The Killing of Butterfly Joe

by Rhidian Brook

  ‘Sometimes I wished they weren’t.’

  ‘Are you done with your poem yet?’

  ‘I have a verse. But it . . . let me keep going here.’

  ‘You have a girl in England?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘You been with many girls?’

  I’d ‘been’ with two. ‘Five.’

  She turned on her side and reached out to pull an imaginary piece of stray cotton from my shirt.

  ‘You prefer Isabelle to me?’

  ‘I hardly know either of you.’

  ‘You don’t have to know someone to know if they’re the person you wanna be with. The knowing comes later, don’t it?’

  I was enjoying this moment, listening to her girly, stoner platitudes and watching her perform (to my eye) flawless arabesques and pirouettes; I didn’t want to think about Isabelle. Isabelle appealed to what my mother would call my ‘higher nature’ and acted as a cold shower on my intentions.

  ‘I saw the way you talked. But she won’t let you in. She is saving herself. And unless you believe that Jesus Christ is Lord you can’t have her. So I guess that leaves me.’

  Mary was wearing shorts and a T-shirt that exposed her everted navel. The downy hairs of her belly were standing up, the breeze goose-bumping her skin that was as flat as a dining-room table. How I wanted to eat off that table. She had one leg up, like a sail, one leg straight, tilted out, and her legs were touchingly unshaven. I could smell skunk smoke, shampoo and naphthalene. And her. She passed the joint to me. I made another long, last-requester’s draw.

  ‘She don’t believe in sex before marriage. But I say sex is for when you want it.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘Would you like to fuck me?’

  ‘Yes.’ (I couldn’t think of another answer quick enough.)

  ‘I’ll let you fuck me on one condition.’

  It felt low asking, but I had to know. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You don’t try to go with Isabelle. Not ever.’

  Sometimes it takes a prohibition to alert us to what we really want. I wanted Mary-Anne with all my body, but even then to retain a little bit of my soul for Isabelle.

  ‘Vow it.’

  ‘Vow it?’

  ‘Vow you won’t try and sleep with her.’

  ‘I . . . this is silly.’

  ‘Vow it!’

  ‘OK. I vow.’

  ‘You vow what? Say it!’

  ‘I won’t try and sleep with Isabelle.’

  ‘On your life.’

  ‘On my life!’

  With the terms and conditions of our future union secured for now, we finished the spliff in silence.

  ‘We can’t do it under my mother’s roof. We’ll get our chance on the road.’

  What an offer, what a promise. Come, Road, sex me here! We’d drive through the land like some sexed-up Bonnie and Clyde, making sales and love.

  ‘So how many boys have you been with?’

  ‘That ain’t for a lady to say.’

  ‘Really? Why not? I told you how many girls I’ve been with.’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘Why different?’

  ‘’Cos.’

  ‘Come on. One? Three? Ten!’

  ‘I’m no hussy!’

  ‘None then?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ she lashed out, with her bare foot. The way she reacted you’d thing being a virgin was worse than being a hussy.

  ‘OK. It’s not a judgement. Either way. It doesn’t matter.’

  But it mattered to Mary. More than I then understood. She shifted her weight and sat up, her hair hanging down evenly each side of her face, a lovely curtain leaving half eyes, nose and lips visible.

  ‘You ever had a naphth-hi?’ she asked. ‘You mix mothballs with varnish and tobacco you can get a really good high and it gives you crazy dreams. Naphthalene dreams are the best. You ain’t lived until you had a naphth-hi. When I’m high on naphth I can tell you things . . . about the future. About your future.’

