Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel (18 page)

The last time Pappy Stagg and Cubby Cardiff had been together they’d talked old times. And now Cubby Cardiff was trying his damndest not to talk about old debts. The two master sergeants were quite obviously over the hill. Wolverine spoke up with the brash voice of youth.

“Three to one says he’s back before Mopar. Either one of you old coots feels like making any odds of your own, I’m ready to hear them. If not, just shut up and put your money down. Three to one, he’ll be back before Mopar.”

Cubby Cardiff didn’t feel right turning down an honest wager, but first he had to ask who Mopar was.

“Sergeant Wolverine’s pointman,” explained Pappy Stagg. “He’s on extension leave.”

“Pointman, you say? Another one of them Spec Four hippies, I bet.” Cubby Cardiff scratched the rash on his throat and thought about the bet. There was just no way of telling. A dog like that—he didn’t weigh much, didn’t eat much, hardly ever broke out barking, and he didn’t trust indigenous personnel—plus, to top it off, he was born with a camouflage suit … A dog like that just might have a chance to make it back.

“Three to one, young Staff Sergeant?” Cubby Cardiff was magnanimous. “I don’t need them long odds. Hell, I’ll take you head-on, even! How’s that sound? Even odds he makes it back before your pointman.”

It was a fair bet for both of them, and they agreed on fifty dollars, held on each man’s honor. Both of them being sticklers for prior coordination, there was no argument when Pappy suggested that the winner was to claim his money only on Mopar’s return, even if Tiger beat him back. Cubby Cardiff needed the money to make up, in part, for last night’s losses. And Wolverine needed to have Tiger back for the sake of his pointman’s morale and his own peace of mind. But Pappy Stagg didn’t need anything much just then, so he stayed neutral.

“Sorry, troops,” he said. “I am not a gambling man.” He reached over for his cup and put down his pipe, then leaned back in his chair and took a sip of coffee. “That’s one of my Lurps wandering around out there without a radio or a weapon, and I don’t think it ought to be a matter of personal gain.”

Wolverine knew that Pappy was joking. But old Cubby Cardiff knew Pappy—had known him for almost twenty years—and he held back his smile. Beneath all his slow ways and easy manner, the old buzzard was taking things altogether too seriously, and Cubby Cardiff wondered if Pappy Stagg was finally going soft and losing his edge.

Two days before Christmas an enormous cardboard box full of gospel tracts and Christian comic books arrived in the Lurp platoon. Since the box had been addressed to the entire platoon, Pappy Stagg turned a deaf ear to Wolverine’s pleas that the whole mess be taken up to the Two Shop, run through the paper shredder, and burned. Wolverine had been careful to hide his own mail from everyone but Pappy and Sergeant Johnson, and now he was worried that someone would link him to Sister Janice Wolverton, who was head librarian of the Full Gospel Book Club and Tract Society, and whose name and photograph appeared on some of the tracts. He needn’t have worried. Except for one especially lurid comic about the Book of Revelation and the rise of the Anti-Christ, all the rest of the propaganda ended up, unread, in the trash barrels. Wolverine’s good name and reputation were safe.

Still, for the next four nights, as he sat in ambush outside the base camp perimeter, guarding against enemy sappers and scouting parties, Wolverine was tempted to pray that someone—anyone, even a lost ARVN or a forgetful farmer—would come strolling through his kill zone and give him the satisfaction of a holiday body count. But nobody came. The local VC had no reason to approach the perimeter, for they had already memorized every foot of it. And the main-force VC and NVA were staying out in the mountains where they belonged, temporarily at peace with everyone but each other, because most of the American troops had been pulled back to firebases and base camps on holiday stand-down, and the South Vietnamese Army wasn’t likely to go out looking for trouble on its own.

It was an idiotic way to fight a war, and Wolverine had trouble believing that either side really trusted the other to honor what Pappy Stagg called “an unofficial, limited, annual holiday ceasefire.” But there certainly didn’t seem to be much going on anywhere in the Louc Ma area. Nothing, that is, but the Lurp platoon’s fruitless ambush patrols. All considerations of strategy aside, Wolverine thought it downright chickenshit of the NVA to play along with a Christmas cease-fire. The only real action anywhere in the area was an impromptu midnight sky show of red and green starcluster flares fired up over the bunker line on Christmas Eve, and that was hardly the sort of thing Wolverine had stayed in the Army to see.

