Butch: A Snapshot, 1977

“Why did the kids on the bus call you Butch, then?” he asked her.

“You know, because of Dad and the meat market. But I didn’t even care,” she said, with an emphasis on the word even, as spoken in the patois of the young in Terrebonne Parish at the time. “I was kind of proud of it.”

“I just pretended to be tough so chumps wouldn’t…” he started, but she cut him off, excited, in the mood to talk.

“When I was little I’d sit on the commode to make and get chill bumps thinking about how lucky I was to be a part of this.”

“Part of…what?” he asked, sitting at the kitchen table, chin resting on fist, narrowing an eye and furrowing his brow with that iconic look of the movies. Comfortable. Humored by her cuteness.

“This home, this family,” she said, pausing, looking for a way to show that she was serious; a hand gesture that would indicate the enormity of her feelings. In an awkward attempt, she cupped both hands together like a small bowl, a reverenced, Holy Grail. Her thin arms shook briefly in some uncontrollable way and something between agony and joy seemed to eke out of her into the receptacle she feigned holding. Eking out slowly and painfully like liquid from a bunched up old chamois passing through a wringer, he thought later. She looked at him, eyes unfocused, but seemed not to see him. Like she was experiencing a religious rite. Or maybe some mystical encounter with the profound. She was trance-like.

“I mean, I knew even when I was little that I had something special. That other kids didn’t have,” she confessed, her eyes wide, her nostrils flaring, her cheeks suddenly flushed.

“What time are we supposed to meet them at Bayou Blue?” he asked.

“Don’t you love your family?

“What do you mean?”  He had a knack for evasion.

“You never talk about them.”

“We don’t use words like that.”

“Like what?”

Silence.

“Like what?” she coaxed, louder.

“Love,” he pretended to laugh.

“It’s even hard for you to say the word.”

“When are we leaving?” he asked attempting to change the subject.

Silence as she packed the picnic basket with ham sandwiches and Frito Lays, inadvertently knocking the salt shaker off the table with a spastic backhanded swipe. Stooping to retrieve it, the lid came off and she slung crunchy opaque granules over the old hardwood planks. Quickly grabbing for a sudsy washcloth she knocked over a flower vase and spilled a surfeit of murky water and broken Magnolias.

The whole thing was a bit like a Lucille Ball skit. And he was never sure if she was really clumsy or it was part of a comic act, the third-child-of-seven’s craving for attention, however small the audience.

Looking up at him from the floor, the knees of her Calvin Klein jeans drenched in the suds and vase water, she suddenly evinced a floodgate of tears.

“You can go from happy to sad so quickly,” he said, holding back laughter.

“Please don’t make fun of me.”

“Is this because you feel guilty for letting your parents down?”

“I just never want to hurt them again.”

“Okay.”

“I’m totally, totally serious.”

“Okay."

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