Butterfly Winter

by W. P. Kinsella

  The Gypsy girl stood behind a narrow counter. On the midway side of the counter a single maroon-topped, chrome-shafted restaurant stool sat unevenly among the shavings, appearing to be mysteriously bolted to the earth.

  The girl crooked a finger at the twins as they sauntered by. Esteban angled slowly toward her, as if he were a fish, hooked, and the Gypsy girl held the pole, slowly reeling him in.

  “For twenty centavos I will reveal the future, analyze the past, delve into the unknown.…”

  Esteban perched his stocky form on the single stool. He dug the money from his pocket and presented it to her.

  Julio stood fifty feet behind Esteban, rocking on his heels, grinning at his brother’s gullibility.

  “You are not all here,” the Gypsy girl said, then seeing that Esteban misunderstood, added quickly, “I don’t mean you are stupid, but something about you is strange.”

  She closed her eyes, seizing one of Esteban’s heavy hands with her own long, brown fingers.

  Esteban saw that her eyelids were a frosty red. He wondered if the color was achieved with paint or if it was produced by sheer concentration.

  “Your aura is big as a circus tent. I can’t quite comprehend it. It reaches all the way to where your friend loiters, scuffling.”

  “He is my twin,” said Esteban.

  “Ah,” said the Gypsy, opening her eyes. “That explains it. You two share more than you realize.”

  “We know,” said Esteban.

  “She’s a fraud,” shouted Julio. “Come on! Let’s go see the dancing girls.”

  “Your future is like your body,” the Gypsy girl said.

  “How is it like my body?” asked Esteban.

  Julio was edging closer to the booth. A few passersby were stopping to watch the fortunetelling.

  “You will live long, become wealthy beyond your wildest dreams, and die happy in your own bed,” said Julio to his brother, his smile wide and infectious.

  “Perhaps I should pay you,” said the Gypsy girl without a trace of humor.

  “Perhaps you should,” said Julio, “for my prognostications are as reliable as yours.”

  The Gypsy girl stared at him, a half smile on her gaudily painted face. “Your brother’s life will be like his body,” she repeated, her eyes fastened to Julio’s face like insects. “Short and compact,” she added.

  “Fortune-tellers are not supposed to be crepe hangers,” said Julio, “you are supposed to lead customers on, entice them to spend more money.”

  “Short and compact,” the Gypsy girl repeated. “If I wished to leech money from you I would stop now and demand more payment.” She held Julio’s eyes with hers.

  Julio, though he certainly didn’t wish to admit it, or even think it, felt as though steel rods connected him with the Gypsy girl.

  Esteban turned uncomfortably back and forth on the red-topped restaurant stool.

  “I like to persuade skeptics of my worth,” the girl continued. “You may pay only what you think the information is worth.”

  Looking straight at Julio she went on. “Your brother will be murdered. By a woman. A mysterious woman who will still his heart with a thin silver knife. The deed will be done far away, in another country, but in the foreseeable future.”

  “How can we prevent it?” asked Julio, surprised to hear his voice, surprised at the concern it registered.

  “You cannot,” she replied. “I see what is going to happen. The future cannot be changed.”

  “Charlatan!” cried Julio.

  “I sympathize,” said the girl.

  “That’s all you have to say?” said Julio, his arms raised in exasperation. “You tell me my brother will be murdered and all you offer is sympathy? You are not only a fraud, but a cruel fraud.”

  “It’s all right,” said Esteban, standing suddenly. “I am here, remember. And I do not like being talked about in the third person. I am not afraid of death, no matter what its form. We are all going to die, what does it matter if my time is shorter than someone else’s?”

  “Philosophical rubbish,” stormed Julio. “My brother has no sense concerning the urgency of life,” he shouted at the fortune-teller.

  “And you have,” she said, smiling darkly. “What if his future had been yours?”

  “If I believed the edict, I would fight it.”

  “You don’t believe it?” said the Gypsy girl.

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why are you so upset?”

