The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories

by McAllister, Bruce

  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.

  That night he can’t sleep. We watch him toss, turn, get up. We watch him pad his way over to the DVD player and sixty-three-inch Samsung plasma screen in the living room, insert a DVD, sit down on the Umbrian-modern sofa, and, yes, it’s the news footage of his McCulloughville exploits—in all their ’50s black-and-white glory. He watches with a thousand-yard stare. The footage ends. He goes to the menu again, clicks on play, and as he does, Janie—who’s somehow still got that ’50s hair-and-nightgown look even in a house like this one—emerges sleepy-eyed from the bedroom. “Come to bed, honey,” she says. “Daddy wants you at the lab early tomorrow morning. You don’t want to disappoint him, do you?”

  Rick turns it off reluctantly. He really would like to see the footage again, but she’s right—he’s got to get up at five o’clock and make the drive to UCLA, where Professor Price now has an endowed chair thanks to those seminal conference papers he delivered on “Pheromonal Response Confusion in Melanoplus spretus: A Food/Sex Model.” Rick
is his laboratory assistant, working once again—but at better pay and benefits—with insects. He doesn’t need the job—the tabloid money is there—and he won’t need it later when the movie, book and A.M. talk show deals his agent’s pushing close. But he’s doing it—working—for Janie. He loves her, and she likes the idea of her “two favoritest people in the world” working together—loving father and famous hero-husband.

  He goes to bed at last. We hold on his eyes in the dark. They’re open. He’s haunted by something.

  Where Rick's Life Is Heading

  It’s only a week later and Rick is lost. The local press no longer wants follow-up stories. The national press has stopped writing about him completely. The movie has become a low-budget direct-to-video project with “life rights” sold for a paltry $50K, and the talk show has become, if he’s lucky, a gig as “The Bug Whisperer” for Animal Planet. The fact is, Rick is old news, and we know what old news is. He stands around at neighborhood barbecues like a zombie, sits for hours in his parked BMW Land Shark just staring through the glass, and at work is beginning to have “concentration problems.” He doesn’t want to let the Professor down, but he can’t help it. He just can’t seem to focus and his job performance is slipping. He doesn’t know why all of this is happening, but we have our suspicions. We’ve seen this before in trauma cases: inability to concentrate, problem with relationships, low-level depression . . . even flashbacks. It’s the start of a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, of course, and Rick is about to develop a whopper.

  The Professor gets cranky, Rick snaps back, leaves the lab early, and at home finds Janie gone, note on the fridge: Gone shopping with Babbs and Dottie. Love, Janie. He’s angry she’s not there, puts the DVD in again and is still watching it two hours later when Janie arrives, mall buys in hand. She doesn’t like what she sees. This isn’t what a hero does—watching old news footage for hours on end. A hero goes out into the world, slays dragons, makes money, sires children, celebrates science and progress with Daddy at the laboratory, doesn’t he? She loves him, sure, but all of this is very disappointing and she leaks her disapproval. He leaks anger back.

  That night they make up, try a passionate kiss, but she’s tired. “You can wait, can’t you, honey?” “Sure,” Rick says, but it’s the same message he’s getting everywhere. When a guy makes love, he’s a hero—for a moment at least. Ask any teenager. But Rick isn’t going to get to be a hero tonight. He’s peevish, feels bad about his peevishness, and gets even more peevish. He looks up at her face in the faint light of the bedroom, and—

  It’s the face of a locust, huge, mandibles grinding, the brown sludge on the lips wet and glistening, the antennae waving at him seductively, hideously.

  He jumps back as if bitten. It’s Janie’s face again, looking at him with concern. He gets up, saying, “I don’t feel good. Something I ate maybe. . . .”

  He keeps looking back at her, ready to see her change again. Even though she doesn’t, there’s something about her expression—her love, her expectations, her wanting him to be Someone—that fills him with horror.

  What’s happening to me? he asks the world.

  His full-blown PTSD has started and he’s scared out of his wits. Why an insect? Why would someone I love become an insect? He’s walking the hallways of the dark house, wanting so much to watch that old footage again, but also not wanting to. The thought of it scares him. He falls asleep at last on the sofa, under the excellent taxidermy job that’s mounted on the wall above him: the giant locust’s head, the eyes, the antennae, the mandibles. Another trophy to heroism lost.

  His limbs are akimbo on the couch—like a child’s or a bum’s. The great eyes on the wall regard him stonily in the darkness. His eyes close.

  The next few weeks have this in store for Rick:

  He will become increasingly dysfunctional because of his syndrome. He will have more hallucinations, more flashbacks, find himself able to concentrate less and less, and both his job and marriage will crash. Janie’s father will ask him (“for Janie’s sake, Rick”) to seek out a man of the cloth—priest, rabbi, Lutheran minister, ayatollah, Tibetan monk—“I really don’t care who, son. The problems of the soul are universal. . . .” Rick will see a billboard on his way to work—THE REVEREND FIRESTONE HAS ANSWERS—MAYBE HE HAS YOURS—and it will remind him of McCulloughville, the church he went to as a child. He will indeed seek Reverend Firestone’s counsel—only to find himself in a modern-day revival tent, the Reverend screaming about the End Days, the Seven Plagues, one of them locusts. Rick will leave in a daze, one hundred dollars poorer and his soul no better off.

