The Killing of Butterfly Joe Read online

  ‘Can I help you?’

  A disembodied, female voice came from behind the counter. A woman stood up from behind it, her face flush with bending down. She had a handful of ribbons that she started to tie into bows. She talked without looking up at me but seemed to know already that I was not a customer. I gave her my best smile and put on my best English accent, trying to sound somewhere between a newsreader and Shakespearian actor – sonorous, bassy and florid. It seemed appropriate to be florid in a florists.

  ‘This is lovely. A . . . veritable floral cathedral.’ (I never use the word veritable – as it’s clearly pretentious – but I was nervous.) Out it came, at the head of a veritable tide of unctuous effluence. ‘I’ve not seen such a dazzling array. You have a wonderful store. Perfectly wonderful. Really. The finest I’ve seen. Ever. You should be proud.’

  ‘I just work here.’

  ‘Well. You work in a lovely store.’

  ‘Well, it’s no picnic, I can assure you. You selling life assurance or what?’ She nodded to my sample briefcase and shot Joe a suspicious look. She looked at me as though I was going to rob her and Joe as if he constituted some kind of criminal threat. This was going to be tough. Her accent and her attitude was pure New York City.

  ‘No, no. Not at all. I uh . . . my name is . . . Mr Jones, this is my assistant, Mr Bosco. We work for Butterfly World, a company specializing in selling gift items to florists.’

  Her name-tag said Anthony.

  ‘Anthony. That’s a pretty name.’

  ‘It’s Anth, “th”.’

  ‘Ah. Where I come from that’s a . . .’

  ‘Guy’s name, I know. My father wanted a boy. I was a constant disappointment to him. So. What you trying to sell?’

  ‘Well, Anthony. If I could show you, I have some samples here.’ I lifted the sample case onto the counter.

  ‘Don’t put it there.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Put it there if you have to.’ She pointed to a chair. ‘This better not be life assurance.’

  ‘No. Something far more life affirming.’ Joe smiled at this line. So far, he was being very restrained.

  ‘So what is it then? I got things to be getting on with.’

  ‘It’ll be easier if I just show you.’

  I set the case down and opened it. The sample case was hollowed out to fit three 6 by 4s with one each of our most popular butterflies (fritillary, swallowtail and blue morpho) and some sample sheets showing the different sizes and a ‘leave behind’ brochure with more examples.

  ‘Basically, we have . . . well . . . you can see . . . they speak for themselves. I think you’ll agree.’

  ‘Is it dead?’

  ‘That’s a Morpho peleides – more commonly known as the blue morpho.’

  ‘It’s real?’

  ‘All our butterflies are real, madam.’

  ‘You catch it yourself?’

  ‘Well. That one is from Brazil . . .’

  ‘You kill them?’

  ‘No. No. Of course not. We just . . . They are all stunned. Put to sleep. In the most humane way.’

  ‘Humane? How’s that?’

  ‘We use . . . It’s a type of . . . It’s painless.’

  ‘Really? To be put to sleep and never wake up. Jesus. That’s sinister. What are you – some kind of mass-murderer?’

  Joe cleared his throat as though about to come and rescue my crashing pitch. It was going as badly as it possibly could. I was unable to relax, to be myself. I was letting her determine the direction of the pitch, and I was focusing on the product’s least appealing but unavoidable aspect. I was sounding patronizing, even to myself. Patronizing and a bit weird. More crucially I was pitching a Muppet. I should have asked there and then to see the owner but instead I dug myself a deeper grave.

  ‘We like to think we are extending the life of the average butterfly. Giving them a life beyond their first life, so to speak.’

  ‘You ever ask a butterfly how it felt about that?’

  ‘Butterflies have a short life span. Some live only a few weeks. So in a way we are giving them . . .’

  ‘All the more reason not to murder them for financial gain. Jesus. I don’t need this.’

  ‘Ma’am.’ I switched into auto pitch panic, drumming up the by-rote facts I’d learned the weeks before. ‘There is no cruelty involved in the killing . . . capturing . . . of the butterflies. All the butterflies we sell are approved for sale. They are all sourced from reputable suppliers . . .’

  ‘So someone else kills them?’

  I looked at Joe. He was making a monumental effort not to laugh.

