The Killing of Butterfly Joe Read online

  As we passed a lonely church we saw a black clump of mourners gathered in a graveyard and I used this to segue into telling them about my father’s funeral, how he wanted to be cremated rather than buried, and how I had been given the task of scattering his ashes because my mother had the shakes and was worried about the wind blowing his remains back over us. I told them how I had not been close to my father and how little sadness I had felt at his passing. From there I said that having a father around wasn’t necessarily a benefit in life and that my life might have been easier (although technically not possible) without him. I asked Joe if he felt the same and he said he did and then I came out with it.

  ‘Joe, can I ask you something?’

  ‘Anything, Rip.’

  ‘This sounds strange, but I look at Mary and I look at you and Isabelle, and I find it hard to believe you’re related, one hundred per cent.’

  The noise Joe made was the same noise he made when he had first told me about his father: a groaning hum, like a dying animal. It contained genuine sadness and weariness, I think, but when he spoke there was just the tiniest hint of anger this time, and anger – you must believe me – was a very rare emotion for Joe.

  ‘Oh nooooowaah. Mary? You been blabbing on that old nonsense. Come on. Come on! Goddamn. You can’t just say such things to people. That’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s settled.’

  ‘Not for me.’

  ‘You can’t just say things like that.’

  ‘You say all kinds of things, Joe. About your past. To get the sale.’

  ‘That’s different. That’s business; that’s causing no harm to nobody.’

  I said, ‘To be fair to Mary, Joe, it was me who raised the subject. I said I couldn’t believe Mary and Iz were sisters on account of them being so sun and moon; I kept pushing it from there, until she told me what your mother said about having a fling.’

  ‘Ma never said no such. Mary’s been putting speculations in your ear, Rip. Pure speculations.’

  ‘That’s a damn lie and you know it, Joseph Bosco!’ Mary crossed her arms as if to stop herself lashing out at him. ‘She said it and she meant it!’

  ‘It’s non-sense. Non. Sense. Shame on you, Mary. You can push that line all you like but it won’t make it true. Shame on you.’

  ‘Shame on you for being her flunkey.’

  ‘I ain’t no flunkey.’

  ‘You been toeing the line all these years. Letting Ma have her way.’

  ‘Come on, Rip. See what you done? You been stirring up a rebellion here.’

  ‘Well, your mother can be a bit of a tyrant, Joe. I know she’s worked hard; I know she is a woman scorned and wronged; I know she suffered – but maybe she’s not completely straight about the past.’

  ‘That’s ’cos she is hiding something,’ Mary said.

  ‘Ma is not the enemy in this story. Let me make that clear. And that there is just a rumour. An ugly rumour.’

  ‘A rumour Ma started herself! When she was drunk.’

  ‘Aw . . . this is . . . I can’t believe. That’s . . . Well, I am shocked and surprised . . . disappointed, Rip. Really. That an educated, sensitive person like you would fall for that. It just ain’t true. It just ain’t. We shouldn’t talk about this no more because it’ll bring trouble. That’s the end of it.’

  ‘He’s such a dick,’ Mary said, turning to me and talking as though he wasn’t there. ‘He won’t face up to it. He talks about good theology and bad theology. But it’s bad theology not wanting to know the truth.’

  ‘You don’t know. You don’t know, Mary.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s possible, Joe? From what you’ve told me about your father being away and even your mother telling me how unhappy they were and . . .’

  ‘Stop! Maybe this, maybe that. We ain’t talking about that! I ain’t talking about that . . . la la la . . . dee dee dee.’

  Joe started to make his distracting dee-dee-dees and we listened to his fake cheer, refusing to talk. He made a great pretence of it not being an issue, but I could see that he was ruffled. After a few miles more Joe asked me some total non sequitur of a question about Europe which I ignored. I had – for now – picked my side. I was with Mary on this one. It was the first time there was any real antagonism between me and Joe.

  ‘Well, looky here,’ Joe said.

  ‘No, Joe!’ Mary could see it.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Let’s do it!’

  ‘No, Joe!’ Mary put a hand out to the wheel. ‘We ain’t got the room, and we need to talk about this!’

  ‘Yes we do got the room! You got the room back there, Rip?’

  The subject of this dispute was sat on the roadside up ahead. I had no objection to picking up hitchers – it was part of the whatifness of the Road – but I couldn’t help feeling this was more Cat-in-the-Hattery; that Joe was creating the next distraction in order to evade any further discussion about Edith. With a stranger in the car it would be difficult for us to probe private matters.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, annoyed at being thwarted once again. Joe wasn’t waiting for anyone’s opinion because he’d already slowed down and was preparing to pull over just ahead of the hitcher.

  ‘He could be an asshole,’ Mary said.

  ‘He could be an angel though. “Don’t forget to entertain strangers, for some people have entertained angels without knowing.” Plus, he might give us gas money.’

  ‘He looks like an asshole.’

