Cracker! (22 page)

She just wished she knew the direction for sure the way she used to. She pushed down any doubt and searched her mind for certainty. For a moment she just about had it. But the pounding in her head wouldn’t stop and she lost the certainty. When she was thirsty, she looked around until she found a trickle of water seeping up beneath some rocks. Rick never let her drink unless he gave her the water. But she was thirsty, so she drank, looking around guiltily every so often. The water tasted clean and fresh, so she drank as much as she could before she started to feel the pull of Rick. She had to get to him. He needed her. She helped him. She was important. She trotted on and on, even when her stomach growled with hunger. Hunger was important, but not like thirst. She couldn’t go on without water. But food, she could last awhile without that.

The time came when the sky was dark and her body began to ache, and she didn’t think she could go farther. She’d walked long distances before but had never run so much in her life. She sniffed around the dark jungle. She knew she could see better at night than Rick or Willie, because they always moved around comically in the dark, with their hands in front of them to feel their way. That seemed funny to her sometimes. But this darkness was so dark that her eyes couldn’t gather enough light to know what was around her. Cracker could hear, though, and she could smell, and so she had a pretty good idea of where she was and all that was around her. She knew the size of the leaves hanging from the trees, how disintegrated the leaves on the ground were, how softly the wind blew-everything except what color it all was. She felt ants crawling on her back. She walked a little farther, to an area that didn’t seem to have so many ants, though she knew they would come for her.

She sniffed around, first raising her head the way she’d been taught, but she didn’t smell anything unusual in the wind. Then she lowered her nose and sniffed the ground, the way she’d been taught not to do. She pawed at the dirt, clearing away a nice area of dirt to lie in. Even when she lay down, the anxiety of finding Rick still ran strong through her, but the feeling of needing sleep was even stronger. Before she closed her eyes, she raised her nose once more but smelled nothing special. She let herself sleep.

R
ICK’S VISION BLURRED AS SOME GUYS LOADED HIM
onto the dust-off. He thought he was only drowsy, but he must have passed out, because all of a sudden he saw that the chopper had landed. Even in his drowsy state, he could see how well organized everything was. Emergency personnel had already been alerted to what kind of injured were on board. Rick watched his slack man, who looked dead, being rushed off. A couple of guys carried Rick to an operating room, and then he was gone.

He woke up in a Quonset hut with a door on each side. One of the doors appeared to lead outside, the other to a hallway. A couple of guys were flirting with a nurse. A young Asian doctor stood over him. For a second he thought he might have been captured.

Then the doctor said, “Hi, I’m Dr. Kanamori. How are you feeling?”

“I lost my dog. She didn’t dust off with me.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m a dog handler.”

“I’m sure someone took care of her. Let’s talk about your injury, and then we’ll get to your dog. In laymen’s terms, shrapnel pierced your right artery and tendon. We needed to take a piece of your left artery and sew it into your right one. We’ll keep you here a couple of weeks, but after that, it looks like you’re going stateside for rehab.”

“You mean I’m going home?”

“You sure are. Congratulations.”

“But my dog. I’m a handler with the 67th IPSD. My dog was lost when they dusted me off.”

The doctor paused, then turned to a nurse and gestured her over. “Linda, this is a dog handler from the 67th IPSD. His dog didn’t dust off with him. Can you check to see if the animal was found?”

“Yes, doctor.” She hurried off.

The doctor smiled at Rick. “Don’t worry, we’ll find your dog.” He sounded sympathetic, but Rick could tell he was in a hurry. “Now get some rest,” the doctor said before continuing down the aisle.

Rick called out, “Do you know what happened to my slack man? His name was Rafael.”

The doctor turned reluctantly. Rick wanted to say “Never mind,” but the doctor had already started talking. “Rafael didn’t make it. I’m sorry.” Rick waited for more, maybe the cause of death, but all the doctor said was, “He didn’t suffer.” Then he began talking to the next wounded soldier.

Rick felt weird in his head, trying to get it all straight. For one thing, how come he felt worse about Cracker than about Rafael? He lay still and waited as his head cleared. Some guys were playing cards. He finally was able to push himself up. A guy glanced at him.

“Poker?”

“No, thanks.”

Rick lay back, waiting for someone to tell him about Cracker. But hours passed and nobody came.

By the end of the day Rick’s head felt fairly clear. But the clearer his head became, the more he could feel exactly where it was, “it” being the worry about Cracker. It was not in his heart, because that would be his left side. It was in his chest. Maybe it tended toward his left: nah, just his imagination. It all seemed unreal—the hospital, the guys playing poker and laughing. It felt irrelevant or something. What the hell was he doing here? What was everybody thinking? He looked around at the guys playing cards, reading magazines. What did they think? That everything was okay now? That they were gonna go on and have great lives or something?

One of the cardplayers met his eyes. “Hey, bud, wanna play?”

Rick shook his head. “Uh-uh. But thanks.” The guy shrugged, and a couple of them raised their eyebrows at each other, like they thought Rick was
dinky dau.

Rick looked at the guy who’d invited him to play. He felt like he knew the guy inside out, though he’d never met him. Mr. Socializer. That would have been Dan Devine at his high school. Last he’d heard, Devine had been drafted.

Rick still felt the thing in his chest, the ache, the guilt. He wondered whether he should have tied Cracker to his leg. But everything had happened so fast. He went over the ambush in his head, over and over until night fell, and the next day he did the same thing all over again. The other guys in the hospital ignored him.

Someone had sent his bag of stuff to the hospital. He went through it and came upon his bundle of letters. He counted Willie’s: thirty-seven. Jeez, the kid was dedicated. Then the idea hit him. Maybe Willie could help. Anyone who could write thirty-seven letters couldn’t hurt. If they each wrote thirty-seven, that would make seventy-four.

