The Butterfly Plague

by Timothy Findley

  “You O.K. here?” she asked, setting aside her chewing gum.

  “Yes, thank you—and don’t put it there” said Dolly.

  “Everybody puts it there,” said Myra.

  “Well, for once,” said Dolly, “behave as though you weren’t everybody.”

  “What’ll I do? Put it in my purse?”

  “Don’t shilly-shally, Myra. Just wrap it in a piece of paper, and later you can drop it in an ash can.”

  Dolly was watching Bully Moxon, dancing still at the edge of the platform.

  “I haven’t got a piece of paper,” said Myra.

  “Then swallow it.”

  Myra obliged.

  “I can see smoke,” she said, gulping her gum. “Here it comes!”

  Everybody began to wave. Bully went right on dancing.

  “Oh! Isn’t it lovely to be at Culver City Railroad Station like this when the train comes in!” said Myra.

  “Yes,” said Dolly apprehensively. “Lovely.”

  Bully Moxon had now made his way very close to the spot where the Super Chiefs engine would screech to a halt not fifteen seconds later. His Bully-bous, ginny nose was displaying a light of warning, but he paid no attention. His little eyes did not seem to focus on the present. His mouth twisted down and sideways with concentration. “How did it go?” he seemed to be saying. “Like this? Like that? One-two? Or one-two-three?”

  He danced on.

  “Lovely Bully. Dear, darling, wonderful sweet old lovely Bully,” said Myra. “Dancing.

  The tune appeared to be a song so long forgotten that even Bully himself was having trouble recalling it.

  “He wants to hear the music,” said Myra, not knowing how right she was but only sensing something sad about the dancer.

  “He’s going down onto the track,” she said.

  The crowd leaned forward, swaying in toward him. It was all very matter-of-fact.

  “Look at that,” said Myra. “He’s waving to us. Smiling.”

  “Wave back.”

  They did.

  The rhythm began to uncloud. The crowd gave a sigh. How wonderful he was.

  “He’s got his cane up. Lovely Bully.”

  On came the Santa Fe Super Chief.

  “Bully.”

  Dancing.

  “Listen. The train…”

  Wailing.

  “Bully.”

  “Bully! Dance this way…”

  “That way…”

  “Back.”

  “Dance up.”

  “Here! Hold up the dancing. Stop.”

  “Bully.”

  Smiling.

  “Bully.”

  Waving.

  “Bully.”

  Dancing.

  “The train. The train, Bully. TRAIN!”

  The train.

  “Bully!!”

  Bully in the cinders. Down. Decapitated. His last step upward…

  Dead.

  The crowd gave a kind of roar.

  The band was playing and the cheering had started farther down the platform and the loved ones were arriving and there wasn’t much you could do except imagine nothing had happened. Particularly if you hadn’t really seen it happen. As Dolly hadn’t, for at that very instant he had fallen carefully to the floor. Myra couldn’t see it because she was crying. In the crowd, there were few who could have realized what had happened—because they cheered. And there were some who had been blinded, who—being blinded—had laughed, thinking someone had played them a trick-death until they wiped their eyes and saw the blood on their fingers and until the engine lurched and all the brown and yellow cars rattled against each other and the wheels screeched and women screamed “God help us all!” and there began to be panic because all at once the accident was everywhere and it seemed for one incredible instant they would all be down beneath the wheels with Bully and, like him, suddenly severed from life forever.

  2:21 p.m.

  Ruth’s bags came down on top of her head.

  Everything exploded and ceased. Was still.

  She came to, lying on the floor. It was barely long enough to contain her.

  Several people gave off screams.

  The engine bellowed like a killer.

  Bully Moxon’s head rolled down the track.

  Ruth struggled upward through her own arms and legs.

  In the corridors the passengers ran in every conceivable direction, seeking immediate and personal escape.

  Ruth dragged open a window and seized the strings of a passing balloon. At the other end of the string a child roared disapproval and rage.

