The Killing of Butterfly Joe Read online

  ‘I won’t molest you or nothing.’ I perched on the end of the bed, inches from her outstretched legs. She was wearing a silk dressing gown over a blouse. Her legs were out straight but covered by a counterpane. Her caliper was propped against the bottom of the bedside table that was stacked with National Enquirers. In her lap was a pile of just opened correspondence. She held up a letter, her nails immaculate purple almonds, and read:

  ‘ “Dear Mrs Bosco, Re: your application for a loan dated” blah, “we regret to say that your application has been declined . . .” Blah!” She screwed up the letter into a ball and threw it at the basketball hoop fixed at the end of the four-poster. ‘Chase Motherfucking Manhattan! These people shit money but not one of them will help us. Cocksucking motherfuckers.’

  I like a good cuss as much as the next person but Edith’s use of the word motherfucker brought me up short every time she said it. She used it the way some people say damn and her offspring – and I include the never-swearing Isabelle in this – hardly ever seemed shocked by it.

  ‘I’d like to say that we don’t need these people. But we do. Unless we get a loan we can’t meet the orders we get. Constantly behind. We are close to sinking here. We got too many pigs for this tit. I mean, look at these bills.’ Edith picked out the itemized phone bill and held it as though it was a live rat. ‘This car phone is just another example. Three hundred dollars’ worth of calls to Wyoming? Who the fuck is in Wyoming? I think maybe Joe’s started a family or something.’

  She leant over for her iced tea. When she sipped it she had to rest the lip of the cup against her lip and tilt her head to stop it dripping. She set the iced tea back down and sniffed, her reconstructed nostril whistling strangely. She stared at me and I braced myself for another ‘test’.

  ‘Still gawping? It takes about a week to get used to me. After that you got no excuse.’

  I sniffed my laugh. ‘Sorry.’

  Edith took another slug of her tea. ‘Let’s get one thing straight. I don’t for a second believe you care about this business or want to be a butterfly salesman. Let’s not pretend here. For you this is all an experience. It doesn’t matter to you if it works or not. You can have your fun and go home. But it matters to me. And it matters to this family. This is our livelihood.’

  ‘It’s in my interest that you do well, Edith. What’s good for you is . . .’

  ‘Save it for the road. I’m already working with one champion bullshitter. I don’t need another. I know when someone’s paying you it ain’t easy to speak your mind but I’m paying you to speak your mind.’

  Being in the chrysalis of my butterflying career, it seemed churlish to point out that I had not yet been paid, or even discussed the matter of my remuneration. The terms of my ‘package’, as laid down by Joe that first day, were to be ‘well paid’, have ‘a car’ and see ‘this great country’, none of which had been delivered yet. But I’d not brought the subject up. The family had welcomed me into their home and adventures lay ahead. I was being fed, I had a roof over my head and I was having an experience. I certainly liked the idea of being paid to speak my mind. So far, it had been the best policy with Edith and the method most likely to promote me in her eyes.

  ‘Before my legs got bad I drove probably more than twenty times around the earth selling. I built this business from nothing into what it is now and I don’t want nobody – especially not Joe and his cockamamie ideas – screwing it up. Your job is to it to keep him on the right road.’

  She grabbed an invoice from a different pile and held it up, pinched between thumb and index. ‘You see this?’ It was headed paper with the name Bangor Floral. ‘This is a repeat order from a flower chain in Maine. They have faithfully re-ordered every quarter for ten years. Fifty cases. We got a hunnerd of these and we’re doing OK. These kinds of people are the bread and butter. Now if we get A and P or J. C. Penney’s they will want exclusive rights and we will have to stop selling to all these good folks. Trade in all that goodwill and loyalty for a big faceless corporation that doesn’t give a single shit about us and who will screw every living cent from us. It’s a big risk. And even if we get an order we might not be able to deliver it. We are a one-product company, like Coke. And you don’t fuck with the recipe. Joe of course wants to fuck with the recipe. To “diversicate” or whatever the word he uses is. But he hasn’t thought it through. He never does the math. He’s too busy tossing dollars around like confetti. And coming up with crazy ideas. We have a good thing going here. This business has kept us all in houses and food and it’s going to put Isabelle through college. It could have put Joe through college too if he’d wanted it. But he had other ideas. And lately, he’s been getting notions too big for his boots. He thinks he can sell the collection for big money and it’s given him this idea that he can act like he’s already sold it. Buying fancy suits. Hiring Cadillacs. When he gets cash in his hands he spends it. Or he gives it away to some tramp thinking he’s a great philanthropist. He has these notions about doing right by people and God but they are not compatible with running a successful business. I need someone to keep an eye on him. I only got one!’

