The Killing of Butterfly Joe Read online

  ‘I didn’t want to say when you asked me.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s . . . fine.’

  Virginity may be prized and revered in some cultures, but it’s not what you want when you’re expecting unadulterated physical gratification. With virginity comes responsibility and I was not feeling responsible. I wanted wild, dirty danger with someone wilder, dirtier and more dangerous than me. I didn’t want to overthink or explain anything. I wanted mindless, thoughtless, irresponsible uncommitted sex.

  ‘I been close to doing it. But he was a farm boy who just wanted to tell his friends he’d fucked a girl. Though they would have been impressed if he said he’d fucked a pig. We fooled around. I made him get off just short of Grand Central Station. I wasn’t going all the way with him. He weren’t the one.’

  I pulled a strand of loose hair from her mouth tenderly. I drank in the implication that I might be the One. In truth, I didn’t want to be the One. Not with Mary. But I was flattered she thought so. I said that it was important you went all the way to Grand Central Station for the first time with the right person. I reassured her that with me she was in good hands, and that I would never fuck a pig or any other kind of animal for that matter. I added – like a gentleman – that we didn’t have to go all the way to Grand Central Station. We could get off at Pough-keepsie or Yonkers or even Harlem if she didn’t feel like riding the whole way. But she said she wanted to get to the main terminus and that I was the one to take her there.

  Having anointed me as her deflowerer she leant towards me and pulled me to her with her hand at the back of my head. She kissed me, and it was a sumptuous fluid kiss. She then stood and took off her clothes until she was standing before me naked, as God made her, but not perhaps where God wanted her to be. I had already seen her naked – that first day back in the falls – but this was different. There was a voice telling me not to get on the train. But I ignored it. She seemed to interpret my awestruck reaction as hesitation because she asked me: ‘You sure you want me?’

  ‘Oh God, yes. I want you. Now. Tomorrow. Forever.’ For five minutes of pleasure I would promise eternities!

  ‘You have something?’

  I didn’t have anything. I hadn’t thought any of this through. Thinking is antagonistic to hedonism.

  ‘It’s OK. Come like a Catholic.’

  We made love with animal urgency. I was concerned that the long buildup would see me rush to a speedy, disappointing conclusion; but I think her virginity, the responsibility of taking it, the pressure to perform and set the bar high for her future lovers, as well as the terror of impregnating her, all focused the mind and took the edge off the pent-up lust, at least long enough to do myself justice and give her satisfaction. I came like a Catholic. Just.

  Afterwards, I lay on my back and she lay on her side with an arm across my chest and her head over my heart; the bouquet of her body was powerful and complex and mildly repelling. With the lust fog clearing I became far more aware (immediately, I’d suggest) of all that I found unsuitable in her (but had ignored in the pursuit of this gratification), and I was filled with the utter certainty that I had made a mistake in having sex with her. Although I set no significance – legal or spiritual – on such things I felt I had bound myself to her in a primal way that could not be reversed and that would give her ‘rights’ over me and that she would exercise those ‘rights’ at some point, no doubt at a time when I least needed it. She lay there in my arms, more passive, more peaceful than she had ever been and more compliant than I felt comfortable with. I wanted the sassy, cool Mary back. But she was tender and, I’d say, sweetly vulnerable. I reached for the cigarettes and, in the time-honoured way, asked her if it had been good for her.

  ‘It was . . . different.’

  Different didn’t sound good. ‘Different good? Different bad?’

  ‘Different. To how I imagined it.’

  ‘How did you imagine it?’ I offered her a cigarette but she declined. She was savouring a landmark moment in her life.

  ‘It felt good but . . . it was like you weren’t there. And I wasn’t there.’

  ‘Well, I can assure you I was right there.’

  ‘No. I mean. You were . . . we were becoming one person.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’

  ‘You know that when a male butterfly fertilizes a female his sperm plugs her so she can’t mate with anyone else?’

  ‘Good job we’re not butterflies.’

  ‘You think you came inside me a little?’

  ‘I hope . . . No. I got off at Yonkers or Harlem. Or wherever the last stop is.’

  ‘But there’s that little bit that comes out before you come. That can get you pregnant. That’s what Ma told me. She said to make sure you get the guy to wear a condom.’

