Judge Breece looked at his notepad, squinting at it and frowning. It was the gesture of a man who hadn’t given it more than a few seconds’ preparation and had a lot of cases to get through that day.
‘Is this witness here?’
‘Not yet, sir.’
‘I understand your witness will be able to prove that the butterflies you have been selling were grandfathered.’
‘Oh yes, sir. The witness is one of the leading entomologists in the world, respected in all continents for his erudiculation, caught those butterflies twenty years ago and can prove it.’
‘Well, I look forward to seeing this evidence. I understand this is your father?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Did you confirm a time with him?’
‘Oh no, sir. I ain’t talked to him in twenty years. Not since he left for Colombia to look for the butterflies in question. Although I can recall the last conversation I had with him in full, sir. He was just about to catch a plane from LA. Dressed in his shorts. Always wore shorts. He had his lepping gear with him. And he leans down. And he says, “Joseph. I am going to bring you something no man has ever seen.” And I ask him what. And he says it was a butterfly with five wings. And then he tells me. “Keep them safe.” This was before the fire. And most of my father’s butterflies being destroyed. Apart from the most valuable ones which we kept in a trunk. That was the trunk I pulled from the fire, sir.’ Joe held up his wrists to show the judge the scars. ‘That was 1967, sir. Twenty years ago. Or one whole Van Winkle, as my friend Rip here would say.’
‘Right. And it is these butterflies that you have been selling recently that you claim to be grandfathered. The ones caught back then. Before the Endangered Species Act made them illegal.’
‘Correct, sir. A set of the Big Four. A case of Palos Verdes blue.’
‘And your father can prove that these were his?’
‘He kept records of everything, sir. He’s an Einstein of entomological accounting.’
‘Well. Is there any word on where he might be?’
The prosecuting lawyer raised his hand.
‘Yes, Mr Kelly?’
‘Sir, Mr Wolff is with agents from the FWA. Going through the notebooks. Trying to match his records with the contraband inventory. Agent Moroni has asked for another fifteen minutes.’
‘Well, we can wait till 11.15, Mr Kelly. Mr Bosco, do you have anything else to add before that?’
‘I can share some insights on the penal system, sir. That may be of interest to you and might even make your job a little easier.’
Breece smiled, gamely. ‘I’m all ears, Mr Bosco.’
‘Well. I should say that the forty days and nights I have endured in the state prison were no great deprivation and that unlike the Lord I got fed and watered and not a single devil offered me the earth. But, it seems to me you got too many ’telligent and useful folks locked up doing nothing much for having done nothing much. For exampling, I shared a cell with a man who made a bomb out of beer just to see if he could. Now that man might better be used to work for the government or the military than “sitting in Sing Sing doing nothing”, which is a song I wrote while I was in there. It works to the tune of “Singing In The Rain”, if you’d like me to sing it for you.’
‘Please, continue with your penal analyses, Mr Bosco.’
‘Sure. Let’s just say that I have learned even in this short incarcerating what it is to be a free man and to appreciate that. It were a levelling experience, sir. A reminder that we are all broken vessels. I should say that the Lord’s presence was thick behind those bars, sir. I’d say I encountered him more clearly there than in any congregation I worshipped at. It was illuminating.’
It was a relief to hear the Joe I knew and loved, full of his usual epizeuxes, exaggerations and escalations – and the interbreeding and mish-mashing of words that weren’t meant to mate with each other; making pronouncements on the law and state of the nation and what the Holy Spirit was up to. It was a pity Joe’s father was not there to hear it.
At 11.15, with Joe in full flow, the door opened and Joe’s father entered, followed by Agent Moroni still looking far too pleased with himself for my liking. Joe’s father sat without a glance at his son – or me. He stared resolutely ahead at the judge. His expression betrayed no emotion or even any sense that his son, unsighted for twenty years, was sat a few feet away from him. He had the same look he’d given me when I had turned up asking if I could talk to him: a look of impatience at the valuable time being eaten up and the inconvenience of it all.
The entrance of his father muted Joe.
