The Butterfly Plague Read Online Free

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