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Show Ferguson Lives I can't find Butch. I enter his house as always where the back door used to be before his father ripped it off and threw it for no reason onto the roof. The house stands wide open at all hours like a house in a war zone which it is with Budd, the father, beating his fists against everything there is. Budd drives three to eleven, so I come over. I go down the basement stairs, one missing, into the most dangerous, dark place I've ever been, a basement like a landslide, like a trainwreck, the rancid depository for everything Butch's father has broken for years without end. If you don't bleed before you climb out of Butch's basement, you weren't trying. I walk the single path through the forest of junk back to the laboratory, as Butch calls his room, but the light is out and Butch is not asleep on the table. I call his name into the corners for a moment; Budd may have slammed him around again, but no answer. There is a chance, I think as I go out into the backyard, that Budd may have killed him this time. Butch is not in the backlot either. Tiny, his German shepherd, is sleeping in a hole. He looks like a dead rug, a wrong rat, a growth. |