The Killing of Butterfly Joe Read online

  Afterwards Joe started looking for someone to give his God Money to. Mary was driving but watching Joe as he counted out the money from the day’s haul.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Four hundred dollars.’ Joe took $40 and then he started looking around.

  ‘What you looking for, Joe?’

  ‘Someone to give alms to.’

  ‘Don’t give no alms, Joe. We might need all that dough.’

  ‘You know that’s stinking thinking right there, Mary. We always give alms.’

  As we passed a row of street stores, Joe called out, ‘There. The old lady.’

  An old woman with a mop was wiping the floors of the canteen. Mary pulled over. Joe jumped out and went and gave the lady the forty bucks. The woman looked bemused but after a little coaxing she took the money.

  ‘Joe, is that wise?’ I asked. ‘Giving away money we need?’

  ‘Of course it’s wise,’ he said. ‘That money ain’t ours. First fruits, Rip. You gotta give your first fruits. The Lord will make it up to us. You’ll see. Now we can go eat.’

  At first I saw Joe’s random philanthropy as another form of distraction, another foil laid to enable him to keep distance; but it was sincere. Edith was right: Joe was too recklessly generous and economically profligate to make a successful businessman.

  Mary pulled up at a drive-thru Taco Bell. ‘I love Taco Hell,’ Joe said, before scrambling his voice at the intercom to try and get an extra burrito at the pick-up counter. Having succeeded in confusing the girl at the intercom we picked up our food and drove on. Before we dispensed the food, Joe said one of his graces. He talked to his God with a familiarity and irreverence that was shocking, even to someone who thought it all nonsense. I had been brought up to be embarrassed by expressions of faith and usually I was, but with Joe I never felt that. His wild, comic God sounded inclusive and accessible.

  ‘Lord, crush our enemies especially that bitch back in Granolaville (just kidding). Seriously. Thank you for this fake Mexican food. May it be a blessing to our bodies. Keep us from haemorrhoids.’ He chewed a mouthful before continuing, riffing theological for a bit – (for my benefit, I think). ‘Thank you that you are with us now, by your spirit, rather than just having died and not risen or been anything more than a good man with some nice ideas, but in fact God himself come to earth! I mean if you’re not God then let’s just quit pretending. And thank you for the fact there is nothing we can do to earn salvation. You have done it for us. No hoops to jump through. There’s no standing up, no sitting down, no talking funny, no men in dresses, or bead-rubbing, no payments or do-goodery that will get us there – because you’ve done it! Oh boy. Forgive us for taking the poetic liberties with the stories and the quotes. And thank you for my new friend who has come to work for us, even though he doesn’t for one second believe in you and finds this prayer embarrassing. Help him sell at the next store we find, Lord. Let him relax and let him fly. And I pray that before our journey’s end you will have changed his atheistic ways by maybe blinding him temporarily so that he might see – just a few days, long enough to really make him think! A. Men.’

  ‘A. Men.’

  Mary gave Jimmy Carter some tacos. The national bird had been supine all day.

  ‘I’m worried about him, Joe. He ain’t right.’

  ‘He’s a major predator. He needs calories.’

  Jimmy Carter came alive at the whiff of food, demanding his next pound of flesh. When he was eating you knew what he was: one of the world’s great predators and symbol of its most powerful country. His mighty, full-grown beak open in a constant demand of ‘feed me feed me feed me’.

  The national bird chomped crackers, chips, bread and even apple cores. ‘Look at him. He’s growing so fast. I swear he’s grown since we he last saw him an hour ago. He’s a true patriot,’ Joe said. ‘He’ll eat anything.’

  Somewhere on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, Mary said she thought we were being followed. Joe had asked me if I could name the great lakes. I named three of them. He gave me the acrostic to remember all five by: ‘Homes’: Huron. Ontario. Michigan. Erie. Superior.

  ‘Don’t all look at once,’ Mary said. ‘This Grand Fury’s tailing us.’

  Joe put his great arm across the back of Mary’s seat to look, trying to be surreptitious.