  This woman was playing me, deliberately trying to humiliate me. She was immune to the charms of my accent or the charms of my charm. Maybe it was a kind of revenge for doing her shitty job, for working for someone else. She would not let me get one sentence ahead of her.

  ‘Anthony, is the owner of the store available?’

  ‘He’s in Barbuda.’

  ‘Barbuda?’

  ‘On vacation.’

  The bell dinged. Anthony looked past me and as she did a radiant, as yet unsighted, smile burst forth across her face. A man entered carrying a plant he had selected from an outside trolley; he set it on the previously forbidden counter without objection from Anthony. Her transformation was profound and alarming. Now she was charm itself. She’d found a smile from somewhere and it was a stunning smile. (Maybe all Americans have a little box of smiles they carry around and stick on, like fake moustaches, when they need them.) Even her accent became homier. It was something to behold and she really went to town on being nice to him, in a shameless and shameful act designed to show me up.

  ‘Acanthus. Is this for Maria?’

  ‘Yah. It’s our anniversary.’

  ‘Well don’t you think you should throw in some flowers? We got a special on today.’

  ‘She loves irises.’

  ‘We have the purple and the yellow. One bunch or two?’

  ‘I’ll take one of each.’

  I wanted to kill her, for her shameless apartheid and her total condescension. While she wrapped the flowers, the man glanced at me and then at Joe. Finally, his gaze rested on the blue morpho on top of the sample case.

  ‘Woah,’ he said. ‘That’s not real, is it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s a blue morpho.’

  ‘That colour. It don’t look real though.’

  In a way the deeply irritating man, who I wanted to kick, was right: with its metallic, shimmering shades of blue and green and the interference effects of its reflective scales (I learned this from Isabelle), the blue morpho doesn’t look real. But I didn’t say this to him. He didn’t deserve to know. He left the store to a virtual ticker-tape parade of ‘see-you-soons’ and ‘say hi-to-so-and-sos’, as though this were the friendliest flower store in the whole of America. Once out the door that woman’s smile fell off her face, just like a fake moustache, where it lay on the floor next to my dead pitch. She made a told-you-so squish face and put her hands out towards the blue morpho.

  ‘Mister. Take it from me. No one here wants a dead butterfly sitting in their living room. They should be flying free, not locked up in that glass tomb. Their life’s short enough, ain’t it?’

  The awful thing is, I sort of agreed with her.

  Joe’s self-imposed silence finally came to an end. As he started to repack the case he set her straight on a couple of things.

  ‘Ma’am. I can see you don’t appreciate our wares. But let’s be clear: these flowers you sell are dying a slow death. You have cut their lives short in the name of putting a little beauteousness in people’s lives. And if you think a butterfly is living the life of Riley, flying free, flitting from flower to flower, let me tell you. It’s a horrible existence: you got predators left and right, you got birds chasing you, people chasing you. You got cars squishing you in their grilles. You know how many eggs laid by females ever make it to adulthood? Two per cent. You may look at this
bug and think, “How cute. What a wonderful life!” But butterfly society is brutal, just brutal. It’s cannibalistic, incestuous, the young butterflies get molested, you got your little caterpillars eating their brothers and sisters trying to become pupae, or they get hijacked by the ichneumon wasp which lays its eggs inside the caterpillar, and then if you’re a female you get to be cradle-raped by horny males desperate for females before you’ve even opened your wings. I mean really and truly some butterflies are better off dead.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In which Joe shows me how to sell and Mary thinks we’re being followed.

  The humiliation and failure of my rookie pitch made me want to curl up and die. To have something to sell, and for that something to be a not unlovely thing, and for your success in selling that thing to correlate with your continued ability to have the experience that you crave, and for someone to dismiss that thing (and you) so comprehensively, well that is a crushing experience.

  ‘Maybe I’m not cut out for this, Joe.’

  ‘Aww, come on Rip! Don’t be disheartened. You’re sounding like the old Llew Jones there. I coulda jumped in but that was a good lesson. I knew that store would be a waste of breath before we even entered. I didn’t want to tell you but I never sold a single case in Ithaca. I just wanted to see if you could do it. And to start with a failure. That way you know what you gotta do. Don’t feel bad. She was not for changing. These stone-hearted liberals who think they’ve found salvation in yoga and granola, I swear they are more stuck in their ways than the rednecks. Had Abe Lincoln himself walked into that store she would have turned him away.’

