The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories

by McAllister, Bruce

  They didn’t have an answer, but he would ask it again and again.

  It was there that they heard of the second group—run by the agency on a base somewhere, DOD and need-to-know, its members still in the service and training hard as dogs, They laughed at how serious it all sounded.

  Two months later, as they began to find the trigger, Schuermann died in a car accident near Napa and they were told to leave.

  June 22, 1990: Jack Tatum didn’t panic when he first felt the pressure on his face. He was dreaming of Santa Barbara, of his first wife, and the pressure, when it started, was faint. Then he began to suffocate. In the dream he had fallen into the Pacific by their hotel, couldn’t get air through his nose, and had to open his mouth wide.

  But the pressure was real.

  When the cloth was plunged deep into his throat, all the way down to his larynx, and he began to gag, he came fully awake but was unable to make a sound. A single hand held both of his in excruciating pain, and he could feel two fingers touching the cartilage of his throat as if lovingly. The figure standing in the darkness above him held him, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to reach the handgun by the bed.

  It had taken less than four seconds, he would realize later. The pinched nose, mouth springing open, the rag crammed down his throat, the pressure points on his hands, the clear meaning of the fingers at his throat. These were the kinds of things they taught you in special-warfare schools. The kinds of things he knew nothing about.

  The figure in the darkness waited.

  There was enough light through the window that he could see the basic contours of the face.

  He knew that face. Was it possible?

  Yes. He knew this man’s wife. He knew this man’s children. He had been hoping for an affair, something long and convenient for them both. They’d had lunch twice. He’d kissed her in the car two days ago.

  He’d never imagined the man would do anything like this.

  The darkness shifted. The figure stepped back and turned, as if waiting for him to do something.

  He got the .38 from the drawer quickly, fumbled, and was aiming it, aiming it again, into the darkness.

  Still the figure did not move.

  He held the gun tightly, wanting so much to fire it, but unable to.

  When he was alone again, the pain fading from his hands at last, he saw suddenly what was expected of him, how he could not afford to open his door to that woman again.

  There had been no blue.

  None at all. Even when he’d waited for Tatum to fire the weapon, there had been no blue. The talent was dead and gone. He knew this now.

  When he appeared at her door that night, he could not remember driving there. “What is it?” she said. Her English was good.

  She was a strong woman. He had known her long enough now that her concern was probably real, that it might even be love, the feelings they felt.

  He could not say it.

  “You have killed,” she said.

  “In my dreams,” he said. “Only there.”

  She let him in, taking him by the hand. It was not the first time he had come to her this way, but it was the worst. He had tried to bring it back, and there was nothing, nothing at all. It was another country, another time now.

  In the small living room with its vase of white flowers she kissed him, knelt down before him, the ao dai hugging her like a silky hand, unbuttoning his shirt, pulling it up and away from his belt. Then her head moved and there was a coolness against his chest. A kiss. A single kiss.

  He felt nothing. His mouth, his eyes, and his lips were dry.

  He was lying back, his head on a familiar pillow, his eyes on the ceiling, which moved slowly, turning like the fans in dark rooms where old men smoked opium and dreamed of animals they had never seen.

  He could hear the rustle of silk, the whisper of it drifting to the floor like dry leaves, and then she was beside him again, working with the clothes that remained.

  He looked at her, and a cry came from him, below all dryness and death.

  She was naked, kneeling as if praying over him, her hair untied, covering her shoulders, and the whites of her eyes like crescent moons, like chalices filling with moonlight. Her breasts moved gently as she worked, unembarrassed and unafraid, and the jackknife curves of her legs, her skin the color of teak, the feet upturned in another prayer, were a beauty he had not seen in years. He closed his eyes. He could feel her fingers. He could feel the cloth slipping away as she helped him do what he could not do.

  He felt nothing but this.

  And then he heard her gasp.

  He raised himself up and found her staring at him, at his groin, at the exquisite tiger there. She had never seen it before, he realized, even after so many nights. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She was nearly crying.

  “It was done years ago,” he said. “Over there.”

  There was nothing he could say to change it. It was her world there, just inside the jut of the bone. The hope of a city, a country. He hadn’t even known what picture it would be when they’d found the place on Tu Do Street, and, too drunk to say no, he had it done.

  He moved his hand to her side and touched her. She shivered. He kept his hand against her. In the end she touched him there as well.

  When he awoke she was asleep beside him, naked, her body against his as if she had known him her entire life.

  On the nightstand he could see the white flowers.

  June 23, 1990: He had a dream like no dream he had ever dreamed. In it he could see an inconspicuous military base, one he had never visited but somehow knew. The kind where white-gloved guards snapped off crisp salutes to official visitors and were courteous to civilians lost on the interstates. The kind where insects beat themselves to death against the lights of the guardhouse during hot summer nights.

  He could see a compound. It was in the northeast corner of the base, just beyond a small airfield, with its own road access and gate, its own guards in maroon berets. Its ten-foot chain-link fence had double outriggers with three strands of wire each and was electrified. Inside the fence was a helicopter pad, and on this the twelve men in training here came and went; as did their superior officers, as did those who had trained them for fifteen years.

