The Killing of Butterfly Joe

by Rhidian Brook

  He put the beauty in my hands and started to sell it to me, adopting a slight Southern drawl.

  ‘Sir. For fifteen bucks you get something that reminds you that there is beauty in this world and that creation is calling out to us and saying, “Look! How amazing!” I mean: look at this! This creature before you started life as an ovum and then grew through the fixed order of insect metamorphoses – larva, pupa, imago – having come out of one male adult and one female adult, in a primordial act of creation, and then reproduced their own kind through time – and is now here, captured in this setting for your pleasure, for as long as you are alive to see it. It’s more than just a piece of scientific data, it’s a message from the Lord himself – a message that says, “Look how much I love you and see what I can do!” For fifteen bucks that’s not bad. What do you say?’

  This was pure Joe: a mangled three-way tug between the salesman, the scientist and the saint. I laughed. ‘You almost make me want to buy it.’

  ‘That’s my Bible Belt pitch. For atheists (and I’m guessing that’s you) I have a different spiel. If I’m in Virginia or Georgia, I pile on the creation stuff. If I’m selling on the east coast, we go for nature and environmental matters. In the Midwest they like some combination of guns, God and America is Great. If I’m in California, I talk about spirituality and a person’s “inner butterfly”. But the pitch that works for everyone is the story of how we came to sell butterflies. That works most places, with adjustment for prejudice. You have to use all your powers of observation and sympathy to try and understand what the potential purchaser thinks and wants. Like the butterfly itself, you have to adapt to the environment to survive. I think you’ll be a natural, Lew. Help me spread the word. What do you say?’

  ‘It’s an interesting offer.’

  ‘Interesting! It’s a lifetime’s opportunity! You can stay here reading books about people who don’t even exist, written by people who are dead, and try to write about things you ain’t experienced. Or you can get out there and live! You can’t serve what you ain’t cooking. You only wrote that poem because of me. Follow me and I’ll give you a whole book to write.’

  Joe had the knack (handy in the salesman) of making you feel your life could be so much more interesting if you dropped everything and followed him; he took delight in making your existing plans and alternative prospects seem bleak whilst identifying your deeper desires and suggesting he could meet them. His methods weren’t subtle, he always ran the risk of insulting or crushing you whilst flattering and bigging you up; but he had my number before I had his. He’d diagnosed my malaise and his medicine sounded sweet.

  ‘Here.’

  He reached inside his suit jacket pocket and produced a little box of business cards. The box was still sealed but had a sample card taped to the outside. He pulled the sample card off and gave it to me.

  Joseph Bosco

  President

  Butterfly World.

  ‘Lovingly hand-crafted gift items’

  Cellphone 201 345711

  There was no address.

  ‘Where are you based?’

  He nodded towards the mountains. ‘Over the hills, not far away. We operate from home. It’s a family business: “Lovingly hand-crafted gift items”.’

  I ran a thumb over the script to see if it was embossed, but it was smooth.

  ‘Think about it. Just don’t take twenty years getting back to me, like the guy in that story!’

  ‘You do read then.’

  ‘Sure I do. And if that story had a message for you I’d say it was: “Wake up, Rip! Before the best years of your life pass you by.” Hey. Maybe that’s what I should call you. Rip.’

  He threw his suit jacket on the back seat of the Chuick, a seat still covered in the detritus of recent journeys. He got in and started up the car. The raspberry purr-growl of its V8 was a sound full of prospect and road-yearning, pulling me with it.

  He drove off at speed and honked his horn. I stood there and watched him until the car vanished up round and into the side of the hemlock hills. I felt the sadness of the person left behind, the envy of the person not going anywhere. As I walked back to the barn, I almost shuddered at the thought of carrying on the way I had been and not ever getting out on The Road.

  I picked up the case with the yellow swallowtail. The base of the case had the little gold sticker with its Latin name – Papilio glaucus – but beneath this there was a hand-scratched message:

  ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.’

  Joe Bosco. How I underestimated you. I thought you weren’t listening but you’d heard everything, seen everything, clocked everything. You had given the impression you were an impatient, boorish fool, and then you went and showed a delicacy and a thoughtfulness that won me back.