  ‘OK, but you do the next one. I need to see how you do it.’

  ‘I’ll do a couple for ya but don’t take heed of my method. You gotta find your own style, Rip. You’ll only find it by doing it.’

  We kicked up the dust on Ithaca and moved on.

  Mary started to tease me for my rookie failure, and her teasing was more about the postponing of our union than my commercial shortcomings. For the next few miles we danced a tango innuendo around her oblivious brother.

  ‘How many cases you sell there, Rip?’

  ‘Zero.’

  ‘Two-fiddy cases seems a long way away.’

  ‘I reckon we’ll do it before Ohio,’ I said.

  Mary smiled and checked the mirror to see if Joe was picking up on this. He was feeding Jimmy Carter and seemed unaware of the subtext. (This guilelessness in Joe was something I admired. I found it reassuring. It was one of the main reasons I trusted him, even.) Mary ribbed on. Testing it.

  ‘Can you wait that long, Rip?’

  ‘Oh I can wait. Better to do it well than do it too quickly.’

  ‘Not doing it at all, that’s worse.’

  ‘That would be a crying shame. But I’ll do it.’

  ‘I’m beginning to doubt you got what it takes.’

  ‘Hey, come on, Mary. It was Rip’s first go and I doubt even Ma could have swung that woman. Rip will come good.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘He better.’

  Joe showed me how to do it at a florist outside a small town near the Finger Lakes. After a flattering preamble (transparently false to my eyes and ears) about the beauty of the store to a reluctant looking Ken (‘Ken, this is really the nicest flower store I’ve seen in upstate New York, maybe in the whole Atlantic seaboard’) and a granted request to show Ken something that might ‘enhanciate’ that beauty (if that were possible!), Joe set the sample case on the counter and started to make the pyramid stack that formed the prop, stage and backdrop to his storytelling. His scars looked conspicuous as he laid out the cases and I waited for ‘How I Saved Ma From The Fire’. Joe paused for dramatic effect, and to let Ken admire the tower of flying colour before him, then he picked out the orange swallowtail that he’d placed at the point of the pyramid.

  ‘Before my father was killed by a jaguar in the jungles of South America,’ he began, ‘he taught me the names of all the butterflies. And this was the first one. The orange swallowtail. Papilio thoas. Isn’t she pretty?’

  The death of Joe’s father and the manner of it was a shock (and, frankly, news to me) but it had the immediate effect of creating the respectful pause into which Joe poured his story. Ken held the sample in his own hand, unsure how to react: caught between ‘Yes, it most certainly is a pretty thing’ and ‘I’m sorry about your father but please tell me about the jaguar.’

  ‘My last memory of him was him holding an orange swallowtail, just like that one there, and saying, “If people took the time to look at butterflies, the world would be a better place.” ’

  Joe paused again, letting the pertinent fact sink in. He later told me he called this ‘testing the levels of compassion’.

  ‘I think your father was right about that, sir. I’m sorry to hear he . . . did he . . . what happened there . . .’

  ‘Well. It was a long time ago. But he at least died doing what he loved. In the habitat of his favourite creature. He was certainly a remarkable man. By all accounts. I only have a few treasured memories.’

  Another pause.

  The storekeeper was now both respectful and not un-curious, the perfect state for a buyer to be in.

  ‘He was an eminent entomologist, see. A professor. He was always away in a jungle somewhere searching for a new species. His particular obsession was the group of butterflies known as Morphidae, a Neotropical family comprising spectacularly colourful butterflies. He wrote books about them. My ma used to joke that he loved bugs more than people. Ha! She weren’t far wrong about that! Anyway. One day, when I was five, he was in Colombia searching for the five-winged blue morpho.’ (Joe pointed to the standard blue morpho case in the pyramid.) ‘It was a super-rare aberration of this butterfly here. Morpho peleides. That’s the blue morpho to you, sir. He’d been away for months. One day, we got a call from the US consulate in Bogotá telling us about his death. That was twenty years ago now.’

