The Killing of Butterfly Joe Read online

  While Joe and I were singing each other’s praises, the voice of reason sounded from the back of the car.

  ‘We ain’t got the dough yet.’

  ‘Come on, Mary!’

  ‘You didn’t sign diddly, Joe. He could change his mind.’

  ‘A man like Roth don’t change his mind.’

  ‘Feels too easy,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s like a test. Maybe God’s testing you. Showing you the riches. Then taking them away. That’s what he usually does.’

  Mary had a negative streak that wasn’t a pose; it was a learned and inherited pessimism that pushed back her hopes whenever they started to rise.

  ‘I don’t know how much the Devil’s paying you to be his advocate, sister. But God don’t tempt you with riches and then snatch them away. That’s the Devil’s method.’

  ‘I’m just trying to keep a lid on things, Joe. We had disappointments before.’

  ‘Look, the worst that happens is we still have the rarest butterflies on earth,’ Joe said. ‘Plus, we had an adventure and got paid ten thousand dollars for it.’

  ‘Right. You better give that to me, too. Before you throw it to a bum.’

  It was just as well the Wizard didn’t give Joe a larger deposit because he would have found a way to spend it before we made it back to the Catskills. Mary (our designated purser) took a thousand dollars from the stack and handed it to Joe saying, ‘There’s your God Money.’ The first one hundred went to the Mexican guard on the outer gate. The guard’s face – a mix of baffled gratitude and alarm – was a picture. He touched his chest in thanks, made a little sign of the cross, and thanked ‘Jesuchristu’.

  ‘Don’t thank Jesus, señor,’ Mary said. ‘It ain’t Jesus that gave you that money.’

  ‘We’re his hands and feet, Mary,’ Joe corrected her. ‘We’re his body. And that’s his money.’

  ‘He ain’t having my body and he ain’t having my money.’

  Joe’s giving – as random and chaotic as everything else he did – could have been more effective but at least it was consistent: ten per cent before taxes.

  ‘Are you hoping to get to heaven with all this giving, Joe?’

  ‘Rip! No. Are you not learning here? You can’t pay to get into heaven. You can’t raise your deeds to the level of infinity! That is dangerous thinking. Only the Lord can pay that currency.’

  ‘OK, but how do you decide who to give the money to?’

  ‘I don’t overthink it, Rip. You overthink it, the money stays in the wallet. You gotta look out for the last, the least, the lost and the left over. Sometimes it ain’t that the person is economically poor. Like that guard there. He’s probably doing OK. But you see his reaction when we gave it to him? I’d pay a hundred dollars to see that reaction.’

  ‘So the hundred thousand? Who will that go to?’

  ‘I promised that to the orphanage in Albany. The one where we found Celeste.’

  ‘You told them already – before the monies was confirmed?’

  ‘I told them that if I ever pull off a big deal, they get the tithe.’

  Joe gripped the wheel and sighed. He had tears in his eye and those tears started rolling down his cheeks. These weren’t the drummed-up tears of a forced sentiment, or a swell of gratitude for the wonders of nature surrounding us in that God-thanking Wyoming landscape. They were the sweet tears of relief and disbelief. My guess is Joe was getting a glimpse of what that million might mean for him: an end to the hand-to-mouth, day-to-day existence, the contingencies of the road, and the burden of being the bread-and-butterfly winner – a burden he never complained of and carried with great humour and cheer, but that must have weighed him down. He let the tears roll and the snot drip and he hung his jaw in gormless disbelief, shaking his head and muttering ‘provision, provision, provision’ over and over.

  ‘This deal is going to change things, Joe. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What do you think it’ll mean?’

  He shook his head. ‘A ton of stuff, Rip. A ton of stuff.’

  Then a Tourette’s of unedited possibility poured out of him, in no particular order, but all expressed with the equal enthusiasm and conviction that it would come to be. ‘We buy and fix the house, we extend the butterfly farm, we open Butterfly World; we have a cafe where people can drink coffee and butterflies fly all around them; Isabelle goes to college; Mary gets a shot at NASCAR; we diversify into other areas, like making jellies from the indigenous fruits of Jamaica where they have fruits called custard apples, starfruit, tamarind and ortaniques – that’s a cross between an orange and a tangerine; and when it’s all up and running and taking care of itself you and me will travel the world! Think of the wonders that are out there as yet un-glimpsed upon by us.’

