Poor Butterfly

12

I tied Miguelito’s leash to the handlebars, put on my Zosh hat, and started to pedal down the street slowly so the dog could keep up. He was well fed and having a good time. We were pals. The streets were alive now and the morning was showing signs of getting hot. I turned a corner, moving away from downtown.

Three kids were throwing a football around on the street. An old man with no teeth and wearing a hat with a wide brim used his cane to make his baggy-pantsed way down the sidewalk, and a fat woman with a pretty face leaned out of a second-story window to call down to a thin man who looked up at her, sweat forming under the arms of his tan suit.

I put my head down and pedaled. I went slowly so Miguelito could keep up, but he wasn’t used to this sort of thing. After two blocks he stopped suddenly. Just stopped and sat down. I had a choice of holding on to the leash and taking a fall or letting him go and risk having to chase him around the neighborhood.

I let go of the leash. Miguelito didn’t run. He sat panting on the curb. I coaxed, pleaded, threatened, but Miguelito had had enough. He wouldn’t even look me in the eye. The old man with the hat and cane caught up to us, looked at the dog, and said, “Shoot him.”

He held up his crippled hand to form a pistol with his fingers and feigned shooting the dog, but Miguelito ignored him.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Between the eyes,” the old man said, pointing his finger gun between his own eyes. “Dog that don’t do as he is told should be shot as an example to others.”

“What others?” I asked.

“Shoot him,” the old man repeated.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Think about it,” the old man said with contempt. “We’d be up to our gazoonkis in Nazis and Japs if Patton and MacArthur sat around thinking instead of shooting. Think about it.”

The old man gave up and headed for a bar on the corner.

Miguelito had stopped in front of a pawn shop. RUDOLFO CASTILLO’S TROPIC PAWN SHOP, the sign said. The shop was steel-gated but an old man had stopped in front of the gate and was pulling out a key. I picked up the dog, held him propped against the handlebars, and wheeled toward the shop.

The man, who I figured was probably Castillo, looked as old as the mountains of hell. He was a brown, wrinkled man, wearing a wrinkled herringbone suit with no tie. The suit was about two sizes too big for him. He opened the padlock on the steel gates that protected the door to his shop and looked at me and the dog as if this were the start of another bad day. I waited till he pushed the gates open and then followed him inside. The place brought back a childhood memory, triggered more by the smell than by the familiar line-up of guitars, portable radios, watches, rings, necklaces, harmonicas, trumpets, and weapons. The smell made a special tug at my memory.

I grunted in with the dog in my arms.

“Rudolfo Castillo at your service and open for business,” said the little old man as he moved slowly behind his counter, pulled open the little window marked CLOSED, and adjusted his glasses.

“You got any hair clippers?”

I put the panting dog down on the floor.

Castillo looked at me blankly.

“Clips, for the hair.”

He grunted and then disappeared into the dark depths of the shop.

And then I placed the smell. My father had bought me a saxophone in a North Hollywood pawn shop when I was a kid. It didn’t have all the parts and couldn’t make all the notes, but I spent a summer and a good part of a winter loving the thing. The case it had come in smelled like Castillo’s pawn shop.

Castillo returned, puffing from the burden of the box in his arms. He dropped the box on the counter and continued to pant heavily while I fished through the box of hair clippers till I found an old black one that looked as if it might still have teeth and wasn’t too rusty.

“I’ll take this one,” I said.

“Two dollars,” the old man said.

“What? It’s not worth a quarter.”

“Yesterday it was a quarter,” Castillo said. “Today two bucks.”

“What happened between yesterday and today?” I asked, watching Miguelito nose around behind a guitar-shaped box.

“Yesterday the police weren’t looking for someone who looks like you,” he said.

“I don’t have any money …” I began, but Castillo spoke over me.

“Bicycle and the hat,” he said.

“You can have them,” I said.

“And the dog,” Castillo added.

“You want that dog?”

“Si,” said Castillo. “Para mi esposa.”

“Okay. Give me the clipper to shave the dog. After I shave him, you can have him, but you have to throw in a shirt for me.”

He handed me the clipper and came up with a small can of oil.

“I get the bike, the dog, and the clipper back,” Castillo said readjusting his glasses as I oiled the clipper. “You get a shirt.”

What the hell. I picked up the clipper and pulled Miguelito out from between the feet of a slightly chipped, full-size ceramic pig on which someone had written MONROE in nail polish. I shaved Miguelito, who simply watched with curiosity as I put the razor to his back.

The clipper wasn’t bad. After a few false starts, I found a patch of fur that looked shorter than the rest and worked on in for a few seconds. Pay dirt. I could clearly see the lettering on the dog. I got down to bristle, read the names, and kept going. When I’d finished, Miguelito’s back was exposed right down to his white skin.

“You got paper and a pencil?” I asked.

Castillo came up with them, and I copied what Lorna had written on her dog. It didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. Three names I didn’t recognize-two men and a woman-a date, and a place: Cherokee, Texas.

“Without the hair he looks like a fat chihuahua,” said Castillo. “I don’t know if my wife wants a fat chihuahua. And who knows if we can get that ink washed off?”

“Then take him on trial,” I said.

“Fifteen days,” he said, making out a receipt. “You don’t come back for him, my wife don’t like him, I sell him. Fifteen days.”

“Okay,” I said, handing him the clipper, the hat, and the dog. In turn, he handed me a white shirt that looked a little large, but that was better than too small.

Miguelito lay there like a hairy cactus.

I took off my shirt, threw it to Castillo, and put on the white shirt. It wasn’t too bad a fit.

“I can cover the dog so no one’ll come around here and get curious about what’s written on him till I get him home and wash him up,” Castillo said, surveying the animal. “Got one of those blankets people put on greyhounds to race them. I’ll show you.”

He moved around the counter, went to a corner of the shop, and came up with a dusty box.

A few seconds later Miguelito’s official number in gold was 9, and I was broke and on my way to look for a killer.