Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

might have to take a piss. Rant put two fingers inside and takes out something pink. Bigger than a tooth. Smooth and shiny with spit.

Even naked, we were never touching. Dried sticky or wet slimy, between his skin and mine, you could always feel a thin layer of sweat or spit or sperm.

Still propped on both his elbows, Rant's looking at something cupped in his hand.

As if he's just sucked this pink object out of me.

So, of course, I have to sit up and look. But it's a joke.

A little doll. A baby made of pink plastic. And Rant says, 'How did that get in there?' His mother's mantra.

He grins at me, says, 'This here makes me the lucky king…'

It almost didn't matter that his spit gave me rabies.

13–Sporting

Bodie Carlyle (Childhood Friend): Monday mornings, I'd feel wore out from staying plugged in all Sunday night, cramming for Algebra II. Mr. Wyland hands out six or eight hours of homework to boost, and I'd always leave it for the last minute. My eyes closed, I can still hear the voice of the primary witness, the gal who boosted those lessons. Since you can't out-cord thoughts—only sensory junk like taste, smell, sounds, and sights—the primary witness talks through every step of every equation, yakking away, while you watch her hand holding chalk, scratching the numbers on a blackboard.

Her voice saying, 'When X equals the cosine of Y, and Y is of greater value than Z, the determining factor of X must include…' And by then, I'm asleep. Still boosting, but sawing logs. Monday mornings, all I learned was the smell of chalk dust. The tap-tapping of each time her chalk hit the board to make a new line. Not a Smart Board, not even a whiteboard, that's how cheap: a chalkboard. Decades later, I could tell you that primary witness was right-handed and wore a long-sleeve red sweater rolled back a ways at the wrist. Always, the taste of black coffee in her mouth. A Night-timer's hand, somebody told me. No tan on the back. The back and knuckles and palm, all the same color.

Only thing that kept me from failing was, Rant Casey knowed even less than shit, and Mr. Wyland graded on a curve. Most Mondays, before daylight, Rant would come knock on my bedroom window. Beyond a couple horizons we'd walk, until Rant found his hole. With one sleeve rolled up and everything to the shoulder of him stuffed underground, Rant would ask me to teach him. Algebra. History. Social studies. He blamed it on the spider bites, the poison, or having rabies, but he complained his port didn't work. He'd plug in but couldn't boost nothing.

Danny Perry (Childhood Friend): Rant Casey would go down on his belly in the sand, plant his elbows on either side of a burrow, and poke his nose inside. Just from the stink, sniffing some dirty hole, Rant could tell rabbit or coyote or skunk or deadly spider. Could even tell you what kind of spider.

To be Rant Casey's friend was always some test. For guys, you had to shove your hand in his choice of dark hole, far up as your elbow, not figuring what you'd find.

Bodie Carlyle: Us in the desert, watching the light wash up from the horizon, fire colors, I told Rant about the federal I-SEE-U Act and how pale and spooky the algebra hand looked. A hand never out in the sun. The taste of a stranger's coffee still in my mouth.

And Rant says, 'Shit.' He stuffs his free hand down the front of his pants and grits his teeth.

'Spider-bite boner,' he says. 'Always happens.' And he twists around inside his crotch to hide it.

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms (Historian): Chronic priapism is one lesser symptom of a-latrotoxin poisoning. By exploiting his poison-induced erections, Rant was liquidating any collateral he had left in the community. He could never go back home, but he would never have to. Something the wealthy know that most people don't is that you never burn a bridge. Such a waste. Instead, you sell it.

Cammy Elliot (Childhood Friend): Our geometry teacher, Mr. Wyland, the same teacher who dogs us through Algebra I and Algebra II, and drags you to stand at the board and demonstrate your limitation to the class, he folds his arms, sucking his tongue to inside one cheek of his mouth, lowers his eyes at Rant, and says, 'What seems to be the problem, Mr. Casey?'

And Rant ducks his head, his chin nodding down, he tilts his hips up, points with the gun fingers of both hands at his crotch, where the zipper is tented, pointed, poked out so stiff you can see the silver teeth of the steel metal inside. 'Mr. Wyland, sir,' Rant says, 'I've had a serious erection here for going on two hours…'

No lie. A gasp comes, but not from the A-plus rows up front. It's more the B students who believed what they heard. Back in the room a couple rows, some C-minus kid snorted a laugh, lips shut, inside a closed mouth.

'As a fellow matured male, Mr. Wyland,' Rant says, 'you can appreciate the painful and potentially injurious nature of this situation.'

Mr. Wyland, all the air come out of him in one push. One exhale. His folded arms sunk into the collapsed chest of him. His lips peel open, sagging so you can see his bottom teeth, the color of bone shadowed with the brown of tobacco.

'You think maybe somebody should take a look at it?' Rant says on, pulling his eyebrows together, folding worry lines between his eyes.

The geometry equation chalked on the board disappeared, gone from the room. Nothing but chalk-dust chicken scratchings in the same room with the low-down, dirty miracle of a teenage hard-on. Inside his head, Mr. Wyland's supercomputing the correct answer. Him stood up to look dumb in front of folks.

Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): Wyland's beyond trapped. If this teacher slams Rant, merely laughes and tells this punk kid to sit down and concentrate on numbers, the school's looking at a lawsuit. If the kid's got a serious medical emergency, and his dingus turns purple and drops off, the school district will be settling that claim for the next ten million dollars of budget talks. Sure, Rant has a history of disruption. Sure, Rant could've presented the situation in a less invasive manner. But none of that will count for much in a courtroom, while Wyland stands in the witness box and tells a jury why he ridiculed and humiliated a student who was possibly dying of gangrene.

Cammy Elliot: Little flicks of Mr. W's eyes, a twitch of his ear, and a gulp of his Adam's apple, only those signify his brain's at work. His face floods from pale to pink to dark red. His whole face almost tongue red. Like time's stopped.

'Mr. Wyland,' a boy's voice says.

Danny Perry sticks one hand up in the air and says, 'Hey, Mr. W!' He waves the hand, his fingers flickering fast, and Danny says, 'I need the Health Room, too. For the same situation.'

Brenda Jordan (Childhood Friend): From what I recall, Rant only had maybe two shirts. One pair of jeans. Leastways, that's all we saw. The same green-plaid shirt with long sleeves to hide the mess of teeth marks on his arms. And a long-sleeve blue chambray shirt with pearl snaps instead of buttons. You could hear when Casey got nervous, because he'd snap and unsnap the cuffs, popping little