The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories

by McAllister, Bruce

  I don’t wake up screaming, because of what they put in the booze. I remember it as soon as I wake up, when I can’t do anything about it.

  Bucannon comes in at first light. He doesn’t say, “If you don’t help us, you’re going back to Saigon or back to the States with a Section Eight.” Instead he comes in and kneels down beside me like some goddamn priest and he says, “I know this is painful, Mary, but I’m sure you can understand.”

  I say, “Get the hell out of here, motherfucker.”

  It’s like he hasn’t heard. He says, “It would help us to know the details of any dream you had last night, Mary.”

  “You’ll let him die anyway,” I say.

  “I’m sorry, Mary,” he says, “but he’s already dead. We’ve received word on one confirmed KIA in Echo Team. All we’re interested in is the details of the dream and an approximate time, Mary.” He hesitates. “I think he would want you to tell us. I think he would want to feel that it was not in vain, don’t you?”

  He stands up at last.

  “I’m going to leave some paper and writing utensils for you. I can understand what you’re going through, more than you might imagine, Mary, and I believe that if you give it some thought—if you think about men like Steve and what your dreams could mean to them—you will write down the details of your dream last night.”

  I scream something at him. When he’s gone I cry for a while. Then I go ahead and write down what he wants. I don’t know what else to do.

  I don’t go to the mess. Bucannon has food brought to my bunker but I don’t eat it.

  I ask the Green Beanie medic where Steve is. Is he back yet? He says he can’t tell me. I ask him to send a message to Steve for me. He says he can’t do that. I tell him he’s a straight-leg ass-kisser and ought to have his jump wings shoved, but this doesn’t faze him at all. Any other place, I say, you’d be what you were supposed to be—Special Forces and a damn good medic—but Bucannon’s got you, doesn’t he. He doesn’t say a thing.

  I stay awake all that night. I ask for coffee and I get it. I bum more coffee off two sentries and drink that, too. I can’t believe he’s letting me have it. Steve’s team is going to be back soon, I tell myself—they’re a strike force, not a Lurp—and if I don’t sleep, I can’t dream.

  I do it again the next night and it’s easier. I can’t believe it’s this easy. I keep moving around. I get coffee and I find this sentry who likes to play poker and we play all night. I tell him I’m a talent and will know if someone’s trying to come through the wire on us, sapper or whatever, so we can play cards and not worry. He’s pure new-guy and he believes me.

  Steve’ll be back tomorrow, I tell myself. I’m starting to see things and I’m not thinking clearly, but I’m not going to crash. I’m not going to crash until Steve is back. I’m not going to dream about Steve.

  At about 0700 hours the next morning we get mortared. The slicks inside the perimeter start revving up, the Skycrane starts hooking its cats and Rome plows, and the whole camp starts to dust off. I hear radios, more slicks and Skycranes being called in. If the NVA had a battalion, they’d be overrunning us, I tell myself, so it’s got to be a lot less—company, platoon—and they’re just harassing us, but word has come down from somebody that we’re supposed to move.

  Mortars are whistling in and someone to one side of me says, “Incoming—fuck it!” Then I hear this other sound. It’s like flies but real loud. It’s like this weird whispering. It’s a goddamn fléchette round, I realize, spraying stuff, and I don’t understand. I can hear it, but it’s like a memory, a flashback. Everybody’s running around me and I’m just standing there and someone’s screaming. It’s me screaming. I’ve got fléchettes all through me—my chest, my face. I’m torn to pieces. I’m dying. But I’m running toward the slick, the one that’s right over there, ready to dust off. Someone’s calling to me, screaming at me, and I’m running, but I’m not. I’m on the ground. I’m on the jungle floor with these fléchettes in me and I’ve got a name, a nickname, Kicker, and I’m thinking of a town in Wyoming, near the Montana border, where everybody rides pickup trucks with shotgun racks and waves to everybody else, I grew up there, there’s a rodeo every spring with a county fair and I’m thinking about a girl with braids, I’m thinking how I’m going to die here in the middle of this jungle, how we’re on some recondo that no one cares about, how Charlie doesn’t have fléchette rounds, how Bucannon never makes mistakes.