  The angel/asshole was sat on an upturned plastic red Coke case with his hitching-hand out and thumb barely to the vertical. He looked like he’d been trying for some time and lost hope of ever getting a ride. He was either very cool or he didn’t realize we had pulled over for him because he stayed sat down smoking. When Joe tooted the horn the hitcher stood up and took a final drag of his cigarette before stubbing it out, then he hiked his bag over his shoulder and sauntered towards us. He wasn’t going to rush for anyone.

  ‘This guy could change our life. You just don’t know. Think of the infinite perculations!’

  I pulled Jimmy Carter into the middle of the back seat that was now free of the extra cases.

  The hitcher held up his bag and pointed to the trunk.

  Joe leant across Mary. ‘Jump in, friend! We got a trunk full so you’ll need to keep your sack on your knees.’

  The hitcher jumped in and sunk into the seat across from me. He brought with him a whiff of perfume and tobacco.

  ‘Thanks. Woah. Is that a bird?’

  ‘This is Jimmy Carter,’ I said. ‘He’s a bald eagle.’

  ‘Is that legal?’

  ‘Oh, he’s a legal eagle,’ Joe said. ‘I’m Joe. This is my sister Mary.’

  ‘Half-sister,’ Mary said.

  ‘And that’s Rip. He’s from Wales.’

  ‘Mark.’

  I shook the hitcher’s hand, clammy from waiting in the heat of the day. Mark nodded at Mary, who refused to say hello to him. He was an asshole until proven otherwise. He didn’t look like an asshole to me. He was a handsome man of around twenty-eight or twenty-nine, worldly and very cool, and I was immediately on my guard, sensing competition. I was no longer the most exotic one in the car.

  ‘You been waiting long, Mark?’

  ‘You were the sixty-fourth car.’

  ‘Well, there are no accidents in the universe. Rip here’s the superstitious one. He’ll find some significance in that number sixty-four. Where you headed, Mark?’

  ‘Rapid City. Then on to LA – eventually.’

  ‘Where you travelling from?’

  ‘New York.’

  ‘No way! We’re from New York too. State, that is. Up in the Catskills.’

  ‘Hippies and hillbillies, right?’

  ‘Right. But which category you putting us in?’ Joe asked with his least intelligent sounding hillbilly inflection, doing his ‘dumb and proud’ act. I think he was still angry at me and Mary and trying to get back at us in some
way. The hitcher looked at Joe and then at me and then his gaze rested on Mary – way too long for my liking. He was trying to fit us to some stereotyped line-up in his mind. ‘The car says hillbilly. But no hillbilly travels this far from home. I’m leaning toward hippy.’ In truth he must have been in a state of confusion about who he’d got into the car with.

  ‘How about you guys? Where you headed?’ he asked, not sounding like he cared much. He had that air some people have – an air that says ‘my life is way more interesting than yours and I am quite content with it and unthreatened by anything you might be doing or have done but will ask anyway’.

  ‘Wyoming.’

  ‘Business or pleasure?’

  ‘I don’t compartmentilate those things, Mark.’ (Although Joe genuinely muddled words I think he sometimes did it deliberately to get people to underestimate him.) ‘Our business is always a pleasure for as long as it allows us to roam free. I mean, it’s only work if you wanna be doing something else.’

  Mark deigned a little smile. ‘That’s the truth. And what’s your business?’

  None of your business, is what I wanted to say. How possessive of my experience I had become. I didn’t want someone from the outside world to come in and break the spell.

  ‘Rip’ll show ya.’

  Reluctantly, I lifted the sample case and opened it on my lap. For some reason – maybe it was the whiff of sophistication I was getting from Mark – I felt embarrassed about showing him the butterflies because, when I stopped to think about it, it was odd to be selling bugs for a living and I could tell that whatever Mark did it would be a cooler way of getting by. I handed him a case with a malachite.

  ‘Wow,’ Mark said, although it was more of a ‘I thought it would be something cooler’ wow than a really impressed ‘wow’ wow.

  ‘Is this what you do for real?’

  ‘For real,’ Joe said, hearing no criticism or superiority in the question. ‘It’s like a currency. We sell butterflies and we keep moving. Experiencing the joys and wonders of this life.’

  ‘Interesting equation. I got a real thirst on out there. I could get behind a beer.’

  I had not had a beer, or any alcohol, since meeting Joe. I’d been happy without it but now, all of a sudden, I wanted one as though it was a thing I’d craved all along. There was a gun in the glove box but no beer.

  ‘This is a dry vehicle, Mark, but there’s a warm Coke there.’

  ‘What kind of country prohibits beer in a vehicle but not a gun?’ I asked, trying to be clever and impress our passenger.

  ‘One that wants to shoot straight?’ Mark said, quick on the draw.

  Joe laughed, a little too enthusiastically for my liking. Rubbing it in, he said, ‘Now that’s a sharpness we could use, Rip.’

  I handed the two-litre bottle to Mark who guzzled down a quarter of it, without shame. I noticed him eyeing Mary as he glugged. He looked at her in an obviously lustful way and I felt outraged at how little he did to disguise it. One’s own hypocrisy is hardest to see – Jesus and Joe were right about that – but I was jealous, not for Mary’s sake but for my own. Mark was cool in a way I coveted. He had an economy of movement and words; it was as though he’d studied Westerns or something, learned all his manners from movies. He didn’t instigate much talk but it wasn’t from shyness; I think it was calculated to make us do the running. Annoyingly, Joe made it easier for him by being his infuriatingly un-judgemental self. In fact, he was being way too nice to a guy who to my mind had an arrogant superiority and an entitlement to this ride that he certainly hadn’t earned yet, considering he had just met us and was beholden to us for said ride.

