The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories

by McAllister, Bruce

  So they let her have the baby. I slept in the waiting room of the maternity unit, and it took local troops as well as hospital security to keep the press away. We used a teaching hospital down south—approved by the group that was funding her—but even then the media found out and came by the droves.

  We promised full access at a medically approved moment if they cooled it, which they did. The four that didn’t were taken bodily from the building under one penal code section or another.

  At the beginning of the second stage of labor, the infant abruptly rotates from occiput-posterior to right occiput-anterior position; descent is rapid, and a viable two-thousand-gram female is delivered without episiotomy. Interspecific Apgar scores are nine and ten at one and five minutes, respectively.

  The report would sound like all the others I’d read. The only difference would be how the thing looked, and even that wasn’t much.

  The little head, hairless face, broad nose, black hair sticking up like some old movie comic’s. Human eyes, hairless chest, skinny arms. The feet would look like hands, sure, and the skin would be a little gray, but how much was that? To the girl in the bed it wasn’t anything at all.

  She said she wanted me to be there, and I said sure but didn’t know the real reason.

  When her water broke, they told me, and I got scrubbed up, put on the green throwaways like they said, and got back to her room quickly. The contractions had started up like a hammer.

  It didn’t go smoothly. The cord got hung up on the baby’s neck inside, and the fetal monitor started screaming. She got scared; I got scared. They put her up on all fours to shift the baby, but it didn’t work. They wheeled her to the O.R. for a C-section, which they really didn’t want to do; and for two hours it was fetal signs getting better, then worse, doctors preparing for a section, then the signs somehow getting better again. Epidural block, episiotomy, some concerted forceps work, and the little head finally starts to show.

  Lissy was exhausted, making little sounds. More deep breaths, a few encouraging shouts from the doctors, more pushing from Lissy, and the head was through, then the body, white as a ghost from the vernix, and someone was saying something to me in a weak voice.

  “Will you cut the cord, please?”

  It was Lissy.

  I couldn’t move. She said it again.

  The doctor was waiting, the baby slick in his hands. Lissy was white as a sheet, her forehead shiny with the sweat, and she couldn’t see it from where she was. “It would be special to me, Jo,” she said.

  One of the nurses was beside me saying how it’s done all the time—by husbands and lovers, sisters and mothers and friends—but that if I was going to do it I needed to do it now, please.

  I tried to remember who had cut the cord when Meg was born, and I couldn’t. I could remember a doctor, that was all.

  I don’t remember taking the surgical steel snips, but I did. I remember not wanting to cut it—flesh and blood, the first of its kind in a long, long time—and when I finally did, it was tough, the cutting made a noise, and then it was over, the mother had the baby in her arms, and everyone was smiling.

  A woman could have carried a Gorilla gorilla beringei to term without a care in the world a hundred, a thousand, a million years ago. The placenta would have known what to do; the blood would never have mixed. The gestation was the same nine months. The only thing stopping anyone that winter day in ’97 when Cleo, the last of her kind on the face of this earth, died of renal failure in the National Zoo in DC, was the thought of carrying it.

  It had taken three decades, a well-endowed resurrection group, a slick body broker, and a skinny twenty-one-year-old girl who didn’t mind the thought of it.

  She wants money for the operation, my daughter says to me that day in the doorway, shoulders heavy, face puffy, slurring it, the throat a throat I don’t know, the voice deeper. I tell her again I don’t have it, that perhaps her friends—the ones she’s helped out so often when she had the money and they didn’t—could help her. I say it nicely, with no sarcasm, trying not to look at where she hurts, but she knows exactly what I’m saying.

  She goes for my eyes, as if she’s had practice, and I don’t fight back. She gets my cheek and the corner of my eye, screams something about never loving me and me never loving her—which isn’t true.

  She knows I know how she’ll spend the money, and it makes her mad.

  I don’t remember the ten-year-old ever wanting to get even with anyone, but this one always does. She hurts. She wants to hurt back. If she knew, if she only knew what I’d carry for her.

