The Killing of Butterfly Joe

by Rhidian Brook

  RHIDIAN BROOK

  The Killing of Butterfly Joe

  PICADOR

  For Adam and Joe

  Well…

  There we were.

  We were working like that

  And then who should come up

  But the CAT IN THE HAT!

  DR. SEUSS

  Contents

  I.

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  II.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  III.

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  IV.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  V.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  VI.

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  I.

  I tell this tale of Butterfly Joe

  The adventure, wonder, trouble, woe;

  But how to let unfold and flow

  To save my butt as well as soul?

  I’d hail a Muse (but they’ve kept shtum

  E’er since Cupid swapped bow for gun)

  Leaving the Music of their name

  And ten thousand spent writers seeking fame

  And glory and lead in pencils,

  An orally delivered, full-blown story.

  No. I’m not waiting for them.

  I’ll just get on with it

  Open with the opening:

  A first encounter with my hero

  And his selkie-sister, naked

  In the cool waters of

  The Kaaterskill Falls

  Not far from where

  Rip Van Winkle took

  His twenty-year snooze.

  This is where the adventure starts

  And this is how my story goes . . .

  CHAPTER ONE

  In which I meet Joe Bosco and his sister Mary-Anne at the Kaaterskill Falls.

  I met him a butterfly-life ago. That’s six months if you’re an exceptionally strong, large, lucky butterfly. It was the beginning of May. I was lying by the side of a river in the Catskill Mountains, reading and smoking, when I fell asleep and into a dream. It was one of those lovely in-and-out dreams that come with shallow sleep. I’d been reading about Rip Van Winkle, the man who took a nap outdoors and woke twenty years later to a world that had moved on without him, and he was in my dream. There was a butterfly – yellow, white and black. And I was at my father’s funeral. Scattering his ashes. I knew I was dreaming and I was enjoying the illogical bleeding of disparate things into one another. But someone was trying to get into my dream. I could hear a voice coming from outside it, pulling me rudely from my semi-sleep. I even remember thinking – in my dream – ‘Don’t wake up, don’t wake up!’ But the intruding voice was as insistent and enthusiastic as a toddler’s. The voice of someone who enjoyed interrupting and who paid no heed to what people thought of them.

  It’s a monster. A total monster!

  It was an American voice. But of course: I was in America.

  I opened my eyes and there he was, eclipsing the sun. He was naked from the waist up, shoeless, holding a butterfly net in one hand, grinning down at me. The lenses of his glasses magnified his eyes to bushbaby saucers. His hair was short on top and long at the back which made him look less intelligent than he turned out to be. I guessed him to be in his twenties, a little older than me perhaps. A boy in a superman’s body.

  ‘Don’t move, sir,’ he said. He made this snorted chortling noise and curled up his nose in concentration. ‘You should see this, Mary. It’s a giant!’

  He was addressing someone in the water. I sat up and saw a young woman, maybe seventeen or eighteen years old, swimming in the pool beneath the main cascade of the falls. She was completely naked, her skin ivory-green, her long hair snaking across her back. I wondered if some spirit of those witchy-woods had put a spell on me and that I had, like Rip, woken up to a world that had moved on without me.

  ‘It’s a Papilio glaucus!’ he said to the girl.

  ‘Not so special as all that,’ she shouted back.

  What were they? Naturist entomologists? Prelapsarian hippies? (The Woodstocks were not that far away.) Or maybe, this being the top end of the Appalachia, they were a couple of feral in-breds.

  ‘Don’t move, sir. If you just could stay . . . very . . . still.’

  He brought the net down over the huge yellow, black and white butterfly that was sunning itself on the rock next to me. He reached in to the net and pinched the butterfly dead, pressing its thorax with his thumb and forefinger (if I couldn’t actually hear the crunch I imagined it). He then held the butterfly in the palm of his hand and stretched out his arm towards me.

  ‘Papilio glaucus. Eastern tiger swallowtail to you. Ain’t she super-beautiful?’

  What with its wings folded over its back and it being dead it was hard to agree.

  ‘Aww. Don’t look that way. She’ll give people more joy dead than alive. You’ll see.’

  He slipped the specimen into a glassine paper triangle that he produced from a Tupperware box.

  ‘ “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”,’ I said.

  He gave a ‘hmmm’ of assent, although I’m not sure he’d caught the sarcasm. He looked at me, curious now. Maybe he was sizing me up before netting, stunning and pinning me? He thrust out his hand.

  ‘Joe Bosco, “Alexandrae boscensis”.’

  ‘Llewellyn Jones.’

  ‘Llewhat?’

  ‘Lew is easier.’

  ‘OK. Lew. That’s my sister Mary-Anne. “Paradoxa boscensis”. I apologize for her in advance.’

  I was unsure where to look: the colossus on the rock or the naiad in the water. Joe was vast: six foot five with absolutely no fat on an athletic frame; he had perfect proportion, built like a statue of a Greek discus-thrower. His stunning physical presence made his voice all the more incongruous. It was whiny and childish and so unlikely I thought it might be a disguise, a voice to lure you into an underestimation.

