The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories

by McAllister, Bruce

  “What do you have?” the tallest boy asked, the one that had the girl’s eyes, standing up and nodding at his bucket.

  He didn’t want to answer, but he knew they’d get mad if he didn’t. “Some turtles.”

  “If you want to cross the bridge, you gotta give them to us.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  The boys laughed. “Because if you don’t we won’t let you cross.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean why?” the girl said. Her eyes flashed again in the sunlight and even this far away he thought he saw something move in them.

  He was shaking. He took a breath. “Why do you want my turtles?”

  This made the brother angry. “Give us the turtles or we’ll come and get them, you little shit.”

  The plank was too heavy for him to push into the water by himself, and he wasn’t a fast runner. He shouldn’t make them mad, he knew, but he heard himself say:

  “Is this what God would want you to do?”

  “What?”

  “Would He?”

  “Jesus Christ,” the brother said. “Are you crazy?” He was about to start across the plank when the girl stopped him. She was looking at the boy and his bucket of turtles—staring at him—as she said, “I’ll do it.”

  There was a board in her hand now—one with a nail in it—one the boy hadn’t seen before—and she came toward him across the plank, sure-footed, her eyes never leaving him. She wanted him, he saw, and he recognized the eyes at last. They were in another body now, a girl’s, not a woman’s, but that was the only difference. Didn’t the boys see it? Didn’t they wonder where the board with the nail had come from—why the girl was acting this way?

  His grandmother wasn’t there—she couldn’t be—and yet suddenly, because the girl with the familiar eyes, the dark thing coiling in them, was coming for him, she was. She was back at the apartment cleaning and doing laundry while his mother taught school in the next town and his father worked in the capital, but she was somehow there. He could smell her, the flowery powder she wore, the vinegar she used on her hair. He could see her, too, in her flower-print dress, one of the ones she always wore. She was there, standing on the other side of the creek just behind the girl; and the boys, who hadn’t noticed her before, did now and stopped and stared.

  “Where’d she come from?” the smaller boy said to the taller, frowning, clenching his fists, and the girl turned on the plank and saw her, too.

  “You’re not wanted here,” the girl hissed, eyes flashing, and with her free hand made a pattern in the air—one the boy had never seen before—and hissed again, “He’s mine.”

  His grandmother smiled at the girl, but it was to him that she said, “John, do whatever you’d like.”

  “What, Grandma?”

  “Do whatever you want to do.”

  He did. He pointed with his finger at the plank, where the girl was standing, and as he kept his finger aimed there, his grandmother helped him do it. Together, without touching it, they lifted the big board high into the air; and as it rose, the girl fell off into the muddy water, shouting and hissing and dog-paddling so hard she couldn’t make patterns in the air. And then the plank was back in place, exactly where it had been before.

  The two boys—even the girl’s brother—had backed away from his grandmother. They didn’t want to be near a crazy old woman who made strange things happen.

  “Stay where you are,” his grandmother said to them, and they did.

  When the girl was out of the creek, muddy as a snapping turtle, it was as if the fire in her eyes had been put out. Her eyes were the eyes of any girl now. She couldn’t have hissed. She was the tall boy’s sister now, only that, and she looked half-asleep. “Craig,” she said to her brother. “What’s happening . . . ?”

  “Hold your sister’s hand,” his grandmother said to the brother, and the boy took it. “Keep holding it until you’re sure she’s your sister, and then you can all go home and watch television.”

  The evil that had made of the girl something else had left them. The woods were bright. Nothing coiled or slithered in the shadows. They were just two boys now, like him, and the girl a girl, and his grandmother, with a rustle of leaves, was gone, back to the apartment, laundry, and dinner.

  You know what to do, John, was the last thing he heard his grandmother say.

  He did. He crossed the plank because he needed to—he didn’t want to get completely wet and muddy—and when he reached the other side, he gave the boys and the girl, who still looked asleep, his bucket of young sliders. They just stared at him—even though he smiled.

  His grandmother would get him another bucket, he knew, and God always made other turtles.

  That night, over dinner, his mother said, “And what did you do today, John?”

  Afraid to answer, he looked at his grandmother, who said, “I hear he gave some turtles to three bullies.”

  His mother looked at his grandmother, then back at him, then at both of them again, and said, “And why would you do that, John?”

  The only thing he’d told his grandmother was that the school had sent him home to change. She’d given him dry pants and sent him back. He hadn’t mentioned the plank or boys or girl, how the girl had gotten muddy, or what had happened to the plank, but he didn’t need to. She’d been there. She knew, and it made him smile.

  He said to his mother, “They didn’t have any and I wanted to make them happy.”

  “And did you?” She didn’t believe him, he could tell, but that was not the only thing that made her mad.

  “Yes, Mom,” he said, “I did.”

  She was staring at him—just at him—and he could see the jealousy grow quickly until it towered above them all, even his father, even his grandmother.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” his mother said at last, but it was a lie.