  I didn’t want to think about Edith, or Edith telling Mary this, or about my little spurts of pre-ejaculate getting Mary pregnant. Or her being plugged so no one else would use her. I wanted to go to sleep. I wanted to fall into a deep sleep from which I would wake and find myself somewhere else, having not made love to Mary or formed a bond with her in this way.

  ‘Imagine if I was pregnant and you went back to England leaving a kid behind that you never knew you’d had. And then you met that kid, years later when he was maybe nineteen or twenty, visiting England.’

  I imagined it and the thought shrivelled everything: my soul, my cock, my capacity to stay awake.

  ‘What would you do?’

  ‘If you got pregnant or if I met my child in twenty years’ time?’

  ‘If I got pregnant?’

  ‘I . . . you won’t.’

  ‘But if I did. Just now. Would you want me to have the baby?’

  Of course not. I was a selfish twenty-three-year-old who had had sex with someone who was physically ravishing but unsuited to my person in every way. These girly tests of loyalty were no fun. All I had wanted was to have consequence-free pleasure and go to sleep.

  ‘I’d go along with whatever you wanted. It’s your body.’

  Mary batted back my sophistry. ‘Except when you want it.’

  Mary’s head was still on my chest and her arm was now stuck to my skin.

  ‘Am I sun or am I moon?

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You said I looked as different from Isabelle as the moon to the sun. Which am I?’

  ‘The moon.’

  ‘You sayin’ Isabelle’s hotter than me?’

  ‘I’m saying you’re more . . . mysterious.’

  She sat up, and pulled the blanket around her, like a poncho.

  ‘I weren’t joking when I said we have a different father. I think I do.’

  I started rolling a joint.

  ‘You think, or you know.’

  ‘I got a theory. Now I’m lying here with you and Ma’s a thousand miles away I feel it even more.’

  I was thinking, ‘Don’t tell me anything that binds me closer to you or makes me beholden to you in anyway’; but also thinking, ‘Yes, tell me, because I need to know what’s going on in this family, and it’s wonderful to have secrets revealed.’ Nosiness is a force as powerful as lust.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘This one time, Ma got real drunk a few years back, at Thanksgiving. I was sixteen. She had been mad at me for getting caught smoking weed at high school. Even though she liked to smoke it herself with me sometimes. One night she starts telling me that when our father was away on expeditions she would get real lonely. She said she even went to a bar one night looking for company. I had the feeling she was trying to tell me something.’

  ‘That she had other men?’

  ‘Maybe. Or maybe that she went with a man who was maybe “my” father. She once described this guy she met. An Apache truck driver. Why would she do that?’

  ‘Did you ask her? If maybe . . . you know?’

  ‘She might kill me for asking such a thing. But I kept thinking it after she told me.’

  ‘Maybe she needed to confess so
mething.’

  ‘It were more than that. I was sure.’

  ‘You ever discussed it with Joe?

  ‘I told Joe what Ma had said. He said Ma was just drunk. It was the liquor talking. I asked him straight if he thought maybe I had a different father. He said you only had to look at us to see we were brother and sister. He thinks we have the same shape noses – which we do even though that nose is – was – like Ma’s nose before the fire. He told me not to talk like that. So I forgot about it. But then you mentioned it and then it gets me thinking again. And the thought don’t go away. It’s become so’s I gotta know for sure. Because I don’t know who I am unless I know.’

  I took her hand. ‘It doesn’t change who you are.’

  She withdrew her hand. ‘You think I’m crazy?’

  I didn’t. Her story and theory seemed plausible. I mean, you just had to look at her! But I was tired. I wanted to move on, to go to sleep. I took another deep toke. I wasn’t thinking straight just when I needed to be.

  ‘Maybe your mother had an affair, it doesn’t mean you have a different father.’

  ‘Maybe. Why do I get these feelings. Of being different? I know it when I’m behind the wheel. Maybe my father was a driver. I am a driver. Where does that come from? No one taught me that. Then maybe I think I just imagined it. Or I think maybe it don’t matter. My father is either a lonely truck driver or a crazy entomologist who don’t give a shit about no one. Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to have a child you never met. Maybe it don’t matter. He don’t care I exist. It means he can’t reject me. It must be worse for Joe to know our father. To think that he’s out there, living a life as though you don’t exist. That must hurt. I think that’s why Joe is the way he is. I think he is trying to prove something to someone who doesn’t even care about him. But I don’t know what I’d do if I was Joe and I met him. I’d probably kill him. Unless Ma killed him first. But I like that I don’t even know he is my father. It means I’m free. Not like Joe. Or Isabelle. They think on him. In different ways. Isabelle through the collection. Joe trying to impress people. But I don’t got to impress no one. He never knew me and I never knew him.’

