Rant

coins with pretty girls or old men, the girls showed standing, hardly dressed, but the old men showing just their wrinkled face.
    “Gold bugs,” Rant says, folks not trusting governments or the bank. Nor neighbors, nor family. Nor wives. Lonely alone misers, Rant says, stockpiling gold and silver and heart-attacking with their life’s secret unshared.
    Rant says you can’t call it robberying if the owners is dead and if the right and lawful heirs wasn’t loved enough to get told about the money being hid. Pirate treasures. Those paint cans lined up on shed shelves, rusting in barns and the trunks of abandoned cars. Turns out Rant knowed the money was around, not in every paint can but enough, knowed it for a long time, but didn’t bother to fetch any cans until he’d figured how to reason us having such riches. Two just-neckerchief Scouts, without scratch to buy the merit badges coming to us, now spending gold and silver money with dates on it going back a hundred and more years.
    Hartley Reed: Supply and demand. Nobody pointed a gun to make those kids spend their money. Funds was their money, to buy whatever they wanted. Just natural, when demand increases so do prices. When you get every kid in town bidding up cherry Fizzies, the cost is bound to inflate.
    Bodie Carlyle: The inflation is how Rant figured to launder our pirate treasure. Starting with our most best friends in fifth grade, we asked around: Who had a tooth loose? Any kid with a coming-out tooth—cha-ching—we gived him a silver or a gold coin and tell him to say the Tooth Fairy brung it. Fifth grade, most kids figure the Tooth Fairy’s a lie, but our folks ain’t told us as much.
    Every weekend, we’re collecting paint cans, pushing that wheelbarrow down longer roads to get to more far-off farms, isolated spreads where the real left-behind money’s gone to pile up.
    And every week, we’re giving kids more gold and silver to tell their folks is from the Fairy for a baby tooth.
    Most folks knowed here’s a lie, but moms and dads not wanting to admit their own lying about the Tooth Fairy and Santy Claus and all. Us lying to our folks, them lying to us, nobody wanted to admit to being the liar.
    None of the other fifth-graders ratted on Rant or me, since they want to keep the money and figure more’s coming. Everybody caught trapped in the same Tooth Fairy lie.
    You can get plenty of folks telling the same lie if they got a stake in it. You get everybody telling the same lie and it ain’t a lie, not no more.
    Livia Rochelle ( Teacher): A year I was teaching fifth grade, the Elliot girl brought me a gold coin and asked how much it was worth in trade for Tootsie Rolls. We looked up the coin in the library, and it was a two-and-one-half dollar Liberty Head, dated 1858. The obverse side showed a woman’s profile, crowned across her forehead with the word “Liberty,” and thirteen stars going around her.
    According to the book we checked, that gold piece was valued at fifteen thousand dollars.
    My fear was that she’d stolen the coin, so I asked how she’d come to have it. That Elliot girl, she told me the Tooth Fairy left it in exchange for a tooth she’d lost, and she pointed a finger to show me a gap in the side of her smile. A molar toward the front was gone, just a baby tooth.
    Bodie Carlyle: Bicuspids brung five dollars, gold. A molar, ten. Silas Hendersen claimed to lose twelve incisors, nine canines, and sixteen wisdom tooths in the passing of that summer vacation. Was older kids selling their teeth to fifth-graders for a half-cut of the Fairy money. Kids ’tempting to pass off horse tooths, dog tooths, big cow tooths chewed down to the stub and roots. Got so Rant Casey turned tooth expert. Knowed a silver filling from mercury amalgam. A real broke tooth from a pried-off crown. Piled up in Rant’s bedroom, he had soup cans of folks’ teeth, then cigar boxes, shoe boxes, then shopping bags. The Middleton Tooth Museum. Making all the fifth grade rich, it didn’t look as suspect, Rant and me being rich. But for every gold or silver coin we passed on to a kid, we held back two for each of us. Rant holding back double what I did, not spending his.
    After plenty of money come into play around town, what Rant and me spended only looked reasonable. Regular, compared to the new standard of living.
    Team captains took money on the side, so even the loserest ball player could pitch an inning. Teachers at Middleton Elementary would take a