Butterfly (45 page)

high. And she suddenly saw everything: her goal, her purpose, her future.

26

He rolled on top of her as if he were changing sides for a suntan—five minutes on the

front, five minutes on the back. His bottom went up and down a few times and then he

collapsed on her.

Pushing away from him and reaching for her Virginia Slims, Trudie gave the guy a

look that said,
That’s it?

He didn’t see it, however. He was already snoring.

Drawing on her cigarette and inhaling deeply, she got out of bed and walked across

the room to the window, from where she could see the lights of UCLA. The campus

looked like a small town, and across the street, at a frat house, there was a wild party going

on. Good heavens, girl, she silently said to her reflection in the glass, just what do you

think you’re doing here?

She knew very well what she was doing there, in the apartment of some guy whose

name she barely knew, who was only twenty-four years old, she had found out after com-

ing home with him, and whose brains were between his legs. It was Saturday night again.

That was why she was here.

Trudie figured that there were three times in a person’s life that demanded to be

shared, two of which were Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. So she had gotten all

dressed up in her best denim and lace, and gone with her cousin Alexis to the Pikme-Up,

where they had drunk mai tais in Pic N Save plastic tumblers. There had been the usual

bright, preppy crowd in secondhand clothing and tacky jewelry lounging on kitchen

chairs on the sidewalk outside, and Trudie and Alexis had been discussing fortune-telling

with runes when a young man dressed in summer whites and a leather tie had come smil-

ing up.

She’d liked him at once. Trudie had always had a weakness for men with shoulder-

length hair. And he had an intelligent glint in his eye. But what had sold her on him was

when he had said, “Runes, wow. The power of Odin and Thor.”

They had left the cafe together, saying good night to Alexis, who had an early-morn-

ing surgery schedule, and they drove to Westwood in two cars, Trudie following Miles’s

VW in her Corvette. Once inside the messy apartment he shared with two other guys,

who were away for the weekend, Miles had poured her a glass of red wine from a screw-

cap bottle and put Springsteen on the stereo. Five minutes later Trudie realized she had

made a mistake.

“Can’t we just talk awhile?” she had said when he’d started making the moves.

“What about?”

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BUTTERFLY

195

“Well, like”—a particularly favorite person had popped into her mind—“what do you

think of Carl Sagan?”

“Carl Sagan? Oh, the
Cosmos
guy. Caught the show. Great music.”

That was when Trudie realized she had been had.

Still, a virile young body was a virile young body, and Miles had shown great bedroom

potential. At first. And then that, too, had turned out to be another case of mistaken

identity, and so here she was once again, in a strange apartment, sexually frustrated and

lonely, wondering what made her do such things.

She found the bathroom on the first try (some apartments were tricky, especially if she

was drunk) and took a look at herself in the mirror. The woman with the spiky blond hair

and smudged makeup was saying, This has got to stop.

The trouble was, she didn’t know how to stop. At least, not until she found the man

she was looking for. Where on earth, Trudie wondered as she washed her face, was she

going to find a man who had looks, brains, knew how to make love,
and
treated a woman

as an equal? Bill the plumber sprang into her mind. He was doing that lately. To her great

annoyance, because she definitely did not like him. Oh, he filled out a pair of jeans very

nicely, and he knew his business when it came to laying in the steel and plumbing in a

pool, but he had that male chauvinist air about him, calling her “honey” and talking to

her as if she were an idiot.

Then she thought about “Thomas.” What was so unique about her moments with

him that she couldn’t seem to recreate them outside Butterfly’s walls? What was the miss-

ing ingredient?

She went to the bedroom doorway and leaned against the jamb, quietly smoking.

Miles must have certainly gotten his satisfaction, because now he was sleeping like a baby.

Trudie was halfway considering waking him, getting him hard again, and showing him

what lovemaking really was all about when he rolled over and farted.

She looked at the digital clock on his nightstand. It was just a little after ten. The

evening was still young.

She went to the kitchen, found the phone, dialed a number, and when someone came

on the line, she said, “Hi, Butterfly? This is Trudie Stein. Is he available?”

She listened, and then smiled. “Hold on to him for me. I’m ten minutes away!”

27

Houston, Texas: 1972

There are times when a good meal is better than sex.

That was what Danny Mackay was thinking as he devoured the chicken-fried steak and

hash brown potatoes that were crunchy on the outside and tender on the inside, all smoth-

ered in spicy country-sausage gravy. A fuck is just a fuck, he thought, wiping the last bis-

cuit around the plate and reaching for his Chivas. But a good meal can’t be beat anytime.

Especially a good Texas meal.

“Well, Bon,” he said as he stood up from the table and stretched. “It’s time we got

going. Houston’s over two hundred miles away.”

Bonner jumped up from the bed, where he had been playing solitaire, and began tak-

ing Danny’s suits out of the closet.