  I’ll find her, I know—tonight, tomorrow morning, the next day or two—sitting at a walljack somewhere in the apartment, her body plugged in, the little unit with its Medusa wires sitting in her lap, her heavy shoulders hunched as if she were praying, and I’ll unplug her—to show I care.

  But she’ll have gotten even with me, and that’s what counts, and no matter how much I plead with her, promise her anything she wants, she won’t try a program, she won’t go with me to County—both of us, together—for help.

  Her body doesn’t hurt at all when she’s on the wall. When you’re a walljacker you don’t care what kind of tissue’s hanging off you, you don’t care what you look like—what anyone looks like. The universe is inside. The juice is from the wall, the little unit translates, and the right places in your skull—the medulla all the way to the cerebellum, all the right centers—get played like the keys of the most beautiful synthesizer in the world. You see blue skies that make you cry. You see young men and women who make you come in your pants without your even needing to touch them. You see loving mothers. You see fathers that never leave you.

  I’ll know what to do. I’ll flip the circuit breakers and sit in the darkness with a hand light until she comes out of it, cold-turkeying, screaming mad, and I’ll say nothing. I’ll tell myself once again that it’s the drugs, it’s the jacking, it’s not her. She’s dead and gone and hasn’t been the little girl on that train with her hair tucked behind her ears for a long time, that this one’s a lie but one I’ve got to keep playing.

  So I walk into the bedroom, and she’s there, in the chair, like always. She’s got clothes off for a change and doesn’t smell, and I find myself thinking how neat she looks—chic even. I don’t feel a thing.

  As I take a step toward the kitchen and the breaker box, I see what she’s done.

  I see the wires doubling back to the walljack, and I remember hearing about this from someone. It’s getting common, a fad.

  There are two ways to do it. You can rig it so that anyone who touches you gets ripped with a treble wall dose in a bypass. Or so that anyone who kills the electricity, even touches the wires, kills you.

  Both are tamperproof. The M.E. has twenty bodies to prove it, and the guys stuck with the job downtown don’t see a breakthrough for months. She’s opted for the second. Because it hurts the most.

  She’s starving to death in the chair, cells drying out, unless someone I.V.’s her—carefully. Even then the average expectancy is two months, I remember.

  I get out. I go to a cheap hotel downtown. I dream about blackouts in big cities and bodies that move but aren’t alive and about daughters. The next morning I get a glucose drip into her arm, and I don’t need any help with the needle.

  That’s what’s behind the door, Lissy.

  We gave them their press conference. The doctors gave her a mild shot of pergisthan to perk her up, since she wouldn’t be nursing, and she did it, held the baby in her arms like a pro, smiled though she was pale as a sheet, and the conference lasted two whole hours. Most of the press went away happy, and two of Mendoza’s girls roughed up the three that tried to hide out on the floor that night. “Mendoza says hello,” they said, grinning.

  The floor returned to normal. I went in.

  The mother was asleep. The baby was in the incubator. Three nurses were watching over them.

  The body broker came with his team two days
later and looked happy. Six of his ten babies had made it.

  Her name is Mary McLoughlin. I chose it. Her hair is dark, and she wears it short. She lives in Chula Vista, just south of San Diego, and I get down there as often as I can, and we go out.

  She doesn’t remember a thing, so I was the one who had to suggest it. We go to the zoo, the San Diego Zoo, one of the biggest once. We go to the primates. We stand in front of the new exhibit, and she tells me how the real thing is so much better than the holograms, which she thinks she’s seen before but isn’t sure.

  The baby is a year old now. They’ve named her Cleo, and they keep her behind glass—two or three vets in gauze masks with her at all times—safe from the air and diseases. But we get to stand there, watching her like the rest, up close, while she looks at us and clowns.

  No one recognizes the dark-haired girl I’m with. The other one, the one who’d have good reason to be here, disappeared long ago, the media says. Sometimes the spotlight is just too great, they said.

  “I can almost smell her, Jo,” she says, remembering a dream, a vague thing, a kitten slept with. “She’s not full-grown, you know.”

  I tell her, yes, I know.

  “She’s sure funny looking, isn’t she.”

