The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories

by McAllister, Bruce

  Rick is at a community center that evening, making his first session of the veteran’s outreach group. He couldn’t be more fish out of water. These vets, not your average, are either enormous guys in denim overalls without shirts, birds of prey and women’s names and Semper Fi and Kill Them All and Let God Sort Them Out tattooed on every inch of them, or little wiry men with haunted eyes who look like serial killers. They talk about “the horrors of the Nam” and the “the gasses of the Gulf” and “the caves of Afghanistan” and Rick, a young Tom Hanks expression on his face, feels like running for his life. But it’s his turn now to speak, to share the horror, and all eyes are on him. They’re waiting for him—aging boomers, bearded bikers, wiry paranoids—to speak. When he does, he can’t help it. He blurts out: “It wasn’t horrible for me. I loved it.” His eyes are tearing. “Actually, I want it back. I miss it.”

  Suddenly everyone is crying. They’re up, out of their seats, huddled around him, all of them crying. Their great tattooed arms and their dark skinny arms are around him, suffocating him in a group hug, and they’re saying, “We know what you mean, Rick. We miss it, too.”

  When the meeting ends, Rick slips away, makes his way down the night street (his car has of course broken an axle), and hears someone coming after him. It’s Chi Chi Escalante, one of those gaunt-eyed wiry paranoids from the group. Worse, he’s Hispanic—something no all-American red-blooded boy from McCulloughville can possibly trust. Chi Chi’s got a scar on his cheek and to make matters worse he’s grinning: He wants to be friends. “How about a flick?” he says and Rick mumbles, keeps walking. Chi Chi persists. He knows a bro when he sees one. “You’re that guy who whacked those bugs, right?” Rick’s vanity sparks. He stops walking. “Must have been excellent,” Chi Chi says. “Yes, I suppose it was,” Rick answers. They walk, they talk. “How about a flick?” Chi Chi asks again.

  Why not? Rick thinks. He doesn’t even have a DVD player anymore. He can’t even watch the old footage.

  Chi Chi driving, they go to a dark downtown movie theater—sticky floors, creepy customers, high ceiling with gargoyles glaring down—and it’s a Mexican horror movie, one about a human brain kept alive on a catering cart. It’s in Spanish, no subtitles, and Chi Chi says: “Man, I grew up on this basura.” Rick stares. Strangely, he can relate. The hero isn’t even Anglo; in fact, he’s not sure there is a hero; but for a moment he can imagine Chi Chi growing up on it and loving it. But then the food—he hopes it’s food—that’s holding his shoes to the floor destroys the magic moment and he’s got to leave.

  “How about a bubbly?” Chi Chi asks. “I know this part of town like my girlfriend’s chi-chis.” Rick shakes his head, breaks away, goes home, where he finds that Frank Emerson has—wonderful guy that he is—broken into his apartment and left a pile of his belongings: Mounted locust head, trophies, awards, wedding pics, belts, socks, cell phone, and keys to a pair of jet skis whose location Rick has forgotten. And a note: Thought you might want these. Frank.

  The cell phone’s battery is dead, he doesn’t have a land line, and pay phones that work, he’s about to discover, are as rare as whooping cranes. When he finds one three hours later, he calls Chi Chi. “Yeah, I’d like a drink,” he says. “I’d like one very much, amigo.”

  They drink. In fact, Chi Chi gets him plastered at an East L.A. bar and before we know it they’re staggering out of a tattoo parlor on Hollywood Boulevard and Rick’s got, on his forearm, a rather large bird of prey clutching what looks like a small fishing pole.

  “A hero’s got to have a tattoo!” Rick announces shit-faced as we fade out and back in to:

  Another montage, even quicker, of the next workday—the van, Rick’s tattooed arm painting another species of vermin on the side of the van, the houses he visits, the very real world of people and their insects. When the montage stops this time, it’s in an old man’s vegetable garden . . . the grasshoppers that are eating his corn and lettuce. We hold on Rick sitting cross-legged in the dirt, holding one of the little locusts as it kicks in his hand doing its best to live. The old man comes out, looks confused, then angry. Rick looks up with an expression like Christ’s: Suffer the little insects to come unto me. “I’m sorry. I just can’t do it,” he says, placing the creature gently back on a head of lettuce, gets up and leaves. We jump to:

  His company’s office, where Rick is quitting. We don’t hear what they’re saying. His boss is pissed and he’s pointing at Rick’s van. Rick gets a can of turpentine and a rag and removes his artwork. When he’s through, he looks terrible. His hair has grown like hybrid grass. He’s got a beard. He does look like a bum.

