The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories

by McAllister, Bruce

  Southpaw

  Story Notes

  It turns out that the seductively ironic and charming story about Fidel Castro—the one “Southpaw” uses as its premise—the one about Castro, the good baseball player even though his fast ball sucked, being scouted by the New York Giants—is probably apocryphal one way or another. But it was such a good story (as apocryphal stories usually are) that when I asked my uncle, the late, great sportswriter and organized-crime investigator Jack Tobin, about it, he simply nodded—which I, of course, and with less than journalistic rigor, took to be validation of the story’s veracity, and which nod I am using, as you can see, to defend this story to this day. Uncle Jack, who wore a hat until the day he died and was as generous as he was Joe-Friday-tough, was one of my idols growing up. Who else could possibly be the West Coast editor of Sports Illustrated, covering all the Olympics, and also the man who helped put Jimmy Hoffa in prison—all in the same lifetime? If he wasn’t investigating the Santa Monica Mountains and the Teamster’s Fund for the Los Angeles Times, he was gum-shoeing the early use of steroids in big-league sports, looking into corporations that wanted to go to bed with other corporations, using his own sixth sense to find people who’d been lost for thirty years, and meeting with secret informants—sometimes under death threats—in the dark of night. Though Uncle Jack was a practical, down-to-earth, get-things-done guy, I learned early from him what I’d also learn years later from “remote viewers” in the U.S. government’s only truly successful experiments with ESP: that past a certain point it doesn’t matter why scientifically something like ESP or the paranormal of Jung’s “synchronicity” or miracles or a sixth sense works. What matters is that it does work. (See the new field of “placebo studies”—a field that accepts the “placebo effect” as an actual effect, just as powerful as medication, worthy of study. See the medical profession’s increasing acceptance of the power of “prayer” to heal, and its increasing acceptance of meridians and acupuncture. If it works, use it, guys.)

  A quick story to illustrate. I’d see Uncle Jack regularly while I was researching and writing Dream Baby, and I’d always assumed he didn’t believe in such stuff—ESP, psychic things. He never commented on my research, the interviews, the wild things I was reporting to him occasionally. Then one day as I started work on the novel itself I said, “By the way, Jack, what do you think about ESP?” The universe stopped (it didn’t turn blue, no, but it did stop). He answered (with words to the effect): “You mean a sixth sense? Sure. How do you think I discovered the Teamster’s Fund story. I use it all the time. When going to sleep or waking up I’ll hear a name—just a name—and later I pursue it. I don’t care whether people say that’s just intuition, the unconscious working with it, or something else—something fancier. I have my own reasons to think it’s fancier, but that doesn’t matter, does it. It works and I use it to do what I do in this life, out of the values I hold, out of doing what I believe is right.”

  Without Uncle Jack I wouldn’t have seen ESP-ish things—what human beings do with them when they’re real enough in their lives to serve them—so clearly. Without Jack, too—without his living example of how one might fuse improbable worlds—“Southpaw,” which appeared originally in Asimov’s and later in the Dozois/Schmidt anthology Roads Not Taken, would never have been written. After all, in what other world would Castro the baseball player choose Lucille Ball over a revolution?

  Benji’s Pencil

  George Maxwell suddenly felt a web of warmth on his skin, then the burn of his heart’s fresh beating, then the first flutterings of sound in his ears. He awoke to focus his eyes weakly on a bare ceiling. His eyes rolled once like oiled agates, then clung securely to the clarity of the white surface above him.

  He was beginning to feel the warm crescendoing tones of his muscles when a voice near him said, “George Maxwell, welcome to life.”

  The muscles sputtered hotly in his neck, but Maxwell turned his head and found the face that belonged to the voice. A pale man smiled back at him, his shiny shaven head contrasted like a wrinkled egg on the thick weave of his white robe.

  Maxwell tried his lips, but they sputtered as all of his muscles seemed to be doing.

  “George Maxwell, please try to say something.”

  “Fihnlegh,” Maxwell tried. “Finlehrg . . . Finahlrg . . . Finalih . . . Finally.”

