Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey Page 5

  The newspaper feels soft as pool-table felt, not white paper but yellow, full of crimes to end all crimes, wars and plagues preached to be the end of the world. Every year of newspaper announcing another new end of the world.

  Hartley Reed ( Proprietor of the Trackside Grocery): One kid, the Jordan girl, she brung in a handful of gold coins. Most of them Liberty Head dollars going back to 1897. Found out, later on, she’d took a rock and hammered apart her grandma’s dentures. Traded those loose teeth for this “Tooth Fairy money,” the kids called it. Brung the coins to me, and took home a dollhouse come special-order from the Walker’s catalogue.

  Bodie Carlyle: Inside them paint cans is stuffed coin money. Gold and silver coin money, packed tight to stay quiet. Some stamped with eagles fighting snakes, and some coins with pretty girls or old men, the girls showed standing, hardly dressed, but the old men showing just their wrinkled face.

  “Gold bugs,” Rant says, folks not trusting governments or the bank. Nor neighbors, nor family. Nor wives. Lonely alone misers, Rant says, stockpiling gold and silver and heart-attacking with their life’s secret unshared.

  Rant says you can’t call it robberying if the owners is dead and if the right and lawful heirs wasn’t loved enough to get told about the money being hid. Pirate treasures. Those paint cans lined up on shed shelves, rusting in barns and the trunks of abandoned cars.

  Turns out Rant knowed the money was around, not in every paint can but enough, knowed it for a long time, but didn’t bother to fetch any cans until he’d figured how to reason us having such riches. Two just-neckerchief Scouts, without scratch to buy the merit badges coming to us, now spending gold and silver money with dates on it going back a hundred and more years.

  Hartley Reed: Supply and demand. Nobody pointed a gun to make those kids spend their money. Funds was their money, to buy whatever they wanted. Just natural, when demand increases so do prices. When you get every kid in town bidding up cherry Fizzies, the cost is bound to inflate.

  Bodie Carlyle: The inflation is how Rant figured to launder our pirate treasure. Starting with our most best friends in fifth grade, we asked around: Who had a tooth loose? Any kid with a coming-out tooth—cha-ching—we gived him a silver or a gold coin and tell him to say the Tooth Fairy brung it. Fifth grade, most kids figure the Tooth Fairy’s a lie, but our folks ain’t told us as much.

  Every weekend, we’re collecting paint cans, pushing that wheelbarrow down longer roads to get to more far-off farms, isolated spreads where the real left-behind money’s gone to pile up.

  And every week, we’re giving kids more gold and silver to tell their folks is from the Fairy for a baby tooth.

  Most folks knowed here’s a lie, but moms and dads not wanting to admit their own lying about the Tooth Fairy and Santy Claus and all. Us lying to our folks, them lying to us, nobody wanted to admit to being the liar.

  None of the other fifth-graders ratted on Rant or me, since they want to keep the money and figure more’s coming.

  Everybody caught trapped in the same Tooth Fairy lie.

  You can get plenty of folks telling the same lie if they got a stake in it. You get everybody telling the same lie and it ain’t a lie, not no more.

  Livia Rochelle ( Teacher): A year I was teaching fifth grade, the Elliot girl brought me a gold coin and asked how much it was worth in trade for Tootsie Rolls. We looked up the coin in the library, and it was a two-and-one-half dollar Liberty Head, dated 1858. The obverse side showed a woman’s profile, crowned across her forehead with the word “Liberty,” and thirteen stars going around her.

  According to the book we checked, that gold piece was valued at fifteen thousand dollars.

  My fear was that she’d stolen the coin, so I asked how she’d come to have it. That Elliot girl, she told me the Tooth Fairy left it in exchange for a tooth she’d lost, and she pointed a finger to show me a gap in the side of her smile. A molar toward the front was gone, just a baby tooth.

  Bodie Carlyle: Bicuspids brung five dollars, gold. A molar, ten. Silas Hendersen claimed to lose twelve incisors, nine canines, and sixteen wisdom tooths in the passing of that summer vacation. Was older kids selling their teeth to fifth-graders for a half-cut of the Fairy money. Kids ’tempting to pass off horse tooths, dog tooths, big cow tooths chewed down to the stub and roots. Got so Rant Casey turned tooth expert. Knowed a silver filling from mercury amalgam. A real broke tooth from a pried-off crown. Piled up in Rant’s bedroom, he had soup cans of folks’ teeth, then cigar boxes, shoe boxes, then shopping bags. The Middleton Tooth Museum.

