The Butterfly Plague (3 page)

Now was the moment to do it. Before thought. Before confusion could be blamed. Before regret. She rose, using the pretext of the spilt coffee. She took up Mein Kampf. She took up her purse. She paid her bill. She strode eight steps in the right direction, and the train lurched. Ruth set her gaze on the distant stare of the seated figure. Swimming in its direction against the current of the disturbed gravity beneath her feet, she arrived at the woman’s table.

“Hello.”

The head rose.

Its veiling billowed slightly.

There was no vocal response.

Ruth went right on. “I must introduce myself. Pm Ruth Haddon. I was Ruth Damarosch. Perhaps we’ve met. I couldn’t avoid the fact that you were looking at me. I thought perhaps you wondered who I was. I…”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. And please leave at once.”

“But…”

“Leave me immediately, Mrs. Haddon. Or I shall have you removed.”

The Negro.

Ruth looked down, frozen with panic, into the depths of the veiling.

“Who are you?” she said.

The eyes lifted. Ruth could just perceive them. They glistened. Dragonfly’s eyes. On the tablecloth the little gloved hands took delicate hold of one another.

“I am no one,” said the voice (vaguely recognizable—deadly), “I am—
no one
. Go away.”

Ruth shivered. All at once, she knew who it was.

2:05 p.m.

Ruth hurried along the corridor toward her compartment, impelled by the knowledge of her discovery.

The blond man followed in leather-scented pursuit.

Ruth got to her door. She opened it and went inside. She turned then and hissed at the man, speaking to him for the very first time. Her words ridiculously echoed the words of the woman in veils: “Go away,” she whispered. “Go away and leave me alone. I am no one.” Then she slammed the door and burst into tears.

2:10 p.m.

Finished with her crying, Ruth sat back and counted: One, two, three and four. Five and six and seven. Eight. Nine and ten. Eleven.

The suspense was unbearable for her. To be losing one’s mind. To be followed. To be stared at. To see, after so many years, that woman, and to look again into that gaze, too well remembered.

Something was going to happen. Something more terrible than anything that had happened before. It would happen to Ruth first, but she sensed that it would also happen to someone else. Perhaps to everyone. It was in the air of her mind: in the air around her. Did she carry it? She wondered.

She refocused her gaze.

The train whizzed on through an intersection, and Ruth saw carloads of waving people stopped at the crossing. She waved back and then she thought, Why do I wave? I hate you.

The Santa Fe Super Chief went on by, its brown and yellow cars going clickety-click.

The people went on waving, unaware of being hated.

2:17 p.m.

“There goes Bully Moxon.”

“Where? Where?”

“Right there. Going into the station. Oh, Dolly—Bully Moxon!”

“Calm yourself, Myra.”

“I can’t. It’s too exciting. He’s marvelous.”

“I thought he was dead,” said Dolly.

“Well, there he is,” said Myra, standing up in the front seat of the car. “Just as alive as you and me or anybody.”

“Pickled to the gills, no doubt.”

“No. Not at all. Looking wonderful.”

Dolly stroked his beard, which was red. He did not mind shaving his cheeks—they were pretty straightforward and safe—but his chin was doubtful territory and he did not dare to lay a razor to it. So he wore a chin beard—handsome and short.

“I don’t see him,” he said.

“Stand up, then,” said Myra.

“In the rumble seat?” Dolly whined.

“Of course, in the rumble seat.”

Dolly carefully hoisted himself until he stood on the cushions with which he perpetually surrounded himself to ward off his death.

Spying Bully, he observed, “He looks nine hundred.”

“No. No. He looks sweet. He looks lovely. Lovely. Bully Moxon. Oh Dolly, look! He’s going to dance.”

“By God!”

“Yes. Yes. There he goes. Dancing.”

They watched.

Bully Moxon, in patent-leather shoes, in brass-buttoned blazer, in white flannels, in boater, and carrying a cane, did his famous “Waiting for My Favorite Dream” routine. His features, adored across the land for their pronounced and swollen redness, reflected a kind of wistful wickedness. He hated dogs, cats, children, and Sunday afternoons. But he loved to dance.

