Soliloquy for one dead [Criminal Featherweight Remix]

by Kirk Marshall

Jimmy Tenderfoot Butterfly’s eyes- two furious oculars engineered to determine the silhouette of a gazelle secreted amongst a snarl of baobab trees whole kilometres away – were stinging from the smoke. The nicotine was obscuring his ordinarily incendiary vision as though sheets of gossamer rain, hanging heavily like the halitosis of Damocles over his monstrous forehead. He yawned, once, without much inspiration, and returned the cigarette to the crimson cushion of his mouth. Butterfly’s mother had never cultivated any real appreciation for the passtime, and had failed to comprehend the value of indulging in it especially whilst inert and blinded by trails of silvering smoke in bed. But this was Butterfly’s room – he paid her sufficient board enough, per week, to dispossess her of a chance to forget it – and if he felt the impulse to hunker against the headboard, his torso entangled in new-laundered sheets and a deck of smokes quashed into his fist like some rare blue flower, he’d occupy his morning however the fuck a sudden whim instructed. He yawned once more, and shifted his position so that one arm, his left, could extend toward last night’s late-hour glass of scotch set squarely on the tallboy. His eyes caught his reflection, swimmy and prehistoric, like a bluebottle encased in amber, at the bottom of his glass. What a haggard fuck, he thought, with loathing.

There used to exist a time, during some unprecedented manifestation of my life, where I remember feeling rested. It seemed a time of populous and ungovernable good fortune, back then, when I was ten, twelve; I didn’t entertain narcotic thoughts that sleep was swarming on my skin, feasting on my every reserve of energy, like a clat of leeches. I’d wrestle the bike out from beneath the neighbourly conspiracy of hedgerows with which I’d ensconced it, glowing mint like the gold in a huckster’s dentures, and burst astride it down the footpath, my feet pounding squeakily at the pedals, reverberant with squash-court sounds. The entire phalanx of weatherboard terrace-houses would wheel passed me. Their shapes, taut and white, like bed-linen hung on the line fanned flat by a serendipitous wind. Tony Moretti would already be folded at the threshold to the local convenience store, anticipating Butterfly’s scandalous entrance, the tread of his ten-gear’s tyres igniting industrial sparks as he slammed the breaks and whirligigged through the shop-front gravel. Moretti, hands furled into fists and abandoned to their own devices within the pockets of his grey denim jacket, would merely nod, offer a paltry acknowledgement of Butterfly’s extravagant risk, and would transfer the Lucky Strike behind his ear to his lower lip.

Sordid twelve-year old badasses, us, they were swift to self-promote. Theirs was no counterfeit gamble, no spurious bravura: they were unopposed gallants and braver than a lame dog in rattlesnake country, south-city grommets of a twin design, tiny men with cowboy hearts capable of catastrophe. It wasn’t an especially remarkable circumstance to observe Butterfly and Moretti loitering with their fable-and-motorcycle haircuts, Lost Boys as channelled by River Phoenix, on the adobe-and-concrete stoop of the local corner store. ‘You motherfucker,’ Moretti would crow, matter-of-factly, as though taxonomising an altogether new species. ‘I mean it. Did she ask you to romance her away from her kitchen chores? Or is there some alternate reason why I’ve been waiting half-an-hour to see your fucking thumb-face emerge ‘round that street corner?’

Butterfly, even then a measured and generous man, would have to later concede, in retrospect, that his own face did share a certain verisimilitude to a knuckle, his head’s architecture as devoid of a contour as a rooftop radiator. He had the implacable countenance of a varlet, taciturn and ridiculous – a head like a hearse, really, with just as much character and colour. Moretti, in contrast, maundered about Melbourne with features of a continental construction, a Ferrari in dishwater denim, with a laugh like the scream of axles on sidewalk, brazen and accelerative. But he would not admit as much to his friend in person. That would only result in putting an end to the game, invite a stranglehold on their precocious teenage need to best one another. No moment shared between them would ever constitute a morally appropriate exchange whereby Butterfly came clean, and admitted that Moretti was on the money: his really was a chimerical exterior; he was an ugly Frankensteinian fuck. So he contained the dark truth of that knowledge, bottled it up and buried it in the soil beneath the violet tangle of his voice. Said: ‘In point of fact, yeah, Little Italy, I gots a right justification.’ ‘Vouch for it?’ ‘No sweat.’ ‘Go on, then, what’s kept your sleepy ass?’

Even now, in his bedroom, fifteen years later and coveting his solitude, Butterfly could still see the vain star in Moretti’s lapis-lazuli eye supernova into black oblivion. No twelve-year old’s that hard – hard enough, savage enough to endure the pageantry of hell’s very own procession. Down into their fey, fallacious teenage world descended the angel of corruption, singing his madrigal for all the fallen saints and twisted darlings of that East Melbourne suburb. With rhapsody dissolving like cocaine into his bloodstream, his pulse pounding, Butterfly unsheathed his Daddy’s gun from the innermost pocket of his jacket and pressed the snout to his best friend’s forehead. It shone like an evil deed, right there, in his palm, it caught the light like flame behind a page, and the zebra stripes banding the barrel of the pistol were suddenly astir, a frenzy in his hand. ‘This be what kept my sleepy ass,’ Butterfly watched himself whisper down the narrow corridor of history to his horrified Italian companion. And he, now twenty-seven, could neither intervene upon nor prevent what his twelve-year old doppelgänger proceeded to do: he could only watch it happen, again, filtered through decades like the nondistinct reflection in his scotch glass, as he thrust the handgun into his friend’s gaping mouth, and pulled the trigger. Moretti was still crying, like a housewife in a Hitchcock film, when Butterfly straddled his BMX and made off to the committee of trees by the Yarra.