The first week of the new year found Wolverine out on a reconnaissance mission with Team Two-Two, carrying second radio in place of Spec Four Schultz, who was on leave in Bangkok visiting his girlfriend, who worked in a bar, but was selective and swore she wasn’t really a whore because she couldn’t come with anyone she didn’t like. After four days on a ridgeline overlooking the Aloe Valley, Wolverine returned to the compound convinced that Two-Two’s team leader was a dangerous glory hound. The dude had an unshakable confidence that nothing bad could happen to him as long as he maintained commo with the relay team and kept faith in himself as an American fighting man, because American fighting men—even non-Airborne Legs—were “more than the equal of any two-bit gook guerillas.” He was crazy. It was only Wolverine’s restraining presence that had kept him from opening up on a full platoon of NVA that came slogging past their position the third morning on the mission, and it was easy to imagine him taking on a whole regiment if he stumbled across one.

Wolverine was determined to lure a couple of men from Two-Two to his own team. They seemed to be good men—all of them but the TL—and it was a shame to think they’d probably get themselves killed before their team leader rotated back to the States.

When the postmission debriefing was finished, Wolverine hung around to talk to Pappy Stagg, and after a few minutes of discussion, Pappy agreed to let Wolverine have Schultz when he returned from leave.

O
N THE SEVENTH DAY
of the new year, Marvel Kim returned from Recondo School wearing spotted Korean Army camouflage fatigues, rubber-soled batta boots, and a flat-top Korean Army soft cap with two little tabs of luminous tape, like captain’s bars, on the back. His cheeks and forearms were crisscrossed with thorn cuts, he’d lost weight, and there, in plain sight, lashed haft down to his left web-gear strap, was a slim new Gerber Mark II commando dagger.

Gonzales was out on radio relay, Tiger was still on his Escape and Evasion route from the Special Forces camp, and Mopar was still on leave, so it fell to Wolverine to formally welcome Marvel back to the team. Marvel was already down in the bunker in his spotted cammies, blushing because Pappy Stagg had just told him that he had been put in for a medal of some sort. When Marvel saw Wolverine he blushed even deeper, glanced down at his boots, then broke into a sheepish grin and greeted him with a polite nod, but didn’t say a word, for Pappy was still talking and Marvel never interrupted anyone who outranked him.

“You did me proud, Spec Four Kim, and I’m damn glad you were there when Sergeant Stabo needed you. Stabo’s as tough as a fireplug, and I’m sure he’ll come through all right, but according to the sergeant major, he’d have gone under for sure if you hadn’t had your shit in order. You did good work, Kim—both in training and on the graduation mission, when Stabo got hit. I reckon we’ll be getting you and your partner Mopar some sergeant’s stripes any day now. Go on, help yourself to some coffee.”

Wolverine felt like an intruder. Pappy had mentioned something about Marvel running into a little contact on his Recondo School graduation mission, but he’d said nothing about a medal, nor about Sergeant Stabo, whoever he was. And Pappy hadn’t said anything to Wolverine about Marvel winning the Recondo dagger, although the sergeant major of the Recondo School surely must have told him about that, too.

“Get me a cup too, why don’t you, Kim,” said Wolverine. “I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow, but it’s good to have you back.” Wolverine glanced at Pappy, then nodded in Marvel’s direction. “See you got yourself a Gerber toothpick there, Kim. Nice knife, huh? You gonna send it home to mother, or just keep it here and hide it from Mopar?”

Marvel shook his head and touched the haft of his dagger for luck. “Neither one, Sarge. You see, it turns out I’m immune to the curse because I’m Korean, so I don’t have anything to hide. The dagger stays on my web gear. It’s my field knife now. It’d be dangerous to leave it back in the rear when I go out in the field, don’t you think?”

Pappy Stagg had little tolerance for superstitious talk of this sort. A soldier had a right to his jinxes and good luck charms, but they weren’t a fit subject of conversation in a combat zone. He frowned slightly, gave Wolverine a warning look, and motioned for Marvel to pull up a chair close to the operations desk.

“Sit down, Kim,” he said. “I’ve got some bad news for you.”

Marvel handed Wolverine his cup, and holding his own carefully to keep from spilling any coffee on his Korean fatigues, pulled up a chair and sat down.

