The Death of a Butterfly Man.

By Jerry McIlroy

A collection of contemporary short stories, humor, and plays.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jerry McIlroy
• Release date: Apr 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370809585

Jerry McIlroy

Jerry McIlroy is a former winner of the Canadian Authors Award. His other books are The Last Hustle, A Member of the Audience, and Collected Short Stories. A sometimes actor he divides his time between Canada and Thailand, where his present "work in progress" is set. Likes Miles and Matisse, Paris and Athens, Billie and Nina, beaches in the evening with a g and t.. He writes, he says, because he has to, and sometimes even likes it. He would like to hear from his readers, liked, did't like, what worked, what did not work. Drop him a line at [e-mail]

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The Death of a Butterfly Man

and other stories

Jerry McIlroy

Copyright 2018 Jerry McIlroy

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever including Internet usage, without written permission of the author.

This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, or events used in this book are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, alive or deceased, events or locales is completely coincidental.

E-book formatting by Maureen Cutajar

www.gopublished.com

CONTENTS

THE DEATH OF A BUTTERFLY MAN

THE ARMS

PRINCE CHARMING

THE MYSTERY OF IT ALL

(humour)

THE LAST FULL MOON IN THE TROPICS

(a play)

A CONVERSATION

(a play)

THE DEATH OF A BUTTERFLY MAN

Lo, some we loved, the loveliest and the best.

Pattaya, Thailand, two-thirty a.m. Seaview Place, Soi one. The taxi ride from the Bangkok airport is a long one and he has dozed some during the last hour. That, combined with the twenty-four hour flight from Vancouver makes his feel groggy and somewhat disoriented. He pays the driver who says something to him, laughing and patting the man’s arm as he says it, some joke about ladies, said in part Thai and part pidgin English. Of course, Thai ladies, the beautiful bar ladies of Pattaya, why else do farangs come to Pattaya? He smiles, shakes the driver’s hand, gives him a tip and wishes him good luck. The night security guard, an older man, small, with a shy smile, is picking up the man’s backpack.

Sawahdee, krep. The man mutters it as he always does. You have key for me? Bennett, Tom Bennett? He mimes opening a door. The security guard nods, smiles again, and leads the way.

The Seaview has changed in the last year, it has a pool now and a small restaurant. It is moving ambitiously upscale. The room is on the second floor and is much as he remembers the rooms although they too have been improved, pictures on the wall, colourful rugs on the floor, sliding glass doors on the shower. The Seaview was not standing still, it was moving upward as were its rates. He showers then unpacks quickly. He always travels light and there is not much needed in the way of clothes in Thailand; shorts, tee shirts, sandals, a couple of hats and sunglasses.

Despite the long, mostly sleepless flight he now feels wide awake, one of those occasions, usually when travelling, that despite being physically exhausted he can not close his eyes. Had it not been so late he might have gone for a walk, stopped at a bar for a cool beer and a chat with a bar lady but instead he lies down on the comfortable double bed and watches a Thai horror movie with screaming ladies and murky shots of knife toting villains, all in Thai. This is how he falls asleep, still dressed, with the lights and television on.

When he awakes it is a little after ten and he has a slight headache. After two aspirins and a long shower the headache is gone, he feels refreshed and energized; hungry and anxious to be out and about. After shaving he studies his reflection for a few seconds then he says aloud but softly. I have come to Thailand to die.

True enough, he thinks, but somehow it does not have the dramatic effect he thinks it should have and he rather wants it to have. True enough, those amazing little cancer cells deep in his interior were doing what they were so very good at doing and he probably will die in Thailand, but when he thinks about it, his impending ceasing to be, he thinks of it more in this being the place where he wants to spin out his allotted days. To spin out his days in a place where he has always felt most at home, and most comfortable. This is where it all finishes.

So here I am, he thinks, still staring at his reflection. I am sixty-six years old, sixty-seven in four months. Maybe. I will never reach that ninety-eight or a hundred and three plateau and so inspire a mild wonder at my endurance and possibly my ability to still form an understandable sentence, nor however will I have died tragically and dramatically young at twenty-four. Sort of middle management in the life game. Do I think about it often? Death. Not that much, there really is not much to think about, not for me anyway. I am, if I am anything, an agnostic, so I really don’t ponder the possibilities of a Christian hereafter with harps and angels and heavenly choruses nor an Islamic one with its bevy of beauteous virgins.

One of his first thoughts, or rather feelings, when his doctor, with what he thought was a rather practised soberness, laid out the medical facts, was that that he had just been given something of an immense nature, that was how he recalled it, but that feeling was something he did not know quite what to do with, or perhaps was not up to dealing with. In any even those feelings were mostly gone now, replaced, most of the time, with a shrugged acceptance.

Outside the heat is Thai heat, enveloping him with its tropical heaviness, its refusal to be ignored, and almost immediately he begins to sweat, feeling the dampness on his brow and across his shoulders. He eats at the same restaurant where he has often eaten breakfast in his previous times in Pattaya; a large, American chain hotel on Soi Three. It has a good breakfast that is reasonably priced. Except for breakfast he mostly eats Thai food.

Coming home one seeks out the familiar; people and places, but here where once he had known four or five of the staff now there was only one familiar face. She remembers him and comes to his table to greet him; smiling and flirting just a little. She asks him how long he will be in Pattaya and expresses the hope that she will see him again. He does not remember her name nor she his.

Pattaya is a city always changing; people one looks for will have disappeared, gone to work in a different hotel or bar, or gone to Bangkok, or Phuket or Chaing Mai, or perhaps home to some village in Issan. New hotels and bars will have sprung up, a huge shopping centre is being built along the beach, and the beach walk will have been beautified once again. Pattaya, the tourist part of Pattaya, is a city of instant gratification, of fond farewells and broken promises, a city of the moment, cynically practical, ‘No Money No Honey’ is a popular tee shirt slogan.

The beach walkway runs from Soi One to Walking Street, about half a mile. It is concrete, concrete with maroon coloured tiles, benches, statues, palm trees, small grassy areas and a large flamboyant fountain. It too wants to be upscale; for the tourists, the tourists that now come from China and Korea and Russia, the tourists that will rent the big new hotels and take the boats to the island where the swimming is better, the water cleaner. At Soi Six there is a large Buddhist shrine.

Buddhist shrines are everywhere, every hotel and bar has one. Once, in a bar he watched a young bar lady as she knelt before a small shrine, head bowed, hands clasped together holding the burning joss sticks, a charming image of purity and innocent devotion; a typical Thai postcard. It seemed a long prayer and he asked the bar lady he was with what she thought the prayer was for. A customer. He said it seemed a very long prayer. She no have customer two week. She smiled and kissed his cheek. She had a customer. He liked that bar lady, she was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, had a nine year old son that stayed with momma and poppa up north somewhere. She was pretty, tiny, like many Thai women and she could make him laugh, and even better, he could make her laugh. He bought her something every day; a little present, usually flowers or a tee shirt or a bracelet or ear rings. She stayed with him for ten days then he went back to Canada. He phoned her once from Canada, there wasn’t much to say, she had moved to a new bar and he wrote the name down. He looked for her the next time he was in Pattaya but never found her. She had told him he had a ‘good heart’, something many bar ladies had told him, and maybe for her he had.

What are the three main reasons so many older western men, farangs, settle in Thailand? Thai ladies, Thai ladies, Thai ladies. True enough, he thinks, but only a part, the main part, but only a part. In Canada one you hit sixty or sixty five your usefulness is over, you find yourself in a kind of