The Butterfly Kid

1

THE TROUBLE with most warlocks is that they talk too much. That’s how I happened to notice the kid in Washington Square: he wasn’t saying anything. He just sat there, quietly making tropical butterflies, while the teenyboppers rippled past, unnoticing.

Okay, I thought, I’ll play your silly game. I parked myself on the bench across the walk from his and elaborately ignored him, which wasn’t all that easy.

He was a pretty ordinary-type kid, by Greenwich Village standards: yellow hair, darker eyebrows, longish face not quite finished yet, blue unbelieving eyes — a sufficiently good-looking kid, but most Village kids are good-looking. The eyebrows gave him a touch of distinction, but there were already three or five other kids making the two-tone scene that summer, so he was going to have to find himself some other trademark. Those butterflies, I thought, would probably do it for him. They were vulgar butterflies, too big and too flashy, but good taste doesn’t matter much in miracles, and anyhow, he’d learn.

I still couldn’t see how he was doing it. He’d clench his fist, then open it, and off’d go another butterfly. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it very smoothly.

The kid looked to be about two weeks late for a haircut, and his clothes were nearly clean. Check. But he was so fair I couldn’t tell whether or not he was growing a… Yep, he was growing a beard. When he turned to watch a particularly garish butterfly veer off toward Fifth Avenue, the new sun hit his face at just the right angle to show he’d recently quit shaving.

He was obviously new to the Village then, but he didn’t look around to catch reactions to his butterfly routine, which was unusual. I was mildly fascinated.

Finally he reached into his shirt pocket, found nothing, and didn’t bother to explore his other pockets. His face looked immaturely rueful. Right. I lit a cigarette as ostentatiously as possible and did not smile.

“Do you have another one of those?” in a light tenor drawl. He was being casual so hard it almost glittered.

“Huh?” The object was to keep him on the offensive, let him write the script. I was very curious about those butterflies.

He said it again, more expressively, and conjured up a small, gray moth.

I said yes and held out my pack, he crossed the path and parked himself beside me, and the crowd remained the crowd. He tore the filter off the cigarette I gave him, but I forgave him for the sake of those lepidoptera.

The kid had a problem. Every time he tried to strike a match, a red and yellow butterfly got in the way. After three butterflies I shrugged my shoulders and gave him a light.

“Thanks, man.”

We sat there for a while. The butterflies got better, more imaginatively colored, and I nodded quiet approval at some of them. Just before he was ready to throw the cigarette butt away, I said, “Pretty good butterflies.”

“Yeah.” He smiled a few watts and generated a large butterfly that had “Pretty Good Butterflies”, gold on brown, printed across its wings. If the trick was still so new to him that he could openly admire it, I figured, he must’ve learned it in the Village, which would be interesting. Of course, he might’ve picked it up at the Bicentennial Exposition, but that could be interesting, too.

“How do You do it?” I stressed the you a bit, ever so gently, so he wouldn’t think I was trying to steal his secret. Forestalling someone else’s paranoia is a basic Village survival technique.

“I dunno,” he said, smiling mysteriously. “I just… Well, I…” He closed his left hand and opened it to emit an iridescent green beauty with a pattern of crossed question marks in gold across its back. Pretty good, for an amateur.

“It just, like, kinda happened. You know?” he went on. “I mean,” he gestured colorfully, “I was at this Party.” He boosted his smile by a few more candlepower and leaned back. He wasn’t exactly smug about it, but he liked it.

“Pretty good butterflies,” I repeated. Then we were both silent for a while. A female teenybopper, blonde or so, in white pants just too tight enough, enjoyed our unanimous total attention for as long as it took her to strut down the path and out of sight, whereupon the kid produced a huge chromatic butterfly of pornographic implications.

“Would you believe,” I invited, “that the term teenybopper was invented sometime prior to 1962 by Lee Lamb?” which I thought might interest him.

I was being inordinately cool, not rushing the kid or frightening him, but generating just as hard as I could the feeling that it’d be lots of fun for him to tell Uncle Chester all about it. After a while, a short one, I could see that I was beginning to get to him. He filled the air with color for a few minutes and then said, “You know, it’s kinda funny…”

“Good morning!” quacked Michael the Theodore Bear in his favorite comic voice. The kid twitched.

“Oh, good Lord!” I tried to sound genial, but it wasn’t easy. “This is Mike Kurland,” I explained. “He’s my Roommate.” I didn’t know quite how, but I was sure Mike was going to scare the kid away. He’s sometimes hard to take if you’re not used to him. Of course, so am I, but…

Mike stuck out a hand for shaking, being a professionally genial sort. The kid’d had his hand closed, so naturally a butterfly popped out when he made to accept Mike’s paw.

“Howdy. My name’s… Shawn. S-e-a-n. You know, like…”

It didn’t work. The butterfly was blue on one side and green on the other, and Michael, face frozen at the start of whatever he’d been about to say, watched after it until it had blended into the new summer foliage and a little longer, all the while shaking hands reflexively. He looked more comical than he’d ever looked on purpose, but I was too bugged to enjoy the show.

“Quack?” he said plaintively. “Quack?”

