The Farm. Butterfly

CONTENT WARNING: VIOLENCE, GORE.

Axel Connell

They looked expensive. Wings like a novoscope, or a famous opal.

A few hours ago, Ralphie Culpepper’s bald head hadn’t yet been blown square through like a pumpkin filled with firecrackers. The slop inside his skull had yet to be acquainted with the closest wall and his shambolic brain-splatter scooped nor disposed of. Instead, he smoked reverently at a cocktail table outside Paulie’s by the Harbour, watching whatever passes for life in the noontide sun. He thought he might’ve made a joke because Paulie sputtered and guffawed, then handed him a glass of lemon squash, off-tap, which he hadn’t asked for.

“Funny words, Ralphie boy! Oh, you magic man!”

How much could those wings go for? Not practically but as an attraction, you see?

Ralph smiled, dragged and returned to his observations; An old junkie scratching at the seat of his work jeans and, beyond a brood of briefcases – bespoke comb-overs in brown, Ox- ford brogues – another bald fella with tattooed sleeves, faded bottle-green. Paulie started again and Ralph regarded the ink on his friend’s own arms; some half dozen topless women dappled with liver spots like soggy tobacco.

“See, what I think you never understood, Ralphie, is that there must exist a compromise in these business-type scenarios. I mean, what about planting some sunflowers near the loo in the beer garden? I’ve got a mate who could even make that old workbench into a garden bed! That would attract the butterflies and class the place up a bit without all these moody daydreams about something which we both know would never practically happen!”

Paulie exhaled, his sunburnt scalp vegetating a mangled crimp of pepper-shaker curls, and he added in a dingier tone; “Plus the B-O-S-S would never approve. You know how God gets with change.”

“Colm told me yes last night.” Ralph said “He’ll sign off on it when he gets in,” and turned away, partly to hide the smugness tugging at the corners of his mouth, to face the promenade.

The sunlight caught a patch of Paulie’s messy braid, spilling over one shoulder. His indecipherable beard and chest hair danced in a low singlet. For a moment, he resembled a Viking berserker, ready to lunge at Ralphie with all the holy terror of a man who knows he is righteous in his pissmad fugue. Instead, Paulie’s eye twitched and his lips quivered and he began to roll a dart.

“I mean, for God’s sake Ralphie! You didn’t think to tell me? For fuck’s sake! There’s a Madame Tussaud’s down the way if you want that type of bullshit! I mean, who do we cater to anyways? Why do people like the pub? They wanna get shitfaced and talk to anybody else who’s shit-tired and ‘as had a dogshit day! Not to fluff around in some butterfly garden out the back of -”

“Butterfly enclosure,” Ralph said. “It’ll be a butterfly enclosure.”

Ralph stared out at the oceanscape behind him. A hundred tons of colonial sandstone, half bleached in the brittle Jacaranda shade and old shipping joineries converted to studios for art or yoga.

“Everything changes and nobody here wants it, Paul. But nobody here’ll begin to understand it if we don’t make a change.”

“I’m all for change, Ralphie, you know me!” Paulie plucked at his bristly turkey’s-gobble. “We renovated the pokies, did we not? You want butterflies? You want something shiny? You want something colourful? What about those yuppie pricks that’re swarming in from clubs up the end in three hundred dollar sneakers! A butterfly enclosure, but? A butterfly enclosure like at a wildlife zoo in the back of a pub – our pub, that might I say, we manage, IN PART! I mean, you didn’t think to tell me it was approved?”

“We’re signing off on it tonight, Paul.” Ralph said and met eyes with his partner. He got up and dropped a couple of coins on the table. “God thinks it’s good for business as much as me. Give us an edge and shit. Colm’s licensee and that’s what.” Then he added: “We’re under. We’re going under. Sorry, friend.”

* * *

A few days ago, before Paulie Pugliani found himself gaping out the open door of a nameless fleabag motel off some equally anonymous stretch of bushland highway, muttering sorry, sorry, sorry, at the distant sirens twinkling red and blue; he had spoken a name.

It was a name he had once heard slurred from the mouth of a pub local, long since barred. A name which silenced that ragged congress of 12:00 a.m. beer garden spooks. A name that would impress an image of both Herculean strength, and Medusean horror, into even the most calloused old geezer. So much so, that he might quake his considerable jowls and flick his sagging earring and donate a slurry of beer froth, dish-soap thin, down his gullet so as to avert eyes with the man who spoke it.

Colm’s gaze had jabbed up at him under Paulie’s by the Harbour’s droning chaplets of mosquito light.

“Paulie, Paulie. Is that who I think you’re going on about…?”

“I heard he was cellmates with Ivan Milat!” An old timer interjected.

“My mate’s brother told me they called him the Bunyip ‘cause he used ta deal meth out of a shack in a swamp!” Another said.

And clamouring and clamouring, as the licensee licked his amber teeth.

The name Paulie had uttered, then, was merely insurance. To make sure that he, as always, came out on top. After all it was his name on the pub –and, sure, Ralphie was smart but he had a head like he’d been chasing parked cars when it came to compromise. The name was that of a vanisher. A phantom devil. A dematerializer. It was the name of someone to call at the wit’s end of a raw deal, when you know the notion of compromise has been boot-kicked from the table entirely. If you wanted somebody not just disappeared, but for the world to only ask questions in some must-reeking backroom, with the taps running at full blast.

Colm grinned, eyes twinkling with the rarest breed of boozer’s virtue: intent. His gold tooth glittered in the backbar-murk and drew towards Paulie a napkin with a scribbled number.

