The Killing of Butterfly Joe

by Rhidian Brook

  Joe ended his story – a story in which I featured merely as the English Assistant – with the bold claim that if he sold the collection to the Wizard he would make the movie himself and pay Mark to write the script. It was hard not to conclude that Joe, as punishment for my betrayal in questioning his own story earlier, was getting me back with this reckless, giddy giving away of his life story. I had been usurped as his chief chronicler!

  ‘What do you think, Mark? Think it’ll make a movie?’

  Mark stayed silent for a while. I could tell he was captivated by Joe’s energy and crazy dazzle – as I had been – and that he, like me, wanted some part of it. But he was acting like the prospector for gold who pretends he hasn’t seen the nugget in the river bed.

  ‘It’s got something.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘The story has to have a happy ending, Mark. Life’s a comedy. Even though it threatens all the time to be a tragedy, it winds up a comedy. That’s the gospel truth. The trouble is, people stop at the tragic part. It’s almost easier to take. People say happy endings are for fools and crazies. Well I’m with the fools and the crazies – and the kids. I have more where that came from. That’s just a brief outline there.’

  Mark wanted to know more, particularly about the rare butterflies, and the collector we were going to meet. He also wanted to know about Joe’s father. If he was still alive. Joe furnished his new best friend and chronicler with all kind of details (details I had been trying to extract myself). My usurpation was completed with Joe’s inviting the scriptwriter to join us in our onward journey to meet the Wizard – and even to come stay in the Catskills when he was done, meet the family, interview his Ma, meet Isabelle. Everything I thought was mine was being offered to this total stranger who then rubbed salt (he must have known) into my wound by asking if I had some quarters so he could make some calls to reschedule things and travel on with us. After that Mark was practically casting the movie of Joe’s life, the movie Mark was going to write.

  When we stopped for gas I announced our need for help with it but the hitcher, no doubt drawing on the unspoken right of the writer to pay for nothing, kept his money in his jeans. He said he was waiting on the green light for them to start shooting his script, any minute now. Joe, who was well used to spending the collateral of nothing, was more than sympathetic to this and told him not to worry. He could pay him back when they made the movie! Mark went to break my five dollars into quarters, Joe starting waxing mystical on our good fortune in meeting Mark.

  ‘You see, Rip. There is a law in the universe that says you keep your eyes open and you will meet who you should meet.’

  ‘He’s an asshole,’ Mary repeated. ‘And I’m going to tell him some truths.’

  ‘Mary, with respect. You and the truth are not great buddies.’

  ‘I don’t like him,’ I said. ‘I don’t trust him. He says he’s a writer but what’s he written? And why did you tell him all that stuff – about your father? And the five-winged blue morphos. A complete stranger? You gave him your pearls, Joe.’

  ‘Aw, Rip. Come on! There’s enough to go around. You were a stranger not so long ago.’

  As Joe talked to the attendant I went to buy some cigarettes, in a petulant funk. Mark was having a cigarette out the back, looking out across a grassy, flat nothing. I went and asked him for a cigarette and we stood side by side, writer and manqué writer.

  ‘He’s not for real, right?’ he asked. ‘The million-dollar butterflies? It’s hot air, yes?’

  ‘Oh. It’s all bullshit with Joe.’

  ‘It’s unique bullshit though. And the butterflies are poetic. But the million-dollar butterfly. I could use that.’

  ‘Use?

  ‘It’s a great title. I just need a pitch to go with it. Is he being serious about that part? He really has a bug that valuable?’

  ‘Joe makes a lot of claims he can’t substantiate.’

  ‘That’s clear. But I’d like to bottle some of that wild energy. And the girl should do a screen test.’

  ‘Screen test?’

  ‘Screen test. That bone structure. The colouring. The whole . . . aura she gives off. She really his sister?’

  ‘So he says.’

  ‘Crazy scene. Selling bugs for a living. Makes for a good story though.’

