Shot Dunyun: How weird is that? It was like something from the Old Testament: the Killer Bee Picnic, the Mouse Shit Attack, the Plague of Fleas, and the Deadly Spider Hat. The next Thanksgiving dinner, with seven oldsters dead, the rest of that generation stayed home. The oldest Caseys turned over the adult table to their middle-aged kids. Siege ended. Baton passed.
12–The Food
Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher): To make time stand still—what sand mandalas are to Buddhist monks and embroidery is to Irene Casey—eating pussy was to Rant. He used to wedge his face between my legs and slip his tongue into me. He’d come up on his elbows, smacking his lips, his chin dripping, and Rant would say, “You ate something with cinnamon for breakfast…” He’d lick his lips and roll his eyes, saying, “Not French toast…something else.” Rant would snort and gobble, then come up with his eyes shining, saying, “For breakfast, you drank a cup of Constant Comment tea. That’s the cinnamon.”
From just the smell and taste of me, he’d nail my whole day: tea, whole-wheat toast without butter, plain yogurt, blueberries, a tempeh sandwich, one avocado, a glass of orange juice, and a beet salad.
“And you had an order of fast-food onion rings,” he’d say, and smack his lips. “A large order.”
I called him “the Pussy Psychic.”
Bodie Carlyle ( Childhood Friend): In the time it took most folks to sit around a table, say a blessing, pass their food, and eat it, eat a second helping, help themselves to pie and coffee, then drink another cup of coffee and start to clear the dishes, in that same stretch of time, the Casey family might take only one bite. One bite of meatloaf or tuna casserole, and still be chewing it. Not just eating slow, but not talking, not reading books or watching television. Their whole attention was inside their mouth, chewing, tasting, feeling.
Echo Lawrence: Get real. Most guys are keeping score with every lap of their tongue. Every time they come up for air, they’re clocking your pleasure. And, lick for lick, you know this had better balance out with the pleasure you give them back. So, lick after lick, you never can relax and get off, not when you know that meter is always running. Every lick an investment in getting licked back.
Even guys who hate bookkeeping and doing their taxes, guys who could only shrug if you asked their savings-account or credit-card balance, they’ll compute the exact number of laps their tongue’s done around your snatch. And the payback they have coming. The sexual equivalent of clock watchers or bean counters.
That’s every guy—except Rant Casey. He’d stick his tongue into you and years could pass. Mountains erode.
Edna Perry ( Childhood Neighbor): Christmas dinner in England, when you find a clove in your food, it means you’re a villain. Automatic. If you find a little stick of a twig, you’re the idiot. No arguing. And if you bite into something and find a rag of cloth fabric, folks will know you’re a slut. Imagine that, being branded a slut, right there at Christmas dinner, but Irene Casey swears she read this in a book.
Echo Lawrence: One time, face planted between my legs, Rant surfaced for air, picked a pubic hair off his tongue, and said, “What happened today? Something bad happened…”
I told him to forget it.
He licked me and rolled his eyes, licked again, and said, “A parking ticket? No, something worse…”
I told him to forget it. I said nothing had happened.
Rant licked me again, only slower, dragging his tongue through me from back to front, his breath hot, and he looked up, staring, until I looked down at him. Met his green eyes. He said, “I’m sorry.” Rant said, “You lost your job today, didn’t you?”
My stupid fucking job I had, selling mobile fucking phones.
Like, he could find out anything with his nose, and from the taste of you. That was Rant Casey. Always right.
And between orgasms, I started to cry.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms ( Historian): Every family has its scriptures, but most can’t articulate them. These are stories people repeat to reinforce their identity: Who they are. Where they came from. Why they behave as they do.
Rant used to say, “Every family is a regular little cult.”
Basin Carlyle ( Childhood Neighbor): Don’t laugh, but in France, Irene says, they bake a metal kind of lucky charm into their dessert cake. Their rule is, the one who bites the charm has to cook the next supper, but folks in France are so cheap they’re more likely to swallow the charm. So they won’t have to host.
From her reading, Irene says Mexicans bake a Jesus baby doll into their food. Folks in Spain always throw in some loose change. Irene showed me a little brochure for baking fancy cakes, told all about it. The entire history of cakes from around the world.
Irene Casey ( Rant’s Mother): Near as I recollect, Chet and Buddy didn’t start out slow eaters. I trained them that way. It got to be too much, baking a devil’s-food cake from scratch and watching Chet and Buddy wolf it down in three bites. Two of them hurrying to choke down one slice, then another, until the cake was nothing left but the dirty plate. Even while they’re inhaling my food, they’re talking plans about something next, or reading out of a catalogue, or hearing the news on the radio. Always living months into the future. Miles down the road.