  The other man laughed kindly. “A most appropriate choice for your first word. It makes me want to start off my talk with an apology for the institute’s tardiness in reviving you. Do you mind if I talk while you regain your lips?”

  Maxwell shook his head.

  “The Institute for Revivication wants to apologize for taking so long in unfreezing you. Your records were misplaced for five years and—”

  “Ahm,” Maxwell interrupted.

  “Yes?”

  “Ahm ah curd?”

  “Pardon me? Please try again.”

  “Am ah cured?”

  “Oh. Of course you’re cured.” The man smiled, almost laughing. “All you needed was a new heart. I hope this won’t bother you, considering what you were accustomed to in your time as far as heart transplants go, but we put a synthetic heart in your chest.”

  Maxwell jerked and emitted a feeble “Argh.”

  “I am sorry. In your time that would have seemed terrible, I’m sure. Something inorganic within you. But let me assure you, you’ll be fine. We’ve been giving people synthetic hearts for a long time, and the psychs always report that there is negligible personality change as a result. Okay?”

  Maxwell nodded, a little relieved. His mind was shouting, “Now I’ll be able to see the green!”

  “Let me finish your formal introduction first. By law I must give you this intro speech, then we’ll have some minutes to talk about anything you’d like. Your grandson—rather one of your multi-great-grandsons—will be here soon to pick you up.”

  Maxwell jerked again, but tried a smile with his limp lips. Relaxing, he waited for the soothing voice of the first man he’d heard in a terribly cold long time.

  “Fine? As I was saying, your records were misplaced, so we had no way of finding any relative of yours. By law a relative must be willing to house and feed you for the remainder of your life. You were lucky. One of your multi-great-grandsons is an assistant food-distributor and can afford to support you. But I won’t say more—you’ll be talking to him soon enough and that’s another problem. The language. The written language of this time is not very different from yours. Inflections and sectional dialects often make it hard for a ‘new’ person to understand. I happen to be an Introducer, so I’ve had to study tapes of past spoken language in order to communicate with people like yourself.”

  “Lingige hand?” Maxwell asked. “Linguage hahd?”

  “No, it’s not hard at all. You’ll be able to pick it up in a week or so. I just wanted to prepare you for it. Now, there’s one other matter for intro—”

  “Ah git wrkuh? Kin ah get wrkh?”

  “Get work? No, I’m sorry. That’s one of our problems. Not many jobs, so that’s why we had to find a relative to support you. I know you’ll feel bad about that, being a burden and all, but that’s modus vitae these days.”

  “How longh will ah liv?”

  “Ah, yes. Technically we could keep you alive and in very good health for over a hundred years. But mandatory death, I’m afraid, is at seventy years of age. Population control, you understand. Family planning and euthanasia. According to our records, you have ten years left. That’s quite a while, you must realize. And it will be ten years of life in a time that’s new to you.” The man smiled again.

  Maxwell remembered his sleep, and said. “Ohnly a momenth. A briefh momenth.”

  “Pardon me?”

  Maxwell shook his head to say “nothing,” but he was thinking, “He wouldn’t understand at all.”

  “One last bit of intro information. The reason you were revived so late was not because of your need for a synthetic h
eart. We’ve been installing hearts for a long time. The problem was the process for unfreezing all of the cases like yours. It’s a delicate operation, and we only developed it ten years ago.”

  “How longh hav ah bin asleep?”

  The Introducer opened his mouth to answer, but a door snapped open suddenly behind him. By raising himself on one elbow, Maxwell tried to look past the man to the doorway, but fell back when his strength failed. The weakness scared him. His eyes wanted to close, but his mind’s hatred of the thought of sleep pricked them open and kept them quivering.

  “I want you to meet,” the Introducer said, “one of your multi-great-grandsons.” A green-eyed boy in a soft loincloth and baggy shirt appeared by the side of Maxwell’s bed. “His name is Benji-tom Saphim. His father will be your guardian.”

  Maxwell’s mind raced into happiness. This boy, his mind shouted, will show me the green of a hundred hills and the warm palette of all the flowers I’ve missed for so long.