  But he’s got a DVD player now and a high-end camera phone—thanks to Chi Chi, who’s got street connections up the wazoo. He doesn’t know how to work the camera, picture caller ID, Bluetooth® connectivity, or much else, but who cares? He calls Janie and leaves his number and that evening gets a call: They’ve got vampire bats in Cleveland, the voice says—millions of them. They know who he is—he’s the only one who can stop these things—and they need him right now. The Mayor’s office, the National Guard, the Highway Patrol—they all need him. His heart is racing. He’s smiling like a kid. It’s happening—finally happening. He can feel the adrenaline, the thrill, the joy, the glory—how important he’s going to be in the universe again—but then it starts: the laughter on the other end.

  It’s a joke, he realizes. They’re Frank’s friends. They’ve got to be.

  He turns off the cell, feeling sick to his stomach.

  He watches the old footage. The mounted locust head, still lying in a corner of the room, stares up at him and his cell starts ringing again. He’s chosen a chirpy bird song for the ring and regrets it. He hesitates—but picks it up. He can hope, can’t he? This time the voice barely gets a sentence out before it cracks up. It’s giant chickens in Duluth this time, but the voice—enjoying itself, other voices in the background enjoying themselves, too—can’t even get the next sentence out and Rick ends it, leaves and walks the streets, which are dark and haunting now. We see tears in his eyes.

  Rick and Chi Chi hang out. More drunkenness. Hitting on working girls, babes in singles bars, hotties with dates whose dates arrive late and surly. Rick falls on his face in a stupor before anything—good or bad—can happen. Close on his tattooed arm hanging in a gutter. The eagle looks more like a parrot.

  He keeps his cell off, but knows the messages will keep coming. Frank’s friends, friends of friends, anyone who wants a laugh. He stays away from his apartment as much as he can—even goes to more Mexican horror movies with Chi Chi—but in the end he still listens to the calls.

  When he’s not with Chi Chi he walks the streets alone. One night, bleary from drink, he sees a very attractive blonde being mugged by a street gang that’s so ethnically diverse it looks like a UNESCO poster. He’s never seen a mugging before and it takes a moment before he realizes exactly what’s going on and why God must have led him here: His chance to be a hero. He has righteousness on his side. The gang will sense this.

  But before Rick is halfway to her the young woman nails two of the gang with her purse. Her wig flies off and it’s not a young woman at all but a very ticked-off transvestite who’s swinging a bag that weighs more than a basset hound. He’s fast, hairy legs pumping as he disappears down an alley just as Rick arrives. The gang turns to face him.

  The gang’s feelings are hurt, it would seem. They’ve been shamed and need to take their feelings out on somebody. The leader of the gang explains this to Rick rather cheerfully. The last shot we see is of a blue Dewey Dumpster in the alley, Rick’s head rising slowly out of it covered with ketchup, the insides of melons and other produce almost but not quite hiding his black eye. We push in on all the flies swarming around him. They make a halo around his head as we cut to:

  Rick, despondent, phoning Chi Chi from his dark apartment, only to hear this: “Message for Pablo and Dennis and Maria and Reek. Sorry, homies, but I can’t take this civilian s
heet no more. I re-upping today.”

  His best friend has reenlisted, for Christ’s sake. Rick looks down at the floor in the darkness. Bugs—hundreds of dark, featureless bugs—scuttle across the linoleum. Cut to:

  Rick heading home at last—to McCulloughville—on a seedy Greyhound bus. He can’t take it anymore and it’s only in McCulloughville, he tells himself, that he’ll be able to put the terrible realities of 2005 America behind him. His bruises show. His black eye makes him look like a raccoon. His hair and beard seem to have grown at an inhuman rate. As he gets closer to home, the billboards get older, some of the products no longer made: Ipana Toothpaste. Carter’s Little Liver Pills. Burma Shave. Buick Roadmaster with Dynaflow. The cars passing the bus get older too and the clothing of those driving warp back to the ’50s as well. Rick Rowe is going home at last.

