Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey Read online

  Coming in through the Caseys’ kitchen screen door—spreee…whap—you’d find Mrs. Casey with both elbows up on the table. Her reading glasses slid down to the tip of her nose. Her head tilted back. In the middle of the table, a white candle, fat as in church, burning with the smell of vanilla. Around the candle flame, a clear pool of melted wax. Mrs. Casey, she’d dip an embroidery needle into that wax, and she’d hold a white egg in her other hand. Holding the egg at the top and bottom, with a finger and thumb, so she can turn it, she’d write with melted wax on the shell.

  You couldn’t help yourself, you had to stop and watch.

  From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms ( Historian): The young hang mirrors in their homes. The elderly hang paintings. And, if I may make an ungenerous observation, residents of rural communities display crafts—those dubious products of spare time, limited motor skill, and inexpensive yarn.

  Bodie Carlyle: Invisible as spy writing, only Mrs. Casey could tell where the white wax disappeared on the white egg.

  The stove would be crowded, with boiling out of every pot a different smell. Onions. Beets. Spinach greens. The stink of red cabbage. Black coffee. Plus the vinegar smell. In each pot, a different color: yellow, red, green, blue, or brown. Everything boiled down to the color of the cooking water. No lunch ready.

  Her eyes crossed, looking straight down her nose, so concentrating on the wax that her mouth hanged open, red lipstick every day of the year, without looking up, she’d say, “If you two are chewing tar, spit it out.” She’d say, “You’ll find graham crackers over the stove.”

  Me and Rant.

  If you stood there long enough, maybe she’d say how the wax was to keep dye off the egg. At her elbow would be hard-cooked eggs that still looked white, but in truth were half decorated with the parts where dye couldn’t go. Just watching her, it could slip your mind how you had an ant hill waiting outside. Or a dead raccoon. Even a box of wood matches.

  Even being hungry for lunch, you’d get nosing into Mrs. Casey’s egg work.

  From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: It’s compelling that so many cultures practice a meticulous yet transitory art form as a spiritual ritual, prayer, or meditation.

  Bodie Carlyle: Her elbows on the table, one hand dipping her embroidery needle in the wax, her other hand holding the eggs, not looking at Rant and me, one day Mrs. Casey says, “Pull up an egg or get out.” She says, “You’re making me nervous.”

  Mrs. Casey gived us each a needle and a cold hard-cooked egg and told us not to shake the table any. “Get an idea in your head,” she said. And she showed how to dip the tip of a needle into the candle and bring one clear drop of wax back to the shell of a store-bought leghorn egg. “Draw your idea with the needle,” she said. Drop by drop. White on white. Invisible. A secret.

  Rant says, “You tell me. I can’t figure what to draw.”

  And his mom says, “Something’ll come.”

  From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Whether it’s Piranski eggs or the sand mandalas of Tibetan Buddhists, their common theme is to somehow achieve an intense focus and complete absorption of the artist’s attention. Despite the fragile nature of the artwork, the process becomes a means of stepping outside of the temporal.

  Bodie Carlyle: Rant, me, and Mrs. Casey around that kitchen table, all leaned together around that candle with the little flame drowned in sun from the window over the sink, drawing stuff only we could tell, none of us figured to be hungry. None of us, anything more than the wax and egg in our hands. Even with the pots of greens and onions boiling, the kitchen air nothing but steam and food smell, none of us so much as jumped when the screen door went—spree-whap—and Mr. Casey stood standing there.

  “What’s for lunch?” he says.

  “Thought you were eating at the diner,” says Mrs. Casey, still looking cross-eyed on her egg.

  Rant stopped, just holding his egg, not dipping back drops of wax from the candle. Rant’s hands and breathing, froze solid.

  Me, I was drawing a wax day on my egg, a sun with rays, a tree, my house, a wax cloud in the sky, but only I could tell.

  Mr. Casey, he says, “Irene.” He says, “Don’t do this to the boy.”

  And Mrs. Casey says, “You told me you were eating at the diner.”

  Leaned over the stove, sticking his nose in the steam above each pot, sniffing, Mr. Casey says, “Don’t ruin him.”

  Still staring cross-eyed at her egg, the invisible secret of her idea, Mrs. Casey says, “Do what?”

  Rant not drawing anything.

