The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories

by McAllister, Bruce

  They taught each other a few words and he gave her a strand of costume jewelry, swirling glass beads from Camp Goodman near Saigon. In return she gave him a brass bracelet and followed after him when he walked the perimeter, though he told her not to. She called him “Cao minh,” which he found out meant “special brother.” “That’s awfully close to ‘long pig,’ ” Carruthers teased him. “Damn close.” They had both laughed.

  He never picked her up. She never climbed up on his lap or asked to be carried piggyback or thrown into the air as an American kid would have. That was okay. She was a female, and the last thing the new A-camp needed was a misunderstanding.

  They touched nevertheless—his hand on her shoulder, her hand in his—and when these touches brought no looks of disapproval from the adults of the village, the unease finally left him.

  A few hours before the patrol was to leave—at sunset—she came to him. All day she had sat watching him on the hard-packed red earth of the village, ten or twelve yards away, looking into the shadows of the jungle whenever he glanced over at her from his packing. She was silent when she finally came, a woman’s anger in her eyes, presenting him with her arm, the limp wrist, the only thing she could offer to make him stay. There was a scratch, not very deep, and he wondered how she had gotten it. The inflammation was all but hidden by the pigment of her skin, and her arms and legs, he realized now, were covered with the little pink scars of scratches just like it from the world she lived in. He simply hadn’t noticed them before. He got out a first-aid kit and disinfected the scratch and fussed over the arm as he would have a broken doll. Then he put a bandage on it and waited. She did not leave. She stood there while he finished packing, and when he said “Good night” and went inside his hooch for a couple of hours of sleep, he heard her say something that also sounded like “Good night.”

  The banyan trees were beautiful. Their world was like a dream. They rose a hundred feet, and their crowns arched like endless umbrellas to keep the sunlight out. In the shadows below, the trunks grew like great gray knees from the ground, and he felt like a toy soldier in a fairy tale. In the yard of the abandoned French hospital, with its perpetual twilight, he saw the C-ration can. It was lying in the middle of the yard and he was the first to see it.

  He walked toward it and the world flickered blue. Everything slowed.

  He stopped, shook his head, and stared at the can.

  He took another step.

  The world turned blue again, slowing, and he stopped, dizzy.

  The others had arrived, and one of the Jarai was heading toward the can. He made himself take another step, and the world flickered blue, stayed blue, and he started to speak, to say “No,” but the Jarai was to the can now, leaning over, rising suddenly, driven skyward, splitting in half like a wet straw doll, the concussion a tremendous No.

  That was the first time it happened.

  Later that day, as he ran toward NVA fire, the world turned blue again and stayed blue. The banyan trees were blue. The AK-47 rounds were bluer still. They slowed as if in a dream, and he left himself, floating high above the others, able to look down and see his own body running on the jungle floor, dodging the slow blue bullets of the NVA, doing exactly what he told it to do.

  He could see the NVA, the blue uniforms on the blue earth, and he took them out one by one.

  When it was over, he was covered with blood. He could not remember why. He could not remember how he had killed them, only that he had, their fire meaningless, their weapons—one by one—stopping at last.

  Carruthers, the black operations sergeant, was the first to reach him. “Jesus, boy, that was some down-home shit kicking,” he said, but the look in his eyes said something else. The black man wouldn’t touch him. He’d never seen anything like it in his life—a boy fresh from Fort Bragg moving through jungle like that, untouched, ten NVA kills. The black man wouldn’t touch him.

  When he returned to camp, he heard how she had died. The camp had been mortared again, but this time a longhouse had been hit. Three villagers had been in it, the girl one of them. She had been wounded in the spine and they had packed her with plasma. She had asked for him until she died.

  He looked at her body. He thought he should take her hand.

  Three nights later he dreamed of the leper he had seen on a beach near Da Nang. The hideous skin, the beautiful sand, a colony the war never seemed to touch.

  In the dream the leper wore his face and said: You can save yourself with this thing, Danny Boy, but you can’t save others. What is it worth? What is it worth if you can’t save another?

  Later, standing down in Pleiku, he would remember what it had been like:

  The ninth blue animal was climbing down from the tree, trying to flee, when he saw it from where he floated high in the trees and told his body where to go and caught it before it could get away. He danced toward it, avoiding the little pieces of metal it threw at him, and tore its throat out with a knife. He knew this was wrong, that the others would be bothered, would look at him oddly, so he fired into the animal’s head, making a third blue eye there, and held the body up against him as it died. Then he went to find the tenth.

  April 17, 1990: When Gala suggested a picnic with the Moynahans that weekend, he said yes. The park was full of kids, the ducks so well fed they could barely walk and wouldn’t even look at the bread in your hand. He wanted his son to lie on the grass with him, but he knew he couldn’t keep him for long. The Moynahan kids knew how to have fun.

  God, I love that boy, he would remember thinking.

  They were lying on the grass, the two of them, near a hedge of bamboo. They could hear the children playing in it. When the dark-skinned boy appeared out of the cane, holding a black toy rifle, he tried to smile. The boy stopped, raised the barrel, and stared back at him. The barrel came down in a flash and the muzzle snickered. Beside him on the grass Aaron’s head exploded, the bottom jaw remaining, jutting like half a Halloween grin, teeth glittering with the blood, as the body spasmed, spasmed again, and tipped back slowly in the reeds and shallow water, which smelled like spoiled milk.