  The best book deal his agent can get will be a print-on-demand publisher who wants a pre-order of three thousand copies, and even Animal Planet will fall through. The movie based on his exploits will go into production suddenly and recklessly at the hands of an aging director and two leads with the acting ability of convenience-store clerks. In a wonderfully hideous sequence Rick will get to watch the project implode before his very eyes as the actor playing him (an overweight thirty-five-year-old) gropes the actress playing Janie (a brunette floozie) and the locust—with creature effects from the Muppets studios—collapses on them both. Lawsuit epithets flying, everyone leaves for lunch, and Rick is left standing alone on the set.

  By this point Janie will be finding him less and less the hero she thought she’d married and will be unable to hide her frustration. Professor Price, his patience at an end and concern for his daughter mounting, will come down on Rick like a hammer. The inevitable occurs and Janie asks for a divorce: She has found someone else—a policeman, a wonderful guy straight from the ’50s who has recently received a city heroism award for saving a woman, her thirteen children, and their seven pets from a trailer fire started by a Little Mermaid nightlight. The policeman, Frank Emerson, has a steady job, solid values, and, like Janie, wants progeny.

  Rick loses his job at the laboratory, moves out on his own, and when he sneaks back into the house one night to retrieve his precious footage—his memories, his glory, the only thing he’s got now—he triggers the new My Safe Castle security system Frank Emerson has installed for his fiancée. The police—all Emerson’s friends—converge on the house, handcuff Rick, and start talking heartily about the barbecue next weekend that Janie and Frank are hosting. Emerson—with what looks like sincere compassion (after all, he is a wonderful guy)—puts his arm around the handcuffed Rick and says: “You need help, Rick—the professional kind.”

  Rick takes the advice. Goes to a shrink—a big, red-haired woman who’s as narcissistic as they come—and she tells him what we already know: he’s got a roaring Delayed Stress Syndrome. What to do about it? Three things, Mr. Rowe: (1) Join a veteran’s outreach group, where you’ll find people you can relate to and work through the problem with. While you’re doing that, (2) offer your services to the community—schools, YMCAs, museums. Every community needs a hero. And (3) get a job that’s got some adrenaline to it, a thrill, one where you can feel that old Being Important rush—“getting back on the horse,” as they say. She adds: “But get a haircut first, Mr. Rowe. And a shave. You look like a bum.” And we cut to:

  He’s gotten the haircut and the shave. He’s talking to an elementary school class. He’s got his news footage with him and he’s showing it to the kids, while the teacher stands in the back, hands on hips. Kids are throwing spitballs and one hits him. One kid has a “Barbie Warrior Princess” doll; another, a full-monty “Malibu Ken” with cute “Partner Brian”; and another, a radio-controlled “Homeland Security Force” action figure whose gender is impossible to determine. They’re not impressed. News video, after all, is news video. They’ve seen everything on TV. When the footage ends, he stands up in front of the class and a little girl says: “Why did you have to kill them, Mr. Rowe? Animals are important. They’re how Mother Nature tells us she loves us, aren’t they, Mrs. Spring?” “We’ve been discussing endangered species, Mr. Rowe,” the teacher explains, while a boy says
shrilly: “They were one of a kind, Mr. Rowe. They were endangered and you killed them. Why? Why?” The teacher’s face becomes a locust. The kids become little locusts. The sound of insect legs rubbing together builds. The floor is the brown of the locust “tobacco.” We hear the little girl saying, “I’m glad he’s not my daddy,” as we dissolve to:

  A gigantic insect face being painted on the side of what we assume is an airplane fuselage—the way cartoon versions of tanks, planes, and/or blonde pinups were painted on the sides of WWII aircraft. We pull back to see that it’s really a Ford E Series commercial van—ZIPLOCK EXTERMINATORS in block letters on its side and two crudely constructed wire insect antennae on its roof—and it’s Rick painting carefully but badly the face of an oversized cockroach. He’s painted other insects, too, on its side—all rendered terribly—things that look like pregnant ants and headless termites. It’s his new job and he’s being as “heroic” as he can be. We go with him to the next house on his list and the experience is brief and chilling: A pickup-on-the-dead-lawn stucco tract home with screaming children and a screaming man and woman and there in the darkness, when he squints, he can see the rug move. He blinks, squints, and, yes, it is cockroaches. There’s more insect life here than he ever saw in the Professor’s lab. He stands frozen until the kids, sticky from too many soft drinks and unbathed body parts, are swarming around him, pulling him toward the squirming carpet. Minutes later he’s spraying the house—the carpet, the sofa, the walls, the kids.

  In rapid montage we go through his workday with him—termites, grease-eating ants, boring beetles, mice so filthy they look like insects. Then a final shot of Rick painting a crude Charlie Brown on the side of his van—Xs for eyes—and we fade to: