by John Jodzio
“You need to learn some patience,” I teased. “That’s what you need to learn.”
Carmen was wearing this low cut black dress and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Her skin was nut brown from sitting by the pool at her half-sister Jennie’s apartment complex.
I jammed a couple bucks into the jukebox and I led Carmen over near the pool tables. It wasn’t really a dance floor, just a spot where the carpet ended, but I pulled her close and twirled her around and around.
“Please,” she whispered into my ear.
“Nope,” I said.
The next morning I opened the door of my apartment and Carmen rushed past me and ran into my bathroom. She slammed the door closed. I heard her start gagging.
“Hey,” I said through the door. “You sick?”
I heard Carmen dry heaving, but then she stopped. The door creaked open. I looked through the crack and saw Carmen slumped over the toilet. Her left hand had gathered up most of her excellent smelling hair, but there were a couple of loose strands hovering dangerously close to the toilet.
“There’s something stuck,” she said. “There’s something stuck in my throat and I can’t get it out.”
Carmen was younger than me, mid-twenties, but she was fragile. I’d met her two months ago and that first night—when she barely knew me—she told me to take my finger and press down on her arm.
“Why?” I asked.
“Just do it and see what happens,” she said.
I pressed my finger down on her arm and the next time I saw her at Manny’s, a couple nights later, she showed me the bruise. I had hardly even touched her, but there on her forearm was my fingerprint.
“If you wanted,” she told me, “you could do your initials. Or spell out your entire name. You could write whatever you want.”
Now Carmen stood in front of my bathroom mirror staring down her throat. She was staying over at my place a couple nights a week now. I’d cleared out a drawer in my dresser and she’d brought over a duffel bag with some clothes. This was as far as I’d gotten with a woman in a long time. I knew that I should savor it, that it was only a matter of time before I did something to drive her away.
“After you dropped me off last night, I fell asleep on Jennie’s couch,” she said. “This morning I woke up to my little nephew shoving an army man into my mouth.”
I went into the kitchen and found a flashlight and pointed it down Carmen’s throat. My face was right near her mouth. Whenever she exhaled, there was this annoying sound—like a radiator that needed to be bled.
“Feel right here,” she told me.
I put my hand on her throat, felt her swallow. There was some-thing big rattling around in her neck. It could have been just about anything. A wristwatch? Legos? An entire battalion of army men? Who knew what her nephew had found on the floor of that ratty apartment and shoved into her mouth?
“I can’t see anything,” I told her. “But there’s definitely something there.”
She turned on the faucet, made a cup with her hands, took a drink.
“Do you want me to take you to the hospital?” I asked.
“No way,” she said. She leaned against the sink, ran her hand over her throat, swallowed, then winced. “You said I get a surprise. And I want my goddamn surprise.”
The surprise I had for Carmen was that we were driving up north to my father’s monarch farm. People needed butterflies for weddings, to christen their babies, for graduation parties. My father was happy to provide this service. He charged five hundred bucks a pop for those ten seconds after he let the butterflies go and the sky turned orange in their honor.
Every year during the first weekend in September, my father went on this trip to visit our relatives in Atlanta. Even though he didn’t really trust me, he was too cheap to pay for real help. He gave me a hundred bucks plus gas to look after his place for the weekend.
“Same deal as last time,” he told me when he called. “You drive up on Saturday morning, ride back on Sunday morning. That’s it. No funny business.”
Taking care of the butterflies wasn’t hard. Mostly you drank and watched TV. The only thing you ever had to do was turn on the heating lamps if it got too cold.
“Don’t be afraid to use those heaters,” my father reminded me for the millionth time when he’d called. “There’s no shame in using the heaters. No shame at all.”
All of the butterflies were housed in this concrete building behind his house. There were tens of thousands of them in there, making their way through their life cycle, from birth to death, but my dad would bitch about even one of them dying. He was a petty man. Once he lectured me for about an hour when he saw that I had accidentally crushed one in the doorframe.
“They’re frail,” he said. “The slightest touch on their wings and they start flying around in a circle and can’t stop. It’s horrible to watch.”
My father and I went for months at a time without speaking, but whenever he called me in the last few years, the only thing he talked about was monarchs. He told me stats about their migration, tidbits about their place in history, about the things he did to help their pupa production. I suppose this was his attempt to get me more invested, to make me into a better caretaker, but I hardly listened.
“They’re an aphrodisiac,” he told me. “Henry VIII used to put a butterfly right on the top of his steak.”
My father was totally obsessed. It was unhealthy. My mother had left him a long time ago and I was a large disappointment. This was the only thing he had now. These butterflies.
I looked at Carmen as I drove. Her face looked ashen. She kept taking her hands and moving them up and down her throat, trying to figure out what was in there. She pulled a crusty blanket out of the backseat and wrapped it around her shoulders. It was pretty hot out, but she was shivering.
I put my hand on Carmen’s knee and squeezed. She was not the first woman I had brought up to my father’s place. There were a couple others too. There was this waitress who worked at the Steak ‘n’ Ale. This girl named Rain who I’d met at the downtown library.