  I don’t think Joe really knew what the money would go to, despite this list. But the prospect of that million revealed his heart’s desire: he didn’t want to sell on the road anymore, he didn’t even want to sell butterflies, or even be rich; he just wanted to be free. I thought of Edith, her face lit up with the surprise of this deal happening and me being its author! I thought, too, of Isabelle and what such a windfall would mean for her. College. And then Mary, quiet and thoughtful in the back seat. The deal would set them all free from and for different things. And I was their chief liberator.

  ‘We should call Edith, Joe.’

  ‘We should do that. Maybe you can tell her yourself.’

  ‘No. It’s your moment.’

  Joe called his mother from somewhere in the middle of America in the middle of the night. I was surprised he’d waited so long, but maybe he wanted to enjoy his dreaming for as long as he could before hitting the hard wall of Edith’s doubt. It was touching that he called her as much as he did. Edith still exercised considerable centrifugal force over him. As well as a natural resistance to the emptying nest, she must have also had a fear that Joe might, like his father, disappear altogether one day.

  He made the call from a booth at the gas station. When he came back he looked disappointed.

  ‘You tell her?’

  ‘I told her.’

  ‘She pleased?’

  ‘She weren’t.’

  ‘Don’t tell me: she’ll believe it when she sees it?’

  ‘You got it.’

  ‘She should have more faith. Well, I am looking forward to seeing her face when Roth hands her that cash.’

  ‘Take a picture of that, Rip. Ma being impressed by something I done. Now that’ll be a sight as rare as a Palos Verdes blue.’

  Joe chuckled but I could see that this time he was – despite being used to years of scant praise from her – disheartened, perhaps even a little angry at his mother’s reaction.

  ‘She should show you a little more appreciation, Joe. I mean I get the need to be realistic and that there have been disappointments in the past; I get all that, but she is a little harsh on you.’

  Joe didn’t reply, but nor did he disagree with me.

  ‘I mean, did she ever pull off a million-dollar deal?’

  ‘She nearly did once. With A and P. But she took exception to the guy staring at her face.’

  ‘Well, I’m proud of you, Joe. Even if she isn’t.’

  We drove from Wyoming to the Catskills, a distance of two thousand miles, in not much more than thirty-six hours, stopping just four times for ablutions, gas, to swap drivers and to help some road workers. Joe gave the last of the God Money to an old woman at a gas station in Pennsylvania. His one other gratuitous act of kindness was stopping to help some navvies dig a ditch, after which he handed them all business cards and told them that ‘a super huge’ business opportunity awaited them working for ‘America’s most exciting theme park’. He drove most of the way and he would have driven all the way had Mary not made him let her take the wheel. When they swapped Joe took to the back, lay down and fell asleep in seconds. I waited for his snoring and then started to rub Mary’s neck.

  ‘You’ve been quiet. Ever since we did it.
You’ve hardly said a word to me.’

  ‘I got things on my mind.’

  I told her that I couldn’t wait to do it again and that when we got back we were going to flout house rules and do it whenever and wherever we could get away with it: in the closed garret of the house, in the library, in the back of Chuick, behind a tree in the lake for the benefit of the cranes and in the butterfly nursery, among hatching nets, with the kisses of blue morphos tickling our butts. Maybe even in Isabelle’s bed in front of all those Russian novelists.

  ‘If you want me you gotta back me up against Ma. ’Cos I’m gonna make her tell me the truth.’

  The deal made me over-confident, cocky really. It gave me the idea I could achieve anything. And it was in the fertile soil of that cockiness that this idea of myself as the great liberator of this family – Joe from the demands of the road, Isabelle from the demands of her mother, Mary from the uncertainty of her paternity – all of them from the tyranny of Edith – began to grow.

  ‘I’ll back you, Mary.’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘Promise.’

  And there I was again: making promises about the future to get what I wanted in the present.

  Somewhere between Des Moines and Joliet, I reached over and brought Mary to a climax whilst she gripped the wheel and her brother slept like a man who’d made a million.

