The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories by Bruce McAllister Read Free Book Online Page B

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. 
    He didn’t believe me. 
    “Was Lieutenant Balsam there?” he asked. 
    I said no, he wasn’t, trying not to cry. I didn’t know why, but he wasn’t, I said. 
    His eyes changed. He was staring at me now. 
    He said, “When will this happen, Mary?” 
    I said I didn’t know—not for a couple of days at least, but I couldn’t be sure, how could I be sure? It felt like four, maybe five, days, but I couldn’t be sure. I was crying again. This is what made him believe me in the end. 
    He knew it would never happen if Steve were there—but if Steve was gone, if the men waited until Steve was gone? 
    Steve would be gone in a couple of days and there was no way that this nurse, scared and crying, could know this. 
     
    He moved me to his bunker and had someone hang canvas to make a hooch for me inside his. He doubled the guards and changed the guards and doubled them again, but I knew he didn’t think it was going to happen until Steve left. 
    I cried that night. He came to my hooch. He said, “Don’t be frightened, Mary. No one’s going to hurt you. No one’s going to hurt anyone.” 
    But he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t tried to stop a dream from coming