  “What has happened?” said Ruth. “For God’s sake, tell me what has happened to us all?”

  The child wailed. It wanted to see the body. It tugged at its balloon and ran away.

  Ruth went out into the corridor. Bedlam.

  “What is it? What has happened?” she asked. But no one paid the least attention.

  “Get off the train!” a conductor yelled. “Get off before she fires!”

  “Fires?”

  “Fire!”

  Fire. Fire. Fire.

  “Get off the train!” cried all the mothers of children on board.

  “Get off the train!” cried all the children themselves.

  “Get the hell out of my way!” cried several other people, childless and alone.

  “But what is happening?” said Ruth.

  She approached the conductor. “Are we really on fire?”

  “Of course not,” said the conductor. “But I’ve got to clear this train. We have a schedule to meet.”

  Ruth got back to her compartment somehow and managed to struggle out with her bags.

  Slowly—more slowly, it seemed, than anyone else—Ruth was moved along the corridor.

  “Please! Please move faster,” Ruth said and was alarmed to find she had not even said it aloud. The blond man was close behind her.

  “It will happen now,” Ruth thought.

  “What will, lady?” said the man in front of her, who was covered inexplicably with talcum powder.

  “Nothing,” said Ruth. “Nothing. Excuse me.”

  At last they had reached the exits, and Ruth was helped down by a Brazilian Boy Scout.

  She thanked him and started along the platform. Adolphus was nowhere in sight, nor Myra (whom Ruth could only hope to recognize from her films). All around her, bodies collided.

  As she arrived near the head of the train Ruth became part of a crowd that had managed to get near the pieces of Bully’s corpse. These were being tenderly gathered and arranged by station attendants and Red Cross volunteers. There was nothing to see except a grisly array of bloody blankets and sheets. But the crowd leaned forward—then it fell back.

  Someone was coming.

  “Who’s that?” they whispered.

  It was the woman in veils.

  She approached, drawn up to her full tiny height, followed by the immense bulk of her servant. She had been joined by two men of indiscriminate age and appearance, both dressed exactly alike in leather overcoats. She was escorted by these men to the edge of the platform.

  Silently and without lifting her veils, the mysterious lady stared down with remarkable poise into the cinders where still lay the head of Bullford Moxon. She seemed to view it as some gigantic and momentous ruin—and in her stance and quiet stare could be felt the power and intensity of a conqueror. She had put him there. Ruth knew it. But she didn’t know how or why.

  Now, amidst the murmurs and mutters of the crowd, the veiled and queenlike figure, at once revered and feared, strode away toward a waiting automobile. No one voiced it. No one dared. They too, like Ruth, remembered that walk. They remembered its portent.

  They were shaken.

  If Bullford “Bully” Moxon was dead by his own intent, then why had the Little Virgin willed it?

  And why was she back, America?

  2:45 p.m

  Dolly lay on the floor of the station. He was extremely angry because no
one seemed to realize he was lying there in danger of death. But there was nothing he could do about it.

  At first he lay absolutely still, paralyzed with the fear of being stepped on. He yelled, “Look out, you damn fool!” several times at people who ran too close. But no one heard him. And no one got him.

  Eventually, when it became clear to Dolly he was not the central attraction, his curiosity got the better of him and he rolled to safety under the bench upon which Myra still stood crying “No, no, no,” as she had when Bully first danced under the train. Dolly pulled his feet up toward his bottom and lay there very still and watching.

  Myra, having begun to weep, was unable to cease.

  Ruth, for her part, had now begun to sense the error of standing around like a principal mourner and turned back into the crowd in order to escape. Hoping to avoid recognition, she hoisted one of her suitcases high, obscuring her face from view, and she pushed toward safety.

  “Hold it, Mrs. Haddon. Not so fast there!”

  (Was it the blond man? Had he spoken?)

