Strays Page 12

  He looked Billy square in the eyes and told him, “I got one more plan left in me.”

  Billy was about to ask him what when Double O turned on his heels and jogged over to the porch to speak to the woman. As they talked, he gestured back at Chuck, explaining something to her. She nodded and held her boy close against her side, her arm wrapped around his shoulder, more affectionate than afraid.

  “What could Double O be up to?” Doc wondered. “We don’t have time for another ping-pong table plan … Those marines are going to be too far away to see us if we don’t set off that flare soon.”

  “I think I know …” Billy said. “I think I get it.”

  Double O came trotting back over to them across the grass. “We’re all set,” he said. “We’ve got to carry Chuck back across the bridge. We’ll shoot the flare and then pop the smoke grenade over there. Ajax won’t follow us.”

  “He won’t?” Doc raised an eyebrow.

  “No,” said Double O. “He’s afraid of the bridge without Chuck holding him … and anyway, he’s got a new family now.”

  He looked back at the woman and the boy, walking slowly across the grass to where Chuck and Ajax were lying. Ajax looked up as they approached. The woman hung back, and the boy stepped forward. Ajax whimpered again, but his tail wagged. The boy put his hand out, and Ajax sniffed toward it. Then he walked to the boy, licked his hand, and then stepped up to lick his face. His weight knocked the boy over, and the boy let out a surprised gasp; it sounded like a yelp.

  “Play nice, Ajax,” Chuck murmured, his eyes still shut. “You’re not a soldier here.”

  Chuck still held the leash in his hand, but his grip relaxed. Ajax stepped away to play with the boy, and they rolled together on the grass, just behind Chuck’s head.

  “Good boy,” Chuck muttered, listening to the grunts and whines of his dog at play. He didn’t turn his head to look. He couldn’t. But in his half-dream, he could see Ajax running through the fields around the grand mansion, playing with a pack of dogs, leaping and bounding, no worries about land mines or punji stakes or missions or foxholes. Just a dog being a dog. He smiled though his lips cracked. “Good boy,” he repeated.

  Double O and Billy Beans and Doc came over to him. Doc bent down to check his pulse again and to make sure he was still breathing.

  “We gotta carry you back across,” said Double O.

  “Frenchman likes his privacy, huh?” Chuck asked.

  “That’s right,” said Doc. “The Frenchman likes his, uh, privacy. We’ve got to get going.”

  “You want to say good-bye to Ajax?” Billy whispered.

  “Nah,” said Chuck. “I don’t want to make it harder for him. Just let him play with the other dogs.”

  The guys shared a look at one another, but they didn’t correct Chuck.

  “He wouldn’t understand good-bye.” Chuck kept talking, more to himself than the others. “He knows I love him. He knows.”

  As they lifted him up in his poncho, his eyes fluttered open for a moment. “He having fun?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” said Double O, looking back at the boy playing with Ajax. He wasn’t lying. The boy was laughing. Ajax had rolled onto his back in the grass, and his legs were kicking up into the air, dancing crazily at the sky, his tongue hanging out. It even looked a bit like the dog was laughing. “Ajax having fun,” Double O said.

  The boy’s mother waved. She had made a promise. She and her son were going to save Ajax. She had sworn it, and Double O believed her.

  “The dog saved my son’s life,” she had said.

  Ajax would be okay. At least, he would be as okay as they could make him. He would be loved, which is the best anyone could hope for, and no small thing. Everyone should be so lucky.

  As the soldiers made their wary way over the rickety bridge, Chuck could feel it swaying in the breeze. He could hear the river rushing below and the wood creaking under their weight, the snap of a loose plank and Doc cursing, the jolt as he steadied himself again. Chuck listened carefully for the sounds behind those sounds, for the sounds from the far bank of the river. He couldn’t hear any more barking.

  He had imagined the Frenchman’s place would be a riot of dogs barking, like a dog pound he’d once visited with his mom when he was young, trying to convince her to let him get a dog. The plan had backfired. All the barking had only confirmed his mother’s belief that dogs were loud, unruly creatures.