Agent Moroni whispered something to the prosecuting lawyer, who smirked.
The judge was waiting expectantly for Joe to say something.
‘Please continue, Mr Bosco. Perhaps you might introduce your witness for us.’
But Joe was stymied. When he started speaking, it was in a mumble that only I could hear. His countenance melted, his facial muscles slackened like someone having a stroke. His arm – in a subconscious mimic of his father’s – also fell slack at his side. The zing that made him zing was gone. It was as if those twenty years of non-fathering hit him like a train.
‘Mr Bosco? Are you with us?’
‘Sir.’
‘Now that your witness is here, perhaps you would like to introduce him?’
Come on, Joe, I thought. Don’t stop being Joe now! Show your father what an extraordinary individual, what a singular creature, you are. Show him what he’s been missing! I had the awful thought that Joe’s Joe-ness was just compensation for a cavernous emotional emptiness he could no longer fill, a persona to compensate for his fatherless life, an ordinary rather than extraordinary Joe. He looked over at his father and his expression was pathetic. His little smile and the raised hand a touching attempt at familiarity. The fact that signal went unrequited, that not a blink came back from the father, made it all the more painful to watch. If time slowed for me in that moment, for Joe it reversed as he travelled back through all his instars to that five-year-old boy seeing his father off on that expedition.
‘I kept them safe, Pa.’
‘Speak up, Mr Bosco?’
Joe continued channelling his five-year-old self, but muttering the words so quietly only I could hear him. ‘I kept them safe, Pa. I did as you asked. I kept them safe. You said they were the most precious things. That’s why I didn’t get Ma out totally. I did a little bit. But I remembered what you said. I dragged the trunk out of the fire. Ma started it but it were an accident. Ma said we should keep them after that. She said they belonged to us. They were our inheritance. I had to sell them. We had no choice. They helped us some. But I never sold the five-wings. Never. Until recently.’
‘Mr Bosco? You’re mumbling. What are you saying there?’
Joe unclipped his bow tie and loosed his top button. He took off his jacket, revealing sweat patches at his armpits and a column on his back. He was burning up. Having such a vivid flashback to the conflagration that I think he believed he was on fire. He flapped his arms, cooling himself. I wanted to put him out. Grab an extinguisher and spray him with it.
Breece’s patience with Joe’s idiosyncrasies (impressive till now) finally ran out, which was a small mercy for I didn’t know where Joe was going and neither did he.
‘It would help your cause and this case if you could introduce the witness. If you intend to prove your innocence, Mr Bosco.’
Then more words tumbled out of him, again too fast and quiet to hear. Edith was right, Joe had a disease of words, a connection Tourette’s not unlike the clang association you can experience on good weed; but where I could usually hear the poetry and the humour in the muddle, this was the sound of someone breaking down. He became tangled and mangled in words and memories, and enmeshed it trying to communicate something to his father who, to compound the awfulness, was utterly unmoved and indifferent to his son’s crashing. Joe was falling. I could hear the shouts of ‘Tim-ber!’ I wanted to c
atch him. But it was too late. I stood up but the prosecuting lawyer had already raised a hand.
‘If I may, sir?’
‘Go ahead, Mr Kelly.’
I sat down and bid Joe sit. He sat and wiped the sweat from his forehead. When I put a hand on his back to steady him it was like touching a man who had malarial sweats.
‘Mr Wolff has shown the proof of provenance to Agent Moroni and the office of the FWA. And we are satisfied that the contraband was grandfathered and that therefore Mr Bosco was acting within the law when he sold them.’
I clenched my fist in a silent tribute. ‘You hear that, Joe?’
Joe didn’t seem to hear it.
‘However, Mr Wolff has asked if he might say a few words. Mr Wolff?’
Shelby Wolff stood and came to the front. Joe quickly glanced at his father and then looked down again. His father still wouldn’t look at Joe; but I looked at him, just as I had looked at him that day in the Princeton chapel.
