From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms ( Historian): In Africa, people don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy. Instead, they have the Tooth Mouse. In Spain: Ratoncito Pérez. In France: La Bonne Petite Souris. A tiny, magical rodent that steals teeth and replaces them with spare change. In some cultures, the lost tooth must be hidden in a snake or rat burrow to prevent a witch from finding and using the tooth. In other cultures, children throw the tooth into a roaring fire, then, later, dig for coins in the cold ashes.
By first believing in Santa Claus, then the Easter Bunny, then the Tooth Fairy, Rant Casey was recognizing that those myths are more than pretty stories and traditions to delight children. Or to modify behavior. Each of those three traditions asks a child to believe in the impossible in exchange for a reward. These are stepped-up tests to build a child’s faith and imagination. The first test is to believe in a magical person, with toys as the reward. The second test is to trust in a magical animal, with candy as the reward. The last test is the most difficult, with the most abstract reward: To believe, trust in a flying fairy that will leave money.
From a man to an animal to a fairy.
From toys to candy to money. Thus, interestingly enough, transferring the magic of faith and trust from sparkling fairydom to clumsy, tarnished coins. From gossamer wings to nickels…dimes…and quarters.
In this way, a child is stepped up to greater feats of imagination and faith as he or she matures. Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency.
Shot Dunyun: Talk about frustrating. All that pretense and reality in flux: Gold worth penny candy. Sugar worth gold. Macaroni passing as brains, and adults swearing the Tooth Fairy was real. Even the way a bizarre cultural delusion like Santa Claus can drive half of annual retail sales. Some mythological fat asswipe drives our national economy. It’s beyond frustrating.
That night, even as a little boy, Rant Casey just wanted one thing to be real. Even if that real thing was stinking blood and guts.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Each holiday tradition acts as an exercise in cognitive development, a greater challenge for the child. Despite the fact most parents don’t recognize this function, they still practice the exercise.
Rant also saw how resolving the illusions is crucial to how the child uses any new skills.
A child who is never coached with Santa Claus may never develop an ability to imagine. To him, nothing exists except the literal and tangible.
A child who is disillusioned abruptly, by his peers or siblings, being ridiculed for his faith and imagination, may choose never to believe in anything—tangible or intangible—again. To never trust or wonder.
But a child who relinquishes the illusions of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, that child may come away with the most important skill set. That child may recognize the strength of his own imagination and faith. He will embrace the ability to create his own reality. That child becomes his own authority. He determines the nature of his world. His own vision. And by doing so, by the power of his example, he determines the reality of the other two types: those who can’t imagine, and those who can’t trust.
Reverend Curtis Dean Fields: No matter how well you seal it, wax or varnish, a wood floor can hold an odor. Clear cedar, tongue-in-groove boards like the grange has, the end part of summer you can still smell what happened. Hot weather. Took only one child to vomit her cake—Dorris Tommy, I believe—and the stink set off so many others you couldn’t never tell who was number two.
Danny Perry ( Childhood Friend): Weren’t nothing but blood and barf, like a sticky carpet covered the whole floor. Blood and barf. History is, that’s how come folks started calling Buster Casey his nickname—“Rant.” On account of every kid doubled over and making nearabouts the same sound. Kids yelled “Rant!” and up comes vanilla cake and frosting. Yelling “Rant!” and spouting out purple fruit punch.
Middleton folks, if they’re sick or drunk, they’ll still say, “I feel I’m going to Rant,” if they’re close to throwing up.
Bodie Carlyle: Before Rant moved to the city, he gived me twenty-four gallon milk jugs full to the neck with folks’ lost teeth. From little baby teeth going back to grandfolks’ mouths, dug out of trunks and keepsake boxes. By my account, the suitcases he hauled to the city, they held nothing but gold money.
Rant, he called those milk jugs “The Middleton Tooth Museum.”