  Edith saw pretty well with her one eye. Up, down, forward – and backwards! She could tell the shape of someone trustworthy and the shape of a faker from twenty paces. I think she trusted me for now; but in the long run she trusted no one, which, although a cynical way to live, means you are proven right more often than not.

  ‘You are here because I told Joe to go and hire someone who was sensible. Someone who had an education. Someone with intelligence but who weren’t too original or liable to go and start their own business. Someone who would do as they were told and respect the law. Someone not like Joe in other words. You are meant to be that guy. So when you go selling, keep him on the highway, keep him away from trouble, and distraction; churches and preachers especially. And keep an eye on the money. Will you do that?’

  I nodded. Although being told I’d been hired for my common sense and unoriginality was a blow to my ego and sense of mystery. It wasn’t for my charm, my voice, or even my intelligence that I was being hired; or because of the serendipitous timing of the gods; it was to steer Joe a sensible course, and report back on his ‘up-to-somethingness’.

  ‘What if he sells the collection?’

  ‘I wish he would sell those little fuckers. I have no affection for them. But Joe’s been saying he’s got a buyer for that goddamned collection for years and I don’t see anyone smoking no cigar. ‘The problem with Joe is he’s got a streak of his father in him. I see too much of him in Joe these days. I see him in Isabelle, too. You can’t deny that. Her brain. Her need for order. That comes from him. But lately I seen some of those same traits in Joe that I don’t like.’

  Edith looked at me, making sure I got the point.

  ‘What traits are those?’ I asked, trying to sound indifferent, lest I scare the moment away.

  ‘An inclination to disappear when you need him. My kids saw more of the Palos Verdes blue than they did their father. That’s an extinct butterfly, by the way. So I’m making a joke there. You know where he was when Joe was born? In a rainforest in Venezuela. You know where he was when Isabelle was born? At a bug convention. When Mary was born he was gone.’

  She paused, breathed, and exhaled the memory.

  ‘I get the impression – from Isabelle – that he was an obsessive man.’

  ‘Obsessive don’t even cover it. What else she say?’

  ‘Not much. She . . . seemed uncomfortable talking about it.’

  She was looking at me now; her lovely green eye more exacting than a lie detector. Maybe this was the real reason for summoning me. It wasn’t to discuss the business, or Joe’s gallivanting; it was to check on what had been said about her ex-husband by her children to me. Like a paranoid dictator, Edith needed to control the story.

  ‘We’re not talking about a normal person, here. I used to joke that he loved bugs more than people – but it turned out to be no
joke. He was as single-minded as an ant. I’m pregnant and he leaves me with two kids to go to South America because he says he’s on the verge of a major scientific breakthrough. After months of nothing he calls from South America to tell me he’s had a revelation. I’m thinking, “Maybe he’s had the breakthrough!” But no. He says he’s leaving. That he is not cut out to be a husband or a father and that the work demands his everything. So he leaves. He only communicates one more time. About a month after the fire. I was still confined to a bed. Mary on a ventilator. He calls me. From Bogotá. I can just about breathe. You know the first thing he asks me?’

  I nod her on.