  He was not one of the twelve, but he somehow knew them—name by name, rank by rank, talent by talent—and he was with them in the briefing room now. They were the government’s team. The team that had trained like dogs. They could hear the rotors. Was the colonel, or the man in civvies who had accompanied him, coming back? Had there been a change in mission plans already, only an hour after the briefing? Would the night insertion into a destabilized Lima be called off?

  Something was wrong.

  Jasper Cheek, the Special Forces sergeant hardened by countless SOG missions in Laos and Cambodia, and a “waking precog,” was sitting, holding his head in his hands, his head moving from side to side, unable to get up. He was, the dreamer saw, crying.

  Adam Riggs, the Navy SEAL petty officer who saw auras on those about to die, was up and standing, pale as a sheet, trying to speak, though the words would not come.

  The rotors were wrong—the pitch of a lighter machine.

  What was happening?

  Lieutenant Yamura was up now, too, eyes as wide as a child’s, moving slowly toward the front of the room where the general and the civilian had stood, staring through the wall. Wernick, the Air Force Black Beret, and ASA’s Arias—the one who had said, “I know I’m the one doing it, Captain, but when it happens I feel like a puppet, you know, the strings, someone else doing the pulling”—were looking through the ceiling as if they could see beyond it, to something horrible there. The veins in their necks were gorged and pounding.

  What was it? Had they been poisoned? A test? A hallucinogen in the ventilation system? Each was a talent, a survivor with special training. Looking at them now it was as if—

  Edwin Vick, a “remoter,” and the only talent the agency had fou
nd among its own, screamed suddenly, “Mother of God! Where are the weapons?”

  Four of them—led by Nuno, another remoter, and the nocturnal clairvoyant Sebastian—came awake now, heading for the door. As they reached it the sounds of automatic weapon fire began. There were sound suppressors, but it didn’t really matter.

  Suddenly the dreamer understood. They were going to die. Someone was going to kill them because of what they were, because of something their superiors in Virginia had done long ago, and because of what they were trained to do. And it would be someone who could indeed do it, who was as good as they were and always had been—the gut senses, the auras, the OBEs, the remote viewing, and everything else a war had wakened in them.

  They were going to die and they could see it.

  They could see themselves dying.

  They were outside now, all except Cheek, who was still in his chair, the vision in his head—the future minutes or seconds away—holding him there. He could not stop crying.

  The dreamer moved toward the door, and as he did he heard the silenced Ingram machine pistols outside again and watched as the forty-five-caliber slugs tore through the thin walls beside him. He kept moving. The world was not yet blue. Outside a body rolled against his legs. Bert Northcutt, the Special Forces sergeant from Bluelight. A sound came from the man, then stopped. Under the light—where the insects battered themselves to death—he could see the exit wound, where it had taken his windpipe out.

  The dreamer looked up, and there, not far from the blurring rotors of a lightweight helicopter painted the colors of a hospital medevac, were six men with black stocking caps pulled over their heads, the eyes cut out like jack-o’-lanterns. They hadn’t seen him yet. He saw the frogman Chambers on the ground. The quiet, sinewy man who spoke of his talent as “Cousteau vision,” where “everything down there is as clear as a TV set,” was trying to get to his feet. Something about the man’s shoulder was wrong, wet, like an oily rag. A jack-o’-lantern face appeared around the corner of the building, raised the Ingram, and sprayed. Chambers jumped sideways, but it was as if the Ingram knew where he would be. It made no difference. It happened fifty or sixty feet away, but the dreamer saw the three heavy-caliber slugs strike the man’s skull and the back of his head blossom like flowers, filling the night air with rain.

  The dreamer moved toward the helicopter, wondering how he would die.

  Off in the shadows of the Q Building he saw a man dodge, dodge, and dodge again as the rounds from two Ingrams tried to find him. The man’s talent was working and he was good, moving as if on a ball court. He was trying his best. He did not want to die either. The man had something—a length of wood or metal—in his hands and was nearly to the first jack-o’-lantern face. He was raising it, whatever it was—

  Before he could swing, the jack-o’-lantern dropped the Ingram and stood waiting. The man swung, but the jack-o’-lantern had already dodged with a terrible ease. The man swung again. The jack-o’-lantern tilted to the side, and a leg came out of nowhere and caught the man in the face. The man shook his head, swung again, knew where the other would be this time, but the other knew it, too, knew it better, as if guiding the man where he wanted him to be. As the man swung, his talent helping him, the jack-o’-lantern turned three hundred sixty degrees, then one hundred eighty, feinted and kicked, and though the man had seen it all and was already moving, too, the jack-o’-lantern had seen more, had already kicked again, and the dodge brought the man’s neck right to him. The neck snapped. Someone laughed somewhere. The jack-o’-lantern stared at the body for a moment, grinning, then turned. He looked at the dreamer and began to walk toward him.

  A name floated up from the darkness, which still held no blue.

  Burdick. . . .

