‘That’s as far as you go, boy,’ she said as I stepped onto the first step.
Edith hadn’t called me ‘boy’ before. Lamo, Limey, Punk, Motherfucker, Shithead. But these were all names I had learned to absorb with good humour and little offence.
‘Ma, Rip is not to blame for this.’ Isabelle was brave with righteousness, too.
‘I’ll deal with you later. For now, I’m gonna speak to the meddler.’
‘No, Ma. This isn’t his fight. This is about us.’
‘How could you, Isabelle Bosco?’ Edith made a grimace and spat.
‘I’ve been telling you she ain’t the saint you think, Ma,’ Mary said. ‘She prolly ain’t a virgin no more neither now. Not if she been on the road with Rip. He likes to get a girl when she’s on the road.’
A gun-toting, drunk Edith with a stoned but spurned Mary for cheerleader. This was looking bad for me. I couldn’t quite see Edith’s face as it was half in the shadow, but I felt sure she was smiling. Isabelle stood in the light thrown by the porchlight, one arm crossing and holding the other arm which was straight. She was not made for confrontation any more than I was, but she was sure of what she was doing.
‘We had no choice, Ma. Joe has to prove that the butterflies were caught by . . . my father.’
‘Don’t call him that.’
‘It’s what he is.’
Edith charged her glass with more claret.
‘Rip went and asked him if he would testify at the hearing. Prove the butterflies Joe sold were his. And he’s agreed.’
‘Did he now?’
‘He did.’
‘And ya’ll best friends now.’
‘Ma. I didn’t meet him.’
‘You sent the meddler.’
‘What would you have us do, Ma? Let Joe go to jail?’
‘Might be no bad thing. Might be better for all of us.’
‘You’re drunk.’
‘What’s got into you, girl? Right now you never looked more like him.’
‘They prolly got married or something.’ Mary sucked in and blew the smoke in big dragony clouds.
Celeste appeared and went and hugged Isabelle but as she came towards me Edith clapped her hands in warning. ‘Stay away from him, Ceelee.’ Celeste stopped mid-step. ‘He’s got a disease you don’t want to catch.’
‘It’s OK, Ceelee,’ I said. ‘I’m OK but do as Ma Edith says.’
‘Is it true you went to see the bad man, with Izzy?’
‘You get to bed now, Ceelee,’ Isabelle said.
Edith didn’t seem to care whether a child witnessed this or not. ‘She should stay, maybe. Needs to see who you really are.’
‘Ceelee?’ Isabelle pointed to the door and Celeste obeyed and went inside.
Edith sucked her teeth and took a sip of the claret.
‘Ain’t you going to join us, meddler? Or you going to stay lurking in the shadows there where you belong?’
The situation was so combustible I decided I should do whatever it took to keep it from catching fire. I went and sat on the armchair. Mary shifted her position and raised one leg revealing her knickers. I felt sadness for her. For what she didn’t yet know. Poor Mary. Her blood was more at fault than she was.
Isabelle went and sat on the balcony step, half in half out of the house.
‘What about you, miss? Are you too holy to drink with us?’ Edith asked her.
‘I don’t feel like drinking.’
Edith poured me a claret and handed it to me. There were bits of cork floating in the glass and I had to pick them out by dabbing my finger at them. She then raised the glass.
‘Blood of Christ.’
I raised it. Isabelle continued staring out across the lawn wanting none of this bad communion.
‘The priest said I couldn’t take communion no more. On account of being divorced. Anyway, Meddler. How was he?’
‘How was who?’ I wanted her to say his name!
‘Don’t make me shoot you already.’
The metal muzzle of the shotgun was lit up by the moon. I felt confident that she would not use it on me but a gun is a gun, a woman scorned is a woman scorned, and a drunk woman scorned with a gun is to be handled very carefully.
‘Oh. You mean Shelby?’
Edith actually shivered to the sounding of his name. ‘You know, sarcasm right now ain’t going to charm me, Meddler.’
‘He agreed to come to the hearing.’