‘I confirm that the butterflies Mr Bosco has been arrested for selling are specimens that I caught on separate expeditions over twenty years ago. In 1964, 1965 and 1967. I have already shown my records to Agent Moroni of the FWA and they are satisfied that my records match the butterflies in question. I want to thank the FWA for their important work in stopping the illegal trade of endangered species. They play an important role in the fight against the wanton destruction of the planet by unscrupulous characters intent on making a buck here and a buck there or, in this case, a great deal of money. I understand that Mr Bosco intended to sell the collection to a Mr Truman Roth, a man whose family made their fortune destroying the planet he allegedly now seeks to save. For the record, I must have it noted that the butterflies that Mr Bosco intended to sell to Mr Roth are not – nor ever have been – his to sell. They were not left as an inheritance. The only reason these butterflies remained in possession of Mrs Bosco is that at the time of our separation she had lied, telling me they had been destroyed in the fire that Mr Bosco seems to have suggested in his rambling account that she started. A fire in which I believed I’d lost around five thousand papered specimens, including a set of twenty-four five-winged blue morphos, which constituted a major scientific discovery at the time.’
‘I thought I’d never see them again!’
‘This collection includes twenty-three new species as well as all nineteen of the rarest butterflies on Earth. They were caught with the financial assistance and commission of the Smithsonian Museum and that is where they rightly belong. Indeed, these butterflies do not belong to Mr Bosco. Nor do they belong to me. They belong to the nation. And it is my express wish that the collection goes to the rightful owners. I realize that this dispute of ownership reaches beyond the remit of this hearing, sir, but I have been advised that it is in the gift of the FWA to decide to whom the confiscated butterflies will be returned. And Agent Moroni has assured me that the entire collection will be returned to its intended owner with immediate effect.’
Joe started to rock back and forth in his seat. I thought he was either going to explode or take flight.
Oh Joe. What have I done?
‘Thank you, Mr Wolff. Well this all seems quite straightforward. The charge is dismissed and Mr Bosco will be allowed to leave this court a free man. The FWA will release the contraband to the original owner for collection at a time convenient to both parties. Mr Wolff, do you have anything else to say?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Mr Bosco?
Poor Joe. He’d spent all his words. Sometimes, when you get bad news you can’t compute the information. It just sits there, obliterating thought. That’s how I think Joe was in that moment. He sat there dumb. His old self nowhere to be seen. His father was, as Edith had described, a man chillingly free of sentiment, compassion, remorse and all the characteristics of a sensitive heart that affect the likes of you and me. I felt the rejection of his son as a rejection of myself and everyone else. I had never really believed Edith when she said she would shoot her former husband if she saw him again, but by the time Shelby Wolff was done, I would have shot him myself had I had a gun.
I left the crumpled chrysalis of my friend in his chair and I ran after his father, catching up to him in the corridor. ‘Mr Woolf!’ I sounded hysterical to myself. No wonder Moroni stepped between us.
‘You didn’t even acknowledge him! Your own son.’
‘I think we’re done here, Mr Jones,’ Moroni said. He seemed unable to stop himself smirking.
‘Fuck off,’ I said, feeling suddenly very British.
‘Careful, Mr Jones.’
‘It’s all right, Agent Moroni. Let him speak.’ Joe’s father looked at me. If I could have taken up twenty years of his time I would have!
‘How could you do that? After all that you said when we met. And all that I told you. And then you just ignored him. Your son!’
‘Mr Bosco has his freedom back. Isn’t that what you came to see me for?’
‘Joe! His name is Joe!’
‘I don’t understand your anger, Mr Jones.’
‘You said that once you had attended the hearing you would meet with your son and your daughter.’
‘I said I would think about it. And I have thought about it. And I have concluded that it would be a bad idea. I would only be doing it out of false sentiment and misplaced guilt. And these are never good reasons for doing anything, Mr Jones.’
‘You really are a monomaniac.’
‘It’s the monomaniacs who get things done.’
A butterfly may flutter its wings in one place and cause a hurricane in another, but my flapping was having no effect on this man. I’d have got more remorse from a rock.
‘Your . . . your son is in that room. And you don’t even want to talk to him?’