  As they set him down on the opposite side, Chuck felt himself growing very tired. He wanted to lift his arm to wave or call out to his dog, one last good-bye, but he couldn’t.

  “Here goes nothing,” he heard Doc say, and then he heard the hiss of a flare and the high whistle as it raced across the sky. There was a pop when it exploded, and even through closed eyes, Chuck could sense the sudden brightness above.

  He heard Ajax bark on the far riverbank, a loud series of barks, sharp and high, one after the other.

  Double O looked back and signaled for the woman, who knew it was time. She urged the boy to take the leash and lead Ajax away. They couldn’t be there when the rest of the Americans arrived. The dog was stolen military property, after all.

  Step by step, the boy pulled at Ajax, urging him, comforting him, begging him, and step by step, Ajax moved backward, away from the river. Eventually, he relaxed and trotted along with the boy toward a path that continued deeper into the hills and into the jungle. Just before they disappeared around the corner, Ajax looked back and pointed his nose in Chuck’s direction across the water. His brown snout, flecked with white, worked at the air, sucking in scent. He raised his right front paw and he barked once.

  The boy gave a gentle tug on the leash and Ajax turned, following, and they were gone.

  Doc knelt down beside Chuck, checking his bandages, measuring his pulse over and over. There wasn’t much more he could do.

  “I don’t hear the dogs,” said Chuck, his voice just barely coming out at all.

  “Oh.” Doc knew he had to tell Chuck something.

  “They went inside.” Billy knelt down, coming to Doc’s rescue. “Time to eat, you know?”

  “Yeah …” said Chuck dreamily. “To eat.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Doc, thinking back on the time Chuck had called him out during their ping-pong table plan. This felt so similar, but so much more serious.

  “He get along with the other dogs?” Chuck’s brow was beaded with sweat. The effort to speak was wearing him out.

  “You should see it.” Double O squatted down beside the other two, resting his hand carefully on Chuck’s good shoulder. “Ajax has the run of that place. He’s already top dog, you know? The others are already following him around.”

  Double O knew he was lying now, but sometimes a lie was the kindest thing. The truth could come later.

  “Yeah.” Chuck’s cracked lips broke out into a smile. “That’s Ajax …”

  He couldn’t find the strength to say anything more. He just lay there with his eyes closed, imagining Ajax running on the lawn of the mansion, eating his food from the Frenchman’s porcelain plates and drinking from his crystal goblets, tracking muddy paw prints all over the marble floors and tearing up the fancy French furniture. He pictured Ajax curling up at night right on top of the soft mattress of a grand antique bed, lying stretched out so no other dogs could get on, and snoring loud enough through that snout of his to scare off an entire battalion.

  As he lay there dreaming, he could hear the snores of his dog. The snores began to sound like the distant whine of a helicopter’s engines, growing louder and louder. Chuck heard voices now, American voices, loud, weary, tough, and angry voices. He heard Doc explaining something and Double O defiant and Billy just trying to get a word in. A radio crackled, and Chuck knew he wasn’t dreaming anymore. The helicopter roar became deafening, and Chuck felt himself being lifted from the ground and rushed forward, set down on the hard metal floor of a chopper.

  “You’re gonna be okay, soldier,” someone said to
him, but it was a voice he didn’t know.

  He strained his eyes open and glanced back, through a choppy sea of camouflage helmets and tired faces, to see Billy and Double O and Doc looking his way, worry etched across all their foreheads, and beyond them he saw just the top of the white marble mansion poking through the trees. He tried to take it all in, to remember the place as much as he could. He sucked in air through his nose — a deep snort — and he tried to hold the smell, over all the engine smells and the sweat smells and the fear, to capture the memory of this place, just as Ajax would have, but his nose wasn’t up to it, and he gasped for breath and felt the helicopter lurch upward.

  Heavy hands held him down and stuck a needle in his arm.

  He feared he would never be able to find this place again. Already, he wasn’t sure if it had been a dream all along.