  And Mr. Casey says, “Don’t ruin the boy for getting married.” And he reached for the bowl of eggs beside her elbow on the table. The eggs, plain white but really halfway decorated with all morning of her secret writing. Invisible art.

  “Not those,” Mrs. Casey says, her eyes snapped up, looking over the tops of her eyeglasses.

  But already two eggs gone, disappeared inside Mr. Casey’s hand.

  And yelling loud, outdoors loud, Mrs. Casey says, “Not those!”

  Mr. Casey turns to the window and—tap-tap-taps—the eggs against the sink edge to peel them.

  Me, I drew a wax bird in the sky, flying over my house, invisible. I put itty-bitty drops of wax in the tree to make apples.

  Lunchtime that day was the first I ever felt time get stuck. With Rant and his mom frozen solid, the smell of egg sulfur and vinegar dye and vegetables boiled to stains, a week, a summer, a hundred birthdays come and went. We sat with the sun stopped a century, smack dab in the window above the kitchen sink.

  Even the clocks held their breath.

  Mr. Casey ate the eggs, looking out the kitchen window, his shadow making the candle flame bright enough to see on the table. The hard-cooked smell of sulfur from the peelings he dropped down the drain. He gobbled the two eggs and the screen door went—spree-whap—behind him.

  After that, the sun moved to touch one edge of the window frame. Time came unstuck. All the clock hands started back to tick.

  Sheriff Bacon Carlyle ( Childhood Enemy): Don’t make Chet Casey the villain for the crimes his boy done. My take is you’re not born loving nobody. Love is a skill you learn. Like house-training a dog. Maybe a talent you do or do not build up. Like a muscle. And if you can’t learn yourself to love blood family, then you’ll never truly love. Not nobody.

  Bodie Carlyle: The first egg Mrs. Casey spooned into the dye, that’s the first time all afternoon we saw each other’s secret picture.

  Wood-spooning my egg into the pot of boiled red cabbage, the stink of vinegar and farts, she dipped the egg out colored blue. Sky blue. Blue except where the wax showed a tree with apples, a house, a cloud, and a sun in the blue sky. My house, where I wanted to get home to before Mr. Casey come back.

  Spooning her own egg into the pot of boiled-down beets, Mrs. Casey dipped it out all red. Blood red. Red except for, all around, the fancy work of wax lines, complicated as spiderwebs or lace curtains. But not curtains—words, handwriting. Fancy as poetry you’d find in a valentine card. Too fancy to read.

  Spooning up Rant’s egg, his mom says, “What color?”

  Green, Rant says.

  “Green it is,” she says.

  She stirs the egg around in the pot of soggy, slimy spinach greens. Dipping the egg out of the pot, the wax lines make it look striped, side to side. Sectioned up to make squares.

  Rant touches a finger to the egg. Touches it a second time. He lifts it from the spoon his mom holds. Pinching it by just one end, Rant dips the egg a little ways into the pot of boiled onions. The yellow dye.

  Lifting the egg out, Rant holds it, striped half green and half yellow. The white lines of wax cutting the sides like the lines on a world globe at school.

  “That’s a beautiful pineapple,” Mrs. Casey says.

  “Ain’t a pineapple,” says Rant.

  The half-green, part-yellow egg, striped into little squares by the white lines of wax. Between two fingers, at the top and bottom, Rant
holds up the green-yellow egg, saying, “It’s a MK2 fragmentation grenade.”

  Packed with granulated TNT, he says. Throwable up to a hundred feet. With a burst radius of thirty-three feet, a cast-iron body for shrapnel. A kill radius of seven feet.

  Rant sets the hand grenade on a kitchen towel, where the other eggs, my blue one and his mom’s red one, are drying out. And Rant, he says, “Let’s make lots more.”

  Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher): According to Rant, the garden was his mom’s territory; the lawn, his dad’s. Irene told time by the flowers in bloom. First crocus, then tulips, forget-me-nots, marigolds, snapdragons, roses, day lilies, black-eyed Susans, and sunflowers. The spinach, then the radishes, the lettuce, and the early carrots. To Chester Casey, one week equaled time to mow the grass. One hour meant time to move a lawn sprinkler. We all live by different clocks and calendars.

