When The Butterflies Come

by Rosemary Ness Bitner

  A third fishing trip was to a godforsaken bass lake in the middle of Mexico, to which they drove in a rented car over several hundred miles of potholed roads. They passed a half-dozen checkpoints manned by teenage boys dressed in soldiers’ garb and armed with machine guns. At the lake they lodged in a compartmentalized prefabricated structure with thin walls between the bedrooms. The cook was a jovial Mexican gal, and for three days they ate bass for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, fishing the lake in guided canoes for more. They caught dozens of the scaly, spiny-finned things. From weed-infested haunts amongst standing dead trees and floating logs, the bass unleashed their angry slams against surface popper lures. Like lightning bolts launched from a watery underworld, these game fish shot to the surface to hit the lures and fight mightily. The wide-mouthed monsters were bold and unafraid of the blood sport they played.

  On the last day, David’s straw sombrero blew off his head when a powerful storm came up. He yelled to the guide to forget the hat and row for shore, but Bob countermanded David. Speaking Spanish, he took charge of matters, he and the guide rowing dangerously broadside to the wave chop and retrieving the hat.

  Back on the beach, David was furious with Bob.

  “You could have gotten me killed,” he blurted out. “I ordered him to go to shore because I can’t swim.”

  “No reason to get upset. The water wasn’t that bad. Besides, if we’d gone over, I would have swum for both of us and brought you back.”

  “But if I had struggled and fought you off, like a drowning man does?”

  “Not to worry. I’d have just knocked you out, put an arm under your neck, and paddled you back.”

  “You would have actually punched me?”

  “You bet. I’d punch you right in your mouth to knock you out cold.”

  “You wouldn’t feel regret that you hit me?”

  “No, none. Would you rather drown?” Bob’s hypothetical answer was given with a matter-of-fact chuckle without the slightest hint of emotion.

  David ignored Bob’s question. “But there are poisonous cottonmouth snakes out there. I’d be helpless.”

  “Yeah, but they are over nearer the shoreline and the trees where we were fishing, not in the middle of the lake where you lost your hat.”

  David stared at Bob, looking perplexed, but said nothing.

  That night, through the wall that separated their beds, Bob awakened from the sound of David crying. He listened for a while, determining it wasn’t the cry of a man in physical pain. There was no cursing paired with the sobs and no inhaled hissings like men give when they cut a toe or a finger. This was a sobbing cry, a low-grade whimpering, muffled, private kind of cry from a man losing a wrestling match with his inner turmoil. Bob puzzled over this episode and rationalized that David was so deeply afraid for his life that day that he had a near breakdown over the incident. He figured David would get over it and then rolled over and went back to sleep. Bob couldn’t relate to the feelings that tormented David.

  HOOVES

  North of Plaintown, elevation increases to the Grand Plateau. It rises gradually, gaining about a thousand feet whereupon it reaches a place Colorado men go to become real men, a place called Wyoming.

  David suggested to Bob that he should become a big game hunter like himself. Hunting sharpens the senses and wits, he declared, and there was no greater thrill than to track down an animal in the wild, although he’d never actually done it. What better way to get acquainted with big game hunting than to go together on an antelope hunt in neighboring Wyoming. Bob agreed that it sounded like a fun idea, a chance to go into the wilds of open-space Wyoming. To properly outfit Bob for the hunt, David presented him with the gifts of a 7mm magnum rifle and a brand-new Jeep Wagoneer.

  David rented a large sleeper trailer that accommodated six for the two of them. They provisioned it with enough food for a full week in the field and plenty of beer and whiskey. David’s plan was to take the antelope by surprise. He consulted with some ranchers who knew the area and wrote down detailed instructions; they would be in position at the first light of dawn. As soon as their rifle scopes could pick out some big bucks, they would whack the fleet-footed beasts before they even got out of bed. That was the plan, but the antelope were never consulted about it.

  There was a special, secret place in Wyoming about halfway north of the Snowy Range, west of Horseshoe and the edge of the Yellowstone Plateau which rose further west. A huge wide-open bowl-shaped basin area existed there where the mountains begin to lift up from the plateau. It was inaccessible from the north or the west or the east because of the rugged terrain, except for antelope, cougar, wolf, or bear. It was where the deer and the antelope played.

