Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey Read online

  Lowell Richards ( Teacher): A clear corollary formed between sunny weather and the number of boys suffering from painful penile erections. At issue wasn’t the penises, but the failure to occlude them while in their turgid state. Furthermore, the district’s legal counsel advised that a dress code requiring constraining, modest, fully binding undergarments would be impossible to enforce and serve the negative purpose of drawing increased attention to the issue.

  Our chief effort intended to deal with the issue of engorged phalluses obliquely and indirectly. Legal counsel advised no direct condemnation of erections on school property. No district representative was to acknowledge or attempt to mask or resolve any obvious erections.

  Cammy Elliot: The biggest secret in Rant’s life was his clothes. At home, he had a closet full of shirts and pants and jeans and vests. The hangers packed together so close the closet rod sagged in the middle from the weight. The trouble was, Irene Casey couldn’t not be creative. She wouldn’t not express herself. She was always trying some new skill, embroidering sunflowers and ivy leaves. Smiling half-moons and stars. Trying iron-on patches or colors of glitter paint. Chrome rivets. Batik and tie-dye. Mrs. Casey would sit up half a night, hunched over and stitching herself blind in bad light, trying to make regular clothes into something special.

  Wouldn’t hurt Rant’s pride to wear rainbow glitter and embroidery to high school, but he couldn’t tolerate what kids said about his ma’s work. Kids saying she was a terrible artist. Saying she had no kind of talent. He wasn’t wearing his heart on his sleeve. It’s more like she’d sewed her own heart on Rant’s sleeve.

  Logan Elliot ( Childhood Friend): Casey had the crowd of us whipped into a frantic. Shouting equal rights for hard-ons, saying how we’re oppressed, and burning jock straps in the school parking lot.

  Leif Jordan ( Childhood Friend): Rant advocating for us, our demands included a therapeutic, all-hours lunchroom, since it’s a known impossibility to eat food and maintain a woody. We asked for nothing short of equal recognition of our biological…But the next word stumped us. Should we say “obstacles”? “Handicaps”? “Disabilities”? This last word, we tortured over.

  We finally settled on the word “burden,” asking for “full and equal recognition of the burden inherent in the male anatomy.” Hearing how “burden” sounded fine and noble.

  Bodie Carlyle: Not much in all his dry years of algebra had trained Mr. W to deal with a potentially life-threatening emergency boner situation. Being displayed as a geometry idiot, or sporting wood in class—either way, you were trading away your dignity. At least this way it was Rant posing the tough problem and Wyland forced to sweat out the figuring with all those eyes waiting on him.

  Leif Jordan: We’d maybe talk some doctor into calling it “chronic boner syndrome.”

  Mary Cane Harvey ( Teacher): Rant Casey told me himself: “This here’s my inoculation against ever being embarrassed and humiliated in geometry, ever again.”

  Cammy Elliot: Had kids, politelike, raising their hand to say, “Beg pardon, Miss Harvey…” Saying, “I’d enjoy nothing more than diagramming that lovely sentence, but I’m suffering a chunk of pig iron so beet red it’s starting to pain me…”

  Cross my heart. Kids said, “Could be, if I got myself a breath of fresh air…” Until half the class was outside.

  Lowell Richards: Instructors hesitated in prompting full participation from male students out of the anxiety that students required to stand might exhibit inappropriate arousal, generating classroom disruption and undermining the instructor’s authority.

  Sheriff Bacon Carlyle ( Childhood Enemy): If we were talking about naturally sprung boners, that would be another kettle of fish. But these here were store-bought, chemically engineered woodies sprouted on purpose to disrupt the peaceful classroom environment.

  Lowell Richards: Though it was widely rumored that certain students abused medications designed to treat erectile dysfunction, legal counsel advised that no just cause existed for requiring that students submit urine for drug testing. Legal counsel cautioned that, though some tumescence may result from illegally obtained prescription drugs, the majority of genital arousal was naturally occurring and thus protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act. On advice from the school district’s legal counsel, the administration organized a presentation exclusively for male students in the affected peer groups.