  One Easter, Rant said his mom hid the eggs among the tulips and rosebushes. She gave him a basket and told him, “Happy hunting, Buddy.”

  Rant still has the scar on his hand where the spider bit him.

  Bodie Carlyle: Easter morning, Rant’s reaching under a plant or a rosebush and he pulls back his hand. Rant’s eyes go—kah-sproing—big and bugged-out—looking at the spider perched on the back of his hand skin. He slaps it away, but underneath, the spot’s already gone red and puffed up. The veins crabbed up, dark red, branching away from the throbbing, hot tooth marks.

  Rant goes back to the kitchen, crying, holding out his bit hand, the fingers already swoll up big and stiff as a catcher’s mitt.

  Mr. Casey takes one look at his boy, one hand swolled and red, the other hand swinging a pink Easter basket of colored eggs, tears rolling down Rant’s cheeks, and Mr. Casey tells him, “Pipe down.”

  Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): The church scene where his Granny Esther keeled over, dead, that’s still fresh in Rant’s mind. The way her dentures bit into her tongue.

  Bodie Carlyle: Mrs. Casey, she’s in the bathroom, putting on her finishing touches before church.

  Mr. Casey swats Rant on the seat of his best Sunday pants and says not to come back inside until he’s found all the eggs.

  Rant still holds out one fat hand, sobbing it’s a black widow spider, sobbing how he’s going to die. Sobbing how bad it hurts.

  His dad turns him around by the shoulders and shoves him back, saying, “Soon as you bring back all those eggs, we’ll get you some medical attention.” Latching the screen door to keep Rant outside, Mr. Casey says, “If you don’t take too long, maybe you won’t lose that hand.”

  Sheriff Bacon Carlyle: Rant always went on about leaving home, getting out and hand-picking himself a new family, but to my way of seeing that’s never going to happen. If you don’t accept your folks for all their worst ways, no stranger can ever measure up. All Rant learned himself is how to leave folks behind.

  Bodie Carlyle: Dressed-up Rant in his bow tie and white shirt, his black patent-leather shoes and belt, his plain, regular Easter egg hunt, it’s now turned into a Race Against Death. His little hands are knocking flowers to one side, busting stems. His feet tramping down petunias. Crushing carrot tops. With every heartbeat, Rant can feel the poison in his hand pumped closer to his brain. The sting of the bite, fading to numb, first his hand losing feeling, then the most part of his arm.

  His mom come outside to find him panting in the dirt, facedown in the compost pile that’s left of her garden, dirt stuck to the web of tears spread out around each green eye.

  Echo Lawrence: So they left him there. They got in their car and drove off to Easter morning services.

  Again, that moment, the end of what we wish would last forever.

  Bodie Carlyle: Rant never found more than those three eggs. They come home and that’s all he had to show for a whole day of hunting. Three eggs and the spider bite, his hand already shrinked back to kid-size.

  That spider, it’s that black widow spider that got Rant hooked on poison.

  Even after Mrs. Casey waded into her garden, all the plants mashed and dug up, she couldn’t find a single one of the Easter eggs she’d hid. The rest of that summer, her garden was ruined. Another week, and Mr. Casey’s yard would be, too.

  Echo Lawrence: Get this. Rant told me he’d found all the eggs, then stashed them in a box, hidden in some barn or shack. Every week, he’d sneak out two or three eggs and stick them in the deepest part of the grass, just before his dad would mow the lawn. By then, the eggs had turned fugly black, the worst kind of rotten.

  Every time his dad ran over one with the power mower, you’d have exploded stink—everywhere. On the mower blade, on the grass, all over his father’s boots and pant legs. Rant’s hand-painted hand grenades, turned into land mines. The lawn and the garden were both disaster areas. Rant said inside the chain-link fence was a jungle. Black stink sprayed on each side of the house. Everything gone so wild you couldn’t see the porch. Driving up, you’d think no one lived there.

  Bodie Carlyle: He dyed eggs gray with a red stripe, made to match CS gas ABC-M7A2 riot grenades. Light green with a white top half, to be AN-M8 smoke grenades. Mrs. Casey, she bottled the leftover boil water. Jars of bright red and yellow, blue and green, they were all she had left of her garden. So the sun couldn’t fade them, she put the jars in the back of a cabinet above the fridge.

