The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (19 page)

“Three thousand of these have been dropped on the Ho Chi Minh Trail from the Ca River Valley to the Mekong Delta. They drop down through the air like arrows and when they hit the ground—bare earth or jungle—they stick. What does it look like to you, Brian?” 

I opened my mouth, but it took a few seconds. “A plant?” 

“Yes. A plant. That’s what I wanted it to look like. But a special one. One that
listens
. It hears things in the ground you and I couldn’t hear. It’s a seismic sensor—it detects vibrations in the earth—and it transmits what it hears to planes and listening posts in Laos and the sea. Why do we want it to do this?” 

I’m thinking of all the NVA and VC traveling up and down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but I’m not completely sure, so I say, “I don’t know, Stu.” 

“I think you do, Brian. There are trucks running up and down the Ho Chi Minh Trail for fifteen hundred miles, and these trucks carry the resupply for the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers in South Vietnam. Without the Trail, the communists wouldn’t have a chance. So a thousand of these things drop and stick in the ground and listen and transmit what they hear—all of those trucks, even a few tanks—so that we know what’s happening. Would you like to hold it?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

I took it in my hands, and it really was wonderful. I wasn’t supposed to like something like this, I knew. I was, after all, a college student opposed to the war, avoiding the draft, but how could I not like it? Silly as it looked, it really was beautiful. I tried my best—because my conscience told me to—to see it as some terrible instrument of the CIA or DIA or NSA—but it was hard. What I saw instead was an ingenious fake plant painted in cammie colors that had electronic ears I couldn’t see and a voice I couldn’t hear. 

“It must have been a lot of fun making this,” I said, knowing I sounded like an idiot. 

“It was, Brian, and that’s the point, too, I guess. That you can make something like this in your life simply because it’s fun, because it’s beautiful, even if others end up using it in ways you wouldn’t. That what we do as people in life is one thing, and that what others do with our lives is another. Sometimes we forget this and think they’re the same. They aren’t. 

“You could drop this thing into Alaska and with it listen to the caribou herds pass by, use what it hears to understand the caribou better than we’ve ever understood them, and help them survive even with all the pipelines and highways changing their world.” Stu paused, sounding a little tired. “And that’s just one of many things you could do with it that aren’t what’s being done with it.” 

I was thinking of the paintings our mom liked to paint—seascapes and landscapes in watercolor, which dried fast, so you had to work quickly—and wondering how someone could use them. Psychological tests in a clinic maybe, or advertising for a beach city. (“Come to San Diego—it looks like this!”) I was thinking, too, of the stories I wrote—I wanted to be a writer and write for a living someday—and wondering the same thing. It wouldn’t be my short stories, though; it would be my writing skills that would be used if I chose to have them used that way. For war. For peace. For my country. For any causes of conscience. That’s what Stu meant, I was sure. 

I’d given the thing back to Stu, and he was standing it up in the corner of the living room, on a piece of newspaper Marjorie had handed him. We were, I assumed, going to go back to the dining room for ice cream, but as I turned to follow him, Stu said: 

“Do you know what an atom bomb is, Brian?” 

“I . . . I’m not sure what you mean.” 

“Do you know what an atom bomb
really
is?” 

“Only that it uses the energy of atoms to do the damage it does.” 

I waited. Stu was still smiling, but there was something else in his look now. I’d never heard him say so much, and I realized that all along—every time we’d visited him—he could have said this much and maybe wanted to but hadn’t because I’d been too young to understand or care. 

“All an atom bomb is, Brian, is the heart of a star—the gorgeous, miraculous heart of a star—that we just happen to step a little too close to. . . .” 

As we left that night, Stu teased me, saying, “Now don’t tell anyone about the plant. If you do, they won’t believe you, and that would feel a lot worse than keeping it a secret, wouldn’t it?” 

I nodded and promised I wouldn’t, though I doubt he really cared. 

The next time I saw Stu I’d gotten a graduate degree in writing, was married, and went up to see him on my own because my dad and mom said he’d started asking about me. I hadn’t seen him in years—I don’t know why, except that when you’re young you go on your way and sometimes forget—and I could tell from the look in their eyes that they were worried about him. Was he sick? “We’re not sure,” my dad said, “but we think maybe so.” 

He was retired, just like my dad, though the Navy still somehow owned any invention he came up with after retirement. He was living in a nice house in Santa Barbara now, one that overlooked the sea. 

“I’ve been thinking of writing a memoir,” he said as soon as I got there, as we both looked down at the ocean, the watercolor-perfect view of it. “You’re a writer. You’ve published quite a few things, your dad tells me. What do you think—should I write a memoir or not?” 

Everyone wants to write a memoir, and that’s a good thing. As the saying goes, “Everyone’s got one book in him,” and that book is of course the author’s life. But Stu was asking something else, I thought. 

“You’re asking me whether everything that’s important in our lives has to be written down—has to be made public—to be worth anything. . . .” 

“Yes, I am. What do you think?” 

“I’m a writer. I’ve always been, Stu, now that I look back on it, so it’s hard for me not to think that writing, that putting things down on paper, is important. I write stories that are true and stories that aren’t and some that are both, and I write about the human heart and dreams and fears and victory and failure. I do this because I think they’re important. What we feel in life we feel alone, but through writing—and through the people who read it—maybe we’re less alone. That’s how I view it anyway, at this point in my life.” 

“Sounds right to me.” 

“But I haven’t really answered your question.” 

“No, you haven’t.” 

“Well, I don’t think a life has to be written down to have meaning. I think the wonderful things we make and do and speak last even longer than words on a page.” 

“I was hoping you’d say that.” 

“But you’d still like to write a memoir anyway—for the fun of it, right?” 