  ‘ “Are they safe?” And I think he means the children. And I say, “Yes, they’re safe.” And he says, “All of them?” And I say, “Yes, all of them.” Still thinking he means the kids. And then he says, “The ones in the trunk, too? The freaks?” And then I realize: he isn’t asking about the kids. And there’s this long silence. I think I’ve lost the connection. And then there’s this faint “Oh my God.” And I swear he’s weeping. Not from relief that his wife and kids are still alive. But because his life’s work has nearly gone up in flames. And in that moment I know it’s over. I can’t let my kids be around that. No scientific breakthrough justifies that kind of behaviour. Not even the discovery of a goddamn talking butterfly justifies that.’

  Edith stopped, opened her mouth and took a gulp of air, the memory of being in that fire and on that respirator triggering a bodily response. She mumbled a few more reassurances to herself as though still needing to justify the action she’d taken half a lifetime ago. Who could blame her for wanting her children to have nothing to do with such a man? A man who valued insects over his own kind?

  ‘He’s never tried to get in touch? See his children?’

  ‘Why would he? He never wanted to when he was around. When he said he was leaving I told him he’d never see his kids while I was their mother. He accepted it. Not because he felt guilt or respect – but because he didn’t care.’

  ‘And you’ve not seen him since?’

  Edith leant over to her bedside table and produced a pistol. It was a small ‘woman’s pistol’, the kind a femme fatale might slip in her handbag before a dinner.

  ‘I bought this for self-protection. After he left. But the truth is I would use it now if I saw him. Without hesitation.’

  ‘What if . . . he’d changed? Expressed remorse?’

  ‘Remorse needs a human heart. And he ain’t got one of those ’cos he ain’t human.’

  It was flattering to have Edith share these painful memories. I was vain enough to think it was because of something intrinsically sensitive and trustworthy in me. But I could see that she was making sure I got the story straight lest I get it crooked from someone else. All the years Edith had controlled the story, its truth augmented by the telling and re-telling and by going unchallenged. The absolute guilt of the accused was testified to by her scars, which were a daily prosecution. But for all that I still felt those scars didn’t tell the whole story. Just the parts she wanted the world to see. I believed Edith’s straight talk on most matters – butterflies, business, religion – but on the subject of her ex-husband I couldn’t help feeling the lady doth protest too much.

  CHAPTER NINE

  In which Joe returns with a new recruit and news of a life-changing deal.

  Joe returned just as the storm broke, dispersing the electric tensions in the house and bringing with him ‘the fresh breeze of ‘optitude’, the Western promise of vast horizons and news of a life-changing deal. We were all in the factory when we heard the scrunching of tyres in the drive and the blaring of country and western filling the air. It had been a week since he had set off without telling anyone where he was going, and two days later than he’d said he’d be when he’d called claiming to have had ‘a heckish high-level meeting’. I was beginning to see that there was a relationship between the level of the fanfare and distraction Joe created upon returning and the amount of making up needed for whatever upset he’d caused by his sudden, unexplained absences. His entrance that day had a lot of Ta Da! And since my ‘briefing’ from Edith I was more alert to Joe’s tricks. Even as the car door slammed I told myself I would not be distracted by whatever white rabbit he was going to pull from his hat, tales of life-changing deals, or odes to the glories of America’s natural wonders he was about to deliver. I intended to get some straight answers about where he’d been and what he’d been up to.

  If Joe’s absences made the heart grow sceptical, when present he had this ability to obliterate any doubts you had about him by the sheer force of his Joe-ness. He looked effortlessly magnificent as he entered the kitchen, his shirt soaked from the storm rain, sticking to his skin, his shoulder muscles and pectorals stretching to bursting, his steamed glasses pushed up above his forehead. All the accumulated irritations evaporated. He was carrying an aerated cardboard box used for transporting pets, which he held in his spread palm above the shoulder, just out of reach of Celeste, who was jumping up to look into the box and asking, ‘What is it? Let me see!’ Joe beamed with the confidence that no matter how many grievances we had, the thing in the box would be enough to make us forgive and forget. He was like an adventurer who, despite being gone five times longer than he’d said he would, and having committed all manner of heinous crimes in the adventuring, had found the diamond that justified it all. Damn you, Joe Bosco, I thought. I don’t care what the something you’ve been up to is. I’ve missed you!