‘What did you say to him, Meddler? I know you are a slippery-tongued snake, but he ain’t coming for the love of his children.’
‘Well, maybe not but he said he would like to meet them.’
‘Bull crap.’
‘It’s what he said. He said he never thought he’d see them again. That sounds like regret.’
‘Like I say: you gotta have a heart to have regret.’
‘Well, I’m just reporting what he said. He would like to meet his children.’
It didn’t feel fair or right that I should be the one to break the news to Mary about her paternity, but I wanted to give Edith the chance. Edith looked at Mary. It was very quick but it was unmistakable. But she said nothing. I was close enough to see her eye now and it was trained on me; I was in its cross hairs.
‘Ever since you came here I had this feeling that you were up to no good and that you would bring no good. Seems you been stirring things up.’
‘Pointing things out.’
‘Pointing things out. That’s thoughtful.’ Edith scrutinized me from the recess.
‘Mary been telling me about what you did on the road. Taking advantage of her. I could shoot you for that. Assaulting my daughter. You are quite the piece of work.’
I let her describe the piece of work I was (and some of it was true).
‘You pitch up all charming. Playing like you don’t know much of what is going on. And then get to make people like you. Then you start to stirring. Stirring where you should never think to stir. Planting little malignancies. Calling me names. Tyrant. Ain’t that what he said, Mary?’
‘That’s it exactly, Ma. That was even the very word. And other words.’
‘Times is a tyrant is what the people need. I don’t mind the description. But I do object to the describing. I object to you going behind my back. Stirring, meddling, planting.’
‘Ma. Please. Stop this.’ Isabelle put out her hands in a gesture of supplication which Edith ignored.
‘You like him, Meddler? “The Professor”.’
‘He was polite enough.’
‘I knew that aberration better than anyone. Better than he knew himself. I can see he charmed you.’
‘I don’t know if he charmed me, Edith. But I know he’s coming to the hearing.’
Edith tried to top up her glass but the bottle was empty and that was the last of Roth’s vintage. ‘This is one thing you did good, Meddler. This wine. I’ll remember you for this.’
‘When we do the deal I’m sure you’ll be able to afford some more.’
Edith laughed. Shelby’s description of her as an outlaw seemed spot on in this moment.
‘The deal is off. I’m cutting you loose.’
Edith pulled back the hammer on the shotgun. Funny how such a precise and delicate action is prelude to great mayhem.
‘Ma!’ Isabelle stepped between us.
‘Lookedy!’ Mary laughed. ‘She’ll lay down her life for you, Rip! True lurve.’
Mary walked to her mother’s side, lest we be in any doubt about whose side she was on.
I should have been afraid, the way I had been when guns were involved in Iowa, but I felt madly emboldened. The adrenalin acting liked a hundred shots of coffee on my system. Maybe being a finger-pull from death tipped me into it.
‘That’s enough, Edith. Enough of your control. Your self-pity. Your domination. Enough of your manipulations and accusations. And your bullying. Your boring anger and your bitterness. The way you constantly run Joe down, the way you patronize Mary and take advantage
of Isabelle. You are a tyrant. A petty one. You are a burning martyr. A foul-mouthed martyr who got burnt! And who wants the whole world to know it. That whole world being those you can control.’
I had the sensation of floating outside myself as I said this; of watching the scene, and wondering why I was being quite so bold when cowardice would have been the better part of valour. I don’t know what possessed me. In my family, disagreement was suppressed and then dressed up in non-saying, with the most patient and unemotional person (usually my father) winning the argument. Threats were never physical, always psychological. With Edith you were of course dealing with emotional threat that carried with it this physicality, this animal ferocity. Plus she had a gun. But on I went, happy to dig Rip’s grave. ‘It isn’t just Joe who had the monopoly on exaggeration around here. This one-eyed story you tell of being married to a selfish man and raising the children on your own, this story is all very well, but there’s another side to it. And you didn’t share that. But you know what, Edith? The real issue is that he isn’t the monster here. You are.’
