The Killing of Butterfly Joe

by Rhidian Brook

  ‘It ain’t that it’s bad luck. It’s that I just don’t have a mind for it.’

  ‘OK. But let’s just imagine. You can have one thing. Starting to my right. Ceelee. What would you like?’

  ‘Frillies.’

  ‘Frillies? Is that a butterfly?’

  ‘Frillies are dresses,’ Isabelle translated for me. ‘Where from, Ceelee. Bloomingdale’s?

  ‘Yeah. Yellow.’

  ‘OK. A yellow dress for Celeste from Bloomingdale’s. Edith?’

  ‘Between the IRS and Joe’s goddamned phone bills I can’t say there’ll be a whole lot left to spend on frillies.’

  ‘How about a nice dress, Ma?’

  ‘A dress won’t hide what is so obviously so,’ she said. She paused, uncomfortable with this speculative sport. She was so used to a making-ends-meet, backs-to-the-wall defensive approach to life, she never allowed herself thoughts of frillies. Edith’s indulgences were emotional not material: her dramatic reaction to things, her exuberance with an expletive, her controlling of the family story. But I pressed her, and the others, getting brave with the wine, did the same. ‘Come on, Ma! Treat yourself.’

  ‘Well, OK. A vacation would be nice. I ain’t had a vacation since a long time. Not since before Joe was born.’

  ‘You can’t be serious. Not even a few days?’

  Edith thought about it. ‘Well, I have had some weekends. When we lived in Michigan we’d drive to Superior. My sister had a cabin there.’

  ‘But weekends are weekends,’ I said. ‘I mean holidays.’

  ‘Nope. Before the kids. Mexico. Canada. But that don’t count.’

  ‘OK. So where would you go? One place,’ I persisted.

  ‘The Taj Mahal. I’d like to see that.’

  This wasn’t randomly plucked just to fob me off; she’d thought about it, you could see in her expression and hear it in her voice.

  ‘OK. Good choice. Edith gets to go to see the Taj Mahal. What about you, Iz?’

  Isabelle had said nothing to me about the deal since we’d returned. Other than asking who Roth was and whether he’d made his money in an ethical way. And then walking out when Joe and I had tried to describe the encounter with Roth.

  ‘Maybe Yale is possible now?’ I said.

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’ll be good to have a little more financial stability.’

  That was the straight truth, but she wasn’t playing my game.

  ‘OK. Stability for Isabelle.’

  ‘Clay?’

  ‘Oh no, not me.’

  ‘You got to play, Clay. Everyone must.’

  ‘I want for nothing, Mr Rip. I got everything I need. The Lord’s given me . . .’

  ‘Play the game, Clay!’

  ‘Well. I love my Ford but if I could get me one of those Japanese pick-ups. An Isuzu. If that’s too much then a season ticket for the Jets.’

  ‘OK. The Isuzu pickup for Clay. And a season ticket for the Jets.’

  Eli was next. Despite my half a dozen ‘English’ lessons, his monosyllabia had not improved in my time at the house, nor had his capacity for abstract thinking.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘But if you could have one thing, Eli.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Imagine it, Eli,’ Isabelle coaxed.

  ‘Eli’s like me,’ Edith said. ‘No mind for speculating.’

  ‘OK. We’ll come back to you.’

  I was next in the sequence. I asked for a year to write my book. And a room with a view to write it in. By the time I came to Mary she was on her third glass of wine.

  ‘Mary?’

  She swirled the goblet, mimicking her mother’s twirling.

  ‘I think I’d like to buy me a blood test.’

  Elijah laughed for some reason. It sounded funny. Unless you were me. Or Edith.

  ‘One of them blood tests for telling if I got the same father as you all.’

  Someone snapped a lobster claw. We all braced ourselves for the storm. I couldn’t look at Edith. I couldn’t have her thinking I was at the root of this. But my casually tossed seeds of subversion were about to erupt like field mustard.

  ‘Why would you want that, Mary-Anne Bosco?’ Edith asked in a soft, controlled voice, saying Mary’s full name to remind her who she was, and then turning to me and saying, ‘Mary-Anne gets these crazy notions in her head.’

