Tinfoil Butterfly

by Rachel Eve Moulton

  “Stay right here. Don’t move,” I say, and hop in the Jeep, driving it up to the entrance to the dark road that brought me here.

  I jog back to Earl’s side, my body slowed by the snow and aching with this small effort. Earl is watching the diner. His concentration so intense that when I reach out and touch his arm he startles.

  “It’s hurting,” he says.

  “What’s hurting?”

  “The building. The land. Can’t you hear it?”

  I listen and hear only the crack and growing grumble of flames. I listen harder to the flames as they screech and crack and rattle. If I flip the noise, I hear what Earl must hear. The building screaming as the flames chew at it, taking their time. A structure whining and whistling, begging to be put out of its misery.

  I take the book of matches out of my pocket and Earl whimpers. I shut my eyes. I pray. Not to God. Never to that fucker. No. I imagine the trees, our feet climbing the sap-sticky branches. Climbing above fire and bodies out into a new life. I’m doing the right thing. I open my eyes, use another match to light the whole matchbook and toss it in through the diner door. I move back. One step, two steps, three, four, until I’m beyond the old gas pumps. Earl moves so he can stand in front of me. Lighter fluid burns my nostrils so I bury my face in the top of his wild hair, and he smells warm and good and in this moment I know I don’t deserve him. He killed his father to save me. His home is burning because I’m scared of staying.

  This time the whimper comes from me and my sinuses burn as if I might start crying. I say: “I’ll get you somewhere safe, Earl. I promise. I’m so sorry.”

  The flames thread their way through the maze of lighter fluid I’ve laid down. A flash of heat pushes up at the window.

  It’s time to move back. I’ve done what I’ve done and there is no changing it. I put both my hands on Earl’s shoulders. His collarbone is thin under my fingertips, his shoulder blades as sharp and thin as a wishbone. He’s begun to tremble. His shaking is erratic. I can feel the tension in him. The struggle to hold still, and despite the seeming frailty of his bones under my hands, he resists for a second before letting me pull him back. My hands stay on his shoulders. The crows begin to take flight. One by one they rise into the sky and head to the woods.

  I hear a sound like corn popping, wood bursting open, and Earl moves suddenly, out from under my hands and past Veronica and the pumps.

  “Earl!”

  My hands are still curled to the shape of his shoulders and the cold air that moves over my palms burns in his absence. He’s got it in his head to put the fire out again. I watch him begin to pick up snow by the handfuls and hurl it at the flames. It’s pathetic, a useless gesture that is so sad I don’t know what to do.

  I move forward until I am by Earl’s side. The building is already giving off a heat so fierce it is hard to stand this close.

  “It’s too late. You’ve got to let it all go,” I say as quietly and as calmly as the burning building will allow.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I do. I’m so sorry, but this is it.”

  “I can’t leave.” Earl straightens his spine to stand at his full height.

  “Yes, you can,” I say. “Those tanks could blow. We have to get out of here.”

  Flames join the smoke coming out of the diner doorway. The red and orange and black rises up, funneled away from us. The wind shifts. I cough and the slight inhale that follows the cough fills my lungs with smoke.

  I only have to move back a few feet to find clear air. There is snow falling once again in little harmless flutters that melt as soon as they hit me. Earl is still in the smoke. It curls around him, swirls about his legs like the tail of a cat.

  The diner is burning quickly, ferociously, as if it has only just found its purpose. It’s eating itself. The smoke is getting thicker, blacker, and I have to cover my mouth with my jacket sleeve. The building begins to glow blue. A flame at the center, at its hottest point, burns blue and that heat is inside the building, charring the insides while the silver outside holds as steady as an oven door. I shift my line of vision back to Earl as the smoke threatens to envelop him, my eyes scratchy with soot. “Earl!” He turns, hears me. There’s a crack, a loud series of pops that spiderweb the large window before sucking the pieces inward. Earl stumbles forward; the building is sucking him in.

  “Earl!” My throat fills up with the stench and heat of the burning building. These hills are hungry for a few more hearts. “Earl!” This time I get a mouthful of clean air and my voice comes out strong. Please let him survive this. Please don’t let me kill him too.

