“Moths?” I asked, for I was no lepidopterist.
“Butterflies,’’ Janie crooned. “They’re all butterflies.”
She lifted the other box toward the weak light from the front door. Suddenly their colors — caramel, black, yellow, and blue — began to glow as though lit up from within, translucent and alive. In that box as in the other, butterflies of all kinds sat in neat spacious rows, orderly and at attention. Their wings were spread open in perfect equipoise, as though they’d just finished a long flight, or a ballet movement, by gently landing and taking a bow. But small black pins pierced the narrow abdomens of each one, holding them to the corkboard surface, making them seem less graceful, more dead, engaged in no dance at all.
A paper nametag was glued below each butterfly, its proper name spelled out in Skeet’s erratic, struggling scrawl: Papilio Glaucus, Lycaena Phlaeas, Spicebush Swallowtail, Silver-spotted, Skipper, Stage Monarch, Red Admiral, Peking Cabbage, Blue Ipso-Columbus, Northern Cloudywing. After reading them, I couldn’t imagine which was more unlikely — Skeet attempting to pronounce the names, or actually taking the time to pen them.
“Look at the others,” Janie said. She wagged a finger and guided me away. We walked down the length of the room until we came to three more identical boxes, standing upright in a row along the rear wall, like museum displays about to be hung. They too were filled with butterflies.
“Where did they come from?” I asked.
Janie moved a few paces away and turned, folding her arms. “I don’t know,” she said. “I honestly don’t.”
I bent down and inspected a few of them. “Maybe he picked them up somewhere.”
“Picked them up? Picked them up where?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe he bought them.”
“Come on,” she said. I looked up at her. Her arms were folded. She was rocking on the balls of her feet. Her forehead was furrowed and she was picking at her fingers mercilessly.
“Or found them,” I stabbed on, “in an alley Or outside a lab. Or the museum. Or a garage sale. Who knows.”
“Picked those up in an alley?”
“Maybe he bought them, Janie. I really don’t know.”
“Look in the drawer,” she said.
“Why? What’s in there?” I asked.
“Just look.”
“There’s something dead in there. Isn’t there?”
“Look in the drawer.”
I looked in the drawer. Scattered around inside were all of the implements Skeet had used to make his displays — tiny plastic boxes filled with colored pins, glue, tape, corkboard, rulers, X-acto knives.
“Look in the other,” Janie said.
In the next drawer down, a deep drawer, were pieces of muslin and cheesecloth, two of them fashioned around coathangers to form crude butterfly nets. There was an old coffee can too. I lifted it out and the pungent odor that wafted from it — ethyl acetate, I know now —- made me return it quickly. It was a killing jar, primitive and also of Skeet’s own fashioning. Strewn along the bottom of the drawer was butterfly carnage, their bodies dry and dusty and disintegrating, brittle like fall leaves.
After I’d closed the drawers I turned the desk chair around and sat down. “I don’t understand,” I said.
“Neither do I.” Janie, still standing, pulled out a cigarette and lit up. I started to cough conspicuously.
“Not a word,” she warned. “I’m the nurse around here.”
“You couldn’t tell by looking at you,” I said.
She inhaled and looked down at herself.
“I’ve got to get back to work,” I finally said.
“What am I supposed to do with them?”
“I don’t know. We’ll talk about it later.”
“I can’t just leave them.”
“You can for now,” I said. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
She started throwing her weight from leg to leg. She let her cigarette fall to the floor and crushed it with a pivot of her foot. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know it doesn’t,” I said. I stood up to go.
“What was he doing?”
I stood looking at her, watching her wonder and wondering myself if she would hit upon it, remember it, allow herself to understand how the most vicious person we had ever known had come to take an obsessive interest in butterflies.
“I don’t know, Janie. I’ve really got to go.”
But I did know. The lies we tell when we’re children might be called innocent lies, not because we’re innocent, but because as children we know we’re lying, and to what purpose or end. The lies we tell when we’re older, though, are the frightening lies, because now we lie mostly to ourselves, and it’s ourselves alone that we wish to delude.
~ * ~
Skeet once made medical history, though his name is in none of the textbooks. Why that is, I don’t know. All I know is that the measures the doctors took to save Skeet’s life, now so commonplace, were unheard of at the time.
He first got sick not long after he moved in with us. He began having difficulty with walking, and talking, and moving his arms, sluggish like a windup toy in the final throes of its gyrations. Mom was a nurse, attentive to those things, and saw it before any of us, including Skeet himself, I think, suspected a problem. She got Skeet the right appointments and checkups, and after many weeks of tests the doctors determined that Skeet’s muscles were dying. They were dying generally, and all over. No name for his malady existed, but the doctors said it typically began in a patient’s extremities. Limbs and appendages would begin to get more sluggish and numb. The arms and legs first, then the fingers and toes and the tongue. Skeet wouldn’t be able to walk or eat or keep his eyes open. And then the numbness would spread inward — to the stomach muscles and the abdominal muscles and the bladder muscles and, in the end, the heart muscle would go. Skeet was nine.