  I watched him saunter off. I was envious, of course. But my aggravation was also born of a possessiveness, an appropriate jealousy for Joe and his story. I had come to feel that these people, and my adventures – going to see a man called the Wizard, ‘million-dollar butterflies’, rags to riches, crazy beautiful sisters, terrifying mother, genius crazy father, maybe another father – were all mine. So you can see how I might feel bad about someone coming and ‘taking’ them, saying ‘I can use’ them. Unlike Joe, who was profligate and generous with himself and his life, I didn’t want to share the story with others and it wasn’t until he started telling this guy these things that I realized just how much I felt that sense of ownership, that they were my stories to write about, not someone else’s. I didn’t want someone coming along and taking them, telling them and selling them; I wanted to be the teller and I would do – if not quite anything – quite a bit to keep it that way.

  While Mark was making his call I walked back to the car, striding purposefully. Mary was at the wheel and Joe was in the back. He’d fetched his attaché case from the trunk in order to show Mark the freaks. I got in the car, calm and said, ‘Drive!’

  Mary looked at me quizzically.

  ‘I’ll explain. Trust me on this. Drive!’

  She fired up Chuick.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Joe asked, looking to see where Mark was.

  ‘Trust me, Joe. You don’t want that guy in the car. I’ll explain. Let’s go!’

  Mary floored it. Chuick screeching off the forecourt and onto the road. I didn’t even look back.

  ‘What’s going on, Rip?’

  When we were about a mile from the gas station, I told them. I told them that whilst having a cigarette with Mark, I noticed that he had a small tattoo on the inside of his arm, a serial number. And when I asked him what it was he said he’d done time, and when I asked him what for, he’d said armed robbery, and that when I asked him if he really was a scriptwriter, he’d said he wasn’t but he felt he had to earn his keep, to sing for his supper as it were, so he invented a different person for each ride, to fit with what might best impress the drivers, that when we picked him up he’d decided to be a Hollywood scriptwriter, and when I gave him the money for the phone calls he said it wasn’t to LA or anyone in Hollywood, but to his parole officer in Detroit. The guy just got out of prison for armed robbery.

  I stopped then, for fear of overreaching myself (if you’re going to lie, lie hard but not too long).

  ‘Goddamn.’ Joe was properly flummoxed.

  ‘That’s why he was interested in the five-winged blue morpho, Joe!’

  ‘Goddamn!’

  ‘He probably intended to call his partner or someone, and steal it. After you’d blabbed about it.’

  ‘I read him wrong, Rip. I totally read him wrong.’

  As Joe pictured the implications of my outrageous fib, he shook his head, still properly mystified, but relieved.

  ‘Wow, Rip. You did good.’

  ‘Sometimes it pays to be a bit cynicalistic about people, Joe.’

  And then, over the noise of the wind, Mary yelled back at her brother.

  ‘I told you he was an asshole!’

  I think we were all equally irritated with one another after that. Joe at me for siding with Mary. Mary at Joe for disbelieving her in front of me. Me with Joe for flirting with the writer and me with myself for doing such a shitty thing to someone who, if I had met under any other circumstance, I would have liked, made friends and gone on to make movies with, maybe even a movie called The Million-Dollar Butterfly.

  Silence reigned for about a hundred miles. Even Jimmy Carter was quiet. Too
quiet, it turned out.

  ‘Jimmy ain’t moving,’ Mary said. ‘We should never had brought him.’

  Jimmy Carter died, somewhere on 10.

  Joe looked at the limp bird and lifted him from the box. ‘Poor Jimmy. He’s deader than a pound of roadside stew.’

  We buried Jimmy Carter on the side of the road where Joe said a few words.

  ‘We commend Jimmy Carter to you, Lord. Forgive us for not being more careful. I’m sorry we didn’t get to set him flyin’ free in the Tetons. Rest in peace, little bird.’

  If you wanted an ill omen, there it was. Hindsight is useless (I know this now!) and hindsight about a piece of foresight is particularly worthless. But I had a piece of foresight during the ceremony, a vision that I was heading towards trouble; a formless trouble on that bright, lying horizon.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In which we meet the Wizard and everything changes.