Now he danced without benefit of music—or certainly without benefit of the right music, for in the distance, nearer the tracks, the Hollywood Extras’ World War Band was still playing. Bully did not seem to mind what music played. He lifted his cane; he flashed his famous feet; he did his high-stepping cakewalk—straight along the white lines leading off through the gate.

The crowd gave way. They clapped and cheered. They loved forgotten Bully Moxon, who hadn’t been capable of making a film for six or seven years. The remarkable thing about Bully had always been that he had been a dancer during the silent era. Not for Bully the orchestrated tangos of Valentino, played by the local theaters’ hired musicians. Not for Bully the gramophone record scratchily blared. Bully had danced to silence. The way he did now. His audiences had always hummed, and now they began to hum again.

“See,” said Myra just before the humming reached them, “he has the white carnation in his lapel. Just the way he always did in all his pictures. Good old Bully Moxon.”

Myra waved.

Dolly remembered. “Bully Moxon stole a carnation from my father’s garden once.”

Another time. Long ago, it seemed, but not so long ago at all. Only 1922. Ruth’s fifteenth birthday party.

“I was just a child, more or less,” Dolly said, but mostly to himself, for Myra, misty-eyed, was caught up in humming and swaying to Bully’s tune. “When I was a child and you were a child, Annabelle Bully Moxon. Hah! Dancing on our lawn.”

“He’s heading for the gates,” said Myra. “Oh, please, please, Dolly. Can’t we go, too?”

Dolly knew he would regret it, but he had to say yes. Where Bully led, others had always followed. And so, clambering down with care from his pillows and cushions, Dolly held onto Myra’s waist with both hands and, like two conga dancers, they made their perilous way toward the platform with Bully in the lead.

In moments, the Santa Fe Super Chief would arrive.

The festival was about to explode, like Mickey Balloon.

2:18 p.m.

Ruth splashed cold water on her face and studied her gray-blue eyes for a long moment in the mirror of her tortoise-shell compact. A gift from Hermann Goering.

“What’s happening?” she said aloud to the image and then snapped shut the lid. A little puff of powder exploded into the air as she did this. She brushed her lapels and sat down.

In a few moments they would reach Culver City and she would be met by Adolphus and Myra and driven home to the house on the beach. To her mother.

People she had not seen for two years would crowd around her and she would have to be brave and lie and tell the story of her life as though it were a true story. She would hate every minute of it and hate all the people. Hate. Oh, why? She did not know why. She was forgetting how to be strong. How to be faithful and loyal: how to be kind and how to remember the dead. Or to brush her teeth twice a day. Or to brush her clothes in the morning. Or to wear clean underwear. To forgive and forget. To pay attention. To cultivate friendship. To be alive. To love. She wept again. She had not forgotten tears. She closed her eyes.

2:20 p.m.

Dolly allowed Myra to help him through the crowd and finally up onto a bench where he would be safe from the hands and feet that always menaced him wherever he went. Myra climbed up beside him.

“You O.K. here?” she asked, setting aside her chewing gum.

“Yes, thank you—and don’t put it there” said Dolly.

“Everybody puts it there,” said Myra.

“Well, for once,” said Dolly, “behave as though you weren’t everybody.”

“What’ll I do? Put it in my purse?”

“Don’t shilly-shally, Myra. Just wrap it in a piece of paper, and later you can drop it in an ash can.”

Dolly was watching Bully Moxon, dancing still at the edge of the platform.

“I haven’t got a piece of paper,” said Myra.

“Then swallow it.”

Myra obliged.

“I can see smoke,” she said, gulping her gum. “Here it comes!”

Everybody began to wave. Bully went right on dancing.

“Oh! Isn’t it lovely to be at Culver City Railroad Station like this when the train comes in!” said Myra.

“Yes,” said Dolly apprehensively. “Lovely.”

Bully Moxon had now made his way very close to the spot where the Super Chiefs engine would screech to a halt not fifteen seconds later. His Bully-bous, ginny nose was displaying a light of warning, but he paid no attention. His little eyes did not seem to focus on the present. His mouth twisted down and sideways with concentration. “How did it go?” he seemed to be saying. “Like this? Like that? One-two? Or one-two-three?”

He danced on.

“Lovely Bully. Dear, darling, wonderful sweet old lovely Bully,” said Myra. “Dancing.