There was a pause, and it was like that pause you get between a child falling over and hurting themselves and the actual cry of pain that follows, where the longer the pause the greater the injury. A few seconds passed and then gunshot sounded. I looked at my chest to see if Edith had put her bullet where her mouth was. But the absence of blood, the flakes of wood and the smoking gun barrel pointing up at the ceiling told me that I had survived. And then the second noise. I don’t even like recalling it. A purring growl that turned into words screamed through a whisper. ‘Get. Out. Of. My. House. Or I will kill you.’
I didn’t even bother fetching my things, such as they were. I walked back to Chuick with Edith firing a volley of invective at my back. It wasn’t until I reached the car that I realized that Isabelle had followed me. ‘Rip?’ I turned, wondering if she might want to come with me. ‘Where will you go?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I can stay at my aunt’s. I have Chuick. What about you? Come with me?’
Isabelle looked back toward her mother and half-sister. She was tempted. I am sure of that.
‘I have to be here.’
‘I understand.’
Isabelle then took my hand in her two.
‘Thank you.’ She then kissed me, on the cheek, still holding my hand in hers and squeezing it with a passionate gratitude and a tension that contained a promise that this was not the end.
I pulled away in Chuick at breakneck speed. As I descended the winding road through the forest, the headlights caught the reflection of a thousand eyes watching from the understorey. I fancied that landscape – loyal to its indigenous inhabitants – and was ready to spring to Edith’s defence. I was so pumped with the adrenalin of the face-off and this feral threat that I continued to drive as though being pursued by a thousand hell hounds until I had left those mountains. I drove as far as the gas would take me, eventually stopping at a small motel on the Hudson. At the time, I felt quite proud of myself. I had stood up to the tyrant and I had done it in front of the people I hoped to liberate, including the one I was keenest to impress. But while being banished with a death-threat singeing my neck hairs made for a thrilling send-off, I had no inclination to go back and test the sincerity of the threat. I realize now that Edith was showing great restraint in not shooting me that night. If I put myself in her calipers, knowing then what she knew that I didn’t, I think I’d have pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
In which Joe meets his father at the trial.
Is it possible to be homesick for a person? Because that is how it felt in the days before the hearing. Indeed, I thought about Joe more than Isabelle, or Mary. More than anyone. I missed him with such a deep longing that it made me realize Isabelle had been right: it was Joe I was in love with. The thought of him being in jail for forty days worried me, not because he couldn’t handle himself, or even because of his preternatural ability to wind people up and get into fights; but because incarceration for Joe was about as bad a punishment as you could devise for him. Twenty-four hours would have been hard; but to be unable to ramble unaccountable for forty days and nights, and not be allowed to stretch those great wings.
When I arrived at the courthouse, Joe was standing in the car park with his guard. He was wearing the bow tie and suit he’d been arrested in and his face made an effort to light up at seeing me.
‘Hey, Rip.’
‘Hey, Joe. You look good.’ This wasn’t true. He actually looked diminished and seemed enervated.
‘I was thinking that when he sees this suit he’ll think I turned out OK. That I’m an intelligent, stylish man who can afford a decent suit.’
I wasn’t sure if Joe meant his father or the magistrate judge but I didn’t have the heart to check. He then became distracted by something on the ground and squatted down on his haunches, to examine whatever it was. ‘Look at this, Rip. This is wonderful.’
There, next to Joe’s shiny black Oxfords, were two monarch butterflies feasting on a dog-turd.
‘These critters must have missed the migration. Got blown east on their way to Mexico.’
We stared at those two lost, shit-eating butterflies.
‘How would you interpret this sign, Rip?’ he asked, teasing me.
As signs go it wasn’t exactly a shooting star. ‘I’d say that it’s a sign we should go to Mexico after we’ve done with this shit?’
‘I’d like that, Rip,’ Joe said. ‘I’d like that very much.’