  ‘A crazy notion you put in my head!’ Mary came back.

  Edith smiled. It was a cold, lizard smile; rather than look at Mary throughout this she kept her eye on me.

  ‘I don’t think Rip wants to hear about your wild fantasies.’

  Mary turned to me. I was holding the pink gristle of the lobster, using the shell as a shield.

  ‘What do you think, Rip?’

  ‘Stop now, Mary-Anne, come on,’ Joe said.

  ‘Let her talk,’ Edith said.

  ‘Rip? You said yourself Iz and me are sun and moon. Chalk and cheese.’

  I looked at Isabelle – sun and cheese in this dichotomy – and she was watching me too, almost as if this outburst were my fault.

  ‘You look the same and different. Like any sisters.’

  ‘That’s because we are different. ’Cos my Ma fucked another man. When she was lonely. When Joe and Isabelle’s father was away all the time. That’s why!’

  ‘Mary. Don’t do this.’ Isabelle widened her eyes at her sister, in a plea to be reasonable.

  ‘Yes, honey,’ Edith said, her voice getting quieter. ‘You are different. But everyone here is different.’

  Rather than fight fire with fire, Edith was more like a sandbank or a moat, absorbing the heat, drawing it.

  ‘You treat me different ’cos I am different. Even if you hadn’t told me. I would still think it. I always been thinking it.’

  Mary looked at me for backup but my coward heart – and the new information about her relationship – kept me mute. She had entered this brave new world of ‘stand up to your mother’ a little too prematurely for my liking. From a thousand miles away the idea of taking on Edith seemed a lot easier.

  ‘That’s the prollem with this. What I want can’t be paid for, not even with a million dollars. A little truth is all I want.’

  ‘Honey. You know you have a problem telling truth and lies apart.’

  Edith continued in this faux-sweet way and her words, so clearly not matching her thoughts, sounded like those terms of endearment maintained between a couple even when they wanted to kill each other. She was either unfazed because she had nothing on her conscience or because she was, like her youngest daughter, one of the finest actresses this side of the Rockies. Trying to discern the fakers from the real in this family had become a subtler challenge than I’d first thought.

  ‘I think that’s enough now, honey. We all got a little excited. Maybe it’s time you stopped with the weed. Don’t mix well with the liquor neither.’

  Mary looked at me. Tearful now. Eyes bugged and watered. ‘You think I’m telling the truth. Or her?’

  I don’t know what would have hurt Mary more: her family closing ranks or my last-minute treachery.

  ‘Ain’t got an opinion now you got what you wanted?’

  I feel wretched recalling this scene because, if I am being honest (and I am trying to be honest), I believed that Mary was telling the truth about this particular thing. Edith’s manner alone told me there was something in her younger daughter’s claim. But I had to make a difficult decision and make it quick: back Mary, face expulsion from the house and the end of my adventuring just when I had achieved something significant and was about to make some real money; or back Edith, face the wrath of Mary and keep this adventure on the road. I was not prepared to give the latter up even though, in my heart of hearts – that bit inside us that doesn’t need to reason with itself but knows – I believed she was telling the truth.

  ‘I think you’ve had a little too much wine,’ I said.

  There wasn’t much time between the
word ‘wine’ leaving my mouth and the actual wine hitting my face. And although it was an unpleasant shock her action was helpful to my cause: it got me off the hook and won me sympathy. If she’d kept her calm, she might have exposed me for the cad I was; but her violence towards me had everyone on my side.

  ‘Goddamn crazy woman!’ Joe said.

  ‘It’s OK. I’m fine,’ I said, sounding sensible and magnanimous.

  ‘Cowards. You are all cowards! I’m not putting up with this chicken-shit family anymore. I’m done with youz!’

  Mary slammed her plate on the table with a crash. She stood up, wiping her lobster juice and butter on her arm. (She looked great again, damn it!) She was angry with Edith of course, but her last words were for me.

  ‘You can fuck her now.’