Considering what had happened last time I’d come up here, I was actually surprised that my father had asked me to housesit again. Last time, he’d found a couple of candles inside the shed. Nothing caught on fire, none of his precious butterflies got hurt, but he wouldn’t let it rest.
“This isn’t a place for you to fuck,” he told me.
But it so was. My dad never used it for that, but he should have, because when you stripped naked and laid on the floor in the shed, butterflies floated down and landed all over your naked body. It was an incredible thing. It was like a million tiny lips kissing you all at once. It was insane being in there alone, but with another person to share it with, it was absolutely mind-blowing.
“I need to be able to trust my son,” my father told me on the phone. “I need him to understand that my butterflies are not his sex slaves. I need him to understand that they have the same delicate psyches as human beings and they do not like to be involved in your deviant behavior.”
“Absolutely,” I told him.
I heard him take a deep breath and then blow it out. I’d recently lost a job he’d lined up for me managing a copy shop, and before that I’d gotten fired from his fishing buddy’s car dealership. I doubted that he’d stick his neck out for me much longer. I’d just about ruined whatever goodwill that been passed on to me from simply being his son.
“I need you to be responsible,” he said.
I knew it was wrong, but as I talked with my father I was already thinking about asking Carmen to come with me. I couldn’t help myself. Those butterflies landing on you felt good enough to be disowned.
“I’m your guy,” I said.
When I put on the blinker to my dad’s house, Carmen’s face dropped. There wasn’t a lake, there was no carnival, there was no string quartet standing in the driveway. My father lived in a brown rambler and other than the
butterfly shed the property had pretty much gone to hell. Next to the house sat a rusted-out school bus that was listing off to one side.
“This is a place you bring someone to kill them,” she said. “Is that the surprise? That you’ve brought me here to die?”
We got out of the car and walked back to the shed. The whist-ling in Carmen’s throat had moved up an octave. I started talking like a carnival barker now, trying to create excitement where there was none.
“There are a million butterflies in there,” I explained.
“So what?” Carmen said.
“Have you ever gotten naked and had a million butterflies land on you at once?” I asked her. “It is like being kissed by God. You can’t even imagine.”
I grabbed onto Carmen’s hand, but she pulled it away from me, curled it up into a fist.
“This isn’t a surprise,” she said. “This is fucked.”
- - - - - - - -
When we got inside the house, Carmen locked herself in the bathroom. She sat inside there for two hours. I sat in the basement and watched television until I heard her footsteps upstairs. I found her standing in front of the fridge, holding a picture of my father in her hand. The picture was from a fishing trip a couple of years ago. He was passed out in a hotel bed. Someone had stuck one of those Burger King crowns on his head and drawn a curly mustache on his face in black marker. I wondered if Carmen was going to say that he looked like me. The fact was we did look a lot alike; even with the mustache and the crown it was hard not to notice the resemblance.
“Whose place is this?” she asked.
“It’s a friend of mine,” I told her. “I help him out sometimes.”
I opened up the fridge. I took out a beer and popped it open. I took a pull and passed it to Carmen. She took a drink, grimaced as she swallowed. I opened another one and downed it and then popped open another one and then downed that one too. Then I went into the cabinet and found a candle and a pack of matches.
“Just c’mon,” I said. “I promise you’ll like it.”
I walked outside. Carmen followed a few steps behind. I grabbed the pad off a chaise lounge and dragged it behind me into the shed. For a while, coming in from the outside light, I couldn’t see anything. I felt the humid air on my face, heard the massive fluttering of wings above my head. I threw down the pad from the chaise lounge on the floor, lit the candle. In a minute or two, Carmen walked inside, looking sheepish.
“They fly to the ceiling when someone comes in,” I explained. “They come down once they get used to us.”
I held the candle up near Carmen’s face, to try to get an idea of her mood. She was staring up at the ceiling. She didn’t look angry any longer and so I moved behind her and started rubbing her shoulders. She spun toward me.
“Fine,” she said. “I’m game.”
She pulled my shirt over my head. She kicked off her shoes, then stepped out of her shorts. I unbuttoned her shirt.
We started to kiss, but I felt Carmen’s body tense up. She pulled away, began to cough.
“Hold on a second,” she said.
She put her hand to her throat and she coughed again. Then she gasped and I watched her eyes roll back in her head. She crumpled to the floor.
For a second, I thought Carmen was messing with me. I thought that she was pissed at me for bringing her here. I thought that this was her revenge, getting me excited and then pretending to pass out. When I got down on my knees and put my ears to her mouth, I realized she wasn’t joking. She wasn’t breathing.
I lifted her up and carried her outside. I took my hands and put them under her ribcage and pulled up. Nothing. She felt cold. Her skin looked grey. I did it again. Her apricot smelling hair was in my eyes and I brushed it away and then I pressed into her ribs again. The third time I did it something flew out of her throat and she began to cough.
I carried her over to the picnic table, set her down. She was shaking. I got a glass of water and a blanket from the house, pressed it around her. She was pointing to the grass. There was a plastic ring with a big red fake jewel there.
“That’s what it was,” she said.
