Cracker! Read online

  He ran up his apartment steps two at a time. When he burst inside, he was already calling out, “Cracker!” He stopped with just one foot inside the apartment. The other foot forgot to move.

  There was Cracker, wearing a muzzle, and there were both his parents, and there was a man in uniform holding a leash that was attached to Cracker. Fury overcame Willie. “Let go of her!” he shouted.

  His mother and father stared at him. Then his mother said, “You’re home,” as if his being home were the odd thing and not the man in uniform holding the leash that was attached to Cracker.

  Willie looked accusingly at the man. “What are you doing?” Now his other foot remembered to move. He walked right up to the man and demanded, “Give me that leash.” He put both hands around the leash.

  Cracker came to life, growling at the man.

  Willie’s father grabbed hold of Willie’s wrists.

  “Willie. Please.” He added, “You’re making it harder on the dog.”

  Willie’s mother said, “Sweetheart,” and she reached out to pull him to her, but he shrugged her off. “Sweetheart, Cracker will be a war hero! Remember when we watched the news that night? The war dogs of Vietnam! You said it was neat!” She smiled, but Willie could see that her smile was phony.

  “Mom, please!” Willie cried out.

  Willie tried to grab the leash again while Cracker strained toward him. Willie’s father held him back and said, “Willie, you have to think about Cracker for a minute. Look how upset you’re making her.”

  And, indeed, Willie saw the desperation in Cracker’s eyes. He had made her terrified. So he stepped back and whispered, “Bye, Cracker.”

  The man pulled as Cracker struggled. “Heel!” the man said. The last thing Willie saw was a glimpse of her frightened brown eyes, and then the door closed. He ran to the window and stared as Cracker and the man left the building. Cracker looked up at him before the man tore off the leather contraption and loaded her into a crate in the back of a van. When the van drove off, Willie watched until he couldn’t see it anymore.

  He didn’t cry at all. It was just … the whole world was completely different now. It didn’t matter if the Cubs won or lost, it didn’t matter if his father had a job or not, and it didn’t matter if he ever went back to school. The thought occurred to him that he should have cut off the hair at the tip of Cracker’s tail or her nails or something so he could always have a piece of her. It was crazy, but he felt like he would give anything in the world for one of her toenails.

  Three

  CRACKER HAD STARTED LIFE OUT AS A BIG DEAL. She was born the daughter of Champion Felix Olympus von Braun, who a lot of people thought was one of the finest German shepherds ever bred. Olympus had won forty-seven Best of Show titles before his owners decided to retire him. Cracker’s mother, Champion Midnight Moon of Shreveport, won seventeen Best of Shows, even beating Olympus one time. Cracker’s name as a puppy was not Cracker, but Magnificent Dawn of Venus. Venus was expected to be a champion herself, for a lot of people thought she was the finest bitch in her litter. She was purchased for $1,500 by Willie’s uncle on Willie’s father’s side and lived a pampered but lonely life in a big kennel with a big dog run. She won Best Puppy in Match three times, even beating out her littermates.

  But one day her left hind leg got caught on a piece of chain link in her day kennel, and the bone broke in two. After healing, she could still walk fine, but her leg bent in a certain way that made it impossible for her ever to be a great show dog. Willie’s uncle decided to give her to Willie as a birthday present.

  She was six months old. Willie named her Firecracker, and when he got her home, she immediately proceeded to figure out how to open the refrigerator, eating every piece of meat in there until her stomach was so swollen, she couldn’t move. His parents had worried that she might need to go to the veterinarian and have the food surgically removed from her stomach. But Willie just hauled her onto his bed and let her spread out while he squished himself up against the wall.

  When she woke up, he was sleeping with his arms around her. At first she growled, but then she realized she liked the feeling. Despite the attention that had been showered on her previously, she’d never quite felt loved in this way before. And so she began a life of being pampered in a different way. Willie worshipped her. Oh, he taught her a lot of stuff and made her behave sometimes, but she knew she had the upper hand. She was born to be a beloved queen and eat good snacks.

