Rant

750 infections annually.
    Before the advent of the Rant serotype of the Lyssavirus, no more than a hundred thousand people died of rabies each year, primarily in tropical or subtropical regions. Despite an annual expenditure of one billion dollars to contain the disease, and a century of vaccinations and public awareness, the infection rate among animals reached a historical peakin 1993.
    Due to the epidemic attributed to Buster Casey, human beings are currently the largest mammal reservoir of the rabies virus.
    Sean Gardner: As I understand it, you have two types of rabies. There’s your “dumb” type, where you never go insane and bite anyone. You only curl up in a ball under your bed and die. And there’s the normal kind of rabies, the “furious” type, which 80 percent of folks get. Where you slobber and swear and flail around, smashing everything in your bedroom, including your Dolls of the World
    collection, and calling your father a “dirty, shit-eating, motherfucking, dickless dickhead…” Well, that’s what kind of rabies our Margot had.
    Denise Gardner: Shame on us, but I think we started to mourn Margot the day she turned thirteen and first dyed her hair black.
    Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: One can argue that all early prohibitions to bestiality were intended to prevent the Lyssavirus, or any disease, from jumping to human beings.
    Ancient cultures also warned that bastard offspring of a priest would become werewolves. As would any children produced by incest.
    Denise Gardner: Shame on me, but when I first suspected, when I had my first inkling that Margot might have rabies, I wrote it off as playacting. Watching Margot and her clique of goth friends, they made such a point to be rude and outlandish. It seemed too much, as if their fondest dream was to have rabies. Well, like I said, shame on me.
    Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: Once the virus begins replicating and is transported along sensory and motor nerves, the infected subject can remain asymptomatic for months, despite shedding virus and infecting additional subjects. That scenario appears to be the case with the alleged superspreader, Buster Casey.
    No, epidemiologists no longer use the term “Patient Zero.” Any individual responsible for ten or more infections, we now refer to as a “superspreader.” What “Typhoid Mary” Mallon was to typhoid, what Gaetan Dugas was to AIDS, and Liu Jian-lun was to SARS, Buster Casey would become for rabies.
    Sean Gardner: Our Margot, you know what happened. So many of her friends died that we held a group service. Not just Dean Leonard. Except it’s different when you bury a goth child. Yes, it’s still heartbreaking, only it doesn’t look as bad. Actually, our Margot looked better—well, healthier—than she did before she got sick. The viewing, with all of them dressed up and so somber, it looked like her junior prom. But no one was dancing. Or smiling. Or laughing. Everyone gloomy and dressed in black…
    Okay, it looked exactly like her junior prom.
    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