Like a Badger, Only Meaner


LIKE A BADGER, ONLY MEANER

One day all the butterflies decided to fly away. And just like that, we were all without jobs. My brothers Paul and Paul were working with me that morning. There weren’t any caterpillars to hatch, and the sun was hurting my eyes after losing another pair of sunglasses.

“Might as well go shoot hoops a while,” Paul said.

Then Paul curled up in a ball in the back of my pickup and took a nap.

It wasn’t planned like this, for two brothers to both be named Paul. My parents weren’t that far off their rockers. The older Paul was born before me. Then I came along, and when Dad divorced the coke addict Paul and I called Mom, he married Charlene. We eventually started calling Charlene Mom, and stopped calling Mom anything. And Charlene (or Mom, I should say) happened to also have a son named Paul. The rest of us talked about nicknaming one Paulie or Pancho, maybe P-man, but this would’ve been unfair. Both liked just being Paul.

                 After eating some salt and vinegar chips in our kitchen, we returned to the farm that afternoon. Still no butterflies. Then the next morning all secen employees gathered in a semicircle. Again, none had shown up.

“What are we gonna do?” I asked the manager, who was dressed in a seersucker suit. He looked happy, like he had been waiting to sell the business anyway. He was making more money off an engine repair store closer to town.

“I’ll call you soon as I think of somethig,” he said.

    Well Paul and Paul and I went back home and spent the bulk of the next several days playing basketball. We took on a group of kids hanging around the and kicked their asses repeatedly. They were half our age but doubled us in ugliness. When money became scarce we stopped ordering out and made a lot of mustard sandwiches, storing backups for later in little Ziploc bags.

Paul had a suggestion. “Why don’t we just move back home?” We all looked at him like he was a crazy person. A crazy person with a bad haircut.

“No way. What if the butterflies come back?” Paul said. “Don’t ya think it’d be a waste to drive all that way, then just turn our asses around and come back?”

“I don’t think I wanna come back ever,” Paul said, “butterflies or no butterflies.”

I tried to take charge of everything, my brothers and the situation. Should we inform the landlord first? No. Should we try to break the news to our pretty girlfriends? No (there weren’t any). It wasn’t long before Paul hooked Dad’s old horse trailer to his truck. We packed it to the brim with boxes of winter clothes and furniture, comic books and water-ski equipment.

“Did you wrap those dinner plates in newspaper like I asked you,” Paul asked.

“Of course,” I said, lying.

                When Mom answered the door she seemed giddier than normal. She took the suitcases from our hands. I spit out my cigarette as she tried to kiss me on the mouth.

“Sick, quit Ma,” Paul said when she made her way to him.

Dad was sitting in his recliner putting batteries in the remote. He was wearing a light blue A-shirt and rolled his eyes several times before finally saying, “Looks like the whole goddamn chicken kebob is back in the saddle.”

We could still hear him from the top of the stairs as he argued with Mom. “Ain’t that pretty. It ain’t even Thanuks-givin.”

Situated in the middle of South Dakota, The Butterfly Ranch had seemed like a golden opportunity for our lives. I was the first to move out. It was the only spot for miles where tourists were able pull off the interstate for a break, and let their kids run around like turkeys. I took pride in my position, eventually receiving a promotion. The participants would use little plastic green sticks with mesh nets, and would swat at butterflies while the dads fussed about nonexistent cell phone reception and the moms clicked the shutters of their disposable cameras.

Paul was the next to drive out after I did, later that August. They had just shipped him back from the army, and it wasn’t long before the other Paul got fired and followed our lead, making a bedroom out of the apartment’s biggest closet.

Occasionally a nice old lady would walk by the tip bucket outside the restroom and leave us a five-dollar bill. After our shifts we’d take it to split for drinks at the local bar. A twenty year-old kid with gray hair named Ralph would always sit beside me.

“See that bitch leaning on the pool table?” he’d ask.

“Yeah.”

“I fucked her brains out.”

Whenever I’d turn away to see if I could find a Paul instead of a Ralph to converse with, he would think I saw another girl that just walked in and say, “I fucked her brains out too.”

One day, about a year into our jobs, Paul saw something on the hill. “What in the boxspring!” he said.

“Hush,” I told him. “Don’t scare off the butterflies.”

