The Killing of Butterfly Joe Read online

  ‘Difference is people want waffles,’ Mary said, puncturing Joe’s ballooning fancy like a good sister should.

  ‘People shall not live by waffles alone,’ Joe said, the syrup anointing his T-shirt.

  We had loaded Chuick with as many butterfly cases as it could hold (about a hundred and twenty mixed in the trunk and another two dozen on one half of the back seat). Mary complained that we weren’t taking the Cadillac but Edith had won the argument about taking it back. Joe said that we’d all be driving Cadillacs soon enough. As far as I was concerned Chuick was a more fitting vessel for our adventuring: faithful, trusted and true. Chuick was a rare instance of something that was claimed to be unique actually being unique. As we walked to the car, Celeste was pleading with Joe to let her come, attaching herself to his leg, making him walk like a giant with a limp.

  ‘Let me come, Joe. Let me come!’

  Joe was carrying three butterfly nets with folding sticks and his ridiculous, faux crocodile skin attaché case with the combination locks, which contained a ‘travel’ set of five-winged blue morphos for the Wizard.

  ‘I’ll take you next year, Ceelee. I promise. We’ll do Disneyland this winter.’

  ‘You promised that last time. Mr Rip, tell him to let me come.’

  ‘It’s not up to me, Ceelee. But it’ll be a lot of driving. You’d get bored. Plus, we only have room for three people with all the butterfly cases and Jimmy Carter.’

  ‘Dang! It’s not fair.’

  ‘You got school, Ceelee,’ Joe said, setting down the case and lifting her up. ‘I need you to be smarter than everyone else. For when you are the first black female President of America.’

  Mary had already called shotgun on the back seat and was lost in the music of her Walkman. Jimmy Carter was next to her in the box Clay had made for him. It was wooden-slatted and had a slide top and a litter of ripped-up National Enquirers which, Joe pointed out, meant the national bird could poop all over the nation’s celebrities. I had the smaller of my two travel bags with a couple of changes of clothes. Joe was wearing everything he was bringing: canvas pants, collarless dress shirt and black moccasins. His only luggage was the attaché case.

  ‘What about a change of clothes, Joe?’

  ‘I’ll buy some when I need them.’

  Isabelle appeared, her hair down, dressed more loosely than usual. How typical that she should be looking her loveliest just as I was leaving. ‘Ma wants you, Joe.’

  ‘Someday she’ll just let me leave.’ Joe put the three butterfly nets on the back shelf and strode off.

  What now? Would there be some last-minute thwarting? My desire to get out there, see the country and start my adventure on the road was so powerful now. I was a pulled-back arrow in a bow, ready to be fired out across the Mississippi and beyond.

  Clay appeared carrying a big Tupperware container. ‘This is if you need to make some cases in a hurry. If you sell out quicker than you thought, or you break some. You got the materials to make up fifty cases if you need to.’ The box contained a tube of silicon, cut 6 by 4 pieces of glass, a hundred mixed specimens, stickers, driftwood. ‘You can keep this. If you get bit again.’ He handed me the haemorrhoid ring.

  ‘Thanks, Clay.’ I shook his hand.

  ‘Be safe out there.’

  We could hear Edith and Joe yelling at each other. I looked at Isabelle.

  ‘She never lets him go without a fight. She’s determined to keep all her chicks chicks. He’s still her Li’l Joe.’

  I put out my hand which she took and shook. Her hand was cold and small and white but her grip was firm. I decided last minute to give her a kiss on the cheek. She did that thing shy people do, bowing their heads when about to be kissed, and I ended up kissing her forehead which had the effect of making the kiss more meaningful than I had intended or she wanted.

  I wished Isabelle good luck with the writing. She wished me well with the selling.

  ‘I hope the collector turns out to be . . . true,’ she said. ‘And travelling mercies.’

  Joe bounded down the steps. ‘OK. Saddle up!’

  ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Yeah! Everything’s great. She gave me the usual send-off: “Go screw yourself. I hope you die. Don’t expect me to be here when you’re back. Why are you making this trip? It’s a waste of time. You’re worse than your father.” She doesn’t like me leaving, is all.’