Pappy Stagg sighed. “Tiger’s gone,” he said. “I reckon it was my fault, and I don’t mind you telling Mopar it was. Figure it’s best to have you break the news to him. I know him and that pup was close. Poor kid probably never had a dog of his own when he was growing up. But this is a war, Kim, and it just isn’t proper for a man to be moping around over a dog when there’s men getting killed. I’ll tell you everything I know about the situation, but it’s probably best to let you talk to Mopar when he gets back. I don’t want none of this affecting his morale, and you can see to that better than anyone.”

Wolverine sipped his coffee and listened in angry silence as Pappy told of taking Tiger to the Special Forces camp and repeated Cubby Cardiff’s version of his subsequent escape through Old Nick Hogg’s perimeter. It just wasn’t right for a platoon sergeant—and an E-8 platoon sergeant at that!—to elbow in on a team leader’s job this way. If Pappy Stagg was so damned concerned about Mopar’s morale, why didn’t he wait and break the news himself? Wolverine decided that the old buzzard must be getting senile to jump the chain of command this way. And he was getting soft, too, caring so much about a camp-following mutt and some young Spec Four’s morale. The old Pappy Stagg, the Pappy Stagg Wolverine remembered from his first tour in Vietnam, wouldn’t have cared two farts in a shitstorm about either one. And if he had cared, he’d never have let on that he did.

Wolverine finished his coffee and left the operations bunker feeling low and useless. Hell,
he
was team leader—Pappy should have let him talk to Marvel first.

Marvel Kim had always been a model son. Or at least his mother thought he was a model son—but then, there’s a lot that mothers never know. She didn’t know that before his father’s death Marvel had planned to become a gynecologist so that he could charge people outrageous fees to examine the private parts of their wives and daughters. She knew that he’d wanted to become a doctor, but that was all.

She had always been proud of his honor-roll grades, proud of his devotion to the high school science club, and though it saddened her to see his grades plummet after his father’s death, she was almost as proud of the way he took over his father’s place in the little Oriental grocery—working before and after school each day with never a complaint—as she had been of his good grades. He had always been a good boy, and she was very sad when it became clear that he would never be a doctor, for she knew he would have been a good one. But times were hard. People were losing their taste for the good food of their ancestral lands, and even with Marvel’s help the grocery wasn’t doing well. There would be no money for college and medical school.

Marvel didn’t seem to mind. He told his mother he was content to work in the store, and for the first couple of years it was true. He hadn’t really wanted to be a doctor. He’d only wanted to be paid to look at women’s private parts. And as he had gathered a collection of pornographic Swedish magazines, which he kept hidden under his mattress, gynecology was no longer as tempting a trade as it once had seemed, for he knew he could look at cunts and clits and labes and hair without the hassle of college and medical school. Of course, his mother knew nothing of the magazines, and so she continued to believe that Marvel was heartbroken about losing his chance to become a doctor.

If he hadn’t been drafted a few months out of high school, Marvel might have stayed at home forever, running the grocery by day, pumping gas at night, and jealously guarding the virtue of his cute little sisters from the healthy lusts of the neighborhood Samoans. But the draft notice called him away from that battle by pulling him out of the neighborhood and off the island. The Army offered him a chance to see the American mainland for the first time. But more than that, it offered him an escape from a life of almost unbearable boredom and drudgery, an escape from the dull life of a dutiful son going nowhere. His mother had to wipe away a few tears when she saw him off at the bus station, and Marvel had to struggle to keep a solemn face long enough to get on the bus. But once the bus pulled out, he lost his composure, and rode off to the Army dancing in his seat and grinning like the happiest idiot in the State of Hawaii.

It was only after basic training, when he received orders for Advanced Infantry Training and saw that he’d be going to war, that Marvel decided to volunteer for the Airborne. Jump pay was fifty-five dollars a month—enough for hamburgers, razor blades, toothpaste, and beer—and with that to tide him over, he could afford to send his entire base pay home. That might not have been enough motivation to get a man through Jump School, but it was enough financial justification to ease his conscience about volunteering.

Of course, there was more to going Airborne than jump pay, and Marvel would be the first to admit it. He had grown up with the same World War Two movies as everyone else, and it was obvious to him that paratroopers were the sort of men who made their own luck in this life.