The only exception was any food the two of them put on the table. Anytime Chet shot a goose, we sat there, everyone talking up how good it tasted. Or if Buddy caught a string of trout, again, the family spent all night eating it. ’Course, there’s bones in a trout. In a goose, you figure to look out for steel shot. There’s a price to pay if you don’t pay attention to the food you’re chewing. You get a fish bone in your throat and choke to death, or a sharp bone stabbed through the roof of your mouth. Or you split a back tooth, biting down on bird shot.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Scripture in the Casey household decrees, “The secret ingredient to anything tasty is something that’s going to hurt.”
It’s not as if she intended to hurt people. Irene only booby-trapped food because she cared too much. If she didn’t give a damn, she’d serve them frozen dinners and call the matter settled.
Basin Carlyle: Don’t you forget. The most I saw the Caseys was over church. Seeing them on Sundays at service and after, at the potluck suppers over by the grange hall.
The secret ingredient that made folks really taste Irene’s peach cobbler was sneaking in some cherry pits. Could about break your jawbone by accident. The secret of her apple brown Betty was mixing in plenty of sharp slivers of walnut shell.
When you ate her tuna casserole, you didn’t talk or flip through a National Geographic. Your eyes and ears stayed inside your mouth. Your whole world kept inside your mouth, feeling and careful for the little balled-up tinfoils Irene Casey would hide in the tuna parts. A side effect of eating slow was, you naturally, genuinely tasted, and the food tasted better. Could be other ladies were better cooks, but you’d never notice.
Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): Rant’s father used to go, “If something looks like a true accident, can’t nobody be mad at you.”
Irene Casey: Men do have the tendency to rush, always pushing to get a job done.
Echo Lawrence: Here’s a single girl’s secret—the reason you eat dinner with a man on a first date is so you know how he’s going to fuck you. A slob who gobbles down the meal, never looks at a bite, you know not to crawl into bed with that guy.
Bodie Carlyle: Mrs. Casey baked birthday cakes that made you blush out of shame for your own lazy ma. Sometimes, a chocolate-cake locomotive pulling a steam train with one boxcar made of cherry cake and one boxcar made of vanilla, then flatcars and tanker cars, all different flavors, until they ended with a maple-flavor cake caboose. It’s good luck, folks say, finding the toothpick stuck inside a cake. But you don’t bother tasting her cake and you’d be tasting pine splinters and blood.
Logan Elliot ( Childhood Friend): Truth was, if you didn’t chew her food, then her food chewed you.
Irene Casey: The way I figure
, as long as food tastes better than it hurts, you’re going to keep eating. As long as you’re more enjoying than you are suffering.
Basin Carlyle: Potlucks over by the grange hall, you’d expect them to be a social event with folks talking and catching up. Don’t hate me for saying it, but anytime Irene brung her chicken bake or three-bean salad, instead of socializing, folks would be too busy picking trash out of their mouths. Her cooking was decent, but it replaced a mess of good gossip. Instead of folks harping on who blacked the eye of his wife, or who was stepping out on her husband, by the end of every potluck, you’d have maybe just a little pile of real trash next to each plate. A trash heap of pits and stones and paper clips. Whole cloves, sharp as thumbtacks.
Edna Perry: Come Christmas, foreign folks have a tradition of baking a cake with a itty-bitty Baby Jesus hid inside. Folks say the person who finds the Christ child will be special blessed in the next year. Just a little plastic baby-doll toy. But Irene Casey used to fold into her batter as much scoops of Baby Jesus as she did flour and sugar. Put a Christ child in every bite. Could be she only wanted more folks to feel lucky, but it never looked right, folks burping up whole packs and litters of naked pink plastic Saviours. Birthing those wet babies out their lips. Big tooth marks bit down and gnawed on our Saviour’s smiling face. Christmas potluck at the grange, and folks sitting at long tables with red crepe-paper decorations and those spit-covered Christ babies coughed up everywhere, it never looked all that holy.
Basin Carlyle: The same as how it’s not always the good child that you love most—sometimes it’s the child that causes you the most trouble—folks only remembered the food Irene Casey brung to potluck. Other food, better food, like Glenda Hendersen’s walnut bars or Sally Peabody’s baked pear crumble, just because they didn’t half choke you to death, you never gave that food a second thought.
Echo Lawrence: This once, after I’d had an orgasm, inside of me is a pressure, not a pain, more like that feeling when your tampon turns sideways. Like I 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 snap sounds in the back of the class.
Cammy Elliot: The outline of Rant’s boner slung sideways in his jeans, almost pulsing with his heartbeat, he went to the office. His shirt cuffs snapping loud and fast as popcorn.
Silas Henderson ( Childhood Friend): The oldest female excuse out of any class is claiming you have “cramps.” Nothing but code for a chance to take a couple aspirin and skip the trigonometry midterm. Compared to that, a fellow’s got nothing.
Lowell Richards ( Teacher): A clear corollary formed between sunny weather and the number of boys suffering from painful penile erections. At issue wasn’t the penises, but the failure to occlude them while in their turgid state. Furthermore, the district’s legal counsel advised that a dress code requiring constraining, modest, fully binding undergarments would be impossible to enforce and serve the negative purpose of drawing increased attention to the issue.