  When I got in the car Mary gave me a dagger look.

  ‘“Good luck with the writing”,’ Mary sneered, mimicking my farewell to Isabelle.

  Jimmy Carter was agitated, squawking and scratching in his box, sensing change. Joe fired up the Chuick and the V8 gurgle of the engine was a sound full of promise; a noise that said, ‘We’re going places.’

  ‘See you when we see you,’ Joe said, leaning across me to speak to Isabelle through my open window. As we pulled away Celeste ran alongside the car, her skinny gazelle legs springing and her feet hardly seeming to touch the ground. Isabelle waved and I waved back through the open window feeling a connection. And then I saw, standing like a sentinel in her bedroom window, Edith. She watched us all the way round the bend until we were out of sight.

  The Road! I was following in the tyre-tracks of a thousand men and women – salesmen, desperadoes, preachers, lawmen, poets; the greedy, the sad, the optimistic, the crazed. The Road was no longer the borrowed road of other people’s telling, it was my own, and it promised a sort of salvation, it was my Asphalt Messiah. The Road was infinite possibility. The routes we might take, the people we’d meet, the timing of all this and the contingency of the subtlest variations that lead to entirely different outcomes makes it so intense and so mysterious.

  I was a participant in the quintessential American drama: the road that takes you from rags to riches via pitches. All over this land, hundreds and thousands of entrepreneurs were flitting to the headquarters of some giant corporation, or a store in a strip mall, their life’s work in a briefcase, praying that their voice wouldn’t crack, that their numbers added up, and that the cut of their cloth was right. Even though the statistics told us that only one of the twenty-five products being pitched cold that day would be successful, we had no doubt our flightless cargo would be the chosen one. Of all the dreamer moths being drawn to the burning lights of the American Dream, we would be the ones that flew right through the flames un-singed. Or something like that.

  I felt elation in being a young, healthy man in the greatest country of the free world, in the company of interesting, unusual people, with the imminent prospect of sexual fulfilment and a means of making money that would keep us forever propelled on adventures. My thoughts raced on to the America I was about to see, the sales and love I was going to make (I was fifty cases from that ecstasy). I could see Mary in the wing mirror, her brown pins across the bench seat, painting her toenails with great concentration, trying to anticipate the bumps and turns in the road (is there anything as mysterious or appealing as a woman doing her make-up whilst on the move? No there isn’t); she was humming along to a tune on her Walkman, her headphones making an Alice-band in her lank hair that fell over her features in a perfect random symmetry.

  If, for the first few miles, we were each alone with our thoughts, as soon as we left the perimeter of the Catskill Park something lifted. (That place really did have some kind of spell that broke the moment you left its range.) As we joined the highway, Joe snapped out of himself and yelled, ‘The Road! The Road! The Road.’ Up ahead there was a metal box-girder bridge and as we came to it he slowed. ‘Listen to this,’ he said. As soon as the car was on the bridge the tyres started to sing a distinct note, which Joe changed by accelerating and decelerating. He played the bridge with the car as if it were a giant tuning fork. As soon as we passed beyond the bridge the tune stopped, or rather, it reverted to a tune that had been playing all along but you didn’t always notice until it stopped. He put out a finger and pointed to his ear. ‘Now hear that?’ It was like the noise of radio
static or a rushing stream. ‘The road makes sounds. And different roads make different sounds. And the weather changes the tune. Heat makes the tyres scream. The rain makes it shush – what a sound that is! The sound of a car driving in rain, Rip. That is the most beautiful sound in the world. I wish it was raining now so that you could hear it. Sometimes you have to be careful though. It lulls you. Makes you sleepy. And I have fallen asleep at the wheel twice in my time – once in Kansas and then in Nebraska. But this hum is like a bass line. You hear that?’ I listened to the sound and there it was, the rushing stream, just behind the chug of Chuick’s V8.

  ‘I hear it.’

  ‘The music of the road.’