  ‘I love those Plymouths,’ he said. ‘And that is a nice colour. The colour of a mimosa moth.’

  ‘I’m serious, Joe. He’s been behind us since Syracuse.’

  ‘He could be going to where we’re going.’

  I turned sideways to look. The green Plymouth was being driven by a man wearing sunglasses who drove with that neutral frown that drivers drive with when they’re concentrating. It was hard to tell if he was tailing us but the trouble is once you think a car is tailing you it’s tailing you. I felt a faint alarm at the time, but it was like hearing a fire bell in a disused factory at the other end of town that everyone ignores and that after a time you think isn’t ringing any more. Maybe if I’d stopped still for long enough I’d have noticed that it was still going, still warning people to get the hell out of the building!

  ‘That weed’s making you paranoid, sister.’

  ‘Fuck you, Joe.’

  ‘Any reason why someone would be following us, Joe?’ I asked, slightly nervous of the answer.

  ‘You kidding,’ Mary said. ‘Joe’s got a thousand people would want to hunt him down and kill him.’

  ‘Well. I left a trail of people I could have upset, Rip,’ he said, a little too proudly. ‘Preachers, storekeepers. The IRS. You shall know me by the trail of the dead butterflies, Rip! Slow down and we’ll wave to him.’

  Mary began to slow down and immediately the Plymouth came off at the next junction.

  ‘See. He knows we know,’ Mary said.

  And that was that. I forgot about it. Until the next time.

  ‘It’s a Kodak moment!’ Joe said as we entered the city limits of Rochester, a midsized city on Lake Ontario, and home to Kodak cameras. We stopped outside the George Eastman Theatre so I could take a picture of Joe and Mary on my little Olympus. Joe went off on one about the great entrepreneur and founder of the famous corporation: ‘George Eastman was a travelling salesman before he got to this, Rip. Pounding the road. Pounding, pounding. You don’t get to have a theatre named after you without a lot of pounding.’

  I remember the name of the store where we sold next because it was the scene of my first sale. It was a florists called Rigby Bluff’s. The woman behind the counter put me at ease straight away with a smile as warm as an armchair by the fire.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’

  In Ithaca I had failed to deploy my main weapons – my voice, my charm – with any success. I had stuck rigidly to the sales script, and the more thwarted I felt the more by-rote I had sounded. I decided to go with Joe: be myself, let the product speak for itself, and make up whatever I felt like saying. Everyone knows that a pitch is a kind of lie; that what’s really behind it is the cry of everyone’s heart: love me, accept me, give me something to get me through the day!

  ‘Good morning, madam. My name is Mr Jones. This is my partner, Mr Bosco. We specialize in making gift items for florists and if you have a few minutes I’d be delighted to show you what we have.’

  ‘That’s a lovely accent you have there. You must be from England.’

  ‘Yes.’ (Yes!)

  ‘Well, we’re always interested in new products for the store.’

  ‘Well. Some products need to be explained but I think our products speak for themselves. When you see them I think you’ll agree that they render words redundant.’

  ‘Render words redundant. I like that. Marge? There’s a gentlemen here who has something to show us.’

  How lovely a product is when already lit by the eyes of approval. When I flipped open the case, the colours flew out and after that the tills were virtually opening by themselves.

  ‘Oh, they’re gorgeous.’

&nbs
p; ‘This is just a selection,’ I said, building the pyramid as Joe had taught me. ‘We have twenty-six different species.’

  Marge appeared brushing her hands on her apron. ‘Oh, they are pretty.’

  I reeled off the names, slowly. Joe added the Latin names for good measure and explained which faunistic region they came from.

  ‘We see ourselves as trying to put a bit of poetry and beauty in people’s lives. I think just looking at a butterfly can bring a little peace to a person’s soul.’

  ‘That is so true.’

  I then used the one actual quote I knew that featured butterflies.

  ‘ “We two will live and pray and sing, and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies.” ’

  ‘That is, well, that is beautiful, sir.’

  ‘I can’t claim the credit, I’m afraid. That was William Shakespeare.’

