Rant

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.”
    6–The Tooth Fairy
    Bodie Carlyle ( Childhood Friend): Don’t laugh, but one landmark summer, a stick of licorice cost you five dollars in gold. A regular plastic squirt gun set you back fifty bucks.
    The spring of the Tooth Fairy upset the whole, entire Middleton standard of living.
    First happened is Rant come to my house a Saturday, with his Scout kerchief tied round his neck, and him telling my mom we needed the entire day to collect old paint cans for a recycling merit badge.
    Before thenabouts, Rant and me was just-neckerchief Scouts. If all your folks could buy you was the yellow kerchief for round your neck, you was the bottom rung of Cub Scouting. Other boys, well-off boys, had the midnight-blue uniform shirt. Rich boys had the uniform shirt and pants. Milt Tommy boasted the regulation Scout knife and scabbard, the Scout belt with the brass buckle, and the compass that you could hook to hang off the belt. Wore his shoulder sash sewed all over with merit badges to every meeting.
    Brenda Jordan ( Childhood Friend): Promise not to tell, but a time we were dating, Rant Casey told me about a stranger. The time his Grandma Esther lay dying, a stranger drove up the road from nowheres. Said he’d look after Esther, and he told Rant where to find the gold. Just a tall old man, Rant says.
    That old man told he was Rant’s real, true daddy, come visiting from the city. That stranger told how Chester Casey was nobody.
    Bodie Carlyle: Didn’t matter how hard you earned it, a Scout merit badge with all that fancy ’broidery still cost five dollars. Rant and me weren’t getting none of those badges.
    That summer, we pushed a wheelbarrow, going to farms to knock on doors. Asking: Can we take away any rusted cans of old, dried paint folks might have stacked round the place? Cub Scouting scrap-metal project, Rant tells them, and folks smile, only too happy to be rid of old cans. All Saturday, until Rant and me collect us a pile in his folks’ barn.
    Rant screwdrivers the metal lid off one can, and the insides is solid pink paint left over from a bedroom ain’t been that color since forever. Forgot colors of handed-down rooms of farmhouses all over. No surprises. Just dead paint. Until Rant pries open a can and the insides is packed with newspapers, some balled up, some papers is wrapped tight round something hard. Rolled open, inside the newspaper balls is old bottles. Black-blue glass from old-time-ago bottles. Little face-cream and medicine jars.
    The newspaper feels soft as pool-table felt, not white paper but yellow, full of crimes to end all crimes, wars and plagues preached to be the end of the world. Every year of newspaper announcing another new end of the world.
    Hartley Reed ( Proprietor ofthe Trackside Grocery): One kid, the Jordan girl, she brung in a handful of gold coins. Most of them Liberty Head dollars going back to 1897. Found out, later on, she’d took a rock and hammered apart her grandma’s dentures. Traded those loose teeth for this “Tooth Fairy money,” the kids called it. Brung the coins to me, and took home a dollhouse come special-order from the Walker’s catalogue.
    Bodie Carlyle: Inside them paint cans is stuffed coin money. Gold and silver coin money, packed tight to stay quiet. Some stamped with eagles fighting snakes, and some