  We had been driving for hours through the summer-yellowed grass of Wyoming, towards the Grand Tetons where Joe had hoped to set Jimmy Carter free. Poetic descriptions of scenery won’t change the facts of what was to come and have little bearing on the essential events of my story, so I’ll not go on about those mountains too much. I wouldn’t want to put you off seeing them. There’s nothing more irritating than someone describing something wonderful they have seen that you haven’t and then insisting you see it because ‘you haven’t lived until you do’. It’s hard not to hear the implicit brag in that urging: my life has been more interesting than yours. Panoramas may stop hearts of men but they rarely change them. That said, if you haven’t seen the Grand Tetons, try. They are something to behold. The best mountains are always the ones that start from a low base, like a flat plain, and these seemed to do just that, rising seven thousand feet straight from the plateau. There are higher mountains in this world but not many as sudden as those great, jagged teeth that appear as the first serious obstacle on your journey westward across the American flats. Poor Jimmy Carter would have loved whirling and careening in the air here. In the excitement of Jimmy’s death, ditching the hitcher, Mary’s theories about her paternity, and my annoyance towards Joe for refusing to discuss the subject, I had almost forgotten that, for Joe, the real purposes of this trip was to go see a man called the Wizard about selling the collection. It all seemed so far-fetched. Even for Joe. But then he suddenly stopped to make a call. ‘They told me to call once we got to Wyoming.’ He was given instructions as to how to find the house by Roth’s private secretary. She told Joe the Wizard’s real name: Truman Roth III, and said Truman was looking forward to meeting us and seeing the five-winged morphos. She told us that the entrance to the property was halfway between Dubois and the Continental Divide, just off Highway 26. We were to look for a small Exxon gas station and count five miles west from there until we saw a gate and a cattle grid and a sign saying ‘Hexapoda’. When we found the gas station, Joe started to sing like a crazy man.

  ‘Who wants to meet a trillionaire? I do!

  Who wants to sell bugs everywhere? I do!’

  My hair was almost solid from the dust that had filled the car on account of having the windows down, Joe’s shirt had a cruciform sweat stain on the back, and I could smell Mary’s spice in the mix; add to that the lingering smells of Jimmy Carter and we were a reeking bunch.

  ‘You think we should smarten up a bit, Joe? They may not let us in, dressed like tramps.’

  ‘Truman Roth III ain’t going to be interested in our apparel, Rip! He probably sees the best dressed, the best educated, and smartest people day in day out; I doubt he gives a flying fish about any of that. We should be ourselves. Authenticulacy is what counts. And it’s not what we’re wearing. It’s what we’re carrying. We could be arriving in a twenty-car presidential cavalcade of shiny black limousines, dressed in cashmere suits and silk pants, speaking Latin and still not be allowed in to see him. There is only one thing that gets us through the gates of this particular heaven, and it’s four inches tall and six inches wide, a heavenly blue with something not even the Angel Gabriel has. That’s what allows us to enter the throne room of this trillionaire and speak as equals. That’s the thing that makes us righteous in his eyes, Rip!’

  Initial security at the gates of this particular heaven wasn’t as stringent as you’d expect. It consisted of the cattle grid, a single-bar gate and a sentry box with a bored Hispanic guard, shelling peanuts, sitting in the shade of the little shelter. A three-foot-high cow fence ran off in either direction – Canada one end, Mexico the other. The name of the house was crudely painted on a piece of junkyard wood with an arrow pointing onwards: ‘Hexapoda’.

  This had Joe chuckling.

  As we pulled up to the grid Mary said what I was thinking:

  ‘Don’t look like the gates of no trillionaire to me.’

  ‘You think he wants everyone to know where he lives by building some fancy gates and a wall?’

  Joe had to open the door to speak to the guard, once more cursing the broken window and promising to get it fixed.

  ‘We have an appointment to see Mr Roth. My name is Joseph Bosco. These are Mary Bosco and Rip Van Jones.’

  Saint Peter didn’t look like he was expecting us. Our names weren’t on any list.