  The concoction sounded awful but I didn’t want to displease her in any way or look feeble. She told me to keep going with my poem and left to fetch the necessaries. I sat there with my undiminished erection, painful against my thigh. I got up and tried to walk it off. Visions of me and Mary in some motel sating our desire didn’t help, so I thought of Isabelle sitting in her bed reading some Russian novel perched at the side of her single, spinsterly metal cot. After five minutes Mary returned with the equipment. She had a glass bulb jar for a bong, some mothballs in a cellophane bag and nail varnish. She knelt on the floor and set to constructing her materials with the dexterity of a pro. She coated each ball in varnish and dropped them into the jar. She lit them with a piece of paper and started cooking up the vapours. The fumes came off pinky-yellow, the bubble-gum smell of the varnish veiling the repellent naphthalene odour. She then pulled her hair back with one hand and leant over, holding the jar with the other, guiding the funnel to her mouth, which covered the lip. She then passed the bong to me and I inhaled the vapours. It was like breathing in the essence of old wardrobes and my grandmother’s dressing table. At first there was no discernible hit.

  ‘You don’t mind my belly button?’

  ‘It’s cute. You don’t see many outties.’

  ‘I hate it.’ She fingered her protruding navel, circling it with her index finger then pressing it in and holding it there. ‘I used to press it in with my finger and hold it in to make it stay. Ma says it’s ’cos I was born in an unnatural hurry and they didn’t cut it right. They were more concerned with her, what with her burns.’ She lifted her finger away and the button pinged back all erect again. It looked like a colourless nipple and I wanted to suck it. ‘Most people have innies. I bet you got an innie.’

  She stretched out her foot and lifted my shirt with her toes to reveal the hairs orbiting my own inverted belly button. She then dropped her foot down and almost-caressed the fly of my jeans. I wanted to ask her more questions about the fire, and about her father, but I was unable to hold any intention for more than the moment of thinking it.

  ‘I like that I can change your body without even touching. Like I did at the falls. When you went to make that dive.’

  I needed to gain some control.

  ‘Why did you take my book that day?’

  She flicked her hair and looked annoyed. ‘I didn’t take your book.’

  ‘Joe said you took it.’

  ‘Is that what he told you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She tissed, but her indignation was convincing enough. ‘That fucker. He took your book, not me.’

  ‘But . . . he doesn’t like books.’

  ‘Joe? He’s read more books that anyone I know. Even Isabelle. I’m going to get him for that. He really tell you that?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. He brought the book back. It’s just odd he blamed it on you. Why wouldn’t he just say he took it – I wouldn’t have minded.’

  ‘Don’t be a dumb-ass. It’s obvious why.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? Because my brother is a lying sonofabitch, that’s why.’

  I didn’t have Joe down for a liar; a bullshitter, an exaggerator, a spinner, a huckster – but not a liar. The disconcerting thought that I had got Joe all wrong coincided with my first hit from the bong. My breathing became noticeable to me and I thought I could see my pulse – on my wrist. Mary took on that shamanic, earthy quality she’d had when I’d first seen her at the falls.

  ‘I feel a bit weird,’ I said.

  ‘You look weird.’

  ‘No, you look weird.’

  ‘No, you look weird.’

  Something was happening to Mary. The narcotic showed me something I was unable to see in my sober state. It was as though I could see beyond her outward allure right into ‘the heart of her’; there I saw a heart of fire, consumed by passions and rejections and envy and crass manipulations.

  ‘I can see your future,’ she said.
r />   ‘I don’t want to know it,’ I said.

  ‘I can see your future,’ she repeated, not hearing me for some reason. ‘You know what I see?’ The smoke came out of her mouth and her words seemed made of smoke. The smoke mingled with the words like magical punctuation. She was talking to me in smoke signals, she had gone back to some root ancestral skill. ‘You are going to go far. But there will be trouble. I see smoke. And fire.’

  ‘Don’t tell me that,’ I said. ‘I have a right not to be told.’

  She frightened me. Her voice was slowing, like a voice on a 45rpm record clicked to 33, and her smoky soprano was getting deeper and deeper. ‘Don’t speak like that,’ I said. ‘Speak normally.’ She smiled at me and chewed on her hair that was falling over her mouth. ‘Don’t eat yourself,’ I said. ‘What’s wrong with your face?’

  She stood up then I went to talk to a man on the other side of the room.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked him.

  The man was my father. He told her to have nothing to do with me. That I was a waster. A freeloader. A disappointment.

  ‘It’s not true,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not true,’ Mary agreed. ‘Rip is going to go far.’