  I can’t overestimate how easy it was to underestimate him. You think you have him pinned down, identified, named and categorized, then he changed colour, or sprouted a fifth wing, or turned out to have different underside markings to the ones he really should have. It would have been easy to write him off, with his grating voice, his dime-store blagging, hyperbolic hawking, his invasion of personal space, his anti-intellectualism, his spiritual certainties, his exploitation of nature for commercial gain, his assumptions and presumptions. Most people I know would have had nothing to do with this guy and given how things have turned out, maybe I shouldn’t have either. I should have thrown his cheap, un-embossed business card in the bin, stuck to my routine, finished the barn, read some more books, smoked my weed and set out to see America on my own and in the usual way. But it was too late: The Cat had set me spinning in his Kingdom of Spinning Plates.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In which I am re-baptized and re-located.

  I was re-named Rip Van Jones in a panoramic lay-by overlooking the Hudson River plateau upon which great American families – the Roosevelts, the Vanderbilts and Van Cortlands – had built their prodigious homes. The ceremony was conducted by Joe and witnessed by Elijah, a sixteen-year-old black kid Joe had found trying to steal his car in Albany and who now worked as a butterfly-case maker for ‘Butterfly World’. As Joe finger-splashed me with Coca-Cola he delivered his own mashed-up baptismal rites: ‘In the name of the Road that leads to sales and glory, I baptize you Rip Van Jones, butterfly salesman. We here gathered commit to pray for your soul for as long as it needs prayerfulness and see to it that you deliver as much product to the people of this great nation – although let’s never forget that its greatness doesn’t necessarily lie in what the American people think makes it great – and that you do this work to the best of your ability under His Grace. Can I get a witness?’ Joe looked around. Elijah was eating a bag of Lay’s potato chips and staring at his feet. ‘Can I get a witness?’ Elijah mumbled a ‘yay’ and Joe brought proceedings to a close with a souped-up preacher’s ‘A-men!’ He then produced a little box of business cards and handed them to me.

  ‘I got these made up in Lexington, on the way to Mississippi.’

  Again, the sample card was taped to the outside of the box.

  Rip Van Jones

  Head of Sales & Marketing

  Butterfly World.

  Cell no 214 3213421

  ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’

  The script was embossed. As I ran my finger over it Joe giggled with pleasure. ‘I saw you turning up your nose up at my card. So I got these and some new ones for myself. You see, Rip! These are the kind of improvements your sophisticated ways are going to bring to us. See I changed the motto.’

  ‘You got them made before I said yes?’

  ‘Oh, I knew you’d say yes.’

  When it comes to making important decisions, my grandfather said you should sleep on it, and then sleep on sleeping on it. Just to be sure-sure. Before calling Joe to accept his offer I gave it the overnight-overnight test, to allow time for a change of heart or fate to intervene; but I knew what my decision would be. I knew it when he’d driven off, leaving me with a chasmic f
eeling of missed opportunity; I knew it when I saw the Keats quoted back at me so unexpectedly from the base of the butterfly case. And I felt it in my animal desire to see his book-stealing sister again. In the two days before I made the call, I did what I sometimes do when anxiously wanting confirmation of a decision already made: I looked for omens in everyday phenomena. I said: ‘If the numbers of his phone add up to a significant number I will do it; and, lo and behold, they added up to twenty-three, my age at that point. I said: ‘If I see something very unusual, something I do not expect to see, I will accept’; and, would you believe it, at breakfast the next morning a black bear walked across the lawn right before my eyes (in the twenty years since she’d had the house my aunt had never seen a bear in the Catskills let alone her garden). I even granted fate a last-minute intervention. As I dialled Joe’s cellphone number, I told myself that if his phone rang three times before he answered it was meant to be. He answered on the fourth ring:

  ‘Butterfly World. This is Joe Bosco!’

  A country and western ballad was playing loudly on the car radio: ‘gonna make my man see, gonna take him home, see’.

  ‘Joe? It’s Llew Jones.’