  Realizing he had been taken in, Julio glowered. The crowd continued to gather. Several people had their money out, hands extended, ready to pay for a prophecy.

  “Since you don’t believe,” said the Gypsy girl to Julio, “then you won’t mind hearing what your future holds?”

  Before Julio could speak out—his mouth was already open to do so, his tongue touching his top teeth—the fortune-teller silenced him by holding up her hand like a police officer.

  “No money,” the Gypsy girl said loudly. “A free prophecy for the skeptic.”

  She beckoned Julio closer, crooking her long, brown fingers, smiling enigmatically.

  Reluctantly, Julio took her hand. As he did so he felt as if his body were generating electricity. As the Gypsy girl drew him up beside Esteban, he put his free arm about Esteban’s shoulders and the sensation increased as he did so.

  “If the generator fails, we can use the power of your combined aura to light the midway,” the girl said. She then continued, speaking directly to Julio. “You, my friend, will fly.”

  She remained silent for several seconds to give the prophecy dramatic effect.

  “Like a myth, with the beauty of a rainbow, with the breath of a dragon and a beating of wings, the hissing of a trillion geometrically patterned snakes.”

  The people in the crowd sighed collectively at the wonder of her words.

  “I often travel by airplane; there is nothing miraculous about it,” said Julio dispassionately.

  The crowd murmured.

  “You have so little imagination,” said the Gypsy girl. “You do not wonder how a million pounds of metal soars through the air with the grace of a condor. But never mind. You will fly beyond the metal wings of man. You will FLY!”

  The crowd squeezed closer, offering their money, eager to be deceived.

  “Go in peace,” the Gypsy girl said. She leaned across the counter and kissed first Esteban, then Julio on the cheek. Esteban turned away and was squished through the crowd like an orange seed. Julio remained where he was.

  “It is both a pleasure and a sadness to be allowed to speak the truth,” the Gypsy girl whispered to Julio, kissing him again, this time on the lips, her mouth open, her tongue inflamed.

  “Do you have a name?” he asked.

  “I am whatever you choose to call me,” said the girl.

  “In that case,” said Julio, “we will christen you Celestina.”

  “We? I see only you speaking.”

  “My brother knew your name before I did. We read each other’s minds.”

  As her lips crushed his mouth Julio could smell cinnamon, and sun-warm earth, and he saw that the girl, behind her garish makeup, was probably no older than he was.

  He slipped a one hundred guilermo note into her hand. “I will see you in the sky,” he said.

  Only Esteban, standing stolidly in the background knew that the girl was the same one who had taken him into the jungle years before. A girl named Celestina.

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE GRINGO JOURNALIST

  As they walked through the streets of San Cristobel the Gringo Journalist swiveled his head about, his body reluctantly following. What he had seen was, he thought at first, a movie poster, a cardboard cut-out of a middle-aged peasant wearing baggy black slacks and a loose white cotton shirt. Then the cut-out moved, turned to face the Gringo Journalist and the Wizard as they passed. To the Gringo Journalist’s eyes he was no more than half an inch thick.

  “What?” said the Wizard. He
had smiled at the man; they exchanged a brief greeting.

  “What’s going on? That man looks like a cut-out. He’s less than an inch thick.”

  The Wizard shrugged.

  “You saw it,” said the Gringo Journalist.

  “Indeed,” said the Wizard.

  “Do you have anything to do with the way he looks?”

  “Hermitio Aquarian was born without a sense of depth perception. Only the most primitive of medicine was known and practiced in his remote village, where, instead of growing up handicapped, Hermitio was considered enchanted,” the Wizard began.

  “To Hermitio the earth is flat. Trees are flat, rocks are flat, the house of his mother is flat.

  “As a child Hermitio Aquarian was in a perpetual state of shock and surprise from bumping into objects that he perceived as flat, that he was about to walk over. To Hermitio a chair looked like a chair that had been stepped into the earth by a giant. But he adjusted, as children with handicaps do. He learned to pull himself up onto things that to him were as flat and uni-dimensional as a crushed cockroach. He learned slowly that his friends and family, each of whom appeared to him like the glossy models on the pages of catalogs, were really upright as he. He is a gardener, to him a lawn looks like a lawn. He has found his place in life, though it took some time to adjust to the fact that a lawn mower was.…”

  “Not flat,” said the Gringo Journalist. “The question is why do I, and I assume everyone else, see him as he sees the world?”