We sat there, holding each other. I kept asking her if she was alright and she kept telling me that she was fine. She was rubbing her throat and I was trying to come down from the adrenaline rush that someone nearly dying always gives you.
“Look,” she said to me then, pointing at the sky. “Look at that.”
I looked up and saw that the sky was orange, the monarchs were spilling out of the shed.
“Whoa,” Carmen said. “Damn.”
I ran over to close the door, but by the time I got there I realized that there was no point in trying to stop what had already started in motion. I sat down in the grass. I watched the butterflies make their way south. I knew my father was done speaking to me regardless of what happened now. All I had left was Carmen.
I went and found the toy ring in the grass and I walked over to her. I knelt down in front of her. Before I could even get the words out of my mouth, before I could tell her how I felt, before I could explain that what had just happened was a sign that we should spend the rest of our lives together, Carmen took off running. This was not what I expected, but it was also exactly what I expected, exactly what she should have done.
“Wait!” I yelled. “Hold on!”
I watched her as she ran across the lawn. She was beautiful. The blanket that she held around her shoulders billowed out around her and made her look like she might float away.
EVERYONE PRANK CALLS THE CLOWN
Everyone prank calls the clown. He’s used to it. He’s driving home now, having just finished a birthday party for some rich kid with big teeth. The phone number that comes up on his cell says “Unknown.” For the most part, the calls the clown gets are from people he does not know. He never lets them roll to voicemail; he answers each and every one. You never know when it might be someone wanting to book him for a birthday party or a mitzvah. You never know when it will be the dognappers contacting him about Choco’s ransom.
This time it’s teenagers. Teenagers who’ve seen him driving around wearing his rainbow wig and written down the phone number that’s on the door of his clown car. This happens fairly often. Today when the clown answers his phone, there is giggling. The clown pictures a group of girls crowded around a single phone, their ears straining to hear a sliver of his voice.
“Hello?” he says.
“Hahahahahaha,” the girls giggle.
These calls do not bother the clown. He is still glad to bring moments of glee and excitement into people’s lives. He is still a clown for fucksake.
- - - - - - - -
There are other prank calls. Not kids. Late night calls that come while the clown sits on his lime green couch and drinks brandy from a cup that looks like a hollowed-out skull. The clown’s wrists, after twenty years of squeaking together balloon animals, feel like they are on fire. His jaw throbs from the millions of smiles he’s forced. There is no giggling in these prank calls that the clown gets, there is only an unnerving mechanical groan on the other end of the line. There is only the ripple of static and the occasional deep and fatigued sigh.
“Choco?” the clown yells into the phone whenever he gets one of these calls. “What have you done with Choco?”
The clown never fails to check the animal shelter. Every day for the last six months he has searched the stacked cages for his lost dog. Sometimes he stops by on his way to a birthday party. He’s in full makeup and when he crouches down for a closer look at the dogs they lurch out and bare their teeth at him.
“Anyone new?” he asks Jay, the volunteer who works at the front desk.
“A couple of big ones,” Jay tells him. “A lab mix and something with some retriever in him.”
The clown has put up signs around the neighborhood. He ran an ad in the local weekly until it got too expensive. One day Jay offered to help him pass out fliers
down by the beach. He and Jay did this for about an hour and then Jay asked him if he wanted to go get a margarita.
“It’s so hot out,” Jay said.
The clown was unimpressed.
“You want to quit just because it’s hot out?” the clown asked him.
- - - - - - - -
When the clown gets up this morning he stands at his bay window and stares out at his front yard. His lawn is gnarly and overgrown. It needs to be mowed, but the clown is too tired to deal with it. The city has cited him. His neighbors continue to complain. They yell at the clown whenever he walks to his car.
The clown tries not to respond to any of their taunts, but sometimes he cannot help himself. He yells back at them about how he is letting the grass grow on purpose, how there is a grand plan at work, how he’s returning his lawn to native grassland, to the way it was before any of them arrived here.
As the clown stands at the counter and sips his mint tea, the phone rings. He picks it up. This time it’s his ex-boyfriend, Reggie.
“Listen,” Reggie tells the clown. “I can’t help you pay for Grosvent. No matter how much I loved Choco, I just don’t have the money.”
Grosvent is the private eye that the clown hired last week. Grosvent specializes in missing pets. The clown hired him to go over the case one last time. He is the third pet detective that the clown has retained. The clown has a good feeling about him. Grosvent has a small picture of a Boston Terrier on his business card and he wears a fedora. The clown likes how sad Grosvent’s eyes look and how there seems to be some sort of menace behind that sadness.
“Then I guess I’m on the hook for the entire thing,” the clown tells Reggie.
The clown does not have the money for Grosvent either. He is a hard-working clown, but there is not enough now that Reggie has moved out.
“Do you really think that Choco is ever going to be found?” Reggie asks him. “Do you honestly still believe that?”
The clown eats stale pretzels from an open bag on the counter. The clown knows what Reggie thinks. Reggie thinks that a hawk or an eagle snatched Choco up. That might be the case, the clown supposes, but there are also dognappers roaming around the city looking for purebreds to send to puppy farms. Why are dognappers any less likely than a bird of prey? Why were his scenarios always so much less likely to Reggie?