  ‘Wait here, señor.’ The guard stepped away and started to speak into his walkie-talkie. We could hear the squawk of the receiver but not what he said. He spoke fast and in Spanish.

  ‘If this guy’s so wealthy how comes he lives like a cowboy?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mary. Maybe he likes horses. You think he has one home? He’s got homes all over.’

  The guard kept giving us sideways glances. His conversation was going on a little too long for my liking and Mary’s patience.

  ‘He’s got no idea who we are, Joe. This is bullshit. We drove all this way for diddly squat.’

  The doubtful guard was gesticulating at Chuick, no doubt thrown at having to admit such a shit heap.

  ‘He’s real pissed.’

  Joe started humming ‘who wants to be a trillionaire’ again. It was hard not to agree with Mary, that this was as far as Joe’s bullshit was going to get us; that we’d reached the end of the blagger’s road. Then, just like that, there was a transformation in the guard. He stopped talking mid-sentence with his mouth open and his eyes widening and he started to nod his head slowly and look back over at us. Oh, OK. He came back a new man, all smiles.

  ‘Go right ahead, Mr Bosco. Go straight up the track. After fifteen miles you’ll come to a second set of gates. You’ll have to clear security there. They’ll take you to the complex. Buenos dias.’

  ‘Muchas gracias!’

  Joe saluted the guard and we juddered over the cattle grid and into the Wizard’s land. We were not in Kansas and the road wasn’t brick, but the bleached stubble and sandy dust bisecting grassland, with cattle one side and horses the other, was almost yellow. The road ran in a straight line toward the mountains. Behind us, Chuick left a delta of dust that consumed our past.

  ‘O ye of little faith!’ Joe said.

  ‘Yeah, we’ll see,’ Mary said.

  ‘You know that they say if your drive is a mile long you’re a millionaire,’ Joe said.

  ‘They?’

  ‘People. The people who say things. It’s true. And if your drive is ten miles long you’re a billionaire.’

  ‘Or a cowboy.’

  ‘So if it’s nearly twenty miles long you gotta believe he could be doing pretty good for himself. A double billionaire. Which gotta be a trillionaire.’

  ‘He probably ain’t even a millionaire.’

  ‘Mary, your cynicalistic ways continue to blind you to the potential joys and wonders of this world.’

  Even accounting for the ‘math of Joe’, Roth would at least have to be a millionaire. The fact the guard called Roth’s house ‘a complex’ was promising, as was the twenty-mile drive to get there; but I still didn’t believe we were going to meet a man described by Joe as one o
f the world’s richest men, the owner of the single largest private collection of butterflies on earth.

  ‘Look!’

  Joe was pointing ahead, to the mountain where, halfway up, we could see the straight, hard lines of a building growing out of the rock. It created the strange effect of looking as though the mountain had been landscaped to fit the property rather than the other way round. The house – we were about to learn – had been built into a rocky outcrop of the Tetons in homage to the ancestral pueblos of the Navajo at Canyon de Chelly in Arizona. From below it did not look that big but that was because it was nearly all facade. Its most visible feature was the huge jutting balcony. The real house must have been within the mountain.

  ‘It takes some dough to put a house there.’

  The road started to camber down into a gully which formed a natural funnel to the next entrance. Here we were left in no doubt that we were on the property of a very wealthy person indeed. The gates were wrought iron and the fencing high and electric. There were two security guards with weapons hanging at their hips, standing either side of the gates, which opened automatically as we approached. We passed through the gates and a third guard directed us to a parking bay. Chuick must have been the most beat-up car ever to make it this far up this drive, but if the guard was bothered he wasn’t showing it. He asked us all – ‘Señora y señores’ – to ‘exit the vehicle’ and said that a transport would take us to the house. Joe joked that he didn’t have time to valet Chuick and the man said he’d have it cleaned and offered to jiffy lube it. We were searched and asked to step through a metal-detecting arch. Joe’s attaché case was opened and a device like a Geiger counter run over it and then over us. We were then sprayed with a liquid before being led toward a shuttle bus. On the bus Joe pronounced loudly on the perils of wealth.