One of the nurses came to help walk him up and down the ward to prevent blood clots and help stretch his tendon. They told him that the first few days he’d be on crutches, then on a cane. But he had to keep moving.

He asked the nurse, “Can I get some stationery? Lots of it.”

“Sure thing. Especially if you promise to keep exercising that leg for the next few weeks. Heel to floor! It’ll keep your tendon stretched out.”

“Deal. I gotta write some letters and find my dog.”

“Oh, I heard about you.” She even stopped to stroke his face. “You poor thing. Don’t worry, hon, I’ll get you all the stationery you want.”

She walked him back to his bed. The guy next to him said, “What, is that some kind of trick for picking up girls?”

Rick didn’t reply.

All that week he wrote to anyone he could think of. Occasionally, he stopped to walk up and down the ward, even on his own with the cane. He knew the faster he recovered, the faster he’d be let out of this place. The nurse who’d first walked him had explained the situation to the other nurses. They got him addresses, contacts. He wrote Willie, explained the situation. He wrote Camel. He wrote his parents. His sister. His sister’s dissertation chair. Twenty-Twenty. His congressman. The nurses’ congressmen. Everyone he could think of. How was that for applying himself? How was that for being a specialist? A dog-finding specialist.

It took him a long time to write each letter, because his handwriting stank and because he’d never done something like this before. In fact, it was kind of embarrassing, because one of the nurses had to show him how to format a letter properly. But it felt good as she leaned over him.

The nurses got so involved, they even had some clerical personnel typing up letters. The other guys in the ward got jealous—how could some guy who was
dinky dau
over a dog be getting all the ladies’ attention? Rick basked in it a little, but mostly he got excited. According to one nurse, he’d mobilized the whole staff about it. If that wasn’t a specialist, there wasn’t any such thing. If that wasn’t applying himself, what was? And the nurses practically competed to be the one to exercise him every day, cooing to him about his dog. He felt a little like his grandfather with the cane, but the girls cooing in his ear sure was nice.

W
HEN
C
RACKER OPENED HER EYES, SHE COULD TELL
it was later than she usually woke up. The pounding in her head was softer now. A few intense beams of sunlight stretched downward through the trees. Everything looked just as she’d figured it had the night before. It looked like many of the jungles she’d seen since she’d come to this place with Rick. Anxiety gripped her hard at the thought of Rick. She got up, stretched, shook off, stretched again, and began to run. She raced through the jungle, even though Rick had taught her never to rush. She had to find him.

Eventually, she needed to stop because she could no longer ignore her thirst. She pushed at rocks and dug at roots, but she didn’t find any water. She smelled the air and also listened to it. She saw a snake and knew to back away. Then she listened again and heard a soft drip of water through the bush to her right. She went that way and found a few drops falling from some rocks. It wasn’t much, but it wet her mouth enough to help her move on.

She felt a little sick but couldn’t stop now. Maybe she was hungry, or maybe it was because she drank from one of those rice paddies the day before. She thought again about how Rick always scolded her when she tried to drink from anywhere but his helmet. But his helmet wasn’t here, and she was thirsty.

But there was another reason she felt sick, and the sick feeling kept growing stronger. She could tell, she just knew, that Rick was no longer where she had last seen him. At the same time she didn’t know where this was. Again she pushed away a feeling that she was passing the same place twice, that maybe she was lost. She paused and whined again, but there was nobody to hear her. She needed to keep going. But which way?

After a while she struck out in the way she felt she must have seen him last. The sun was already setting when she finally arrived.

She slowed down as she neared the place.
Easy.
This was the place that had caused all this trouble in the first place. She peeked out of the jungle and saw people just leaving the field. She crouched down so they wouldn’t see her—humans here seemed to get quite excited when they did. She could smell freshly dug dirt, and she could smell decaying bodies underneath that dirt. But no matter how much she concentrated, she couldn’t smell Rick.

There were other smells, however, that interested her. The smell of chickens, for instance. She lay down and waited for darkness. But when darkness fell, a bunch of men dressed in black went through the homes talking to people. Sometimes she heard shouting or a gunshot. When the men left, the village was silent of human sounds. Yet she sensed that people were awake. She waited more.

After the men had been gone a long while, she crept along the edge of the field and stopped at a small house. There were chickens underneath, and they were sleeping. She lunged and grabbed one, setting off a ruckus of chickens and pigs and humans and who knew what else. She just ran and ran, back into the jungle with the chicken in her mouth. She knew nobody would catch her. She heard human voices crying after her.

She ripped into the chicken’s throat and ate the insides and even some of the feathers. The feeling of ripping into this chicken flooded her with energy. She loved the taste of blood. For a moment she forgot everything else in the world except the feeling of life flooding through her. She crunched on the bones, and when she was finished, she felt a little disappointed to have no more food. She always felt that way when she finished eating. But she was stronger than before.

She went deeper into the forest and fell asleep. In the morning she felt better. The pounding had almost gone away. She felt confidence returning. She knew what to do: head back to where she lived with Rick. The trucks they’d come in had made a clear path through the jungle. People were already using the path, but whenever she saw or heard a person, she simply stepped off the path and waited until they went by. Then she moved again. Later, when there was no jungle to hide her, she had only a small window of time to travel if she wanted to avoid humans. She didn’t want to wait, but she knew she had to. At night there seemed to be more human activity than during the days. During the day the humans worked in the fields, but at night she saw a different type of person, the ones with guns kind of like Rick’s. They were everywhere at night. Some wore uniforms and some didn’t.

Every so often she passed a hole in the ground that reminded her of the hole she’d been in when she was captured, and she would run fast from the hole. Once, she passed another village and waited until everybody was asleep before stealing a chicken again and running off to eat it. Then she ran until early morning, when people began waking up.