  As the bus slides into the McCulloughville station, we see the town. It hasn’t changed. Rick may have saved it from the mutant locusts, but something else has saved it from the new millennium: It’s still the Small Town of The Blob, Them!, and all those other ’50s horror flicks, and it’s the only home Rick’s got.

  A little museum has been built to commemorate him and he goes there first. He remembers hearing about it. The docent at the door—an old lady who’s not quite sure where she is, or who—doesn’t recognize him, and what he finds inside is a shock. The two giant locusts that have been preserved, reassembled, and put on display are covered with dust. The lighting in the place sucks. There aren’t any school children or elderly couples on tour. In fact, there isn’t anyone in the museum except a pair of teenagers—a boy with slicked-back hair and a girl with a mohair sweater—necking behind the left hind leg of the locust occupying the darkest corner of the room. When they notice him, they laugh, he hears a word that sounds like “wino” and he realizes what he must look like. He can’t let the town see him like this. As he leaves he sees a portrait of himself under a burnt-out bulb: Someone has drawn a mustache on his upper lip and antennae on his head. . . .

  He checks into the main hotel, signs in under “Smith,” and pays cash. Somehow it’s still ten dollars—just what it used to cost in the ’50s. He showers and shaves and as a haircut, settles for removing the hair from the back of his neck with a razor. He puts on the one set of clothes he’s got in his bag, downs two cups of Folger’s coffee in the hotel’s bar, and in the mirror over the bar practices smiling.

  He ambles down the street and it’s McCulloughville all right, town of his childhood, site of his glory, and the smile is for real now. His eyes are wide and he’s happier than he’s been in a long time—

  Until a couple passes him and the look they give him is deadly—as if he were diseased. Maybe they don’t recognize him. It’s a small town. Maybe they think he’s a stranger and—

  There, across the street, is Buddy Blaylock, his best friend from McCulloughville High School. Rick moves toward him quickly, hand raised for the hello that’s about to come out of his mouth, and as Buddy Blaylock turns—

  We see the same expression. Daggers.

  “Hello, Rick,” Buddy says.

  Rick is ebullient: “Gee, it’s great to see you, Buddy. Gee, you’re looking good. How’s Spooky. How’s the Ford?”

  Buddy stares at him and it’s not friendly. “How’s the big city, Rick? Treatin’ you well?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Rick lies.

  “Glad to hear that because some of us had to stay here in McCulloughville after you left—to keep things going. Know what I mean?”

  Rick doesn’t know what he means. Patty Rippey, Buddy’s girlfriend, comes out of the market and stops, the same look on her face. “Well, if it isn’t The Rick Rowe.”

  “Yeah, if it isn’t,” Buddy says.

  They’re looking at him like he’s a pedophile. “It’s been great, Rick,” Buddy says suddenly, “but I need to get back to work now. You know, work. What people do on weekdays. But you have fun now, hear?”

  Rick is left standing in the street as the two drive away in Buddy’s blue-and-white ’56 Ford with tuck-and-roll.

  Rick walks on. He sees people working. He sees men in pickup trucks working, men and women in stores working, secretaries in offices working, a covey of housewives shopping. It’s McCulloughville, all right, but it’s the real world now, a McCulloughville he doesn’t remember.

  Whatever happened (he asks himself) to the good old days of hotrodding and moonlight necking and Christmas trees where boys and girls opened their presents in their jammies and Dean Martin sang “White Christmas”—and everything else from a world where the aliens were aliens and you knew who you were?

  It’s gone because you left it, Rick, a voice says, the one that always talks this way, because you became a Hero and left.

  He walks on, finally finds himself before his parents’ house. It looks the same. The lawn, the trees. The sunlight feels like the sunlight he remembers. He rings the doorbell, running his fingers through his hair. It’s Friday, the day his father often takes off from bank duties, and maybe he’ll be here. His mother certainly will. Mr. and Mrs. Rowe are inseparable. The family—the three of them—were inseparable.