  The lowest place in the bowl had water, a stream flowing into a catch basin from a cool water spring a ways off to the west. Just east of the little basin lake was an elevated spot where an old buck pronghorn liked to lay at night with his herd of thirty other antelope. He was out of harm’s way there, sheltered on three sides by rugged rising terrain. He could see for about ten miles to the south, the only viable approach for man, his most feared mortal adversary. He was a wily old goat, this herd-master pronghorn. He was all muscle and easily topped fifty miles per hour running flat-out over rock-strewn prairie, changing direction in sharp-angle turns at full speed by planting his hooves and whipping his body into a new heading.

  Close beside him on his lookout perch were seven adoring does. Each doe alternately looked up from feeding, turned her head, and scanned the horizon. When awakened, his herd had sixty eyes constantly searching to the horizon as one unified body. The herd master had outsmarted dozens of hunters’ attempts to kill him over the past seven years. He understood that hunters would never relent in their quest for his magnificent standout horns, but he remained determined to never have his head and horns mounted on a hunter’s wall.

  On that particular morning, the faint prairie breeze started up as it was want to do in pre-dawn Wyoming. The tips of the cheat grass began to bend slightly as they had for millions of such fall mornings on the vast expanse. It was how the prairie welcomed the sun. A flock of junkets whirred about in some brush around thirty yards below the herd buck. He could hear their feathered wings flutter as they prepared to get out of their evening quarters and flit and skip over the prairie floor searching for rising insects. Dawn’s first light was still about a half hour away, so except for the junkets all should’ve been still, unless a cougar or bear was stealing its way toward his herd.

  But there was something else that morning; it was far away and made an unnatural sound. His ears pointed toward the sound, taking it in and processed all it told him. Men were out there, coming in a motorized vehicle. Its motor was straining a bit and it clanked along more than most he’d heard before. It was noisy, but still too far away to bother a decision about what he should do about it. He let out a grunt. Twenty-seven females and two lesser bucks lifted their heads. All sixty eyes were on full alert.

  Bob drove the Jeep that towed the trailer over a narrow, twisted dirt road which featured massive rock outcrops along the roadside. The hunters were running a half hour behind their planned schedule, as David had to dump out his intestines just as they were scheduled to start off. That took ten minutes and couldn’t be postponed. The instructions had to be off, David had declared about an hour before. The rancher told them to turn left at the intersection, which they did, and then they were to go for fifty-seven miles and turn right. That’s as definitive and explicit as a Wyoming rancher gets when he gives directions to somebody driving up from Plaintown to hunt antelope. At the fifty-six-and-a-half-mile mark, there was a right turn. David claimed that that road must have been the one the rancher meant, or else the odometer on the Jeep must be off a little, so they turned right.

  After about a five-mile drive that meandered back eastward, they came upon a ranch house right where the road stopped. They got out of their Jeep and looked around for a road bypass around the ranch house, but the road didn
’t go further; it just dead-ended at that ranch house. The commotion woke up a dog that barked its head off. Then a rancher with a shotgun came out to greet them in his pajamas. After making their apologies and gathering renewed instructions, Bob and David got back on the road. They went another half mile and turned right, like they were told to do in the first place. With great difficulty and considerable cursing, they turned their rig about and made their way along the correct road.

  David was miffed. “You’d think that rancher who gave me directions would have told me about the first turn just a half mile before.”

  “He probably thought you knew how to follow directions.”

  Silence ensued. David resented cynicism.

  The road they found was different from the ranch road. It didn’t have deep pickup truck ruts with grass growing in the middle hump. This road was graded two years or so before, but it was in many respects more miserable than the first. Looking ahead as far as their headlights would take them, a fine gray-white gritty dust rose. The early prairie breeze was behind them. As their Jeep and trailer crawled along, the breeze picked up their trail dust, lifted it to the window level of the vehicle, and swirled it into the beams of their headlights. Antelope along the trail for three miles in every direction saw the reflective sparkles of dust dancing in the headlight beams. They all knew hunters were here.