When he stood up I saw that, despite the familiar garb, he really did look different. He had lost weight and the volume of everything had been turned down a few notches. There were crinkles of anxiety on his brow. He looked a bit grey around the gills and he had a fat lip. It was clear, close up, that forty days and nights in jail had taken its toll.
‘How was it, Joe? Being locked up?’
‘It were super-interesting, Rip. An insight into the condition of man and the state of this nation.’
‘How did you kill time?’
‘I did some cogitationals. And I got my fellow incarcerees into bugs big time.’
‘You get that lip while you were in there?’
‘Aww. This is nothing.’
‘Theological argument?’
‘A man wanted to rape me, Rip. That was one cheek I weren’t turning.’
‘You fought back?’
‘I hit him once. I ain’t never hit a person before that.’
‘I imagine that once was enough.’
‘It’s true, he didn’t get up for a few hours. But I got some regard after that. I turned him round. I made a lep lover outta him. Then I converted the guard, too. He gave me some materials. Let me have a metal box with a glass lid. Some cotton so I could make some sleeving. I gave my fellow prisoners some lectures. Showed them how to raise their own butterflies. And they were hungry as caterpillars for knowledge. I told them to think of prison as a kind of chrysalis stage before they flew free. They were lovin’ on it.’
‘So. You ready for Joe Bosco v. The United States of America?’
‘I’m ready, Rip.’
‘It doesn’t sound like a fair contest to me. It’ll be over in seconds.’
‘I know,’ he said. But he didn’t sound like he believed it.
‘How do you feel about meeting your father?’
‘Huh?’
‘Your father. You ready to meet him?’
‘I appreciate him turning up. To exonerify me.’
‘You nervous?’
He tweaked his bow tie. ‘Are you kidding? I don’t do nerves, Rip.’
Just then Moroni pulled up in his Plymouth and parked next to Chuick. He greeted us both, ‘Mr Jones. Mr Bosco.’ His eyes were hidden behind shades but they were smiling, I was sure of it. He seemed disconcertingly at ease to me; no longer a man hell bent on capturing, killing, stuffing, mounting and hanging Joe on the wall of his office. More like a man confident of an outcome going his way
. We watched him saunter into the courthouse.
‘Looks like he got promoted,’ I said.
‘Bogus angel.’
Joe Bosco v. The United States of America deserved a better arena than that grotty magistrate’s courtroom in Hudson. The room was just clearing from the previous hearings and two court guards were escorting a felon in cuffs from the room, the felon muttering, ‘Ain’t no justice in this county.’
We found a room with a few dozen plastic stackable chairs, strip lighting that flickered and buzzed. A guard wearing a foodstained shirt, overweight even by American standards, was all that stood between enraged felons and a judge’s judgements. A magistrate judge who looked to have other – more important – things on his mind, like the itch at the end of his nose, was already sat at his desk going through the paperwork. Joe and I took our chairs on the left. The prosecuting lawyer was already sat on the groom side. Moroni wasn’t in the room, nor was Joe’s father.
‘Seems that tarditude runs in the family,’ I said to Joe, who was dee-dee-deeing, making an unconvincing show of ease.
The hearing was set for 11 a.m. and the magistrate judge started it bang on time.
‘OK. Let’s start. We’re calling now Mr Joseph . . . Bosci? Bosco. I’m sorry. Please come forward. OK. Mr Bosco, good morning, sir. You have been charged with selling Appendix I butterflies in contravention of the Lacey Act. I understand you are representing yourself?’
‘It’s the only way to be sure, Your Magisty.’
‘ “Sir” is fine, Mr Bosco. And I must warn you against a repeat of your previous contempt at the arraignment.’
‘I apologize, sir. I believe I learned my lesson. And although I still say that the land of the free is being strangled by legalism and religious bigots I’d like to let that be water passing under a bridge of no returning.’
‘Very well. And you are calling your own witness today.’
‘Yes, sir. I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to set the records straight here and prove my innocence in this business of selling protected species and I am sure that when my witness arrives and takes the stand he can exonerify me and put this case down like a litter of kittens.’
The Killing of Butterfly Joe Page 33