  We all sat there for a few seconds. No one said anything. I took in air and breathed it out slow. I pulled my T-shirt away from my skin. The silence was broken by the scrape of Isabelle’s chair as she got up and went after Mary; not for the first time trying to rescue her sister (it was already half-sister in my thinking) from self-destructing.

  ‘Leave her be,’ Edith said. ‘She’ll drive to Cassie Rose. She can cool off there.’

  ‘Cassie Rose?’

  ‘My sister.’

  A minute later we all heard the muscle growl of the supercharged Camaro roaring up the drive.

  A minute after that Isabelle re-entered, upset at having failed to stop Mary and, I am sure, blaming me for what had happened. She was tight and started to clear the plates away with a clattering anger.

  ‘She was quite drunk, Ma. We shouldn’t have let her go.’

  ‘She drives better drunk than most people sober.’

  I started to help Isabelle clear the plates, wanting to put my case forward. But Edith signalled me to join her and as I went to sit with her Isabelle left the room.

  I sat on the stool and Edith topped up my glass.

  ‘How’s that shirt?

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘You better soak that.’

  The wine spatter on my T-shirt made me look like I’d been attacked with a dagger.

  ‘My younger daughter is a liar, Rip. She’s full of falsehoods.’

  ‘I’m beginning to see that.’

  ‘They all have dealt with not having a father in different ways. Joe keeps talking, Isabelle keeps reading. But Mary ain’t landed with who she is. She has one crazy notion about being a NASCAR driver one week, or an actress, then a dancer the next, but she don’t know what she wants. So she’s invented this idea she has a different father. What did she tell you? She tell you I got drunk once and had an affair?’

  ‘Something like that, yes.’

  ‘Uh-uh? Who was it? She say I went with an Apache truck driver?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, I knew an Apache driver. But he ain’t her father. The lyin’ gives her another life, see. The trouble with you, Rip, and I been noticing it, is you get taken in too easy. If you believe everything people in this family tell you you’ll get in a creek.’

  Edith continued watching me with her one eye. It narrowed as she smiled.

  ‘You plant that seed in her?’

  This question gave me fibrillations. I pictured my seed shooting over her daughter’s nut-brown belly.

  ‘The one about me being a tyrant? That weren’t a word she’d use. I knew you been talking.’

  I tried to look innocent.

  ‘Well. I might have watered it, but I didn’t plant it.’

  ‘Anyway. Enough of that. Tell me about this deal. Is it true that it was you that asked for a million? With Joe all tongue-tied?’

  ‘Roth offered a hundred and fifty thousand but, from what little I knew, it didn’t seem nearly enough. I knew he’d pay. So I plucked the number that sounded right.’

  ‘Is this guy as wealthy as Joe’s mouth makes him?’

  ‘To be fair to Joe, he undersold it.’

  ‘That ain’t possible.’

  ‘I think Roth will be good on his word.’

  ‘A man’s word means nothing until it’s something.’

  ‘Maybe put the champagne on ice then.’

  ‘I ain’t drunk champagne since my wedding day. And that’s something I don’t like to be reminded of. Anyway, you’ve come good, you little punk. I didn’t think you would but it seems you’ve come good. Here’s to you.’

  We chinked glasses and drank them dry.

  Later, after throwing my claret-stained T-shirt in the sink to soak overnight, I went and lay in bed and contemplated the day’s events. I could still feel the glow of Edith’s endorsement (I’d suckled that tit of praise like a famished piglet); but Mary’s duplicity ate away. I don’t know what was worse: the fact she’d lied to me or that I hadn’t noticed it. She’d made such a convincing virgin, responding exactly as I’d expect someone having sex for the first time to respond. But the thought of her having had another lover left me feeling more foolish than hurt. And it made me feel less bad about stabbing her in the back. I managed to convince myself that my ‘betrayal’ in not supporting her at dinner was of a lesser order than her betrayal of me.

  A purposeful knock at the door jolted me from my justifying. I thought it might be Mary come to get revenge.

  I opened the door to find Isabelle standing there wearing a look that suggested I was in trouble.