  ‘What you reading there?’

  ‘Just a book of stories,’ I said.

  I showed him the cover of my book – Classic American Stories. It depicted a painting of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.

  He squinted at the cover and looked unimpressed. He swept his hand towards the waterfall and woods behind. ‘The real story’s here, my friend. Here, over there, and beyond that.’ He opened his arms and turned a 360 to take in the waterfall, the hemlock trees, the cornucopia of life within. ‘Don’t you just wanna dive in?’

  ‘I’m working up to it,’ I said.

  I tried not to look at the figure in the water but I could ‘feel’ her there even without looking, her nakedness more threatening than any predator.

  ‘Don’t mind her,’ he said. ‘My sister hates men.’

  ‘I what?’ she snapped back, clearly listening, her disinterest a pose.

  ‘I said you hate men!’

  ‘Ain’t met one yet!’

  She was now swimming on her back, her breasts breaking the surface of the water.

  ‘So . . . where you from, Lew? I’m hearing England. You from England?’

  I nodded, not bothering to explain that I was Welsh and the differences
therein.

  ‘You travelling? Working? What’s happening here? What’s the plan?’

  What’s happening here? My plan was vague: see America; have a good time.

  ‘I don’t know yet. I’m just living in the moment.’

  ‘You ain’t depressed or nothing?’

  ‘Depressed? No.’ I laughed but it was such a pathetic laugh I despised myself for it. ‘Why?’

  ‘You seem kinda blue.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well. You’re right by a cool river on a hot day lying next to the most beautiful natural wonder and you’re reading a book.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Well am I right or am I right?’

  I was a bit down but I wasn’t going to tell a complete stranger about the recent death of my father or my tendency to get high when I was low.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Ha! I don’t believe you. But I like that voice. Hey, Mary, you should come up here and listen to this. This is how to talk right!’

  From the start I think Joe heard something in my voice he could use. I have a good speaking voice: clear, neutral-accented, with just enough Welshness to give it a good timbre. I realize a British accent has a disproportionately mesmerizing effect on the natives here, but to Joe’s ear my voice was a door-opening, deal-closing voice.

  He laid down his net. ‘You coming in or what?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  He placed his specs on his net and stepped onto the rocky overhang that served as a diving board. He lifted his arms into a vee and stood there as if about to conduct the foliage; he milked the moment of delay then dove with great theatre and surprisingly poor coordination. He re-emerged and let out a tumultuous whoop!

  ‘You don’t know what you’re missing here!’

  I knew exactly what I was missing: what I was missing was the un-self-consciousness required to just strip down and dive in whilst his sister was still in that pool, her nakedness now more tantalizing for being obscured by the eddying waters directly beneath the falls.

  ‘Mary! Don’t embarrass the man. Put some clothes on!’ He turned to me with a shrug. ‘It’s her protest. She thinks it’s her right to swim naked, as Eve would have swum before the fall. ’Cos she ain’t done nothing wrong. She has Bad Theology, see. Mary, come on!’

  She trod water. I couldn’t read the look she gave me; but it wasn’t completely hostile. She slowly swam back to the bank and stepped out – one step, two step – whipping her head to catch her hair in a bunch and squeeze out the water, all this while leaning over, ignoring me but checking to see if I was looking, which I was, like a mesmerized frog before a hypnotist snake. Out of the water, her skin was milky pale and she had a boyish skinniness. She picked up her towel and mercifully wrapped it around her midriff. There was something un-American about this show of immodesty. She could have been French.

  ‘All yours, mister,’ she said. Unlike her brother’s, her voice was smoky and deep.

  I wanted to show them (her mainly) that I had more than just an inner life. I stood and stripped down to my boxers, turning away from the pool, conscious of some arousal. I took off my watch – an heirloom from my late father – and laid it carefully on top of my shorts. I walked to the ledge feeling, with the gaze of that girl on me, like I was walking a plank to shark-ridden waters. I stood there for a while looking down into the pool, calculating its depth. I thought for a moment about the tricksy refraction of the light, my fear making the distance to the pool greater and the pool itself shallower. Joe coaxed me from the bank. ‘Go on! Dive in!’

  I dove, my whole being focused on keeping my legs together and arms dart-straight, determined to make a good impression on the girl. The bottom of the pool came to meet me quicker than I expected, my hands touched and dispersed gravel, making little clouds. The sun carved chutes of light around me. I stayed under for a few beats, to prove I had puff to spare, enjoying the new cool world. When I resurfaced I cried out, as much to catch my breath as praise existence. It was May and the water was still ice-fresh. I was expecting applause or acclaim of some kind but I was greeted only by the sound of water falling on water. I looked up to the pedestal rock but there was no sign of Joe or his sister. I thought little of it and swam breast-stroke across the pool, stopping in a silky warm patch in the sun to float on my back. A bird of prey flew across the waterfall spray. (I know now that it was a bald eagle.) Then I heard a shout from the creek, a man’s voice, followed by a crack of wood and a cackle of girl’s laughter, then another shout from the man. Dopily I wondered if more people were coming to spoil the idyll, and then it hit me: this whole thing – the butterfly netting, the engagement in conversation, the encouragement to dive, the naked girl – had been a sting. And I had been stung. I swam to the bank, pulled myself from the pool and ran up to the perch where I’d left my watch with my clothes. The watch was still there lying on my shirt, glinting gold in the sun, but the wood fairies had stolen my book. I looked down the creek and thought about giving chase but they were too far gone and, anyway, it was just a book, a book I could replace without my aunt ever knowing.

