We Were Butterflies
by Ray Aldridge
/The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1990/
By the second day of the sandstorm, Rob Owen was nearly dead. The old man had the lungrot, from breathing the chalky radioactive dust of the phosphate pits. We were locked in our hut until the storm broke, so I couldn't fetch the camp medics. It didn't matter; they would only have put him to sleep.
A coughing fit occupied him for a while. The deep bubbling sounds he made scared me. I was twenty years younger than Owen, but almost as sick; how long before I started to drown in my own disintegrating body?
He caught his breath, finally. «You know, John, we weren't all monsters. You'd be surprised; sometimes you couldn't tell us from real people.»
«Oh?» I wiped the sweat from his face.
«Thank you,» he said. «You've been kind.»
«It's nothing,» I said.
«No, no, it means a lot.» He struggled to speak. «Did I ever tell you about the time my first wife and I went to see the Battery Man?»
«It was in Denver, you know... used to be a nice place to live, before the Big Dry-something fresh and, oh, adventurous about the place... you had the feeling that anything might be possible. Or maybe it was just that I was young....
«Anyway, I had a friend... sort of a skinny little sad sack, really, with bad skin and a squeaky voice and delusions of popularity... but Robert had good connections, which he'd go to any time I asked him.
«Robert told us stories about the Battery Man-he was supposed to be the biggest acid wholesaler in Denver. 'Wanna meet him?» Robert asked one night. 'He's a heavy dude.'
«Mandy-that was my first wife-she was a little reluctant. It's funny; she'd swallow or smoke or snort just about anything, but she wasn't physically brave. Once when we went camping in the desert, I saw a rattler in the middle of an arroyo. I watched it from a safe distance for a bit. Really, it seemed like an interesting critter; of course, I was high.... And all the time I stood there-I was a good ten feet from the snake-Mandy screamed her lungs out.»
Owen stopped, coughed, spat something brown on the floor, smiled a thin crooked smile. «Figuratively speaking,» he added wryly, and then went on.
«In those days people got their dope from their friends, so I'd never met a big-time dealer. They were almost legendary, especially the ones who dealt acid, just a step below the ones who made acid, which is to say just two steps below God.
«Eventually we all piled into my old truck and went over to a semi-seedy neighborhood behind the stockyards.
«The house was a shack, one of half a dozen tiny places clustered at the end of a dark road. Maybe they'd been little tourist cottages a long time before. But inside, the place was real nice, with phony tapestries on the walls and a lot of woody antiques.
«The Battery Man wasn't too pleased to see Robert, especially since Robert had been dumb enough to bring two strangers to his house. The Battery Man spoke to us in monosyllables: 'yeah, uh-huh, right.' He was small and wiry, with hooded eyes and a pointy black beard. Robert was visibly frightened, which didn't do much for my state of mind.
«On the other hand, the Battery Man's girlfriend seemed pleasant; she was a tall healthy blonde girl with big perfect breasts, which showed through her blouse, especially when she moved in front of one of the candles that were everywhere. I was sorta caught between being scared of the Battery Man and being fascinated by his girlfriend's tits.»
Owen paused, gasping. I tried without success to imagine him as a lusty young man.
He went on in a thicker voice. «I guess part of the fascination was because Mandy was a little flat-chested. You know, she had a great ass, round and ripe and smooth as a peach, but those cute little bee-bite breasts. I thought they were beautiful, but she was always worrying they weren't big enough....» The old man trailed off, and I thought he might go to sleep, but after a minute he stirred, as if from a dream.
«Anyhow, we were getting more and more paranoid, when the girlfriend offered to make us some hot spiced cider. We all nodded and I guess my eyes were big as pies. 'Come in the kitchen,' she said and so I leaped up and trotted after her. My tongue was hanging out, probably. Mandy was right with me; she held my arm with both hands.»
I stirred restlessly and Owen looked up at me, a faint twinkle in those sunken eyes. «O. K., John, I'm getting to the point of the story pretty soon now. On that old white-enameled kitchen table was about half a bushel of speckled pumpkinseed acid, thousands of tabs, spilling out of a big plastic bag. It looked like a sack of gold to us, and probably it was worth its weight in gold.
«The girlfriend seemed a bit worried all of a sudden, like she just realized she was being too hospitable. Careless. I glanced at the Battery Man, and he'd gone a little stiff. I thought I could see evil thoughts behind his eyes. Mandy was squeezing my arm, more from fear than from possessiveness now, and Robert looked pale under his blotches. Nobody said anything for a moment, then the Battery Man cleared his throat and suggested we go back in the living room until the cider was ready. 'Sure,' we all said, real quick. I could have sworn some dangerous message passed from the Battery Man to his girlfriend-and then she nodded.
«So we're back in the living room, sitting on the edges of our chairs, and no one's saying anything. The Battery Man's watching us like we're meat on a grill.
«The girlfriend calls from the kitchen, says, 'Help me with the cookie tray, would you, honey?'
«When he's gone, I lean over and whisper in Mandy's ear, 'Don't drink the cider, don't eat the cookies.' She nods. Robert looks over at us like he's wondering what's going on, but I don't say a word to him. He got us into this; let him get dosed to death.
«But what happened, John? We had to eat the cookies and we had to drink the cider, because both of them watched us like hawks. The cider was real good, with little curly sticks of cinnamon bark in the cups, and the cookies were homemade, butterscotch chip, I think.
«Our ears were buzzing with paranoia; I was almost dizzy, and I thought: whatever they've dosed us with is coming on. But it was just panic, John.»
Owen took my arm in a surprisingly strong grip and raised himself a little. «That's the point, that's the point. In one of those propaganda films you people were always making, what would have happened? Eh? We'd have ended up raped and mutilated and murdered. The cops would have found us wrapped in bloody sheets, our legs sticking out of a dumpster in some alley. Right? Right?»
He released me and fell back on the cot. «All that really happened was we went home full of cookies and cider.» His voice was soft.
After a while his eyes closed and he slept.
I thought about the old man's story. I remembered the beginning of the road I followed to this place.
I was sitting in front of the TV, watching the news. There was the usual story about the coming of the Big Dry, and then a story about Abdul Hamid, upscale crack dealer and AIDS vector. I watched cops in white decontam suits bring him out of his penthouse. He was shirtless, muscular; he didn't look like a dying man. He seemed swollen with dark energy, as if he might burst his manacles and fly away. His large beautiful eyes glittered. He grinned, showing strong white teeth.
The newshead's voice-over explained that Hamid had been arrested for crack distribution and felonious infection. He had cheerfully admitted trading drugs for sex. A datebook contained the names of two hundred young women. Secondary infections were estimated in the thousands.