Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel by Kenn Miller Page A

of Marvel’s Korean blood, Hawaiian upbringing, and his visits to the fortune teller in the Louc Ma marketplace when everyone else was in the whorehouse had made him an expert on indigenous psychology, and Mopar trusted his judgement in all matters related to the gook mind.
    “There’s only one place they can be headed,” Marvel said. He looked toward the north, the direction of both J. D.’s Recon Zone and the radio relay team on Firebase Culculine. “Poor Culculine …” Marvel shook his head sadly. “They’re going to wipe her off her mountain. I told you radio relay was dangerous. I broke it down and laid it out and labeled the parts, but you wouldn’t listen to me. Radio relay was too boring to be dangerous. It was chickenshit and boring and degrading. But it wasn’t dangerous. That’s what you said …”
    Marvel paused, embarrassed and aware that he’d spoken too long and with too harsh a whisper. Wolverine and Gonzales were both stirring now, but neither of them was awake yet, so he went on and finished what he’d started out to say.
    “You just wouldn’t admit I was onto something. If you’d admitted I was right, maybe it would have changed the luck of the thing. Maybe if you hadn’t tempted fate laughing when I said radio relay was dangerous, those poor fuckers on Culculine wouldn’t have to get hit to prove I was right!”
    Wolverine was awake now. He sat up and held a finger to his lips and scowled fiercely. Then, with a cold, malevolent smile, he took his finger from his lips and drew it across his throat. Mopar and Marvel held their breath to prove their sudden devotion to noise discipline, and, satisfied that he’d made his point, Wolverine nodded politely and went back to sleep.
    Gonzales was awake now, although he didn’t change position or even alter the timbre of his breathing enough to give that fact away. He was thinking about home, wondering if those Sierra Maestre Oriente mountains back home resembled these gook mountains of Vietnam. He’d never been in the Cuban mountains, but he planned to go there someday with an army of his own. He’d have only good men in his army—nobody like Mopar and Marvel, who were given to squabbling in the field, where victory depended on keeping a united front against the comunistas. They were good men, but they didn’t understand the comunistas and they weren’t motivated by thoughts of victory. Gonzales spent most of his guard watch on slow nights thinking about victory. But it wasn’t yet time for his watch, and after a few minutes, he too drifted back to sleep, leaving Mopar and Marvel to man the radio for updates on J. D.’s situation and keep alert eyes on the shadows and speckles of filtered moonlight and the faint, diffused green glow of vegetable matter rotting back into the soil with a pale, cold fire.
    J. D. failed to make his midnight situation report, and the next scheduled sit-rep after that. With a growing, fascinated horror, Mopar and Marvel passed the headset back and forth, but all they could hear was the radio relay whispering ever more desperately into the air waves: “Tacky Blinker Two-One, Tacky Blinker Two-One … This is Tacky Blinker Six Alpha, over …” and “Two-One, this is Six Alpha. If you hear me break squelch by code.”
    Again and again the radio relay tried to raise J. D. on the horn, but there was no answer, and after an hour Mopar decided it was time to wake Wolverine. He bent down to touch him on the shoulder, but Marvel stopped him.
    “Let him sleep. There’s nothing any of us can do now but keep our ears next to the radio in case J. D.’s all right and we can pick him up. Maybe we should start figuring out what we’re going to do when they overrun Culculine tomorrow and we lose our radio relay—but there’s no sense in waking Wolverine. Nothing even he can do for J. D. now.”
    “I told you J. D. was too flashy to ever see his grandchildren. And I told you that radio relay was more dangerous than