The Killing of Butterfly Joe

by Rhidian Brook

  ‘And the book? You getting some writing done?’

  ‘It’s really flowing. Like the Kaaterskill Falls, Aunt Julia.’ I winced at this embellishment.

  ‘Lew, that’s wonderful.’

  My third lie in as many minutes. It was interesting how easy I found it to deliver these lies. I consider myself to be an honest person but over the years I had learned to tell lies largely to avoid disappointing people, seeing it as both a sort of kindness as well as a self-protection. In the year since I’d left university I had started telling people that I was a writer. This was a lie that grew in the soil of my failure to get a decent job and a need to differentiate myself from my professionally successful siblings and friends who were thrusting ahead of me in the world, and a way of placating my father who had despaired at my failure to find a real profession. It was also an enigmatic and purposeful (as well as handily hard-to-verify) answer to the question: ‘So what are you doing these days, Lew?’ When I first tried the line on a girl at a party she had been so taken with it I decided that I would use it for as long as I could get away with it. It seemed to work a kind of magic on people, granting me favours and, at the very least, unwarranted admiration from strangers and even friends. Only my father dissented; laughing in my face when I told him of my plan to write a book, a travelogue written in verse and set in America. (My Americodyssey). My aunt, however, loved the idea of me – someone, anyone – writing a book almost more than I did and she indulged me by setting up a desk and typewriter in the barn and politely asking after my progress whenever she called, which was every other day. I went along with the pretence, discussing the things I had not-written as though they existed on the page. Sometimes I liked the sound of what I was not-writing so much I wondered why I wasn’t actually writing it. In truth, I had written something the night before but it wasn’t ‘The Book’ I’d set out to write. It was a poem inspired by my strange day at the waterfall; but I didn’t want to tell my aunt about this lest it led me to telling her about the stolen book and the butterfly people or, worse, her asking me to read the poem to her. It was somehow easier telling her about a book I was not-writing than the poems I was.

  ‘I’m pleased things are working out, Lew. You’re OK with everything now?’

  ‘I think so. I’m getting there.’

  By ‘everything now’ my aunt meant the death of my father, still four weeks fresh at that point. I had not disabused her of a belief that I had taken his death badly. My ‘loss’ gave me leverage, permitting me to request things that might otherwise seem cheeky; things such as asking if I could stay longer in her house than the original two weeks she’d offered.

  ‘Grief does strange things,’ she said. ‘I know I felt weird when my Pa died. I couldn’t face people for months. I think you’re doing great, Lew.’

  When I got to work on the barn that morning I found myself picking up the argument with the butterfly guy – really an argument with myself that I’d had the night before. It was about ‘reading’ versus ‘experiencing’ and I was winning this argument handsomely when a car pulled up the drive, country music blaring. It was a sedan of unidentifiable make or model; its bonnet was metallic blush-red, the rest of the car was cobalt-blue. A man in a baggy yellow cotton jacket, lilac shirt, green shorts, white socks and trainers stepped from the car and it took me a few moments to realize that it was Joe Bosco. Joe’s jacket was too small for him and his shorts were a two-tone moss–lime green. Despite the appalling, ill-fitting, uncoordinated get-up, his sheer animation and wonderful physique made it all work.

  ‘Hey there, Lew!’

  It is a measure of my neediness for contact that someone speaking my name came as a pleasant surprise, even when that person was someone I regarded, at that point, as a thieving hick. But I was immediately glad to see him. He was carrying a book and a glass box and came up the path looking all around, assessing the premises as if measuring it out for his own purposes.

  ‘Oh my!’ he said. ‘Would you look at this.’

  My aunt’s house was pretty enough but hardly exceptional. It was a standard white clapboard ‘New Englander’; it had a veranda with wicker chairs and roses growing on the timbers, a white picket fence and an average-sized barn for those parts. It could have been transposed to any Midwestern town without causing comment or offence.

