The Demon Butterflies: a Visitor's Guide
by Michael Reid Busk
Kickoff is at noon, but you'll want to be there by nine for the goat-roasting and midget jousting. Of course, many undergraduates hold vigil the night before, marching around Lepidoptera Stadium in black monkish robes, bearing waxy tapers that cast ghostly shadows on their faces. Some have described it as a ten-hour séance with a half-mile radius. At dawn, they extinguish the candles, releasing a pall of smoke into the sycamores that ring the stadium, waking the crows conditioned to know goat flesh will not be long behind. If you do arrive early, guard your children closely, especially those that smell of hay or still perambulate on all fours.
While the undergraduates strip bare and ritually bathe in Lake McTavish, some of the more eager alumni will descend onto campus in dirigibles, while those crossing the central plains often arrive in kilometer-long trains of Conestoga wagons, the report of their gunfire mingling with the yaks' guttural bleats. Of course, there are rumors that some alumni have never left campus at all, prowling the deep pine forests in feral packs, unshaven and unwashed, sleeping in high hammocks or hollowed-out trees, sneaking into the dining hall after midnight to pilfer sides of beef or barrels of lard. It is these self-described "Fillmore University Demon Butterfly Samurai" who discover the lodging of opponents near campus, the Taft College Jungle Monkeys, the Arthur A&M Giant Chinchillas, and of course, the arch-nemesis Buchanan Tech Belugas. Legend has it that certain of the FUDBSs have dumped buckets of rotting fish in the heating vents of opponents' hotels, kidnapped and maimed star wingbacks or strong safeties, leaked mustard gas into offensive coordinators' rooms and sealed the doors with woodshop putty. They are the ones who don diaphanous wings and march to the stadium in lockstep while chanting fierce ballads, wilting daffodils along the way.In kiosks near the stadium, unlicensed gypsy peddlers will try to sell you relics purported to have been touched by Head Coach Gideon McTavish himself—Big Mac wrappers, well-annotated scraps of Dickens novels, elastic bands in scribed with the phrase "Fruit of the Loom," long scrolls scrawled with hieroglyphs diagramming plays so complex they look like Kandinsky sketches. But do not let these gypsies fool you. Gideon McTavish is an illiterate vegetarian who does not wear underwear and composes all plays on-field. Some necromancers have claimed he will never die.
If your seats lie below the student section, wear Kevlar and a grenadier's helmet, for although the Fillmore Archers are notoriously accurate, their arrows do occasionally miss the referees' testicles or the earholes of opponents' helmets. Moreover, if you or your loved ones are put off by the smell of rotting squid, you might consider sitting elsewhere, perhaps with the alumni, hard to miss in their rainbow fleeces and baseball caps emblazoned with the Demon Butterfly gnawing on a human femur, or with the graduate students taking their weekly break from photons or Foucault, the stringy-haired ones with the high Adam's apples and a tendency to sniffle. Or, if your resources are more meager, you might rough it with the locals whose seats are so high they bring oxygen tanks. They're the ones who look like they haven't read Heidegger.
Do not be alarmed when you notice the Demon Butterfly quarterback appears to be a beardless dwarf. Ollie Shunt might only be eleven, but he is descended from Apollo and has never yet been sacked. Legally, his mother must attend every team practice. She is difficult to miss on her dais, ten rows up on the fifty yard line, wearing an iridescent veil and a chiffon dress with a forty-cubit train. Yes, those nubile young lovelies attending her are dryads. On the sideline, Gideon McTavish stands like Odin, directing Ollie with his aspen staff in Old Norse, wearing a tattered gray robe with a raven perched on his shoulder, the craggy hollows of his cheekbones like canyons long worn by wind and water. Always at his side is Wang Xi, his defensive coordinator, chauffeur, and backgammon partner, a man who speaks only in aphorisms that depending on your perspective are either extraordinarily profound or extraordinarily trite, a Buddha on the Atkins' diet. Aphorisms like, "Friends are the enemies you haven't killed yet." Xi chooses his squad from the thousands of doe-eyed hopefuls by placing each in a deep pit with a starving lion or wounded hyena. Those that survive make the team.
