When The Butterflies Come

by Rosemary Ness Bitner

  He ensnared the less fortunate who miscalculated or underestimated him. As the silent, stealthy frog of financial liquidity, he baited the unwary with his money; then, when the time was right, he shot out his unfurled tongue and stuck it fast to his unwary prey. The flies he’d once tortured by pulling wings from their bodies were replaced by human victims now. Contracts they signed were strictly enforced with no extensions or forbearance. His delinquency notices arrived unexpectedly at the most inopportune times, when his prey had no chance of escape. He never negotiated easier terms and gave no quarter. The white-collar monster was unshackled from his father’s restraints. He expanded his reach slowly, first for control of the office, then outward to society at large.

  David had rising cash flows which he put to use, not by hiring more sales muscle in the field but by creating a home office environment more to his liking. Three people were hired in rapid succession. Rublina was the first as a backup for Susan, in case she decided to resign or if she were to become ill. Susan resisted this hire saying she felt perfectly wonderful and intended to work at least another fifteen years. This woman’s cost allocation came from David’s sales and marketing revenues, so Susan eventually had to accept the incursion onto her turf.

  After twelve months on the job, Rublina fell facedown in the office hallway, stone-drunk and comatose. She frequently ran to the ladies’ room and barfed into a toilet during her morning hours in the office. It was painfully obvious to everyone on the staff that the poor woman would never come close to the grasp of administrative matters that Susan or Barbara possessed. Her IQ simply wasn’t there, her desire to learn anything about the business was completely absent, and her work ethic was nonexistent. It was a mystery to many why Rublina was ever hired because the woman was completely dysfunctional and reeked of alcohol, but David told all doubters that he saw great potential in her and counseled them to be patient. Since Rublina was often so drunk she couldn’t keep her head up off her desk, David hired a second woman as an assistant for her.

  The assistant’s name was Judith. She was in all respects a corporate workhorse type. She could follow the instructions in various manuals, dutifully kept the flow of reports to the regulators moving upstream to Barbara and Susan, and she quickly mastered everything about running Rublina’s office. She propped up the office drunk.

  The third female hire and the last of the new hires was Donna. She had a beanpole figure with straight brown hair and glasses. Her glasses practically covered her entire upper face and her vision was so poor that her lenses were well over a half-inch thick to bend light rays into a reasonably discernable image. The woman could have qualified for Social Security disability on the basis that she was legally blind and unable to drive, but she had a husband at home who she couldn’t stand. The man only drank beer and watched football, so she preferred to be out of the house and working. She asked several employees if they’d like to earn extra money to help her kill her husband, but no one offered to help her. Rumor had it that Donna was some distant relative of David’s and that she coordinated mysterious murder-for-hire business relationships for him.

  Donna’s office functions were two-fold. She was to assist Judith, Rublina’s assistant, whenever Judith needed help in compiling a report. Her second duty was to keep track of Bob. She maintained a secret log of Bob’s daily whereabouts, and whenever he was in Plaintown. She kept a second log of the people who visited him in his office, how long they stayed, and, if she could possibly hear by listening at the door, what his conversations were about. David hired Donna because he was paranoid that Bob would possibly succumb to the siren calls of a recruiter and leave the firm someday, or that Bob would unravel David’s fraud.

  After a year passed, Mrs. Rodriguez made a comment to Barbara that set in motion winds of change at UGGA. Neither woman brooked acceptance of another employee suffering abuse, unless of course the employee willingly agreed to it. Rublina stoked their curiosity. Initially, the woman appeared to be gaining health. The office grapevine said she was on a special diet and initially gained strength under David’s personal interest in her well-being, but Mrs. Rodriguez never bought into that speculation. It was too shallow, too much not David. He never nurtured anyone. There was always an ulterior motive to every kindness he showed anyone. Mrs. Rodriguez’s suspicions gained plausibility when Rublina began falling down drunk in the mornings. Often there were shouting matches between her and David behind the locked doors of his office.

  One day, as Rublina walked past the front office on the way to David’s office, Mrs. Rodriguez said to Barbara, “There goes the 10:00 a.m. express delivery.”

  “What do you mean?” Barbara had noticed the routine trip as well but decided to play coy, a trait she learned from Chief.

  “She goes by every morning at ten. I’m sure you noticed. But look very closely at her breasts.”

  “Okay, I’m looking. What is there to see? She has breasts. We all have breasts.”

  “Remember how they looked.”

  About twenty minutes later, Rublina walked past the front office on her way back to her own office. Mrs. Rodriguez glanced at Barbara. “Look at them again,” she said. “Do you notice the difference?”

  “Yes, they are much smaller now, not so swollen.”

  “I’m happy to know it’s not just my old eyes deceiving me,” said Mrs. Rodriguez. “I’ve seen her come back sometimes with stains on her blouse where her nipples wetted through her brassiere.”

  Barbara hadn’t paid attention to Rublina’s breast size before that. She’d never born a child like Mrs. Rodriguez had, so she never thought to make the observation. Suddenly the thought dawned on Barbara, the same thought the old Mexican woman first had several months earlier.

  “She’s going to David’s office every morning for twenty minutes to breast-feed him! Is that possible?”