Mike turned back to us and, completely deadpan, sat down. He used to be something of a spy — our side, of course, during the Second Cambodian Crisis — and took just pride in his utter unflappability. “That was a butterfly.” He said it like a line of print, which showed that he was pretty shaken by it all.

“Yeah,” the kid explained. “I’ve got these Butterflies.” He demonstrated.

“Hmm. So I see. Yass.” He sounded like W. C. Fields, a very bad omen.

“What’s happenin’, Mike?” I burbled in alarm. That’s an ancient Village greeting, full of implicit hipness and signifying nothing. Mike was in the habit of satirizing this with a blatantly absurd program of events, and I was willing to endure anything to prevent a battle of cools between him and the kid. Cooler-than-thou contests are never informative, and I was starving for information. But it didn’t work. I began to think nothing was going to work.

“Butterflies, you say?” Mike had now said four complete sentences, using a different voice for each, and the kid was growing nervous, very carefully keeping both hands open and fingers widely separated.

“Hey,” I blurted, “that’s right! I haven’t even introduced myself yet.” It was a clumsy non sequitur, but it just might turn the tone back toward casual and comfortable conversation, I hoped. “My name’s Chester,” I drove on. “You,” an enormous concession, “can call me Chet.” We shook hands formally. “Where are you from?”

The butterfly that fluttered where our hands had met was extravagantly baroque, and Mike, his cool now wholly blown, overtly goggled.

“Howdy, Mister Dillon,” the kid drawled. Every Chester in America hates that line. Usually when I hear it, I deliver a short prepared speech on the evils of TV and memorized wit, but I had other fish to fry at the moment, so I let it pass.

“Yeah,” I sighed. “Where did you say you’re from?”

The ornate handshake butterfly was perversely circling Mike’s head, he swiveling pompously about to keep it in view, and I hoped it’d go away and he’d follow it. From the look on his face, if it did he would.

“I’m from Fort Worth,” said the kid, forgetting about Mike. “I just got here Saturday, last Saturday. I’m a lead guitar player.”

Fine. A bull teenybopper with butterflies. Just what the Village always needed. Great.

“How do you like the Village?” I asked politely. Mike was still occupied with that butterfly, and his antics (twirling about like a dignified top to keep it safely in front of him) were attracting some attention. A small herd of tourists was developing about us. I tried to keep the kid from noticing.

“It’s funny,” he said. “I mean, well, the people are kinda funny. You know, strange.” The herd was increasing, but the kid went on. “I mean, well, I went to this Party last night and, well…” He made a sweeping gesture and the air was thick with butterflies.

That’s when it hit him. He gaped at the butterflies and the crowd, dropped his jaw, then turned back toward me with panic in his eyes: precisely what I’d been trying to avoid.

People don’t make butterflies! It was a truth so basic it had never needed stating, and now Sean’s universe was crumbling in lepidoptera.

“And what else can you do?” breathed Mike at this worst of all possible moments.

And all the stunned while, the sentence Sean had been working on, impelled by its own momentum, dribbled out one word at a time. “I went to this Party and they gave me this Pill…”

Phuip! Where he’d been was just a kid-shaped heap of butterflies.

There was scattered light applause. Somebody threw us a copper quarter. Then the butterflies and tourists drifted off. A mixed bag of teenyboppers wafted past us unawares. In the distance a Good Humor man plaintively cried his wares.

“Hmm.” Mike stared at me with his very best hurt look. A plaid butterfly landed on his knee and he slapped at it petulantly. I hate to see grown men petulantly slapping innocent plaid butterflies.

“Coffee?” I suggested. No response. I stood up, rescued the debased quarter from an approaching wino, and started toward MacDougal Street. Michael came along, still looking hurt. Whenever a butterfly approached, he ducked. He seemed to be dancing Swan Lake.

At last, “You gave me your Solemn Word,” he said earnestly, “that you weren’t going to doctor my orange juice anymore. In fact, you Promised.”

So that’s what was bothering him. “No, Mike,” I swore. “That was all real. Honest.”

“That kid? And all those…”

“The whole bit, baby.” My public image at the time involved a cultivated smattering of hip jargon, which I undertook to speak with a distinctly Liverpudlian accent. The tourists expected it.

Mike brooded a little. Then, “No LSD?” he asked.

Just once I’d spiked his orange juice, just once.

“Not a bit.”

“You really saw it, too?”

“Everybody saw it. Honestly, Mike, it really happened.”

But he wasn’t convinced until he overheard two nuns talking about the strange butterflies and one ancient chess player named David explaining how freak air currents sometimes blew migratory butterflies off course, and even then he had reservations. I’d played a regrettable series of complicated jokes on Mike a few years back, and he wouldn’t put it past me to be in collusion with a brace of nuns and old David.

However, as we strolled down MacDougal toward West Third, Mike’s expression moved slowly back to the bland malevolence that passed for normal with him. By the time we reached The Garden of Eden, the coffeehouse our people frequented that year, he was chattering animatedly about an elaborate joint deception we were working on.

We peered past the awful paintings in the foggy plate-glass window to see who was there. Everybody does this — even the Law — even though he’ll be inside in a few seconds.

Moving toward the door, Mike said, in total explanation, “Contact high?”

“Right.”

“Obviously.”

It had been that kind of summer.