He grinned, but instead of answering said, “I want to show you something.” Why wasn’t I surprised? He went to his shed in the backyard and came out with this wire, this thing that looked like a big slinky with a hand-held generator attached to it. Then we drove down to the pier—the main pier in Santa Barbara—and with the wind blowing through our hair, billowing our jackets, making it hard to hear, he said: 

“Remember how the government wanted to turn the entire American continent into a big antenna?” 

I thought for a moment. “You mean by putting all those wires underground?” 

“Not underground.
On
the ground. But, yes, that project.” 

“I remember reading something. An antenna to listen to outer space—something like that?” 

“No, just the opposite. It was for listening to the sea and what might be hiding there.” 

“Oh,” I said. I had no idea what he was talking about. I felt like a kid again. Did he mean submarines? Something else entirely? 

“Well,” he said. “Watch this. He had the big slinky in his hands, and he dropped it off the pier into the water. The slinky uncoiled gracefully until it was almost straight, and the little generator—or receiver or whatever it was—sat there quietly in Stu’s hands for a while without either of us saying a thing. 

Finally he took an earpiece that was hanging from the receiver and gave it to me. “Listen. . . .” 

I did. I heard transmission static and more static, and assumed it was coming from the sea. The wire was down in the water, and unless there was a radio station or a police dispatcher hiding under the pier, where else would it be coming from? I felt stupid, sure, but this was Stu—which meant that something miraculous was probably going to happen and that feeling stupid for a couple of minutes was worth it. 

Then I heard a voice. An actual voice. It shocked the hell out of me. It was a man’s and it sounded military.
Alpha ralpha romeo
, words like that. It was hard to hear in all the static, but it was a voice. 

“I know,” he was saying. “Awfully obvious, isn’t it. It’s coming from a secret undersea station—one belonging to the Navy—six thousand miles from here. You’re not supposed to be able to hear it this easily, but with the right wave and the right conductivity you can hear practically anything, Brian. I keep telling the Navy that, but. . . .” 

It wasn’t, I knew, good news that it had been so easy. It was good news for Stu because he’d invented the thing—if you could call a long, looping wire with a little box on it an invention—and how wonderful it was, being able to hear that far away and with just a wire and a secret undersea station no less. 

But not good news for the Navy. 

“So you told the Navy about it,” I prompted. 

“Yes, I did, Brian. At first they didn’t believe me, and then, when they did, they were mad about it. A state-of-the-art, hush-hush station and with a little wire like this anyone could find it?” 

“I can imagine they’d be unhappy,” I said. 

“Unhappy isn’t the word. What we create in this life, Brian, can make
us
happy, but it can make others very unhappy. Happiness is freedom, and too much freedom can scare entire governments. Have you ever thought of that?” 

I laughed. “No.” 

He laughed, too. “But you have now, right?” 

“Right.” 

“That’s not the end of the story,” he said. 

“It’s not?” 

“Of course not. No story ever really ends. We just stop it when we run out of breath. It’s easier that way. More manageable—less frightening. Stories that never end can scare governments, too, you know.” 

Wire in his hand, earpiece still in his ear, he was quiet for a moment, as if listening to something else now— the love songs of humpback whales safe under storm-tossed seas, or the distress calls of porpoises stranded in an inlet far away. 

“I’m retired now, as you know, but when I heard that the government wanted to turn the continent into a great underground antenna—not for outer space but for submarine communications—I contacted them and told them about my wire, what I’d done with it, what anyone could do with a wire like that. It took them a year to answer—can you believe that—a year. I’d sent a message through ONI to NAVDOR and NAVDUW. They knew who I was, they knew I wasn’t senile, and they found out pretty quick that I was right. But a year? They didn’t want to give up their antenna. To them it was a beautiful thing and they just didn’t want to give it up even if it was a silly idea no one had really thought through. In the end they dropped the project, of course. They’ve got some little antennae now doing what needs to be done, I guess, but the big one was always just plain silly.” 

“I don’t understand, Stu,” I said. I had no idea why Stu’s wire would be enough to stop the plan for the continent-sized antenna. 

“Doesn’t matter. Just know that this little wire—the simplest thing in the world—stopped a very big and very silly project. Sometimes that’s what it takes—a little wire that someone actually drops off a pier on a sunny day in July while dozens of men sit around long tables talking for a year about a plan they should never have gotten excited about. Did you know, Brian, that the Navy’s got people studying the mathematical chaos of the universe just to see if it can help them talk to its nuclear submarines? They should be using it to talk to the
universe
instead, don’t you think—to the stars, not to a bunch of guys on submarines?” 

“Are they mad at you about this, too?” 

“Yes—and you’ve lived long enough, Brian, to know why, I bet.” 

“The emperor’s clothes?” 

He laughed. “Exactly! The emperor’s clothes. He’s not wearing any, but no one—especially a clothing designer—is supposed to mention it.” He laughed again. “You also know why I’m telling you this, don’t you.” 

“Yes, I do. The same reason you’ve told me all the other stories since I was a kid.” 

“Which is?” 

“So that I’ll do what I need to do in life to make miracles even if it scares others—even if it drives them crazy.” 

“Thank you.” 

For old time’s sake we had hamburgers and hot dogs on his back porch—just the two of us—and he didn’t mention his memoir again, and he didn’t say anything about being sick. He didn’t look sick. Maybe older, but not sick. I didn’t know whether I should ask—and I didn’t really know how—so I didn’t. 

But I wasn’t surprised when I got a call from him only a month later—an actual phone call from
Stu—and this time he did sound different. Not just older and tired, but weak, the smile on the other end of the phone working harder than it should have to.