Although the doctors had seen this before, and knew what to expect, they still had no way to successfully treat it. One of them had some ideas, though, and wanted to try them on Skeet. And because the treatment was experimental, and the risks somewhat uncertain, and because we had no money to speak of, the entire procedure — tests, injections, physical therapy, and hospital stays — would be free.
Mom took a couple weeks to think about it, and to try and find Skeet’s mother.
Before he came to live with us, Skeet was no one special. He wasn’t even Skeet. His name was Ted, and he was just the sickly looking kid who lived across the street from us, in a shotgun house like our own. Ted and his mother had moved from somewhere, Cincinnati I believe, and because Ted’s mom and our mom were the only single mothers on our block, and close in age, they became friends. Skeet’s mother would haul him over to play with us when she wanted to sit on the porch and talk aimless talk to Mom. She would find a sitter for all three of us when she wanted to take Mom out drinking with her, which Mom liked to do now and again.
I wasn’t home when Skeet’s mom brought him over to spend a few days with us — forever as it turned out. Janie was home, and she remembered that Skeet’s mom seemed rushed. Apparently Skeet’s father had turned up in Ohio somewhere, and she was off to find him and bring him back. Could we look after Ted for a while? Of course.
That night, with Skeet asleep upstairs and Janie on her way up to join him in the bedroom we would all come to share, I lingered in the kitchen a while with Mom, and prophetically asked her what would happen if Skeet’s mom didn’t come back. She laughed. “She’ll be back for Ted, sweetie,” she said, unable to imagine a mother abandoning a child. “That woman’s had a hard way,” she said, never once stopping to think of herself in those very terms. In the months that followed, Janie and I were worried and Mom was privately terrified, waiting for Skeet’s mother to show up, then waiting for some city agency to discover her missing, or to question our possession of this child who did not belong to us. But nobody came, mother or father or officer of the law, and in time we all stopped
worrying. It seems amazing now that a child could simply be left forever with a strange family, but I suppose you could get away with itinerant moves like that back then. You can get away with anything, really, when people stop paying attention.
Skeet never seemed to note his mother’s absence. He never once mentioned her, and in time none of us mentioned her. After Skeet’s illness we never spoke of her again.
If it was an awkward household before Skeet got sick our unease grew as Skeet’s strength began to waste away drastically. When Mom wasn’t at work she was at home, holed up in her bedroom when she wasn’t making us meals, while Janie and I took Skeet around the neighborhood in the wagon, and sat him up on the porch with us. In the afternoons the three of us would watch TV, and when Mom would come out to fix dinner, Skeet, who could not move his head very well, followed her everywhere with his eyes as she moved about the room, and Mom, sensing it, would risk one glance at Skeet and start crying. She didn’t know what to do for him. Neither did we. And after a month of not being able to find Skeet’s mother, and with the doctor’s reports evolving from “concerned” to “grave,” Mom signed the releases. Skeet’s treatment began immediately.
The experiment they tried, untested then, as I said, but so common now, was to administer huge doses of synthetic hormones to his system. They did this in the hospital three times a week, for four hours each time — with a few hours afterward for rest and rehabilitation. On those days Skeet went to work with Mom in the mornings, and Janie and I went directly to the hospital after school and waited with Skeet while he rested, in the aftermath of the treatment. It was not unlike the way in which my mother would take chemotherapy just a few years ago before we had lost her, and it was not unlike chemotherapy in the havoc it wrecked on Skeet’s little body. He was exhausted, then exhilarated, then wracked with muscular cramps that made him scream. They had him on a rigorous program of physical therapy on his “off’ days. When, after three months of treatment, his muscular control not only returned but started to flourish, Skeet continued with the workouts on his own and only went into the hospital for tests and an overnight checkup once a month.
“He’s Charles Atlas gone crazy,” Janie said one night at the dinner table, a year later. Mom and Janie and I were alone. Skeet had already left for the YMCA to work out. He worked out every night, always leaving the three of us at the table. Skeet had no patience for table talk, and he left us that way almost every evening. Not rudely, not unhappily, but in a distracted and determined way that seemed completely uncalculated.
“I think I’ll call him Charles,’’ Janie said, “instead of Skeet.”
“Oh, I hate that name,” Mom said. “Skeet is a name for hoodlums. Or hillbillies. I don’t know why you can’t just call him by his real name.”
Janie and I looked at each other, and Janie rolled her eyes.
“Ted,” we both said aloud, and started laughing. Mom smiled reluctantly and soon was laughing along with us. We were ashamed of our smiles, but we all smiled nonetheless. Skeet had been such a constant preoccupation for all of us that we could afford to take refuge in the shoddy respite of a little smile.