  She said all this with such touching ingenuousness.

  ‘You listening to what I’m telling you?’

  ‘I’m just thinking.’ I should have let it lie but I have a meddling tendency. ‘Why don’t you find out for sure?’

  ‘How can I know for sure?’

  ‘Well, you could do one of those blood tests.’ I don’t know why I said this to Mary. It was more post-coital, drowsy stupidity than any desire to know the truth.

  ‘How do they work?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. They can test your paternity. If they took blood from your siblings and compared them.’

  ‘I’d need Joe or Isabelle to give blood. They would never do that.’

  ‘Isabelle?’

  ‘You think she would?’

  ‘I think she would,’ I said. ‘If she cares about the truth.’

  ‘She wouldn’t rock the boat.’

  ‘What if I ask Joe.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘I’ll ask him tomorrow.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Yes. I promise.’ I said this because it cost me nothing to say it and I wanted to go to sleep. But later, as I lay there with my eyes closed, I was wide awake. I was the very thing Isabelle suspected me of being: a hedonist, willing to take advantage of her immature sister for a fleeting pleasure and ignore the consequences; willing to egg on a childish fantasy, to make her feel wanted. If, at first, lust for Mary blinded me to the subtler attractions of Isabelle, it had also blinded me to the finer qualities of Mary, whom it suited me to see in a particular (diminished) way. She may have been self-regarding and a little too self-consciously brazen, but it was probably an act and, to be fair to her, an act I encouraged. A regret washed over me like a tiredness, a sadness I could not fully explain. I was sure that I had made a mistake, but then it’s easy to be wise the far side of a fuck.

  We woke at eleven, after checkout time. Ms McCarthy was standing where I’d left her, behind the reception desk. I handed her the ridiculous but effective keyring and apologized for being late. ‘Don’t you worry, Mr Van Jones. The sign says ten o’clock so we can get ahead. The cleaner comes at twelve, truth be told. And if newlyweds can’t sleep in then who can?’

  I paid the bill with my own cash, making a mental note to tell Joe that I couldn’t keep bankrolling his alms-giving and bail monies. ‘I hope you slept well, Mr Van Jones?’

  It didn’t seem appropriate to tell her that I had in fact had an uneasy night full of unsettling dreams that amalgamated three basic terrors: impregnating Mary, being caught by Edith, and then being tracked and hunted down by Mary’s Apache father. ‘Like a log,’ I said, a phrase that made her smile and I had to repeat.

  ‘And I hope your lovely bride slept – like a log, too?’

  ‘We both slept like logs, Ms McCarthy. Like a whole timber yard.’

  ‘Well. You’ve married a pruddy lady there, Mr Van Jones. Ya’ll have a safe journey.’

  I accepted the compliment on my new bride’s behalf and thanked Ms McCarthy. Just before I reached the car I took the washer off my wedding finger and annulled our twelve-hour marriage.

  My ex-wife was already waiting at the wheel, ready to sell a bail’s worth of butterflies and set her brother free. We got the money in one stop. Mary did a $300 deal at the very first place we tried, a gift store in a strip mall some thirty miles out of Centerville. It was the only time I saw her sell and she did it with little fuss but no little charm. I could certainly see Edith in the way she sparkled and flirted in the initial exchange. As we walked back to the car with a roll of green she looked at me.

  ‘We could still just leave the sonofabitch, you know.’

  It was a nice idea: me and Mary setting out across America like a sexed-up Bonnie and Clyde, making love and sales wherever we pleased, living off butterflies for the rest of our days. The trouble is Mary wouldn’t have been my first choice of companion and the feeling of regret had not lifted off me one bit. If anything, the change in her – a kind of accepting, sweet confidence, almost an assumption that we were together now – made it even clearer to me that we were not for bonding and that I had to work on some kind of withdrawal strategy before she made me put a real ring on it.

  But I’d planted a seed (please God, not that kind of seed) that had grown overnight into an idea. Her thoughts had started to travel a little too far along a particular road of thinking; in a direction encouraged by me.

