“Let’s get off and walk from here,” she said, relieved to cut the noisy engine and go on foot. She wanted to watch his upturned face. Despite the wet hair stuck to his forehead and raindrops stippling his wire-framed glasses, Preston was in heaven. “There-goes-King-Billy, there-goes-King-Billy!” he cried again and again, rolling the sentence out in the rapid-fire manner he used for yelling “Five-four-three-two-one-blastoff!” prior to launching flying objects. Soon there were too many kings for each one to get his own announcement, but Preston’s mouth still moved silently.
Today there were not so many flying around as before. Not a river of motion, but stragglers adrift. Careening down the trail, they looked a little drunk or crazed, somehow.
“They’re probably hungry too,” Preston said. “What do they eat?”
“I have no idea,” she confessed. He was right, they would surely need to eat, after hunkering in the rain for days without cease. She was embarrassed that her five-year-old was asking questions that had not occurred to her. But she refused to be first in the long line of people who would shrug him off. “We’ll have to look that up.”
“Look it up where?”
“Google it, I guess.”
“Okay,” he said.
Googling a butterfly. It sounded comical, like tickling a catfish, but she knew it wouldn’t sound that way to Preston. He would clamber up to the computer at Bear and Hester’s and punch the keys, finding what he needed in there. Having children was not like people said. Forget training them in your footsteps; the minute they put down the teething ring and found the Internet, you were useless as a source of anything but shoes and a winter coat. But Preston still asked her questions. That touched her, that they were a team. Here in the looming forest he gripped her hand tightly, as if crossing a street, as they approached the trees where the butterflies hung in their droves. Wings littered the ground. “Look up,” she said, pointing at the brown clusters drooping from the branches. These trees were completely filled now. Even the tree trunks wore butterfly pelts, all the way up, like the bristling hairy legs of giants. It was a whole butterfly forest, magically draped with dark, pendulous clusters masquerading as witchy tresses or dead foliage. She only knew what they really were because her eyes had learned the secret. Preston’s had not. It all waited for him, perfectly still and alive. She watched his dark pupils dart up and around, puzzling this out, looking without yet seeing. Mine, ours, her heartbeat thumped, making promises from the inside. This was better than Christmas. She couldn’t wait to give him his present: sight.
“What is it?” he asked.
“That’s the King Billies too. I know it looks weird, how they’re all hanging down. But the whole thing is butterflies.”
“Gaaa!” he cried, breaking free of her grip. He ran toward a monstrous bouquet that reached nearly to the ground from above, some thirty feet long, dwarfing a tiny boy. Before she could warn him against it, he reached up to stroke it with his hand, causing it to writhe and awaken. Wings opened and jockeyed within the clump. The lowest piece of the bristly string dropped off, landing with a plop on the ground. In slow motion it exploded, individual butterflies flapping, lifting, dispersing.
Preston looked back at her, expecting a reprimand.
“It’s okay. You can check them out. Just be gentle, I guess.”
She walked closer so she could see this as her son was seeing it. She hadn’t examined the clumps at close range, and even now it was hard to understand how they were constructed. The butterflies didn’t seem smashed or stuck to the wings of other butterflies, not like a hundred-car pileup, it was nothing so simple. They seemed to be holding on by their needle-thin front legs to some part of the tree itself, bark or branch or needle, out to the very tips. The tree’s basic shape was still visible underneath, the column of trunk and broomlike sweep of the branches, but all enlarged and exaggerated by the hangers-on. Only at the ends of the dangling clusters did butterflies seem to be clinging to the legs of other butterflies. The insecure and the desperate, she thought. No world can be without them.
“Mama, they smell,” Preston said.
She inhaled the air, realizing she hadn’t had a cigarette for hours, but could not detect any odor. “Good or bad?” she asked. “What do they smell like?”
Very slowly Preston crossed the breach, moving his face through the last few inches between himself and this life form, until his nose touched it. He sniffed, and gave his verdict: “Good. A cross between lightning bugs and dirt.”
Crystal met them at the back door with her coat already on and her purse slung over her shoulder, ready to light out of there. She had her Dear Abby letter in hand, but had put it back in its envelope.
“Crystal, I’m so sorry, I owe you. I do. We were longer than an hour. You can take my car if you need to go pick up your boys. Where’s Cordie?”
“She’s down for a nap. I’ll just leave your car at Hester’s, okay?” Crystal cut her eyes down the hallway and said in a low voice, “There’s somebody at the front door.”
Dellarobia saw that Roy had posted himself inches from the door, gazing directly as if he could see through the wood. He was not barking but moaning talkatively and waving the white flag of his tail tip in a slow circle. A reliable judge of character, was Roy. No real threat out there, but it needed attention.
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know! They’ve been there, like, fifteen minutes?”
“Just standing there? Man or a woman?”
“It’s a little family. A couple and a little girl.”
“Good grief, Crystal, it’s not an ax murderer if they brought a child with them. Maybe they need help or something. Why didn’t you open the door?”
Crystal glanced sidelong at Preston and shielded the side of her mouth with the envelope. “They’re foreign,” she whispered.
Dellarobia stood momentarily dumbfounded, which Crystal took as her cue to exit via the kitchen door. Preston went to the front hall to stand with Roy, but she knew he wouldn’t open the door, drilled as all kids were in stranger-danger. She peered out the windows in the upper part of the door, but saw nothing. She had to stand on tiptoe and look down before she could see them on the porch, the man and woman both about her own height, possibly even shorter. They looked Mexican, or very dark-skinned at any rate, especially the man. Jehovah’s Witnesses? Did they travel the world for their cause?