The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories

by McAllister, Bruce

  They sat down together on the blanket and she gave him an orange, the small red kind they grew in Jaffa. He took it from her but waited, wanting to do it exactly the way she did. So she did it slowly, peeling it carefully, keeping her eyes on his and smiling with each bite, until his movements had lost their nervousness and he was calm again.

  She looked at the trees. Later, sitting in the little room, she would remember looking at the trees, seeing the shadows there, and for a moment feeling they were something else . . . a darkness moving closer and closer to her. She laughed. It wouldn’t come now, the darkness, unless she asked it to. It was hers to invite. It wouldn’t come until she wanted it to.

  And it was not the same darkness as before, she knew. The one she had felt in Pisa long ago. . . .

  She thought of her father, who had left all four of them many things, but who had left her so much more, and how this had driven her brother and sisters to do many, many things.

  The shadows remained where they were.

  When she turned back to him, he was sleepy again, his eyelids heavy, his left elbow barely holding him up. He would not, she knew, lie down unless she lay down with him. The blanket was big—colorless now in the glare of the sun—and warm, and she lay down with him, making sure that their arms touched.

  She watched him as he dreamed. He made a whining noise, the kind she had heard a child make long ago. Then he frowned, his eyes still closed, and the dream gone. His face was quiet again.

  The chemical they had put on his skin to protect it from the sun glistened like ocean waves. She let her own eyes close.

  Even in this darkness, she was not afraid. The shadows under the trees did not move. Nothing moved toward her that she would not have welcomed.

  When he was again rested, she took him by helicopter one evening—in the one infrared Pirelli that remained to her—to the town of Assisi, where they slept together in the largest canopy bed of her villa. He tossed and moaned all night. He hit her four times with his elbow and lay against her quietly only once, for a few minutes. She thought at first that it might be the wings. But that was wrong, wasn’t it. The wings were gone. Even the scars could not be bothering him now, could they? Why had she thought he still had wings?

  In the morning, her guards escorting them like priests, she took him by the hand down the stone path to the courtyard of the church, to the hologram of Saint Francis that had been there ever since she could remember. The tourists had left. They had been asked to leave. Those who’d objected had been paid handsomely.

  The hologram was much larger than life, a full three meters, and the grainy texture of the ruby light made the saint look almost ill. They sat together on one of the benches. The tape played on.

  The young man at her side, dressed in summer linen while she wore silk, looked at the grass, at the bees and the bright farfalle on the flowers near them, and did not listen. The tape was made of words, she realized suddenly. He did not yet know these words. He did not even know what words were, perhaps.

  The red arms of the hologram moved as if in prayer, moved again in exactly the same way, while the voice said:

  Laudato si, mi Signore, per frate Vento, e per Aere e Nubilo e Sereno e onne tempo, per lo quale a le tue creature dai sustentamento.

  It said:

  “Praised be my Lord for our brother the wind, for air and cloud by which Thou upholdest life in every creature.”

  The voice then repeated the words in French, in German, in four other languages, but she wasn’t listening. She was watching the ground, too. She was watching what he was watching there: the green lizard making its way in fits and starts across the stone path, the insects moving through the grass so near their shoes, and the white butterfly that wanted to land, but never did.

  “Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, through whom Thou givest us light in the darkness,” the voice was saying somewhere. “Praised be my Lord for our sister, the death of our body, from which no man or woman may escape.”

  An angry voice made her look up suddenly. Two of the guards were arguing with a man, a tourist who wore a single, heavy holo-camera around his neck. She recognized the camera. Her father’s factory in Rimini had made it. She got up quickly, took the young man’s hand in hers, and pulled him with her, his eyes never leaving the ground.

  That night in bed, she took his hand again and thought she might teach him, that it might be possible, that he might enjoy it, but when he looked at her in the dim light of the room and cocked his head like a child, she knew she could not.

