Free Unburying Hope by Mary Wallace Page A

to take you scuba diving.   Are you certified?”
    “This is Detroit,” she laughed.   “Why would I get certified?   It’s not the tropics, the water’s cold
here!”
    “I’ll take you to Lake St. Clair.”
    She shivered unexpectedly.   “I don’t think so,” she said.   “Their dog is almost as old as they
are,” she pointed back at the elderly couple, changing the subject.
    “I know.   Who is helping who there?”   Eddie’s face softened.
    “I never wanted a dog, but that one is
cute.”  
    “The old man needs the dog,” Eddie said.   “He’s got vision problems.   I don’t know how he juggles the chair,
the dog and seeing for himself but he’s out on a date with his wife, so more
power to him, I guess.”
    “You ever want a dog?”   Celeste wondered if Eddie’s hard edges
might be blunted by the adulation of a reserved dog like the Labrador, who now
tucked itself under the table, out of the way.
    “I never had a dog here in Detroit, but we had
one in Al Anbar,” he said quietly.
    “We?” she asked.
    “My platoon.   In camp, we took in a dust-colored puppy, fed him from our
own MREs.   The flop eared mutt took
turns sleeping in bunks with whoever was most homesick or had nightmares,”
Eddie said tentatively.   He placed
his order after she did, and then continued, “We came back from a two-day
patrol and I fell onto my bunk, waking up to my face being cleaned by the
scratchy licks of the little puppy.   It was easier to roll off my sleeping pad and head to the
showers to wash the pup’s squirmy body and short furry legs, he made it easier
to reconnect with being back in camp.   I made it halfway through my first deployment praying that the dog would
be alive when I returned from patrols, because sometimes the guys I went out
with weren’t.”
    “Oh my,” Celeste said quietly.
    “We named him Scrub.   He fit into the back pocket of our knapsacks when we first
found him, but we couldn’t risk him barking as we headed out.   So we’d leave him by the tent and find
him there when we’d return, even if it was days later.”
    “That’s so sweet,” Celeste nodded.     
    “Iraqis don’t treat the wild dogs like pets,
we discovered, so we had the advantage in keeping him in camp.   You’d tap him on his nose when he’d
whimper, to calm him down.   And I’m
pretty sure that the attention of so many tired soldiers soothed Scrub because
he’d just romp around, he didn’t bark.”
    “Did anyone bring him home?” she asked, not
realizing the danger of her question until it was out of her mouth.
    He shook his head.
    She waited in silence, in case he wanted to talk
about what had happened to the pup.  
    “The only time Scrub barked,” Eddie remembered,
“it was the black of night, and this deep husky growl woke us up, then he bayed
like crazy, and the platoon jumped out of bed and we were able to fight off a
raggedy group of villagers who were sneaking on a hillside outside our camp to
lay IEDs, land mine things.”
    He put his hands under the table onto his
knees.   “They took Scrub out the
next night.   They must have had
infrared and been looking for him.   He was such a good little guy.   Just a couple of pops and we were all out of our tents with our guns,
blasting into the hills.   They
killed Scrub to stop him from protecting us, to mess with our minds.”
    “That must have been horrible!”   She could see a crack in his hard
fought reserve.
    “Scrub’s death destroyed a kid from Wisconsin
who’d been lost almost from the day he arrived in country.   He rocked back and forth for days after
the truck dropped him off to us.   Walked patrol and then he’d rock himself to sleep.   Rocking, eating, rocking.   After a bad day on patrol, Scrub put
his head on the corporal’s lap and just lay there.   The rocking would slow down and even the cheesehead would
scoop Scrub up and hug him for a while.   It killed a part of each of us to find