Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

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.