Danny went to the sliding glass doors of his hotel-room balcony and looked out over

the white sands of the south Texas coast. “Corpus Christi,” he said with a soft laugh. “The

Body of Christ. Hell of a name to give a town.” He finished the last of his Chivas and

tossed the crystal tumbler down onto the sandy beach.

Danny liked this semitropical town on the Gulf of Mexico. That was why he had

come here, to spend a week buying up beachfront property. It was a way of counteracting

his Dust Bowl beginnings and childhood in hot waterless places. Corpus Christi made

him think of faraway exotic places, of islands where the girls were brown and welcoming,

where rum ran like waterfalls, where the days were like butter and the nights like cinna-

mon. The free and easy life, where you just reached out your hand for sex or food,

whichever you had a mind to indulge in at that moment, and it just fell into your palm!

Maybe I’ll buy myself a tropical island, Danny thought as he watched Bonner care-

fully fold Danny’s expensive shirts and place them in the calf-hide luggage. Somewhere in

the South Pacific. Where the natives will make me their king.

Danny laughed again. He felt so darned good. Thirty-eight years old and riding high!

He was rich, the paperback edition of
Why God Took the Kennedys
was now in its for-

tieth week on the best-seller list, the crowds that packed into his Houston church every

week were big, and he had been on the
Tonight Show
and
Laugh-In.
But the biggest high

had come two years before from his Christmas tour of Vietnam, where he had gone, Bob

Hope style, with entertainers, celebrities, and his charismatic energies to take the word of

God to the homesick troops. Danny had expected his show to be a success, but he had

not anticipated such a stunning success. He had stood out alone on that stage and belted

out his power and fifty thousand soldiers had cheered.

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The sound of so many cheering him…

“It might not be wise to go to Vietnam, Danny,” Bonner had warned. “After all,

Vietnam is a very unpopular subject these days. Folks might turn on you.”

But Danny detested antiwar marchers and hippies and bleeding-heart liberals. He

wanted to show the world that he believed in America and that America was right. Danny

had stood on that stage so many miles from home, held his arms out to embrace the

troops, and he had shouted up to the sky, “I know what you are going through, my broth-

ers and sisters! I, too, was once a soldier like yourselves. But I was never given the honor

of fighting for freedom and democracy! Don’t listen to the voices of the cowards back

home. It’s easy to sit in your living room and denounce a fight you know nothing about!”

Those in the crowd who were in the war cheered and shouted. Then Danny said, “An

ancient noble Roman named Livy once said that a necessary war is a just war, and

weapons are holy when there is no hope except in weapons. Brothers and sisters in Christ,

this is a just war, and your weapons are holy!”

They had gone wild. Not so much over the words as over the way he said them. Up on

that stage in front of so many thousands, Danny might have looked small. But they felt

his power come rolling out over their heads, a power that made them feel—for a while, at

least—that they were not miserable, forgotten, despised by friends and family back home.

And they loved him for it. Fifty thousand troops would have done anything for Danny

Mackay at that moment, they would have followed him into any field of fire.

And Danny knew it.

His troupe still traveled about in a bus after all because Danny had found it good pol-

itics to go out on a revival circuit now and then to keep his profile high. But he was based

in Houston, where he had built a church and had a penthouse on top of the finest hotel.

Danny drove a white Lincoln Continental with wire wheels and steer horns on the hood;

he dressed in the finest Western-tailored suits and wore a white Stetson. He had acquired

expensive tastes and made sure that he was every inch
class.
Politicians and prominent

businessmen were now in his social circle. And with each rung of the ladder he ascended,

Danny’s sights went higher and higher. He had power, but not enough, not yet….

Danny loved this wild and weird city whose veins and arteries ran with black gold and

whose name, Houston, was the first word uttered by man when he landed on the moon.

The first thing Danny always did upon arrival was to spend some time with the two or

three costly mistresses he kept in Houston. Tall, leggy women, all furs and diamonds and

knowing every sexual trick imaginable, they would come up to his penthouse to get him

revved up for the preaching. Then he would eat an enormous meal and wash it down with

Chivas until he could feel the power of the Lord invading his muscles, guts, and lungs. He

would spend the next three or four hours in his church using his charisma and sex appeal

to remind folks of sins and demons, of hellfire and eternity, subtly mentioning his per-

sonal hot line to God, and finally wringing their dollars out of them with the promise of

salvation.

As he pulled off the I-45 and saw the cars already streaming into the parking areas

Danny laughed at the utter simplicity of it all. The money was literally falling into his

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Kathryn Harvey

hands now. If he tried to keep people from giving it to him, he couldn’t get them to stop.

And it was all because of an idea that had come to him a few years back, while he was still

burning in the limelight of Kennedy’s assassination.