Paul liked to pay no mind to warnings, and ran after the thing like it was a diamond necklace. He was a fast runner, had always been ever since his days competing on the track team. I thought I saw the thing for a minute too, which looked like a badger, only meaner.

Paul was still running over the hill like a puppy shot by a BB gun when he finally got it. I still don’t know how he did it, but I swear to God he was cradling the thing in his arms like a newborn baby. Enough with the metaphors, but all of a sudden he was running back toward us, grinning wide and petting the fur. As he got closer the animal bit him on the neck.

It jumped down, and ran off into the fog. Paul jerked back startled, holding his injured neck. He waited a while, pondering if he should chase it again or not.

“Why’d ya do it?” asked Paul. “Why’d ya pick it up? Did ya think we needed somethin like that in our backyard?” Paul just stood there for a minute, staring at a mound of dirt, a little embarrassed at the episode. “Tell me!” Paul said, grabbing his neck where the blood was coming out and started shaking him hard. They wrestled and I walked back to work.

                 Dad was grilling a pack of weenies on the back porch while Paul was now struggling to get the new TV box working properly. The NBA playoffs were coming in fuzzy. I fumbled through an album we had made Mom for her birthday one year earlier. Underneath the plastic pages were all kinds of rare butterflies. We weren’t supposed to catch them for ourselves, but who plays by the rules all the time? No one. Mom loved to hear about pollination and the larval cycle, about how the insects navigate using a sun compass, traveling for thousands of miles before finding a permanent home, but Dad hated it.

After we all gathered around the table and said thanks I told everyone I had an announcement.

“Well what is it?” Mom asked. “Are you gettin married?”

I told her no, it was more serious than that. I dropped my fork and stood up. “I think someone sitting at this table now is going to die.” I felt the heat of their eyes focus on my eyebrows, which were thicker than anyone else’s in the family. “In less than a week one of us won’t be here any longer.”

“Oh my,” said Mom.

“What the hell?” said Dad, continuing to pick at his enchiladas.

Paul wanted me to expand on the topic. “Which one of us will it be?”

My breathing had become more heavy than normal. “One of you,” I told him. “A Paul.” And then added “Sorry, but it’s still not clear which one.”

Later that night the house got cold, more than I’d ever remembered it being before. I heard someone get up to use the bathroom a couple times. I looked at the clock, which seemed to remain between 4:00 and 4:38 for several hours. Tossing and turning a while, I kept having funny feelings about my life, then about everything that had happened at the dinner table.

When morning came Paul was dead, lying stiff on his mattress. There was no heartbeat or life is his face. Dad closed his eyelids like they do in the movies while Mom cried in the backyard, sitting in her garden hammock.

Paul confronted me in the garage. “How’d you know it,” he asked. I shrugged and told him I wasn’t sure. “Tell me, you pig-fucker.”

During the week the butterflies had left, after never receiving a call from our manager, I started planning out other options, like lobstering in Alaska. Ralph had told me lobstering was a pretty decent job if you were a hard worker. “It sure made a wealthy man out of me,” is what he said. Eventually I abandoned these ideas, thinking twenty-seven wasn’t a bad age to finally do some things back home I’d never had an opportunity to do, like helping Dad out with his roofing business, or stealing a laserdisc player from the millionaire neighbors’ living room at the end of the block. What really ended up happening though was this: we hung out  few days, buried Paul, and the day after that I found a newspaper ad. I drove out, far out, in Paul’s old truck until arriving in Texas. I would work there, at yet another farm.

“This must be your callin,” snickered the manager when I first called. “You really like butterflies, don’t ya?”

“Not really,” I told him. “They’re okay.”

Paul and I played one last game of basketball before I left. Somehow he’d gotten really good at lay-ups. I told him I’d save a spot for him on the farm, that things might be fun out there.

He told me no, that he only came out in the first place last time because Paul had talked him into it. He paused and shook my hand, as if we were agreeing over something important.

“By the way,” he said, “I found some letters between Mom and Dad, in a box under his bed.”

“By Mom you mean Charlene?”

“No, Sally.”

“They old?”

“Look pretty current.”

I looked at Paul’s neck, which was still scabbed from the incident. “Think he’s cheatin?”

“I dunno. I’ll try to find out.”

The next morning I hopped in a cab, sitting and staring at the keys in the driver’s ignition. As we pulled out of the driveway, I waved goodbye at everyone that was still alive and kept waving until their silhouettes against the teal garage door finally vanished, and that was that.