  * * *

  We arrived at the house around eight in the evening, Joe at the wheel, Mary flat out in the back, me drifting in and out of sleep, keeping a half-eyed vigil in case Joe made some unplanned detour. The house was silhouetted against a moonlit sky and with its crenellations, spikes and gables it was at its most castle-like. Sleepily I fancied us as heroes returning from a quest almost accomplished: the fleece found, the grail grasped.

  Chuick’s headlights picked out the four red slits of the dogs’ eyes as we came up the drive. But apart from Nancy and Ronnie, no one else came to greet us. Not even Ceelee. I know the money wasn’t in the bank but some sort of fanfare would have been nice. Tickertape’s been thrown for less. At the end of a two-thousand-mile drive and a million-dollar deal we deserved a little more gratitude. Clay appeared, coming up the side track from his house. He chained the dogs and walked toward us, bending down to inspect the front of Chuick.

  ‘Look at the bugs in this grille. How was the trip?’

  Joe got out and gripped Clay by the shoulders.

  ‘We are millionaires!’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Ma not say?’

  ‘Miss Edith been busy.’

  ‘We ain’t sold them yet,’ Mary said, mussing up her hair.

  ‘We got complications, Joseph.’

  ‘Complications or trouble?’

  ‘I’d say complications leading to trouble. Them bailiffs came back. They demanded the rent. Six thousand bucks.’

  ‘We got six thousand bucks, Clay. Pretty soon we’ll have six hundred thousand bucks!’

  ‘Well, Miss Edith will be relieved to hear it. We all been busy trying to get orders done. We got a huge order in from Cleveland. Five hunnerd cases.’

  ‘Hey, Rip! That was the gift emporium you charmed. You see. A natural born salesman! Where is everyone?’

  ‘Everyone’s in the factory, working hard to get it done.’

  I followed Joe up to the factory and watched him – a big shot entering a saloon.

  ‘Stop your grinnin’ and drop your linen!’

  Ceelee ran from the table to Joe, leaping into his arms. Elijah was using the silicon gun. Isabelle was setting a butterfly on a twig. Only Edith didn’t look up. She stayed sat on her throne, fixing stickers. I hoped, for Joe’s sake, she might at least say, ‘Well done,’ but instead we got: ‘No one’s counting chickens here.’

  Looking back with distance and hindsight and all those other wise-after-the-event luxuries that are unavailable at the time, Edith was right: we should not have counted any chickens until the chicken was standing right in front of us, wearing a suit and writing out a cheque for a million dollars. Of course, her unwillingness to acknowledge the deal was sensible, it was protection against disappointment; it showed a healthy scepticism towards a lifetime of Joe’s over-claiming. When you’ve been around a loudmouth with a congenital hyperbolic condition for so long it must be hard to take when they deliver on what they’ve promised. But still her ‘welcome’ could have been a little more encouraging. And despite being used to his mother’s stone-cold scepticism about pretty much everything he said, Joe looked a little woebegone; I got a glimpse of what Joe the boy looked like. His need for approval was as deep as mine, he just disguised it better.

  ‘You should be excited, Edith,’ I said. ‘This man is the real deal.’

  ‘I’ll decide when I’m excited and no one ever “shoulds” me – ever. The deal means dick till the money’s in the bank. Right now we got to find six thousand dollars for the rent or we are out of a home.’

  ‘Ma, the deal’s a forgotten conclusion,’ Joe said. ‘And we got the monies for the bailiffs.’

  Joe produced the deposit and threw the dollars on the factory table, counting out the first few before tossing it all in front of her.

  Edith looked at the new money, picked a single note and sniffed it.

  ‘What do we know about this man?’

  Isabelle had kept her head down when we’d entered, taking a lot of time to fix a glass-wing to a twig; but whilst her fingers fiddled, her ears were burning. The sale of the collection was going to be hardest for her.

  ‘How did he make his millions?’

  ‘The usual way, Iz,’ Joe said. ‘Squishing the poor. But he had a teachable heart. Wouldn’t you say, Rip?’

  ‘Yes. Joe gave him plenty of guidance there.’

  ‘You shouldn’t go around saying it like you got it, is all,’ Edith said. I don’t want another Yo-Yo.’