  ‘Good day, leppars!’

  ‘Show me, show me, Joe.’ Celeste stood on a chair to get a look inside the box.

  Joe giggled with the vicarious excitement of us discovering what he knew he had for us.

  ‘What happened to your face?’ Mary asked.

  In all the razzmatazz I’d failed to notice the cut over his eyebrow sealed with a butterfly strip and a faint bruising on the cheekbone.

  ‘Skunk. Broke so hard I hit my head on the mirror.’

  Mary’s expression said ‘skunk, my ass’ but we were all too mesmerized by the box now to pursue it.

  ‘OK. You need to be quiet.’ He set the box on the table. ‘Don’t crowd round.’ He pulled of the lid and stepped back.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you . . . Jimmy Carter.’

  It was a bird. Large as a crow but featherless and baby in every way except for the beak – which was hooked and formidable. The bird lifted its head and opened that beak anticipating food. Joe grabbed a piece of pizza that Elijah had left in the box and dropped it into the bird’s maw.

  ‘Know what it is?’

  ‘It’s a baby turkey,’ Celeste said.

  ‘No!’

  I had no idea. It was ugly as a dodo and helpless as a lamb, except it ate like something born to devour. Its beak was monstrous.

  ‘Is it a . . . crow?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘A buzzard,’ Clay said.

  ‘Close.’

  ‘It’s the goddamn national bird.’ Edith was sticking Latin names stickers to the bases of the butterfly cases and buying none of it.

  ‘Yay, Ma! Come on down! You’ve won a car! It’s a little orphan bald eagle. Ain’t he cute? I found him at Batavia Kill. Just sitting in the road.’

  ‘We got enough lame birds around here already.’ Edith said.

  Celeste tossed the bird another slice of pizza. When it ate you saw more clearly the bird it was going to become.

  ‘He’s a hungry son of a gun. Needs constant feeding. I reckon he’s grown about a pound a day. Clay, you think you can fix Jimmy Carter a coop? Needs to be dark but have a feeding hatch.’

  ‘We can try.’

  ‘I’m not feeding that little fucker a single scrap,’ Edith said.

  ‘You don’t have to. He’ll be coming with us, out on the road. We’re going to set him free in the Grand Tetons.’

  ‘You just get back from one bit of gallivanting and you’re already bragging about the next?’


  ‘Fear not for I bring tidings of great optitude.’ Joe was beaming now, and the beaming looked sincere. ‘We got a buyer for the Collection.’

  ‘Oh here we go.’

  ‘No. This time you gotta believe me. I met this guy. He buys for a private collector who lives in Wyoming. He says his patron is one of the richest men in America. He is building a museum called “The Museum of Extinction”, which is full of species that are no longer found on the planet, from the brontosaurus to the Palos Verdes blues. I showed him the photographs of the Collection. He said that he ain’t, in all his days, seen bugs like it. When I mentioned the freaks he didn’t believe me.’

  ‘Makes two of us.’

  ‘This is serious, Ma. This time. It’s real. I showed him the sample.’ (Joe carried this freak on him at all times, as a sort of emergency insurance/credit/calling card.) ‘This guy was so super-impressed he called his client. I asked who this client was and he wouldn’t say. Super-secretive. He just called him the Wizard. ’Cos no one gets to see him. He wouldn’t even tell me his name. Just that he’s like a super-private reclusive type who happens to have the largest private collection of butterflies in the world. Like Rothschild, Riley, Bretherton, Margaret Fontaine all rolled into one, Iz. He is “The John Paul Getty of Butterfly Collecting”. He invited me to his house in Wyoming!’

  I watched Isabelle during this announcement. Her mixed feelings were all there to see in her lowered eyes and little nods: resignation mixed in with gratitude, a necessary scepticism towards Joe but a desire to be pleased for him.

  ‘You talk money with this Wizard?’ Edith asked.

  ‘Trillionaires don’t talk about money, Ma.’

  ‘So why don’t he come and see the collection for hisself?’ Mary asked, voicing what I was thinking.