  I nod.

  “Hey, I think she knows me!” She says it with a laugh, doesn’t know what she’s said. “Look at how she’s looking at me!”

  The creature is looking at her—it’s looking at all of us and with eyes that aren’t dumb. Looking at us, not through us.

  “Can we come back tomorrow, Jo?” she asks when the crowd gets too heavy to see through.

  Of course, I say. We’ll come a lot, I say.

  I’ve filed for guardianship under Statute Twenty-seven, the old W&I provisions, and if it goes through, Lissy will be moving back to L.A. with me. I’m hetero, so it won’t get kicked for exploitation, and I’m in the right field, I think. I can’t move myself, but we’ll go down to the zoo every weekend. It’ll be good to get away. Mendoza has asked me out, and who knows, I may say yes.

  But I still have to have that lunch with Timosa, and I have no idea what I’m going to tell her.

  The Girl Who Loved Animals

  Story Notes

  When I first mentioned the idea for this story to the late Terry Carr—a man who’d not only published my first novel (Humanity Prime, Ace Specials, 1971) but also made it publishable through heavy editing and reshaping to the degree Anthony Boucher reportedly reshaped Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz—he said, “No way. I’ve checked with a number of colleagues, both male and female, and everyone says it sounds like a joke (a woman carries a gorilla fetus to term) and there’s no way to get around it.” I trusted Terry—who had also published a couple of my stories in his anthologies—and took his response both as the proverbial, highly inspiring writer’s challenge (“You can’t do it!”) and as wisdom I needed to heed. He was right, of course: The first two versions of the story—set in a totally different world and characters—bombed; and, poor fellow, he had to read and respond to both. I put the idea aside for a while and kept repeating to myself the mantra “People will believe if they care—because when people care they believe.” All I knew was that there was—or could be—something very poignant about a woman willing to carry another species to term (which was indeed possible with a gorilla—frozen fertilized ovum, etc.—even in the ’80s). All I needed, it turned out, was the glimpse of a hard-boiled and rather bleak but nevertheless human, and therefore redeemable, future where “light could shine brightest against the darkness”; a first person voice I could hear and believe and care about; and some worries, as a parent, about what kind of world my own daughter and son, whom I loved without limits, would grow up in. Because I truly cared—because it wasn’t just an idea anymore, but a world and characters I wanted to see (to use William Faulkner’s word) prevail—I could at last make it more than just a joke. Terry’s wisdom proved the guiding light, Science News the scientific premise, and Ellen Datlow provided both the editorial-craft help she is famous for and the publication venue (OMNI) that the story needed. The story went on to see reprinting in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction; Ellen’s OMNI Visions One and her anthology about endangered species, Vanishing Acts; and (thanks to Ellen’s recommendation) Joyce Carol Oates’s anthology of American “gothic” fiction, American Gothic Tales.

  Southpaw

  Eventually New York Giants’ scout Alex Pompez got the authorization from their front office to offer Castro a contract. After several days of deliberation with friends, family, and some of his professors, Castro turned down the offer. The Giants’ officials were stunned. “No one had ever turned us down from Latin America before,” recalled Pompez. “Castro said no, but in his very polite way. He was really a very nice kid. . . .”

  —J. David Truby, Sports History, November 1988

  Fidel stands on the pitcher’s mound, dazed. For an instant he doesn’t know where he is. It is a pitcher’s mound. It is a baseball diamond, and there is a woman—the woman he loves—out there in the stands with her beautiful blonde hair and her very American name waving to him, because she loves him, too. It is July. He is sure of this. It is ’51 or ’52. He cannot remember which. But the crowd is as big as ever and he can smell the leather of his glove, and he knows he is playing baseball—the way, as a child in the sugarcane fields of Oriente Province, he always dreamed he might.

  His fastball is a problem, but he throws one anyway, it breaks wide and the ump calls the ball. He throws a curve this time, a fine one, and it’s a strike—the third. He grins at Westrum, his catcher, his friend. The next batter’s up. Fidel feels an itching on his face and reaches up to scratch it. It feels like the beginning of a beard, but that can’t be. You keep a clean face in baseball. He tried to tell his father that, in Oriente, the last time he went home, but the old man, as always, had just argued.