  I’m running and screaming and when I get to the slick the Green Beanie medic grabs me, two other guys grab me and haul me in. I look up. It’s Bucannon’s slick. He’s on the radio. I’m lying on a pile of files right beside him and we’re up over the jungle now, we’re taking the camp somewhere else, where it can start up all over again.

  I look at Bucannon. I think he’s going to turn any minute and say, “Which ones, Mary? Which ones died from the fléchette?” He doesn’t.

  I look down and see he’s put some paper and three pencils beside me on the floor. I can’t stand it. I start crying.

  I sleep maybe for twenty minutes and have two dreams. Two other guys died out there somewhere with fléchettes in them. Two more guys on Steve’s team died and I didn’t even meet them.

  I look up. Bucannon’s smiling at me.

  “It happened, didn’t it, Mary?” he says gently. “It happened in the daylight this time, didn’t it?”

  At the new camp I stayed awake another night, but it was hard and it didn’t make any difference. It probably made it worse. It happened three more times the next day and all sorts of guys saw me. I knew someone would tell Steve. I knew Steve’s team was still out there—Echo hadn’t come in when the rocketing started—but that he was okay. I’m lying on the ground screaming and crying with shrapnel going through me, my legs are gone, my left eyeball is hanging out on my cheek, and there are pieces of me all over the guy next to me, but I’m not Steve, and that’s what matters.

  The third time, an AK round goes through my neck so I can’t even scream. I fall down and can’t get up. Someone kneels down next to me and I think it’s Bucannon and I try to hit him. I’m trying to scream even though I can’t, but it’s not Bucannon, it’s one of the guys who was sitting with Steve in the mess. They’re back, they’re back, I think to myself, but I’m trying to tell this guy that I’m dying, that there’s this medic somewhere out there under a beautiful rubber tree who’s trying to pull me through, but I’m not going to make it, I’m going to die on him, and he’s going to remember it his whole life, wake up in the night crying years later and his wife won’t understand.

  I want to say, “Tell Steve I’ve got to get out of here,” but I can’t. My throat’s gone. I’m going out under some rubber tree a hundred klicks away in the middle of Laos, where we’re not supposed to be, and I can’t say a thing.

  This guy who shared his ham-and-motherfuckers with me in the mess, this guy is looking down on me and I think, Oh my God, I’m going to dream about him some night, some day, I’m going to dream about him and because I do he’s going to die.

  He doesn’t say a thing.

  He’s the one that comes to get me in my hooch two days later when they try to bust me out.

  They give me something pretty strong. By the time they come I’m getting the waking dreams, sure, but I’m not screaming anymore. I’m here but I’m not. I’m all these other places, I’m walking into an Arclight, B-52 bombers, my ears are bleeding, I’m the closest man when a big Chinese claymore goes off, my arm’s hanging by a string, I’m dying in all these other places and I don’t even know I’ve taken their pills. I’m like a doll when Steve and this guy and three others come, and the guards let them. I’m smiling like an idiot and saying, “Thank you very much,” something stupid some USO type would say, and I’ve got someone holding me up so I don’t fall on my face.

  There’s this Jolly Green Giant out in front of us. It’s dawn and everything’s beautiful and this chopper is gorgeous. It’s Air Force. It’s crazy. There
are these guys I’ve never seen before. They’ve got black berets and they’re neat and clean, and they’re not Army. I think, Air Commandos! I’m giggling. They’re Air Force. They’re dandies. They’re going to save the day like John Wayne at Iwo Jima. I feel a bullet go through my arm, then another through my leg, and the back of my head blows off, but I don’t scream. I just feel the feelings, the ones you feel right before you die—but I don’t scream. The Air Force is going to save me. That’s funny. I tell myself how Steve had friends in the Air Commandos and how they took him around once in-country for a whole damn week, AWOL, yeah, but maybe it isn’t true, maybe I’m dreaming it. I’m still giggling. I’m still saying, “Thank you very much.”

