Cracker! by Cynthia Kadohata Read Free Book Online Page B

that getting the timing perfect was one of her favorite things.
    Even on the day they practiced flying on a helicopter, she seemed intent on jumping onto the chopper at the precise moment that he did.
    Cracker loved the chopper, how the scents from the air flooded her and vanished almost simultaneously. Everything Cracker could feel on the outside, she could also feel on the inside.
    The squad was also supposed to practice rappelling that day. That was when you put on a harness and jumped off with your dog. But the chopper malfunctioned, and they ended up skipping that.
    After about six weeks they started what Rick figured was the most important part of training. So far they’d searched for booby traps and personnel that the handlers already knew the location of. Finally, they were going to spend a week bivouacking with their dogs and searching for booby traps and personnel whose locations were unknown to them.
    Before this aspect of training, a bunch of guys planned to take their minuscule paychecks and have themselves a weekend of fun in Atlanta. But Rick didn’t get a pass, and Cody and Twenty-Twenty decided to stick around. Rick didn’t much like the big city anyway.
    Saturday morning the sun warmed the back of Rick’s neck as he, Cody, and Twenty-Twenty walked to the kennels together. Cody and Twenty-Twenty had become good buddies of his, though they didn’t have a lot in common. Rick was glad to know he’d have a couple of pals in Vietnam. Cody and Rick were from fair-size Midwestern towns, and Twenty-Twenty was from Phoenix. Cody hardly ever worried, while for no particular reason, Twenty-Twenty worried all the time. Rick wasn’t much of a worrier either. On those rare occasions back home when he did worry, he just went into the shop in the garage and sanded a table, fixed a chair.
    After they took out their dogs, Cody told them about something he’d seen on TV—some variety show he was obsessed with. The whole idea was to get their three dogs to move in unison. “Dancing dogs,” Cody called it. It worked great. The dogs learned it in about three minutes. Left paw! Right paw! Heel! Heel! Heel! It seemed like they had half the guys in camp watching. Finally, they got chewed out by a lieutenant colonel for playing with the “well-oiled military equipment”-that is, the dogs. So they put the dogs away and went to mail call.
    Rick had heard that when you got to Vietnam, you lived for mail from home. Rick got regular mail from his family, of course. And about once every week Rick had been getting a letter from this Willie kid. Rick wrote to his parents about the training, trying to make it sound as fun as possible, and then told them that they’d be starting an important aspect of training soon. He asked about the family and so forth. Just the usual stuff, yet it felt good. It made you feel like you were still a part of the real world. He didn’t write the kid back, though. He only had so much free time. He tried once, but he didn’t want the boy to think that he might get Cracker back someday: He wouldn’t.
    That night after he dropped off his mail, he ate with his buddies in the mess hall, chowing down some pretty decent hamburgers. They weren’t like Mom made, but they weren’t half bad.
    “So does U-Haul have it out for me or what?” Rick said.
    Cody laughed, sharing his mouth full of food with the table.
    “Aw, man,” Rick said. “Close your mouth!” That could get you banned for life at his house.
    Twenty-Twenty said, “For all intensive purposes, many teachers I’ve had in life seemed to like some students more than others and some students less than others. But sometimes-and again, for all intensive purposes-the students they seemed to like less were occasionally their favorites underneath it all. It happened once in a herpetology course I took.”
    “Herpetology?” Rick said. “That sounds like some kind of disease.”
    “It’s the study of reptiles and amphibians.”
    “Studying