  Dr. David Schmidt ( Middleton Physician): My slide show consisted of color photographs documenting penises suffering extended priapism and the resulting gangrenous injury. For the purpose of this lecture, I selected the most extreme examples, members on which the foreskin, glans penis, and engorged corpus carvenosa had discolored to a purple-black or iridescent dark green, typical of advanced necrosis in oxygen-deprived tissues.

  Silas Hendersen: Some kids would take a shoelace and tie it off. Other kids brung a cucumber. Tying off something full of blood could hurt, but keeping track of a cucumber took all your concentration. God forbid, but you’d see guys limping halfway to the bathroom for readjustment, and a cucumber or zucchini squash slips out the cuff of their jeans.

  Kids called it “Sportin’, Spottin’, or Stuffin’.”

  Spotting was, you’d take a fingertip of cooking oil or shampoo, something too greasy to dry out, and you put a dark spot on your front. Fake peter tracks.

  Lowell Richards: The district’s strategy remained only marginally successful.

  Cammy Elliot: Rant Casey wore those same two shirts to school because he couldn’t bear to have kids make fun of his mom. Even he figured the embroidered rainbows and the ivy she’d stitched up the legs of his blue jeans, they looked pretty sad. So he brung home two secondhand shirts and a pair of plain jeans, and kept them hid in the barn, where he could change clothes on his way to or from school.

  He was double-trapped. If he wore the clothes his mom monkeyed with, he’d hear jokes about her until they broke his heart. But if Rant told her to lay off decorating his stuff, then he’d be breaking her heart.

  Danny Perry: History is, a week into spring term, and Rant sat down to negotiate our demands with the school board. Behind closed doors, in the teachers’ lounge, they talked while the rest of us waited in the hallway.

  Bodie Carlyle: The teachers’ lounge being off-limits to us, nobody knowed it had an outside door. After our long butt-sit in the hallway, the school administrators come out. But no Rant Casey.

  Danny Perry: History is, Rant skedaddled out that secret door leads to the outside, sidestepped us, took with him a check for ten thousand dollars and a certificate saying he’s graduated early.

  Logan Elliot: No lie. Rant left us standing there with our boners, taking a political stand with our dicks on the line, and he goes kiting off, paycheck in hand from the school district. Folks is still branded him the Boner Benedict Arnold.

  Silas Hendersen: Without him, the Erection Revolution kind of lost steam. Gone limp. Left us just dumb kids with vegetables stuffed down our shorts and rubber bands wrapped around our wieners.

  Trusting Rant Casey was our mistake.

  Rubber bands was a bigger mistake. Nothing hurts more than snipping a rubber band, snarled and tangled, all mangled up in your short hairs.

  Lowell Richards: The trade-off gave Rant a new school record, awarding him a 4.0 grade-point average and top honors, plus a letter in every sport. Rant Casey, who never kicked a ball or ran a step in his life.

  But if he ever showed up at a class reunion, there’s men in Middleton who’d wait in line to kill him.

  Bodie Carlyle: A paycheck at school graduation—instead of just a diploma. Both them, just paper folks agreed mean more. Being in agreement the big step from a lie to reality.

  Rant sawed how reality was something you could build. Same as the Tooth Fairy money. If enough folks believe a lie, how it ain’t a lie no more.

  Mary Cane Harvey: Even all these years later, I’ll discover “Rant Casey Got Out of Here” carved in a desk in my classroom.
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  Leif Jordan: Sure, some folks never forgave Rant for his betraying us. But most guys, we just shrugged. We shook the carrots out of our pants and got on with life.

  Irene Casey ( Rant’s Mother): We could only afford the plainest things, but I dressed them up with embroidery or rivets. Boys love lots of shiny chrome. Sometimes, I’d sew on special trims or rickrack. I know Buddy loved those clothes. He wore them to school and kept them so nice.

  The night he left home, Buddy packed up the lot of them to wear in the city. He was so proud.

  14–Going Away

  Bodie Carlyle ( Childhood Friend): It took the both of us to haul off Rant’s clothes. A night before he left home, he only pretended to pack them in his suitcase. Got garbage bags and filled those instead, folding those shirts and pants just so. Half his mom’s life wasted in embroidery-ing. The young part of her life spent punching rivets and sewing extra trim on regular blue jeans. Rant, he’d hold each shirt tucked under his chin, petting the wrinkles smooth against his chest, then folding the sleeves. He’d button all the buttons. He piled all the folded pants and shirts into the black plastic bags.