  We’re out maybe fifty klicks and I don’t know where we’re heading. I don’t care. Even if I cared I wouldn’t know how far out “safe” was. I hear Steve’s voice in the cockpit and a bunch of guys are laughing, so I think safe. They’ve busted me out because Steve cares and now we’re safe. I’m still saying, “Thank you,” and some guy is saying, “You’re welcome, baby,” and people are laughing and that feels good. If they’re all laughing, no one got hurt, I know. If they’re all laughing, we’re safe. Thank you. Thank you very much.

  Then something starts happening in the cockpit. I can’t hear with all the wind. Someone says “Shit.” Someone says “Cobra.” Someone else says “Jesus Christ, what the hell?” I look out the roaring doorway and I see two black gunships. They’re like nothing I’ve ever seen before. No one’s laughing. I’m saying “Thank you very much” but no one’s laughing.

  I find out later there was one behind us, one in front, and one above. They were beautiful. They reared up like snakes when they hit you. They had M-134 Miniguns that could put a round on every square centimeter of a football field within seconds. They had fifty-two white phosphorous rockets apiece and Martin-Marietta laser-guided Copperhead howitzer rounds. They had laser designators and Forward-Looking Infrared Sensors. They were nightblack, no insignias of any kind. They were model AH-1G-X and they didn’t belong to any regular branch of the military back then. You wouldn’t see them until the end of the war.

  I remember thinking that there were only two of us with talent on that slick, why couldn’t he let us go? Why couldn’t he just let us go?

  I tried to think of all the things he could do to us, but he didn’t do a thing. He didn’t have to.

  I didn’t see Steve for a long time. I went ahead and tried to sleep at night because it was better that way. If I was going to have the dreams, it was better that way. It didn’t make me so crazy. I wasn’t like a doll someone had to hold up.

  I went ahead and wrote the dreams down in a little notebook Bucannon gave me, and I talked to him. I showed him I really wanted to understand, how I wanted to help, because it was easier on everybody this way. He didn’t act surprised, and I didn’t think he would. He’d always known. Maybe he hadn’t known about the guys in the black berets, but he’d known that Steve would try it. He’d known I’d stay awake. He’d known the dreams would move to daylight, from “interrupted REM-state,” if I stayed awake. And he’d known he’d get us back.

  We talked about how my dreams were changing. I was having them much earlier than “events in real time,” he said. The same thing had probably been happening back in ER, he said, but I hadn’t known it. The talent was getting stronger, he said, though I couldn’t control it yet. I didn’t need the “focal stimulus,” he said, “the physical correlative.” I didn’t need to meet people to have the dreams.

  “When are we going to do it?” I finally said.

  He knew what I meant. He said we didn’t want to rush into it, how acting prematurely was worse than not understanding it, how the “fixity of the future” was something no one yet understood, and we didn’t want to take a chance on stopping the dreams by trying to tamper with the future.

  “It won’t stop the dreams,” I said. “Even if we kept a death from happening, it wouldn’t stop the dreams.” He never listened. He wanted them to die. He wanted to take notes on how they died and how my dreams matched their dying, and he wasn’t going to call anyone back until he was ready to.

  “This isn’t war, Mary,” he told me one day. “This is a kind of science and it has its own rules. You’ll have to trust me, Mary.”

  He pushed the hair out of my eyes, because I was crying. He wanted to touch me. I know that now.

  I tried to get messages out. I tried to figure out who I’d dreamed about. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and try to talk to anybody I could and figure it out. I’d say, “Do you know a guy who’s got red hair and is from Alabama?” I’d say, “Do you know an RTO who’s short and can’t listen to anything except Jefferson Airplane?” Sometimes it would take too long. Sometimes I’d never find out who it was, but if I did, I’d try to get a message out to him. Sometimes he’d already gone out and I’d still try to get someone to send him a message—but that just wasn’t done.

  I found out later Bucannon got them all. People said yeah, sure, they’d see that the message got to the guy, but Bucannon always got them. He told people to say yes when I asked. He knew. He always knew.

  I didn’t have a dream about Steve and that was the important thing.