  When David rented the trailer, he’d inspected it completely to make sure the interior quarters were clean and working properly to his satisfaction. The shower, toilet, and stove all worked fine. In order to climb up to enter and inspect the mobile hunt headquarters, a set of metal stairs had to be released from their holding latch. The salesman didn’t notice, Bob didn’t notice, and David forgot to secure the stairs when he finished his inspection. Because of their delay getting started, his hopes of slamming the herd buck at daybreak were slipping away. Although it would mean making more noise to go faster, he hoped the herd buck was a late snoozer and wouldn’t notice.

  As Bob picked up speed, the rig made a clamoring racket as the trailer bounced over the hard feldspar road rocks, careening from side to side as it dragged behind the Jeep. He drove fast to keep the choking road talcum out of the Jeep’s passenger compartment. Neither hunter heard the trailer’s steps fall down from their upright stowed position. They were fully extended in their down position when the fast-moving Jeep passed between two gigantic rock outcrops. With scant clearance on either side, the trailer didn’t make it.

  The rocks were fifty-ton boulders which didn’t yield a smidgeon to the steps that protruded three feet from the trailer’s side. The hunters heard a sickening, gut-wrenching sound as the steps caught the right rock wall, the Jeep lurching left as the forward momentum of the rig ripped a gaping opening in the side of the trailer. The gigantic rock can opener with its ragged jaws ripped the aftermost two-thirds of the trailer wide open and jerked its body sideways off the trailer frame. The rig twisted free from its hitch to the Jeep and rested diagonally across the road. It was a wounded metal beast lodged between the rocks. Their hunt was off to a terrible start.

  Farther up the trail, at the basin, the herd buck stood up and peered in the direction of the clamoring and crashing, but he couldn’t see around corners and the rig came to rest below his visible horizon. Nevertheless, he and the others arose, evacuated, and moved west about a mile before they began grazing. Antelope couldn’t be too careful.

  Bob and David decided to forgo hunting that first day and drove the Jeep back to a nearby town. Towns in much of Wyoming weren’t very large, and this one was no exception. It had a gas station, a liquor, and a general store outpost for hunting and fishing supplies and licenses. When they pulled up to the general store, Bob and David noticed there was a German shepherd lying in front of the entrance door.

  “I wonder if he’d bite us,” David said.

  “Don’t know. I’ll blow the horn and see if anybody comes out.” After a horn blast, an older man, tall and sinewy of build and heavily bearded, shoved the door open and moved the dog out of the way.

  “What you fellers want?”

  Bob reckoned he was the owner of the place.

  “We need a place to stay the night, and we need somebody to retrieve a damaged motor home trailer,” said David. He went on to explain how the trailer got stuck in the rocks on the trail road to the basin.

  The tall bearded man spit out some chew tobacco and began laughing. “You boys wouldn’t be frem Colrado, wood ja?” It was obvious the station master—or mayor, or owner, or whatever he was—was sizing them up to see how much he could charge them. People from Colorado were likely to be easy pickings for overcharges.

  David confessed the obvious; after all, the Jeep had Colorado plates. He agreed to an exorbitant, bordering on extortion, sum to have the trailer retrieved. The sinewy man revealed he was the owner of the general store, as well as the motel across the street. His wife ran the motel and he doubled as the go-to man with a bulldozer for emergencies such as rescuing Coloradans who got themselves into messes in Middle of Nowhere, Wyoming.

  David rented a motel room for the duration of the hunt. He called the rental dealer in Plaintown and complained about the latch not holding the steps in place, threatened to sue the trailer maker and the dealer for faulty equipment and putting his life at risk, and told them he’d deal with them when he returned to Colorado. Meanwhile, he and Bob got the only remaining room in the motel that night; it was hunting season and the only time the motel was more than one-tenth occupied. Their great hunt would start tomorrow.

  In their room with two twin beds, David shouted out loud, angry with himself. “We blew it. We weren’t thinking. We should have thought it through first.”

  “What? Thought what through?”

  “The accident and the trailer! We should have set fire to it and let the rental company collect the insurance instead of billing us for the accident.”