  So why was she now trapped in a crate in the back of a van? Why were two other dogs who looked like her also trapped in crates in the back of the van? She howled. The howling reverberated in her ears and seemed to fill the whole world. The other dogs seemed scared, but they didn’t howl. Cracker concentrated on Willie as she howled. Maybe he didn’t understand the seriousness of the situation. Where was he? It was getting dark already. It was time for their walk.

  She was so lost in her howling that she didn’t have the slightest idea how much time had elapsed by the time the truck stopped. The two men carried out the other dogs one at a time. She breathed deeply and howled even louder. As soon as the two men returned, she stopped howling and tensed her body.

  “Beautiful animal,” said one of the men.

  “If you like dogs,” said the other. He looked at her. “Dog, you’re going to Vietnam. They got dog diseases there I can’t even pronounce.” He turned to the other man. “She’ll be lucky to make it home in one piece.”

  “Actually, they keep the dogs there until they die,” the other man said. “They never come home.”

  “No kidding? My dad had a Doberman who served in World War II, and he came back. He was the family dog after the war.”

  “They changed the policy with this war. The military considers the dogs equipment, and equipment is expendable.”

  Cracker growled as they neared the crate. They picked it up. She threw herself against the side of the crate and felt gratified when one of the men almost lost his balance. But it didn’t stop the men from loading her into a big, dark room full of stifling air. She smelled more dogs and heard a couple of them howling. The room jerked, a whistle blew, and then the room jerked again and started moving. She couldn’t see anything except a dark wall. This all went on so long that she fell asleep, dreaming of biting the man who had taken her from Willie.

  When she woke up, the train had stopped. A voice from a loudspeaker boomed, “Lackland Air Force Base, ladies and gentlemen.” But all she could see was the wall.

  Two new men picked up her crate and took it to a place that was almost like the place Willie’s father had taken her a couple of times. A man put a new leather contraption around her snout so she couldn’t open her mouth, and then another man poked and prodded her. So maybe she was at a similar place as before, and Willie’s father might come get her before long. The man tried to grab her neck, but she whirled around and threw herself as hard as she could against him. She heard his head clunk and felt satisfied. Then another man came and grabbed the chain around her neck and held her down while the first man stuck her with a needle.

  After that, the days were filled with odd activities. Men would make loud noises around her and study her reaction. A big, whirring mechanical thing someone called “chopper” landed nearby. Again men poked and prodded her. One man examined the leg she’d broken by pressing his fingers into it.

  Then one day a woman came along and stuck her with yet another needle. The woman had kind eyes. “You passed all the tests, Cracker. We need to tattoo your ear, baby. Go to sleep, sweetheart. Sleepytimes.”

  And that was the last thing Cracker remembered until she woke up in another big, dark, rumbling room, just like the previous big, dark, rumbling room. For some reason, her right ear hurt, as if it were scratched. That made her start up a new howl, and what she heard in reply surprised her: There must have been twenty other dogs, all howling or whimpering. They kept it up as long as they could, and then they all slept. She usually didn’t care for other dogs
but she already felt a sense of kinship with these. What was happening to them? The room stopped again. She stayed still to concentrate on the commotion behind her, and then two new men were carrying her crate out of the room and to the back of a truck. She knew what a truck was. She’d ridden in trucks with Willie when they went camping a couple of times. The air outside was warm, humid, and fresh, and the pain in her ear had subsided a little. Another dog looked at her, which annoyed her, so she snarled and threw herself against the side of the cage. He whimpered. Annoying coward! She met eyes with yet another dog, one even bigger than her. He didn’t annoy her. They looked at each other, and she felt a mutual respect. She pushed her nose to the gate of her crate, and he did the same in his crate.

  When the truck stopped, several men in uniforms crowded around the back talking with the drivers. The uniforms were the same as the one worn by the man who took her from Willie.

  “A couple of them are real beauties,” the driver said. “That one’s big for a female.”

  “How much does she weigh?”

