The Butterfly Kid

19

“SERIOUSLY, CHESTER,” droned the double reed of Andrew Blake, “What’s this really all about? You can tell Me.”

“Wait a bit.” I was tired of repeating my long, involved story, and even more tired of trying to condense it for popular consumption. “Mike’ll tell you all about it. Just wait till five, okay?”

The Kallikak box was playing our old arrangement of “Love Sold in Doses,” and I was trying to remember the arrangement I’d pulled on Ktch and his fellow crustaceans last night, but I couldn’t. In fact, I couldn’t even remember the tune, not even while I was listening to it. This was a very odd sensation.

“Chester? Mr. Anderson?” That sweet and worried voice belonged to Karen Greenbaum, who was still going around in not quite circles with Saint Andrew, though by now you’d think she’d know better. “Is something wrong?”

“Wrong?”

“You look so — Funny. You know.”

“Oh. I’m just trying to remember something that I know too well to recall.”

That seemed to satisfy her.

The Garden was full of our people, a professionally motley crew, with more coming in all the time. It was rather flattering to see how large a crowd our people were. I mused idly that it would pay some Village businessman to open a coffeehouse catering pretty exclusively to our crowd, then I remembered that that’s what The Garden of Eden was and gave up musing for Lent. It was three minutes to five.

I turned to Michael the Theodore Bear and said, “Do you have some kind of speech worked out?” He looked worried. If it were anyone else, I’d say he looked nervous.

“That’s the trouble,” he fretted. “I’ve got three of ’em, and I don’t know which one to use.”

“Don’t sweat it. You’ll probably have a chance to use ’em all.”

Sean and Sativa were holding hands and things, oblivious to the crowd and The Garden and Sativa’s current karma — unless maybe Sean was part of that — an island of horny serenity in a lake of curious hipsters. Stu, Pat, and Kevin were huddled off in a nearby corner singing four-part harmony.

Four-part harmony? That brought me up. Oh: they had Little Micky with them. It’s fairly hard to see Little Micky when there’s anybody else in the room, unless you’re looking for him. He’s quite small. (He was also singing flat, which made him even harder to see.)

Sandi Heller and her old man Leo were sitting with a bunch of people named David several tables away from mine. Leo was grinning like a dentist’s testimonial. Sandi, assisted by years of drama study and dance experience, was totally failing to communicate with me by means of beautifully expressive gestured and neat pantomimes. Nicely picturesque.

“What’s happening?” I yelled to her when it became obvious that she really did want to tell me something.

“Mutter jumble mutter garble Baby,” she explained.

“Oh.”

And then it was five o’clock. Joe pulled the plug on the kallikak box, which had next to no effect on the noise level of the room. Michael, having previously obtained permission to do so, climbed up on the table. He spread his hands wide like an old-time revivalist and said, “Ladies and gentlemen!” in stentorian tones I’d never before suspected he possessed.

Nothing happened.

He said it again, even more loudly, and nothing continued to happen. Somehow he wasn’t communicating. He tried it again, to be fair, and when it didn’t work that time either, he puffed out his chest, stood on tiptoe, arched his spine, threw back his head, opened his mouth too wide, and hollered, “COOL IT!” so loudly the whole room rang like a cymbal.

Instant silence.

Highly gratified and showing it, Mike launched into whatever speech he settled on, but most unusually oddly. His mouth moved convincingly, his gestures seemed apt and well chosen, but no sound came out. This lasted for what would have been one and a half sentences, during which his face went through an amazing series of changes on the general theme of absolute dismay. Then he bent over, brought his lips as close to my ear as he could without exciting comment, and whispered tonelessly, “You tell them. I can’t talk. Lost my voice.” I was careful not to laugh.

So I got up on the table, waited for Michael to get down and some whispering to fade, and then with great solemnity said, “Laszlo Scott has finally gone and done it.”

I told them about the invasion, playing Laszlo up and the lobsters down. They knew Laszlo, after all, and were ready to believe anything villainous of him, even to consorting with blue lobsters that they wouldn’t’ve believed in otherwise. I dwelt at length on the horrible consequences of turning everybody on to the Reality Pill.

“Remember what happened last Saturday? Butterflies and chaos and confusion and the National Guard and what have you? Remember that? And that was just a handful of people high, less than a dozen. I mean, all it took was one cat from Texas to make all those butterflies!

“Now, what if Everyone was like that? The whole city of New York, ten million people, all of ’em high on Reality Pills at the same time. And it only took one cat to make all those butterflies. Think about that.”

A few of them whistled approvingly at the notion, but then it sank in. They didn’t like the idea any more than I did. It’s nice to have friends who think the way you do.

Then I told them what the lobsters were planning to do, heavily stressing Laszlo’s willing treason against the human race. I don’t think I ever quite mentioned that the lobsters looked like lobsters. “Nonhumanoid blue aliens,” is the closest I recall coming to a description of them. Laszlo or not, this particular audience might think that giant blue talking lobsters were a bit too much to be believed.

I was speaking quite rapidly, but very clearly and with great intensity, and I had the crowd in the palm of my hand all the way. Indeed, I was doing much better than I had any right to expect. Even Andrew Blake looked about to be convinced.

So I swung into a glowing peroration, saying — almost chanting — “And no one in the whole world knows what’s happening but us! Nobody’s hip enough to believe it but us! By the time anybody else can figure out what’s happening, it’ll be too late for everyone.

“We’re all alone with this thing, babies, and here is where it’s at: We-Have-Got-To-Save-The-World-Ourselves! Us! Save the world from Laszlo Scott! Save…”

That’s as far as I got. They were cheering and yelling and shouting things, and it didn’t seem worth my while to go on. I’d been talking for under ten minutes.

I bent down and said, “Hey, Michael, voice back yet?”

“Just about.” Actually, not quite. He could be heard, but his voice sounded tattered and shopworn.

“I didn’t mean to get them all so excited,” I said. “I just wanted to get enough volunteers to fill the bus. Now what’ll we do?”

“Pick,” his voice was really pitiful, “and choose. Tell the rest to alert the authorities.”

“Groovy. That’ll keep ’em hopping.”

And that’s the way we did it. When the noise died out, I recruited the mixed bag of warriors Mike and I had tried to phone a few hours back, sixteen heads including ourselves, and sent the rest, some forty-five or fifty, jabbering hippies, out to warn the unsuspecting world.

And then it was five forty-five, ninety minutes till sunset and darkness.

’It’s time, gentlemen, it’s time,” said Michael, beginning to regain some vocal strength. “Let’s get moving.” And off we went.

“Hey, Andy,” Joe stopped me at the cash register. “Jeez, that was really Some Show you put on there, Andy. Honest to God.”

“You liked it?”

“Like it? You was Great, Andy. Great. I ain’t never heard nothin’ like that in my whole life. Jesus Christ! You know what? You almost got Me believin’ all that stuff. Honest to God!”

“Well, gee, Joe. I’m — well, I’m just Glad you liked it.”

“Like it? Tell you what: you had a cuppa coffee, right? An’ it’s onna house. It’s on me. That’s how much I like it, see?”

And so I went off to the war feeling just a bit foolishly good about things.