  My eyes water and shut, and by the time I open them back up, he’s there. My Earl. I can see him again. I can see all the different parts that make him up, but he is too close to the building. I know he can feel the heat through his shirtsleeves, the heat on the good half of his face.

  I move through the space between us and grab his arm.

  “Earl, we have to go.” My muscles are tight with begging. My nonexistent insides knot up, my back folds itself origami style, just like that morning when I finally lost it. I know there’s something I should say or could say to fix all this, but I can’t find the words.

  “I’m home. I’m already here.”

  “I want to be your home,” I say, and the desire is so real and true and felt that I have to raise one hand to my heart and push the other into my scarred stomach to keep all the feeling inside.

  “Really?” he says with so much awe and hope that I want to laugh, but then he screams. It’s more pain than surprise. The sleeve of his thermal long johns is on fire. He raises it out to the side, looking at it as it arches up with orange. I bat at his burning arm with my naked palms. I feel no pain. And then we are ripping off his layers, leaving the flames behind us on the pavement, and moving farther from the heat, but it follows us. Dogged. I let Earl go.

  I squeeze my eyes shut, try to hack up what’s already worked its way into my system, and kneel down. My burned hands slide gratefully into the snow. As far as I can tell, Earl has moved in closer to the heart of the fire. In an effort to save his treasures or leave me behind, he’s going to burn. Burn what’s left of his good skin and heart in my fire, my fault.

  The heat’s too intense, but I want it. I want it to feel good. I want to know how it feels to be pushed up against something so hot that your skin gains muscle and willpower and curls away from the source, but I’m too weak. I have to back away a little. I’ve turned myself around, and I can’t tell which way is in, which way is out.

  The heat curves up my body before the building inhales, sucks up all the air around it, and then goes up in a fierce glare of red and smoke. I reach out again for anything to ground me. For a minute, I’ve got something that brushes against my fingers like cloth, like Earl’s flannel shirt, and my body hiccups a little awkward sob. I grab on hard but whatever it is comes off in my hand moist and soft with heat. I drop it. I fall to my knees. Smoke rises. I’ll get beneath it. I’ll crawl in. Something hits my arm and then my thigh. A sharp, numbing burn like my body is being sterilized. Held over the flame until I’m hot and thin as a needle, a knife blade.

  I’m bleeding. Bits of building, fire, and brick splinters rush out to meet me, gashing new wounds in my cheek, my palms. The first explosion from the tanks opens me up, reminds me that my life’s thick with blood.

  I’ve got a splinter in my upper arm that’s as thick and wide as one of those fat black pencils they give you to use when you’re first learning to write. I pull it out, and the wound burbles. The tanks are bound to blow and with them Veronica, and here I’ll be, crawling between them, singed thin. Maybe I’m dead. Something catches me across the face, whizzing by in its hurry to get out of the center of the heat. Something else bites into the outside of my thigh and seems to want to stay there, comforted to have found a stopping point. Between the coughing, vocal cords twisting, and the tiny explosions, I catch a glimpse of Earl. I see myself at that age. Emm
a with her hair accidentally cut too short and fuzzing out all over her head, all dirty and lanky. Breasts not yet a threat. I want to save her, but then she raises her eyes and the scar is heating up, peeling her face away in blisters that I can tell will never heal and underneath somewhere is Earl with all his murderous mistakes and longings.

  There’s a boom, like a construction ball hitting a skyscraper, and the entire structure caves inward sucking the smoke in for a Kodak-clear moment. I lie belly to parking lot. There’s no snow here, only hot asphalt. The heat has lessened, the air is thinning. Pine trees ahead. The pain comes as I put my hands to the pavement to crawl out. The burns coming alive in a way that makes me cry out and drop to my elbows. I army crawl away from the fire, barreling forward on soft-sore elbows. There’s snow under me and stray gravel bits. I’m near the Jeep. A few gulps and I’ll be ready to climb inside.

  The Jeep’s engine is still running and too close to the building. I need to move it farther out. I turn back to look at the burning. It’s lighting up the sky and climbing the trees that stand tall all around the gas station. They’re growing flimsy with fire. A matchbook hillside.

