The Butterfly Kid

20

IT WASN’T until we’d pushed our way through a ring of gawking teenyboppers and boarded the much-admired Tripsmobile that I stopped feeling foolishly good and started worrying properly once more. I realized, while Mike was warming up the motors and getting them in sync, while our unshielded air cushion side-blast was scattering tourists left and right like brightly colored shrieking leaves, while all this noise and busyness was happening… I realized that we’d now done everything we’d planned, back at the house, and that no one, least of all us, knew what to do next.

We were going to the Croton Reservoir. Sure. And there we were going to prevent Ktch and Laszlo and their buddies from pouring six hundred gallons of that fiendish reality drug into the city’s drinking water. Sure.

It was all so simple until you wondered how. I was wondering how. Also with what. And worrying like a pro.

To begin with, we had our little army: sixteen standard Greenwich Village heads and hipsters of various kinds — except that there were two empty seats, so we had fourteen, not sixteen. We hadn’t even started yet, but already we’d lost two men — which worried me — and I couldn’t remember which two — which worried me more. And of the fourteen fighters we had left, one was Little Micky, who wasn’t even on the list. That meant we’d lost three men, and I was thoroughly confused.

What an army. Besides Michael, Sean, Sativa, and myself, we had the rest of the band: lovable Stewart Fiske, a hundred pounds of muscle and ten pounds of hair on a six-foot-three-inch skeleton he must have bought at Sears and put together in his spare time by himself, whose purple buckskin jacket was almost buried under buttons saying “End the War in Israel” et al, a less than awesome warrior whose gentleness was so complete we’d had to amplify his drums;

And playful Patrick Gerstein, an authentic human puppy wholly dedicated to romping — through pastures of cannabis, through female populations, through psychedelic fun houses and rock-n-roll music rants — sturdy enough that he might be able to fight if he could want to, but impossible to imagine wanting to, a constant laugher without even a temper to lose — some warrior;

And Kevin Anderson, no kin of mine, who had the best furnished mind and longest, kinkiest hair in Greenwich Village, plus a well-designed and carefully developed body, but whom I’d seen paralyzed with terror before a pugnacious twelve-year-old punk from New Jersey less than a week ago.

(While I was taking this worried inventory, the tourists and teenyboppers outside the Tripsmobile started jeering and making sarcastic cracks about windbags, beatniks, and what have you, adding embarrassment to my worry, and a cop started walking toward us with clearly less-than-friendly intent. There were six motors, you see, and if they weren’t properly synchronized, the bus would be, to say the least, unstable. And this, naturally, was the time Mike had to have trouble getting them in sync. All of this hassle just to save the world.)

I wasn’t much of a fighter, either, and Michael — though I supposed he could if he had to — was basically more the undercover type. Any cover. Sativa, on the other hand, might actually be dangerous in a fight, if only because her gleaming nails were an inch and a half long.

Sean, being a Texan and all — healthy, strong, and all that jazz — was probably pretty good with his fists. Texas kids still tended to be sluggers in those days. But there were so many ways that he wasn’t a typical Texan, who could be sure? Still, he might be a fighter.

Groovy. That’s one.

(The cop was closer now, having trouble pushing through the crowd. Good old crowd. A ticket — the least I was prepared to expect from him — would cost us a good fifteen minutes, and we were running out of time. But Mike, cursing blandly, was adjusting the motors in a leisurely manner that threatened fair to overload my worry circuits.

(Then — BanG KlunK, ROAR — the motors suddenly meshed. The Tripsmobile rose its full eighteen inches from the pavement, the crowd cheered cynically, the cop looked disappointed, and we floated away up Sixth Avenue. But I continued to worry, of course.)

The band and Sean, alas, were the cream of our little army. The rest… words fail me. Look at them.

There was Andrew Blake, looking as though he weren’t quite sure what he was doing in our company and most likely feeling the same. He might easily talk the lobsters to death, given time, or con them out of their evil scheme and everything else they owned, but he’d never impressed me as having any native gift for violence.

Karen Greenbaum, I decided, could be counted on to faint at the sight of almost any six-foot-tall blue lobster.

Little Micky was crazy enough to be, perhaps, pound for pound a real ferocious critter, but he didn’t have pounds enough to matter much. I mean, he could doubtless lick anything his size, but he was only five feet tall and undernourished, and I couldn’t offhand think of anything his size that needed licking.

Sandi Heller and Leo might be dangerous as a team, he being strong and wiry and she being a dancer, unless they happened to flip out, which they both tended to do from time to time, usually together. And if what she told me in The Garden (“Mutter jumble mutter garble Baby,” with gestures) meant what I feared it might, the odds were she was pregnant and all bets were off.

(This catalog of worries didn’t take as long to make as it’s taking to tell. A moment’s glance at each face was sufficient, and I’d ordinarily spare you all these personnel details, but I think you ought to know what we had to work with. Why should I be discouraged all by myself when I can bring you along for company? And the action later on will much more nearly make sense if you know who’s doing it, perhaps.)

But the thing that really worried me was this: as long as we had this busload of question marks to begin with, wherefore I was going into battle feeling more like a keeper than a general, why in God’s personal name did our army have to include Gary the Frog and Harriet? Oh, I knew how we got them. Mike and I called them in on this out of habit, because we call them in on everything.

But Gary the Frog was anemic, full of parasites, extravagantly stupid, and a coward, and Harriet weighed more than three hundred pounds and had barely strength enough to climb a flight of stairs. This we needed?

Furthermore, Gary the Frog and Harriet liked Laszlo Scott (a chilling concept). In fact, they were even friends of his. He was one of their heroes. Ten to one they were on his side. I couldn’t help thinking that, though there wasn’t much they could do for us, if they wanted to help Laszlo, there was a hell of a lot they could do to us. What business did we have carrying Laszlo’s spies into action with us?

I was runner-up last year in the World’s Championship Worrying Contest at Poughkeepsie, but I think the winner cheated.