  The driver looked at a clipboard. “Hundred and ten. Moderately aggressive, just what the army is looking for. She had a broken leg, but they’re keeping her anyway. Never heard of that.”

  Another couple of men lifted down her crate, and she lunged at the side. These men weren’t thrown off balance, though.

  “She seems more than moderately aggressive,” said the driver. “Gorgeous animal, though. From Chicago. Name’s Cracker.”

  At the sound of her name Cracker’s ears perked up, but nobody said anything more to her. From the truck, she smelled grass and lots of different people.

  The dog crates were carried to a nearby kennel area. One by one the dogs were taken out of the crates and put into a kennel. Only Cracker waited in her crate. Finally, a man appeared with padding on his arms, and he and another man pulled Cracker out of her crate and tried to push her into a kennel. She slammed her body into the padded man and heard that wonderful clunk noise as his head hit the concrete. She saw one of his legs rise as he fell.

  A third man appeared from somewhere and reached for the back of her neck. She figured whatever he wanted to do was bad, so she heaved her side into him, and he ended up grabbing her around the stomach. They wrestled and wrestled.

  “Throw her in the kennel!” somebody yelled. She bit the third man’s arm.

  “Ahhh! Ahhh! Crazy dog!” Suddenly, the man let go of her, and the three men rushed into her kennel and slammed the door. Cracker looked at them. They looked at her. Even she knew this was all wrong. Oh, well. She trotted off but stopped when she saw another man wrapped in padding.

  “You’re supposed to grab them by the back of the neck!” shouted one of the men in the kennel. But as the man moved toward her, she easily galloped away. She kept running until she came to a long building. She turned around and saw what was now six men closing in on her, breathing hard.

  For a while she ran in a big circle as she listened to the men losing their breath. She heard one of them trip; ordinarily, this might have been fun. But there was nowhere to go. And there was no Willie to go to. This wasn’t fun at all. So she ran back to the only place she knew of where she might belong: the kennel. The gate was open, and she slipped in. It took the men a couple of minutes to reach the gate and slam it shut.

  They looked at her. She looked at them. Then nothing happened. She turned her head both ways and saw that kennels with dogs stretched into the distance on both sides of her. Two kennels down was the dog she thought was okay. They met eyes. He looked a little scared—but a little happy, too—to see her. The dog to her right was half her size. She wagged her tail eagerly. Cracker went to sniff noses with her. Then Cracker waved her tail in approval.

  A roof protected one section of her kennel from the sun, and a bowl of water sat in a corner. She lapped eagerly at the water. The dog to the left of her whined and pawed at her kennel. She growled, and the dog slunk back. Some dogs she just didn’t like.

  The men still watched Cracker as she lay down. And then they left, and she waited and waited and waited, occasionally chewing on the steel gate or licking her raw spot.

  She felt crazy in this kennel, but at the same time she knew that there was nowhere else to go. She tried to feel exactly where Willie was. She knew the direction, and she knew he was far, but that was it. She whined and laid her head on her paws.

  But the more she waited, the sadder she felt. And then the sadder she felt, the angrier she felt at everybody who came by. Whenever someone tried to take her out, she growled with such menace that they left her and took out another dog instead. She bit a fellow who brought her food in, just because he annoyed her. She felt furious with everybody, even the people who just walked in front of her cage.

  The dog on her right, the one everyone called “Tristie,” had guys petting her and taking her out all the time. Everybody liked Tristie, even Cracker. Sometimes Tristie would slap a paw on the fencing between them, and Cracker would slap a paw in the same place. Then they would run up and down their kennels at the same time. Other times, when Tristie was away, Cracker would lie sullenly at the back of her kennel. One day two men in uniform stood in front of her cage. She snarled and jumped over and over at the gate. She hated them—whoever they were.

  “This one’s not going to make it. She’s too mean. They’re going to have to put her down or maybe make her a sentry dog.”

  “Five dollars says she makes it.”

  They shook hands.