  Earl.

  Earl is not behind me. I rise up on my knees and peer into the smoke but see nothing. My hands are red, the palms bubbled up with blisters stiffened with pain. I stand, keep my palms raised in front of me and dive back into the smoke.

  At first, I see and hear nothing. It is like the time Frank took us to the ocean. He was still wooing my mother. He drove a red convertible 1982 Chrysler LeBaron. He thought it was the coolest thing, but I knew my dad would have hated it. Like Frank, it imitated cool without understanding that being hip was meant to look effortless. Its faux leather interior with its plastic dash and its hefty top that took forever to go down. Still, I sat next to Ray in the back, and while we did not speak, we moved in close enough to share headphones. An all-day drive and when we finally hit the Atlantic the sun was setting and a storm was coming but we’d spent so much time getting there that Frank insisted on the beach, top down, waiting for all the stars to arrive.

  Ray and I were restless. We leaped from that car, ran out into the near dark. The waves crashed tall and loud and because our parents were happy and distracted they did not notice me showing off for Ray as I ran into the surf. The water hit so full and cold that shock kept me from understanding what I felt was pain. Instead of fighting to find the surface, I relaxed and felt whole, until my body started awake and fought. Found the sand and pulled myself to the beach. Coughing up the water that had already swept into my lungs so eager to have me hold it.

  It is like that now but with heat. The fire I walk into hurts so much and in every spot that it doesn’t hurt at all. I give up on being able to see and shut my eyes. The flames wrap around me, big black bird wings that lead me to Earl. In the darkness, I find him and my body stops hurting. I pull him in, our bodies against each other, and I feel that peacefulness I felt in the ocean. All of it roaring around me as my body confuses its own strength with that of nature’s. Out of the flames. I cradle Earl against my chest.

  In my arms, he is a dark thing. His clothes spark and sizzle. His face dark with soot. He does not move or speak or open his eyes but I feel his heartbeat in him. It is slowed and slumbering in his chest but still there, still blessedly wicked.

  Outside the Jeep I sink to my knees in snow. I press the melt of it to his hair and face. The blisters on my palms are continuing to form and dipping them into the snow brings no relief. I won’t be able to hold the steering wheel like this and they will stiffen as they try to heal.

  First, I lift the loose pile of Earl into the passenger seat. Second, I reach into the back and grab two of Earl’s shirts and wrap them around my hands. The cotton will have to be peeled off later—I can already feel it sticking to my skin—but right now I just have to get us away from this place. That is all that matters. The Jeep door pulls open easily but loudly, echo creaking in my head. I pull myself up and in. I pull the door shut and curl my hands to the steering wheel, letting myself scream as I do it.

  The rearview mirror is filled up with a glow-mask gray.

  I lean forward, a quick flash of the old blue Maverick again. My mother driving me to school on a snowy morning. Not worried for once. She’s laughing like the snow doesn’t mean anything but hot chocolate with marshmallows. She smells like cedar and coffee.

  I’m not sure I’m going in the right direction. My only consolation is that the road is tilting down at a fairly consistent angle. Sloping into ground that barely reaches past the headlights.

  I’ll drive straight to a hospital and tell the nurses, the doctors, that the Black Hills are burning. I’ll tell anyone who will listen that the little boy with me needs help. That I set him on fire, and if they want to save him, they need to get him far, far away from me.

  EPILOGUE

  I’ve had disaster dreams for nine nights straight. Meteor crash. Tidal wave. Tornado. Campy dreams as well. New York eaten by army ants. Alien invaders. The atom bomb. Jail busts complete with nail files. And blizzard after blizzard after blizzard. I’m averaging three a night. Penance for surviving my handmade disasters.

  It’s dusk. The very end of it anyway, leaving me with enough light to find the path into the campground.

  The road into the campground isn’t impressive. It’s dug deep with family-motor-home grooves. Everything around me is flat with shadows. Far off I see the threatening tilt and dip I’d recognize from National Geographic. I was expecting surrealism, Salvador Dalí, or at least Georgia O’Keeffe. Instead, there is a trailer park. No snow. No trees. Only small patches of cedar chips where I can pitch my tent.