  ‘Well, it makes the heart sing to hear it. Do go on. With the Shakespeare. Or anyone.’

  That was the start of my fake quoting days.

  ‘Well. I believe it was William Wordsworth who said . . . “There is in mankind a flickering gossamer soul searching for sunlight like a butterfly in June.” ’

  ‘Well you paint a lovely picture, sir.’

  ‘If only,’ I said. ‘It’s all down to Mr Wordsworth, ma’am.’

  Fake Wordsworth sealed the deal. It was a modest start – ten small and five mediums and a discount – but it was $195 in cash, and my virgin sale. The feeling it gave me was as uplifting as any pastoral scene or poem about a pastoral scene that I could recall. I gave Joe the green and black and white wad of rolled-up presidential promises and an unexpected elation came over me. I had persuaded someone to part with money in exchange for something I had that they didn’t. The sweet maths of butterflies + poetry + charm + courage + bullshit = dollars. As we walked back to the car, Joe was beaming. ‘What did I say? For every Ithaca there’ll be a Rochester, Rip. That was beautiful. All that learning is paying off now.’

  ‘I made it all up, Joe.’

  ‘Who’s going to know?’

  ‘I wanted to be a poet; but maybe I am a salesman.’

  ‘They are the same thing, Rip. They are the same thing!’

  We arrived in Buffalo at Niagara Falls in the early evening, our day’s work done. Mary was driving, Joe was sitting up front, I leant forward into the space between them, like a kid between parents, eager to see the coming natural wonder. We took the panoramic drive around the American side of the falls. A billboard advertised helicopter rides at $100 per person.

  ‘Let’s take a ride,’ Joe said.

  ‘No, Joe!’

  ‘Come on! See the falls the way Jimmy Carter might see them.’

  ‘We got $350. That would leave us with $50.’

  Mary and I managed to overrule him on the grounds that we’d have no money for a motel. Instead, we opted for the boat ride and caught the last ‘Maid of the Mist’ of the day. Mary looked cute in her blue oilskins and sou’wester, the spume and foam of the Ontario flecking her face with droplets. Joe yelled like a lunatic, the spray on his face mingling with the tears that great natural beauty always induced in him. I confess that the natural wonder that was Niagara didn’t make me cry. If you haven’t seen it, don’t let me put you off; but the feeling I got from looking at those roaring waters was as nothing to the feeling that selling two hundred dollars’ worth of butterflies had given me just a few hours before.

  Joe insisted on driving until we found a room for under twenty bucks. He was profligate to lunatic degree in the big things – cars, helicopter rides and giving alms – but thrifty as an ant in the small; gas, motels, clothes and food. There was always this wrestle between the poor kid who had grown up with very little and learned to make a dollar stretch, and the person who owned the world and everything in it.

  We found a motel called The Western Promise. Rooms from $15. The Western Promise was a line of single-storey rooms with a reception one end, an angled slot for the car out front and a neon welcome sign. It could have been anywhere in America but it was my first motel and therefore special.

  The room had two double queen-size beds. Joe took the floor. Mary took the bed near the bathroom. I took the one next to the window. While Mary went to the bathroom to shower, Joe took off his shoes, shed his clothes down to his underpants, lay on the bed with the remote control on his belly, and surfed the channels. He found a natural history programme about bears in Alaska.

  ‘Denali National Park. That is a place, Rip. I sold some cases in Anchorage.’

  His favourite programmes were nature documentaries and televangelists. The former he watched for the knowledge and the wonder; the latter for the sport and out of a sort of professional curiosity. He’d watch a documentary about Siberian tigers or a coral reef in wide-eyed urgency and shamelessly tear up at the images. But nothing got him stirred up as much as a televangelist asking for dollars. After watching the bears for a while he got bored and surfed until he found what he was looking for.

  ‘Praise The Lord Ministries. These guys are total born-again crooks, Rip. Look and learn.’

