laundry beneath Gonzales’s cot, then after Gonzales returned from the shithouse and chased him away, he wandered down to the team leaders’ tent and begged a taste of Lurp-ration chili from Sergeant Johnson, who, with Farley gone, was now the only soul brother he trusted. After sampling the chili and losing interest in it, he went off to walk his regular rounds. He scent-marked the corners of the tents and bunkers, sniffed around the guy wires and antennas of the operations bunker, lifted his leg against the compound gate and the skids of the ships on the chopper pad, and poked his nose here and there, just to check things out.

He could hear Pappy Stagg’s voice coming from the depths of the operations bunker, and when he stood in the entrance he could smell Pappy’s pipe smoke and Wolverine’s Pall Malls. There was nothing unusual in that—when he wasn’t in the field, Wolverine often stayed up with Pappy in the operations bunker—so there was no need to go down for a firsthand inspection. Still, Tiger had a vague, uneasy feeling that something was wrong.

He wandered back to the sleeping tent and let Marvel scratch his ears. But the uneasy feeling wouldn’t go away. After only a minute or two, he stood up, shook himself, and left before Marvel had a chance to switch ears and finish the job. Something was wrong, but Tiger had no idea what it was.

Out in front of the tent he paused by the trash barrel and lifted his nose to the breeze. There was rain in the air, but none of it was falling yet. There was a faint taste of marijuana smoke mixed in with the other night smells, but it wasn’t as sharp and exciting as the aroma of Project Delta Red, and it was coming from someplace outside the Lurp compound, and therefore wasn’t worth investigating.

After sniffing around the operations bunker and the compound gate to make sure no other dog was laying claim to his territory, Tiger ambled back to the team leaders’ tent. He normally didn’t like to spend too much time there, but tonight he felt drawn to the electric lights, and he knew that Sergeant Johnson always had food. He nudged the screen open with his nose and stuck his head inside to check things out. Sergeant Johnson saw him and invited him in.

His tail at half-mast, ready to wag if necessary but not really primed for it, Tiger strolled over to Sergeant Johnson’s cot to sniff his boots and nuzzle his hand for a treat. Although his tail hadn’t fallen any from its half-mast position, his ears hung lamentably, and when he discovered no treat in Sergeant Johnson’s hand and looked up to rebuke him, his eyes were big and dark and pitiful.

Sergeant Johnson reached down with his big strong hands to stroke Tiger’s head. “Poor dog, Tiger. Poor boy missin’ somebody for sure,” he cooed. Tiger settled down with a sigh and rolled over on his back to have his belly rubbed.

The lieutenant was lying on his bunk reading Sergeant Johnson’s latest copy of
Jet.
He put the magazine down and turned around with a sigh of his own when he heard Sergeant Johnson ask Tiger if he knew who it was he was missing. The lieutenant had still not completely forgiven Sergeant Johnson for saying “Bullshit!” during the chaplain’s speech, and he was now paying attention to everything he said, just in hope of starting an argument that he could finish with a first-class asschewing. It wasn’t easy for a lieutenant to chew a senior staff sergeant’s ass, and he’d been glad to let Pappy handle Wolverine and Johnson after the chaplain went home to his chapel. But now he regretted not getting in a few licks of his own.

“What the fuck do you mean Tiger’s missin’ someone? You know as well as I do that he hated J. D. And he wasn’t any too close with Wilkinson and McKinney and the others either. He doesn’t know they’re dead, and if he did, he probably wouldn’t care, as long as someone’s left here to feed his shiftless ass.”

Tiger cringed a little at the lieutenant’s tone of voice, but Sergeant Johnson kept scratching his belly.

“Wasn’t thinkin’ of them, sir. It’s Mopar he’s missing. Him and Mopar’s tight as spoons, sir.”

“Shit.” The lieutenant wasn’t in a sentimental mood. “That little camp follower doesn’t know one of us from the others. All he knows is how to get a free meal and how to piss on a tent Peg.”