Rant

would watch and sneer while Rant ate every food with the same fork. Rant wasn’t a dumbshit, he just never got past using a plastic spoon.
    Behind Rant’s back, Green used to call him “Huckleberry Fagg.”
    From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Mr. Dunyun refers to Rant as “The Tooth Fairy.”
    Echo Lawrence: Get this. Around midnight in Middleton, Shot Dunyun and I parked at the turn-off to their farmhouse, next to a mailbox with “Casey” painted on it. In the middle of a lot of crops, the house was white with a long porch along the front, a steep roof, and one dormer window looking over the porch: Rant’s attic bedroom with the cowboy wallpaper.
    Bushes and flowers grow close to the foundation, and mowed grass spreads out to a chain-link fence. We could see a barn painted brown, almost hidden behind the house. Everything else is wheat, to the flat circle of the horizon going around every side of Neddy’s Cadillac. Shot fiddled with the radio, hunting for traffic updates.
    From DRVR Radio Graphic Traffic: Just a heads-up. Watch out for the two-car fender bender along the right shoulder, westbound at Milepost 67, on the City Center Thruway. Both vehicles appear to be wedding parties, complete with the tin cans tied to their rear bumpers. Traffic is slow, as drivers rubberneck to watch the brides and grooms scream and throw wedding cake at each other. Be on the lookout for bridesmaids and white rice in the roadway…
    Echo Lawrence: Shot fell asleep, snoring against the inside of the driver’s door. I kept waiting for a sign Irene Casey was still alive and no mysterious stranger had strangled or stabbed her to death yet.
    Neddy Nelson: Tell me how in 1913 did the anthropologist H. Reck discover a modern human skull buried in Early Pleistocene soil of the Olduvai Gorge? Explain how modern human skulls have also been unearthed from Early Pleistocene and Middle Pliocene strata in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Ragazzoni, Italy, respectively?
    Shot Dunyun: We walked around their cruddy cemetery, a mess of lawn-mowered weeds, but we couldn’t find Rant’s grave. How weird is that? We found the best friend’s name in a phone book, Bodie Carlyle, then found his trailer at the end of a dirt road. Tumbleweeds piled window-deep against it, and a pit bull chained and barking in the dirt yard. This was hours before sunrise. We didn’t even knock on the trailer door.
    Echo Lawrence: Forget it. I never did see Irene Casey. We didn’t even knock on her door. For all we knew, she was already dead inside that farmhouse.
    Wallace Boyer ( Car Salesman): Sell cars long enough and you’ll see: Nobody’s all that original. Any lone weirdo comes from a big nest of weirdos. What’s weird is, you go to some pigsty village in Slovakia, and suddenly even Andy Warhol makes perfect sense.
    Echo Lawrence: Give me a break. At dawn, that redneck sheriff pulls up next to our car and bullhorns that we’re in violation of the federal Emergency Health Powers Act and the I-SEE-U curfew. We didn’t want to leave Mrs. Casey unprotected, but the Big Chief Sheriff points his gun at us and says, “How about you-all come into town for some questioning…”
    From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: In Middleton, sleeping dogs have the permanent right-of-way.
    1–An Introduction
    Wallace Boyer ( Car Salesman): Like most people, I didn’t meet and talk to Rant Casey until after he was dead. That’s how it works for most celebrities: After they croak, their circle of close friends just explodes. A dead celebrity can’t walk down the street without meeting a million best buddies he never met in real life.
    Dying was the best career move Jeff Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy ever made. After Gaetan Dugas was dead, the number of sex partners saying they’d fucked him, it went through the roof.
    The way Rant Casey used to say it: Folks build a reputation by attacking you while you’re alive—or praising you after you ain’t. For me, I was sitting on an airplane, and some hillbilly sits down next to me. His skin, it’s the same as any car wreck you can’t not stare at—dented with tooth marks, pitted and puckered, the skin on the back of his hands looks one god-awful mess.
    The flight attendant, she asks this hillbilly what’s it he wants to drink. The stewardess asks him to, please, reach my drink to me: scotch with rocks. But when I see those monster fingers wrapped around the plastic cup, his chewed-up knuckles, I could never