The Butterflies of Grand Canyon

by Margaret Erhart

  “Afraid? I should say so,” Dotty replies. “You would be too if you had his condition.” Jane looks at her blankly. “Why, don’t you know, dear? Hasn’t he told you? Shame on you not telling her, Moose. Since he was a little boy, he’s been allergic to bee stings.”

  Lunch leaves Dotty with a rare (for her) affliction: bad gas. And Morris, light in the head, due to the seven-thousand-foot elevation and a lumpish heart, feels an overwhelming need to lie down and nap. Oliver, with a butterfly net in each hand, stands before Jane. “Madame,” says he, with an almost imperceptible bow. “Your weapon awaits you. Mightier than pen and sword combined, faster than a moving ringlet, if used well. Made of broomstick and bridal veil—the cross-pollination of virgins and witches. May I introduce you, Mrs. Merkle, to your future calling. Hark!” He cups his ear, charming and ludicrous man. “What do I hear? Is that your future calling? No, it’s the dry cleaners. Your husband’s suit is ready to pick up. But don’t go!” he cries. “Resist! What we promise you here is the adventurer’s life, guaranteed no money back, no money at all! You can be penniless, for heaven’s sake, and enjoy every minute of it!” He calms his voice and says sadly, “Entomology’s not a useless profession, Jane, simply a misunderstood one.”

  “Oliver,” says Dotty from where she lies beneath the piñon, knees to her chest, trying to get some relief, “you’ll scare the poor girl. Stop talking and get going.” No sooner said than a great rumble erupts from somewhere near her hip, and Oliver and Jane move off swiftly in the direction of the South Kaibab Trail.

  At first she isn’t any good at all. Oliver shows her how to hold the net with both hands, but she feels too encumbered. Her sweeps are awkward and way off the mark. She has only slightly better luck slapping the net down and catching things on the ground. The targets, he informs her, are Vanessa cardui, otherwise known as painted ladies. “These butterflies,” she pants, after one of her more dazzling sprints and misses, “stand a very good chance.”

  “One in ten,” he laughs.

  “One in ten?”

  “Only one in ten is captured.”

  “I’m not surprised. But there must be dozens of nincompoops like me to balance out sharpshooters like you.”

  He is quite marvelous with a net, and she watches as he leaps and swings and pirouettes and swings some more. An old man! He rarely misses. He’s airborne most of the time, and his wrist seems made of many moving parts—his whole arm does. It’s like watching a delicate machine in flight, a delicate, deadly hunting machine. “You’re a bird!” she cries in admiration, and he was but moments ago a doddery old fellow. He swishes his net. Like the tail of an angry cat, it makes a slicing sound in the air. Then she sees it. She sees the very thing he’s doing that she’s not, the source of his unhinged acrobatic joy: he’s got only one hand on the net! He’s twice as long that way, his reach is doubled, and he can sweep and slash unhindered; he can miss and turn and try again on a backswing. A backhand, that’s what it is!

  As luck would have it, she herself has a formidable backhand and a fifty-five-mile-an-hour serve, and the moment she sees how the Ballard Park Tennis Club ladies’ division championship has prepared her for a life of collecting, a life of preda tion in the name of science, it’s a sad day for butterflies.

  No Traces

  Jane cannot remember if the young man’s name is Earl or Ewell, and this bothers her to the point where she’s kept awake by it, a terrible night, not one wink of sleep. Pulling on her blue jeans in the morning, she wonders if Ewell is even a name, and if so, is it spelled Ewell or Yul or Yule? Not Yule, she decides. Might as well call a boy Christmas.

  She has grown quite attached to her blue jeans, which she purchased against Morris’s will on her seventh day in the West. She and Dotty drove to Flagstaff, where they ate their sandwiches at the Hotel Weatherford. They sat on the upstairs balcony with a charming view of the train station to the south, that fearsome mountain to the north. It was a surprisingly hot day and Jane wanted something cool and slightly wicked to drink, so they crossed the street to the Black Cat, where she ordered a beer. “A beer!” whispered Dotty. “I didn’t have any idea you drank beer.”

  “I never do,” said Jane. “I thought I’d try it.”