  He delivers another curve—with great control—and smiles when the ball drops off the table and Sterling swings like an idiot. He muscles up on the pitch, blows the batter down with a heater, but Williams gets a double off the next slider, Miller clears the bases with a triple, and they bring Wilhelm in to relieve him at last. The final score is 9 to 4, just like the oddsmakers predicted, and that great centerfielder Mays still won’t look at him in the lockers.

  Nancy—her name is Nancy—is waiting for him at the back entrance when he’s in his street clothes again, the flowered shirt and the white ducks he likes best, and she looks wonderful. She’s chewing gum, which drives him crazy, but her skin is like a dream—like moonlight on the Mulano—and he kisses her hard, feeling her tongue between his lips. When they pull away she says: “I really like the way you walked that Negro in the fifth.”

  He smiles at her. He loves her so much it hurts. She doesn’t know a damn thing about the game and nothing about Cuba, but she’s doing her best and she loves him, too. “I do it for you, chica,” he tells her. “I always do it for you.”

  That night he dreams he’s in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra, at a place called La Playa. He has no idea why he’s here. He’s never dreamt this dream before. He’s lying on the ground with a rifle in his hand. He’s wearing the fatigues a soldier wears, and doesn’t understand why—who the two men lying beside him are, what it means. The clothes he’s wearing are rough. His face itches like hell.

  When he wakes, she is beside him. The sheet has fallen away from her back, which is to him, and her ass—which is so beautiful, which any man would find beautiful—is there for him and him alone to see. How can anything be more real than this? How can I be dreaming of such things? He can hear a song fading but does not know it. There is a bay—a bay with Naval ships—and the song is fading away.

  Guantanamera . . . the voice was singing.

  Yo soy un hombre sincero, it sang.

  I am a truthful man.

  Why, Fidel wonders, was it singing this?

  After the game with the Cardinals
on Saturday, when he pitches six innings before they bring Wilhelm in to relieve him and end up a little better than the oddsmakers had it, a kid comes up to him and wants his autograph. The kid is dark, like the children he played with on the finca his father owns—the ones that worked with their families during the cane harvest and sat beside him in the country school at Marcana between harvests. He knows this boy is Cuban, too.

  “Señor?” the kid asks, holding up a baseball card. “Por favor?”

  Fidel doesn’t understand. It is a baseball card, sure. But whose? He takes it and sees himself. No one has told him—no one has told him there is a card with his face on it, something else he has always dreamed of. He remembers now. He has been playing for the Giants—this is his first year. The offer was a good one, with a five thousand dollar bonus for signing. Now he’s on a baseball card. He tries to read it, but the words are small, Nancy has his glasses and he must squint. The words fill him with awe.

  It says nothing about his fastball, and he is grateful. He smiles at the boy, whose eyes are on him. The father hands him a pen. “What’s your name, hijo?” he asks. “Raul,” the boys says. “Me llamo Raul.” To Raul, he writes. He writes it across his own face because that is where the room is. It is harder than hell writing on a card this small and he must kneel down, writing it on his knee. May your dreams come true, he also writes, putting it across his jersey now. He wants to write And may your fastball be better than mine, but there isn’t any room. He gives the card back and returns the pen. The boy thanks him. The father nods, grinning. Fidel grins back. “Muy guapo,” Fidel tells him. The man keeps nodding. “I mean it,” Fidel says.

  He dreams of a cane field near Allegria del Oio, to the north, of soldiers moving through the cane. He can’t breathe. He is lying on the ground, he can’t move, can’t breathe. He’s holding something in his hand—but what? None of it makes sense. There isn’t any war in Cuba. Life in Cuba is peaceful, he knows. Fulgencio Batista, the President, is running it, and running it well. After Pirontes, how could he not? Relations with the United States are good. Who could possibly be hiding in the Sierra Maestra? Who could be lying in the cane with rifles in their hands, hiding from soldiers and singing a song about a truthful man?