The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories

by McAllister, Bruce

  She was broadcasting a lot now. There might be a dozen transmissions on any given day. He wanted to be there for all of them.

  The first came in at 11:00 A.M.

  . . . who are you to tell me you hear me who are you to speak of love to me?

  He felt the chill again. All that was missing was his name. If she would only say it: John. John K.

  He waited.

  There were no more transmissions.

  As all of the fixers waited the next morning for the meeting to start, Corley played with a portable digitizer in the folding chair beside him and a new kid, just out of Poly, leafed through a medical-benefits brochure. When the kid went out to use the bathroom, Klinger said to Corley:

  “Corley, any way I could get a name to go with an ID?”

  Corley looked at him.

  “You really are fucking crazy. Don’t you ever listen at these meetings? Reading a transcript is a fucking misdemeanor. Anything to do with an ID is a fucking felony!”

  “Don’t get so tracky about it, Corley. I just saw a TV episode where they had this guy, this fixer, finding out who a transmission belonged to and nothing happened to him. . . .”

  “Sure, Klinger. You’re out of your fucking mind.”

  Corley gave him a good-natured shove and got back to work diddling the portable as Davis began his check-in, the new kid following him around like a puppy, asking questions as if it were the end of the world.

  When the meeting was over, Klinger said to Corley: “Don’t tell anyone I asked?”

  “Asked what, asshole?”

  Klinger gave him a smile. “Thanks.”

  “Jesus Christ, Klinger, don’t thank me. That’s as good as accessory.”

  Corley had been in law school once. He was a talker, knew a lot, and had balls. Klinger liked him.

  “Sorry, Corley.”

  “I don’t hear you, Klinger. Go fix a mixer, will you?”

  When he returned to the shack that evening, the cassette ribbon on the printer had torn and the ribbon alarm was screaming faintly. For one insane second he thought he’d lost transmissions, and then he remembered the PC.

  The PC had recorded three. Something was garbling them, but it wasn’t the Osterizer—it was something out there—and they were intact enough that he could for the first time hear her voice in them:

  . . . you could have been the man who killed me you could have been (garbled) you could have been (garbled) and never said what I needed to hear in the rooms where (garbled) but you didn’t you could have been one of a hundred who said nothing (garbled) when dreams meet and I have known rivers my love. . . .

  And:

  . . . but sometimes I think of myself as Snow White and God or the man whose hand He chose to take me the swan taking me a sudden blow the great wings beating still above me I do not feel special I have wings but these mean nothing I fly but it means nothing nothing at all John K. . . .

  As he stared at his name—John K.—he knew he had been right.

  He knew what he needed to do. He had known it all along, of course.

  That night, on the cot, he dreamed about her again. In it he saw her face clearly for the first time. Not a flower child’s face, willowy and ethereal, but the big hands of a country girl from Oklahoma or Kansas, hands that opened a book of poetry one day to find the voices of angels, which she memorized so she would have them forever. Blue eyes, yes, but hair full of grit, blown by the wind, killed by a boyfriend she would never, in a fairer universe, have ever had.

  Seeing her clearly now, he loved her even more.

  And wasn’t that why he had dreamed it?

  The phone message was waiting for him the next day when he returned to his apartment for some tools and his checkbook. Davis wanted to see him immediately. In his office.

  The new machine had come, Klinger told himself. He could feel it in his stomach and the feeling only got worse as he drove the two hours to Central.

  “One of your codes is being duped,” Davis said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Someone’s been duplicating the transmissions from one of your IDs, Klinger. The system in Sacramento has registered it. Have you noticed any tampering with the fence or the gate, with the machine itself?”

  “No, sir.”

  Davis stared at him. He was a big man who always looked tired and he looked especially tired today.

  “Have you noticed any tampering with the recorder itself?”

  “No, sir. I’d have mentioned it to you if I had.”

  “Yes, you would have.” Davis paused and looked out the window at the skyline. “I’m going to meet you out at the Mojave at three today. I’m going to have to have a J.D. investigator and one of their techs with me and they’re going to have to ask you questions. They’re going to have to give you a polygraph or a voice-stress analyzer, or both—I’m not sure which.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Davis looked at him again. “What do you do out there, Klinger?”

  “What do you mean, sir?”

  “You know what I mean. What do you do with all that time?”

  Klinger didn’t answer.

  “You like being alone out there? Is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with a young man being out on the desert alone doing whatever he wants to do in a shack, as long as he’s not breaking the law. You wouldn’t be doing that, would you?”

  “I don’t understand . . . Why would a fixer want to duplicate an ID’s transmissions?”

  Davis looked away.

  “That’s the question. There was a fixer last year in San Ysidro who made duplicates of a particular ID’s transmissions and sold them—sold them to the people who were being incriminated. No one like that has approached you, have they, Klinger?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I’m just asking. That’s the kind of question you’re going to hear, Klinger.”

  Klinger was standing now. His arms were stiff, to stop the shaking; his knees locked. He moved his weight to one leg and balled his good hand, watching Davis’s eyes.

  The eyes stayed on his.