8–Pacing
Wallace Boyer ( Car Salesman): Your truly effective car salesman, he hands you his business card, first thing. That salesman says hello, tells you his name, and gives you his card, because human behavior studies show that 99 percent of customers use the business card as their excuse to exit the dealership. Most car buyers, if they hate you, even hate your cars, they still feel bad for wasting your time. If they can ask for your card, the customer feels better about bailing out. You want to trap most shoppers, you hand them your card the minute you meet them: They can’t escape.
In the first forty-three seconds you meet a stranger, experts in human behavior say that, just by looking at them, you decide their income, their age, their brains, and if you’re going to respect them. So a smart salesman wears a decent suit. He doesn’t scratch his scalp and then smell his fingernails.
A landmark study, out of Cal State LA in 1967 and proved a bunch of times since then, it says 55 percent of human communication is based on our body language, how we stand or lean or look each other in the eye. Another 38 percent of our communication comes through our tone of voice, the speed we talk, and how loud. The surprise is, only 7 percent of our message comes through our words.
So a smart salesman, his big talent is knowing how to listen.
We call it “pacing” a customer: You match your breathing rate to his breathing. He taps his foot or drums his fingers, you do, too, and match his speed. If he scratches his ear or stretches his neck, you wait twenty seconds and do the same. Listen for his words and watch where his eyes roll as he talks. The majority of customers, they learn through vision, and most times their eyes are looking up—to the left if they’re remembering information, but they’ll look to their right if they’re lying. The next group learns by hearing, and they’ll look side to side. The smallest group learns by moving or touching, and they’ll look down as they talk.
The visual people will say, “Look,” or “I see what you mean.” They’ll say, “I can’t picture that,” or “See you later.” That’s Echo Lawrence: always eyeing you.
Your audio customers will say, “Listen,” or “That sounds good,” or “Talk to you soon.” For example, that Shot Dunyun guy: Makes almost no eye contact, but if you talk fast, sound excited, he’ll get all worked up.
Your touch-based customers will tell you, “I can handle that.” They’ll say, “Got it,” or “Catch you later.” That’s the young kid, Neddy Nelson: Stands too close to you, and he’s always tapping you, touching you with his fingers, to make sure you’ll listen.
In really effective pacing, a salesman adopts the learning style of the customer—visual or hearing or touch—to the point of looking up or sideways or down at the ground while you talk. Your goal is to establish common ground. Not everybody enjoys baseball or even fishing, but every person is obsessed with himself.
You are your own favorite hobby. You’re an expert on you.
All a good salesman does is make eye contact, mimic your body language, nod or laugh or grunt to prove he’s spell-bound—those noises or gestures, they’re called “verbal attends.” A salesman only has to prove that he’s just as obsessed with you as you are with yourself. After that, the two of you share a common passion: you.
There’s lots more comes after that: embedded commands, objection bridging, hot buttons, tie-down and add-on questions, control questions…you name it.
Any good salesman will tell you:
Before a customer cares how much you know, that customer wants to know how much you care.
And your truly effective salesman, he knows how to fake that he really, truly does give a shit.
9–Fishing
Bodie Carlyle ( Childhood Friend): Living, alive animal fur is what my fingers would finally come across. Rant just egging me to push my arm deeper into the ground. My fingers slippery with grease. Most of me sun red, stretched out on the sand, my hand’s crawling down, colder than cool, into the dark of a varmint hole. Skunk, maybe. A coyote or gopher den.
Rant’s eyes on my eyes, he says, “Feel anything?”
My hand blind, touching a tangle of sagebrush roots, smooth rocks, then—hmmm—fur. The soft hairs moving off, out of my reach down the tunnel.
Rant saying, “Go after it.”
A gust of wind takes off with our crumpled sheet of tinfoil still greasy from Mrs. Casey’s leftover meatloaf. The ground beef and oregano we each worked our digging hand through, the meatloaf wedged deep under our fingernails and slippery between our fingers. And my hand, lost somewheres underground, stretched beyond where I figured it would get, I reach to feel that fur and the rattle of a fast heartbeat underneath. That heartbeat almost as fast as mine.