  ‘That’s not his real name,’ my father said.

  ‘I can feel I’m changing,’ she said. ‘Can you feel it yet? Are you changing?’

  ‘No. I like you the way you are.’

  She turned away from me and slowly lifted off her top. Her back was nut-brown and flawless, but where her shoulder blades were there were wings. Not feathered, but gossamered butterfly wings. And then she turned round and revealed the rest of her metamorphoses: her nose a proboscis, her mouth a labial pulp, her ears antennae. She stared at me with her two great compound eyes and asked: ‘Ever fuck a butterfly?’

  CHAPTER SIX

  In which I wake to an empty house and a nasty surprise.

  Blue paper butterflies were turning in the heat. I could smell mothballs and wood smoke. I was hellish thirsty. My tongue was furry and fat, my mouth dry and the taste in my craw was vile. I felt the dislocation of waking in a strange new bed. Then, with a hazy dawning, I remembered: I was sleeping in the bedroom of an adopted girl called Celeste, who was part of a family that included two sisters, one of whom I admired the other whom I desired. The one I desired had come to my room in the evening and we’d got high; she’d told me she could tell the future and that I was heading for trouble. Then she’d . . . turned into a butterfly!

  I sat up, slapped my face and shook my jowls. The cause of my muddle (and Mary’s metamorphosis) lay on the floor, its sides stained with the vapours we’d inhaled. Burned, varnished mothballs sat in its base like the evil eggs of some mythical creature. I went and took a shower to wash off the coagulations of the night. The water came out brown just as Isabelle warned me it would. After my shower, I stood in front of the mirror, cleaning my teeth, making the pose I make when thinking myself handsome: a slight tilt of everything – head, mouth, eyebrows – and my mouth pouted askance. I remembered my new name and I practised saying it, like an actor doing exercises before taking the stage. ‘Hello. My name is Rip Van Jones. Rip. Van. Jones. Van Jones. Ripvanjones. I have something that I think you will like.’ I felt good about the new, improved iteration of myself looking back from the steamed-up mirror. Llew had always had a credibility gap between his ambitions and his ability to realize them; he had always been afflicted by idle indecision and procrastination. Rip had the appearance of someone who was not only going places but going to arrive. Having established who I was, I got dressed and went in search of souls and sustenance.

  On the landing I paused outside a bedroom strewn with girl’s clothes. A duvet had been scrunched into a ball at one end of the bed. A poster with swirl paisley print saying If it feels good do it was stuck on the wall above the bed-head. There was a chest of drawers with the top two drawers out and tilting, the clothes over-spilling; a dressing table draped in jewellery and tat; and a wall festooned with idols cut out of magazines. It had to be Mary’s room. The next bedroom was organized and had little adornment. There was a chaste and made single bed, a bureau with books and a shelf full of copies of the Entomologist’s Review and Butterfly Monthly; two Tolstoys and a Dostoevsky on the bedside table. In the corner of the room there were collecting boxes, killing jars and nets, including what looked like an antique net, a strip of muslin held between two poles. Isabelle’s room? The room at the end of the landing had a mattress on the floor, no bed. Not even a pillow. The only furniture was a chair draped with a blue and white striped cheesecloth jacket. A large open suitcase full of clothes jumbled pell-mell lay in the corner of the room. By the side of the mattress there was a well-thumbed little red Gideon’s Bible, like the ones you find in the drawers of motels. Indeed, the room looked like it was being used by someone who never stayed in one place for long and had left in a hurry. Joe.

  In the kitchen I found the remains of a breakfast eaten a few hours before: an unfinished bowl of Golden Grahams, the milk honey-yellow and grainy; a pot of coffee and a half-eaten waffle drenched in maple syrup. I ate the waffle feeling as guilty as Goldilocks, poured myself a mug of cold coffee and set off to continue looking for the bears.

