Rant

  From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms ( Historian): How does one compensate for the loss of a peer?

  Looking back, I sometimes wonder if we didn’t invent Rant Casey. The group of us. If, perhaps, we didn’t need some wild, mythic character to represent our own vanishing lives. A marvelous, glittering antihero to be the challenge whom the rest of us—Mr. Dunyun, Miss Lawrence, and I—had survived to tell about. The moment Rant exploded on television, the moment his car burst into flame, he became this fantastic tale we could recount about our reckless Party Crashing past. And, bathed in the flare of his gasoline limelight, we would appear mythic by association.

  Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): How weird is this? It didn’t matter a thousand people had Party Crashed over the past few years, getting nothing worse than whiplash. We hadn’t really seen what could happen. We didn’t realize. When we saw the worst that could go wrong—shit, we could die, we could burn alive—then Party Crashing did start to peter out.

  From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Not to be overly moralistic, but sometimes the death of one person can justify the death of an entire culture.

  Lynn Coffey: On the third day after Rant Casey died, the drag boats hooked his car on the bottom of the river channel. Over the better part of three hours, they pulled the scorched shell of the Cadillac Seville—complete with the charred skeleton of a Christmas tree still tied to the car’s roof—out of the river at the Madison Street boat ramp.

  Neddy Nelson ( Party Crasher): Doesn’t the government have to make damn sure Rant Casey never turns into our martyr? Haven’t oppressed people always gone to church for comfort? There, didn’t they meet other oppressed people? Haven’t all your major revolutions brewed as people complained together and sang songs and got riled up to take violent action?

  Wasn’t Party Crashing our church, the way people came together? Like in pit stops, griping together? Weren’t we the revolution that every night almost happened…almost happened…kept almost happening, but instead we just only crashed into each other? If just one leader would emerge—Rant Casey or anybody—the army of us, ready to fight and die, wouldn’t we be invincible?

  From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: In actuality, we’re mourning a thousand vehicles filled with snack food, flirting, and talk therapy. It had been a form of consciousness-raising. Also, connection, dreaming, planning, perhaps even actual cultural change. Every night since that night has become the postmortem of Party Crashing. An autopsy, not of Rant Casey, but of a subculture that some Nighttimers have come to believe would have improved their quality of life.

  Lynn Coffey: With all the windows rolled shut, the velvet interior of that torched Cadillac remained largely unsinged. According to eyewitnesses, the automatic transmission was still in drive, and the headlights were still switched on, although the car’s battery had long been flooded. Furthermore, that powder-blue interior contained river water, one blue denim shirt embroidered with flowers, one pair of blue jeans embroidered with ivy leaves, two Converse high-top basketball shoes, but not a single, solitary Buster Casey.

  In addition, to open the vehicle, the officers at the scene had to call for a Slim Jim rod. Because all the doors were still locked. And the keys still in the ignition.

  Reverend Curtis Dean Fields ( Minister, Middleton Christian Fellowship): The Bible tells us it will happen in the twinkling of an eye. The Rapture. Rant was delivered to Heaven. That’s what I stopped by and told Chet and Irene. You never saw a couple so heartbroke.

  Officer Romie Mills ( Homicide Detective): It’s at this point the department issued a warrant for Buster Casey’s arrest.

  31–An Accounting

  Irene Casey ( Rant’s Mother): Close as I can figure, the older Carlyle boy went and got himself made sheriff just so he can break bad news to folks. He come up our porch steps, middle of breakfast, the morning after Buddy’s car accident, and banged on the screen until Chet come to the door. Bacon Carlyle, he says, “I regret to inform you, but your son, Buster Landru Casey, was killed in a car accident at approximately eleven-forty-three of last night.” He read the words from a little white card, looking at the card instead of us. Sounding out each word, slow as if he was in second grade. Then, all respectful, he snatched off his trooper hat, and he turned the card over and read the back side, saying, “You have my deepest sympathies in your time of grieving.”

  We’d already see’d that part while he read us the first side. Chet asks, “They found a body yet?”

