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Show Why We Cry Butch and Fenn Stories 98 "That's no good!" Butch says, finally seeing me. "Five killer crushes and he only cries on two! Two!" "What'd he do the other three?" Then Butch really looks at me, knowing I don't know what he's talking about. "You smartass, get up on the table and take off your shoes." "No way." "I should have burned him. I should have had some matches and scorched his arches." "Your dad counts the matches, remember?" Butch just glares at me and then wads up his old lab robe and flings it in my face. Outside I join him on the edge of the geothermal pit where he sits eating his fingernails. The pit is a steep sided funnel, nine feet deep. We never hit the five-thousand degree "earth's mantel", and, in fact, Butch abandoned the project when the bottom of the hole consistently read five degrees cooler than the top. Now Tiny sleeps in the pit daytimes, and "we call see h~im now down there, curled like an old coonskin cap. Butch scratches his heels in the side of the pit and dirt trickles down on the dog. "What were you doing to Roto?" "It's not Roto. I'm trying to figure out why people cry. I mean, how does pain work?" I can tell by Butch's voice that he has done some thinking about this one. "Why do you cry |