  On screen a preacher in a snappy suit was standing by a swimming pool in what looked like a theme park. ‘We’re having a great time in Florida,’ he was saying. ‘We want to thank all of you who have made that phone call to become a faith partner with PTL. I want you to praise God by praising him right now – in your home.’

  Joe made no judgements about irreligious people behaving badly – which was just as well for me – but he hated immorality in the religious and he went out of his way to call it out.

  The telephone number appeared across the screen and Joe picked up the room phone and dialled an outside line. He was through in seconds!

  ‘Heritage USA? Hi. Yes, I’m fine. And God bless you too, Cheryl. Tell me, Cheryl. I’d like to pledge but I need to be sure you take my credit card. Great . . . One thing I need to know first. What percentage of the money I pledge will go to Pastor Joel and what percentage to the poor? Uh-huh. Oh. Really? Ninety per cent. OK . . . Let’s do this. A million dollars. The number on the card. OK it’s . . . fourbrif, thrcahhh, serooseeeee. You get that? OK. It’s threeftsixteen brr. I’m sorry, I’m losing you . . . Cheryl? Pardon me, was that a yes to the million dollars? I can’t hear . . . you’re . . . fading.’

  He put the receiver back. ‘Seems they don’t need it.’

  ‘That’s cruel, Joe.’

  ‘Taking advantage of poor people who don’t know better and spending that money on hair product and Mercedes is cruel.’

  ‘I thought you believed in all that.’

  ‘That’s not the Gospel, Rip. Do you know what the great disaster of our age is? Apart from the gap between the rich and poor? It’s that the most significant event in world history and the best news mankind ever received has been hijacked by wolves. It has become this twisted thing. Bad Theology is killing people, Rip. I have to do something about it. It’s not religion that the world needs, Rip; it revelation. You gotta know the difference.’ Joe was at his most righteously angry when it came to the religious people – ‘The Hoop Jumpers’ as he liked to call them – and especially the ‘wolves who led them astray’. For him, these purveyors of an expensively coiffed and suited Gospel were the chief perpetrators of crime in the land, above drug dealers, duplicitous politicians or corporate thieves. These were the guys (it was nearly always men, he noted) who had the most to answer for given what they supposedly believed and knew. In his mind, they had taken something freely given, cheapened it, and then made people pay for it. I didn’t believe in any Gospel, freely given or otherwise, but I believed Joe’s indignation was authentic and righteous.

  Mary emerged from the shower wearing knickers and a vest, her hair dyed blue.

  ‘That ain’t blue morpho blue,’ Joe said. ‘It’s purple.’

  ‘It’s still wet.’

  Joe went and did his ablutions. Whilst he flossed and dee-dee-deed Mary lay on the bed.

 
‘How many cases you sell now?’

  ‘We must have sold fifty.’

  ‘How many did you sell?’

  ‘Maybe fifteen.’

  ‘It could take a few more days. Maybe weeks.’

  ‘I can wait,’ I lied.

  Joe re-appeared.

  ‘Well, Rip, that is one hell of a day. We should do the lakes. Head to Cleveland and then, when you really are blooded, we’ll unleash you on Iowa’ (he pronounced this Eye-Way). ‘The very middle of Middle America. Your product makes it there, it makes it everywhere.’ He took a pillow and laid it on the carpeted floor. He lay down and put his hands together in prayer, the way a child might. He said a prayer – the usual reverent and irreverent all at once – thanking God for the day, for sales, for stone-hearted liberals, evil televangelists, cheap motels, and me, and then closed his eyes and was snoring within a few minutes, breathing like factory bellows. It was a miracle he slept as well as he did. Like a man with no troubles and nothing on his conscience.

  Mary and I lay there for a bit, listening to his breathing.

  ‘Does he ever sleep on a bed?’

  ‘I never seen it. He says most people in the world don’t have beds so he won’t.’

  Mary was an arm’s length away, lying there like a bay, a harbour, all calm and curled and inviting. Lights from the road make quadrilaterals in the room and a shadow on the roof filtered through the curtain and blind. It was full of the atmosphere I hoped to find. Charged. Seedy. Anonymous.