  ‘Here.’ He held out the book to me. It was my stolen Classic American Stories. ‘My goddamn little sister. She ran off with it. I only caught up to her at the bottom of the creek. She does these things. She’s a klepto.’ The book’s spine was broken but its return was so unexpected I didn’t complain. ‘This is for you, too.’

  He handed me a 6" by 4" glass box with five clear sides and blacked-out base. It contained the swallowtail he’d caught and killed in front of me the day before. The butterfly had been mounted upon a piece of smooth, pale-grey driftwood and its wings were fully expanded. I could clearly see their intricate venation, like the lead lines holding in pieces of stained glass. It’s easy to overlook that kind of detail in the blur of brilliance that is a butterfly flying by, but caught and displayed in a box you noticed things. It was just as he’d said to me the day before: ‘She’ll give people more joy dead than alive. You’ll see.’

  ‘This is a fine barn you’re working on here.’

  He left me holding the butterfly and the book and marched up towards the ladder. He grabbed the rails and shook them to test the steadiness. He looked at the tin of paint and sniffed it. ‘You need a hand here.’ It wasn’t a question and he wasn’t asking permission. I’m not sure Joe ever asked permission.

  ‘What about your clothes?’ I offered, lamely, not wanting him to mess up my system, such as it was. (If there was a system, Joe would mess it up.)

  He took off his jacket and threw it on the grass, rolled up his shirt sleeves, picked up the brush and dipped it in the tin and started to layer on the paint thick and fast, with great splashy strokes, singing to himself as he did: ‘Dee dee dee. Dee dee dee.’ He had such a superabundance of energy and it could not be contained.

  ‘You’ve done this before, then.’

  ‘I’ve been varnishing barns since I was eating Gerber. You gotta get it on quick. One time, when we lived in Michigan, I was painting the barn just hours before we had a tornado. When the tornado came our two dogs would not come inside the shelter. We were yelling at them but they just wanted to bark at that twister. So the twister comes and it picks them up and slams them against the side of the barn and leaves two doggie-shaped imprints there on the un-dried paint.’

  He painted manically, for about ten minutes, covering twice what I would have done in the time, and as he painted, he asked me questions as though I were the visitor and he the host. How had he done that? How dare this guy barge in to my nice, ordered life and turn everything upside down, with his theologies and entomologies and mangled etymologies!

  ‘I’m curious. What brings you here, Lew? You didn’t come all this way just to paint a barn.’

  I set the case with the swallowtail on the garden table and explained my family connection, how my mother’s sister had married an American and moved here when she was just twenty. How I had always wanted to see America. I spoke euphemistically about my travel plans. My intention to work here and there. For good measure, I told him I was writing a book. I gave him a fair bit of myself and as I talked it became clear that my need to talk was greater than I cared to admit. The information poured out of me with a candidness almost inappropriate outside of a counselling couch or lover’s bed.

  Joe didn’t appear to be listening. He nodded away but – like an actor in a badly dubbed foreign film – the timing of his nods and his cod-meaningful expressions didn’t quite synch with what I was telling him. Then, as abruptly as he’d begun painting, he stopped, descended the ladder, tossing the brush to the ground, spattering the green grass blue.

  ‘Gotta see inside this barn.’

  He climbed the side steps to the open door in two bounds. He was al
ways moving, like the Cat In The Hat, setting a plate spinning and then moving on to the next plate, then the next. He never heard the crashing behind him because he’d already moved on.

  ‘You must be kidding me!’

  When I caught up to him, Joe was running his hand along a bookshelf, shaking his head.

  ‘How many books are here?’

  ‘Ten thousand. Exactly ten thousand, apparently.’

  ‘It would take you twenty years to read them all.’