  “It’s routine. Also, she goes at 2:00 p.m., right when the market closes. You can set your watch by her.”

  “That explains the mystery of her employment,” said Barbara.

  “You don’t know the rest of it. You are too young to know what his mother looked like, but I remember Eloweiss Sustack well. Rublina is her body double when Eloweiss was in her early thirties, when David was an infant.” Mrs. Rodriguez nodded, affirming her own revelation to Barbara.

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means David is a very sick man. It means he’s using this woman to try to recapture his infanthood. He’s trying to buy love from this flop that he never got from his mother. It means he hates his life and this world so much he thinks it owes him a second chance at whatever he believes he missed. I don’t understand all of it. I am a simple woman, but I know there’s something about that woman, about her looks and her tits. I believe there’s something very unhealthy going on here. I think David pretends she’s his mother.”

  “Isn’t that kind of sweet, in a perverse sort of way?”

  “No, not sweet. You don’t understand. David hated his mother. I mean he hated her really and deeply, and all his life he wanted to hurt her, punish her. When she was dying, he delayed paying her nursing help. They retaliated, but not against him, against his mother. They left her to piss the bed and lay in it for days before they changed her out. He liked to see his mother suffer with bedsores. He even, according to one of the nurses I spoke to once, mixed in placebos with her medications. She had terrible Parkinson’s at the end and she constantly screamed in agony, especially without her medications being right. The nurses told David and he went to the house to see her.”

  “To help her?”

  “No, he went there to laugh at her!” Mrs. Rodriguez raised her voice above a whisper. “That’s how much he hated her.”

  Barbara’s jaw dropped. That helped explain everything.

  “So that means at some point David will likely hurt Rublina, possibly very badly?”

  “I am afraid so. I am afraid for that woman and her son.” Mrs. Rodriguez stared into empty space and slowly sh
ook her head. “This will not end well.”

  In time, David had Rublina under his complete dominance. When he was bored with his dalliances with his boy-toy employees, Muscle Boy and Man Child, he demanded that she service him with blow jobs. As a chronic alcoholic in desperate need of a paycheck, she complied. He plied her with alcohol, then complained that her milk was unsatisfactory. Her hair was dyed bright red and her face was always heavily made up with bright red lipstick and black eye shadow with black lash extensions, all as David demanded. She looked sexy in black webbed lace stockings and a tight black bodice that lifted her ample breasts upward and outward as if they were being served as a dessert dish. David insisted that she keep that attire in her office closet and wear it when he requested her presence in his office. When in her ‘skin outfit,’ Rublina looked like a Las Vegas Keno girl who was doubling as a prostitute.

  David had no respect for Rublina and had no intention of ever helping the poor woman rehabilitate herself. Instead, he did the opposite. He kept her amply supplied with bottles of Boothby’s gin, Jack Daniels sour mash bourbon, and Grey Goose Vodka, her favorite spirits. Rublina had no willpower and was in no position to resist David’s demands.

  David and Rublina’s relationship went beyond the office. He often went to her home with alcohol, proceeding to get her totally inebriated. Then, while she was passed out, he would bugger her eighteen-year-old son. David threatened the lad with firing his mother if he ever said anything, and he threatened Rublina with firing her if she ever tried to stop him. David rationalized his behavior by thinking that, with a mother such as this young man had, he had little chance to make his way in the world, so the destroyer of his poor trapped soul might as well be none other than himself. David relished the sadistic pleasure of knowing he was victimizing both mother and son simultaneously, pitting them against each other’s well-being with his threat of retaliation if either broke their silence.

  There were days when the tormented woman locked herself in her office and sobbed quietly for hours until she was exhausted. This went on for several weeks until finally her cries of mental anguish piqued another woman’s conscience.

  Barbara could no longer bear the sufferings of this pathetic human being, even if it meant she could lose her own position. She approached Bob and told him all she knew and related her conversations with Mrs. Rodriguez about Rublina’s misfortunes.

  As fate would have it, David’s secret nursing fetish was revealed unexpectedly. An examiner from Financial Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, appeared at UGGA offices unannounced, investigating an allegation of fund dividend payment errors. Susan was out of the office, so he asked to see her assistant. Barbara was out of the office. He then asked to see any administrative officer of the firm. No one could locate David and he didn’t answer his intercom. Bob inquired to Mrs. Rodriguez where David and Rublina were. Mrs. Rodriguez motioned toward David’s office without saying a word. Bob took Barbara’s master office key and went to David’s office.

  What he saw when he opened the door shocked him to his core. There was David suckling like an infant on Rublina’s massive left tit. Bob needed to say something.

  “David, there’s a regulator here and no one to respond to him. You need to go to the front office.”

  “Tell him to wait in the conference room. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

  “David, this is serious. He knows you’re in the office. He wants to see an administrative officer.”

  “Well, you’re an officer. Take care of it.”

  “This is an inquiry about our dividend. It’s administration, not sales. You need to get to the front office!” Bob was emphatic.

  “Fuck him. I’m busy. He’s just a fucking regulator. Tell him to wait.”

