Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

Echo Lawrence: Come on. Driving around any hillbilly burg between midnight and sunrise, you take your chances. The police don't have much to do but blare their siren at you. The Middleton sheriff held our driver's licenses in the beam of his flashlight while he lectured us about the city. How Rant Casey had been killed by moving to the city. City people were all murderers. Meaning us.

This sheriff was boosting some kind of Texas Ranger affect, plugged into and looping some John Wayne brain chemistry. Boost a drill sergeant through a hanging judge, then boost that through a Doberman pinscher, and you'd get this sheriff. His shoulders stayed pinned back, square. His thumbs hooked behind his belt buckle. And he rocked forward and back on the heels of his cowboy boots.

Shot asked, "Has anybody been by to murder Rant's mom yet?"

This sheriff wore a brown shirt with a brass star pinned to one chest pocket, a pen and a folded pair of sunglasses tucked in the pocket, and the shirt tucked into blue jeans. Engraved on the star, it said "Officer Bacon Carlyle."

Come on. Talk about the worst question Shot could ask.

Neddy Nelson: You tell me, how in 1844 did the physicist Sir David Brewster discover a metal nail fully embedded in a block of Devonian sandstone more than three hundred million years old?

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: You might see Middleton from the air, flying between New York and Los Angeles, and you'll always wonder at how people can exist in such a place. Envision ratty sofas abandoned on porches. Cars parked in front yards. Houses half off their foundations, balanced on cinderblocks, with chickens and dogs sleeping underneath. If it looks like a natural disaster has occurred, that's only because you didn't see it beforehand.

Neddy Nelson: How do you explain the fact that an Illinois housewife, Mrs. S. W. Culp, broke open a lump of coal and found a gold necklace embedded inside it?

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Despite the dreary scenery, it's all very sexual, these towns. It's only the individual who attains an early beauty and sexuality who becomes trapped here. The young men and women who acquire perfect breasts and muscles before they know how best to use that power, they end up pregnant and mired so close to home. This cycle concentrates the best genetics in places you'd never imagine. Like Middleton. Little nests of wildly attractive idiots who give birth and survive into a long, ugly adulthood. Venuses and Apollos. Small-town gods and goddesses. If Middleton has produced one remarkable product in the tedious, dull, dusty history of this community, that extraordinary product was Rant Casey.

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."