  “Handicapped people often develop their other senses to extremes. It is very easy for him to make his way through crowds.”

  The Gringo Journalist turned and stared at the spot behind them where the cut-out man leaned indolently against a lamppost.

  “Have you forgotten you are in Courteguay, where magic does not need an explanation?” says the Wizard. “Besides, it is the least we could do.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THE WIZARD

  Esteban’s hitting was always a problem. He was an adequate if uninspired catcher. But he could not hit, or run the bases. “Tell you how slow he is,” said Al Tiller, addressing a gaggle of sportswriters in the dressing room after a particularly humiliating loss, where Julio had pitched a two hitter, but one of the hits was a home run, and where the team had been unable to get a runner beyond first base. Esteban’s batting average was a puny .130.

  “I seen trees grow faster than he runs. He once started out for second base in the fifth inning and got there in the ninth. He is slower than shit movin’ through a long dog.”

  Eventually, the sportswriters got around to Esteban’s hitting. “He’s the only player I ever managed with a negative batting average. When he comes up in a situation I’ve got a special sign telling him to get hit by a pitch.”

  But humor could only go so far. The owner and general manager could not believe that Julio would not pitch to another catcher. They threatened to send both boys back to Courteguay, if Julio continued to insist that Esteban be his catcher. They agreed. Management withdrew the offer for they couldn’t release their star pitcher. They forced Julio to pitch to another catcher. He smiled sullenly, went to the mound and lobbed batting practice pitches to the opposing batters. After seven consecutive hits, rather than take Julio out of the game, word came down to Al Tiller to put Esteban in. Julio pitched a shutout for the remaining innings.

  At the All-Star break Esteban consulted a moth-eaten priest behind the chain-link fence. As a side bar, Julio Pimental never played in an All-Star game though he would have been a choice of the National League manager for probably eighteen of his twenty professional seasons. But, since Julio would pitch to no one but Esteban, and Esteban was never a factor in All-Star voting, Julio had to be dropped from the team every year.

  “Do you think a holy relic might do the job?” the old priest asked.

  “I believe in holy relics,” said Esteban.

  “Then it is as good as done.” The priest retreated to the huts where he and his compatriots existed. Minutes later he returned with an inch-long sliver of bone, which he handed to Esteban. “This is from the arm of Saint Cayetano of San Barnabas, a simple fisherman who, though he had to fish from the Dominican coast, then smuggle his catch back to Courteguay, became lost at sea, landed in Florida, and returned to Courteguay in possession of a cathedral-shaped radio which, when properly motivated, spoke in many voices and of many things.”

  “I will insert this shard of bone into my bat and Saint Cayetano will take pity on my inability to match the round bat with the round ball.”

  Esteban carried the shard back to America, inserted it into the hitting end of his bat, and his batting average for the remainder of the season was .312, while the only Major League Baseball Club in the True South put on a late-season rally that allowed them to finish in second place in their division.

  Esteban’s emergence as a hitter was not without trauma. After a month of hitting over .300 he shattered his bat one night in San Francisco. Pieces of the bat scattered in all directions as if it had exploded from inside. Esteban, neglecting to run out the pop fly he hit, dropped to his knees and began gathering bits and pieces of the destroyed bat. At his urging the bat boy returned splinters of bat and the other players picked up what bits they could find. Esteban struck out in his three remaining at-bats, and on the team bus and later in their hotel room the twins frantically searched for the bone chip from the arm of St. Cayetano of San Barnabas.

  Unable to find it they slipped out of the hotel and made their way back to Candlestick Park. They talked a caretaker who recognized them into letting them in and, in the predawn fog and drizzle, crawled about the infield noses to the ground desperately searching for the bone shard.