“For in case you need it. And God help whoever you need it for.”

* * *

A few hours ago, before Ralphie Culpepper’s body was bathed in wet cement beneath a lonely part of the city that the Trip Advisor reviews plead you to avoid after dusk, he was mentally preparing his nostrils to rail a couple No Doz before the late shift. He came out of the bathroom and assumed his post behind the bar. The horses were on. Between that and the occasional hitch of a barstool over Paulie’s mummified carpet brittle, some MTV pop-hit blared from dual flatscreens. A shadow walked in from the back and sat at the stool opposite Ralph.

“What’s having?” Ralph smarmed.

The shadow, whose face was obscured by a long, white cap, said nothing.

“Open a soda pop, watch it fizz and pop (Mm-hmm),” Brittney cut in from the TV.

“After anything, friend?” Ralph enquired, louder this time.

He saw beneath the stranger’s bowed head and half-buttoned work shirt, the tattooed words; When I die, bury me upside down so the world can KISS MY — before being swallowed by the other side of the fabric.

He adjusted his cap and the glint of a glass eye reflected a chirpy music video overhead.

“Heard there’s gonna be a butterfly farm,” the stranger growled.

“Not a farm,” Ralph said. “A farm implies we’re using them as products. We don’t want them to work for anything. It’ll be an enclosure. In the beer garden. We just want people to come and look at them.” He glanced around. “We’re hoping it shakes some life into this place.”

“If you’re making money off ‘em, they’re still being used for somethin’,” the stranger said.

“Well,” Ralph affected a smile, “I’d welcome you to come along on opening day to see how happy they are!”

“I saw one once.” The stranger said and looked back down at his beer. “At the big airport in Singapore. One of those enclosures.” He hung on to every syllable of the last word. “It was beautiful.”

“Ahhhh, so you’re a fan!” Ralphie smiled. “Have you come in because you heard about us?”

“No,” the stranger lifted his head abruptly and revealed his face, pocked and cratered like some seasick moon.

“I come ‘ere to tell you I’ve found something of yours that you lost.” The stranger gestured to the ‘Employee’s Only’ section of the pub. “Chucked it in there for ‘ya.”

“Something I lost?” Ralph said, eyeing the stranger who stood up from the stool and beckoned for him to follow, and added more wearily; “Well, if I forgot I lost it then it’s, of no real loss to me, friend.”

The stranger considered him for a second.

“I really think you should see it, Ralphie. It’s a present, really, from your friend Paul. In the back.”

Ralphie looked around. A subarctic sweat christened his brow. Nine o’clock on a Friday night and not a single barfly to be seen. Nobody here except him and…

The stranger had slithered over to his side of the bar and tapped him with the tip of something metallic hidden in his pants pocket.

“Wha- What? Why? Is this about —”

“Let’s go now, Ralphie. We can either do it here or out there.” The stranger gestured again to the ‘Employees Only’ section with the semi-automatic pistol that was now completely out of his pants pocket.

Ralph’s was the image of a man with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. He said nothing and whimpered. The stranger escorted him into the back, which resembled a breakroom but had no real furniture.

The stranger sat on a milkcrate and rested the gun on his lap. He said tiredly,

“Get on both knees and put your hands behind your head.”

Ralph did what he was told. Then he began to blubber.

In his final moments, Ralphie Culpepper’s soon-tobe-unyoked brain did two noteworthy things.

The first was a plea:

“Wait- WAIT - WAIT! I can fix it! The enclosure — it doesn’t need to go ahead! I mean, it was a pipe dream is all! If Paulie’s hired you — tell him it’s nothing! A fad! We’re under anyway. What’s a bloody butterfly enclosure gonna do to fix anything!? You really don’t need to hurt me!”

The stranger sighed and rubbed his gun-free hand across his face and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Believe me Ralph, this is gonna hurt me far more than it’s gonna hurt you.”

And shot.

The second noteworthy thing happened in the final, microcosmic shudder of brain activity Ralph was afforded in the split second before that 115 grain hunk of refined steel, hurtling towards him at approximately 1,300 kilometres per hour, made contact with the frontal bone of his skull.

In that moment, Ralph had a vision:

He was five years old again and on a fishing trip with his father. Dad had just decapitated a yabbie and it was sizzling on the campfire stove. Something in Ralphie’s young mind couldn’t bear the way the wet, pink- ish innards had splattered across the campsite floor. He had taken off sobbing and fallen face-first onto a narrow floodplain which scythed across the river. There, between the rat burroughs and the river muck was a single, dazzling, butterfly wing, half submerged between the mud straits.

It was dusk and the wing kissed the pale light in a million tiny, crystal refractions. It was jagged and it was frail, and in that moment, he was all joy and all pain and all love, and suffering - not because of the pain but because he could never be - never fathom, couldn’t ever even think to fathom a scraggy fraction of the beauty he saw beneath the river silt. And it hung forever in that dirty crevice of the world.

At the same time, both Ralphs, the one with aching knees in the ‘Employee’s Only’ and his hypnotised kid-self from the replaying memory, realised they had stopped crying.

There was a gurgle and a crash and some impressive flailing. Then nothing but Britney Spears coming from the now-empty bar. Open a soda pop, watch it fizz and pop (Mm-hmm)

The clock is ticking and we can’t stop (Now)

Open a soda pop, bop, shubop, shu-bop

The clock is ticking and we can’t stop.