  The blue tints of the uplands were turning purple as I tramped back to my aunt’s house. The robbery was a mild violation but it left me feeling unsettled and foolish. I like to think I’m a good judge of people but I hadn’t seen that coming. Yes, the girl had been aggressive and sullen but the guy had seemed sincere in his friendliness. They probably scammed day-trippers like this all the time. I felt I’d been robbed of my discernment as much as my book and, as I descended the creek, was sure the trees and the rushing waters were laughing at me. I know this is just a projection of my feelings but from the day I arrived in the Catskills I felt that the landscape had a spooky intelligence, as if it knew things about me, things about my past, things about my future, things I didn’t even know about myself. And if I’d been better at reading the signs I might have seen a warning.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In which Joe brings me an offering and makes me an offer.

  That night, the sleep that embraced me so sweetly during the day played hard to get. My encounter with the butterfly people had stirred up an over-stimulating cocktail of obvious desires, exciting possibilities and abstract anxieties. Who were they? Where were they from? Why had they taken the book and not the clearly more valuable 1950s Omega Seamaster wristwatch? Had I really met them? The ghost of the gone-book at my bedside table confirmed that I had but the dreamy overlapping of the day’s events and an evening spliff fuzzed my sense of what was what. As I lay in bed I noticed – for the first time since I’d been at my aunt’s – the animal sounds of the forest. Trying to identify them, I ran through a hierarchy of American predators from cicada to bear via frog, snake, owl, lynx, coyote and cougar with the butterfly guy’s selkie-sister at the top of the tree. She was still out there, naked in the cool pool beneath the falls, hornier than a frog, more cunning than a snake, more powerful than a bear, making siren sounds to lure me.

  But if I could dispel her image with corny fantasy and a few flicks of the wrist, I couldn’t get the butterfly guy from my head. His presence had been burned on my retina in that first sun-eclipsing glimpse, and his observations about me – so presumptuous, so judgemental, so true! – repeated on a loop in my mind like an annoyingly catchy pop song.

  ‘You ain’t depressed or nothing?’ ‘You seem kinda blue.’ ‘The real story’s out there.’

  It was as if he’d read my mail (as they say here). I’d come to see America, but since I’d arrived two weeks before things hadn’t quite gone to plan. I’d got myself fired from my first bar job for oversleeping. My aunt, feeling sorry for me, offered me work painting her barn but, being impractical, I found this work hard and slow. I also got distracted by and lost in her vast collection of American literature. The barn contained ten thousand books and she’d asked me to catalogue and alphabetize them, a job that I was only too happy to do but that saw me retreat to the fictional terrain of American literature instead of
getting out and exploring the actual land in which many of the stories were set. I told myself, ‘Why leave the beautifully turned world described in books for the messy, contingent reality that required sweat and blood and money to see when it was all here and available to me?’ Truth is, the reading encouraged my introspection. And I was smoking too much.

  I woke the next morning – oversleeping the alarm by two hours – to the long-noted, American-style telephone ring (these differences were still novel enough to surprise me then). I felt heavy-limbed and hungover. My right arm was dead. Pins and needles spread up from my right calf. When I set my feet on the floor my spine felt dislocated, as though I had wrestled all night with a strongman and lost. I vowed that I’d never smoke dope again.

  ‘Did I wake you, honey?’

  I covered the mouthpiece and cleared sleepy phlegm from my throat to make my aunt think I’d been up for a while.

  ‘Not at all, Aunt Julia.’

  ‘You’re not getting lonely and bored up there, Lew?’

  ‘No. I have good company. I’m working my way through the library.’

  ‘Pa had some weird things in that barn.’

  I decided not to mention the stolen book or the butterfly people. I didn’t want my aunt to think I was losing my mind as well as her possessions.

  ‘How about the car? You get it started?’

  ‘I took it up to Hunter. It drives fine.’

  This was also a lie. In the two weeks I’d been at my aunt’s I had not taken the car out once. The reading and the mild agoraphobia that excessive smoking of weed tended to bring on had limited my excursions to the waterfall and the general store.

  ‘Listen, I won’t be coming up this weekend, Lew. But if you want a break you’re welcome to come to the city for a few days. We have room.’

  ‘I’m fine. Thank you. I’ve found a good rhythm here.’

  ‘So how is the barn coming on?’

  ‘I’m a bit slow. But I’m enjoying it. It’s very therapeutic.’

  This was not a lie. The manual labour was helpfully thought-neutral, goal-achievable and outdoors. I had settled on a routine of painting nine to twelve, stopping for lunch, walking to the falls, reading, cataloguing in the afternoons, leaving evenings for more reading, smoking and, supposedly, writing; but the painting was the best part.