  Over the horizon, beyond the windbreak of Russian olives, three horizons off from the Casey farm, we walked, until we almost got to morning. Getting to nowhere, Rant fished a shirt out from a bag. Holding the collar with one hand, Rant shook a cigarette lighter in his other hand. Rant sparked a little flame and stood there, looking at the bright tie-dyed colors in the weak light. His mom’s masterpiece. That shirt looked brighter and brighter, until Rant had to let go, let it fall, flaming, to his feet. In the firelight, little snake bites of yellow stood around us, dog and coyote and skunk eyes flickering, scavengers, watching, all having sunk teeth into Rant’s skin.

  Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher): The first time you met Rant, the first part you met was his teeth. Instead of chewing gum, him and his redneck friends, they used to pinch up clean tar from the county roads. In summer, black tar oozed up from cracks in the blacktop, and they used to chew it. Teeth they sold to the Tooth Fairy were pitch-black.

  Bodie Carlyle: Rant used to carry his radio out, nights, into the desert. He’d walk, monkeying with the dial to pick up traffic reports from all over the world. Car crashes and whatnot. Holding that radio to his ear, Rant used to smile and listen. Eyes closed, he’d say, “It’s always rush hour somewheres.”

  From DRVR Radio Graphic Traffic: Northbound on the 417 Freeway, at Milepost 79, look for a totally cherry Dodge Monaco, maybe the heaviest coupe ever in mass production, four thousand pounds of Winchester Gray powered with a 175-horsepower V8. Very nice hidden headlights. Word from the officer on the scene is, the driver of the Monaco apparently hit a slick patch and went sideways in the right lane. The driver was a thirty-one-year-old female with the dicing injuries typical of shattered safety glass.

  Echo Lawrence: On Party Crash nights, Rant used to talk about leaving Middleton. How, on his last night at home, he was chewing tar. That night, Rant sat out with his dad on the gravel shoulder of the highway, down the road three mailboxes from the barbed-wire fence at the edge of their farm. The sun going flat-tire against the soft, wheat-field horizon. Chester Casey, squatting on his cowboy-boot heels in the dust smell of the gravel. Rant, butt up on a cardboard suitcase heavy with gold and silver coins.

  Bodie Carlyle: Rant’s old suitcase he had was full to busting with Tooth Fairy money.

  From DRVR Radio Graphic Traffic: The Monaco was T-boned by a Continental Mark IV that’s really worth crying over: California Sunshine Yellow with a cream leather interior, the first model of American automobile to feature “loose cushion” upholstery. The meat-wagon boys called to say the Monaco suffered predominantly left-side injuries, including lacerations of the liver, the spleen, and the left kidney. Immediate cause of death looks like transection of the aorta.

  Echo Lawrence: Rant’s chewing tar that last night of his childhood. His suitcase packed and dragged to the shoulder of the highway, father and son waiting next to the metal bus-stop sign shot Swiss cheese with bullet holes. The wind twisting the sheetmetal sign a hair, side to side. With the wind whistling through those rusty holes, Rant says, “I got a secret I needs to tell.”

  And Chester Casey says, “No.” He says, “No, you don’t. You ain’t got no secrets from me.” A hand pushing down on the top of each thigh, Chet Casey stands up from squatting. Arching and twisting his spine until it pops, Chester kicks the pointed toe of one cowboy boot, just tapping the side of the cardboard suitcase printed to look like leather. His toe tapping the brown cardboard, Rant’s father says, “You ain’t never told me as much, but I knowed you’re packing nothing but cash money here.”

  From DRVR Radio Graphic Traffic: Smart money says the Mark IV has myocardial contusions and lacerations of the pericardial sac, but we can’t confirm that until the coroner opens him up at the morgue. I’m Tina Something with your DRVR Rubberneck Report, every ten minutes or as the wrecks happen…

  Echo Lawrence: The future starts tomorrow, and Rant needs to say this before the bus pulls up. This moment, it’s something his dad won’t want to know. This here, Rant says, is the fact that starts a new future. Or a brand-new past. Or both.