  Joe had failed to tell me about Yo-Yo. Yo-Yo, Isabelle later told me, was supposedly a collector from Japan who was interested in buying the entire collection. Joe had met him at the Annual Bug Fair in LA and after showing Yo-Yo the catalogue he’d offered a hundred thousand for it. He invited Joe to his house in Kyoto and bought him a plane ticket. But then cancelled without explanation.

  ‘This isn’t a Yo-Yo. This guy has real bona fides.’

  Isabelle left the room; she’d heard enough.

  ‘You think he has that kind of money?’ Edith went on.

  ‘Ma. He showed it to us. On a plate. It was unbelievable.’

  ‘Right. It is unbelievable.’

  ‘Roth’s got the money,’ I said. ‘You should have seen his place, Edith.’

  It was hard to describe Roth’s place without sounding like an insane fantasist, but I gave it a go.

  As I was describing it, Mary entered the room. She gave Ceelee a hug and then mumbled something about ‘turning in early’.

  ‘You ain’t even got a hello for the mother that bore and raised you?’

  The self-pity-in that question wasn’t going to win Mary back. Not this new, emboldened iteration of Mary.

  ‘We got a hundred cases to make by morning here.’

  Mary muttered something that sounded like ‘I ain’t doing this no more’ and made for the door.

  Edith hollered. ‘Hey! Get back here. You ain’t doin’ what no more?’

  Mary paused, thought about ignoring her mother, then turned and half faced her. ‘I ain’t got time for this no more.’

  ‘Time? Time for what?’

  ‘For your . . . tyrannical bullshit.’

  Of all the words Mary could have used she has to use my word! Edith was on it like a one-eyed hawk.

  ‘Well, that’s a fancy word for a girl who claims she don’t read.’ Edith looked at me rather than Mary when she said this. ‘There’s only one person in this house uses a word like that and maybe two who know what it means. And you ain’t one of them.’

  As it was, Edith was just like a tyrant in that moment, a tyrant whose subjects had returned fro
m lands that enjoyed greater liberty than their own and who needed to re-establish the hierarchy.

  As Mary walked off, Joe stepped in.

  ‘Ma. Mary’s fatigued. We just drove two thousand miles in two days to get here and we did the deal of our lives and you’re hollering about nothing.’

  ‘Nothing? I had two men threatening to take everything I own today. I ain’t livin’ off your maybes no more.’

  Joe picked up some of the tossed dollars.

  ‘This ain’t a maybe, Ma.’

  * * *

  For a few weeks, we lived in the tension between the possibility of a life-changing windfall and a ‘nothing’s changed yet’ industriousness. For Edith, it was business as usual and the usual business was getting out that order of five hundred cases and a hundred-case order of yellow swallowtails (to match the colour of the bridesmaids’ dresses) for a wedding in White Plains. Despite the million-dollar promise, she would not countenance talk of it. Joe, however, acted as though it were a done deal, and I was inclined to agree with him. I had been inside the Wizard’s house and glimpsed his vault. I had seen the look in the collector’s eye when Joe had shown him the sample case. And something of Joe’s hope was starting to rub off on me. I had become less ‘cynicalistic’, more credulous, more expectant of good things. I had begun to think like an American and it was more fun than being my old, sceptical, no-can-do European self.

  Joe decided to throw a ‘Thanksgiving dinner’ in lieu of ‘the great harvest we were about to reap’. Like any rational person I was superstitious about celebrating something before it had transpired but Joe, of course, dismissed this as more Bad Theology on the grounds that God was outside time. When Edith pointed out that actual Thanksgiving was still two months away Joe said that those Pilgrim Fathers had got the calendar all wrong and that actual Thanksgiving was just another bogus concoction of man’s making. He wanted to serve up ‘a surf and turf cornucopia of American produce’, including New York strip steaks and Maine lobster. He was going to get the ingredients from Poughkeepsie, where he knew someone at the Culinary Institute of America who could source ‘the best produce in all the land’. The idea of this meal was not completely spontaneous because Joe had kept back some monies for it – three hundred dollars. He called it the Feast of the Assuming because he was assuming we’d have plenty to thank God for.