  The voice was directly in front of her and startled her into releasing her hold on her suitcase. It fell, splashing underwear over the ground. The photograph appeared in the Examiner the next day.

  “Thank you,” said the cameraman and waved to her as he moved away.

  Ruth wanted to cry. Where was Dolly? Where was this Myra who was supposed to be with him? Why was she alone like this? She wanted help.

  “Help!” she cried aloud.

  Dolly saw her.

  He reached up and grabbed Myra by the dress.

  “There she is,” he yelled.

  “Get the police!” screamed Myra. “I’m being raped!”

  “It’s only me,” said Dolly. “For God’s sake, Myra! It’s only me!”

  “Rape! Rape! RAPE!!” screamed Myra, immediately assuming the physical proportions of an actress playing in close-up.

  Dolly, emerging from under the bench, somehow got his head pornographically involved with Myra’s skirts.

  Myra launched several octaves of invective into the sky.

  At this point, Ruth, trailing underwear and knotted lingerie from her suitcase, lurched into Dolly’s behind as he crouched in front of Myra. All three ended up in a heap on the ground.

  Those who were near enough heard the following dialogue:

  “Get the police!”

  “It’s only me!”

  “Rape!”

  “I’m sorry. My underwear’s dragging!”

  “Pervert!”

  “I’m your sister!”

  “Help!”

  “I’m bleeding.”

  “Dolly!”

  “Ruth!”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  At which point the confused bystanders saw the apparent rapist assisted to his feet by his victims and dusted from head to toe by one of them while the other kissed him on the face and said, “I thought you’d never come!”

  Beyond them, nearer the tracks, the crowd had begun again to hum some sort of tune. Shortly thereafter the band struck up and no one seemed to notice the ambulance arrive.

  Four stretcher-bearers forced their way into the choiring chaos of humanity, all shoving and regrouping in order to view the remains of their late idol. “Bully Moxon is dead,” they lamented, holding hands and swaying. “Had his head cut off by the Santa Fe Super Chief.”

  This was the end of a legend as old as Hollywood, but also the beginning of a new legend—one that most people would remember as the Butterfly Plague.

  Sunday, August 28th, 1938:

  The Beach at Topanga

  12:30 p.m.

  She looked up.

  A sea gull rose upon heated air and hovered, dazed, above her head.

  It might even be asleep up there, she thought, with its closed eyes and its painless breathing. Mrs. Damarosch, on the beach in a sun dress, oblivious and ankle-deep in the outgoing tide which filled the canvas shoes that hid her feet, could hardly take a painless breath. These were the weeks of her death.

  Her name was Naomi, and she gazed away from the gull toward the horizon. The sunwhite sky had shed the sea like a winter skin below it. Just once, Naomi took a breath so deep that, while it pained her diaphragm and abdomen, it filled her also with a sense of serenity.

  She would live, she knew, for a little while. And where there was life, she remembered, there was…something or other.

  She began very slowly to walk toward the far end of the beach.

  The house she had lived in ever since the divorce was at the southern extremity. Between this end and the north there were four more houses of varying size and pretension. One was barely a cottage. Two of the others were houses on stilts, and the one farthest away was surrounded by a high board fence through the cracks of which you could see an endless gleam of glass. This house was very modern, built three years before.

  The sky above was cloudless, blank and seared. It was populated with molecules of haze and, seemingly, by fire itself. Mrs. Damarosch had traveled the world with George, her husband, sometimes watching him film in foreign studios, but never had she experienced such a heat as this. So dry a heat, it seemed quite capable of evaporating the whole Pacific Ocean. Almost a prehistoric heat, she thought—biblical—plaguelike. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” and He dried up the oceans like that.

  As George had.

  As George would again, if he could.

  Pictures!

  Mrs. Damarosch—Naomi Nola, the silent-screen star—smiled. “Of course he won’t,” she said to herself.

  “Science would not allow it.”

  She moved on.