Skeet’s name came from the sputtering sounds he made early on in his illness, when the muscle spasms were just beginning to act up and were proceeding toward his tongue. His speech devolved into a drooling hiss as he struggled to control the delicate sounds — the S’s and T’s on the end of his tongue — and his tongue went flying off the handle. He sounded, said the neighborhood kids, like a mosquito. Skeet still went to school then, and the kids we had known all our lives, with whom we grew up and were familiar, became unfamiliar in the way they took to teasing Skeet, cruelly. They asked him questions. They were always asking him questions, any question they could think of, and many of them. They loved to hear him speak, and when he finally wouldn’t answer, humiliated, they asked him more and more questions, again and again, until he lost all restraint and sputtered out, screamed out, and the words fell apart and they called him Skeeter.
But by the end of the year, when he was almost well again, he adopted the name all our classmates had called him and would only answer to Skeet. His speech restored, he relished the slow, methodical, precise pronunciation of his name. “My name is Skeet,” he would say, and the way he said it seemed sinister.
One autumn evening after school, the air metallic and cool, we all went to play in the dead fall light that filled the outdoor lot of Jemson’s Brick & Tile down the street. On a cement island in the middle of the shipping yard was the neighborhood’s only really tall tree. We all liked to hang and swing from the tree, and that early evening our swinging brought down from the tree’s highest branches a bird’s nest. It went wheeling to the pavement. There were two eggs in it, and two chicks just recently hatched, one of which seemed to have been hurt in the fall. It was shiny and newborn, its nascent feathers wet and spiky like hair, and it was struggling, its beak opening and closing, one free wing flapping about.
“Look, look, it’s hurt,” somebody said.
“It’s not hurt. It’s just starting to come out of the shell.”
“No, not that one! Look! The wounded one!”
Everyone peered at the broken little bird, and after a while I looked around for Janie and Skeet. Janie was at my side, but Skeet was walking away. He was walking straight to the brick piles. I stood up from the huddle and watched him go. He came walking back into the group with a single red brick held high over his head. It was a remarkable thing to see, given that months before he could barely raise his own arms. I realized what he intended to do, and I stepped back swiftly. In the pause that followed the other kids looked up and, understanding, all scattered backwards. We waited. Skeet said something and let the brick fall from on high. We all approached slowly and looked down at the devastation. Flecks of blood and a yellow ooze spread out from under the brick. The wounded bird’s lone wing was still flapping feebly. A few of the children ran off crying. Another, bewildered, just said “cool.” In time they all wandered home, slowly and silently, but Janie and I stood with Skeet for a long time, until the one bird finally stopped moving. On our way back, I asked Skeet what he had said before dropping the brick. He repeated it, but so softly we still couldn’t hear him. “What?” Janie asked again. He said it once more, loudly and sternly and distinctly now — “I’m not the wounded one.”
~ * ~
The last time I ever saw Skeet we had an awkward encounter. My graduation from law school was kind of a miracle in my mind, not because I didn’t do well — I was an average student — but because I just never imagined it was possible. Janie knew how much it meant to me. It meant just as much to her, I think, and she knew how much it would have meant to our mother. So Janie arranged a celebration picnic, on that first Sunday in June after the graduation ceremony, in Seneca Park. We were going to have friends of mine, mostly new friends from the college and from law school, Janie would bring Hal, and when my new girlfriend asked if we wouldn’t have any family, Janie looked at me and we both said “Skeet” out loud.
Skeet was sort of beyond the pale around all us pasty types. His sheer bulk, his thick arms and neck, and his new buzz cut set him apart almost as soon as he pulled onto the grass in his hatchback, his car stereo blaring, and stepped out to join us. We’d been sitting in the sun, on the grass, drinking wine and eating cheese, and Skeet’s arrival put a stop to our drunken chatter. I didn’t know how I would introduce him, but I was suddenly glad he was there. There, where my future was supposed to start, I had a taste of my indiscriminate and reprobate past, setting me apart like a brash tattoo from my new friends and classmates. But as the afternoon proceeded and I watched Skeet work so hard at simply existing among us, I was ashamed. My past was Skeet’s present, and I was wrong to claim any share in it, especially now that I was poised to walk away.
Barbara and Stan invited him to sit, and they tried to get him to talk about his work, but when you’ve just been fired as bouncer at a bar for brutally beati
ng a patron, and now you’re collecting loans for Jimmie Lavender the loan shark, the talk does not go far and everyone sits empty-handed. Later Skeet dropped under the tree and began flirting with Barbara and Margaret, who were fixing the food. He sat with his hands behind his head and gnawed at a blade of grass, Marlon Brando-like. And when he gave me a wink, though Barbara saw it and got up to walk away in silent disgust, I winked back.
He was at ease in a way I almost couldn’t believe, far less removed and far more present than I could ever remember. Later Skeet and I walked off together. If I had been glad to see him, he seemed more happy for me, and happy to have been invited at all. He made me feel as though Janie and I hadn’t forgotten him — which we had — but that he had forgotten us, so busy and moving and new had his life become. He was overdoing it. There was something hollow and vulnerable in his enthusiasm. Still, he insisted — he had big deals going. Responsibilities. Work to do. That’s what it was all about now. Never better, never happier. Moving up. “Making my own way now,” he said, as though there were any other way.
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