  When I finally dreamed that Steve died, that it took more guys in uniforms than you’d think possible—with more weapons than you’d think they’d ever need—in a river valley awfully far away, I didn’t tell Bucannon about it. I didn’t tell him how Steve was twitching on the red earth up North, his body doing its best to dodge the rounds even though there were just too many of them, twitching and twitching, even after his body wasn’t alive anymore.

  I cried for a while and then stopped. I wanted to feel something but I couldn’t.

  I didn’t ask for pills or booze and I didn’t stay awake the next two nights scared about dreaming it again. There was something I needed to do.

  I didn’t know how long I had. I didn’t know whether Steve’s team—the one in the dream—had already gone out or not. I didn’t know a thing, but I kept thinking about what Bucannon had said, the “fixity,” how maybe the future couldn’t be changed, how even if Bucannon hadn’t intercepted those messages something else would have kept the future the way it was and those guys would have died anyway.

  I found the Green Beanie medic who’d taken me to my hooch that first day. I sat down with him in the mess. One of Bucannon’s types was watching us but I sat down anyway. I said, “Has Steve Balsam been sent out yet?” And he said, “I’m not supposed to say, Lieutenant. You know that.”

  “Yes, Captain, I do know that. I also know that because you took me to my little bunker that day I will probably dream about your death before it happens, if it happens here. I also know that if I tell the people running this project about it, they won’t do a thing, even though they know how accurate my dreams are, just like they know how accurate Steve Balsam is, and Blakely, and Corigiollo, and the others, but they won’t do a thing about it.” I waited. He didn’t blink. He was listening.

  “I’m in a position, Captain, to let someone know when I have a dream about them. Do you understand?”

  He stared at me.

  “Yes,” he said.

  I said, “Has Steve Balsam been sent out yet?”

  “No, he hasn’t.”

  “Do you know anything about the mission he is about to go out on?”

  He didn’t say a thing for a moment. Then he said, “Red Dikes.”

  “I don’t understand, Captain.”

  He didn’t want to have to explain—it made him mad to have to. He looked at the MD type by the door and then he looked back at me.

  “You can take out the Red Dikes with a one-K nuclear device, Lieutenant. Everyone knows this. If you do, Hanoi drowns and the North is down. Balsam’s team is a twelve-man night insertion beyond the DMZ with special MACV ordnance from a carrier in the South China Sea. All twelve are talents. Is the picture clear enough, Lieutenant?”

  I
didn’t say a thing. I just looked at him.

  Finally I said, “It’s a suicide mission, isn’t it. The device won’t even be real. It’s one of Bucannon’s ideas—he wants to see how they perform, that’s all. They’ll never use a nuclear device in Southeast Asia and you know that as well as I do, Captain.”

  “You never know, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, you do.” I said it slowly so he would understand.

  He looked away.

  “When is the team leaving?”

  He wouldn’t answer anymore. The MD type looked like he was going to walk toward us.

  “Captain?” I said.

  “Thirty-eight hours. That’s what they’re saying.”

  I leaned over.

  “Captain,” I said. “You know the shape I was in when I got here. I need it again. I need enough of it to get me through a week of this place or I’m not going to make it. You know where to get it. I’ll need it tonight.”

  As I walked by the MD type at the door I wondered how he was going to die, how long it was going to take, and who would do it.

  I killed Bucannon the only way I knew how.

  I started screaming at first light and when he came to my bunker, I was crying. I told him I’d had a dream about him. I told him I dreamed that his own men, guys in cammies and all of them talents, had killed him, they had killed him because he wasn’t using a nurse’s dreams to keep their friends alive, because he had my dreams but wasn’t doing anything with them, and all their friends were dying.

  I looked in his eyes and I told him how scared I was because they killed her, too, they killed the nurse who was helping him, too.

  I told him how big the nine-millimeter holes looked in his fatigues, and how something else was used on his face and stomach, some smaller caliber. I told him how they got him dusted off soon as they could and got him on a sump pump and IV as soon as he hit Saigon, but it just wasn’t enough, how he choked to death on his own fluids.