The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (42 page)

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?
 

The
Backstory
 

The day the giant, angry, hungry locusts reached McCulloughville, Nevada (pop. 2000, Elks, Lions, VFW), Rick Rowe was twenty-one. He’d never been to college, but that was okay. He’d never even been to Reno, and that was okay, too. He had a “gypsy red” ’57 Bel Air convertible he was proud of; and though he knew his parents disapproved, he liked drag racing it with his friends from high school. He’d kissed a girl or two, sure, and even gotten to second base with them, but not without some guilt. He was an upstanding hometown kid and everyone knew it. After all, his parents were fine people. Mr. Rowe was an officer at the McCulloughville Bank; Mrs. Rowe, a housewife. If there was one thing to be said about McCulloughville in 2005, it was that it—and everyone in it—was trapped in the ’50s. The golden-oldies stations that managed to reach the car radios played ’50s songs, and the parents still talked like Ward and June Cleaver. It was a town ripe for ’50s mutant locusts. 

Before the mutants ever showed their antennae in McCulloughville, Rick knew insects. One of his responsibilities at the Grange—his job since high school—was to keep them out of the seed stores and to do it without pesticides that would poison the grain. Livestock sometimes ate the grain. Family pets sometimes did, too. You couldn’t sell poisoned seed. And locusts had always marched through the grass valleys of Northern Nevada. Rick had, by necessity, become an “ecologist” when no one else in town knew what the word meant. He’d talked to old-timers, read books, and knew what kinds of insects you could put in the grain to eat the insects that ate the grain. Assassin bugs ate boll weevils. Parasite wasps ate assassin bugs. He knew about insect
hunger,
and when the locusts hatched like bulldozers from the soil of Duffer’s Dry Lake and flew the thirty miles to the ranches that surrounded McCulloughville, it didn’t actually surprise him. 

He heard their wings that first night and somehow
knew
what it was even when others thought it was just the wind, or bad radio reception, or jets from Nellis. Even when the locusts marched on the Grange itself and Rick barely escaped with his life, it all made sense. They were
hungry
. They were a whole lot bigger than they were supposed to be, but if you thought about it, that was reason enough to be hungry
and
angry. 

They could fly. The brown stuff they spit—the “tobacco”—was corrosive and so foul-smelling it was as effective as mustard gas. Their chitinous exoskeletons were impervious to flamethrowers or armor-piercing, teflon-coated .357 magnum slugs in the hands of the State Police. Their ganglia weren’t sophisticated enough to be bothered by the concussion grenades. Fuel-air bombs and “daisy cutters” (ones dropped—thanks to a call from Nevada’s Governor—by aircraft from Nellis Airfield) killed hundreds, but hundreds more simply took flight to the next town, the next county and its ranches, the next Grange. Towns were being trashed; the state economy was in tatters; and the locusts were about to deposit their titanic eggs in the endless stretches of dry Nevada soil. Was the end of life as we know it near? 

Hunger
. That was the word—the feeling, the thought—that haunted Rick day and night as the holocaust waxed. A Professor Price from the big university in Reno had come with his daughter (who assisted him in his work) and had identified the species (
Melanoplus spretus
) and the source of the mutation (a fungus that was a mutant itself); but the Professor saw no solution. 

Hunger
. Like an FBI psychopath-tracker trying to get inside his man,
Rick got into hunger
. He ate. He ate without utensils. He ate a lot. He made himself feel what they must have been feeling, which was:
I am growing and no matter how much I eat, IT WILL NOT BE ENOUGH
. Monsters though they were, they were no different from the boll weevils and potato bugs and seed mites that plagued every Grange in Nevada and that Rick knew so well. According to the Professor, each mutant would keep eating until it was 376 percent larger than it was now—at which point its exoskeleton would no longer be able to support it in Earth’s gravity. But by then its progeny would be out in the world to continue the work—which was eating. 

That night it came to him: “Can’t we make them eat each other?” he asked. 

The Professor just stared at him. 

“They are going to eat, whatever we do, Professor. Can’t we make their very hunger our weapon?” 

In a flash the Professor saw it. “Yes! Pheromones!” 

“I don’t understand, Professor.” 

“Animals smell, Rick: They smell each other. If the smell is right, they mate. Another smell, and they eat. They recognize their food by smell, Rick.” 

“We can make the locusts smell like
food?”
 

“Yes!” 

So it was that Rick—a red-blooded American kid who didn’t know any world other than his sharp Chevy and a hometown trapped in the ’50s—and a distinguished entomologist from a large university sat down to work out a way to stop the “McCulloughville Mutants”—namely, a modified pheromone based on sex hormones but
read
as “food” by the locusts and sprayed by aircraft on the marching, flying hordes. 

It was destined to work, so of course it did. The locusts fell upon one another, hunger insatiable, and those that escaped the original spraying were mopped up over the following weeks by more spraying. The gargantuan eggs were never laid and Rick even got to save two little kids from a very irate locust, killing it with a heat-seeking, shoulder-launched Stinger missile. He’d never been a hero before and it felt good. 

The TV news footage (which we’ll see more than once in our story) shows this: 

Rick and the Professor and his daughter, Janie Price, standing between them, the carapace of a giant locust out of focus behind them, the sound of jets above them, the sound of giant insect legs rubbing together but fading, and the TV reporter thrusting his mike into Rick’s face with the words: “You’re a hero, Mr. Rowe. Tell us how you did it. How did you stop those mutants when no one else—not even the State Police or the Army—could? Your public wants to know.” 

The
Present
 

We open eighteen months later on a fine suburban home in southern California, 2005. It’s Our Hero’s house, of course: His trophies and awards for saving his hometown, the State of Nevada, two little kids, probably the entire world, line the mantelpiece and wall above the fireplace, along with a framed front-page victory story, a wedding portrait of Rick and Janie, assorted pics of their honeymoon in Hawaii six months ago—leis and all. He stopped the giant locusts, became famous, married the girl, sold his story for seven figures. All is as it should be. Or is it? 

Rick and Janie are on their way out and we go with them—jet-skiing, para-sailing, and catamaranning in the bay, lunch with friends on a very buff power-yacht, romantic dinner in Beverly Hills. He’s still our ’50s hero all right, but he’s somehow traveled to the new millennium. Right after the defeat of the locusts, we learn, he sold the rights to his story to the nation’s favorite tabloid and he’s affluent now. There’s even talk of a
Rick Rowe Show
. But we see something in his expression as he plays with his toys and enjoys the good life that says he isn’t
really
happy. He should be, but he’s not.