Minetta was napping on the Chinese blanket we had brought back from a trip. The hot wind lifted the maple leaves, and their underbellies flashed silver images on her face. Her shirt was still open down to the purple butterfly, a Mexican keepsake, nestling between her breasts.
I lay just beyond the shadow of the wildflower she had pinned in her hair. It was hot. I had taken off my shirt, and the sun came through pine needles in a bright, white heat. Of course, this was intensified from being near Minetta. But even the lizards had disappeared. Only the enormous red-orange butterfly teetered on my arm.
"Wants me to fly away!" I wanted to tell her, but she rested nicely, and I also knew her aversion to silliness.
"They call me the IRON BUTTERFLY," Minetta once told me.
I closed my eyes and drifted. It seemed as if I was suspended in space with this diaphanous creature fluttering high in the sky, with translucent wings. Of course this wasn't unusual since, during most of my days spent with Minetta, I hovered between reality and purgatory, the name I gave this addiction. This bondage was like a hot-air balloon with no hiss of wind to blow it about. I glided and nothing touched me in this spinning world.
The butterfly was fragile and delicate as a lace valentine, but the thought of hundreds of them, like the unseeing moths fluttering around streetlights on hot June nights, could make me lose the magic of this charming afternoon.
It seemed that even in purgatory, apparently memory was present and had a place.
"Do toads come from the same place as frogs?" Kathy asked, kicking the dirt where one hopped into a tall clump of grass. I looked at the place where I saw the cat, Tinker-Bell, disappear. Seven Angora cats with matted, amber hair and round, owl eyes ruled my uncle's house, and one had escaped. I swatted them off counters and tables when Uncle John and Aunt Norma weren't looking. Kathy liked rabbits and had no interest in cats.
"I think there's a difference," I said, eyeing what I thought was Tinker-Bell slinking between the tall posts Uncle John put up for his tomato plants. "What do you think?"
"They look a lot alike. I'm not really sure either," she said, brushing the dirt off her hands.
"There she is!" I yelled. I crouched on my knees behind a stake. Kathy frowned and bent down beside me. The cat heard the movement we made and stopped, ears back, tail pointing bolt upright, green eyes squinting in our direction. There was a crystal-clear silence in the intense July heat. Then a giant bee wing buzzed loudly. Kathy poked me. "Shh! What's the matter with you!" I whispered.
The cat was slithering into the barn, so I started to chase it, but I knew it wasn't going to work. Now we stood in the middle of Uncle John's flower patch, with giant sunflowers smiling down on our faces. I looked at Kathy and said, "Wanta steal some cookies from Fotey's Bakery?"
"Nah! Let's make butterflies." She fell to the ground and began to make her arms go out like she was flying, trying to make some kind of a print of herself flying in dirt. I did, too. After a while we stopped. Now Kathy had been a friend since we were six, but I never realized how peculiar she was until I began to pal around with her. I mean I don't like to label her strange, but hell, what do you call this behavior?
The sky clouded up like over-cooked mashed potatoes, pressed rain into the air, and the rain began to fall on our clothing.
"Maybe we should get back now, Kathy."
"Wasn't that great, Brian?"
"Of course, silly. But it's getting hot now, don't you think?"
"Oh no, that's not it at all. I mean the butterflies going up in the air with their wings. It's so beautiful, clean."
"Yeah, if you say so."
"Do butterflies come from the same place as birds? I mean they both have wings."
"Everybody knows where butterflies come from, stupid. They come from worms."
"Then what makes them fly? Did you ever think about that?"
"Nope."
"I do. I think of things like that, but I can't figure it out."
"Come on. I'm hot and I'm so tired, even my butt is complainin'," I said and started to leave.
"Oh, Brian, wait. Didja ever think...."
"Not again, Kathy. I don't think of those things and honestly, I don't care."
Kathy gave me a look. "What's the matter with you?"
"Well, now that you ask, it's just that you ask a lot of weird questions, and I'm damned if I know how to answer."
She looked at me, her brow puckered. "BRIAN."
"Sure, you're clever for asking them, but I don't know all these answers. Besides, why you keep asking me, I don't understand."
"Well, I was only asking, that's all, Brian. I was sure you DID know. Why are you getting mad? I do have one more question for you."
I sighed. "O.K. It's another one of those dumb questions, but what the hell, I won't know the answer, I guarantee it. And then I'm outta here."
The sky came so low it touched Uncle John's tomato plants, and the lightening streaked over the barn where Tinker-Bell hid. Kathy smiled sweetly and asked, "What would you do if a butterfly carried you up into the sky?"
I rolled my eyes. "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard of."
"I guess so, but supposing it happened," she said, looking into the sky like she saw something I didn't. The rain splattered onto her glasses and ran down her face.
"Well, like any normal person, I'd swat it and run, O.K.?" I said, raising my shoulders up and letting them fall. A murky gray cloud and a mutter of thunder made me suck in my breath. The sky grew lower and thicker and darker. The wind whistled through Uncle John's sunflowers, bending them over double. They looked like stooped old ladies in a mud bath.
"Brian, do you see that rain come down?" she asked, like I wasn't there in the middle of it.
Inside my head a light went off, like when somebody stole my bike. It could have been the wind, or it could have been Kathy. Why did she keep looking up there, and why didn't she wipe off her glasses?
"Where does the rain come from, Brian?"
"From heaven! Now can we please just go?"
I held her hand as we walked. She was quiet. I tried to imagine what SHE was thinking, perhaps about how many drops of water in a quart. The rain stopped suddenly. I hardly noticed at first.
There must have been twenty butterflies, fluttering and floating, with black spots on amber, and gold with wings tipped with brown stripes, yellow and white, and orange.
There they were, and Kathy, standing next to me, smiled like she knew something I didn't. "Butterflies are really angels," she said, "that's why they can fly."
In thinking of Kathy, I had forgotten the butterfly still fluttering on my arm. The implications would have made the Iron Butterfly Lady shake her head. But even if she had been awake and I had spoken aloud, she wouldn't know. For the butterfly had succeeded in taking me beyond the rim of purgatory and the sleeping Minetta, like an angel from another space.
(Copyright 1998 by Mimi Carmen - No reproduction without express permission from the author)