No doubt your homicidal screams and full-throated singing of the Demon Butterfly's Wagnerian fight song, Antenna Like a Bloodied Mace, will leave you parched, but fear not, each section is continually stalked by half a dozen mead peddlers—scrawny, leathery old men wearing only loincloths and tiny velveteen wings. However, be prepared to answer obscure questions about arcane cabalistic texts, for most of them are emeritus philosophy professors, gnomes who would like nothing more than to deny mead to a metaphysical ingénue ignorant of the narrative structure of The Gospel of Thomas or the real identity of Dionysius the Areopagite.
The carpet-bombing begins at halftime, although some of those rusty Canadian biplanes appear as early as the first quarter. Fortunately, the enemy aircraft are slow, stuttering, and awkward, much like Canadians themselves. Try not to jostle your neighbors as they aim their bazookas—too many cheerleaders have died already. Sometimes play is stopped while wings or propellers or airmen fall flaming to the field; sometimes it is not. It is during these times that even opposing fans become temporary allies, everyone pulling out Canadian flags to burn, or large grainy photos of Neil Young. Indeed, we don't need him around anyhow.
During those halftimes with lighter sorties, undergraduates tend to grow restless, feeling their portable anti-aircraft guns are being underused, and often channel their adolescent energies into full-scale fisticuffs or section-wide orgies. If you happen to bring children along, this might be an opportune occasion to show them Lepidoptera Stadium's impressive goat pens, its marble balustrades, and its Hall of Champions, featuring a plaque for each of the fourteen men who have coached the Demon Butterflies: including Henrik Schlaft (108-17-3), who would force his team to practice naked on the five Finger Lakes after they had frozen over, a man whose later fascist pamphleteering does not tarnish his four National Championships; Dusty McGee (145-8-4), who secured the corporate sponsorships that helped save the university during the Depression, a man who, despite rumors to the contrary, did not drive a tank through his mistress' house after he caught her playing tic-tac-toe with Joe DiMaggio; Hank Tuttle (86-19-2), a brilliant but troubled man who was fired (and later incarcerated) after one too many of his disappointing players were found gored to death outside his Laredo ranch; and of course Gideon McTavish himself (208-22-1), thrice featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, twice on Time, and once on Cosmopolitan. It's a long story. . . God help poor Ellis Neely (18-25-2), McTavish's predecessor, who was forced to enter the CIA's witness protection program after his fourth consecutive losing season. Rumor has it he was spotted a few years ago in a Keno bar outside Topeka, drinking Black Russians and singing over-loud to Merle Haggard songs that were not playing on the jukebox.
Since the Demon Butterflies' halftime lead is usually close to a three-digit number, the second half is often time for playbook and personnel experimentation. Last season, Wang Xi once replaced his middle linebacker with a wild boar, which looked quite sleek in its helmet filled for tusks and its two pairs of Adidas cross-trainers. A few years ago on fourth down, Gideon McTavish had his punter smuggle a prosthetic leg onto the field and hurl it into the air at the moment he faked the punt, running past the stultified defenders for an easy touchdown.
At the game's end, McTavish will often leave the field with his hand benevolently resting on Ollie Shunt's head, a pagan ascetic's version of Father Christmas. The reporters will ask their questions, which Wang Xi will patiently translate from English or Quebecois French to Old Norse, and by now they are prepared for hours-long replies that might involve chaos theory, heterodox taxonomies, and the need for the colonization of the dark side of the moon. Sometimes Ollie will chip in and say he's descended from Apollo and likes bubblegum ice cream.
When you leave the stadium, do try to ignore the tortured screams that might be reverberating around the high concrete walls—it means only that a few daring FUDBSs managed to sneak past security into the opponents' locker rooms on brave but almost certainly suicidal missions. For their sake, exit somberly, perhaps genuflecting at the gate. For if you learn nothing else from your visit to Lepidoptera Stadium, you must at least realize that even in this era of cryogenics, summer homes, and the 401K, there are some things worth dying for.
Michael Reid Busk is a PhD student in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Creative Writing Program. His work appears or is forthcoming in Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Madison Review, Lake Effect, and The Pinch.