  ‘Mind if I smoke?’

  ‘Go right ahead.’

  Since we’d left the Catskills I’d tried not to smoke that much around Joe. It’s not that he would have told me not to, but more that his natural vitality took away the inclination. When I was alone with Mary the desire returned and when Mark started lighting up and smoking a spliff out the window I was drawn into that world again. I don’t mean the world of smoking, I just mean everything that goes with it: some degree of intelligent subversion, a cultural edginess, anti-establishment feeling that equates to the illusion of freedom.

  ‘So what’s in Rapid City for you, Mark?’

  ‘My friend’s got a small part in a movie. They’re shooting it around there.’

  ‘No way!

  That had us all sitting up. Even Mary adjusted her slump. In the pecking order of seductive things – unaccountable freedom, sexual gratification, drugs, money and panoramic landscapes – involvement, any kind of involvement, in a movie ranked highly; to even be able to say to someone, ‘I know someone in the movie business,’ bestowed superpowers beyond what wealth and education could buy. There I was thinking my life was the most interesting life currently being lived in America and then he gets in our car. Damn him! But it was about to get worse.

  ‘So what’s the movie?

  ‘It’s a Western. It’s about this cavalry officer who goes native.’

  ‘Oh my God! That’s awesome!’ Joe went on, mindlessly. He was doing it deliberately, I was sure, but he was at his worst – his most try-hard and embarrassing – when around cool, sophisticated people. I wanted to disown him completely.

  ‘So what line of work are you in, Mark?’

  ‘I’m a writer.’

  It was like a punch to the solar plexus. Of all the people we could have picked up in that flat nothingness we had to pick up a writer.

  Joe was giggling like a kid. Oh, he was tickled pink at this. ‘This is great! Only in America. So now we got two writers in this car! Think it’s big enough for the both of ya? Rip here wants to be a writer.’

  ‘I’m a dabbler,’ I said, before Joe announced me as Nobel Prize-winner or something.

  Mark didn’t blink. He didn’t even look at me. My self-deprecation was at least meant to lure him into asking me what kind of writing I dabbled in. But no, that was beneath him. The arrogant fuck. The way he said ‘I’m a writer’ in such a nonchalant and matter-of-fact way; I wanted to kill him.

  ‘Say, what kind of car is this?’

  ‘It’s a Chuick, sired out of a Chevrolet and a Buick.’

  ‘It’s neat.’

  Well great, no one was asking for your opinion, I thought. I had transferred my anger at Joe to this guy. But God how I wanted to know what kind of writer he was and I had to swallow a lump of pride fit to choke a horse to ask him.

  ‘What kind of writer are you?’

  ‘Right now, a broke one.’

  Oh God, a self-deprecating writer.

  ‘I’m a script writer. Mainly. And I got a novel going.’

  Right. Neither have I.

  ‘Like movies?’ Joe jumped in.

  ‘Like movies.’

  ‘That’s awesome. I got so many ideas for movies. Like you wouldn’t believe. So many stories. So many. Rip here’s going to write a book about me and our travels. Maybe you should write the movie.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘So how comes you’re hitching? A big Hollywood hotshot like you? You should be flying to LA. Or behind the wheel of a Corvette.’

  ‘I like to see the land I’m travelling through. You get a feel for something better. Plus, you meet people and people are stories. I get most of my ideas from just hanging with people. Listening. Hitching is great for that. Every ride’s a story.’

  ‘Well, you picked the right car for that,’ Joe said. ‘I got stories you would not believe.’

  Don’t do it, Joe. Those stories are yours – and mine. Don’t give him your pearls. Don’t just piss away the magic on this stranger. We barely know the guy. He says he’s a writer but you don’t know that. And writers are thieves. He might steal your story, claim it as his own, use your life – and mine – and ruin us. It’s my story!

  Too late. Joe gave himself to this stranger, body and soul, lubricating everything with his overstatements and fancy flights of fantasy. He started with the
full-fat version of the family history, throwing in some other details I had never heard before; he told him about his father’s collection of aberrations, and the five-winged blue morphos, and how we were heading to Wyoming with ‘a million-dollar butterfly’ to meet a man called the Wizard. I have to commend Joe for the energy and the drama he put into the telling. He was virtually projecting the pictures on the road ahead. It was as if we were driving into this movie he was describing. The scriptwriter listened intently, occasionally smiling, sometimes interjecting to clarify a point. But mainly he just listened. He wasn’t physically writing anything down but you just knew he was scribbling away furiously in his mind, the way true writers probably did, and that he was already formulating the plot for a movie that he would pitch in LA that I would one day, in the not too distant future, see a poster for in the foyer of a cinema back home: The Million-Dollar Butterfly.