  Looking to the west, she watched the sea of peace and its gleaming surface. Placid and free, innumerable birds rode upon it, unaware of tide and sea drift. Not even bothering to feed, they were so docile surely someone must have drugged them.

  The quiet prevailed in all directions. Silence was broken only by the lapping of shore water, the whirring of insect wings.

  Mrs. Damarosch walked. Her gray canvas shoes squelched and belched with tidewater. She looked at them. She would find a place to sit down, take them off, and let them dry.

  Unfortunately, in looking at her feet she could not avoid her ankles, shins, and knees.

  “Oh, dear,” she sighed. “Oh, dear.”

  It was still such a shock to see herself so thin and formless. Once she had weighed one hundred and twenty pounds. Now, only ninety-five.

  “Oh, my,” she said. “Oh, well.”

  And walked on.

  Presently she opened an orange-colored parasol.

  “Ruth hates the color orange, but I don’t care. Ruth will have to put up with it.”

  In her mind’s eye Mrs. Damarosch imagined the effect the orange parasol created, resting against the green shoulder of her sun dress. She was lately inordinately fond of a brightness in things and had recast her wardrobe to appease this taste. “Money, money, money…” Mrs. Damarosch heard George saying. To hell with it.

  Changing the subject, she thought back to that first day in the blue-eyed doctor’s office.

  “But I don’t feel anything,” she had said to him.

  “I understand that,” the doctor had said. “But you shall,” and his eyes had frozen over. Two blue marbles.

  “When?” Mrs. Damarosch had said, expecting to feel the tremors of pain at once.

  “All in good time,” the doctor had said.

  Now Mrs. Damarosch repeated his promise. All in good time. As though he had promised her a mink…“But I cannot,” she had said in his office, “I cannot endure pain.”

  “We can arrange that when the time comes.”

  (Now.)

  Mrs. Damarosch had sat very still on the hard wooden chair. Not even a cushion for comfort. She had felt the cold on her buttocks (which then had been heavier) and the silk of her underclothes had been moist.

  Hating the doctor, knowing he pitied her, hating his withholding of mercy, Mrs. Dama
rosch had said, “Is there really nothing one can do?”

  He had smiled.

  “Nothing.”

  She had smiled back.

  Well.

  She walked through the sand.

  She thought about the cancer inside her and about abortion. She wondered why you cannot abort a disease from the womb the way you can a child. She had aborted once herself. And considered it one other time. Well, twice. But she had finally allowed two children life. Dolly had paid the consequences. But didn’t we all?

  Now Ruth, husbandless, childless, was coming home. Another tragedy.

  Let me live. Let me die. Let me—don’t make me.

  She stopped walking.

  “Here,” she said. “This is the place. The very place. Perfect.”

  She had selected a slight rise in the sand, just above the tide mark. Noting with her shoe that it was firm and dry, she sat down on the sand in an approximation of the lotus position, with her parasol tilted against the sun.

  She sighed and removed her damp shoes.

  “I really do like it here,” she said, laying them neatly to dry beside her. “And I particularly like this view.”

  Beyond her in the shallows of the bay some rocks gave chameleon shelter to a few sleeping seals.

  “I cannot waste my time with sleep,” she thought. “Like you can.”

  Then as if to spite her words, on cue, one of the seals rose from its place, nosed the air for danger, and slipped like a dancer, graceful and awkward at once, into the water.

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Damarosch. “Oh! How lovely.”

  The seal swam directly toward her.

  It’s tame, she thought. It’s actually going to come in.

  But it wasn’t tame and it didn’t come in. It swam fairly close, however, and stopped to look at her, possibly expecting her to respond in some way.

  Mrs. Damarosch looked back. She went on smiling.

  The seal, its eyes bright with water, opened its mouth and appeared to smile back.

  Suddenly, unaccountably, Mrs. Damarosch found herself waving at it excitedly, raising and lowering the parasol and gesturing with her free hand.

  “Hello,” she said. “Hello! Hello!”