  Making all the fifth grade rich, it didn’t look as suspect, Rant and me being rich. But for every gold or silver coin we passed on to a kid, we held back two for each of us. Rant holding back double what I did, not spending his.

  After plenty of money come into play around town, what Rant and me spended only looked reasonable. Regular, compared to the new standard of living.

  Team captains took money on the side, so even the loserest ball player could pitch an inning. Teachers at Middleton Elementary would take a couple hundred under the table in exchange for a report card of straight A’s. Was babysitters bribed a hundred dollars in sterling silver so kids could stay up, watching movies past midnight.

  Livia Rochelle: Mr. Reed at the Trackside Grocery was only too happy to sell them candy. Another reflection of the time, the grocery took out the “Gifts for M’Lady” section and extended the toy and hobby selection all the way down to frozen foods. For a year, it seemed as if half the store was candy bars and air rifles and dolls. You had to drive clear to Pitman Mills for a new filter for your furnace, but the Trackside stocked seventeen different colors and sizes of bottle rockets.

  Bodie Carlyle: We learned folks will sell anything to anybody if the money’s enough. Inflated the whole entire Middleton economy. Flush with Tooth Fairy cash, kids didn’t clamor to mow lawns. Returnable pop bottles and beer bottles piled up alongside the shoulder of roads.

  Hereabouts, folks called it the “trickle-up” theory of prosperity. All the kids rich. All the adults smiling and wheedling and playing nice to get that money.

  Looking back, we sparked a boom and rebirth of little downtown Middleton. Kids buyed new bikes, and the Trackside finally paved its parking lot. Kids going back to school that fall, they wore lizard-skin cowboy boots. Rodeo belt buckles studded with turquoise. Wristwatches so heavy they made a kid lope to one side when he walked.

  The second boom come at Christmas, with Santy Claus stuffing gold and silver in the stockings of fifth-graders, didn’t matter good or bad.

  Livia Rochelle: In my classroom, I tried to impress on the students that reality is a consensus. Objects, from diamonds to bubble gum, only have value because we all agree they do. Laws like speed limits are only laws because most people agree to respect them. I tried to argue that their gold was worth infinitely more than the junk they wanted to trade for, but it was like watching Native Americans sell their tribal lands for beads and trinkets.

  The children of Middleton really were driving our economy. Within the week, that little Elliot girl was sneaking Tootsie Rolls in class. By junior high school, she had a face like raw hamburger meat.

  Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher): The spooky part is, except for Rant, most people in Middleton had no idea how far someone had gone to acquire that gold.

  Mary Cane Harvey ( Teacher): The children told me about one woman selling shaved ice in a paper cone with cherry syrup, two cones for a gold dollar. You’d watch kids take two bites and drop the rest in the playground grass.

  Money you don’t work to earn, you spend very quickly.

  Brenda Jordan: The Tooth Fairy come different to every family. At the Elliots’, they wrapped a lost tooth in tissue and slept with it under a pillow. In the morning, inside that tissue was the money. The Perrys, they dropped the tooth in a glass half full of water and set it on the kitchen windowsill. In the morning, instead of the tooth was money. The Hendersens done the ritual same
as the Elliots, but they used a lace doily they called “the tooth hankie.” The Perrys always used the same glass, a fancy cut-glass jigger they called the “tooth glass.” My family, we put the tooth in water but we left it sitting, overnight, on the bedside table. Near a window left open a crack for the Fairy to fly inside.

  The sole and only time I almost told on Rant Casey was one night I changed my tooth in the glass for an 1897 Morgan silver dollar. But in the morning, it was just a regular quarter-dollar, dated modern. I knowed my folks had switched and took the real money, but I had to act happy.

  Cammy Elliot ( Childhood Friend): Adults lying about the Tooth Fairy. Kids lying. Everybody knowing that everybody was lying. Then adults selling helium balloons for a hundred bucks to kids who didn’t know any better. Adults stealing from kids, then merchants stealing from folks. Greed on top of greed.

  Cross my heart, the summer of the Tooth Fairy destroyed all credibility anybody had in Middleton. Since then, nobody’s word stands up. To everybody, everybody else is a liar. But folks still smile and act nice.

  Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): That next Thanksgiving, Rant’s Granny Bel is in line for a seat at the adult table. Then his Uncle Clem. Then Uncle Walt and Aunt Patty. Rant says his mom stood there and counted on her fingers—four, five, six relatives would have to die before she’d eat like a grown-up.

  Before the end of that Thanksgiving dinner, Rant’s Granny Bel was already sweating with fever. Bel’s running a fever of 105 degrees, but complaining of the cold. Her other symptoms include dizziness, fatigue, and muscle aches. Rant says Granny Bel can’t catch her breath because, it turns out, her lungs are filling with fluid. Her kidneys have failed. Halfway to the hospital, Rant says his Granny Bel’s stopped breathing.

  Echo Lawrence: It turns out, lucky Grandma Bel’s been infected by a killer virus. It’s called the “hantavirus,” and you get it from something Rant called the “white-footed mouse.” The mouse shits, and the shit dries into dust. You breathe the shit dust, and the virus kills you inside of six weeks.

  She’s an old lady wearing red lipstick, with powder on her nose.

  Rant says the county tested the talc in Bel’s compact, and of course it was half mouse shit. The dried, ground-up dust of wild-mouse turds. The powder puff was loaded with shit dust. Mystery solved. Kind of solved.

  Shot Dunyun: Don’t get the idea Rant Casey was some kind of naturopathic serial killer—spiders, fleas, mice, and bees—but you could make that argument.

  Bodie Carlyle: Just a little part of my gold bought me that midnight-blue Cub Scout shirt and pants, bought the Scout knife, the belt, and the compass. Since Milt Tommy was a sixth-grader and didn’t get no treasure, I paid him a hundred bucks in gold for his sash with every merit badge already sewed to it. Every badge from First Aid to Good Citizenship.

  Folks really will sell you anything for the right price.

  And I learned a cash-bought merit badge ain’t worth shit.

  7–Haunted House

  Bodie Carlyle ( Childhood Friend): The only gold money Rant spent was, one day he pushed a wheelbarrow down the road, all the way to the Perry Meat Packing plant.

  Reverend Curtis Dean Fields ( Minister, Middleton Christian Fellowship): Inside the grange hall, the annual haunted house consisted of old oilcloth tarps, smelling from train diesel, hung up to make a pitch-dark tunnel you’d walk inside. How folks hung the tarps, it made the tunnel turn right and left, turning back on itself to confuse you and make the walk last long as possible. Kids waited at the start, and Rant took them through one at a time. Kid stuff inside. At the far end was a party with a costume contest, cake, and candy. One year, a piñata.

  Inside, the tunnel was pitch-dark except when lights flashed to show something scary. The far end was most dark, and Rant would blindfold you. He’d put your hand in a big mixing bowl full of cooked elbow macaroni stirred with cold butter, and he’d tell you, “This is brains.” You’d feel a bowl of grapes coated with corn oil, or peeled hard-cooked eggs, and Rant would say, “These is pulled-out eyeballs.” Pretty tame stuff these days. Hard for a kid’s imagination, standing in the dark, feeling a bowl of warm gelatin water while Rant Casey says, “This is fresh blood…” Anymore, it’s pretty hard for imagination to make that seem horrible.

  Luella Tommy ( Childhood Neighbor): At the party end of the haunted tunnel, kids is gobbling cake and playing Ducky Ducky. Playing Pass the Orange. Kids ask can they have napkins to wipe off their hands, after touching the pretend brains and lungs and scary junk. Other kids just wipe their hands on their costumes or on each other.

  The little Elliot girl comes out the tunnel, red up to both elbows. Real red. Crying. Dressed as a little angel with tissue-paper wings stretched on coat-hanger wire and a wire halo dusted with gold glitter, the Elliot girl wipes her eyes with one hand and smears red across her face. The Elliot girl, just sobbing, she says, “Rant Casey put a real live heart in my bare hand…”

  And I told her, “No, honey. It was make-believe.” I spit on a napkin to wipe her face and said, “That heart was just a plain old peeled tomato…” My first fear is she’s scared. I’m kneeled down, wiping her face with a paper napkin, and the paper’s coming apart. Then I see how sticky the red is, gumming her skirt together in folds. Sticky and blotched with dark spots. Clots. Not just red food color. And there’s a smell. On top the diesel stink of those old tarps, that creosote smell same as railroad ties on a hot day, I can smell a sweet kind of marigold, kind of potty smell of meat gone bad.