  He started to drum on the steering wheel, grip and flex it, and then he started to sing one of his songs. When he was at the wheel Joe sang songs – an appalling bastardization of popular tunes and half-caught lyrics mashed up with his own words. There was one he sang, to the tune of ‘Yankie Doodle’, that he said was his hymn to selling; it was his theme tune. The words to the first verse went:

  ‘Will you buy my butterflies

  From all around the world?

  I pinned them here for you to see

  How much do you think they’re worth?’

  And the chorus went:

  ‘Five for fifty dollars,

  Ten for seventy-five.

  Buy some with the flowers,

  To help us stay alive!’

  We sang the song all the way to Ithaca.

  Odysseus was born in Ithaca and I took it as a good omen that my first attempt at selling would begin in a place named after such an esteemed traveller. A cynic might laugh at the idea but I have no difficulty in seeing a Homeric equivalence in my own voyage and the business of selling. The cold-calling and hard selling, the humiliation and rejection, the daily questioning of integrity and taste, the combination of confidence and humility required by the salesperson would have tested the wily Odysseus as severely as any siren, Cyclops or harpy. Joe said (and I would back him) that travelling salesfolk were the true heroes of this age, setting out in all weathers, covering great distances, risking body and soul, facing humiliation, rejection, destitution every day, away from their loved ones; facing more temptations, demons and beasts and beatings than your average hero – all to make ends meet. This Ithaca (population 30,000) was an elegant and civilized college town built around the southernmost tip of one of the Finger Lakes, populated (according to Joe) by educated, left-leaning people who were open to nature and a more poetic view of the world. By Joe’s reckoning this was the ideal demographic for a rookie butterfly salesman needing to flex his wings.

  ‘They’ll be lapping you up,’ Joe said.

  ‘You gonna try him selling here?’ Mary seemed surprised at the choice of town.

  ‘Sure, why not?’

  ‘You ain’t even cracked it yet.’

  ‘None of us have. Rip’s gonna be our secret weapon.’

  ‘Who is best at selling in the family?’ I asked.

  ‘Ma,’ Mary said, as though it were indisputable.

  ‘Nooowah!’ Joe protested.

  ‘Come on, Joe. She always outsold you.’

  ‘What about her . . . ?’ I drew a circle in the air in front of my face.

  ‘People either feel sorry for her or are too scared to turn her away,’ Mary said. ‘She don’t sell too much these days. But she always pitched it straight, no frills. Unlike Joe. Joe claims to be the best but he talks too much.’

  ‘I bring in the deals, Mary. You know it.’

  ‘You use ten words when one will do. And not all those words are words people know.’

  ‘I got my method. Everyone got their own method.’

  ‘Right. Joe makes up all kinds of shit to get the sale. You’d think us the most tragic family in all America the way he talks sometimes.’

  ‘Don’t listen to her super-negative talk, Rip,’ Joe protested although I’m not sure he really cared about his reputation as a salesman.

  ‘What about Clay?’

  ‘Clay’s good but being black ain’t helpful – especially in this part of the world. Elijah’s too shy.’

  ‘Isabelle?’

  ‘Isabelle!’ Mary sneered. ‘She couldn’t sell if her life depended on it.’

  I actually thought it was admirable – not to be able to sell – but I didn’t say this to Mary.

  ‘And what about you?’

  ‘I can do it if I have to. Ma thinks women sell better than men because men are full of shit and never really say what’s true about a thing. Ma wants me to sell more but I don’t like it. I feel like I’m selling myself. I like the driving. I drive good.’

  ‘You do.’

  As Joe parked up, Jimmy Carter started squawking and scratching in his box on the back seat.

  ‘I think he needs more food already,’ Mary said. ‘You got dough, Joe?’

  Mary pulled her headphones down around her leg and was leaning forward into the space between the front seats. Joe handed Mary ten dollars from a roll he kept in his sock. ‘See if you can get Jimmy Carter some fish. Fish is his natural diet.’

  ‘I need some for hair dye.’

  ‘Hair dye?’

  ‘I’m thinking of going blue.’

  ‘Make it blue morpho blue! Good branding.’

  Joe gave her another ten dollars. Mary wished me luck. ‘Two-fiddy cases,’ she said, before winking and setting off to look for raw fish and blue hair dye.

