The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (43 page)

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: 

Rick is at a community center that evening, making his first session of the veteran’s outreach group. He couldn’t be more fish out of water. These vets, not your average, are either enormous guys in denim overalls without shirts, birds of prey and women’s names and
Semper Fi
and
Kill Them All and Let God Sort Them Out
tattooed on every inch of them, or little wiry men with haunted eyes who look like serial killers. They talk about “the horrors of the Nam” and the “the gasses of the Gulf” and “the caves of Afghanistan” and Rick, a young Tom Hanks expression on his face, feels like running for his life. But it’s his turn now to speak, to share the horror, and all eyes are on him. They’re waiting for him—aging boomers, bearded bikers, wiry paranoids—to speak. When he does, he can’t help it. He blurts out: “It wasn’t horrible for me. I loved it.” His eyes are tearing. “Actually, I want it back.
I miss it.”
 

Suddenly everyone is crying. They’re up, out of their seats, huddled around him, all of them crying. Their great tattooed arms and their dark skinny arms are around him, suffocating him in a group hug, and they’re saying, “We know what you mean, Rick. We miss it, too.” 

When the meeting ends, Rick slips away, makes his way down the night street (his car has of course broken an axle), and hears someone coming after him. It’s Chi Chi Escalante, one of those gaunt-eyed wiry paranoids from the group. Worse, he’s Hispanic—something no all-American red-blooded boy from McCulloughville can possibly trust. Chi Chi’s got a scar on his cheek and to make matters worse he’s grinning:
He wants to be friends.
“How about a flick?” he says and Rick mumbles, keeps walking. Chi Chi persists. He knows a bro when he sees one. “You’re that guy who whacked those bugs, right?” Rick’s vanity sparks. He stops walking. “Must have been excellent,” Chi Chi says. “Yes, I suppose it was,” Rick answers. They walk, they talk. “How about a flick?” Chi Chi asks again. 

Why not?
Rick thinks. He doesn’t even have a DVD player anymore. He can’t even watch the old footage.