  ‘I need to talk to you? May I?’ She pointed to the alcove, where she stood, hugging her arms, more from modesty than from the evening chill. I left the door ajar, not wanting her to think I had anything to hide or any intentions towards her, but she went and closed it, signalling the reprimand to come. I lit a cigarette in cocky provocation, and then I lay on the bed in idle pose, smoking my cigarette in the manner of a man who gave not ten thousand shits.

  ‘When I told you that Mary is more vulnerable than she lets on, I thought you understood that – that it was obvious. She got let down badly by someone. You showed her approval. Even if it was for shallow reasons.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying that you took advantage of that vulnerability.’

  I laughed, a little haughtily. ‘She didn’t seem so vulnerable this evening.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have encouraged her.’

  ‘To throw wine at me?’

  ‘To think such things. She was clearly expecting you to say something. Why did you encourage her?’

  ‘Because I believed her?’

  ‘Because you want her.’

  I laughed but this stung.

  ‘Well?’ Isabelle asked.

  ‘Well what?’ I was not going to make this part easy for her.

  ‘It sounds like you got what you wanted. That you “had your way with her” – isn’t that how you would phrase it?’

  Impressively, Isabelle didn’t blush. Her skin kept its true hue. Instead it was I who blushed and, damn it, I didn’t want to lose to her in a game of embarrassment tennis.

  ‘I didn’t have my way with her! We had our way, with each other. Jesus, Isabelle. What are you? The sex police?’

  ‘I don’t care about the sex. I care about my sister.’

  ‘Your half-sister.’

  ‘Don’t start that.’

  ‘Well, it’s possible, isn’t it? You never wonder if your Ma might not be telling you everything? I mean, given the history, the way Mary looks, the way you look. Do the math!’

  ‘Mary is my sister.’

  ‘You’re prepared to live with the lie? I thought you believed in truth.’

  ‘We all live with lies – our own and other people’s – every day. Sometimes you have to believe the best of people.’

  ‘Except for me, it seems.’

  Isabelle turned back to the window. She didn’t deny it. She then sat in the armchair and leant forward with her hands together, a gesture that seemed almost conciliatory.

  ‘You haven’t even mentioned this deal. Or said thank you for it. The fact that we’ve sold the c
ollection for an amount of money that will make a big difference to all of you. I know this guy isn’t squeaky clean but who is? From day one you’ve been untrusting towards me, Isabelle. Prickly. Suspicious of my intentions. Superior.’

  ‘I appreciate what you’ve done. And yes, I’d rather the collection went to someone more reputable. Or a public museum. But I understand we have to sell it. It’ll make a difference to things – especially Joe.’

  ‘And you. You won’t have to play Mummy all the time.’

  ‘Is that what you think I do?’

  ‘Well, yes. You’ve said yourself you delayed university because you needed to help your mother. This deal will enable you to go and study. Follow your dreams.’

  She winced. ‘You really think life is about following dreams? What if the dream is a ridiculous dream, or dangerous one? Or a selfish one?’

  ‘Oh. What is life about then – do tell.’ My sarcasm was slightly forced but I sensed that a little fight was needed here, to open her up.

  ‘You come here and make these pronouncements and judgements about us.’

  ‘Maybe it’s easier for an outsider to see things clearly.’

  ‘And you think you see things clearly?’ Sarcasm from Isabelle – good!

  ‘I see a family trapped, trying to get by by doing one thing and struggling. I see a family with the means of making money in another – legitimate – way. And that this could free them from that trap. It’ll free Joe from pounding the road. It’ll free you from having to keep house so you can study. It’ll maybe help Mary get out and pursue dance or acting – or whatever it is.’

  Isabelle pulled at her earlobe.

  ‘That’s a fine speech but I don’t believe it. I don’t believe you. I think you are here for what you can get. I don’t think you care about us. You will say what it takes to get what you want. Even now you’re doing it. Because you want the deal!’

  ‘You’re not so pure though are you?’

  ‘OK. No. But now you’re going to tell me something I don’t know about myself?’