William Vollmann - Butterfly Stories

The school bully was retarded. He had failed fourth grade three times. He was therefore much bigger and stronger than any other boy in the elementary school. In the winter time the custodian shoveled all the snow in the playground into a great heap in one corner, and the pile froze into a mountain of ice that almost topped the fence by February or March. The school bully claimed this mountain as his kingdom. He stood on the summit of that dirty blue pile of frozen slush and picked out his victim, following a sorting algorithm which may have been similar to the butterfly boy's once he grew up and had to decide which whore to fall in love with. The bully, however, appeared to have studied at the school of the eagles. He turned his hunched head in a series of alert jerks, his eyes rarely blinked, and when he had spotted someone he could torture he shrieked like a bird and brought his arms up into wings. The way a boy walked, the color of his shoes, these and other unknown criteria were scanned by his hard little eyes, until he had searched out a rodent worthy of his malice. It was always the butterfly boy first, but sometimes it was someone else, too. You might think that that someone else and the butterfly boy would become allies, but it never happened. Whomever the school bully hurt was so disgraced and humiliated that he was no good for anything. He had become so despicable by virtue of being hurt that not even other despicable people could stand him.

So the only playmates that the butterfly boy had were girls. He loved girls. Sometimes he kissed them, and sometimes they kissed him. Occasionally the stronger girls would even defend him from the bully. But this only made the butterfly boy even more miserable. He would rather have gone home with another bloody nose than endure the additional odium of being defended by girls.

So the butterfly boy's pleasures were of a solitary kind. One evening a huge monarch butterfly landed on the top step of his house and he watched it for an hour. It squatted on the welcome mat, moving its gorgeous wings slowly. It seemed very happy. Then it rose into the air and he never saw it again. He remembered that butterfly for the rest of his life.

The last bell had rung. The children rushed into the wet and muddy hallway in a happy rage of shouts and clattering lunch-boxes. As the butterfly boy reached the halfway mark with his galoshes buckles, a girl came to help him. Some of the buckles were crooked or a little rusty. Every day this girl did up the most difficult ones for him. The outer door kept banging open and closed as children ran into the snow. Through it the butterfly boy caught stroboscopic glimpses of the waiting steaming school-buses, not as yellow as they would be in the spring rains when their gorgeous new yellowness shouted itself even more brightly than the No. 2 pencils given out for penmanship; the sticky snowflakes paled and frosted the buses into something coy and lemon-gold, more fit now to swim through blizzards illuminated by their pale yellow eyes.

Want to come to my house? the girl said.

When? said the butterfly boy, startled.

Now.

The butterfly boy smiled down shyly as the girl fastened the last buckle for him. - Yeah, he said.

When he got into her bus with her, he had a sense of doing something deliciously wrong. Her bus had a different black number stenciled on it, and a different driver. The black vinyl seats smelled different. There was chewing gum stuck in different places. The children who got on the bus were different. They seemed quieter and happier and more perfect to him. They left him alone.

The bus that he usually rode drove away first, and when he saw it go he felt nervous for a moment. His parents might be angry.

The girl was taking him somewhere he'd never been. They sat warmly together with their lunchboxes on their laps, passing white winter hills and farmhouses and horses shaking snow off themselves. Some of the trees were only dusted with snow, as a cake might be with sugar, while others below, onto which they had discharged their loads, resembled snowmen or plump downy birds. They passed a little evergreen heavily lobed with it like a brain stood on its end, and by its agency the light passing into the bus window was whitened, so that when the girl turned suddenly toward him her face resembled a marble angel, and then the tree was past, and her features obeyed the vibrations of a rosier light. Without knowing what he was doing or why, he suddenly plunged his face into her wann hair. The girl looked at him with great seriousness. The snow was getting deeper the farther they rode into this unknown land, and it had begun to get dark. He was entirely happy by the girl's side. The bus stopped more frequently now to let the pupils off. It was almost empty. Then they traveled for another long interval along the edges of snowy fields. The butterfly boy saw a low pond in the direction of the setting sun. A wavy black channel had formed between its plates of ice. - Our dog likes to play there, the girl said. - A great rolling hill caught the sunset in the distance. Below it was another wide field of steep-roofed farm sheds and half-frozen ponds and trees becoming successively more frosted in the distance. They drew closer to the base of the hill, and the girl pointed to a white house. - That's where I live, she said.

It was late twilight, and getting cold when the bus let them off. - Now we have to walk a minute, the girl said. - She took him up a wide road that swiveled through the bare and spacious forest. The road was irresistibly blank and creamy with snow like the notebook-paper that they used at school. The butterfly boy drew loops and circles with his mittened hand. - Come on, the girl said. I want to show you my things. - The road had steepened as it curved them up through snowy shade. Whitened limbs hung over their heads, and then they turned one more bend, and came to a field again and they saw the girl's house. - I'm sad, the girl said. 'Cause I wanted to show you the footprints I made in the morning. But the snow's covered them up.

The butterfly boy realized that the girl liked him very much. Without looking at her, he followed her inside, glowing with a soft warm joy.

Who's this? said the girl's mother in surprise.

He's coming for dinner, the girl explained.

She took him up to her room, and, giggling, opened her chest of drawers to show him her folded white underpants. He had never seen girls' underpants before. He was as happy as when he'd seen the butterfly: a special secret had now been revealed to him.

After that, he and the girl read storybooks together until dinnertime. There was one book about five Chinese brothers who couldn't be killed. One was condemned to be drowned, but he drank up all the sea. The page showed a night scene, glowing with the rich pigments of children's books like some lantern-lit stand of fruits in bowls. People were diving in the stagnant pond, their ploughs parked under the trees. They were bringing up armloads of skulls. Across the brown river's bridge, a white monument rose like a Khmer tombstone. Here the executioners, skinny serious men in black pajamas, were trying to drown the Chinese brother. They had tied his hands behind his back with wire and forced his head down into the water, but he was drinking it all up with bulging cheeks; they couldn't hurt him even there at the foot of the lion's gape where white teeth blared. Making a festivity of the event, little kids were beating a drum and leaping barefoot down the dirty street lit by a single orange-shaped lamp held to a power pole. They didn't see the man in black pajamas who was coming with an iron bar to smash the lamp. The Chinese brother was still drinking; the water got lower and lower. On the bridge, a one-legged boy leaned on his crutch in astonishment. There was a golden temple in the background, with snarling stone figures carved on the pillars; other winged figures were about to swoop. Skinny boys in black pajamas were smashing it down with pickaxes. There were dark gratings in front of which people sat under lightless awnings and the girls laughed. They were eating at a table crowded by bowls of string beans, limes, yellow flowers, peppers, a bowl of red chili powder, chopsticks, the people putting everything in their soup, sitting down on little square stools with other big bowls of soup steaming at their back. Their backs were turned, so they didn't see the men in black pajamas coming toward them with machine guns. The butterfly boy had never seen anybody who wasn't white. He wondered if all Chinese people possessed these supernatural capabilities.