  It was, in fact, the first time in her life she’d ever ordered an alcoholic beverage at lunchtime, and she wasn’t prepared for the wooziness she felt for most of the afternoon. But it made the shopping interesting. And Dotty became more fun. There was an underwater feeling to the day, which Jane quite liked. Nothing seemed very important. There was a sodden dullness to the world, and it was restful. Had she not had that beer, she wondered later, would she have felt comfortable enough to equip herself with an almost entirely western wardrobe? Probably not. She chose four new pairs of blue jeans and three western shirts, one in red and two in white. She bought an untooled brown leather belt with a silver buckle, and a long, loose, red cotton skirt. A flame of a skirt! That, she would wear to the party. For Louis and Ethyl Schellbach, the park naturalist and his wife, were having a party to which she was invited, along with the Hedquists, of course. Morris would be gone by the weekend. She needed a jacket of some sort, and Dotty recommended a black wool riding jacket, cut straight just below the waist, with wide lapels and a small slit up the back—very “caballera” she called it, whatever that meant. They picked up socks and bras and underpants at Fine’s Ready-to-Wear, though the underpants, in their sheer lack of material, resembled nothing Jane had ever worn before. “Why, there’s nothing to them!” she puzzled. Dotty cocked her head and passed along her decision: “There’s enough.”

  The icing on the cake was a pair of jet-black cowboy boots, pointy and shiny, yes indeed, to be worn with the red skirt, Dotty explained, or to dress up the blue denim trousers. “Blue jeans,” said Jane. “They’re blue jeans, Dotty. Get with it.”

  “You get with it,” Dotty chuckled. She seemed to be enjoying herself as much as Jane. “Now, one last thing, dear. We need a hat.”

  “What kind of hat? I loathe hats. Oh, Dotty, Dotty, don’t make me wear a hat!”

  “Why, out here a hat is your best friend. A hat is your Saint Bernard, your salvation—”

  “I can’t. I won’t.”

  “It’s a must, my dear, an absolute not-to-be-done-without. You’ll perish, it’s as simple as that, if you step outside without your hat! Oh, I’m not talking about a pillbox, Jane. Or a beret, for goodness sake. Or one of those terrible tams my mother made me wear to school. I wore a pillbox to church, poor me. Can you imagine, me, little Dorothy, in her dark blue pillbox hat and her little white gloves? Oh, I never was much of a believer, I’m afraid. Maybe I would have been if Mother hadn’t believed so strongly in starch. I think she believed in starch the way I was meant to believe in God. I sat, every Presbyterian Sunday, in a good bit of pain as a result. I don’t think one is susceptible to abstractions when one is in pain, do you, Jane?”

  But Jane had formed a question of her own. “Was Morris a Presbyterian?”

  “Well, of course he was.”

  “He’s always said he was an Episcopalian.”

  “An Episcopalian! How very odd. What does he know about Episcopalians?”

  “Nothing, I imagine.”

  “Does he go to church?” asked Dotty. “Well, of course, you were married in a church.”

  “We aren’t much for church,” said Jane. “I don’t know why we got married in a church. A park would have suited me more, a meadow by a stream. But I suppose a church is expected.”

  “Yes, when it comes to marriage, many things are expected.” Dotty forced a little laugh. “Children, for example.”

  “Yes,” sighed Jane.

  “Now, you would tell me, wouldn’t you, if there was a bun in the oven?”

  “I would,” said Jane.

  “I could never, frankly, imagine Morris with a child.”

  “No.”

  “But you, dear?”

  “Well, I’m married to Morris.” />
  Dotty cocked her head. “Where there’s a will there’s a way, that’s what I say. To every problem there’s a solution.”

  “Oh, I don’t know that it’s a problem—”

  “Not at this moment, perhaps.”

  They wandered down Beaver Street after that, saying very little, looking in shop windows. An inexpensive yet well-made straw hat was what they were after, and what they soon found. Dotty used the word handsome to describe it, and it was, in fact, a handsome hat for a man as well as a stylish hat for a woman. It had a slight crease in the crown and a widish brim, and the hatband was a simple leather cord that came down to tie under the chin. It was made of pale straw, a blond straw that complemented Jane’s dark hair. They bought it at a small shop on Route 66 that sold hats to tourists, and at the time of their transaction it was crowded with a whimpering, red-faced group for whom it was already too late. “You see,” Dotty poked Jane in the arm. “Cooked lobsters! That’s how you know who’s from here and who’s not.”