  His father answers it in his suit and stands there in the doorway. Rick can see a figure moving in the background and knows it’s his mother.

  “Come in,” his father says. That’s all. Just “Come in.”

  “Hello, Rick,” his mother says inside, and Rick blinks. It’s dark. He can’t see anything in this sudden change of light. “Have a seat on the couch,” his father says. Rick goes toward his mother to hug her but can’t see her, bumps into a table, and when his vision clears he sees it: Her face. Her expression. “It’s good to see you, Rick,” she says, but it’s just a courtesy. She was always courteous to everyone. “Yes, son, it is,” his father echoes. “How is Los Angeles treating you, son?”

  “Things could be better,” Rick says—wondering whether he should tell them.

  “I’m very sorry to hear that,” his father says, and silence follows. His father doesn’t ask what’s wrong. His mother is sitting in the big stuffed chair opposite the sofa, where Rick is sitting, and his father doesn’t sit down. “Is there anything we can do, son?” one of them asks—he’s not sure which—but it’s only a courtesy.

  “How are you both?” Rick asks. “I miss you,” he says.

  “We miss you, too,” his mother says, robotic.

  Then his father says it: “We’ve wondered about you and we’ve worried, as parents do. We wouldn’t have worried so much, son—especially your mother—if you’d written to us or phoned us more. . . .”

  Rick can’t believe it. He did call them, he wants to say. He did write. At least at the beginning. They’d come to his wedding. They’d seen the house. Maybe over the past few months, with everything so crazy, he’d neglected to stay in touch—but that was because he’d been embarrassed, because he didn’t want to burden them with his troubles.

  He starts to explain all of this, to apologize, but the two of them—like cutouts, cardboard characters in some terrible ’50s Aliens-Among-Us movie—just stand there staring at him.

  “I came because I wanted to see you,” he’s saying, but they don’t answer. “I wanted to see if McCulloughville was the same. I wanted to let you know that I think about you constantly, even if things have been pretty crazy and I haven’t had much chance to—”

  “Is that a tattoo on your arm, son?” his father asks sternly.

  Rick gets up. He’s got to leave. His father says more gently: “There’s a twenty-five-dollar savings bond . . . We found it in the attic the other day. If you need money, you could cash it.”

  “No,” Rick tells him. “I’d rather keep it here. You know, knowing it’s here . . . in the house where I grew up. . . .” Then his mother says: “You look terrible, Rick. You wouldn’t look so terrible if you got a haircut.”

  Rick is walking fast down the street, away from the house where he spent his childhood, turning once, des
pite himself, to wave at the two shadowy figures just inside the doorway. And then he’s free—free from this new horror—and we cut to:

  Rick returning to the Greyhound Bus Station, somewhere between McCulloughville, Year of Our Lord 1958, and southern California, 2005. And we fade to:

  Rick, at night, listening to his cell messages in the darkness of his apartment. If it’s dark, he doesn’t have to look at the bugs so much. There’s a message asking him to save San Francisco from bad Italian sopranos. A call informing him that UFOs posing as convenience stores are kidnapping citizens in New Jersey. A call about radioactive prostitutes in Chicago and one about little red crabs that have invaded a town in Florida. Dissolve to:

  Rick, the next day, trying to find the veteran’s outreach group—but it’s moved and no one knows where.

  That evening, Rick’s cell has only one message: A man representing the Mayor of Corkscrew, Florida, saying that he called yesterday and would appreciate it if Mr. Rowe would call him back. The man, very serious—somehow not laughing—keeps talking, and we hold on Rick’s eyes in the darkness—insectlike, faceted, despairing. “Do you have a fax or email, Mr. Rowe?” the voice asks.

  We see the horrific nightmare he has that night—a perfect amalgam of everything he’s gone through over the past few weeks: locusts, little kids spitting “tobacco,” Janie with thirteen children, his parents telling him, “Get a haircut—get a shave—you look like a bum.” And then:

  The sound of his cell chirping brings us out of the nightmare into the bleakness of his apartment. At least the insects have returned to the walls for the day. He struggles up, angry, ready to read the prankster the riot act if he can only get through the piles of dirty clothes and trophies to the cell in time.