  Bacon shrugged, the big idiot. He stuck the white card inside his hat and set the hat back on his ears.

  Lew Terry ( Property Manager): Some farmer in bib overalls shows up, ringing the buzzer, and rolling me out of bed in the middle of the day. Daytimers haven’t any respect. He won’t leave my stoop, and he’s waving an envelope with this building as the return address, claiming to be the Casey kid’s father. The father guy comes here all the way from nowhere to collect his kid’s stuff.

  Of course I gave him my sympathy. The police have already combed the apartment, but they didn’t say I couldn’t let in relatives. Funny thing is, the layout of this building isn’t overly logical. To find the kid’s unit, you need to go all the way to the back of the first-floor hallway, take the fire stairs up to the second floor, then walk along an open-porch deal to the end door. I don’t tell the father guy this, but when I duck back inside my unit to get the pass key, the guy’s disappeared.

  One, two, three, the father guy’s found his way to the kid’s door and gone inside. His boots tracking cow shit all over my floors without a single misstep. Like he’s lived here, but I swear he’s never set foot on the premises. To open the apartment door, he shows me, you lift the knob and the hinges give, the screws wiggle, so you can trip the latch.

  Me standing there with the pass key in my hand, he waves me inside.

  But somebody’s already beat us there.

  Sheriff Bacon Carlyle ( Childhood Enemy): The coldest folks you’ll ever meet. Them’s the Caseys. Raised an only son who run off and got himself killed, probably just to pain his old man. Then Chet Casey stood on his own front porch and took the bad news like I was a radio giving the weather report. No emotion on that man’s face. None whatsoever. All I can figure is, with a loco kid like Rant Casey, his folks gived him up for dead a long, long time before.

  Lew Terry: The father guy’s with me in the apartment, but you can hear somebody banging around in the bathroom. A burglar. These sneak thieves, they see an obit in the paper, or they see an article about how somebody snuffed it, and these lowlifes bust in to steal the stereo, the television, the prescription drugs. Seeing how our burglar’s in the toilet, it’s got to be some junkie ransacking the medicine cabinet.

  Meanwhile, the dead kid’s father, he doesn’t look too concerned. He doesn’t look too sad, neither. He’s running the palm of one hand over one wall, feeling the paint with the flat of his hand.

  The bathroom door busts open, and a girl steps out. One of her arms, it’s not right, shriveled up, but in her other hand she holds the top of a black plastic garbage bag. She looks at me and the kid’s father and says, “Who the fuck are you?”

  And this hayseed smiles. Grinning like an ape, he steps away from feeling the walls and says, “Echo…” He says, “It’s darned sweet to see you again.”

  Irene Casey: The morning I drove Chet up to the airport in Peco Junction, on his way to collect Buddy from the city, Chet told me the oddest bit of news. He reminded me about the brown cowboy wallpaper we hung in Buddy’s room. He said to pull it down. Steam it soft, and tear it down, he said.

  Stuck in the wall, behind every wad of booger that boy pasted there, Chet told me to dig in the plaster drywall. If I did that, he said, I’d never need for money another day in my life. Only, touching the boogers, he told me to wear rubber gloves.

  Lew Terry: So this girl with the curled-up arm and the garbage bag, she looks at the father guy and says, “Have we met?”

  And Farmer John
, he nods at the black plastic bag she’s holding and says, “What’d you find worth busting in for?”

  “Rant gave me a key,” the girl says.

  And the father guy says, “I’m sorry. I reckon I forgot.”

  To me, the girl says, “You know what a ‘Porn Buddy’ is?” She says that if somebody dies, most times they have a close friend who’s designated to hurry over and search their place for drugs and sex stuff. All the junk they don’t want their parents to know about them. She swings the black plastic bag in her hand and says, “Everything you don’t want to know about your son is inside here.”

  Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): We were, all of us, worried about Echo. On my own, I went to visit her. I took her a deli carton of chicken soup one night. I wanted to make sure she was eating. We sat and talked, and I didn’t leave until she’d eaten every bite.