  All he could think to say was, “Thank you, sir.” The man meant well. He did feel thankful.

  Davis nodded.

  “If they don’t find any tampering with the gate or the fence, they’re going to ask you a lot of questions. They’re going to check everyone who could’ve gotten a key to the gate and to the shack, but they’re going to start with you. I’ll be asking security staff if they know of any way the dupe alarm can be triggered by accident. I’ll do what I can.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He took the Bell to the Witness. They’d find out about the chopper record and any sudden change on his part would look bad. He got there by noon, knowing that Davis had given him a head start, that the shack would be untouched. He removed the PC and the Osterizer from their connections, checked the connections for telltales of any kind, removed the hand-copied transmissions from the walls and from the floor (where he’d laid them out), put everything in a black plastic garbage bag, and buried it a hundred meters from the shack, looking around for figures or cars in the distance. He’d considered tampering with the gate or the shack’s door—Davis had practically told him to, hadn’t he?—but decided against it.

  Davis and the other two—both somber men—arrived an hour later. Klinger showed them the gate, the shack’s door and window, and told them he’d walked along the fence the full three kilometers and hadn’t found a thing. They asked him to walk it with them again. As they did, Davis kept looking at him.

  Back in the shack, while one investigator began to dust the equipment for prints—using a pink powder Klinger had never seen before—the other began the questioning: Had he given anyone a key to the gate or the shack? Had anyone—anyone not working for Central—been asking him about the Witness recently? Had he seen anyone—ground vehicle, chopper, hikers—in the vicinity of the Witness over the last month? How wa
s his social life? Did he have a girlfriend? Had anyone appeared in his life recently—over the last two months—if so, who? Did he go out drinking—if so, with whom? Did he know of any fixer who seemed “troubled”? Had anyone—any fixer—confided in him . . . about personal problems, resentment over work, financial worries?

  When they asked him how he felt about his own life—his parents’ death, his lack of family in the southern California area, his isolation in the desert—he stiffened and was sure they noticed.

  They’d check his bank account, any credit purchases, and would make a visual inventory of any recent acquisitions like a car or boat or expensive home entertainment system. He knew this.

  They would have someone watch him. He was their prime suspect, whether they were sure he was guilty or not.

  When they pulled out the polygraph—and right after it, the Mark IV voice-stress analyzer—and began to ask him a list of very precise questions: “Do you harbor any resentment toward your employers?” “Do you have financial problems you feel are not your fault?” “Do you find your work unchallenging?” “Has the man who has been loaning you the Sheriff’s Aviation helicopter been asking you for anything in return, hinting that there might be something he’d like?” And finally, “Have you, in whatever fashion and for whatever reason, been duplicating the transmissions being received by this Witness?”—he stiffened again but kept repeating silently to himself the one message he had composed so long ago for her. The message he would, somehow, send to her.

  As they were leaving, Davis nodded to him and said they would be getting in touch with him again when they had interviewed others at Central—other fixers.

  “Is he staying here?” the tall investigator asked.

  “I don’t know.” Davis turned to him. “It might be a good idea, Klinger, if you didn’t stay here tonight . . .” Davis was doing his best to smile.

  “I’d like to stay and work on the printer, sir. The ribbon keeps breaking, and the sound-synthesizer on the alarm is weak. Would that be all right?”

  “Is that all right?” Davis asked the men.

  “I don’t know . . .” the tall one said.

  “He’ll be out of here in a couple of hours, won’t you, Klinger?”

  “It shouldn’t take any longer than that, sir.”

  “All right,” the shorter one said, frowning. “Just don’t touch the dust.”

  “And, Mr. Klinger,” the other one added, “make sure that from now on the arrangement with the SA chopper goes through your supervisor.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Outside, as he walked them to their car, Davis fell behind and said: “I happen to think you’re innocent, Klinger.” He let the words hang, the sound of sand, of gravel below them. “But this is a very big case. You need to understand that. The ID was a nobody, but the people she touched—one of them anyway—had fingers up into Vegas.”

  Klinger wanted to ask, Who was she?—wanted more than anything in the world to ask this—but instead found himself saying stupidly, “So it was a murder?”

  “Don’t ask, Klinger. I just wanted you to know how big it is, that I don’t happen to think you’re involved. That’s all.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As he spoke, his father’s face came to him and the old feeling with it.

  “By the way, Klinger,” the voice was saying beside him, “the arrangement with the Bell is fine. I talked to McKinney about it today. But do let me know from now on when you’re planning to use it. . . .”

  They walked together to the car. Klinger wanted to say something, but didn’t know what. He could see them—his father’s eyes; he wanted to tell Davis something, and couldn’t find the words.

  As he made his way back to the shack, the sound of wheels turning on gravel somewhere behind him, he realized that they never would have let him stay—never would have spoken to him as they had at the end—if he hadn’t passed the tests—

  That he had indeed somehow passed them—

  As if she had been there helping him, helping him lie, because she wanted it, too:

  That he be free to find what he needed—that he be allowed to speak to her.