  “Aaron!” he screamed, the weapon in his own hands arching, stitching the boy up the middle with a burst. Somewhere out in the paddy two women began to scream.

  Aaron was staring at him. He was okay now. There wasn’t any blood.

  Gala was rushing toward them.

  “It’s all right,” he told her. “It’s all right.”

  He looked at the boy standing by the bamboo. The barrel was pointed at the grass now, a duck passing inches from it. The boy was watching the duck now.

  The boy’s eyes weren’t even slitted. There wasn’t even an epicanthic fold. The boy was Hispanic, Chicano, that was all.

  This isn’t real, he told himself. This is a disease. The others have it, too.

  What is it worth, the leper said to him on a beach as blue as his wife’s eyes, in a war that hadn’t ended, if you can’t save others? What is it worth, Cao minh?

  October 18, 1964: They were just kids, he and Art. Jesus, they were just kids. They were going to get out of the heat of the Merced Valley, away from the same girls with the same brown hair at the same county fairs, away from the jobs you always took after graduation and the little towns where no one knew a damn thing. They were going to get away and then come back, older and better. They were going to be John Kennedy’s warriors—berets and three languages and training in five combat arts. They didn’t smoke. They drank in moderation. They ran fifteen miles a day together, did ten sets of everything and laps at the school pool whenever they could and watched their grades. They didn’t want you if you flunked out. You had to be smart. He’d miss his sister and his parents, sure, and even his brother, Jim. He’d remember his father standing in the almond groves setting the long sprinklers that seemed to go forever. His father would stand up suddenly in his memory, in the morning light, and wave at him, and he’d remember this, carrying it with him in any jungle, on any highland plateau, in a
ny riverine darkness. He’d remember his sister, too, her last birthday party, and his mother, her eyes. He’d come back to them all at last, older and wiser. He knew this.

  April 17, 1990: That night he saw two men from his unit die horrible deaths, their blue bodies headless, cleaved from their spines by men they thought were friends in a war that wasn’t a dream at all.

  He awoke shouting, and it took him a moment to realize that someone else was screaming with him.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” Gala was kneeling on the floor, as if in prayer, fists clenched like a little girl’s, the anger and fear whipping her face like wind, her eyes wide and locked on him, but not in love. She said she didn’t want this anymore, that it wasn’t fair to ask her to live through it again and again, and that if he loved her he wouldn’t.

  Tomorrow, he knew, he would find her at Jack’s house. Aaron and Katie might or might not be with her. She could stop pretending now.

  Was it gone forever? Was it buried so deeply after twenty years of his life that it would take a hundred deaths witnessed, a hundred threats to his own body, to bring it back, to make him again what he had once been, moving through jungles untouched, unafraid, floating free, the world turning blue, the gift—as Schuermann had put it more than once—waking at last after an eon of civilized sleep?

  He remembered a man in Pleiku, an A-camp captain from Georgia who hadn’t been afraid of him, who’d known the blue flickering for what it was, because things like this happened to him, too, and he knew of others just like them, and he kept a list.

  “It’s a warrior’s gift, Danny Boy,” the man had told him. “Samurai’s blessing. Use it or lose it, Danny Boy.”

  But this wasn’t a warrior’s war, the man had said later. MACV wasn’t going to let them win. So it made no sense to stay, and he’d left as soon as he could.

  On a pretty campus after the war they had met again, invited by an agency that had kept its own list. They’d worked together there, laughing and questioning, for a couple of months, and then gone their separate ways.

  Later, that man—whose name was Burdick—had tried to find him more than once. “We can use this thing, Danny Boy,” he’d said on the phone, his voice the soldier he would always be, looking for a war to win. “We can change the world with it. I’m putting together a little group—in Schuermann’s memory. You know them all. I hope you’ll join us.” He’d paused, then added, “We don’t need their army, do we, Danny Boy.”

  He’d told the man no both times.

  He found where they lived and watched them come and go. A young man who held his cigarette the way Europeans do and wore a white short-sleeve shirt watered the front lawn every day. An old woman in loose, black clothes walked up and down the street every morning with a two-year-old. The four boys who attended the high school walked home at four P.M. and did not leave again. Stone dogs with heavy scowls sat on either side of the old porch, and he could see the unpainted lumber of the rooms that had been added, one by one, to the back of the house. He watched a yellow Celica arrive one day and a pretty woman with Eurasian features get out. She did not live there, he would discover, but she visited often.

  Three weeks later he found the courage to speak to her. She did not understand him at first, was annoyed, and did not want to talk. She worked for an agency that resettled her people, she said at last.

  These were her cousins. They had lived in Cholon, too.

  He followed her and made sure that he ran into her again, at the place downtown where she usually had a late lunch. A week after that, he asked her out. He did not tell her he had fought there, but she seemed to know. There would have been no other reason for him to talk to her, would there?

