Echo Lawrence: “The big reason why folks leave a small town,” Rant used to say, “is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.”
Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: The central metaphor for power in Middleton, and especially within the Casey family, was the staging of their Christian holiday meals. For these events—Easter breakfasts, Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners—the family members were divided between two distinct classes. The adults dined with antique china that had come into the family generations before, plates with hand-painted borders, garlands of flowers and gold. The children sat at a table in the kitchen, but not actually one table, more a cluster of folding card tables butted together.
Echo Lawrence: In the kitchen, everything was paper, the napkins and tablecloth and plates, so it could all be wadded up and shit-canned. When the Casey adults sat down to break bread, they always said the same blessing: “Thank You, God, for these blessings of family, food, and good fortune which we see before us.”
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Aging family members still stalled at the children’s table prayed for salmonella. For fish bones stuck in windpipes. The younger generations held hands and bowed their heads to pray for massive strokes and heart attacks.
Echo Lawrence: Rant used to say, “Life’s greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you.”
Shot Dunyun: Before Party Crashing nights, when our team would go out for dinner, Green Taylor Simms would watch and sneer while Rant ate every food with the same fork. Rant wasn’t a dumbshit, he just never got past using a plastic spoon.
Behind Rant’s back, Green used to call him “Huckleberry Fagg.”
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Mr. Dunyun refers to Rant as “The Tooth Fairy.”
Echo Lawrence: Get this. Around midnight in Middleton, Shot Dunyun and I parked at the turn-off to their farmhouse, next to a mailbox with “Casey” painted on it. In the middle of a lot of crops, the house was white with a long porch along the front, a steep roof, and one dormer window looking over the porch: Rant’s attic bedroom with the cowboy wallpaper.
Bushes and flowers grow close to the foundation, and mowed grass spreads out to a chain-link fence. We could see a barn painted brown, almost hidden behind the house. Everything else is wheat, to the flat circle of the horizon going around every side of Neddy’s Cadillac. Shot fiddled with the radio, hunting for traffic updates.
From DRVR Radio Graphic Traffic: Just a heads-up. Watch out for the two-car fender bender along the right shoulder, westbound at Milepost 67, on the City Center Thruway. Both vehicles appear to be wedding parties, complete with the tin cans tied to their rear bumpers. Traffic is slow, as drivers rubberneck to watch the brides and grooms scream and throw wedding cake at each other. Be on the lookout for bridesmaids and white rice in the roadway…
Echo Lawrence: Shot fell asleep, snoring against the inside of the driver’s door. I kept waiting for a sign Irene Casey was still alive and no mysterious stranger had strangled or stabbed her to death yet.
Neddy Nelson: Tell me how in 1913 did the anthropologist H. Reck discover a modern human skull buried in Early Pleistocene soil of the Olduvai Gorge? Explain how modern human skulls have also been unearthed from Early Pleistocene and Middle Pliocene strata in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Ragazzoni, Italy, respectively?
Shot Dunyun: We walked around their cruddy cemetery, a mess of lawn-mowered weeds, but we couldn’t find Rant’s grave. How weird is that? We found the best friend’s name in a phone book, Bodie Carlyle, then found his trailer at the end of a dirt road. Tumbleweeds piled window-deep against it, and a pit bull chained and barking in the dirt yard. This was hours before sunrise. We didn’t even knock on the trailer door.
Echo Lawrence: Forget it. I never did see Irene Casey. We didn’t even knock on her door. For all we knew, she was already dead inside that farmhouse.
Wallace Boyer ( Car Salesman): Sell cars long enough and you’ll see: Nobody’s all that original. Any lone weirdo comes from a big nest of weirdos. What’s weird is, you go to some pigsty village in Slovakia, and suddenly even Andy Warhol makes perfect sense.