  When the car was out of sight, he dug up the bag and brought it back to the shack. Reconnecting the PC, he set the alarm to her code again, and began to wait. When nothing had come by sunset, he lay down on the cot, wondering if the just-dead could see the stars, if they could see anything other than what they had already seen during their lives. When he fell asleep it was easier than he’d thought it would be.

  He awoke at dawn, checked the printer, unplugged the PC, and put everything in an old backpack he hadn’t used in months. McKinney needed the Bell back at 6:30—for a routine check. He had thirty minutes.

  He got there with ten minutes to spare, using them in the main office to make a Xerox of the hand-copied transmissions so that he’d have a second set—so that no one could take them all from him regardless of what happened.

  No one paid any attention to him at the machine.

  McKinney pointed the way to the lockers, giving him a key and joking about desert bums with their backpacks full of drugs. When he’d stashed the backpack, Klinger sat with him in his office and tried to stay awake. All he wanted was to get the pack out of the locker, get in his car, and return to his apartment.

  “In Nam they had a gunship, Klinger, a chopper that could turn a hamlet into matchsticks—one round per second per square foot. They called them Vulcan mini-cannons, Klinger, and I’ve got one of them sons-of-bitches right here.”

  McKinney was beginning to blur. Klinger closed his eyes.

  “Now, you can’t go flying over cities with a mini-cannon, Klinger—that’s against every law there is—but we’ve got one assigned to whatever chopper we want as ‘Riot Control Study 14.’ ” McKinney laughed, the crow’s-feet crinkling at the corners of his eyes. “I take it out to Joshua every Saturday and do a little controlling of the jackrabbits there . . . How’s this Saturday look for you, Klinger?”

  “I don’t know, McKinney . . .”

  “Shit, Klinger! You owe me a Saturday. You keep stringing me along like this—” he laughed again, but it was serious “—and I’ll think you don’t love me. What about it? Saturday. The floor is covered with them. You’ll be the only fixer in candy-assed Justice who’s ever fired a Vulcan.”

  Klinger got up unsteadily, feeling he was going to throw up.

  “I’ll have to let you know . . . Something’s come up at Central and they’ve got me on call. Something’s been going down.”

  “You steal something?” McKinney was grinning.

  “Yeah. A Witness—” Klinger was smiling back.

  “—piece by piece,” McKinney finished for him.

  It was one of their jokes, Klinger remembered foggily. If they don’t pay you enough, Klinger, McKinney had said one day, you can always steal a Witness—

  —piece by piece, Klinger had said.

  “They hassle you too much, boy,” McKinney was saying, “you can always use the Vulcan on them.” He grinned. “Saturday?”

  “I’ll do my best, McKinney.”

  When he got back to the apartment, he looked around, saw nothing had been touched, and rolled a joint, smoking it on the porch and looking out at the sky high above the buildings. Then he went back in to clean the grease from the pink plastic of his prosthesis. The grease wouldn’t come off. He tried to cut his own hair in the bathroom mirror. It looked worse. Nothing was going right. Nothing at all. He put the backpack under the sink with the PC and the Osterizer in it and then flattened the hand-copied transmissions of her voice and the Xeroxes he’d made so that they would fit inside the pillowslip on the one pillow he used at night.

  That evening, he dreamed of touching her breasts, making her gasp and hold on to him hard, as if he could protect her from everything in the world.

  That night the men broke into his apartment.

  They began in his living room. He woke to the sound. While one
kept at it, turning things over, the other one appeared in his bedroom doorway and kept the light on him, blinding him like some animal caught in headlights. Even in the stupor, even in the blinding light, he knew who they were. One found the backpack easily under the sink. The other one grabbed him, pulled him off the bed and laid him down on the floor, kneeling over him. This one—the one he could see—wore a dark leather jacket, the kind the LA gangs liked. The blinding light went away. The bedroom light came on. The man by the doorway wore a nice suit. Both of them were wearing goggles—not unlike the kind McKinney had shown him, the kind you wore for seeing in the dark, but smaller, lighter weight.

  He didn’t try to move, but the kneeling man hit him anyway, the blur of the hand passing into Klinger’s brain and making him cry out. He’d never be able to identify them with the goggles—which was the point. Or one of them.

  “What we want to know,” the man in the nice suit standing by the door said calmly, “is where the duplicates are and who exactly you’re making them for . . .”

  Before he could answer, the kneeling man hit him again, this time on the ear, and Klinger made another sound.

  “I don’t—”

  The hand came again—on the same ear—and he knew they weren’t going to let it go, that they didn’t need some voice-stress analyzer to feel sure they knew who had made the copies, and why.

  “So you don’t get paid enough. So someone approaches you one day and tells you how much he’s going to pay you to dupe some ID—”

  “I really don’t—”

  He was pulled from the floor and shoved against the wall. He was held with one forearm while the other arm, with its fist, broke his nose, then struck his left eye, then hit him just below where he imagined his heart was, moving lower and lower as he blurted:

  “Just . . . the handwritten stuff.”

  He had to repeat it because his mouth was a mess, because the man was hitting him even as he tried to get the words out.