  Joe stopped and pulled a book from a shelf. He started to read from it haltingly, in a robotic, flat monotone giving the prose no chance of success whatsoever: ‘ “At the clubhouse the next morning, the unshaven Knights were . . . lumbering and red-eyed. They moved around list . . . listlessly and cursed each step.” ’ He stopped reading and tossed the book aside whilst reaching for another. He read from the next in the same manner, managing to make a different author sound like the last. ‘ “Cheese it, the cops,” whispered Bettina. “Why, Blake,” she said loudly, “you . . . angel ape . . . angel ape . . . of a stud, who do you think I’m talking to?” Eeuuu, that sucks.’ He threw the book to the floor, its pages flapping as it landed spatchcocked, a broken bird. He grabbed another: ‘ “Some months after, dragged to the gibbet at the tail of a mule, the black met his voiceless . . . his voiceless end.” ’ He paused, deigning to look at the cover. I reached out this time and took the book – Billy Budd and Other Stories – from his hand before he threw it across the room.

  ‘Please be careful. They don’t belong to me. Besides. It’s hardly fair, is it? Reading random extracts like that. To make some kind of point.’

  ‘The point is this, Lew: there’s a time for reading stories, and there’s a time for making them. You read too much about other people’s lives, you forget to live your own.’

  He moved on, measuring the floor with his metre-length strides. When he reached the end he saw something in the corner. ‘What have we got here?’ He was inspecting a spider’s web in which there was a single butterfly wing. He extracted the wing from the web taking care not to break the threads. Joe could be tremendously gentle when he wanted to be and, despite the violence of things to come, I believed then and still believe now that he wouldn’t hurt a fly (unless severely provoked) or a butterfly (unless he could sell it). He studied the brown and – to my eyes – featureless wing the way a person might read a text. He was at his most calm and contented when ‘lepping’. As I watched him studying the insect I studied him and noticed discolouring on his wrists and forearms, scarring that looked like skin-grafts.

  ‘Papilio ulysses here? Can’t be,’ he said. ‘Met a bad end.’

  A butterfly named after my hero? I took that as a sign.

  The cat then put back his hat and resumed to turning things upside down. The typewriter was next in his sights and he was on it before I realized it still had my previous night’s effort sitting on the platen.

  ‘This your book?’ My heart flopped then spluttered.

  ‘No . . .’

  He bent over and twisted the platen knob to release the sheet. Then, to my horror, he started to read the poem out loud, in the same sense-crushing way he’d read from the random books.

  ‘ “At Kaaterskill Falls

  I met a man

  Who killed a butterfly

  With bare hands;

  Then saw a girl,

  In the brook

  Who killed me, too

  With one bare look.” ’

  ‘Please. It’s not really for . . .’

  ‘This is great. I’m in a poem! This is me and Mary, right?’

  ‘It could be. It’s just . . . thoughts.’

  ‘Well. I like these thoughts . . .

  ‘ “They stole my stories

  Then my pride

  The book no longer

  At my . . .” ’

  I had to physically retrieve the sheet to stop him. I put out my hand. ‘It’s really not meant for others to read.’

  ‘Aw . . . don’t be so sensitive. This is funny.’

  ‘Well it’s not actually meant to be.’

  He handed me the poem back. He seemed genuinely tickled by my efforts but I’d rather have swum naked in front of him than have him read on.

  ‘I tell you, we could use a wordy guy. I’m looking for one right now.’

  He started rubbing his hands together and then he struck the pose of someone about to make an offer: hands out palms up, the purpose-driven smile.

  ‘Look. Llewellyn, Lew . . . whatever, – and we have to do something about the name – I’ll be straight with you. When I first saw you I thought, “Who is this pale, puny, good-for-nothing European guy lying by the river, smoking weed and reading a book?” I saw you from the top of the falls before we got to the pool and I thought you looked dissatisfied, like some philosopher, the way you were lying on your side with one leg up. I mean it was hot as heck and yet there you were, nose down inside this book, reading it as if it contained an answer to life’s mysteries. I was sure that it contained no such thing and that even if it did you weren’t going to put it to it any use. When we talked I kinda liked you, and some of what you said about beauty and such, though I knew you were looking down your nose at us, like you thought we were a couple of redneck retards. You didn’t disguise that too well.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking that.’

