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Show Carlson Ferguson Lives 4 his way along, and we bumble back into the dark junk space. "Lift that." Butch points to the other side of an old Admiral televison cabinet. It's heavy as a safe, and we brutalize it into the other room. "What," I say,"Why do you have a violin?" Butch's face is checkered red and white from lifting heavy television equipment. But he looks different another way too, as if his eyes have both moved slightly in his face, and his mouth is stapled shut. "You taking violin lessons?" Fenn asks. "Gonna go on Eugene Jelesnik's show?" "Help us, F&m." Butch wants to lift it off the floor; I know we'll drop it and be crushed, but somehow it sits right and centers. "That your machine gun?" Fenn won't quit about the violin case. Then he's found a Superboy comic and runs his nose along the inside of it, reading. It makes sense: blind boy reads in the dark. "Look," Butch says to me, his eyes still strange, hurt, something. I step to the operating table which is still stained with blood from the cat and grease from the fish autopsy. He unclasps the three brass fasteners on the violin case and opens it. On the purple velvet inside is what looks like the white belly of another carp, but Butch turns it over, and I see it is Ferguson, his alligator, dead. "Did he die?" "Murder. Fucking murdered by my father." G "Who?" Fenn says. |