‘I don’t.’
I stared at Joe’s father, flabbergasted. This man who’d spent his lifetime looking for and studying the beautiful aberrations in this world had missed the most beautiful of all.
‘You shake your head, Mr Jones. But is that so difficult for you to understand? I came to retrieve what I thought I’d lost and would never see again.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
In which I return to the house for the last time.
I realize I’ve been infected with Joe’s disease of amplification, but I have never been as angry as I was in the moment his father walked off having got what he wanted, leaving his son slumped in a chair, disinherited and abandoned for a second time. The wise tell us not to act out of anger but their proverbs and aphorisms, bons-mots and smart-arseries are of no use in the moment of true anger. Of course, my anger wasn’t all righteous. I’ll admit it was as much for my loss as for Joe’s. I was angry at myself too, for this situation was of my making. Out of a vain need to please, a naive belief that I could get Joe out of jail and a prideful desire to prove I could keep the deal alive, I had manufactured a disaster. Without my meddling the events that unfolded might have remained folded, the crap brushed under the carpet, the sleeping dogs snoozing, the cyclops in its cave etc. I had, again, been one step behind what was going on, and, again, I had misread someone’s intentions. My sanctimonious conscience was very clear about all this, telling me (in a loud voice) to make amends and (in a quieter voice that I chose not to hear) to do so within the bounds of the law.
When I walked back to the courtroom I was practically in tears. The guard thumbed me towards the entrance. ‘I took your friend outside. He don’t seem in his right mind.’
I found Joe sitting on a bench overlooking the car park. He was bent forward, elbows on knees, fingers picking nails. He was looking down at his feet. Had Joe ever looked down? He was always so busy looking up. It didn’t look right.
‘Joe? I’m sorry. I really am. I don’t know what to say.’
Joe didn’t respond at all. I don’t even know if he could hear me.
I led him to the car and helped him into the passenger seat, the way one might help an elderly person or a badly wounded w
ar veteran. As we set off for the Catskills I launched into a rant about his father; how he had totally blanked Joe, how he had failed to meet his promise to me.
Joe was still mute. Not even a dee, dee, dee. A downcast, silent Joe was a disconcerting thing: a creature not being itself, like a great white that ignores the skinny legs of the swimmer or a tiger scared of the antelope. I was still half hoping that at any moment a great smile would burst forth from him, and he’d say, ‘Just kidding!’ It took me several miles to get over myself and see that it was Joe who needed consoling and that my grievances were secondary. I tried to be cheerleader to his cheerless heart, to wake him from his catatonia. I lobbed ropes of hope into the pit he’d fallen into, trusting that he might grab one and pull himself back up. I talked about the utter injustice of what had happened. That he had been robbed of his inheritance – by his own father! How he had been the real father in the family, the bread and butterfly winner. I listed all that was singular about him and said how proud I was of him and as I said these things I believed everything to be true. But still he remained silent, staring off into himself. In desperation, I sang his theme song:
‘Will you buy my butterflies,
From all around the world?
I brought them here for you to see
How much d’ya think they’re worth?’
Nothing. I found a radio station playing country music and I sang along in my worst Americanian, but still he remained out of radio contact. I had wanted Joe to get real, but not too real. Not this real. Where have you gone, Butterfly Joe? Please come back. I need you.
‘Joe? Say something.’
Still no words. He was a stunned bug. A butterfly trapped in a killing jar and I was unable to set him free. Perhaps he didn’t want to be freed. Perhaps he needed to be defeated, to get to the end of himself. Perhaps he was tired of being the Cat; tired of being all that. It was easy to forget what a massive energy it must have required just being Butterfly Joe.
I decided to let him be for a while. He would bounce back; he always bounced back from setback and disappointment. When I first met him, I thought he was afflicted by a surfeit of unreasonable hope; something I saw as an American condition. But he carried this unreasonable hope with him wherever he went even when others doubted him. He remained the super-optimistic poor kid who says, ‘With all this horse shit around there must be a pony somewhere.’
The Killing of Butterfly Joe Page 34
