Rant

red. Crying. Dressed as a little angel with tissue-paper wings stretched on coat-hanger wire and a wire halo dusted with gold glitter, the Elliot girl wipes her eyes with one hand and smears red across her face. The Elliot girl, just sobbing, she says, “Rant Casey put a real live heart in my bare hand…”
    And I told her, “No, honey. It was make-believe.” I spit on a napkin to wipe her face and said, “That heart was just a plain old peeled tomato…” My first fear is she’s scared. I’m kneeled down, wiping her face with a paper napkin, and the paper’s coming apart. Then I see how sticky the red is, gumming her skirt together in folds. Sticky and blotched with dark spots. Clots. Not just red food color. And there’s a smell. On top the diesel stink of those old tarps, that creosote smell same as railroad ties on a hot day, I can smell a sweet kind of marigold, kind of potty smell of meat gone bad.
    Glenda Hendersen ( Childhood Neighbor): For God’s sake. All the kids, just their fingers, one hand or both, some their arms and their costumes, little pirates and fairies and hobos, but they’re all smeared with blood. Red blood so old it’s gone black. Touching the cake, they got blood on the vanilla icing. Blood on the ladle for the fruit punch, and the orange for Pass the Orange. Fingerprints of blood all over the soda crackers for playing Whistling Crackers.
    On the concrete floor of the grange hall, leading out of the tarp tunnel, come an army of little footprints, the tread marks of sneakers and sandals, all printed in sticky blood. Lowell Richards, from the high school, he borrows a flashlight and goes to take a look.
    Sheriff Bacon Carlyle ( Childhood Enemy): Worse than the worse-ever police crime-scene photo.
    Luella Tommy: Folks rumored maybe Irene Casey brung home and froze her afterbirth when Buddy was born. My first impression was, could be, Buddy made it a scene in the haunted house: the Hanged Man, the Ghost, the Vision of Hell, and Irene Casey’s Placenta…
    Thank God I was wrong—but not by far off.
    Polk Perry ( Childhood Neighbor): Wouldn’t have sold Rant Casey those eyeballs if I’d knowed what that runt had planned. What went on, that’s a surefire sign the Casey boy would grow up to be a killer.
    Lowell Richards ( Teacher): In the dark, Rant Casey holds the Hendersen boy’s hand, dipping that hand into bowls. In the circle of my flashlight, bowls of blood thick as pudding. Bowls of slaughterhouse lungs. Pig and steer lungs, gray and heaped up. Bowls of squirmy gray brains, all busted and mashed together. Bowels and kidneys slopped on the floor.
    There’s one salad bowl rolling with different-size eyeballs. Cow, pig, and horse eyeballs all staring up, smudged with bloody fingerprints. All this mess starting to warm, starting to stink. Kidneys and bladders and cookie sheets heaped with intestines.
    Polk Perry: History is, it’s just a nightmare. Cut-off tongues laying everywhere.
    Lowell Richards: With me watching, Rant Casey held the Hendersen boy’s hand open, palm-up, and set something shining and dark in the fingers, saying, “This is a heart…”
    A huge dead cow’s heart.
    And the Hendersen boy’s giggling, blindfolded, and squeezing the heart. Blood oozing out the cut-off tubes.
    Bodie Carlyle: It’s spooky to consider, us turning teeth into gold and gold into eyeballs. Things in life is either flesh or money, like they can’t be both at the same time. That would be like somebody being both alive and dead. You can’t. You got to choose.
    Sheriff Bacon Carlyle: Him being a Casey, ’course he made it look by accident. Told folks he thought that’s how the haunted house was set up, always. Said he didn’t know pillars of the community as trusted and honored and respected as Scout den leaders, grownups, would lie to little kids. Just like a Casey to play dumb. Rant said how since forever kids looked forward to touching brains and lungs. Said it was nothing scary to touch old macaroni. Rant made the old, respectable way we did things, using grapes and food color, sound like the shameful crime.
    Lowell Richards: Rant Casey wasn’t evil. He was more like, he was trying to find something real in the world. Kids grow up connected to nothing these days, plugged in and living lives boosted to them from other people. Hand-me-down adventures. I think Rant wanted everybody to experience just one real adventure. As a community, something to bond folks.
    Everybody in