  “Sometimes,” his grandmother said with a smile, “that’s what bullies really want—to get what they want without having to take it. It makes them happy.”

  When he was eleven and his family lived in a big house in San Diego, on the great bay, and his mother taught school, as always, and his father left the house every morning to go to the Naval laboratory high on the peninsula (where scientists built miniature ships made of brass and tested radar and sonar with them), he would go with his grandmother after school to Sorrento Valley, in the wild northern part of the county. There he would catch butterflies, katydids, witch moths, and other insects for his collection while she, with her watercolor class, painted the old eucalyptus trees they loved to paint, and the hills of sage, anise, and lupine. It was here the boy first saw the tiny blue butterflies that would die if they left these hills (these he would not try to catch); and the great black wasps with orange wings—“tarantula killers”—that cruised like little helicopters a few feet from the earth, looking for the big spiders to paralyze and lay their eggs in, so their children would have something to eat. Both of these creatures filled him with wonder, and, like the painted turtles, made him think about God.

  He had collected snakes when they’d lived in Palo Alto, the year before, but had felt bad about keeping them in terrariums and feeding them mice and lizards, which he also loved. So he’d stopped collecting them. But one day in the Sorrento Valley, as his grandmother sat on the hillside with her painting class, the boy saw a king snake, his favorite kind—the one with the “yellow chain” pattern—slipping through the grass at his feet; and he grabbed for it. When its head came up to look at him, its tail coiling around his arm in fear, he saw what he’d seen only once before and even then, not out in nature but in the museum downtown.

  The snake, no more than two or three years old, had two heads. Both were alive, but one looked dumb, staring up at the sky as if in wonder, while the other hissed at him, ready to bite, with teeth so tiny it would only make him laugh. The two-headed king snake in the museum’s display case had been bigger, stuffed, and though its heads had been posed to look alive, the eyes had be
en dead.

  He wanted to let it go, and yet he didn’t want to. It was a beautiful thing, and he wanted to have it, to stare at its two heads for days until he understood what it was, how God could make a two-headed snake (not often, but sometimes), strange as it was, doing it with love so that a boy who was also a little strange might one day hold it, mesmerized by the miracle it was.

  But he felt guilty about keeping it, and as he felt the old feeling, the snake relieved itself on his arm, as snakes sometimes do when afraid; and as it did, he looked at its two heads and saw the ground opening at his feet, while the cobra—the one he knew from his dreams, but never when awake—rose from the earth, from the lupine and sage around him, and he could only stumble back with a cry, looking everywhere for his grandmother.

  The cobra wouldn’t stop, he knew. It never did in his dreams and it wouldn’t now. It grew and grew until, thick as a tree, it towered over him. Where was his grandmother? Where was her class? Couldn’t they see it? Its hood flared and he saw lettering on it, big old-fashioned letters that said “YOU” and “MINE” and something else he could not read; when he looked into its eyes, which were the size of plates, he recognized them but could not remember whose they were. They were the cobra’s—that was what mattered—and he was, this time, going to die, just as he had in his dreams and as he would have twice awake had his grandmother not saved him. All it would take was for the jaws above him—the terrible jaws—to spit, the venom dripping down his face, or the tip of a single fang, long as a curved kitchen knife, to touch him.

  Then he heard a voice, one he knew, and when he looked to his right, there was his grandmother, her paint box and pad of watercolor paper under one arm, her other hand free to draw quick things in the air, while a swarm of the great, black spider-killers and their orange wings spun in a whirlwind around her and little blue butterflies covered her hair lovingly like pieces of the sky.

  The cobra turned to her, enraged, rose higher, hissed, and got ready to spit; but the paint box was a book now, somehow, and the paper was wood, two pieces, joined in a cross, and his grandmother said to him without moving her lips:

  Hold it up to the sun, John.

  The little two-headed snake was still wrapped in fear around his arm. He wanted to let it go, but instead did what she asked—raising it to the sun.

  Seeing it, the cobra pulled back, hissed again, and rose higher—wanting him.

  The little snake in his hand became two, then three, then a dozen, all two-headed and glowing like little suns; and when he finally let go of them they rose like butterflies, like wasps, filling the air; and as they did the cobra stopped, stared, and could not look away.

  His grandmother laughed.

  That, John, she said to him, is what you do to anything that wants to take you. What it really wants is to forget itself, to forget its pain. It is happy now, watching the little snakes fill the sky, watching what it has always dreamed of being: tiny and beautiful.

  Back in the car, he tried to rub the smell off his arm, but his grandmother said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s the smell of fear, yes, but also love.”

  That evening, just before his mother and father were to return from an awards ceremony at the laboratory, he sat in his grandmother’s bedroom, at the big table she had for all of her seashells—the ones they’d collected together in Florida and San Diego, and the ones her son, who had died years ago, had collected for her on Guam during the war. Together he and his grandmother had put the names of the seashells—the scientific names and the common ones—on little cards along with information about where they’d found them, and when, and what the weather had been like, because that’s how scientists did it.