  The rest of the year, Rant used to sneak out drops of those colors. Summer into Christmas, he’d dig his dad’s dirty shorts out of the laundry pile, and Rant would eye-dropper spots of yellow into the crotch of every pair.

  After every sit-down piss, Mr. Casey would dangle his dick, trying to get out the last stray drop. Blotting with a square of toilet paper. But every week, more yellow spots in his shorts. It almost killed his pa when Rant switched to using drops from the red food color.

  Echo Lawrence: As an adult, Rant’s favorite way to skip work was to put a drop of red food coloring into each eye and tell his boss he had conjunctivitis. You know, pinkeye. For a week’s sick leave, he’d use yellow to imply hepatitis. Rant’s real master stroke was to arrive at his job and let someone else see his eyes, red or yellow, and make the boss force him to go home.

  Rant would arrive at my place with his bright-yellow eyes, and we’d cruise the field for a tag team.

  Bodie Carlyle: Mr. Casey spent big bucks trying to cure a bladder infection he never did have. He swallowed so much antibiotics he couldn’t take a solid shit most of that year.

  Echo Lawrence: Before he died, Rant gave me a white hardboiled egg. He said he’d written something on the shell with white wax, but it’s impossible to read, white wax on a white shell. If anything happened to him, Rant said only then could I dye the egg and read the message.

  By now, that egg is so old I’m afraid to touch it. If the shell cracks, with the smell that’ll come out, I’ll be evicted.

  Bodie Carlyle: After Rant took off to the city, after he died, the FBI come and grilled me. You should’ve seen how their eyes lighted up when I told them about the Easter hand grenades.

  Irene Casey ( Rant’s Mother): The winter after Chet quit mowing the yard, all winter, dog packs used to come roll on their backs. To work the stink into their fur. The same dogs that tore up Grandma Esther. Makes no sense, how dogs can hanker after something so awful. A stink bad as pain, dogs seem to wear it with pride.

  6–The Tooth Fairy

  Bodie Carlyle ( Childhood Friend): Don’t laugh, but one landmark summer, a stick of licorice cost you five dollars in gold. A regular plastic squirt gun set you back fifty bucks.

  The spring of the Tooth Fairy upset the whole, entire Middleton standard of living.

  First happened is Rant come to my house a Saturday, with his Scout kerchief tied round his neck, and him telling my mom we needed the entire day to collect old paint cans for a recycling merit badge.

  Before thenabouts, Rant and me was just-neckerchief Scouts. If all your folks could buy you was the yellow kerchief for round your neck, you was the bottom rung of Cub Sco
uting. Other boys, well-off boys, had the midnight-blue uniform shirt. Rich boys had the uniform shirt and pants. Milt Tommy boasted the regulation Scout knife and scabbard, the Scout belt with the brass buckle, and the compass that you could hook to hang off the belt. Wore his shoulder sash sewed all over with merit badges to every meeting.

  Brenda Jordan ( Childhood Friend): Promise not to tell, but a time we were dating, Rant Casey told me about a stranger. The time his Grandma Esther lay dying, a stranger drove up the road from nowheres. Said he’d look after Esther, and he told Rant where to find the gold. Just a tall old man, Rant says.

  That old man told he was Rant’s real, true daddy, come visiting from the city. That stranger told how Chester Casey was nobody.

  Bodie Carlyle: Didn’t matter how hard you earned it, a Scout merit badge with all that fancy ’broidery still cost five dollars. Rant and me weren’t getting none of those badges.

  That summer, we pushed a wheelbarrow, going to farms to knock on doors. Asking: Can we take away any rusted cans of old, dried paint folks might have stacked round the place? Cub Scouting scrap-metal project, Rant tells them, and folks smile, only too happy to be rid of old cans. All Saturday, until Rant and me collect us a pile in his folks’ barn.

  Rant screwdrivers the metal lid off one can, and the insides is solid pink paint left over from a bedroom ain’t been that color since forever. Forgot colors of handed-down rooms of farmhouses all over. No surprises. Just dead paint. Until Rant pries open a can and the insides is packed with newspapers, some balled up, some papers is wrapped tight round something hard. Rolled open, inside the newspaper balls is old bottles. Black-blue glass from old-time-ago bottles. Little face-cream and medicine jars.