  The search was unsuccessful. Esteban eventually fell into a fitful sleep while Julio slipped out of the hotel and after asking directions several times found a butcher’s shop where he explained, with great difficulty, what he was looking for (though Esteban learned to speak grammatically correct and almost unaccented English, Julio liked to give the impression he had a limited knowledge of the language. In interviews he frequently lapsed into Spanish and ‘How you say?’ were three of his favorite words, though the non sequiturs and malapropisms he came up with were too clever not to have been intentional). Julio held the shard over a gas flame until it dried, then polished it with cloth. On the way back to the hotel he stopped at a hardware store and bought a small drill and a hammer and chisel.

  Julio spread the broken pieces of bat on his bed and began dismembering them with the hammer and chisel.

  “I’ve found it! I’ve found it!” he yelled into Esteban’s sleeping ear.

  Julio held the shard before Esteban’s bleary eyes.

  “I will hit again,” said Esteban, grasping the bone chip.

  Taking a new bat, Julio drilled a hole in the business end and inserted the shard, then he closed the entrance with plastic filler. Esteban, now wide awake, took a few mighty practice strokes.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THE GRINGO JOURNALIST

  She was one of the refugees from Courteguay; eighty of them crammed together, scrunched like broccoli, the girl recounted, her eyes wide with the remembered discomfort of it, in an open boat, dilapidated, unseaworthy, the bottom spurting water as a wounded general spurts blood.

  Several people were lost when the boat was swamped repeatedly. She told of sharks turning like saws in the bice-colored waters, waiting, told of the agonized screams of those who were swept away, told of the ugly stains on the waves, how blood, like rust, colored the waters.

  The boat limped into Miami harbor and promptly sank, losing a few more of the refugees. The remainder were arrested and preparations were made to ship them home to Courteguay.

  “We are political refugees,” they cried.

  “Courteguay is not considered an unpleasant place to live,” countered the US Immigration Service.

  “But Haitians arrive in America daily, by the boatload.”

  “If Co
urteguay was to become part of Haiti we might consider you.”

  “We are poor.”

  “So is most of the world.”

  “The priests live behind chain-link fences.”

  “By their own choice. We are sorry, but unless your life is in danger in Courteguay, or unless you have relatives in the USA.”

  “I am not from Courteguay,” said the girl.

  “Where are you from?” asked the immigration official.

  “I am from the sky,” she replied.

  “Mentally unstable,” the official scribbled on a note pad.

  “I have relatives,” the girl said cunningly. “The Pimental brothers, who pitch in the President of the United States Baseball League are my cousins.”

  She looked deep into the eyes of the immigration officer. He stamped each application “refused” and the would-be immigrant was led away. He used the same stamp on her application but what appeared on her application was “APPROVED.”

  She was waiting outside the ballpark when Esteban and Julio emerged.

  “She is the girl from the sky,” said Esteban, not at all surprised by her appearance.

  “She is the Gypsy fortune-teller,” said Julio, also unsurprised.

  Esteban took her to dinner where she ate nothing but stared at him with large starving eyes. Back at his hotel room her lovemaking made Esteban forget, possibly for the first time in his life, the mysteries of philosophy and religion.

  “I was very lonely,” Esteban said, her head on his shoulder, her perfumed hair spread across his chest. She accompanied him on the remainder of the road trip. Back home she moved into Esteban’s room in the apartment he shared with Julio.

  “Nothing good can come from this,” Julio prophesied ominously.

  “You have more than your share of women. Allow me a little pleasure,” said Esteban.

  “There is a difference between pleasure and enchantment. She has attached herself to you. It spells trouble.”

  “Nonsense,” said Esteban, who, even after he had showered, carried the odors of the strange girl on him.

  THE WIZARD ARRIVED UNEXPECTEDLY, his balloon landing roughly on the roof of the hotel, jarring the plaster off the roof in the penthouse. The Wizard was not in top condition, his balloon having been caught in Tropical Storm Carlotta, one of the first hurricanes of the season.