Cracker! by Cynthia Kadohata Read Free Book Online Page A

maybe to sentry dog training. They liked the dogs meaner there.
    The more Rick trained, the more he started to feel that Cracker was reading his mind or something. Of course, he would never say this out loud, unless he wanted to be the laughingstock of the squad. In fact, when he first had the thought during formation one morning, he looked around self-consciously as if somebody might have read his mind.
    Rick saw U-Haul scream at someone down the row and couldn’t stifle a yawn. Suddenly, the sergeant marched right in front of Rick. Rick’s heart raced. U-Haul had been looking another way, and Rick didn’t see how he could have seen him yawn.
    “You bored, Private?”
    “No, SERGEANT!”
    “No tact and diplomacy, is that correct, Private?”
    “Yes, SERGEANT!”
    “Went crying to your friend’s buddy to get into dog-training school, did you, Private?”
    “I never cry, SERGEANT!”
    “You know how many dead men I’ve seen, Private?”
    Rick stopped a second. The guys didn’t like to think about that aspect of the war, but the sergeants liked to remind them.
    “No, Sergeant,” Rick said more quietly.
    Sarge spoke quietly as well. “Two hundred and seven. I keep a record.”
    Rick didn’t answer.
    “Fifty push-ups, Private, and don’t ever yawn in front of me again! If you yawn at the wrong moment in Vietnam, you’ll be a dead man. Understand what I’m saying, Private?”
    “Yes, SERGEANT!”
    Rick dropped to the ground and executed fifty perfect push-ups while the other men left to run their dogs down the road.
    Cracker sat patiently, and when Rick was finished, he could swear that dog was laughing at him.
     

Five
     

 
    C RACKER LIKED TRAINING A LOT NOW. S HE HAD FUN doing what Rick wanted the second she was sure what it was or sometimes even the second she thought she knew what it was. Back with Willie, she felt like she was the center of the world. She didn’t quite feel that with Rick, but she felt she was doing important work, and she liked that.
    Cracker’s favorite part of her new life was when they all started going out into the field and finding men hiding in bushes, guns buried in holes, and anything that smelled or sounded wrong. Rick taught her what was “wrong,” like wind whooshing over a taut string, the smell of gunpowder, growling at the other guys, a hole dug in the ground hidden by leaves, and especially biting certain people. That happened only once, and it wasn’t really her fault. The guy had reached out really fast, and she had been surprised. So she didn’t see how Rick could blame her for that.
    Then sometimes they would spend the night out there, and she would lie in the darkness with images of the day drifting through her head. She would see the food she’d eaten or the hidden man jumping out of the bushes. Other nights she would listen to Rick, Cody, and Twenty-Twenty talk. Every so often as they talked, she would hear “Cracker” in their conversation, so she would listen more closely, but she didn’t know what they said.
    She always stuck with Rick. She felt the absence of Willie, but it wasn’t an anger anymore. She had started to feel happy whenever Rick was around. He would pet her even while he talked to the other men. She liked that.
    Rick, too, would often lie quietly under the stars and think of the day, usually of how well Cracker had done and how well he felt the two of them were starting to understand each other. As a matter of fact, he thought she was going to whip the world. The previous week on the way to a training session he’d inadvertently made the crawl gesture, and Cracker immediately crouched and looked up at him, ready to crawl. A number of times she lay down when he’d only just placed his tongue on top of his mouth to pronounce “down.” Previously, this had bothered him, but she’d gotten the timing so exact that she didn’t do it before he wanted her to but she still did it before he finished speaking. In fact, he got the feeling