LouAnn Perry ( Childhood Friend): History is, the girls Rant liked, he used to kiss. Boys, he took them out animal-fishing. Both ways it was a test of your faith.
Bodie Carlyle: Summers, most folks would go fishing, over along the river in hot weather; Rant would head the other way.
It wasn’t nothing to find Rant walked straight all morning out in the desert, laid down flat on one side, his arm disappeared up to the elbow in some dirty hole. Didn’t matter what critter—scorpion, snake, or prairie dog—Rant would be reaching blind into the dark underground, hoping for the worst.
That black widow spider on Easter Sunday, since it didn’t kill him, Rant figured to hunt down what might. “I been vaccinated against measles and diphtheria,” Rant used to say. “A rattlesnake’s just my vaccination against boredom.”
A cottonmouth bite he called “my vaccination against doing chores.”
Pit vipers, just about half the time they forget to inject their venom. According to books, Rant says, rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, they truly are more scared of you. A human being, giving off so much heat, that’s what a pit vipers sees. Something so big and hot shows up, and it’s all a snake can get done to unfold those swing-down fangs and—kah-pow—sink them in your arm.
Nothing more pissed off Rant than getting a dry bite. Pain but no poison. A vaccination without the medicine. Those double holes marching up his arms, ringed around his shins, no red welts. Dry bites.
Instead of river fishing, Rant walked out beyond the back porch, beyond the barrel for burning trash, past the machine shed, out into the fields leased out for alfalfa, the Rain Bird sprinklers—tick-tick-ticking—shots of water into the hot sunshine. After the alfalfa came the horizon of Russian-olive trees, shaggy with their long silver leaves. Over that horizon come the sugar beets. After the beets, another horizon. Beyond that, a barbed-wire fence piled solid with tumbleweeds trying to get inside. Kotex and rubbers snared and flapping, full of Middleton spunk and blood.
Beyond that, another horizon. Three horizons outside the Caseys’ back door, you found yourself in the desert. Rant called his walking out to get animal bit, he called it: “gone fishing.”
Irene Casey ( Rant’s Mother): The fire ants should’ve been a red flag. Buddy never come in the house without his hands and feet being all over a red rash of ant bites. Pain you’d expect to make most kids cry, Buddy wore it no worse off than a heat rash.
Bodie Carlyle: His folks didn’t hear the half of it. Rant could roll up his sleeve at school and count off the bites: red ant, hobo spider, scorpion.
“More of my vaccinations,” Rant used to say.
All through ninth grade, Rant would ask to be excused from playing Friday dodgeball against the twelfth-graders on account of a fresh rattlesnake bite. While the rest of us got creamed to hell, Rant would pull off one sweat sock and show the coach a fat, red foot. The two poke holes leaking clear ooze you’d take for venom.
Between him and me, this was his vaccination against playing dodgeball.
To Rant, pain was one horizon. Poison, the next horizon. Disease was nothing but the horizon after all them.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms ( Historian): The black widow spider only kills about 5 percent of those it bites. An hour after the bite, the neurotoxin a-latrotoxin spreads throughout the victim’s lymphatic system. Your abdomen contracts into a solid washboard of rigid muscle tissue. You might vomit or sweat profusely.
Another common symptom is priapism. It’s nature’s cure for erectile dysfunction. Rant never told his parents, but that Easter was the first time he’d ever experienced an erection. Sex and insect venom were completely collapsed in his childhood psyche.
Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher): That’s the secret behind Rant’s craving for snakes. Even in the city, he needed to find a black widow or a brown recluse before he was worth anything in the sack. Getting a “booster shot,” he used to call it.
Don’t try this at home, but the result is a dick that stays hard for hours. On demand, and big as a gearshift. A little calcium gluconate and everything goes back to normal.
Sheriff Bacon Carlyle ( Childhood Enemy): The only why Rant Casey got himself bit was to catch a buzz. Poison being just another drug to abuse. Another high. Speaking as an officer of the law, I can tell you an addicted addict ain’t like regular folks. By the end of this story, you’ll be pretty near shocked what Rant done to get and stay strung out.