  He tilted his head for one last look at the mansion as they rose over the treetops, but he was tilted at the wrong angle, looking up and away, out the side door and at the gray sky above instead of down at the river and the jungle and Ajax’s new home.

  “Good-bye, old friend,” he whispered anyway, up at the sky, and he could swear over the roar of the helicopter that he heard the gleeful barks of a whole pack of dogs, running free, and Ajax barking louder than any of them.

  Most of the young tourists weren’t even looking up from their handheld video games or their music pods or their tiny little telephones. They didn’t pay much attention to the shiny black wall in front of them, etched with thousands of names. School groups filed past as their teachers tried to keep the children’s chatter to a respectful level of quiet.

  “This is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall,” a teacher told her class. “It honors members of the United States armed services who served their country and died in Vietnam between 1959 and 1975. Each name on the wall is listed by the year that service member lost his life. There are 58,272 names on the wall, including those of eight women.”

  “What does the cross next to some of the names mean?” a girl called out.

  “Please, raise your hands,” the teacher said. The girl rolled her eyes but raised her hand.

  “What does the cross next to some of the names mean?” she repeated. “Some of the names have diamonds and some have crosses.”

  “The cross means that the soldier went missing in action during the war. No one knows for sure what happened to many of these young men. A diamond next to a name indicates that the person was killed in action.”

  The girl nodded and lowered her hand.

  “Come along,” the teacher urged. “We still have to see the Lincoln Memorial before lunch!” The class scurried on. As they went, the girl ran her fingers briefly along the black stone wall, letting the names flow beneath her fingertips like a rushing river as she followed the path with the rest of her class.

  On the ground at the foot of the memorial wall, visitors had laid all sorts of items: flowers and flags, prayer cards and photos, even a pair of boots.

  A gray-haired man in a flannel shirt and crisp blue jeans stood close to the wall, running his pencil back and forth over a piece of paper to make a rubbing of a name carved into the shining stone.

  When he was done, he looked down at the name with the diamond beside it, exhaled, then folded the paper and put it carefully in his pocket, wincing slightly as he shifted his weight onto his bad leg. The man in the expensive suit standing beside him handed him back his cane, and he leaned on it with a feeling of relief and disappointment.

  “Leg gets worse every year,” Chuck said, feeling the worn rubber grip of his cane against his palm. The pain in his hip had followed him from Vietnam to the military hospital in Japan, back to the States and through his discharge from the army. It stuck with him when he started his business and when he danced with his wife at their wedding, through his children’s graduations from high school and college and the birth of his grandchildren. It was with him today, standing in front of the memorial wall in Washington, DC.

  “Nothing fun about getting old,” said Raymond Withers, running his hand along the top of his bald head.

  “You seem to be doing okay, Congressman Withers,” said Chuck. “Is it against the law to call you Double O?”

  “Ha!” the man Chuck knew as Double O laughed. “Since when do you care about the law?”

  “Since your understanding of it got us all out of trouble back in the war,” Chuck answered him.

  It was true. If it hadn’t been for Double O’s quick thinking and even quicker reading on the law, Chuck, Billy, Doc, and Double O would have all been court-martialed and thrown in jail for running off with Ajax during the war in Vietnam. But Double O had talked their way out of it.

  It helped that the army was tired of scandal and didn’t want the story of what happened to all their heroic dogs running in newspapers across the country. They swept the whole thing under the rug, kept it quiet, and like so much that had happened during that war, it wasn’t talked about again.

  Now the two old friends watched as young men in desert camouflage stood with their fathers and grandfathers, searching out names on the memorial wall, listening to the hard-won wisdom of old soldiers, and nodding as if they understood. Maybe some of them did.

  It was their generation’s turn to fight the wars that the generations before them no longer could. Double O watched them with sadness and with pride. He’d been so angry at the government back when he was their age, and now here he was, over forty years later, and he was the government, an elected congressman. Who would have thought?

  “Billy’s late,” said Chuck, looking at his watch and then looking up at the wall. All the names. Some of them he’d known. Most of them he hadn’t.