  As he held a Murex foliatus, beautiful with its petal-like folds—and the only one they’d ever found in the great tide pools at the end of Point Loma—a shadow fell over the house and he knew what it was. As he and his grandmother listened, the front door opened and slammed, the house shook, something shrieked, and what wanted him was there again. But this time he told himself what it really was.

  His mother and father were back, and she was coming for him, hoping that his grandmother would be asleep by now, that he would be alone in his bedroom—awake or asleep, it didn’t matter—and that what lived in her eyes would be free at last to do what it had wanted to do since he was born.

  To have him—and if she couldn’t, to make sure no one else could.

  His grandmother—blue eyes blinking as she listened, as she saw things he could not see—looked at him quickly and said, “Do what we’ve done before, John.”

  And they did, quickly. They put the largest shells—the big conchs, long trumpets, heavy “helmet shells,” and “ton shells”—in a big circle on the rug. Inside that circle they put another circle—of bright scallops, pectens, from all over the world, and angel wings, and fragile tellinas (the prettiest of the clams); and inside that circle another circle of the most beautiful cowries (like living pearls), cone shells, and volutes; and inside that, a circle of the sturdiest, bravest murexes; and then a circle of the most fragile ones, the “Venus combs” and the black-spined nigrispini—until the floor was covered except for a circle just large enough for a boy in the middle of it. In that space his grandmother made a five-pointed star with olivas, slipper shells, keyhole limpets, rare tegulas, scorpion conchs, and spondyli, and made him lie down on it quickly, though the spines of the spondyli hurt.

  There was a knock on the door, and neither of them said a thing. He looked up at his grandmother and waited. “Do not look at the walls,” she whispered, but he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to know what the figure at the door was doing to the room this time. The walls had darkened, were darkening even more as the knock came again and louder. The walls were beginning to glisten. They were glistening with scales. They were covered with scales, and something—something like spit or venom or seawater—began to drip from the flowery wallpaper, from those scales, eating at the paper’s pattern of birds and flowers, making it curl to reveal beneath it the flesh of something huge—a great skinned frog, an immense turtle with its fiery-red shell crushed, something he’d once loved.

  The knocking grew more frantic as if it were not just angry, but afraid, too. The door began to bleed, and as he and his grandmother watched it they heard what sounded like crying—which was impossible—a trick, a lie, since what was pounding wanted to kill him.

  Do not move, his grandmother said. Be the star on the floor.

  The door buckled in at the pounding and the voice on the other side, as it wept and screamed in rage and grief, said, Are you all right? and He’s not in his bedroom, but as always it was a trick. If he moved, she would take him and he would be nothing.

  When the knocking stopped at last, the voice stopped, too, and with it the crying.

  “If you surround yourself with what you love, evil cannot hurt you,” his grandmother said as they picked up her seashells, put them back on the table, and she made the walls look right again. “It can only be jealous of what you have.”

  Two months after his grandmother died, as he lay in his bed in the dark, he heard it coming for him on heavy footsteps. His grandmother’s room was too far away for him to hide in. Her shells were too far away and he wasn’t sure he could make the star correctly anyway.

  When the figure entered his room, it did not turn on the light.

  “John?”

  He could barely hear the word above the knocking of his heart.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I wanted to tell you good night.” It stepped toward him in the darkness. He couldn’t see its face. He wanted to look at it, yes—so that he might understand why it wanted to kill him—but he also didn’t—didn’t want to see the face he had tried so long to love, but could not.

  “I wanted to tell you good night,” the figure said again. It had come to do what it couldn’t do before—what, now that his grandmother was dead, it could. Why was it waiting?

  “I also wanted to tell
you—”

  His heart stopped. The figure had sat down on the side of his bed, where pale light from the porch fell through the bedroom blinds to its broad face. He could see its eyes now. He could see its hands, perfectly still in its lap—hands that never made patterns in the air, that hated and always would the idea of such things. He looked in its eyes for the cobra, the towering wave, the girl with the board, the bleeding door, but he saw none of these things.

  What he saw instead was impossible.

  “—how sorry I am your grandmother is gone. . . . She was my mother, too . . . and I miss her, John.” There were tears in the words. It had to be a trick, a lie, but it wasn’t.

  The figure fell silent then, unable to speak.

  In the silence of the room he heard his grandmother—who was gone, but somehow there, as she would always be—say:

  This is what she wanted all along, John—to have you for herself, that is all. And now that she does, what wanted to kill no longer needs to kill. It can sleep, and I will be watching. There are more witches, John, and spells than the world can imagine, and a witch who doesn’t know she is one is a sad and terrible thing.

  Grandma? he asked.

  Do not be afraid.

  I can’t. . . .

  Yes, you can. You now know who you are.

  The boy waited, and when the figure sitting on the side of his bed still did not speak, he reached out, and, though he was shaking, touched it, saw his hand begin to glow like a little sun, and in a moment the figure touched him back, uncoiling in the warmth of his light.