Echo Lawrence: Give me a break. At dawn, that redneck sheriff pulls up next to our car and bullhorns that we’re in violation of the federal Emergency Health Powers Act and the I-SEE-U curfew. We didn’t want to leave Mrs. Casey unprotected, but the Big Chief Sheriff points his gun at us and says, “How about you-all come into town for some questioning…”
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: In Middleton, sleeping dogs have the permanent right-of-way.
3–Dogs
Bodie Carlyle ( Childhood Friend): Wintertime, Middleton dogs run in a pack. Regular farm dogs hereabouts, they’ll tear off and disappear, except you can hear them howling and barking at night. Other dogs, people car-dump them at the side of the road. Abandoned. City folks figure any dog can fend for itself, turn wild, but most mutts will starve until they’re hungry enough to eat the shit left by some other varmint. The shit’s crawling with fly eggs. Most of those let-go dogs die of worms.
Other dogs, they pack together to stay warm. The dogs that survive. The pack runs down rabbits and mule deer. Come winter, the farm dogs hear the packs howling over a fresh kill down in the trees along the river at night, and the farm dogs take off.
A pet dog hears that howl, and, no matter how much you call, even the nicest dog forgets his name. Except for their howling, all winter, they’re as gone as dead. Snow starts to fall and your pet dog, your best friend, is nothing but the wolf-man sound of far-off howling in the dark. Sound carries forever when the air turns cold.
Wintertime, a kid’s worst nightmare was walking home after dark and hearing a dog pack, all that howling and snapping, coming closer and louder in the dark. Something with a zillion teeth and claws. Folks come across a mule deer caught by a pack, and the skull might be the biggest chunk left. The rest of any hide or skeleton you’d find in bites, tugged apart by teeth and scattered all over. With a rabbit, you might find one little foot in a mess of fur, spread everywhere. Blood everywhere. The rabbit’s foot, with a little wet, soft fur, just like folks carry for luck.
The Caseys’ dog, it ran with the packs every winter up until it disappeared. Used to jump on the sofa, look out the windows at night, ears up to listen, when the packs were roaming. Hunting. Those packs, more rumor than anything real you ever saw. Half legend. The only monster we have hereabouts. More than half. The idea those dogs, maybe even your own dogs, would go crazy and hunt you. Your own dogs might track you home after school. Trail you through the brush alongside the road. Stalk you. Your own dog would run you down and yank you apart, bite by bite. No matter how much you might call out “Fido” or tell him “Stay,” tell him, “Sit!,” the dog you housetrained from a pup, spanked with a newspaper, that dog will snap his teeth together on your windpipe and rip out your throat. Fido would howl over your dying and drink the blood still pumping hot out of your own loving heart.
Sheriff Bacon Carlyle ( Childhood Enemy): Don’t ask me to feel sorry for him. Even in grade school, Rant Casey was begging to get killed some terrible way. Snakes or rabies. The Caseys, their dog, they named it “Fetch.” Some sort of half-hound, half-beagle, half-Rottweiler, half–bull terrier, half-everything mongrel. That’s the name Chester Casey gived the dog: Fetch.
Edna Perry ( Childhood Neighbor): If you’d care to know, the three of them Caseys called each other by different names. Irene Casey called her husband “Chet.” He called her “Reen,” short for “Irene,” and only to her face. Nobody else called Irene Casey that. Rant called Chester “Dad.” Irene called her son “Buddy,” but his father called him “Buster.” Never “Rant.” Only Bodie Carlyle called him Rant.
History is, Rant called Bodie “Toad.” No lie.
Everyone gave a differ
ent name to everyone else. Buster was Rant was Buddy. Chester was Chet was Dad. Irene was Mom was Reen. How folks lay claim to a loved one is they give you a name of their own. They figure to label you as their property.
Sheriff Bacon Carlyle: Same as dumping a dog, the worst thing a man can do is turn himself loose.
Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher): Listen up. Rant would tell people: “You’re a different human being to everybody you meet.”
Sometimes Rant said, “You only ever is in the eyes of other folks.”
If you were going to carve a quote on his grave, his favorite saying was: “The future you have tomorrow won’t be the same future you had yesterday.”
Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): That’s bullshit. Rant’s favorite saying was: “Some people are just born human. The rest of us, we take a lifetime to get there.”
Bodie Carlyle: I remember Rant used-to saying, “We won’t never be as young as we is tonight.”
Irene Casey ( Rant’s Mother): Used to be, Buddy walked with his Grandma Esther to church on Sundays. Good weather, Chet and I would drive Buddy to Esther’s place and drop him off. Little Buddy made it a habit, seeing how she didn’t have nobody to walk in with. She only lived a glance down the road from Middleton Christian. An old lady in her little church hat, and a little boy wearing a clip-on bow tie, holding hands and walking along a dirt road, they made a picture to touch your heart.
One Sunday, we’re through the opening hymn, through the first Gospel reading, and halfway into the sermon, but Buddy and Esther still ain’t arrived at the church. We’re passing the basket for the collection offering, and the church door busts open. A pounding comes up the steps outside, pounds across the church porch boards, and the big door swings open so hard the inside knob punches a hole in the vestibule wall. With all the heads turning, craning to look, little Buddy stumbles inside, panting. Leaning forward with a hand braced on each knee, the door still open behind him and sunlight bright around him, Buddy’s panting, his hair hanging over his eyes, trying to get his breath. No bow tie. His white shirt tails hanging out.
The Reverend Curtis Dean Fields says, “Would you kindly close the door.”
And Buddy gasps and says, “She’s bit.”
He catches enough breath to say, “Grandma Esther. She’s sick, bad.”
Being cold weather, I figure a dog pack, could be a dog bit her. Wild dogs.
Sheriff Bacon Carlyle: Don’t hate me for saying, but no Casey never paid to fix that hole Rant punched with the doorknob in the church wall. Even accepting he done it by accident.
Irene Casey: Buddy says a spider done bit Esther. From the look of it, a black widow spider. Buddy and his grandma was walking, halfway done, and she stopped, stood still, dropped his hand. Esther shouts, “Lord!” and uses both hands to rip the hat off her head, the pins pulling out ribbons of her gray hair. A sound, Buddy says, same as tearing newspaper in half. Her black church hat, round and black, about the size of a bath-powder box. One swing of her hand pitches that hat at the dirt ground. Both Esther’s church shoes stomp that black satin in the dust. Her black shoes, gray with the dust. Dust stomped up in a cloud around her black coat. Her purse swings in her other hand, and she waves Buddy back, saying, “Don’t you touch it.”
Still pinned to the hat, tore out at the roots, thick hanks of Esther’s gray hair.
With one church shoe, Esther toe-kicks the hat over, and the two of them squat down to look.
Mixed up in the dust and gravel, the mashed-up veil, and the crumpled satin, just barely bending one leg, flexing one leg, is a spider. A dusty black spider with a red hourglass on its belly.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms ( Historian): Cousin to the shoe-button spider of South Africa, of the genus Latrodectus of the comb-footed spider family, the black widow nests in isolated places such as unused clothing or outdoor latrines. Until indoor plumbing became prevalent, bites from the black widow were most commonly inflicted on the buttocks or genitals of the victim. More recently, the spider is more likely to bite when trapped between clothing and the victim’s skin—for example, when a spider nests in a seldom-worn shoe or glove.
Irene Casey: Granny Esther touches the top of her hair, two fingertips feeling between the strands of her hair, stepping the curls one way, then the other, until she touches a spot that makes her mouth drop open and her eyes clamp shut. When she opens them, Buddy says, his grandma’s eyes, they’re blinking with tears.
She clicks open her purse and fishes out a tissue. When Esther presses the tissue on top of her head, Buddy says, when they looked at the tissue, they seen a red spot of fresh blood. It’s then Esther told him, “Fast as you can, run get your pa.” Esther Shelby lowered herself to one knee; then sitting, then laying in the dust on the shoulder of the road, she says, “Boy, be fast!”
