On the sidewalk, I waited and talked to Janie while she finished another cigarette.
“How’s Hal?” I asked. I don’t claim to know or understand Hal very well, even though we went to high school together. But asking after him is one way I have of asking after Janie. Things were still rocky between the two of them, so I thought I’d ask.
“He’s pathetic,” Janie said casually. She exhaled and glanced at me to register my reaction. I gave none. “He says hello.”
“Say hello back,” I told her. Janie, I guess, has always held her husband up to the masculine standard that Skeet came to represent for her. Or for both of us, really. Skeet was vicious. He often frightened me. Everywhere he walked, he walked with a steely stone scowl. The arteries in his neck twitched, alive like vital organs, and the blood rushed into his cheeks when he was coolly furious, which was often. But he made us both feel safe.
Janie stopped going out with us eventually. She was dating some, and when she wasn’t dating she had girlfriends to run with. Skeet and I went everywhere together, though. High school for us was probably no different than it is for anybody else. And in the parks and parking lots where we all gravitated at night, somebody was going to get fucked up. I had Skeet to make sure it wasn’t me.
One late Friday night, in the bathroom of the White Castle downtown, where everyone went on late Friday nights, two guys from St. Xavier, primping at the mirror, mumbled something not nice about Skeet and me. I don’t know what they said, but they said something — “faggots” maybe. I wasn’t paying attention. But Skeet was. He was waiting for it. He was always waiting for it — the offhand insult, the snotty look, the middle finger, the rich-boy snort, the bigoted slur. He’d learned to expect those signs and was attuned to them in a way that I never was. In me they provoked a shrug if I noticed them at all. To Skeet they really mattered; they were everything.
I looked over at Skeet, standing at the urinal next to me. His eyes were narrowed and directed, burning holes in the tiles ahead. Then he just stopped peeing and zipped up in mid-stride, left me at the urinal, walked up to them in two decisive steps and smashed both of them full in the face so hard — one, two, that quick — that neither of them — both big boys in varsity letter jackets of some sort — had a chance to start. The sound of one of their noses breaking nauseated me.
Skeet didn’t stop. He pulled one back by the hair and threw his head into the Formica countertop, let him fall to the ground, and then kicked him. He picked up the other one, who was cowering in the corner holding his bloody face, and kneed him in the stomach. That one fell to the floor and vomited. Skeet waited for him to finish, held his head up by the hair, and threw a sidewise punch into his jaw that made it seem as if the lower half of his face had a life of its own. When we walked out of the bathroom, every head in the restaurant was turned toward the bathroom door and Skeet cut an easy swath through them. I followed.
He did it to pretty boys at country club parties we crashed out in the county, without provocation and for fun. He did it to jocks at basketball pep rallies, in the dark, behind field houses. He got into it with the black guys who strutted by our car in Central Park. He did it at dances to guys who were too drunk to dance and too drunk to know better.
The one that Skeet killed, Gordon Lang, had dated Janie twice. Only twice, but I guess that was enough for Gordon to feel he had an investment in her. Drunk and bitter, he called her a whore to my face, slurring the words grotesquely, and I suddenly hated him. We were standing in Brad Bowman’s kitchen, in a lull during one of Brad’s backyard parties. I looked around for Skeet. He brought out the best behavior in everyone who came near him, and his arrival at my side usually brought a quick apology or a retreat. The only thing that could stop him was a word from me, and often that did no good. No one else was in the kitchen, though. No one had seen or heard a thing.
After a minute of threats and posturing, Gordon walked away laughing. When Skeet returned a moment later I told him. “Who? Which one?” Skeet asked. I pointed out Gordon as he walked toward the street, and thought nothing of it, though in fact I’d just killed him. I walked away myself, to get another beer and brood on my own. The next morning Gordon Lang was found, two blocks down, in the backyard of a neighboring house, his head bruised and submerged in a two-foot-deep goldfish pond. He had “drowned.” Janie cried all the next day as though she had lost one of us, and maybe for that reason alone I never told her what Skeet had told me — that he’d done it, beat Gordon’s head against the creekstone and held him under. Janie never knew. She never knew and I never told her. I could never protect Janie the way Skeet could. But still, I have ways of my own — not telling her things being principal among them.
“You’re still coming for dinner?” she asked me, stepping off the curb and into her car. Bachelor that I am, I eat dinner at least twice a week with my sister and brother-in-law.
“What are we having?”
“What do we always have?”
“Something grilled?” In the summertime, with Hal cooking, we always have grilled something. Janie started the car, the door still hanging open.
“That’s what we’re having, then. Grilled something.”
“Bring beer?” I asked.
“Please,” she said. “And dope.”
Just after Janie left, I drove a few blocks out of the way to see the old house we had all three grown up in. It’s never been very far from the places I’ve lived — nothing’s very far apart in this city. But it was the only time since leaving it that I’ve ever been seized by a sense of nostalgia for my home, so I drove over and sat and looked at it. You could not pick it out from a picture; it still looks like every other house on that street, and it stands apart only because of its number: 332 Clay.
I have three of Skeet’s butterfly boxes in my possession now, Janie has the others, and I’ve since taken the time to look up their names in Peterson’s Field Guide to Insects. What were at first extraordinary to my eye seem so no longer. The guidebook told me that. Most of the books I read these days do that — take the extraordinary out of everything. They were the most ordinary of butterflies, despite their exotic names, easy to catch in any suburban yard or public park. Easy to catch even along a city street. They were garden variety butterflies. Not an exceptional one among them.
“I think I know,” Janie says. She is sitting on the couch across from me, cross-legged, her third scotch cupped in her hands like something delicate, alive. Hal is asleep on the couch next to her, wheezing gently as he has been for almost an hour. A big meal and marijuana always make Hal sleepy. But it makes Janie alive, fills her with chatter. We’ve been talking for some time.
“You think you know what?” I ask.
Janie, laying a fresh cigarette in the ashtray, throws her head against the couch and stares up at the ceiling. “The butterflies,” she says. “Why Skeet had the butterflies.” She says it in an almost mystical way, and I guess it’s just stoned talk. But as she finishes speaking her whole demeanor slides rapidly into a quiet oblivion. She looks down into her glass, then up at me, and then back into her glass, and I suppose she has understood something.
“Why?” I ask, settling back into my chair.
“Well,” she says, “it’s just a guess.” She looks up at me sheepishly. “It may seem kind of kooky.”
“I’m sure it will,” I tell her. “What is it?”
“Well, do you remember the picnic, your graduation picnic?”