Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

Echo Lawrence: Get this. Around midnight in Middleton, Shot Dunyun and I parked at the turn-off to their farmhouse, next to a mailbox with «Casey» painted on it. In the middle of a lot of crops, the house was white with a long porch along the front, a steep roof, and one dormer window looking over the porch: Rant's attic bedroom with the cowboy wallpaper.

Bushes and flowers grow close to the foundation, and mowed grass spreads out to a chain-link fence. We could see a barn painted brown, almost hidden behind the house. Everything else is wheat, to the flat circle of the horizon going around every side of Neddy's Cadillac. Shot fiddled with the radio, hunting for traffic updates.

From DRVR Radio Graphic Traffic: Just a heads-up. Watch out for the two-car fender bender along the right shoulder, westbound at Milepost 67, on the City Center Thruway. Both vehicles appear to be wedding parties, complete with the tin cans tied to their rear bumpers. Traffic is slow, as drivers rubberneck to watch the brides and grooms scream and throw wedding cake at each other. Be on the lookout for bridesmaids and white rice in the roadway…

Echo Lawrence: Shot fell asleep, snoring against the inside of the driver's door. I kept waiting for a sign Irene Casey was still alive and no mysterious stranger had strangled or stabbed her to death yet.

Neddy Nelson: Tell me how in 1913 did the anthropologist H. Reck discover a modern human skull buried in Early Pleistocene soil of the Olduvai Gorge? Explain how modern human skulls have also been unearthed from Early Pleistocene and Middle Pliocene strata in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Ragazzoni, Italy, respectively?

Shot Dunyun: We walked around their cruddy cemetery, a mess of lawn-mowered weeds, but we couldn't find Rant's grave. How weird is that? We found the best friend's name in a phone book, Bodie Carlyle, then found his trailer at the end of a dirt road. Tumbleweeds piled window-deep against it, and a pit bull chained and barking in the dirt yard. This was hours before sunrise. We didn't even knock on the trailer door.

Echo Lawrence: Forget it. I never did see Irene Casey. We didn't even knock on her door. For all we knew, she was already dead inside that farmhouse.

Wallace Boyer (Car Salesman): Sell cars long enough and you'll see: Nobody's all that original. Any lone weirdo comes from a big nest of weirdos. What's weird is, you go to some pigsty village in Slovakia, and suddenly even Andy Warhol makes perfect sense.

Echo Lawrence: Give me a break. At dawn, that redneck sheriff pulls up next to our car and bullhorns that we're in violation of the federal Emergency Health Powers Act and the I-SEE-U curfew. We didn't want to leave Mrs. Casey unprotected, but the Big Chief Sheriff points his gun at us and says, "How about you-all come into town for some questioning…"

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: In Middleton, sleeping dogs have the permanent right-of-way.

3–Dogs

Bodie Carlyle (Childhood Friend): Wintertime, Middleton dogs run in a pack. Regular farm dogs hereabouts, they'll tear off and disappear, except you can hear them howling and barking at night. Other dogs, people car-dump them at the side of the road. Abandoned. City folks figure any dog can fend for itself, turn wild, but most mutts will starve until they're hungry enough to eat the shit left by some other varmint. The shit's crawling with fly eggs. Most of those let-go dogs die of worms.

Other dogs, they pack together to stay warm. The dogs that survive. The pack runs down rabbits and mule deer. Come winter, the farm dogs hear the packs howling over a fresh kill down in the trees along the river at night, and the farm dogs take off.

A pet dog hears that howl, and, no matter how much you call, even the nicest dog forgets his name. Except for their howling, all winter, they're as gone as dead. Snow starts to fall and your pet dog, your best friend, is nothing but the wolf-man sound of far-off howling in the dark. Sound carries forever when the air turns cold.

Wintertime, a kid's worst nightmare was walking home after dark and hearing a dog pack, all that howling and snapping, coming closer and louder in the dark. Something with a zillion teeth and claws. Folks come across a mule deer caught by a pack, and the skull might be the biggest chunk left. The rest of any hide or skeleton you'd find in bites, tugged apart by teeth and scattered all over. With a rabbit, you might find one little foot in a mess of fur, spread everywhere. Blood everywhere. The rabbit's foot, with a little wet, soft fur, just like folks carry for luck.