  Jane was startled by a sudden feeling of wanting to be “from here”—perhaps brought on by the sight of these human crustaceans. The feeling passed, but the shock of it lingered. Hadn’t she but a week before been unequivocally, if not happily, from St. Louis?

  She thinks of this again as she dresses. It must be very early still; the sky is just beginning to lighten. She knows how quickly the light comes when it comes, here in Arizona, an avalanche of gray becoming white, a sudden opening of the day, which doesn’t happen in the same way back east. And here there is a sky. Such a blue one—a turquoise one! Oh, for heaven’s sake, she thinks, my ring! Where on earth is my turquoise ring? She hasn’t had it on or thought of it since she took it off on the train. She bought it at the station in Albuquerque, from an old Indian woman selling jewelry on the platform. The woman had a blanket draped across her shoulders, and she leaned across the table and put the ring on Jane’s finger herself. Suddenly, quite irrationally, she’s afraid it’s somehow gone back home with Morris. But of course it couldn’t have. It’s here somewhere, she has it, she must. Take a deep breath, she commands herself. Now, think. A likely place for it would be . . . ?

  She’s tempted to throw herself into action, to search the small room from top to bottom, but she makes herself try to remember. The few things she brought from the train . . . Sometimes she wonders where her clothes have ended up, in what drear lost and never to be found, or given to the poor of Kansas City or Albuquerque. Oh, she’s glad to be rid of them! What did she bring from the train, then, besides her purse? Her purse! That must be where it is. It’s in her purse. She remembers now tucking it away in the inner pocket of her purse. But where is her purse? It’s not on the bureau, where she has been in the habit of leaving it. It’s not on the chair by the door. She had it last night at the party, yet she has no memory of leaving the Schellbachs’ house with it, no memory at all.

  She had, in fact, felt a strange lightness, which she attributed to the wine, a lightness of limb and mind as she returned by car with the Hedquists. She sat in the backseat, looking directly at the back of Dotty’s head (her hair was in its usual social bun), and felt tingly and light all over, a feeling that stayed with her all night, she now realizes, which was the reason for her wakefulness. To think that leaving one’s purse behind gave one one’s freedom! She will absolutely not indulge in the thought that sending one’s husband home might do the same. She tries to imagine the contents of the purse, and all she can come up with, besides the hidden ring, is a rather too red lipstick, some nail scissors, a pack of Chiclets, and a small hanky from her maiden days, monogrammed with her pre-Merkle initials. Of course there must have been money, her coin purse at least and a few odd dollars. Oh, and of all things—quelle horreur!—the pocket-size notebook in which she jots the names and identifying features of those she meets and wishes to remember: Unsightly Wen, for example, or Spits When Speaking. It isn’t malice but simple necessity that drives these laconic asides. She has a terrible time with names, and creating visual prompts has greatly helped her in social situations in the past. But now, she fears, she’s done herself in. What if her purse and its contents have fallen into the hands of Rust Spot on Collar, or Ears That Protrude, or Jewelry Not Fit to Pawn? Her hope, this morning, is that Mating Habits of Tarantulas, who spent most of the evening in earnest conversation with Insect Rape!, is now in possession of her purse, or Insect Rape! himself is, as they are the two least likely to examine its contents for fear they will come across something feminine and unseemly. They are both young men at the age of embarrassment, she believes, a period of life in a man’s early twenties. Insect Rape! is a scrawny redhead whose name she can’t recall, and Mating Habits is a more mature-looking, dark-haired fellow with very white teeth and a squint that gives the impression of intelligence—or suspicion or sleep. His name is Earl or Ewell, the name she puzzled over in the night, and she has several reasons to remember him.

  First and foremost, he’s a dead ringer for the Duke of Windsor, despite the obvious age difference. Jane Merkle is much taken with the Duke of Windsor, though she frankly mistrusts that carpetbagger Mrs. Simpson and imagines her capable of inexhaustible bossiness. A second reason is that all the while Mating Habits huddled with his good friend Insect Rape!, he held a plate of Swedish meatballs in one hand, each meatball speared by a toothpick, each toothpick decorated with a lively pink ruffle. It seemed to Jane, herself no more than a few years older than this young man, that she was watching someone right smack in the middle of wildest youth, to whom small pink-tailed birds flocked. At one point the hand holding the plate imperceptibly drooped—a small shift of angle to be sure, but enough to encourage a greasy drip of meatball juice to leap out onto the toe of Earl or Ewell’s boot. The hand shifted again, causing the drip to become a trickle, and suddenly, with the noise of liquid spattering the hard black linoleum of Ethyl Schellbach’s floor, the young man seemed to awaken and adjust, as bewildered as he could be to have fallen into a world of plates and consequences.