  The florist was in the centre of the city, in the car-free zone (a thing Joe decried as elitist arrogance and a restraint on trade as it meant having to park up and walk a few blocks). I was suddenly overcome with nerves. What if I wasn’t any good at this? I had sold, cold, on the telephone and proven a success; but that was a faceless experience; rejection was disembodied and impersonal.

  ‘Aren’t you going to show me how to do it first?’

  ‘The only way to see if you can ride the horse, Rip, is to ride the horse. I’ll be right behind you. I’ll stay quiet. I’ll pretend you’re the boss. I’m just carrying for ya. I will not say a word. Tell them I got a problem with my speech if you need to. Tell them I’m dumb.’

  He continued to prep and gee me up as we walked. ‘You have to read the signs real quick, Rip. Is this person happy or sad? Do they like their job or not? Republican or Democrat? Atheist or Believer? Or neither. Do I get heavy on the science? Or the business side? Or will they prefer the against-all-the-odds version? Should I lead with the blue morpho or start with the malachite? You’ll get a feel real quick for these things. You’ll soon learn when to goose the accelerator and when to ease off. Remember to smile. You got one of these faces that looks kind of grumpy when it’s in neutral. Try and look a little more – you know – upbeat. In this world, a fake smile is better than an honest frown.’

  I tried a smile.

  ‘How about some teeth? We need to see your teeth.’

  ‘They’re a little yellow.’

  ‘It don’t matter. You can’t smile without teeth. And you can’t sell without a smile.’

  I opened my mouth and flashed a toothy grin.

  ‘Jeeze.’ Joe grimaced. ‘Don’t you ever floss? You need to floss, Rip. OK. Keep the mouth closed mainly. Except when you’re talking. We need to get those fixed. Maybe a writer can get away with bad teeth, but a salesman gotta have great dentures. It’s kind of a given. And if you can you make the smile a little less . . . you know . . . smile from the inside if you can. From the inside . . . a sincere smile.’

  ‘The smiling doesn’t come naturally to me. I can’t fake it.’

  ‘OK. But you got to learn how, Rip. You gotta sacrifice your pride in the name of selling. You gotta be ready to be a fool for your fortune. Fake it to make it. And remember, every pitch a poem. Or a story. Bring the butterflies to life with your pitching. Make them fly. And make sure you admire their wares before you sell yours. And don’t forget to compliment the way they look. Not just the women. Men, too – “Sir, I like
that shirt. I been thinking about growing a goatee myself. Does it take much upkeep? You work out a lot? You must be bench-pressing two hundred pounds” – that kinda thing. And get them to talk about their product. Look interested. Let them show you their enthusiasm for what they do. Oh, and if you can get a name, or see their name on a name-tag, use it. I tell you. People love to hear their name spoken by a stranger. It has a magical power. Don’t be afraid to make little variations in the story. You gotta serve fresh bread. And finally, whatever you do, never . . .’

  ‘Pitch a Muppet.’

  ‘Right! They taught you well.’

  Kris’s Flower Shop was sandwiched between a bookshop and a vegetarian restaurant. It was hardly a castle or an impregnable fortress but when we entered that store I felt like I was going into battle. I had more butterflies in my stomach than in the box Joe was carrying. I’ll say it again and again: all over the world there are people in the front line, going over the top, once more unto the breach-ing, all in the name of making a living. And I salute them all because every sale you attempt contains the possibility of failure, rejection and a kind of death.

  ‘You think I look professional enough?’

  ‘I’d buy a crippled horse from you.’

  I straightened myself out, tucking a lose flap of shirt into my jeans and brushing back my hair. I did a mouth stretch, pictured myself as a clever, charming winner, and stepped into the store.

  I was hit by the smell that would become familiar to me in the days and miles ahead. The aggregated smell of flowers in a flower store is a sweet, bottomy stink, an odour so powerful and primal and sexy, at first. There appeared to be no one in the store. It was just after nine o’clock and we were almost certainly the first there that day. Classical music came from somewhere in the foliage. I stifled a sneeze.