  The Introducer said something garbled to the boy. It sounded to Maxwell like nasalized English, chopped but softer than German. The boy said something equally strange to Maxwell, and smiled.

  I don’t understand their language, Maxwell thought, and there is so little time.

  The boy took Maxwell’s hand as they left the cottony white corridors of the hospital. It had taken the old man three hours to learn to walk again, but now his legs flowed under him as if the long sleep had only been a dream, and the desire to see green things had not waned at all.

  I was an English teacher, Maxwell was thinking, but this drive in me to see the green of grasses and the ripples of ponds and the lace of pastel flowers seems more poetic than academic. Perhaps the long sleep did this to me, or perhaps I should have been a poet back then. Maybe Lana would have been happier with me, had I been a poet.

  They took a vast empty elevator down to the ground level and stepped out into the quiet city, the boy still holding his hand. Perhaps, Maxwell thought, his father told him to hold my hand—“Take the old man’s hand and be careful with him.”

  The streets were like clean gutters, rendered Lilliputian by the towering cement walls on either side. Maxwell was afraid to look up, afraid that the buildings pierced the clouds; so he kept his eyes at street level, and the boy was silent, a flicker of smile playing across his lips when the old man looked at him.

  Something seemed dead. A color was missing. Maxwell stopped suddenly and looked around him. The color green was absent. Maxwell laughed at himself and resumed walking. On many streets of the New York of his time there had been no green at all. He should expect even less green in a time when population increases would have spawned miles and miles of cement structures for housing and business.

  At the end of an hour’s walk nothing had changed. The same buildings and streets seemed to jump from block to block, keeping up with Maxwell, making the walk monotonous. Still no green. And soon an irrational fear popped into existence in Maxwell’s chest, making his synthetic heart beat faster. Was there any green anywhere? Even the green of a man’s shirt or the green paint of an automobile would have helped, but the few people on the street wore only drab cloth, and the only traffic was the intermittent passing of gigantic trucks.

  Another empty elevator let Maxwell and the boy out on the dark fortieth floor of an apartment building. Maxwell still only understood a word or two when Benji-tom’s father and the fifteen members of his family—parents, sisters, brothers, infants, and aged—greeted him with the pale smiles of people who were never touched by a sun that had been exiled past towering cement walls.

  Maxwell sat on his blanket, the squall of babies to his left, and to his right the rustle of Benji-tom’s mother in the kitchen-bedroom. After a week of learning to understand the sectional dialect of Benji-tom’s family, Maxwell’s heart had begun beating even faster from his one fear. In the language of these people never once did he hear the words “green,” “flower,” “hill,” or “grass.”

  Benji killed a cockroach that had just flashed across his floor-blanket. Maxwell watched him, thinking, “God, poetry is dead. There is no green.” He had asked Benji a month before to take him to the nearest park, and Benji hadn’t understood him. Maxwell had then asked Benji’s father, who said that he didn’t understand either, that buildings and streets and food-trucks were the only things in the city. And the city, Maxwell realized with a sick thumping in his chest, consisted of seventy-five regions; a region meant one hundred sectors; a sector was one hundred sections, and a section, as Maxwell understood it, was about twenty miles square. “What is a ‘park’?” Benji’s father had asked, and Maxwell was now afraid to mention the words “tree,” “grass,” or “flower.”

  The absence of green was one part of Maxwell’s agony. The first two nights with Benji’s family, he had screamed. The pull of fatigue had advised him to sleep, and his mind had bellowed in revolt. He had slept too long and too cold, and he remembered the acid of that sleep. The colorless, dreamless, icy sleep. And the three apartment rooms containing Benji’s family were crowded, stuffy, and lightless at night. The cockroaches scuttled, the babies whimpered, and the only clear sound was the buzzing that issued briefly in the morning from a black knob on the wall, meant to waken Benji’s father in time for his job at the market. Maxwell knew the market, too, and he hated it. He had visited the market once with Benji’s father, hoping to find green vegetables for sale. Something green to look at. But there was never any sale. There were only government coupons that allowed husbands and wives to obtain boxes of yellowish biscuits, dried fish, sometimes dried meat. The market was housed on two floors of an apartment building where the walls had been ripped out to permit the flood of sweating individuals flowing in with their coupons and out with the food supplies from the massive food-trucks—those lone members of street traffic.