*

He wasn’t equipped to be able to withstand passion and inner turbulence of this kind; his was a body devised for an athlete and not a thinker; his head – for five rounds, determining the most favourable side of the ring’s spring-propelled floor, and a resin mouthguard. Butterfly was a professional prizefighter, had been a boxer from the get-go, and he was sharp-witted enough to understand that it was an irrevocable discipline, a sport you could not scorn or spurn, a commitment you could not turn your back on. Nonetheless, there did sporadically eventuate dangerous days, long ones which seemed to draw out like nails when retracted with the claw of a hammer, when he’d question his resolve – ask himself why he’d brutalised his friend in that way, renounce the light and proclaim to his coach that boxing was for jackals, for sharks, for beasts. But such a conviction wouldn’t last a day – they rarely even stood up to his coach’s enforced scrutiny, like a wave form which would collapse as soon as a microscope observed it – and Butterfly would be coaxed and coddled into admitting that he loved the might of the fight, Yussir, There ain’t nothing more sweet than a tussle against a formidable rival, There ain’t no fanny or skirt worth that calibre of motherfucking honour, hoo-boy, Nossuh! He had minerals, and he had pride. It was these very attributes, these indeterminable virtues, as unlearned as the nature of a prodigy, his own phylum of genius, which encouraged within all those whom met Butterfly the inclination to think him a noble man. A noble man wouldn’t divorce himself from his talent, in the same way that he wouldn’t quit the one he loved. But undermining his every modicum of goodwill was that sour-mouthed inner voice telling him he was dispensable, disreputable, reviled and revolting. It had bloomed within him, this voice, with its singular Italian inflection, when he was just a morose teenage boy, and now it incapacitated his self-confidence at the pulse of a synapse, now its carnivorous reign meant that no happy thought could escape unmolested.

These people hate me, he’d think, pacing about the ring and hitting his skull with a glove-suited fist, as he espied the clamouring mouths and cynical gazes of the spectators from between the cage of ropes. It’s just like Tony’s parents, and the girls at school, and the wrath of Daddy all over again, he’d think. Sometimes he wanted to howl, and the wolf within him would break through the tree-line, so that everyone could see the rabid dance of his eyes, but most people these days associated this rage with the boxing – they didn’t stop to consider with any overt sense of concern as to whether young Jimmy Tenderfoot Butterfly, up there, artfully dodging and sparring his heart out, was okay on the inside. And those collective coterie of watchers, week in and week out, they certainly didn’t demonstrate any palpable apprehension when Butterfly ascended into the quarter-finals with electricity in his brain and confusion in his steps, confronting Joe Nigel Moretti, Tony’s older brother, a man so svelte and lithe with muscle that Butterfly saw the tide wash back in. ‘I’m going to fuck you,’ Joe grunted with the hoarse romance of an avenging champion, ‘Just like you fuck that divorcee bitch of a mother, I’m going to fuck you. Tony didn’t come tonight, but he sure as shit knows I mean it.’ And all the threads suddenly converged to simulate some sort of sense to Butterfly, the cinnamon smoke exhaling from Joe’s bulldog mouth, the ebbtide of the Yarra river beneath the spangle of the early-nineties daylight, the inability for him to launch into the world and his prevailing sense of comfort living in his mother’s sucko-stucco house, the moment he thought he glimpsed a car, submerged, beneath the surface of Melbourne’s living water. It had been a hearse. Yes, indeed: Butterfly could now appreciate the intricacy of the design, the web of significance with such alacrity, such newfound veracity; he’d hated Tony Moretti for being a someone with a future, a someone with a family and looks and indiscreetly gorgeous girlfriends and a channel out of the morass of a hard fucking childhood, he hated being the unattractive wraith at school whom everybody had to embrace as financially disadvantaged, he hated having a bike with a bullshit chain and the sanctuary of a slurry of brown water wending its way through the country of his lost future. If he was going to drown, a disenchanted and discontent man, he would lash himself fast to the driver’s seat of that submerged fucking ghost hearse.

‘What kept your sleepy ass?’ Butterfly asked, with the cruel laughter of a plague of Hercules moths. ‘What kept your sleepy ass, boy, ‘coz I been waiting fitteen years to do what I did to your pussy brother, and put these guns to your motherfucking head.’ The question was rhetorical; it required no enigmatic solution. Jimmy Tenderfoot Butterfly didn’t anticipate an answer, not least for another fifteen years, when the paramedic staff idled an inert and blood-spat Joe Moretti into the double-doors of the warbling ambulance outside the auditorium. Butterfly revealed the breadth of his wingspan, opened wide his aching brown arms, and retreated into the mist of a piping locker-room shower, his eyes stinging in the smoke again, a platinum belt slung over his hunched shoulder. He gazed at his reflection, swimmy and prehistoric, shimmering on the surface of the textiles. He was a winner again. Butterfly didn’t look so much like a thumb, as he did the whole fist.

The Criminal Featherweight Remix by Kirk Marshall is licensed under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia licence. It is a derivative work of James Phelan’s CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia licensed story. The original is available at http://www.remixmylit.com/wp-content/pdf/soliloquy-for-one-dead.pdf. For details on how you can reuse the original and this remix see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/au/