Cracker! (25 page)

Sitting down always made people happy!

The vet took her to another room and stuck yet another sharp thing into her. She wondered why some of these humans liked to stick sharp things in her. She wondered where Rick was. She wondered if he was coming for her…. She wondered if anyone would feed her soon…. She wondered …

R
ICK WAS FLYING INTO
O’H
ARE, WHERE HIS PARENTS
would be meeting him. It was a commercial flight, but there were several DEROSing vets on board. He’d decided to wear his uniform, like a couple of the others. When Rick’s plane was just about to touch down in Chicago, the captain came on the plane’s P.A. system. “Welcome home to our brave soldiers from Vietnam. We’d like to ensure your well-being and have been asked to remind you that to avoid incident over your status as Vietnam veterans, you are advised to remove your uniforms before you deplane or soon thereafter. In the meantime, the temperature in Chicago is a chilly 28 degrees, with winds at twenty miles per hour. We’re expecting to touch down a few minutes early. It’s been a pleasure being your pilot.”

The soldiers all looked at one another. Rick didn’t even have an extra set of clothes with him. He was so worried about Cracker that he hadn’t even thought about politics. He saw one guy grab his bag from the overhead compartment and take it into the lavatory, emerging a few minutes later in civvies.

Rick hadn’t even thought of civvies. Cracker was all that mattered. He thought,
This is what time does. It changes what matters.
He smiled ruefully at himself, Rick the Philosopher. Rick knew that some things would stick through time. This Cracker thing wouldn’t go away, ever.

As the plane closed in on land, the sun hung in some strange spot, creating the illusion that the streets below were like mirrors or something. Must have had something to do with the sun reflecting off the tops of the cars, Rick figured. As the plane lowered, he saw its shadow to one side on the ground, first small and then getting larger. It seemed like the ghost of Cracker running alongside the plane but finally merging with the plane. By the time they landed, it looked like what it was: just a simple shadow.

Rick saw neatly cut grass edging the runway. Weird, after all that elephant grass in Nam.

The ache. It had gotten worse every mile he’d traveled farther away from Vietnam. When your heart belonged somewhere different from where your body was, it made everything depressing. Rick the Philosopher again.

As he deplaned in Chicago, he held his head high. Walking away from the plane he limped a bit—what he pictured as a tough guy’s limp. He tried to close off his inner ear like a dog could, but sometimes something broke through. Like a couple walking together but clearly arguing, the woman stomping two feet in front, occasionally turning to the man and hissing something at him. The guy was keeping his face blank. Rick could relate to that. He kept his face blank now. A nice thing broke through too, almost made him smile. A happy kid saying, “Mom, what’s the opposite of nobody being there?” Mom answering, “One person being there.” “No,” another of her kids said. “The opposite would be nobody being there.
Mo-o-om
, the opposite would be nobody being there.”

Then he spotted his parents and grandparents waiting for him at the gate. His feeling of joy was accompanied by a feeling of isolation. He knew they wouldn’t understand him anymore. He felt as if the world were divided between those who had been to Nam and those who hadn’t.

“Rick!”

Rick rushed over. “Mom. Dad. Hey, Grandpa, Grandma.” Everybody hugged him.

“I brought you extra clothes,” said his mother. “I thought you might not have any.”

The soldiers who weren’t being met by anyone looked around tentatively. “Baby killer!” a woman called out. Somebody was talking to
Rick.
Several people glared his way.

“You talking to
me?
” he snapped back.

“Let’s get you changed,” his father said. “It’s not worth fighting over. You’d have to fight half the country.”

Rick changed in the bathroom. When he emerged, nobody glared at him anymore. A part of him wanted to put his uniform back on. He wasn’t scared to fight half the country. But instead, he quietly followed his dad. When they got in the car, he immediately asked, “So, do you know if they heard anything about my dog?”

His father looked straight into his eyes. “Sorry, son” was all he said. And Rick could tell he really was.

And then he was home. Pancakes, lace on windows. He tried to feel happy to be here, but the thing that had been in his chest was in his stomach now. What used to seem like the real world now seemed like a fake. He wrote more letters but without the same fervor. He even wrote to the principal at his old high school. You never knew who might help.

He heard nothing for a few weeks. Many nights he sat alone on a lawn chair out back, staring at the streetlamps rising from the next street. His parents kept reminding him that he needed to start training to take over the store someday.

The family home had a great backyard. Trees everywhere. As a kid, he’d loved the sound of the branches tapping the windows. But lately he would lie lonely in bed, listening to the branches hit his window during an occasional breeze and feeling annoyed by the sound. So his math teacher had been wrong all along. This was what applying yourself all came down to: silence, then wind and the tapping of branches. Even he had to smile at that. Pretty poetic, if he did say so himself.

One night at dinner his dad said, “So, what about a job? You going to spend the rest of your life writing letters about a dead dog?”

Rick could have answered a lot of things, but he didn’t answer at all. Then he said, “I talked to my buddy John about a job at his security firm.” He paused. “I’m gonna get my own place.”

His mother looked aghast, but he knew he couldn’t stay here. He’d been to Vietnam. He didn’t belong in a house with lace curtains.

Over the past weeks Rick had imagined he’d heard the phone ring so many times that it took him a moment to realize that it really was ringing now. At first nobody moved. Then Rick pushed up off his chair and ran to the kitchen phone. “Hello?”

R
ICK COULD HARDLY HEAR THE VOICE ON THE OTHER
end of the line. “Who? What?” He could tell that the caller was shouting, but he still couldn’t quite make out what he was saying. But it sounded like—could it be?—Cody. The static suddenly cleared.

“… I said, it’s Cody!”

“Cody! Are you back?”

“I’m DEROSing next week. Did you hear what I said?”