  “Here he comes now,” said Double O, pointing behind him.

  Chuck turned and saw Billy strolling down the path along the wall, his short beard neatly trimmed, his hair thick and dark, not a speck of gray in it. He waved happily as he approached.

  “The famous author arrives at last,” Double O called out, hugging Billy the moment he reached them. Chuck did the same. “I read your latest novel,” Double O announced, “and I think the critics got it all wrong.”

  “But the critics loved it,” Billy answered him.

  “Oh, I know,” said Double O.

  Billy frowned, and then Double O broke out into a big smile and let out a deep belly laugh.

  “Forty years later, and you two are still driving each other crazy,” sighed Chuck.

  “What else are friends for?” said Double O.

  “Well, I thought it was a beautiful book,” said Chuck. “Even if you got most of the facts wrong.”

  “It’s a story,” said Billy. “The facts don’t all need to be right for the story to be true. Sometimes, it’s the facts that get in the way of truth.”

  “Deep thoughts, Billy. Real deep,” said Double O.

  They all turned to consider what Billy had said and to look at the wall in silent thought for a moment. Chuck pulled the folded paper from his pocket and handed it to Billy, who unfolded it and read the pencil rubbing of the name: Robert Malloy.

  “They should have put Doc on there,” said Billy.

  “You know how many Docs there were in the US Army?” said Double O. “The wall would have to be twice as large to make all those nicknames fit.”

  “Maybe it should be twice as large,” said Billy. He studied his own reflection in it, looking through the thousands of names at himself in the blazer and khaki pants that Nancy had packed for him. He would have just shoved them into his suitcase like he used to pack a duffel bag, but Nancy folded them neatly. She said she wouldn’t let him travel all this way to look a mess when he saw the congressman, even if they were old war buddies.

  “I never could understand why Doc chose to stay in combat after everything we went through.” Billy sighed.

  “Guess he still thought he could save some lives,” said Chuck. “After he saved mine.”

  They got quiet again, each of
them remembering that day by the river so many years ago.

  “You know I broke my promise,” Chuck said. “I told Ajax I’d never leave him. But I did leave him.”

  “You didn’t have much choice,” said Billy.

  Looking at all the names on the wall in front of him, Chuck remembered carving his name into the tree by the ping-pong table. “Chuck P + Ajax were here. Devil Dogs. Undefeated,” he’d written.

  But he guessed they were defeated. The war had defeated them in the end. “Ajax’s name should be on that wall,” he declared. “And Bruno’s. And all those dogs who never came home. There should be a memorial for the canine heroes who gave their lives.”

  “Maybe so,” said Billy. “Maybe so. But Ajax wouldn’t be on it.”

  “What?” said Chuck.

  “The wall’s for heroes who were lost in the war, right?” said Billy.

  “Right,” said Chuck.

  “Well, Ajax wasn’t lost,” said Billy. He looked at Double O and gave him a wink. “Tell him.”

  Double O nodded and smirked at Chuck. “I just got back from a congressional delegation to Vietnam last week,” he said. “That’s why I called you to meet here today.”

  “Still as charming a country as ever?” Chuck said sarcastically.

  “Quite,” said Double O without any sarcasm at all. “While I was over there, I had some folks do some poking around for me, asking some questions. And, well …”

  He pulled out his digital camera and showed Chuck a picture on the screen. It was a picture of a middle-aged Vietnamese man in a white lab coat, standing behind a desk. The nameplate on the desk read Dr. Nguy n Chi, Veterinarian.

  “Best small-animal veterinarian in Vietnam,” said Double O.

  “Why are you telling me about him?” Chuck wondered.

  “Well, I went to see him,” said Double O. “And we talked for a long time. He told me how he got his start caring for animals. It was during the war. It was a dog he had … a dog some Americans left with him and his mom.”

  “No way,” said Chuck. He pictured the boy from that village, clear as day. The boy riding his bike. The boy playing with Ajax. The gunfire.