  ‘It’s OK. I’m used to it. But I was impressed you made the dive. I didn’t think you would do that. That showed me you had some life – some daring – in you. But then Mary-Anne steals the book! I chase after her. We get back home and later I am lying in bed feeling bad about this, and I’m half thinking about the day and some of the things you said, and the way you said them, and it comes to me that maybe you could be the answer to my prayers. At the precise moment when my business is growing and I am in need of intelligent, articulative people, I meet you. You could be the right man at the right time! With that voice and your way with words and your understated manner. So I came here not only to return your book but to make you a proposal: to offer you a job working for us. I’ll put you in charge of marketing. You will be paid well. You’ll have a car. And, as a bonus, you will get to see this great country of ours. Although its greatness doesn’t necessarily lie in what Americans say or think is great about it. But I do promise you this: if you come and work for me, I will show you America.’

  Joe was raising a severe challenge to my continued days of hermitry. When he was selling hard, when he wanted something, words and thoughts poured out of him like an Ontario over a Niagara. He worked up a flow and rode the froth and foam.

  ‘I did some telesales once. But I’m not sure I’d make much of a salesman.’

  ‘That’ll be your secret weapon. Modesty. Understatement. This country’s overrun with guys full of their own gas and there’s no trick of the trade the public hasn’t seen or heard. But you’ll bring something new. With your cynicalistic European ways and your way with quotes. I can see you are an educated man. A refined person. You are not easily impressed. These are things we need. Qualities I need.’

  ‘What would I have to sell? I don’t even know what you do. What your business is.’

  ‘Come and see.’

  He led me back to his car. Despite my above-average knowledge of American makes and models, I really couldn’t identify this vehicle. Its front grille didn’t look like it belonged to the rest of the car and was tilted down on one side. The radiator chrome had a Buick emblem but the side signs said it was a Chevrolet. A bumper sticker read What the hell, it runs.

  ‘What make of car is this?’

  ‘It’s my Chuick. Maybe the only Chuick in the world. Rarer than a five-winged morpho. I hit a deer in Pennsylvania and had to rebuild the front. It used to be a Chevrolet Caprice Classic but after the accident I had to fix it up with a Buick Delta 88 grille and the front fender. I came pretty close to meeting my Maker that day. The car flipped a full one-eighty and drove into a spruce. I got cut up pretty bad
.’

  ‘Is that how you got . . . those?’

  He scratched his forearms and paused for a moment (Joe’s state of perpetual motion made any pause seem like a meditation). Then he laughed. ‘Nah. I got these when I was a kid.’

  He leant in the driver’s side to pop the trunk then went to the back and lifted the lid, inviting me to look in. Was he about to show me something awful: a body perhaps, guns, or some illicit contraband? No. It was a trunk full of butterflies. Butterflies in glass cases. Small, medium and large cases with one, two or three butterflies per case, all mounted on driftwood, some decorated with dried flowers. The colours and patterns flew out in a dazzle of visual information, black blotches, blue crenels, cinnabar eyespots, neon blues, parakeet greens (phrases I would come to learn and use later).

  ‘You sell these?’

  ‘We sure do.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘To gift shops. Flower shops. A few department stores. And pretty soon to America’s Number One retail chain. J. C. Penney. We sell in eleven states so far. But we’re about to go national. And that’s where you come in. I’m gonna need extra hands on the wheel. Extra heads in the room.’

  ‘Is it . . . I mean, is it OK to sell them?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Do you catch them yourself?’

  ‘You’re kidding me!’ He picked up a case containing an extravagantly marked little lime green and black beauty. ‘This one’s from Australia. That one’s from Alaska. And then . . .’ He reached in and held up a case containing a single, large, neon-blue giant. ‘These blue morphos are from a farm in Costa Rica. Our Number One Seller. Although we’re trying to rear our own.’

  The stunning specimen was as big as a man’s hand. ‘It looks rare.’

  ‘Nah! These bugs are as common as ants. We offer seventy-two different species in total. All legally sourced and CITES approved. I’ll explain that later. Look at it.’