  Glenda Hendersen ( Childhood Neighbor): For God’s sake. All the kids, just their fingers, one hand or both, some their arms and their costumes, little pirates and fairies and hobos, but they’re all smeared with blood. Red blood so old it’s gone black. Touching the cake, they got blood on the vanilla icing. Blood on the ladle for the fruit punch, and the orange for Pass the Orange. Fingerprints of blood all over the soda crackers for playing Whistling Crackers.

  On the concrete floor of the grange hall, leading out of the tarp tunnel, come an army of little footprints, the tread marks of sneakers and sandals, all printed in sticky blood. Lowell Richards, from the high school, he borrows a flashlight and goes to take a look.

  Sheriff Bacon Carlyle ( Childhood Enemy): Worse than the worse-ever police crime-scene photo.

  Luella Tommy: Folks rumored maybe Irene Casey brung home and froze her afterbirth when Buddy was born. My first impression was, could be, Buddy made it a scene in the haunted house: the Hanged Man, the Ghost, the Vision of Hell, and Irene Casey’s Placenta…

  Thank God I was wrong—but not by far off.

  Polk Perry ( Childhood Neighbor): Wouldn’t have sold Rant Casey those eyeballs if I’d knowed what that runt had planned. What went on, that’s a surefire sign the Casey boy would grow up to be a killer.

  Lowell Richards ( Teacher): In the dark, Rant Casey holds the Hendersen boy’s hand, dipping that hand into bowls. In the circle of my flashlight, bowls of blood thick as pudding. Bowls of slaughterhouse lungs. Pig and steer lungs, gray and heaped up. Bowls of squirmy gray brains, all busted and mashed together. Bowels and kidneys slopped on the floor.

  There’s one salad bowl rolling with different-size eyeballs. Cow, pig, and horse eyeballs all staring up, smudged with bloody fingerprints. All this mess starting to warm, starting to stink. Kidneys and bladders and cookie sheets heaped with intestines.

  Polk Perry: History is, it’s just a nightmare. Cut-off tongues laying everywhere.

  Lowell Richards: With me watching, Rant Casey held the Hendersen boy’s hand open, palm-up, and set something shining and dark in the fingers, saying, “This is a heart…”

  A huge dead cow’s heart.

  And the Hendersen boy’s giggling, blindfolded, and squeezing the heart. Blood oozing out the cut-off tubes.

  Bodie Carlyle: It’s spooky to consider, us turning teeth into gold and gold into eyeballs. Things in life is either flesh or money, like they can’t be both at the same time. That would be lik
e somebody being both alive and dead. You can’t. You got to choose.

  Sheriff Bacon Carlyle: Him being a Casey, ’course he made it look by accident. Told folks he thought that’s how the haunted house was set up, always. Said he didn’t know pillars of the community as trusted and honored and respected as Scout den leaders, grown-ups, would lie to little kids. Just like a Casey to play dumb. Rant said how since forever kids looked forward to touching brains and lungs. Said it was nothing scary to touch old macaroni. Rant made the old, respectable way we did things, using grapes and food color, sound like the shameful crime.

  Lowell Richards: Rant Casey wasn’t evil. He was more like, he was trying to find something real in the world. Kids grow up connected to nothing these days, plugged in and living lives boosted to them from other people. Hand-me-down adventures. I think Rant wanted everybody to experience just one real adventure. As a community, something to bond folks.

  Everybody in town seeing the same old movie or boosting the same peak, that doesn’t bring folks together. But after kids came home, their costumes matted with blood, blood under their little fingernails for a week, and their hair stinking, that had folks talking. Can’t say they were happy, but folks were talking and together.

  Something really did happen that only belonged to Middleton.

  Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): It wasn’t only the boosted experiences that bothered Rant. It was dipshit kids done up as soldiers and princesses and witches. Eating cake flavored with artificial vanilla. Celebrating a harvest that didn’t occur anymore. Fruit punch that came from a factory. A ritual to placate ghosts, or whatever bullshit Halloween does, practiced by people who had no awareness of that. What bothered Rant was the fake, bullshit nature of everything.