  Just to tie up any loose ends, I’d loaded that soup with those Plan B birth-control pills. To really flush her out, I mean beyond loaded.

  Lew Terry: The kid’s father has gone back to feeling the walls, touching the soft black lumps that, close as I could guess, were hashish. Still touching the wall, not even looking at this girl with her bag, the father guy says, “Two secondhand skin magazines, some Percocet left over from his one visit to the dentist, a stained vibrator, and a pair of handcuffs lined with fake fur.”

  The girl looks inside the bag.

  “The last two gadgets are yours,” the father guy says, “but you’re welcome to take it all.”

  And the girl says, “How the fuck…?”

  Officer Romie Mills ( Homicide Detective): Standard procedure is to stake out the residence of anyone emotionally significant to the suspect. We had officers watching the Lawrence apartment and the suspect’s apartment. We were well aware of Chester Casey’s comings and goings, and we can confirm that both he and Echo Lawrence were in the suspect’s apartment, together, for a period of time with the landlord, Lewis Terry.

  Lew Terry: The father guy touches a spot on the apartment wall, tapping the paint, and he says, “Look here.”

  It’s one of those hash bumps.

  The father guy reaches inside the chest pocket of his bib overalls and brings out a jackknife; he snaps the blade open and stabs it into the plaster.

  And I tell him to just hold on. The damage deposit won’t cover him carving up the walls.

  With the knife still sunk into the plaster, he’s wiggling the blade, saying, “But the money you stole should cover it…”

  I didn’t steal any money. I tell you. I told him, I did not steal anything from this apartment.

  “Let’s ask the coin dealer over on Grinson Street,” the father guy says, and he draws the jackknife blade out of the wall. Where he stabbed and dug, he picks with two fingers. He slides out something and wipes the white plaster dust from it. A gold coin. And he says, “This look familiar?”

  Officer Romie Mills: What’s less clear is why Echo Lawrence apparently invited the suspect’s father to her home, after that meeting. And why she allowed Chester Casey to take up residence in her apartment.

  At that point, we had no solid leads on the whereabouts of Buster Casey.

  Irene Casey: When I saw Chet onto that airplane, he must’ve been scared he was going to die. The poor man, he told me, “Reen, you’ve had a difficult time of this life.” He said he was sorry about everything, but that he loved me, he would always love me. The last time he looked at me, from the doorway of going on that plane, Chet said, “You were a wonderful mother.”

  Shot Dunyun: Boy oh boy, Rant’s dad rolls into town certifiably, bona-fide, bat-shit crazy. He shacks up with Echo. Calls that pest-control place to ask for Rant’s old job. The first time I meet him, this middle-aged doofus, he grabs my neck with one hand. He gropes me, plants his mouth over mine, and says, “Miss me?”

  How weird is that shit?

  When I said “mine,” I meant my mouth.

  Lew Terry: Me and that crippled girl, we watch while the dead kid’s father goes around the room. Everywhere there’s a soft black lump, he stabs in his knife and digs out a gold coin. Looking at the girl, the father guy says, “In your apartment, when you fell asleep, the last night you and Buster were together, he pasted lumps of his snot around your walls.”

  The cripple, she says, “Rant wiped boogers on my walls?”

  Everywhere she finds a lump of snot, the father says, Rant was leaving her some treasure.

  She says, “I still don’t understand.”

  He says, “Don’t bother getting tested for rabies, just start your treatments.”

  This girl, she says, “You’re not really a policeman, are you?”

  32–In Hindsight

  Ruby Elliot ( Childhood Neighbor): I can tell you, getting abandoned at the Junction Airport by her husband is not the worstest event ever to happen to Irene Casey.

  Glenda Hendersen ( Childhood Neighbor): Basin and Ruby and me, we went through school with Irene, and she was always cutting class. Never did seem to matter, how she come into the world without a daddy. Irene was full of grand plans. Talking all the time about college or the army, anything she figured could deliver her out of town. Sad part is, she never did get beyond the ninth grade. The summer we was thirteen years old, her and Basin, Ruby and me, we ran wild, staying out; then Irene quit coming to the phone. Irene quit—well—everything.

