Virgin With Butterflies by Tom Powers Page B

he had told me about picking up a friend seemed like more or less a confidence, but anyway for some reason I never told Aunt Mary.
    The next place we stopped Aunt Mary went with us to see some old ruins of a place as big as the Stevens Hotel, but it wasn’t there anymore. It was all mostly nothing but stones that had fallen down off of each other and got run over by a lot of vines and stuff. But there was one place like a church with stone seats around the sides and Aunt Mary said she wanted to draw a picture of a kind of an idol or a statue of a very ugly woman that sure needed a brassiere, so she sat down and drew it. I didn’t know she could but she could, and she didn’t leave anything out.
    Me and the prince went up some steps that wasn’t going anywhere anymore. We sat down in the sun and he smoked a cigarette.
    I didn’t ask questions and only talked when he wanted to talk about things, but now he did again, so we did.
    I felt sorry for him, having to go all over the worldselling stuff to get him and his brother out of trouble. I told him that I hoped he wouldn’t go haywire just because they was in trouble and sell this Soodan king anything his pop wouldn’t want to part with.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” he said.
    â€œI mean, I hope you ain’t figuring to get rid of Hankah,” I says, “because your father wouldn’t think that was right, and neither would I…Listen,” I says, “jumping around over the face of the earth selling second-hand jewelry is all right—and collecting the money must be fun—but suppose we was to crash down into some of these jungles, then what would happen? I mean with us and all the money dead and lost, wouldn’t your brother have to take the rap for whatever it is you and him have been doing together? That ought to make you scared to collect all of this and go all over Mexico just to pick up friends.”
    He laughed louder than I thought he could. Then he told me there was a little old lady that lives on a funny sounding street in England, and he said she kept the money by telegraph, and when I asked him if she might not get bombed out, he laughed again and he said she was a pretty strong old lady. And he said something I couldn’t understand about her being a bank, or maybe he said she had a bank.
    I asked Aunt Mary where she learned to draw and she said in the map school, but I didn’t know where that was at.
    We talked like that a lot of times, at places we got to, him and me. But then finally we got to a place in the sky, up over a beautiful harbor that Aunt Mary said wasthe most beautiful harbor in the world, and there was Christ on a mountain, and we were in Rio.
    By this time I was use to living with the sweet and shopping on Mr. Hoover’s money—as I thought it was at the time, but when I found out whose it really was, was pretty peculiar.
    So, in Rio, Aunt Mary said why didn’t I buy some presents for Bill and Coo, for by this time they even called themselves that. So I did. I also got a nice fat book for myself to write down things I didn’t want my mind to forget but to remember—and I was so glad I did for if I hadn’t of I wouldn’t of.
    I thought that Rio was a Mexican city where everybody spoke like they did in Mexico City, except the tune is different. But then I learned we were in a different country—they sure seemed to pinch and pat more than they did in Mexico, but it didn’t mean anything more than whistling at a girl does in Chicago. The people in Rio wear wide black hats and they are called Brazilians.
    We hardly stayed in Rio at all, just long enough for Aunt Mary and me to buy some funny hats and leather things with silver nails on ’em for Bill and Coo. They sure looked funny when they put the hats on top of their white head things, which do come off, I suppose, not that I ever saw ’em off, but of course they do.
    Like everywhere else