  Compared to the masses, Benji’s father was well-off. He could afford to house and feed his wife’s mother, father, brothers, and sisters, in addition to his own. As Maxwell had discovered the day before, two of the old people in Benji’s family were sixty-nine and would be put to sleep like animals in a year.

  In the dim room, where Maxwell slept on a blanket beside Benji, Maxwell watched the boy pick up the cockroach carcass and play with it, pretending it was alive, pushing it across the floor, flicking it with his finger to make it slide away “in escape.” Maxwell had watched the boy’s play before, and the loneliness of the vision made the loss of nature’s green things even worse. Mother Nature, Maxwell thought to himself, reached the magic age of seventy and was then put to sleep—by cement rivers of human fish.

  Maxwell tried not think of his own son. Many people had died during his long sleep, and he knew, were he to think of all of them, of his sixty years of life with them, that he would fail to live in this new present. Maxwell said, “Benji-tom?”

  The boy looked around, his pale face the only clear light in the room. The cockroach dropped from his fingers and lay still by his blanket.

  “Yes, Great-father?”

  “Are you ever sad?”

  “Yes. Sometimes.”

  “When?”

  “When the food-trucks break down.”

  “No, I mean sad about living here.”

  “I don’t understand.” The boy was smiling, but confused. But he wasn’t dumb at all, Maxwell knew, and that made everything a little sadder.

  “I mean, what do you do to be happy here?”

  “Lots of things, Great-father.”

  “Does it make you happy to play with that roach?”

  “Uh-huh.” The boy poked at the insect and smiled more surely.

  Maxwell was silent. Something that felt like optimism was suddenly nagging at him, asking him to talk to the boy. “What do you do with the roach, to be happy?”

  The boy looked embarrassed, confused again, but he said, “I think that the roach is like a food-truck. I push it around. M’father says that food-trucks can run even faster than roaches. He likes food-
trucks, and I’ve seen a lot of them when I go down on the street.”

  Something in the boy’s words sounded familiar to Maxwell. A vague memory of his own youth flickered at the back of his mind. Maxwell persisted, “Do you ever dream about food-trucks?”

  “Dream?”

  “Do you ever see pictures in your head at night? Pictures of food-trucks.”

  “Oh! Sometimes, yes.” The boy was happy with this. “I once saw a picture of myself, and I was a food-truck running down the streets taking food to everybody. I never broke down because . . . because . . . I just never broke down.”

  My God, Maxwell thought with excitement. Sitting down quickly beside the boy, he said, “What do you like as much as the food-trucks? Anything else?”

  “I like the elevators. When they don’t have to stop on a lot of floors, then they go fast. They go fast like food-trucks go fast. M’father says they do. Just like food-trucks go fast.”

  Maxwell’s heart stopped. The word “like” pounded in his mind, and he remembered happily that “like” was one of the two key words of a simile, and that a simile was the most common sign of poetic thought. Maxwell thought to himself with growing contentment: “Grass is like a blanket . . . an elevator is like a food-truck.” It wasn’t the poetry Maxwell was used to, but it was poetry. Poetry, he realized, is not at all dead here.

  Maxwell wanted to hug the boy, but Benji had picked up the cockroach again by its legs and was staring at it closely as it dangled from his fingers.

  “And dead cockroaches,” Maxwell said anxiously, “are they like broken-down food-trucks?”

  The answer was slow in coming, but the boy said, “Yes,” and smiled.

  With the aftertaste of dinner biscuits in his mouth, Maxwell lay still on his blanket, hoping that Benji-tom was still awake. The darkness and threat of sleep was much less fearful these days, and the compulsion for seeing green things had been supplanted by a desire to know the poetry of Benji’s world. Maxwell remembered his long, cold sleep, and that naked memory told him again: There is little time, just a brief moment; the night is coming.