The tune appeared to be a song so long forgotten that even Bully himself was having trouble recalling it.

“He wants to hear the music,” said Myra, not knowing how right she was but only sensing something sad about the dancer.

“He’s going down onto the track,” she said.

The crowd leaned forward, swaying in toward him. It was all very matter-of-fact.

“Look at that,” said Myra. “He’s waving to us. Smiling.”

“Wave back.”

They did.

The rhythm began to uncloud. The crowd gave a sigh. How wonderful he was.

“He’s got his cane up. Lovely Bully.”

On came the Santa Fe Super Chief.

“Bully.”

Dancing.

“Listen. The train…”

Wailing.

“Bully.”

“Bully! Dance this way…”

“That way…”

“Back.”

“Dance up.”

“Here! Hold up the dancing. Stop.”

“Bully.”

Smiling.

“Bully.”

Waving.

“
Bully
.”

Dancing.

“The train. The train, Bully. TRAIN!”

The train.

“
Bully!!
”

Bully in the cinders. Down. Decapitated. His last step upward…

Dead.

The crowd gave a kind of roar.

The band was playing and the cheering had started farther down the platform and the loved ones were arriving and there wasn’t much you could do except imagine nothing had happened. Particularly if you hadn’t really seen it happen. As Dolly hadn’t, for at that very instant he had fallen carefully to the floor. Myra couldn’t see it because she was crying. In the crowd, there were few who could have realized what had happened—because they cheered. And there were some who had been blinded, who—being blinded—had laughed, thinking someone had played them a trick-death until they wiped their eyes and saw the blood on their fingers and until the engine lurched and all the brown and yellow cars rattled against each other and the wheels screeched and women screamed “God help us all!” and there began to be panic because all at once the accident was everywhere and it seemed for one incredible instant they would all be down beneath the wheels with Bully and, like him, suddenly severed from life forever.

2:21 p.m.

Ruth’s bags came down on top of her head.

Everything exploded and ceased. Was still.

She came to, lying on the floor. It was barely long enough to contain her.

Several people gave off screams.

The engine bellowed like a killer.

Bully Moxon’s head rolled down the track.

Ruth struggled upward through her own arms and legs.

In the corridors the passengers ran in every conceivable direction, seeking immediate and personal escape.

Ruth dragged open a window and seized the strings of a passing balloon. At the other end of the string a child roared disapproval and rage.

“What has happened?” said Ruth. “For God’s sake, tell me what has happened to us all?”

The child wailed. It wanted to see the body. It tugged at its balloon and ran away.

Ruth went out into the corridor. Bedlam.

“What is it? What has happened?” she asked. But no one paid the least attention.

“Get off the train!” a conductor yelled. “Get off before she fires!”

“Fires?”

“Fire!”

Fire. Fire. Fire.

“Get off the train!” cried all the mothers of children on board.

“Get off the train!” cried all the children themselves.

“Get the hell out of my way!” cried several other people, childless and alone.

“But what is happening?” said Ruth.

She approached the conductor. “Are we really on fire?”

“Of course not,” said the conductor. “But I’ve got to clear this train. We have a schedule to meet.”

Ruth got back to her compartment somehow and managed to struggle out with her bags.

Slowly—more slowly, it seemed, than anyone else—Ruth was moved along the corridor.

“Please! Please move faster,” Ruth said and was alarmed to find she had not even said it aloud. The blond man was close behind her.

“It will happen now,” Ruth thought.

“What will, lady?” said the man in front of her, who was covered inexplicably with talcum powder.

“Nothing,” said Ruth. “Nothing. Excuse me.”

At last they had reached the exits, and Ruth was helped down by a Brazilian Boy Scout.

She thanked him and started along the platform. Adolphus was nowhere in sight, nor Myra (whom Ruth could only hope to recognize from her films). All around her, bodies collided.

As she arrived near the head of the train Ruth became part of a crowd that had managed to get near the pieces of Bully’s corpse. These were being tenderly gathered and arranged by station attendants and Red Cross volunteers. There was nothing to see except a grisly array of bloody blankets and sheets. But the crowd leaned forward—then it fell back.

Someone was coming.

“Who’s that?” they whispered.