  Ruby Elliot: Between you, me, and the lamppost, it was no surprise to anybody that Irene was expecting. Three months along, folks say, before she married Chet. Story is, out of the blue, Chester Casey walked up on her porch and asked her ma, Esther, Could he have a word with Miss Irene Shelby? Like him and Irene was total strangers. Nobody hereabouts knew Chester from Adam. He come out of nowhere, no job or family, simply showed up in Middleton, saying, “Good morning, Dr. Schmidt…Howdy, Reverend Fields.” Calling everybody by his name.

  Wasn’t until that day Esther even knowed her girl was pregnant.

  Dr. David Schmidt ( Middleton Physician): For better or worse, it was Chet’s child. The age Irene was, we wanted to be certain she wasn’t making another mistake, only looking for some man, any man, to help her raise a child. Chester must’ve been nineteen or twenty years old. We ran your standard paternity test, and every genetic marker pointed to the baby being his.

  In hindsight, every genetic marker pointed at the baby being him. His genes and the child’s were so close, the two were indistinguishable.

  Reverend Curtis Dean Fields ( Minister, Middleton Christian Fellowship): My clearest recollection is, during our requisite premarital counseling, the couple waived any discussion of intimacy. It was my assumption that their squeamishness arose from Irene being so far along. A lecture on contraception would have been locking the barn door long after that particular horse had run off.

  Whether or not it was due to the pregnancy, I have never seen a couple less physically infatuated with each other. So you know how standoffish they seemed, at their wedding, when I told Chester he could kiss his bride, he kissed Irene on the cheek.

  Dr. David Schmidt: Our gravest reservation had been regarding the possibility that Chester Casey had raped thirteen-year-old Irene Shelby, and circumstances were forcing her to marry her assailant. Small towns have a tragic way of trapping young people and making them answer for small mistakes with the rest of their lives.

  Ruby Elliot: All the Shelby kin, leastwise the womenfolk, they were born under a dark star. Irene’s own great-great-grandmother had been attacked by a man. Her Great-grandma Bel Shelby, when she was thirteen or fourteen years old and walking home after school, a stranger assaulted her. A transient. No sheriff ever caught the man, but Bel Shelby had a baby as the result, and that illegitimate baby was Irene’s Grandmother Hattie.

  It’s as if bad luck stalks after the women in Irene’s family.

  Basin Carlyle ( Childhood Neighbor): Don’t make me laugh. Don’t call what’s really loose morals any “attack.” Women in the Shelby family have always run around. No
curse settled on the Shelby women, except maybe the curse of promiscuity.

  Ruby Elliot: But soon as Hattie Shelby turned thirteen, it did happen, again. Another stranger and another baby. This baby was Irene’s own mama, Esther.

  Edna Perry ( Childhood Neighbor): Their farm, Middleton folks call it the “Shelby Place” even after Chet Casey took over. For all those years it was Bel raising Hattie raising Esther. Local history is, the exact day little Esther turned thirteen, she got pregnant with Irene.

  Ruby Elliot: A family history like that, and you can’t blame Glenda Hendersen and me for fearing the worst once Irene got to ninth grade. We walked everywhere with her, not once letting our best friend out of eyesight. When we weren’t watching Irene, her ma and grandma was. You could argue they drove Irene a little crazy, mother-henning that way. Could be that amount of safeguarding is what drove Irene to sneak out. Just to be by herself and walk along the river, through the trees along the river, alone.

  Sheriff Bacon Carlyle ( Childhood Enemy): The wild-dog packs running around in those woods, it’s nothing but self-destructive, walking in those woods by yourself. For a young girl like Irene was, we’re talking about just plain insane suicide behavior.

  Ruby Elliot: Except maybe Irene didn’t want to spend her life hiding behind locked doors and best friends and her mama’s skirt.

  Basin Carlyle: Irene Shelby took to sneaking off. Then she got herself knocked up. Then she gone and married Chester. No mystery. It’s crazy talk to say a rapist has run down four generations of the same family. Don’t make me laugh.