  “Not doing that, David. Up you go.” With that, Bob yanked David off Rublina’s tit. Milk was still squirting out of her as Bob stood David on his feet and shoved him out the door of his office.

  “I’ll deal with you about this later,” snarled David as he adjusted his tie.

  “You bet you will,” Bob shot back.

  Rublina was on her feet with a towel wrapped around her upper chest.

  “Go home and get yourself cleaned up. Stay sober and don’t come back to the office until you are called. And clean out your desk of all your personal items.” Bob waited until she left David’s office.

  “Does this mean my life is over?” asked the droopy-eyed alcoholic.

  “No. It means it’s beginning. Now get out of here.”

  With the commands from a strong male voice, Rublina stumbled down the hall bare-breasted, cleaned out her desk, and left for the day.

  There can arise a time in the affairs of fathers and sons when their relationship turns. In the case of the faux father and son duo, David and Bob, that time came. It arose because of the complaints Bob heard from the office staff about Rublina, and from what he personally observed. He provoked the confrontation in David’s office, not waiting for David to bring it up when it suited his timetable.

  “She needs to be let go,” Bob demanded when David returned after promising the regulator he’d look into the firm’s computer glitch. “It doesn’t matter why you hired her, or what you think she can become here. Remember, this is going to be my company and I don’t want some sloppy drunk demoralizing the place. She’s worthless. She can’t stay awake. She stinks. I told her to go home and stay home. She’s out of here. I insist!”

  “Oh, you insist, do you? I run this office. You get sales. This is none of your business, so stay out of it.” David was adamantly opposed to relinquishing Rublina. She was his reincarnated mother image, a perfect victim for him to torture, with her son thrown in as a bonus.

  “I’m not staying out of it. She’s out.”

  “Or you’ll do what?” David was visibly angry. No one talked to him that way and got away with it.

  “Or I’ll break your nose, that’s what.” Bob wasn’t backing down.

  David was shocked, realizing his protégé meant it. “Look, we can disagree on something small like this. You don’t need to go to general quarters over it. Give me a little time to work something out.”

  “No, David. I’m doing this for your own good. This is going to get you and the firm in trouble. It stops now. I mean it. I love you as a father, but that will not save your nose. She goes, or you will never recognize your nose again.”

  “Give me one week to find a place for her.”

  “Okay. One week, not a day more.”

  “Agreed,” David said, but he seethed with anger inside and deeply resented being pushed around by the younger man, even though he knew Bob was the one who was thinking clearly about Rublina. Within the week, Bob had Rublina in counseling and going to Alcoholics Anonymous, and he signed her up with a temporary help agency. David never did anything to help the woman during that week he said he needed. He was just trying to buy time to think of a way to keep her, but his scheme failed. Eventually the woman married a good man who worked construction and was blessed to discover a normal life. David harbored a deep-seated grudge about Bob’s intervention, but pretended to forget about it.

  His next foray into anomalous mischief was to decorate the corporate offices with animal heads. He enjoyed going to game farm ranches in Texas where the hunt was more of a relaxing excursion than an actual hunt in the wild. By using the heads he harvested for office decor, his accountant certified they were a legitimate income tax write-off. The animals were in tip-top shape and their habitat range was fenced in so they couldn’t run off when the hunters came to shoot them.

  With their luxurious quarters and fabulous food, David would sometimes go off for a week to one of these exotic ranches. During the daylight hours, after a hearty breakfast, he would be driven by his hunt guide to where a prime animal was located. There were wonderful selections from North America, Asia, and, of course, Africa. Every animal imaginable was available to be shot for the right price. Once located, the guide would pull up close to the animal, stop t
he vehicle, mount David’s rifle upon hand-carried sandbags to steady the weapon’s sights upon the animal, and then bring David to his rifle to pull the trigger. The guide did all the work of gutting and cleaning the animal, harvesting the meat if it was an ungulate, and capping the animal’s head for mounting by a taxidermist. Predator cats got full body mounts, except for an adult male lion, which was capped to resemble the animal with its front legs and extended claws leaping through a wall as if in a charge. Its wide-open mouth with four-inch canines eager to bite was fearsome, shocking visitors who saw it for the first time.

  With the animal heads, David created the image he coveted. He portrayed himself to employees and guests as the fearless, world-traveled big game hunter. He told guests and prospective investors he hunted stocks with the same ferocity that he hunted animals. The boast had mixed results. Some couldn’t find the exit door fast enough but for others, their confidence in David soared, confirming in his mind that the world was populated with idiots.

  Things didn’t always go smoothly in the home office. One incident occurred on the day the two-man committee team finally approved a sketch of a new corporate logo. Muscle Boy and Man Child had worked on the logo for the better part of four months. They were anxious and very proud to unveil their work.

  This day was special. They’d finally thought of something. It was a sketch of a globe with wings on it, meant to signify that UGGA was flying. Muscle Boy went to the reception area and asked Barbara to come see their creation. He was brimming with pride as he ushered her into his office. Man Child stood by, anxiously awaiting her approval. Four months of work had resulted in a circle with two little wings on it. Barbara looked at it for a long moment before her hand went up to her mouth and she broke into hysterical laughter.