  They tried to kill him the very next week. They were afraid that she would find new ways to spend, on this thing she’d had the doctors make for her, the very wealth they believed was theirs, the wealth their many lawyers had assured them would indeed be theirs, because at her passing—the one they knew she was planning (an injection in the vein of one arm? a perfumed gas in a little perfumed room?)—it would pass to them. There was no one else—no children, no other siblings, no organization whose rights could not be successfully contested to whom her wealth should go. Their lawyers could not assure them, however, that she would not put a new skin, another pair of wings, a scaly tail, a second head on this creature, and so it needed to be killed, didn’t it?

  They tried at Lake Como during the height of the tourist season, while she was sleeping on the deck of the biggest villa, tired out by the sun. The young man was standing on the dock just below her, looking down into the dark waters as he always did, and only a movement by the quickest guard was able to save him. The hydrofoil removed the first ten meters of the dock, somehow avoided the retaining wall, and moved down the lake without stopping. Shaking, naked, she stood in the sunlight and knew.

  To the guard, a middle-aged Tuscan by the name of Cichinelli, she gave one of the new apartment buildings in the Ligurian castle-town of Pozzuoli, smiling as she presented him with the papers the next day. To the other guards, who would certainly have done the same had they been able, she presented new Alfa Stellanovas. Someone back at the lodge would report it all, of course. Even the smile, she knew.

  When they tried again, at Assisi, in the garden there, while she sat with him quietly on a bench watching the lizards move on the walls, and the bullets from the assassin’s rifle shattered the marble corner, she had him moved back to Siena, to within the grounds of her father’s hunting lodge. It would cost her two of the gambling barges in Trieste to establish the newest security technology on the grounds. It would cost her half of her interest in the cablecar network on Anacapri—the one her father had given her when she was twelve—to establish the same for the building in Lucca, which she no longer used. All of this would he reported to her brother and her sisters, she knew.

  Being with him each day, holding his hand, helped her to remember. Was this perhaps why she’d had him made? She saw it clearly the day she led him through the hallways of the hunting lodge to show him all of the paintings of wings—the very kind she had once hoped he might have. Caravaggio’s Angeli di Dio. Fra Angelico’s Il Sogno del Cielo. The dancing angels of Turacco, the long wings of Pagano. The paintings had always been there. They lined the oak walls of the hallways, as they always had, but as she watched him look at them, as she watched him turn to her with questions in his eyes because he had no words to ask them—it came to her suddenly:

  They had been her father’s paintings. He had given them to her. He had loved them; he had loved the wings.

  How could she have forgotten? How?

  They were never going to try the poison, she admitted to herself finally. The cardiotoxin they had used on Piero, her gangly son, sixty years old the day he drove his two sisters, teenagers, from Old Genoa down the galleria highway to the birthday party for her in Pisa—the gradual poison in his veins, the Alfa Romeo d’Oro tumbling to the rocks at Cinque Terre, the bodies floating in the bay, like pale ghosts, for three whole hours. For some reason they were not going to try it this time and she was sorry. Perhaps they knew; perhaps they did not. The
doctors had made alterations and it would not have worked this time.

  It had cost her half of what her father had left her to have the creature made. The other half remained, and this was what her brother and sisters wanted—more than anything in the world.

  Love is sometimes a terrible thing, she would remember thinking, sitting in a little room.

  In September he began to make sounds with his throat at last. He tried to make her understand what he wanted by them, and she did her best to understand. But she did not try to teach him a language. It would have taken too long, she knew. Others would have the time. For now she wanted him to herself, before words could change him.

  She could remember it now. Lying on the beach at Viareggio as a child, her father, his beard, the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes, his eyes bluer than any Italian should have had. His hands were in his pockets, his legs only a few steps away in the warm sand. The sunlight seemed to go forever. A poet had died there, she knew. Even as a child she had known this. It had bothered her even then that a poet could have drowned in such a beautiful sea, the Ligurian Sea, near where her own mother had been born, and where she, even now in memory, was a child playing in the sand, her father, his beard, his legs so near her in a sunlight that went forever.

  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.