  I’m tired, dream-anxious. I’ll set up camp, go to sleep. Dream dive. It’s been strange since I hurt Earl. The dreams are horrible. I wake up sobbing, heaving like I’m trying to cough up a hairball. I want to cough it up, dislodge Earl from my lungs so I can feel free. Instead, I wake up feeling lost, but I still want them, the dreams. I crave them.

  The snow has stopped coming. It’s still thick on the ground up in the hills, but here, here it is just a dusting at its worst. The wind, however, is picking up speed, beating at my old-fashioned heavy green army tent. Threatening to pole snap. I should explore. Investigate what I came so far to find, but I’m tired.

  The campground is surprisingly full and it takes me longer than I’d like to set up camp. The burns on my hands were largely second-degree but my palms are still wrapped in gauze and the pain is still there.

  With a grimace, I push my last tent stake in and catch a curtain falling back into place at the RV closest. Someone watching me. It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing to see. I ease carefully into the tent. My tent blocks the wind that’s pushing canvas in to touch my cheeks as I undress, arrange blankets. I curl into a fetal position. Pull up blanket layers. I try not to picture the Earl I left at the hospital. A small, all-alone boy in a too-big hospital room. His scarred face red against white sheets. His arms bandaged. Machines and tubes and pulleys meant to help him breathe and pee and hold still. They wouldn’t let me see him.

  In the night, however, I’d find my way to his room. They put a cop outside it—outside mine too—but the guys who came on duty at midnight felt bad for us, and they’d let me shuffle in and sit with him, rest my bandaged hands on his chest and hope somewhere in his bruised-up brain he felt the weight of me.

  I picture Earl now not as I saw him last but as I wish he was. No machines, no mask. Just Earl sleeping. His small body under blankets. His eyelids resting soft and grateful. Earl. I’m sorry. I shut my eyes. Wind ripples the tent canvas.

  * * *

  I’m moving up out of dark. Swimming for air in my fishbowl. Kids laughing. Something clanking. A water pump? Morning dishes. Didn’t sleep well. But no disasters. I open my eyes to stained canvas. There’s a lump under my back. The lump shivers under the hollow spaces between my body and dirt. It squirms when I shift, moves down past my tailbone.

  I c
rawl outside in my T-shirt and underwear to loosen a tent stake and peer underneath. A lizard darts out to stand at my bare toes blinking rapidly, shyly aware of my height. He ducks his shiny black head toward ground so I won’t see so much of his half-circle smile, but the gleam of the red stripe down his back in the sunshine gives away his pride. He’s as big as my foot. When I bend down to stretch a finger along his slick-oil-surface skin, he darts under the RV parked next door. I hop up on the picnic table bench to clear his path. He gives me a hiss, a tongue-drag-tail hiss as he swishes in the dirt. It’s a soft hisssss, barely a threat. It starts the word going in my head again. “Hysterectomy.” I remember now, last night, alone and only half asleep in the tent with the wind pushing at me, I practiced saying it slow. Hyssssssterectomy. Slower so that the y changes into an i. Hissssssssssterectomy. I like the way it slides out from between my front teeth; it’s spit-slippery and sly. I drag it out at the end until it vibrates my lips. Hisssssssssssterectomeeee. It sounds like the balloon-size leak that brought all of the gushy clumps out of me in the first place. Bodily fluids all mixed up until they can’t even recognize their own potential. Hissssssssssssssterectomeeeeeeeeee. A word like that will upset my RV-owning neighbors.

  It’s morning. From atop the picnic table, I can catch a look at the landscape that juts out in crevices and pillars like shadow puppets against the faint pink skyline. My skin has begun to itch again.

  I can hardly wait to change into my jeans and boots and head into the Badlands. I’ll need to wear my sweater today. The wind whips up sand and cold and makes exposed skin pucker. Standing tall on the bench, my socks stuck to the wood by splinters and ancient-family-barbecue leftovers, I listen. The wind sounds different here. Different than it did in the hills. It’s full of voices carried in from the surrounding highways and towns.