  Out of respect for the dead, the man picked the case up carefully, aware that he was one remove from a great rarity as well as a touching tragedy.

  ‘But he left a legacy,’ Joe continued. ‘A pure love of bugs. For which I thank him, daily. He took me to see the great monarch migration. I grew up surrounded by butterflies – green bird-wings from Australia. Malachites from South America, Indian moon moths; small blue Grecians from Venezuela, and that one, the blue morpho – our number-one seller. A cousin of that five-winged aberration my father literally lost his life looking for.’

  ‘It’s a very attractive colour. It almost seems . . .’

  ‘Unreal! I know. That’s what everyone says. But that blue is the morpho’s great trick. It’s a trick of light. It’s a play of light, like the sky itself. It ain’t really blue. My pa would bring home rare specimens. Valuable specimens. But this one – although quite common – was my favourite. And I remember when he gave me one – in a little frame – I had that strange feeling that I think every butterfly lover has of wanting to keep it and let it go all at once. And I also had this powerful feeling of wanting to share it with other people. For people to see how beautiful it is. It’s why we started this business. That desire gave birth to a dream, a dream of putting a butterfly in every home in this land. It’s in the pursuit of that dream that I stand before you today.’ Joe held the blue morpho up to the light. ‘You could say we’re keeping the memory of my father alive.’

  Joe was actually crying! All teared up.

  ‘He taught me that butterflies transcedate politics. And borderlines. I mean when a monarch flies to Mexico does it care that it has crossed into another country? He taught me that.’

  I can’t say for certain if it was the man’s attraction for the product or his sympathy for Joe’s story that sealed it; but the pitch that had begun with little chance ended with twenty cases bought for cash.

  As we walked back to the car $150 richer, I had to ask.

  ‘Jesus, Joe. You took some liberties there.’ />
  ‘Come on, Rip. It’s called poetic licensing. You should know that! He could be dead. I don’t know. I mean, he might as well be. We ain’t ever heard from him. I have told and retold this story so many times I actually can’t remember what the real version is. I don’t know that it rightly matters as long as the deal gets done.’

  ‘Don’t you feel . . . bad? Saying that? Isn’t it . . . dishonouring the dead or something? Your memories.’

  ‘I can do what I like with the memories of my father ’cos I got hardly none. It’s my history, Rip. I’ll do with it as I please.’

  ‘Were you faking those tears? You got me going, too.’

  ‘Sometimes when I get to pitching I’m so in it I can’t tell. It’s like I’m there. Look, Rip, if you start telling someone about someone they never met, telling them what a great person they are, listing their achievements, then they are only going to be so interested. Tell them that person died, and died in a heroic or tragic way, then they really get to sit up. A death really greases the skids in a story. Try it.’

  All families tell myths about themselves. My own family myth is that my parents were a faithful, happily married couple, and our family a close, brilliant, sociable unit, but at least we kept it to a single, consistent narrative. With Joe the myths were legion. When it came to pitching, that lacuna in his past was filled with whatever dramas he pleased. And because he delivered fact and fiction with equal conviction, melding them seamlessly in such a torrent of words and energy, it was sometimes hard discerning the truth of the tale. I don’t think Joe was mendacious because once he got going he got so into it he believed it. The tears were not crocodile; the emotions were felt. But he was an absolute anarchist with his past. In one pitch he might start by talking about the day he saw his first butterfly (he was five, he was ten, it was an orange swallowtail, it was a blue morpho). He might have several brothers and sisters; he was an only, lonely bug-obsessed boy; sometimes they lived in Michigan, other times (if it fitted) they lived in California. He liked to open with the line, ‘The first butterfly I ever saw was a dead one. And it changed my life.’ Sometimes he’d stretch out his hands so the shopkeeper could see the scars and they’d ask and he’d tell them (faux-reluctant) how he saved his Ma from the flames. Other times he’d tell them about the day they heard his father disappeared or died (in Colombia, in Borneo, even in the Congo once!); he might have been seven at the time, he might have been twelve. His father was often the hero of this entomological tale. The Great American Lepidopterist who disappeared in the jungles of South America, and who never returned, and in whose memory the butterfly business was started. If it was Joe’s way of dealing with the father who’d left him, I can’t fault him for it.