  The jack-o’-lantern face came toward him, and it was the leper now, and it wore his face. “They killed Schuermann, Danny Boy, because he wouldn’t help them,” Burdick said at last. “He had the ‘trigger’ and he wouldn’t help them. You didn’t know that, did you? You should have joined us. We could have worked together to avenge him.” The face paused. “We still can, Danny Boy. We’re the only team left now.” The face paused again. “The gift isn’t dead, Danny Boy. It never dies.” All of this was real, the dreamer knew. Twelve men with talent had died, were dying, this very night somewhere, while he was living.

  The dreamer felt something stir beside him and knew what it was. In another world, a woman lay on a bed beside him, dark-skinned, and asleep. He remembered the little girl who had died in Dak Lo, and the woman lying against him now, what he might feel for her if given a chance, and the man named Burdick, who had reached him at last, in his sleep, in his waking hours, picture after picture over the past two months, without his knowing it.

  It never dies, Danny Boy, the jack-o’-lantern face said again, and waited.

  There would be a phone call or letter soon. The man named Burdick would want an answer.

  Cao minh? he heard her say beside him, her hand in his, as alive and real as anything he had ever known.

  He felt her stir again, and as they woke together, he knew the two he could save.

  Little Boy Blue

  Story Notes

  This is the other story that would never have seen the light of day had I thrown away the Terrible Ludlumesque Novel that so awkwardly and painfully preceded Dream Baby. It’s told in third-person—as so many thrillers are—rather than first, and captures, about as well as it might, not only those ESP accounts from my first Dream Baby “consultant,” Art W. (that fellow in the bus station), but also how it felt emotionally to him: To have such a “gift,” and yet be able to save only himself, and how that left him feeling . . . about himself . . . war . . . and those he cared about. But what made me keep the pieces of the Terrible Novel that became “Little Boy Blue” was, I remember, their lyrical style and moodiness—and the epiphanies, the heartfelt moments, that made the story possible. A quick read through the manuscript with a magic marker in hand located the moments worth saving; but when strung together, lyrical and epiphanic as they might have been, the fragments made a profoundly less-than-coherent whole. Ellen Datlow at OMNI, where I sent the story, called that incoherency to my attention and finally got a coherent draft out of me. The story appeared in OMNI in 1989.

  I sometimes ask myself whether what truly matters in life can ever be captured—made to fit—a short story or novel. Can all the storyteller’s tricks in the world pull it off? I don’t know. As acclaimed Vietnam novelist Tim O’Brien said in his remarkable essay, “How to Tell a True War Story” (to paraphrase): As soon as you have a hero in a war story, you’re leaving something out—because the hero never sees it that way. And: If a story makes sense, it’s probably a lie. And: If it ends well, you’re leaving something out, too.

  What truly sticks with me from those fifteen years of work on Dream Baby (short story and novel both) and this story (the relic of its predecessor) are things like this:

  —We’re at a bar and the vet I’m interviewing is telling me how he still dreams of the friends he lost in Nam. In his dreams, they’re still in Vietnam, all of them, sitting in a hooch, and they’re laughing because “that’s what you do when gallows humor kicks in and you’re alive; and you laugh, too, because in a dream you’ll always be together . . . no one can take your friends away . . . no one can take you away from them. . . .”

  —Another vet is telling me about his first OBE (out of body experience) in battle—the infamous Lang Vei tank fight—and how it saved his life and, because of it, he later became an Evangelical Christian minister; while another vet, that same day, tells me about his own OBE that kept him alive, and how he went to Japan after the war and became—and still is—a devout Buddhist.

  —Another vet with a strikingly similar OBE but in another province and in another year, returned to the States, tried to make it happen again with one near-death accident or another, but couldn’t—and now, having made peace with himself as best as he can, raises Rottweilers
in Alabama.

  —And yet another vet, a one-armed, seasoned and vetted Green Beret captain—a Bull Simmons protégé who buried three million bucks of gold leaf in the mountains of Laos during Operation White Star, chased Che Guevara in Colombia, worked for the CIA more than once, and later became one of the four most important consultants on the novel—sitting in front of me after one too many beers, suddenly flashing back, weeping, saying only and with eyes like a stunned deer, “Oh God . . . he was such a good RTO . . . they skinned him. . . .” I sit there for thirty minutes in silence, waiting for him to speak, and he can’t because sometimes words just aren’t enough to capture it, or bring back what was lost. . . .

  Hero, the Movie

  What’s Left When You’ve Already Saved the World?

  “We’re in this together, aren’t we, Steve?”

  —Janie, The Blob

  “When man entered the atomic age, he opened a door into a new world. What we will eventually find in that new world nobody can predict. . . .”

  —Dr. Medford, Them!

  “An atom bomb couldn’t eradicate this thing.”

  —Entomologist, on the new breed of fire ant,

  National Geographic, February 1997

  The Pitch

  This romantic comedy begins where all low-budget ’50s creature-features ended: The mutant insects born of atom-bomb radiation (or invaders from space, or monsters from the sea, or fifty-foot women) have at last been defeated and our small-town hero, with girlfriend Janie or June or Betty at his side, must now face the rest of his life. Didn’t we wonder what his life would be like after the final credits rolled? After you save the world, what’s left? You can marry the Professor’s daughter, sure. You can sell the rights to your story. Be on national talk shows. Hold onto fame a little longer. But then what?