  ‘You’re right, Rip. I should know who my father is. Or who my father ain’t. I’m going to do one of those blood tests. I’ll need to get Joe and Isabelle to do it. That’ll be the hard part. Maybe you can help with that. The hardest part will be Ma. But maybe you can help me with that, too. She likes you. Will you help me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s Joe that’s the problem. You can’t keep anything from Ma. Joe tells her everything. She’s got him on a line.’

  ‘Really? Joe?’

  ‘He plays all footloose. But she’s got him pinned. Why do you think he calls her every day?’

  ‘Would it make you feel better to know? I mean. Which outcome would be best. That you have the same father or that you don’t?’

  ‘I won’t know that till I get there. But I think you should say something.’

  We got to the sheriff’s office around noon. Mary waited with the car and I went in with the cash, filled out the paperwork and settled the bail. Joe was in his cell cheerfully evangelizing the duty guard in the habits of butterflies. He emerged, unrepentant, bragging that he had converted the sheriff to his way of seeing things about the meaning of hawking and the problem with guns and freedom being ‘An American Paradoxical’. He gave the sheriff’s department a blue morpho to remember him by; they gave us a police escort to the Appanoose County line where the sheriff gave us a blast of h
is siren and Joe waved to him, friendly as anything.

  ‘Goddamn small-town freaks!’ he yelled, smiling his smile.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In which I challenge Joe about the past as we head across the hard ocean.

  Having set Joe free we headed north through wooded valleys, fields of corn and soybeans, hog sheds and cattle, and then west across steadily flattening prairie. Joe made no apology for the expensive and irritating hiatus his stubborn stance had caused. Instead he riffed on how Iowa was America’s most fertile state and that the more fertile the soil the more backward the people, although I think this was just sour grapes for his being arrested by Iowans who seemed like fairly reasonable and friendly people to me.

  ‘America’s a melting pie, Rip. You gotta swallow it all. Bald Eagles. Indigenous genocide. Natural wonders. The 3/5ths clause. The Road. Unlawful arrest.’

  After Des Moines the landscape stayed the same all the way to Nebraska where it would somehow find a way to become even flatter and lonelier with horizons so distant you fancied you could see the curve of the earth. Joe said that to see the curve of the earth it had to be a flat nothing for 168 miles (a fact I still haven’t verified but believe to be true). At the state line we would turn north passing through Sioux City and then continue on up to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which Joe claimed to be the furthest point from the sea in the whole of the US. He called the plain ‘the hard ocean’ and said that the further from the real ocean we got the more you felt the sensation of being at sea.

  It was in the middle of that sea – at the point where we were furthest from stops, or any potential distractions or escapes – that I decided to confront Joe with the question of Mary’s paternity. It was late afternoon, the hottest part of the day. Joe was at the wheel, Mary was up front, I was in the back. The radio was on but the noise from having the windows down drowned out the music. (Joe said it had to be 100 degrees before he’d put the air-conditioning on.) I had my elbow a little out and was holding my hand open, fingers splayed, catching the air until it felt like a ball in my palm, weighty and hard. I had been thinking about Mary being conceived in a truck-stop fuck. It rang true to me: the physical differences between her and Isabelle were undeniable, the personality traits too; Edith’s husband’s long absences, her drunken semi-confession years later; Joe choosing to believe his mother out of loyalty and a misplaced sense of needing to protect Mary. I worked myself up into a state of indignation. I felt anger at Edith for her management of the story and cross that Joe had maybe been the gatekeeper of her secret. I was not afraid of Joe; not once in my whole time with him did I fear for my physical well-being, even when things got fraught. He was a gentle soul, unsuited to violence, despite his great strength and erratic tendencies. He was always up for knockabout discussion and people speaking their minds, and well used to being challenged by his sisters, storekeepers, the law, indeed by all who crossed his path. But where I find it easy to challenge someone over an abstract philosophical, cultural or political matter, I’m a coward when it comes to the emotional and personal, even (perhaps more so) when I think I have right on my side. I had grown up tiptoeing around my father, of whom I had been afraid, and had adopted an anything-for-a-quiet-life approach to emotional disagreement, always taking the less bumpy way around an argument. But I now found myself in the role of knight errant, and I had sworn an oath to Mary to go into battle on her behalf. We were a thousand miles from Edith, in a flat plain of nothing, with a Joe contained. It had to be now.