Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

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.

Every time his dad ran over one with the power mower, you'd have exploded stink—everywhere. On the mower blade, on the grass, all over his father's boots and pant legs. Rant's hand-painted hand grenades, turned into land mines. The lawn and the garden were both disaster areas. Rant said inside the chain-link fence was a jungle. Black stink sprayed on each side of the house. Everything gone so wild you couldn't see the porch. Driving up, you'd think no one lived there.

Bodie Carlyle: He dyed eggs gray with a red stripe, made to match CS gas ABC-M7A2 riot grenades. Light green with a white top half, to be AN-M8 smoke grenades. Mrs. Casey, she bottled the leftover boil water. Jars of bright red and yellow, blue and green, they were all she had left of her garden. So the sun couldn't fade them, she put the jars in the back of a cabinet above the fridge.

The rest of the year, Rant used to sneak out drops of those colors. Summer into Christmas, he'd dig his dad's dirty shorts out of the laundry pile, and Rant would eye-dropper spots of yellow into the crotch of every pair.

After every sit-down piss, Mr. Casey would dangle his dick, trying to get out the last stray drop. Blotting with a square of toilet paper. But every week, more yellow spots in his shorts. It almost killed his pa when Rant switched to using drops from the red food color.

Echo Lawrence: As an adult, Rant's favorite way to skip work was to put a drop of red food coloring into each eye and tell his boss he had conjunctivitis. You know, pinkeye. For a week's sick leave, he'd use yellow to imply hepatitis. Rant's real master stroke was to arrive at his job and let someone else see his eyes, red or yellow, and make the boss force him to go home.

Rant would arrive at my place with his bright-yellow eyes, and we'd cruise the field for a tag team.

Bodie Carlyle: Mr. Casey spent big bucks trying to cure a bladder infection he never did have. He swallowed so much antibiotics he couldn't take a solid shit most of that year.

Echo Lawrence: Before he died, Rant gave me a white hardboiled egg. He said he'd written something on the shell with white wax, but it's impossible to read, white wax on a white shell. If anything happened to him, Rant said only then could I dye the egg and read the message.

By now, that egg is so old I'm afraid to touch it. If the shell cracks, with the smell that'll come out, I'll be evicted.

Bodie Carlyle: After Rant took off to the city, after he died, the FBI come and grilled me. You should've seen how their eyes lighted up when I told them about the Easter hand grenades.

Irene Casey (Rant's Mother): The winter after Chet quit mowing the yard, all winter, dog packs used to come roll on their backs. To work the stink into their fur. The same dogs that tore up Grandma Esther. Makes no sense, how dogs can hanker after something so awful. A stink bad as pain, dogs seem to wear it with pride.

6–The Tooth Fairy

Bodie Carlyle (Childhood Friend): Don't laugh, but one landmark summer, a stick of licorice cost you five dollars in gold. A regular plastic squirt gun set you back fifty bucks.

The spring of the Tooth Fairy upset the whole, entire Middleton standard of living.

First happened is Rant come to my house a Saturday, with his Scout kerchief tied round his neck, and him telling my mom we needed the entire day to collect old paint cans for a recycling merit badge.

Before thenabouts, Rant and me was just-neckerchief Scouts. If all your folks could buy you was the yellow kerchief for round your neck, you was the bottom rung of Cub Scouting. Other boys, well-off boys, had the midnight-blue uniform shirt. Rich boys had the uniform shirt and pants. Milt Tommy boasted the regulation Scout knife and scabbard, the Scout belt with the brass buckle, and the compass that you could hook to hang off the belt. Wore his shoulder sash sewed all over with merit badges to every meeting.

Brenda Jordan (Childhood Friend): Promise not to tell, but a time we were dating, Rant Casey told me about a stranger. The time his Grandma Esther lay dying, a stranger drove up the road from nowheres. Said he'd look after Esther, and he told Rant where to find the gold. Just a tall old man, Rant says.

That old man told he was Rant's real, true daddy, come visiting from the city. That stranger told how Chester Casey was nobody.

Bodie Carlyle: Didn't matter how hard you earned it, a Scout merit badge with all that fancy 'broidery still cost five dollars. Rant and me weren't getting none of those badges.

That summer, we pushed a wheelbarrow, going to farms to knock on doors. Asking: Can we take away any rusted cans of old, dried paint folks might have stacked round the place? Cub Scouting scrap-metal project, Rant tells them, and folks smile, only too happy to be rid of old cans. All Saturday, until Rant and me collect us a pile in his folks' barn.

Rant screwdrivers the metal lid off one can, and the insides is solid pink paint left over from a bedroom ain't been that color since forever. Forgot colors of handed-down rooms of farmhouses all over. No surprises. Just dead paint. Until Rant pries open a can and the insides is packed with newspapers, some balled up, some papers is wrapped tight round something hard. Rolled open, inside the newspaper balls is old bottles. Black-blue glass from old-time-ago bottles. Little face-cream and medicine jars.

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