  ‘Rip! It’s you! So – you decided to come work for me!’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You think so? Or you know so?’

  The music remained at yell-forcing volume. ‘I’d love to work for you! If you still want me!’

  ‘Of course we want you! Hey, Mary, turn it down will ya? This is great! This is great! You are not going to regret this decision, Rip. We will take this country by storm. States will fall. Right now I’m in the Magnolia State. Know which one that is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mississippi! We’re heading north to the Volunteer State. Then it’s the Bluegrass State. Then we drive through Almost Heaven State up to the Keystone State and back to the Empire State! I’ll come by and pick you up in a couple of days.’ In a few state-swallowing sentences, Joe shrank the nation to Sunday-afternoon-drive size.

  ‘You got a suit?’

  ‘I have a smart shirt and a jacket.’

  ‘That’s OK but we gotta get you a suit. Get you in front of some honchos. I been using your “thing of beauty” line on people all week. Like today, when I was selling, I said it to the store owner and she went all quiet. I thought, hell I’ve blown it. Then she just said: “Mr Bosco, that is the most beautiful thing I have ever heard.” She took a box of twelve mixed cases right there! You see, Rip! Your words are doing business for me already.’

  ‘I’m glad. Although they’re not my words.’

  ‘Take the credit here! No one’s gonna know! Oh. Mary says hullo by the way. And she says sorry for stealing the book. Right, Mary?’

  I could hear Mary saying no such thing. But I could picture her: denim dungarees, bare feet up on the dashboard, painting her toenails black, and I confess the prospect of seeing her again was a draw more powerful than America itself.

  ‘So. I’ll be there to pick you up late Friday afternoon. Take you to meet the family. They’ll all be lovin’ on you! I’ll show you the ropes. We’ll stock up and be out on the road before you can say Kalamazoo. Ever seen the great monarch migration?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ll see it. One of the greatest wonders in nature.’

  ‘I just have to tell my aunt what I’m doing. But that should be fine.’

  ‘Tell her you’ll be working for one of this nation’s most entrepreneurialistic persons and helping to bring joy and beauty into people’s lives.’

  ‘What about my things? Do I bring everything?’

  ‘This is a family business, Rip, and you’re going to be part of the family. Bring it all.’

  ‘But you . . . have room?’

  This made him really laugh. ‘Aww! He’s asking if we have room, Mary. You hear that? Tell him. Tell him how many rooms we got.’

  ‘Tell him yourself.’

  ‘There are many rooms in my mansion, Rip. You’ll see.’

  He broke into song, the way he did when he was excited, mimicking the tune still playing on the radio and adapting the lyrics to the moment: ‘I’m gonna make my man, see; I’m gonna take him home, see; see the folks he’s gonna see, how many rooms he will see! Rip is gonna work for me! Dee dee dee dee dee, dee; dee dee dee dee dee, dee!’

  I still had Joe pinned for poor-white-trash-done-good at this point. I had pictured him living in a tumbledown shack with jalopies on concrete blocks in the yard, wire-mesh fencing running the perimeter, and siblings sleeping three to a bed. I had not and could not imagine him living in a mansion. Butterfly salesmen didn’t live in mansions.

  My aunt seemed genuinely pleased when I told her about the job. I admit I made it sound more kosher, more formal, than it was, partly because I didn’t want her to think I was getting involved in something weird, or working for a cowboy outfit; but also because I didn’t want to disappoint her or seem ungrateful in any way. She had been kind to me. I said I’d met the CEO of a national company that specialized in making ‘a range of gift items’ and that they were looking for someone to help them take their business ‘to a new level’. I seasoned the whole dish with phrases like ‘sales and marketing’, ‘promotional literature’, and threw in the likely J. C. Penney deal for good measure. I summarized it all as being, at the very least, a way of seeing America and getting paid for it. I didn’t describe Joe or mention butterflies, but nothing I told her was untrue.