  The factory was empty, the production line paused with a row of topless glass cases waiting for their butterflies to be mounted and lids to be sealed. There was no one in the Operations Room either although the map of America – the America that Joe wanted to conquer and that I wanted to see – had an unfinished mug of coffee sitting on Massachusetts and loose pins lying on their sides as though someone had been plotting a route west. The door to the library that housed the collection was open. Instead of finding books and bookcases I found myself in a canyon of seven-foot-tall, twenty-drawer mahogany chests. I opened one of the drawers and it slid out smoothly and silently on felt lining. It contained a case of spotted green butterflies, with creamy forewings and spiralling red hindwings. The introduction of such colour into the dark space was a pleasant shock, like finding a drawer full of jewellery (indeed, I would soon discover that some of these specimens were as valuable as gemstones). I left the drawer open and opened another. A card – written in spidery cursive – indicated the name of the species. Blue-yellow Nessaea batesii. There was a system here that was at odds with the rest of the family’s chaotic poetry. A more ordered hand and mind than Joe’s was behind this. I opened another drawer containing Asterope sapphire. Another. Much larger and more dazzling, primal butterflies with huge yellow abdomens, green and blue wings. As the brilliant ghosts of dead butterflies lit up the room, their colours pushing against the glass, I had this feeling they wanted someone – me! – to set them free! Then the drawers began to creak. It was such a creepy phenomenon and the timing so uncanny (Isabelle would explain the cause later as heat expanding the wood) that I closed the drawers and backed out of the room, talking to myself out loud, splitting myself in two for company:

  ‘Maybe everyone’s outside.’

  ‘Why don’t you have a look then?’

  ‘Yes. Good idea. I’ll go and have a look.’

  ‘Yes. Do that.’

  The interior of the house was so dark it was a shock to discover that outside it was a fine day. Joe’s Cadillac was gone, as was the flat-bed Ford that had been parked by the outhouses next to the Chuick. I decided to walk up the track to see if the family were at the lake that Mary had mentioned, but when it came into view I saw that its waters were as flat as a mirror, teak-dark and naiad-free. I thought about calling out ‘Is anyone there?’ but fear at having nothing but my own voice echo back prevented me. It’s a risky thing asking an empty landscape if anyone is there.

  I started to walk back to the house when I saw the dogs – Nancy and Ronnie – sniffing around, unchained! I kept walking, praying they would not see me; but dogs always see you when you don’t want them to. In the same second I broke into a sprint I caught the black blur of the chasing dogs in the corner of my eye. I wasn’t going to make i
t to the house before they got to me so I swerved towards the Chuick and reached it with Nancy (the Dobermann) just a few bounds behind. The door was locked and as I tugged the handle, she launched herself at my leg. I lashed out with my other leg and caught her hard in the eye. Seconds later Ronnie (the Rottweiler) arrived and sank his teeth into my buttock. I did a peculiar squat thrust, holding the door handle and lifting both feet off the ground, and then double-kicked my feet into Ronnie’s haunches, forcing him back. I rolled forward onto the boot and scrambled to the roof. Nancy (the smarter of the two) ran around to the front of the car and took a running leap onto it. She managed to get all four paws onto the bonnet but couldn’t grip it properly and went scrabbling off the side, whining in frustration. I stood up on the car’s buckling roof. Those hounds were relentless! They must have tried thirty, forty times, their claws making an awful mess of the car’s paintwork. But they couldn’t get to me and once I realized this I started taunting them: ‘Come on! Crazy dogs! Ha! Ha! Ha! You can’t get me! Ha! Ha! Rar! Raaaar! Raaaaaaaar! I’m the King of the Castle! You’re the dirty rascals!’ Ronnie stood on his hindquarters, his front paws on the side window, his peeled-back fangs inches from my feet, mouth snapping, drool spattering. I remember thinking how embarrassing this would have looked had any of the Boscos seen me! Then, without apparent reason, the dogs stopped, turned and slunk off towards the outhouses. I was so relieved and deranged by adrenalin I taunted them. ‘Awww. Come on . . . doggies! You scared of me now?’ But they continued to trot towards the outhouses where I could see a man, speaking calmly but firmly to them, pointing them towards a metal spike and a chain to which he then tied them. Once he had secured the dogs the man came towards me – the loon on the roof – with a look of amused puzzlement.