Bodie Carlyle: Don’t ask me. I never did figure out the attraction. While other kids was sniffing gasoline or model-airplane glue, most summer days, Rant would be belly-down in the sand next to a sagebrush. Most kids around here, they’d be escaping from reality, while Rant was trying to get ready for it.
Those dirty holes, under those rocks he’d tip up a crack, those places where he couldn’t see, that was the future we was so scared about. After he’d stuck his hands into the dark, and not died from it, after then Rant wasn’t so scared. He’d roll up one pant leg and point his foot out straight. He’d sit in the desert and poke this bare foot down in a coyote burrow, slow, the way folks test bathwater with their big toe. In case it’s too hot or cold. Watching him, Rant would plant both hands braced in the sand, his eyes shut tight, holding one big breath inside his chest.
In the bottom of that hole, a skunk, a raccoon, a mother coyote with pups, or a rattlesnake. The feel of soft fur or smooth scales, warm or cool to the touch, then—kah-pow—the mouth grab of teeth, and Rant’s whole leg would shake. And Rant never pulled back, not the way most folks would, doing more damage as the teeth hung tight. No, Rant let the mouth let loose. Maybe snatch tight a second time. Sink deep. Let go. Get bored. Then a sniff of warm breath against his toes. Underground, the feel of a wet tongue licking up his blood.
Out of that hole Rant would pull his foot, the skin tore up and mangled, but licked clean of dirt. His clean skin bleeding—drip-drip-drip—pure blood. His eyeballs nothing but big black pupil dialed all the way open, Rant would be pulling off his other shoe and sock, rolling up the second pant leg, and shoving another bare part of himself into the dark to see what might happen.
The whole length of summer, Rant’s toes and finger would be frayed skin, fringed with dripping blood. One bite of venom, one little squirt of poison at a time, Rant was training for something big. Getting vaccinated against fear. No matter the future, any terrible job or marriage or military service, it had to be an improvement over a coyote chomping on your foot.
Echo Lawrence: Get this. The first night I met Rant Casey, we were eating Italian, and he says, “You never been snake-bit?”
He’s wearing a coat, so I have no idea about how mutilated his arms look.
As if this is my shortcoming, he keeps goading me, saying, “I can’t
believe a person could live so long and never been sprayed by a skunk…”
As if mine has been a life of utter caution and deprivation.
Rant shakes his head, looking and sighing at his plate of spaghetti. Then, turning his head sideways and giving me a look with only one eye, he says, “If you never been rabid, you ain’t never lived.”
The nerve of him. Like he’s some redneck holy man.
Get him. He couldn’t even work a three-speed mounted on the steering column.
Until that night, he’d never seen ravioli.
Dr. David Schmidt ( Middleton Physician): The little screw-up, that Casey boy, he was presenting symptoms before he bothered to let his folks know he’d been bit. With rabies, the virus is carried in the saliva of an infected animal. Any bite or lick, even a sneeze, can spread the disease. Once you have it, the virus spreads through your central nervous system, up your spine to your brain, where it reproduces. The early stage is called the “eclipse” phase of the disease, because you present no symptoms. You can be contagious as all getout, but still look and feel normal.
This eclipse phase can last a couple days to years and years. And all that time, you can be infecting folks with your saliva.
Bodie Carlyle: Instead of boosting peaks, Rant wanted to go fishing. He used to say, “My life might be little and boring, but at least it’s mine—not some assembly-line, secondhand, hand-me-down life.”
Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): Getting bit by a rattlesnake, that’s pretty low-tech.
Dr. David Schmidt: The intolerable aspect was that Buster Casey was a popular boy. He must’ve been. In the past ten years, we’ve treated six cases of rabies infection in a male. All six cases being Buster himself. But we’ve had forty-seven infections in girls, most of those girls he attended school with, and two of those being his female teachers. Out of those, three chose to terminate pregnancies by unnamed fathers at the same time.