  And so, five days later I sat on the veranda waiting for Joe, packed and ready to go. The sky was overcast and I could feel the electricity of a gathering storm. Clouds were forming, bulging full of threat. I realize that I might be seeing everything through omen-tinted spectacles now, but these clouds were shaping up to be just like clouds you’d want to convey a message that change was coming. Change, and maybe trouble. Cumulo portentous. The first drops started to hit the road and that lovely smell of rain on hot tarmac filled the air. The downpour was torrential but quick, unlike the rain where I come from which is timid and persistent; this rain passed so fast that by the time Joe arrived the sun was out and the road shining from the storm’s aftermath. He turned up in a brand-new midnight-blue Cadillac Seville with Elijah sitting in the passenger seat. Joe beamed proudly as he came up to the veranda to greet me. The mullet was gone. As were his terrible clothes. His hair had been cut conventionally and gelled back and he was wearing a new dark suit, a white cotton shirt, sober, silk polka-dot tie and black Oxford shoes. He looked like a Mormon coming to convert me: a comparison he would utterly reject on the grounds that he believed Mormonism was based on a bogus revelation and was as perfect an example of Bad Theology as one could find in this world. He opened the flap of his suit jacket to show me the lining.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Very smart.’

  ‘The President of Butterfly World needs to look the part. You like the tie? It’s the same colour as a malachite. You like the Caddy?’

  ‘Yes. You . . . just bought it?’

  ‘No! It’s a rental. When you pull into the lot of a bank you got to look like an executive with national ambitions. We get the big deal done we’ll buy our own Caddies. Think of it as an incentive.’

  It looked a little stubby for a Cadillac and lacked the trailer-trash-charm of the Chuick, but it was new and expensive and suggested success, which was the point. I could feel questions forming in my mind but in the whoosh of those first days obvious questions rarely got from my head to my tongue because there was always a fresh distraction to delight in, some new surprise to absorb.

  Like the fact that a young black kid was sitting in Joe’s car.

  Joe waved at the kid, who was listening to a Walkman, moving his head to another beat. ‘Hey! Elijah! Elijah! Come say hi!’ Elijah pulled off his headset and got out of the car. As he loped towards me, he scratched his hands and avoided eye contact.

  ‘Say hi then!’ Joe said to him, with sudden exasperation.

  ‘
Hi.’

  I said ‘hi’ back and shook Elijah’s hand, which was dry and calloused and covered in little prickly rashes.

  ‘Say something then!’ Joe coaxed the kid.

  ‘Do you have cars in England?’ Elijah asked.

  ‘Yes. We do.’

  ‘Do you have Cadillacs?’

  ‘Well. There might be some but we don’t make them.’

  ‘Do you have Fords?’

  ‘Yes. We have Fords. Smaller than yours. Everything is smaller than yours.’

  ‘Oh.’

  This seemed to satisfy him.

  ‘Elijah used to be called Leroy, which is no help in this country, and in Albany a sure-fire passport to the state pen. I gave him a name to make folks sit up and give him some respect. Now he’s Production Manager for Butterfly World and is the fastest case-maker we ever had. He makes them quicker than my sister Isabelle. Isn’t that so, Eli?’

  Elijah gave a modest nod.

  ‘Rip here is going to be bringing you in so many orders you won’t be able to keep up.’

  Joe’s philanthropy was admirable but I was a little irritated to hear this. It undermined my newfound sense of self-importance, as well as my hope that Butterfly World was a company going places. If a gauche teenage kid could be a Production Manager for Joe’s company then my speedy rise to Head of Sales and Marketing was not such an achievement. Joe’s hyperbole notwithstanding, I wanted to believe his rhetoric about me being ‘the right man at the right time’; I wanted to be chosen on merit not randomly rescued.

  These cusp-of-journey fears were soon forgotten in the pure thrill of setting off in a car named after a French explorer and an Andalusian city, with a man built like a Titan and a boy named after a prophet who was carried off to heaven in a golden chariot. I looked back at my aunt’s house and the freshly painted barn for the last time. I was saying farewell to introspection, sedentary contemplation and going nowhere; hello to sensual experience, the great outdoors and the pull of The Road. I was saying goodbye to Llewellyn Jones too, for within the hour I would have a new name, a name charged with American myth, and I was full of hope for things I could not see.