  Four

  RICK HANSKI WAS GOING TO WHIP THE WORLD. It was just a feeling he had. He hadn’t done much to back up this idea, but he just knew it. He’d signed up for the army on his seventeenth birthday, after a long talk with his parents and grandparents about his future and about his father’s hardware store and who might take it over someday if not him. His parents were first-generation Scandinavian Americans—all four of his grandparents came from the tundra. After he’d moved to Wisconsin, Grandpa Hanski had gotten a patent for a bar clamp and sold the patent to a big tool company. He’d used the money to start a hardware store that Rick’s father had inherited when Grandpa retired early. Rick had worked at the store since he was a kid.

  When he wanted to relax, he liked to make things: He’d made quite a few frames for his mother and a couple of chairs for his father. He liked to shape things. But he knew his work wasn’t good enough to sell, and anyway, making stuff was mostly just for relaxing. It took his mind off of what worries he had. He guessed his biggest worry was that he wasn’t sure he wanted to take over the hardware store someday. Everybody had assumed that the store was his future; that’s why his parents didn’t complain about his so-so grades. They were just proud that he worked hard in the store, and they’d never made him feel bad that his sister, Amy, was a math prodigy who’d graduated from MIT a couple of years ago and was now going for her PhD in Applied Mathematics, whatever that meant. He did overhear his father saying once that his sister had a calling, whereas Rick was a “good, strong, well-mannered boy,” just like all the Hanski men had been at his age.

  When his father had met one of the actual DeWalts at a convention once, he’d talked about it for days, as if he’d met the president or something. But sometimes, working at the hardware store, Rick felt…. not bored exactly, but like something wasn’t quite right. And Rick was filled with guilt, because he knew how proud his father was of the store. But it just didn’t feel right for him. So when Rick turned seventeen, he thought he’d sign up like some of the other local guys had. He was a man now, not a boy, no matter what his parents thought. He’d made the announcement at dinner the week before he turned seventeen. Everyone had just finished eating.

  Rick had turned to his father, who Rick could tell was just about to stand up.

  “Dad?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I’d like to sign up.”

  “Sign up for what?”

  Rick had felt four sets of eyes burn into him. His parents’ and grandparents
’. They’d probably been thinking dinner was over, and it was time to watch television, maybe laugh at a TV comedy. Life didn’t hold many surprises in the Hanski household. “Sign up for Vietnam. But I need you to approve since I’ll be only seventeen.”

  Rick felt his own chest heaving with nervousness but kept his eyes trained on his father’s. Then everybody was talking at once. His parents and grandparents grilled him for hours. He’d prepared for all this, had planned to start out by talking about something he’d done once: save a kid’s life. It was a couple of years ago, and he’d been standing on a sidewalk and seen a six-year-old boy run into the path of an oncoming bus. Rick had pushed the boy out of the way and just managed to get out of the way himself. Those moments stood out with clarity in Rick’s mind, whereas every day at the hardware store dulled in comparison. That’s what he’d wanted to talk about that night. But instead, his family had hardly given him a chance to speak.

  They’d lectured him about what he planned to do when he got back, about whether he really understood that war was an “ugly thing,” as his grandfather said over and over. Grandpa had lived in Finland during World War II. He knew war.

  “I know, Grandpa,” Rick started to say, but then his grandmother broke in.

  “If we’d pushed him more in school, maybe none of this would be happening,” Grandma Hanski had said. If they’d pushed him in school, she continued, maybe he’d want to go to college and be an accountant for the hardware store or something. Finally, at the end of the four hours, silence fell and everybody turned to Rick’s father. His father was a serious man who surprised you sometimes with a practical joke or a belly laugh. But there had been no joking at that table for those four hours.

  His father had leaned his forehead on his fingertips in deep thought. Then he’d raised his head and nodded and said, “You do what you have to do.” His father came with him to sign the papers, and the Saturday before Rick left, his family threw a big party. A lot of their friends were also customers. Farmers, furniture makers, factory workers. A couple of the old men had played saws with violin bows. Lots of laughing, a little crying.