The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (39 page)

She could remember it now. She could remember him standing in the sand, day after day, and saying:
Tu sei mi’angelo, Pupa.
 

You are my angel. You will always be my angel, Pupa. 

It was the last thing she would need to remember, she knew, sitting in a room that smelled of jasmine, breathing it in at last. 

The young man sat in the corner of another room and tried his best to think. It was difficult. The men and women around him were telling him—in words, ones he had only recently learned to understand—how many things in the world were now his, how these things could never be taken from him, and how this was all that the woman had really wanted. 

Angels 

Story Notes 

I’d written about Italy before, in a fablelike, pastoral ESP-ish short story called “Without a Doubt Dream” (
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
1968)—after all, Italy still hummed as an impressionable-age experience for me only eight years later—but “Angels,” with its futuristic, sf mindset, was my first “adult” foray into an Italy no middle-school kid could have imagined. Fourteen years after this story was published—and after a decade of being away from writing completely for reasons (though life-changing and maybe worthy of an Ionesco screenplay) too strange and complicated to detail here—I began writing again about that fourteen-year-old’s world in that magical Ligurian fishing village—not as science fiction, however, but rather as a series of fablelike fantasies not unlike that 1968 story that editors have been calling, since they’re seeing so many of them, “the American boy stories.”
 

This past summer, I was able to return at last, with my wife Amelie—and after forty years—to that very village looking for my five friends from school. My two best friends—Gian Felice and Antonio—are both alive and kicking, though Gian—all grown up and living in a world verging at times on the harsh reality of “Angels”—has had some close calls. A third friend, who grew up as much in love with nature and nature’s beasts as I did, died awhile ago of a heart attack on the nature preserve north of Rome that the International Wildlife Fund gave him to oversee because of his love. A fourth friend captains a cruise ship in the Caribbean, and a fifth was taken by depression. And what of the other villagers—all of whom did indeed have the kind of small-town generosity of heart that Leo Buscaglia often wrote of? What of our hunchback teacher who’d spoken with a lisp and had been so humble we viewed him as a saint? When he caught me writing sf in class one day instead of reading about the pig production of Calabria or Garibaldi’s march to Volturno, he didn’t scream—he simply said to me, with compassion and sincerity, “When you are grown, if you are still writing and have published your stories, will you send us a story?” I’d tried to do just that in college, but he’d died long before I could. Our maid—a “white witch,” I often thought, with her one white eye and one blue eye—had of course died long ago, too, as had the man at the wharf who had no throat and spoke by spitting air. The little bay—the one that Shelley had sailed to his death from—is full of boats now, and there are condos in the olive groves on the hills; and a garage space costs a fortune; and the zoo with its undernourished lion is gone from the little town two hills away. But the spirit of the place—the magic that was there in the eyes of a fourteen-year-old American boy, but also there, truly, in the people and the events that really happened—remains even though we’re all grown up and some are dead. You can feel that spirit in the clear, lapping water where the two kinds of
Murex
shells, which the Romans used to make their royal dye, still crawl across the sand; in the vegetable stalls and at the Saturday market in Piazza Garibaldi where a Southern gypsy may still appear playing a tiny rubber bagpipe of his own design; and in the castle high up over the bay where yet another witch once spat her curses and where, instead, today there is a small museum of fossil bones. In other words, that village is still a place of angels —the ones we were and the ones the world has, like a wise old lady who can afford it, made of us.
 

“Angels” appeared in
Asimov’s
in 1990 and was reprinted in the Dann/Dozois theme anthology
Angels! 

Little Boy Blue 

April 6, 1990:
That night he dreamed of the leper again, and of the little Montagnard girl he had come to love who had died in Dak Lo. His own sounds woke him. He was weeping with a corner of the pillow wet in his mouth, and he was alone. Gala was gone, and the bedroom door was closed. To keep his sounds from the children. 

In the morning he noticed a pillow on the living room couch and a blanket folded neatly beside it. The four of them ate breakfast in silence, with only one attempt at felicity from Gala. She spoke of a porcelain class she was going to take at the Y, and how she would be having lunch with a friend that day. He waited for the children to speak. Katie had a new kindergarten teacher, he remembered. The children said nothing. 

He avoided contact with Stratton at the office, gave the Irvine contracts to the new man, and was unable to concentrate. When he came home forty-five minutes early, he found a note from Gala saying that she and the children were at Jack Tatum’s. He knew she would never go there alone. 

When he went to get them, Tatum grinned, shook his hand, and told him what good kids he had. That evening Gala’s blue eyes avoided his, and even Aaron seemed nervous, as though he had been a party to it even at age ten. 

The next morning, as he drove toward the freeway off ramp at Orange Street, he saw the first one. The boy was on a lawn in front of an apartment complex, squatting on his haunches. He was thin and dark, with delicate features. 

He hadn’t seen anyone squatting like that in years. 

The boy was Vietnamese. 

That weekend, as he drove his son to soccer practice, he saw four teenage boys, all of them lithe and confident, with ready grins. He passed them slowly, wondering where they lived. 

Aaron said, “Is anything wrong, Dad?” 

“Are they Vietnamese?” he heard himself say. 

He thought of the young boys in Darlac Province whose left arms he and another medic had vaccinated, how those same left arms had been cut off by the NVA and piled in the center of the village—as an example. 

Aaron said, “I don’t know, Dad. They kind of look Japanese to me.” 

But they weren’t. They were moving into town, family by family, and he saw the same four a few days later, near the high school again, where he had driven in the hopes of seeing them. They lived near the school. He was sure of it. 

For an instant, as they stood undressing in the bedroom, her gaze moved down his front to the spot just below his waistband, just inside the jut of his hipbone, where the tattoo was. It was a small thing, but horribly intimate there, and he knew how grateful she was that it was always hidden, that their friends at the pool and on Balboa could not see it. It was of a tiger, tiny and exquisitely done, its eyes wide, its paw raking the air. He could not remember how he had gotten it. 

That Saturday, while he mowed the lawn, the bag of clippings came loose. As he leaned over to reattach it, he watched the clippings and the red dust from the bare earth rise, beaten by the rotary blade. This close the grass seemed as tall as an elephant’s legs. The red dust filled his nose and he swore. Even in the monsoon season, there was dust. 

The rotors beat the air over him and he kept his head turned from the prop wash, his eyes squinting, his hand cupped to the right side of his face. He could hear the Huey struggling overhead, overloaded with body bags. 

The fading sound of the rotors filled him with an emptiness. 

“Cao minh?”
a voice said. He turned. 

His wife was standing not far away, looking at him oddly. She had never called him that. Someone else had. 

Her eyes were slits now, her skin dark, her young face as broad as a platter. “
Cao minh?”
 

Her lips, he could see, did not move as she said it. 

This isn’t real,
he told himself.
It’s happening to me because I was there. It’s happening to the others, too.
 

November 17, 1966:
Her name was Moye. She was the niece of Lam, the village headman who spoke fluent French. She was eight or nine and he often thought she had chosen him from all the others because of his age. At twenty-one he was the youngest and greenest of the team, and she seemed to know this. 

She was stocky, unlike most of the Montagnards, and her broad face made him think of grass skirts and hula dancers rather than rice paddies and triple-canopy jungles. Her nose was flat, her lips full, and her eyes wide set. Coming from those lips the patois of the Jarai—which he didn’t understand and still wouldn’t at the end of a year—made him laugh. It sounded like coughing. 

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.