  “That’d be worse. That’s arson. Those things get investigated by insurance companies. They don’t just automatically pay. If they find arson, it’s jail time. We’re doing the right thing. Besides, there’s insurance for the collision.”

  “Yeah, but we’ll get stuck paying the deductible.”

  “Beats jail. Good night.” Bob turned the lights out.

  After a while David turned the lights back on. Bob was nearly asleep when he turned toward David’s bed to see why he’d turned the lights on. There was David sitting naked on the edge of the bed, crying while stroking an erection and looking wistfully at Bob. Through sobs and teary eyes, David moaned in pitiful whimpers. When he saw Bob was awake, he began a baleful tale of woe.

  “Nobody has ever loved me,” he sobbed in a wretched display of self-abasement. “Nobody wants to hold me and kiss me because I’m so ugly, and I can’t help it. I’m terribly overweight and I have awful body odor. I stink. I’m sure you’ve smelled me, haven’t you?” Bob just shrugged as if to say ‘so what.’ David continued. “I can’t urinate right. A lot of my urine comes out through my skin. That’s why I stink so badly. I shower three times a day. I use colognes, but I still stink.” He paused between his sobs, his eyes hopeful for sympathy.

  “Well, why don’t you see a doctor about it?” Bob was non-committal, eager to change the subject.

  David continued stroking his penis.

  “I hated my mother from the time I was a child. My father was always trying to get rid of me, trying to send me away. They left me millions but they never loved me, especially mother. I even heard her say that she wished I’d never been born. I’ve hated all women ever since I heard her say that.”

  “You hate all women?” Bob couldn’t understand David or anyone hating women. He adored women, practically every one of them, even though his own mother was abusive and dictatorial toward him as a child.

  “Yes, I hate all women. Over the years I’ve grown more and more distant from women and closer and closer to men. Oh, I’ve tried to be attracted to women, and some of them I’ve eve
n been able to make love to, but it’s impossibly hard for me.”

  Where David was trying to lead Bob with his pitiful suggestive words and behavior was unmistakable. All his suspicions about David came into focus. David’s lingering hand on his back at the pier in Astoria, the trips away in and of themselves, the gift of the rifle and Jeep, the trip they were on now—all were his manipulations to try to get Bob to become his lover. It was never about a father and son relationship as David purported it to be, nor about a business partnership. It was all a grand pathetic manipulation played out over many years.

  Bob rolled his head to the side, away from David, who persisted. “When we first started working together, I saw in you a man like my father, only something more. Dad was Dad, but he was also my partner and my best friend. I loved him, but he never loved me.” Bob wasn’t about to ask what more he could be to David than son, partner, and friend. Lover was the only base uncovered and Bob wasn’t about to go there. He was as straight as a man could be.

  “I thought you said your dad always pushed you away?” He pointed out David’s inconsistency.

  “Yes, he sent me away, but I still thought of Dad as my best friend. I loved him, but he didn’t love me. When you and I met, I thought we could have the same relationship Dad and I had, only more. I thought I could be like a dad to you and a partner and a best friend, only more. I thought I could love you and you could also love me.”

  This was getting way too weird for Bob. He needed to disabuse David of any notion that they’d ever be lovers. His eyebrows went up to their full extent and his jaw dropped open as he stared at the ceiling.

  “Look, David, I’ve got to be honest with you. You are a great guy. You are a great friend and a great partner, and you are like a dad to me. I’ve learned a great deal from you and we’re making the business grow, but you need to forget about me loving you. You need to understand that I’m wired very differently than you are. I love women. I mean that I love them as an opposite sex love. I love holding them, kissing them, and fucking them. There’s nothing about any man that even remotely interests me. I’ve been attracted to women sexually since I was a little kid, and I also like a lot of them as people I can be friends with. That works for me and I’m not going to be changing that. I’m sorry to tell you this, but I had no idea that’s what you expected of me. I just can’t be in love with you. I was in love with Marty, and I guess you could say I’m open to a woman’s love again, but that’s it for me. I’ve never been in love with a man and I never could be. I’m not a homosexual, and I don’t want to become one either. You need to understand that about me and forget this notion of yours.”