“You’re DEROSing next week. Hey, congratulations.”

“No, what I said before that. They found her. They found Cracker alive. She’s shipping home!”

“What?!”

“They’re shipping about two hundred of the dogs back. Cracker’s shipping into O’Hare. You got a pen? Let me give you the flight number. There’s another guy waiting for the phone. Hello?”

Rick was already running to the drawer where they kept the pens, on the other side of the room. He shouted to his family staring at him from the table. “They got her! She’s shipping back! Cracker’s coming home!” Damn, what if Cody hung up? He ran back and snatched up the phone.

“Cody?”

“Yeah, you ready?”

“Yeah.” His hands quivered as Cody spoke.
Damn, damn, damn!
The pen didn’t work. He threw it down. “Hold on.” He ran back to the drawer and pulled out a handful of pens. “Go.”

Cody gave him the flight information. Rick’s heart pounded as hard as it had when he’d been under contact. His handwriting looked like he had some kind of shaking disease. He asked Cody to repeat the information, just to make sure he had it down correctly.

As Cody told him the details again, Rick noticed something funny in Cody’s voice. His own happiness faded slightly. “Did Bruno make it?”

“Nah,” Cody said, so softly Rick almost didn’t hear. “The dogs who weren’t put to sleep were given to the South Vietnamese Army. Some other dogs got put down, but I begged for Bruno’s life. Now I think she would have been better off put to sleep. The ARVN probably …” He didn’t finish, but Rick knew what he was thinking: They probably ate or killed Bruno. Rick could hear the huge effort in Cody’s voice as he struggled to say, “Nobody knows what happened to them after we gave them away.” Another pause. “I played with him all day.” He choked up. “We played on the obstacle course. Cracker was there. I didn’t call you sooner because I didn’t know if she was going to make it … so many of them went down.”

“I’m sorry,” said Rick. “I’m really sorry.”

“Hey, I’m happy for you.” But Rick got the feeling that Cody would never be the same kind of happy that he’d been a year ago.

“I gotta go,” Cody said. “See you back in the world.”

“Definitely,” Rick said.

The phone clicked dead.

Rick took in a breath.

That night Rick listened to the scraping branches. They sounded different from yesterday. Less lonely. He sat up, looked at his clock. Ten thirty p.m.
So what?
He went through his drawer of letters, found one from Willie with his phone number in it. Rick’s own parents had been in bed for half an hour.

He dialed a number, and a man answered, sounding annoyed. “Hello?”

A
WEEK LATER
R
ICK WAS STANDING IN HIS
uniform in the airport in Chicago, waiting for a crate to be unloaded in the baggage area. Who knew why it took a whole week to process Cracker? He was probably lucky it had taken such a short time, actually. They probably could have quarantined her for half a year if they’d wanted. But apparently, Twenty’s uncle had a lot of pull.

For some reason, Rick felt he owed it to Cracker to wear his uniform. Probably a
dinky dau
idea, but so far there’d been just a few glares. A couple of other guys in uniform were also waiting for their baggage one carousel down. He nodded at them, and they nodded back.

A moment later he saw one of them in a scuffle with a civilian. He limped over to help, but some other people had already broken up the fight.

As he returned to his carousel, he spotted a boy, a woman, and a man running toward two guys who were setting down a dog crate. He hurried toward them and heard the boy shouting with despair.

“No! Oh no!” the boy called out as he stared into the crate. Rick reached the crate and knelt down.

“Something’s wrong with her!” cried the boy.

Rick peered inside: It was her! For a second his blood seemed to stop flowing. She lay on her side, not visibly breathing. But then he saw her ribs expand. She was just tranquilized, probably a little overtranquilized. He yanked open the gate.

Cracker’s head hurt, and she felt sleepy. It seemed she’d been sleeping for a long, long time. She’d dreamed about the jungle, about Rick, about lizards, about rats. But now she smelled something … something important … very important.
Wiener!
She opened her eyes and staggered out of the cage, falling into Rick’s arms.

She weakly pushed her head into his. Felt nice. Felt wonderful.

Twenty-Twenty, Camel, everybody had come through for Rick. Apparently, his father had even made some calls. Even that crazy fart U-Haul had made some calls—Rick had heard that from Twenty. As far as he knew, he was the only dog handler in the entire U.S. Army who had gotten his dog back. Fewer than two hundred dogs had escaped death, and all but Cracker were going to remain in the service until they died of old age.

His first words to Cracker were, “Want a wiener, nuthead?”

She wagged her tail, and he handed her a whole wiener at once. Gulp! One less wiener in the world!

Then Rick remembered the boy beside him. It had to be Willie.

He stood up and shook hands with Willie. “Thanks for coming.”

“Thanks for calling me!”

Cracker wobbled confusedly for a moment as Willie knelt down to hold her. Wait a second … she belonged to Rick now. She wanted Rick.

“You think you can carry the crate to my car?” Rick asked. “I’ll carry Cracker.”

“Sure!”

Rick looked at Cracker. She’d lost a lot of weight, but she still had to weigh about ninety. Could he carry that much? He was pretty much rehabbed, but once in a while when he put too much weight on his leg, pain stabbed through it. He thought of Camel and told himself,
I
will
do it.
He would carry her, even with his weak leg. He took in a breath, lifted Cracker, and winced as the weight fell on his bad leg. “Ahhh,” he moaned.

“You want me to help?” Willie asked.

“No, I’m cool.”

As he walked, he tried—unsuccessfully, he knew—to keep from limping, to keep up that tough veneer. But as he carried her, he knew he didn’t look tough, and he knew people were staring, and he knew he didn’t give a can of beans what they thought. Man, she was still heavy.

Willie walked alongside him, his dad helping him tote the dog crate. “Will you let me come visit you sometimes?” the boy asked.