  Rant slapping flies, cupping wind and sand away from his face, he says, “Just so you know,” he swats a bite on the back of his neck and says, “I’m never getting hitched.”

  A star blinks on the edge of the world, getting bright, blinding bright, growing so fast it goes past before you can hear the sound, the wind and dust of it—only a car, already come and gone. The headlights fading over the far side of the world.

  And Rant’s dad, he says, “No.” He squats in the gravel and says, “You only figure that way to put a fright in me.” Chester Casey says, “Soon as you meet a girl name of Echo Lawrence, you’ll figure otherwise.”

  The wind bowing every weed and clump of cheatgrass in the same direction. Shaking every sagebrush. On the wind, you can smell the smoke of embroidery silk and smoldering denim. Chrome rivets.

  Look here. It’s impossible Chester Casey could’ve known my name. We’d never met. At this point, I’d never heard of Middleton or Rant.

  Logan Elliot ( Childhood Friend): The only worst part of the Casey house, when you visited, was how his ma used to listen outside the bathroom door. No lie. The first time I was over, I opened the door, and she stood there blocking the way, telling me, “I would appreciate it, upon future visits to this household, if you would urinate from a seated position…”

  It didn’t matter I didn’t know the word “urinate.”

  Echo Lawrence: That night, waiting for the bus, Rant and his dad squinted as a new star blinked on the horizon, getting big, blowing by in a gust of wind and diesel smoke, the star exploded into white headlights, yellow running lights, red taillights. A cab, sleeper box, double trailer. Then—gone.

  Rant says, “I’m meeting some girl?” He says, “How do you figure that?”

  And his dad says, “Same as I knowed an old man pulled up and talked to you before you come running about your Granny Esther.” Chester says, “Old man in a Chrysler, told you that he was your for-real pa.”

  Spitting black, a sideways stream into the gravel, Rant says, “What model of Chrysler?”

  And Chester Casey says, “Same as I knowed your Granny Esther screamed at the sight of him, called him the Devil, and telled you to run.”

  East of the bus-stop sign, the real stars come on. Straight overhead, more stars blink on. Flicker, and stay bright.

  Scratching at bug bites, rubbing away goosebumps, Rant says, “Supposing that’s the truth,” he says, “what else did that old man tell me?”

  Cammy Elliot ( Childhood Friend): At the Casey house, if you used their peanut butter, Mrs. Casey wanted for you to smoothe what was left in the jar. So it always looked fresh store-bought.

  Echo Lawrence: Chester Casey tells his son, “That old man telled you he was your real pa, he telled you to come find him in the city, soon as you
was able.” Chester’s cowboy boot, the pointed toe taps the cardboard suitcase, and he says, “And that old man telled you where to find all this cash money.”

  And Rant spits black tar, close enough to splash the side of the suitcase. Rabies-infected saliva. Black spattered on the brand-new of the cardboard. Rant just sits there, shaking his head no.

  Chester Casey says, “That old man, he telled the truth about being your for-real pa.”

  Sheriff Bacon Carlyle ( Childhood Enemy): Don’t ask for my feeling sorry. Your average city’s nothing except different levels of pervert. Rant only told that story to fit in. Him and Mr. Casey, they just took their pissing matches a little more far than your average father and son.

  Echo Lawrence: At the edge of the world, another star pops up.

  Rant says, “You’re only lying so I won’t get homesick…” He shifts his ass on the top of that cardboard suitcase full of gold.

  In the city, Chester tells him, Rant will find his real father, and his grandfather. Rant will discover his true nature. “First thing,” Chet says, “soon as you meet Echo Lawrence for the first time, you give her a big kiss for me.” He says, “Let her know, does her cholesterol taste too high.”

  Brenda Jordan ( Childhood Friend): Don’t say I told, but Rant showed me a gold twenty-dollar coin his mama gived him for his going away. Dated 1884. Mrs. Casey told how Chet Casey weren’t Rant’s real daddy, but she’d never tell how come she had that coin she gived him for good luck.