Echo Lawrence: Rant says his granny told him, “Run fast, but if you ain’t fast enough, remember I still love you…”
Cammy Elliot ( Childhood Friend): Kill me if I’m lying, because I ain’t, but Middleton dogs turned wilder when the wind blowed too hard. A real gust of wind and all the trash cans go over. Dogs love that.
The first lesson a gal learns in sixth grade is what a septic tank can’t digest. Any female trash, you have to wrap it in newspaper and bury it, special deep, in the garbage. The honeywagon comes to pump out your tank and he finds more than just natural waste, it’s an extra cost.
’Course, when the wind blows over a garbage can, depending on the household, you have dirty Kotex flapping everywhere. Those gusty days, it’s everybody’s Aunt Flo has come to visit. Pads and napkins walking off, a regular army drove by the wind. Wrapped and losing their newspaper, they’re showing dark blood coated with sand and cockle burrs. Pin-cushioned with cheatgrass seed. Every trash can that blows over, that army of throwed-away blood gets bigger, marching in the one direction of the wind. Until they come to a fence. Or a cactus.
Shot Dunyun: Close by, Rant could hear the dog packs barking and snapping. He didn’t want to leave his grandma, but she told him to get going.
Cammy Elliot: No lie. A regular three-strand barbed-wire fence will look Christmas-decorated with those white puffs. Walk too close and you’d see the condoms snagged there, same as so many dead party balloons. Flapping green or gray or light blue, every rubber with some white mess still hanging heavy in the end.
Flapping at you in the wind, snagged on those pricks of sharp wire, you got panty liners and big strap-on, heavy-day pads. Smooth and ribbed rubbers. Brands of condoms and sanitary napkins you never saw on the shelf at the Trackside Grocery.
Old blood and chunks so black it could be road tar. Blood brown as coffee. Watery pink blood. Sperm died down to almost-clear water.
Blood is blood to most folks, mostly menfolks, but you’d be hard-pressed to match any two tampons pinned on a mile of barbed-wire fence.
Here and there, you’d find pubic hairs. Blond, brown, gray hairs. A good wind kicks up and all the folks of Middleton, we’re hanging out, same as birds on a telephone line. Like some 4-H display at the county fair.
Sheriff Bacon Carlyle: If you ask me, the worst part was keeping your dogs inside the house. Folks didn’t even need to see the spunk and blood snagged out on the barbed wire to know the wind had dumped somebody’s trash. The dogs would turn crazy, whining and digging at the bottom of doors, scratching the paint and wearing out the rugs, to get at that smell so faint only a dog nose would pick it up.
It’s different than needing to go outside and do their business. Dogs smell those rubbers and pussy plugs swinging in the hot wind, and dogs start to slobber.
God forbid you open that door. Most folks got right on the phone, blaming each other for the mess and calling someone else to come pick up.
Cammy Elliot: Country around here, it’s so flat folks can see from anywhere to anywhere just by looking. Regular folks hold to too much dignity to go hiking out in the face of a Sex Tornado. Nobody wants the community watching them harvest the s
hame like so many ripe tomatoes.
It’s either all the folks pick up their own, or nobody will.
Always, a big showdown. A decency stalemate.
Mary Cane Harvey ( Teacher): If I wasn’t still teaching, Lord, the tales I could tell you about Buster Casey. An exceptional young man.
Sheriff Bacon Carlyle: Don’t forget how some folks, including the FBI, was saying his Grandma Esther was Rant’s Victim Number One.
Mary Cane Harvey: Buster never got higher than a C in any language-arts course, but there was a sense that Buster would build you the entire world out of just sticks and pebbles and the few words he’d learned. I’d compare it to Tramp Art that men make in prisons, or sailors used to make on voyages that took months. For example, scale models of the Vatican built out of wooden matchsticks, or the Acropolis assembled from sugar cubes glued together. These are artworks based on limited materials and tools, but requiring enormous amounts of time and focus. Monuments to patience.