  January 3, 1967: When she opened the door, he was standing there, shaking and filthy. His eyes were dead. “You have killed,” she said, her accent a whore’s, her broad face beautiful.

  He said, “Yes. But my hands are empty now.”

  She took him by the hand, led him to the small tiled room with its vase of white chrysanthemums, and made his bath warm. She helped him from his uniform and saw the old blood on it. As she bathed him, he began to fall asleep. She kissed him and let him lie back with his head against the tile. He did not come to her as the others did. He came as a child, running from someone else’s shame. This was why she felt what she felt for him, and why she thought of him when he was gone.

  She knelt for a moment by the window, looking out at Cholon, at Dong Khanh Boulevard and the lights of Saigon, and in the darkness above the city tried to see the flight of a beaked bird or the flailing of a big cat, fighting for its eternal life.

  He did not wake, even when she moved him to the bed. There, she wrapped her legs around him until he was warm against her, and stared into the night until she could see it.

  June 18, 1990: Over dinner, the fifth time they went out, he said to her, “I knew a man named Clipper—a medic. For nine months he saw people, his and yours, whose deaths made no sense to him. When his tour was over he went to Japan. I wanted so much to go with him. I knew it was the right thing to do. He went to Kyoto, to study kendo. By the end of three years he could hear men approach him from behind even when they made no sound. He knew when the katana would fall on his shoulder in the training even when there was no warning, except the truth of his own centeredness, the rightness of his choices. The bodies of small-boned people falling from the skies, pushed by men just like him, were still with him, but they meant something else now. He said this in a letter, one that did not sound like him, one he had written only because he had promised he would. It was the only one he wrote. I read it again and again in Ben Biet when the shelling wouldn’t stop, when the world stayed blue for three days and I was still alive, and there were others who were not. I wanted to be there with him. I wanted to use what I had differently. Over the next two days I lost the letter. I cursed him for leaving. I told myself that he was a coward and didn’t care that others might die in his place.”

  She looked at him. He could not read her face but did not think it was contempt he saw. She had been there, too. A secretary for a shipping company, she had said.

  It was the first time he had talked to her about these things. After this, it would be at her apartment, only there, that he would tell her.

  April 17, 1969: “Synchronicity,” Dr. Schuermann was saying to the ten of them, “is a wonderful idea. It is a Jungian concept that explains, without really explaining, psi phenomena that are beyond even speculative explanation. But it doesn’t help us much, does it?”

  The group had been together for four months, working in the lab and on the makeshift training course six days a week, twelve or fifteen hours a day, and they liked this Schuermann, candy-assed civilian that he was. They liked him and he liked them. He liked seeing them think, and even the lamest training idea someone suggested he would try. Even Burdick, who had quit the war because of MACV, liked him, and this said something, didn’t it?

  “The trick,” Schuermann would say, “is not to understand the role of the hypothalamus or medulla oblongata, or the importance of ‘intentionality readiness peaks,’ or the phenomena of ‘psi missing,’ but simply to find a trigger—here, back in the Big PX—that will work as well as fatigue and blood and fear worked over there, to make you what you were. After all, boys, there are a lot of people interested in what you were over there.”

  Their visitors from Virginia didn’t come often, and when they did, they talked to Schuermann, no one else, and this made it easier, as did the pay, and how laid-back it all was, because Schuermann wanted it that way. All they had to do was listen to what terms like OBE and waking precog and nocturnal clair meant, sit at a monitor with wires on their chest and head every once in a while, and do their best to bring it all back: the voices, the tunnels of light, the visions of angels, the auras, the gut senses, the blue flickering world—the things that had kept them alive, over there. “They don’t think we can do it,” Schuermann would say. “They think we need a war to bring it
back, boys. What do you think? A little fatigue, a little Valium, an arcade game or two? We can do it, can’t we?” He’d wait, and then, with a wink, he’d say, “But if we can, let’s not tell them.”

  He’d laugh. They’d laugh. They were twenty-two years old and thirty and forty-five, and he was sixty-five, the retired director of a “dream lab” on the East Coast. They’d all laugh like boys.

  The campus was beautiful. They were civilians now, vets with special talents and special invitations to be here, and it was like a dream.

  “Psi cannot exist independent of individual psychodynamic need,” Schuermann would say while they gazed out the windows of the classroom, the eucalyptus trees dappling the sunlight, the girls walking by pretty as magazine ads, books under their arms. It didn’t bother him. He knew they needed this, and he would say it again without getting angry: “When a woman dreams her lover is dying, and he is, it is a bond-based receptivity ruled not by the paraphysical laws of the talent itself but by her own, very measurable psychological needs. Sometimes the imagery is literal, sometimes it is symbolic, but it is always dictated by need.

  “When the world turned blue, as it did for you, Daniel, it was because a part of you, refusing death, reached out. When you, Burdick, made the NVA see the pictures you wanted them to see, just like your father did in another war, it was the same. Had you been able to accept death—your father’s or your own—you wouldn’t have needed pictures, would you.

  “What is it that a man really needs, boys?” Schuermann would ask them, his voice rising with emotion. “Is it victory over death, power over others, the sating of every hunger? Or is it—sometimes—something else entirely?”