  Something childlike about him, then. That’s the reason he impressed her. A boy who did not want to be king, who wanted instead to chase down tarantulas. And beetles, as this scrap of conversation revealed. She had eavesdropped shamelessly, and was able to recall it almost in its entirety.

  Mating Habits I was out at Rowe Well last Thursday, just about dusk, and all around in the rabbitbrush these little darkling beetles were having a group grope.

  Insect Rape! A what?

  MH An orgy, ferrethead. They were doing it. In multiplicate.

  IR! It’s called lekking, you know.

  MH No, I didn’t know. Lekking? Sounds like what you lek in brains, you make up for in imagination.

  IR! Mock me if you want, Charles, but it’s right there in Jaques.

  MH Don’t call me Charles.

  IR! If you studied a bit, you know, put your nose in a book instead of wandering around watching beetles buggering each other—

  MH Buggering’s interesting. To everyone but you.

  IR! It’s interesting to me. But I’m old-fashioned and sentimental and silly, I guess. I prefer Homo sapiens. I’m a little less keen on the bumping and grinding of insects. Theirs is a world of rape, Charlie. Now get on with your sordid tale.

  MH The darkling males were completely indiscriminate, trying to breed with anything and everything they bumped into—

  IR! Invertidos!

  MH Worse. I dropped my cigarette butt and one of those boys climbed on and tried to hump it.

  IR! Ah! They don’t call them Lucky Strikes for nothing.

  Silly boys, thinks Jane Merkle. She slips into the left Ked, then the right, takes one last look at herself in the long mirror behind the door, and tiptoes through the house to the kitchen. It’s too early for Dotty and Oliver to be up, and for this reason she likes this hour. The house, which doesn’t belong to her, nonetheless seems to be hers, and she goes about toast and coffee with the confidence of a resident.

  She
is staring into her empty coffee cup when Oliver enters the kitchen. “Oh, hello,” says he. “Looking for minnows?”

  “Minnows?” asks Jane.

  “In your cup.”

  “No,” she laughs. “My fortune.”

  “I had a lady read my tea leaves once. Said I was going to live a long and happy life. Then she poked around, just like some old forty-niner sifting for gold. Sifting for gold and turning up bear turds. I should have known the bad news was coming. They save it for the end, after the long and happy.”

  “Goodness! What was it?”

  “Blindness.”

  “Oh, how awful! Blindness? What a terrible thing to say! They shouldn’t be allowed to say things like that. Not if you pay them.”

  “I asked her how blind and happy went together.”

  “I don’t like this story at all.”

  “She said if I looked around while I still had my sight, I would see not one happy man who wasn’t blind.”

  “Good heavens! What sort of person was this?”

  “Happiness demands blindness, said she, but if I wished to explore a different sort of satisfaction, I might see clearly for the rest of my life and on into the future.”

  “Gosh.”

  “Those were her very words.”

  “She sounds like a gypsy, Oliver.”

  “Dotty’s Aunt Gretchen? She was a Communist.”

  Jane has never heard of Aunt Gretchen. Probably dead, she thinks. She knows so little about Morris’s family. He’s never spoken of a fortune-teller. Or a Communist, for heaven’s sake. Good Lord! Is he a Communist too? It’s certainly possible. He’s not been entirely forthcoming about certain things. He’s allergic to bees. And he’s a Presbyterian, while all this time he’s presented himself as an Episcopalian. It’s very possible—likely, in fact—that her husband of five years is a Presbyterian Communist, and she is nothing but his unknowing dupe of a wife. It’s unbearable, suddenly. She feels alone on an island in a sea of barracudas. She watches her brother-in-law pour himself a glass of orange juice, and then, to her astonishment, he kneels down and reaches into the cupboard under the sink and pulls out a bottle of something. He adds a generous dollop to the juice. At first she believes it’s Lestoil and gives a little cry of protest, which she regrets.