Rant

shoes and belt, his plain, regular Easter egg hunt, it’s now turned into a Race Against Death. His little hands are knocking flowers to one side, busting stems. His feet tramping down petunias. Crushing carrot tops. With every heartbeat, Rant can feel the poison in his hand pumped closer to his brain. The sting of the bite, fading to numb, first his hand losing feeling, then the most part of his arm.
    His mom come outside to find him panting in the dirt, facedown in the compost pile that’s left of her garden, dirt stuck to the web of tears spread out around each green eye.
    Echo Lawrence: So they left him there. They got in their car and drove off to Easter morning services. Again, that moment, the end of what we wish would last forever.
    Bodie Carlyle: Rant never found more than those three eggs. They come home and that’s all he had to show for a whole day of hunting. Three eggs and the spider bite, his hand already shrinked back to kid-size.
    That spider, it’s that black widow spider that got Rant hooked on poison.
    Even after Mrs. Casey waded into her garden, all the plants mashed and dug up, she couldn’t find a single one of the Easter eggs she’d hid. The rest of that summer, her garden was ruined. Another week, and Mr. Casey’s yard would be, too.
    Echo Lawrence: Get this. Rant told me he’d found all the eggs, then stashed them in a box, hidden in some barn or shack. Every week, he’d sneak out two or three eggs and stick them in the deepest part of the grass, just before his dad would mow the lawn. By then, the eggs had turned fugly black, the worst kind of rotten.
    Every time his dad ran over one with the power mower, you’d have exploded stink—everywhere. On the mower blade, on the grass, all over his father’s boots and pant legs. Rant’s hand-painted hand grenades, turned into land mines. The lawn and the garden were both disaster areas. Rant said inside the chain-link fence was a jungle. Black stink sprayed on each side of the house. Everything gone so wild you couldn’t see the porch. Driving up, you’d think no one lived there.
    Bodie Carlyle: He dyed eggs gray with a red stripe, made to match CS gas ABC-M7A2 riot grenades. Light green with a white top half, to be AN-M8 smoke grenades. Mrs. Casey, she bottled the leftover boil water. Jars of bright red and yellow, blue and green, they were all she had left of her garden. So the sun couldn’t fade them, she put the jars in the back of a cabinet above the fridge.
    The rest of the year, Rant used to sneak out drops of those colors. Summer into Christmas, he’d dig his dad’s dirty shorts out of the laundry pile, and Rant would eye-dropper spots of yellow into the crotch of every pair.
    After every sit-down piss, Mr. Casey would dangle his dick, trying to get out the last stray drop. Blotting with a square of toilet paper. But every week, more yellow spots in his shorts. It almost killed his pa when Rant switched to using drops from the red food color. Echo Lawrence: As an adult, Rant’s favorite way to skip work was to put a drop of red food coloring into each eye and tell his boss he had conjunctivitis. You know, pinkeye. For a week’s sick leave, he’d use yellow to imply hepatitis. Rant’s real master stroke was to arrive at his job and let someone else see his eyes, red or yellow, and make the boss force him to go home.
    Rant would arrive at my place with his bright-yellow eyes, and we’d cruise the field for a tag team.
    Bodie Carlyle: Mr. Casey spent big bucks trying to cure a bladder infection he never did have. He swallowed so much antibiotics he couldn’t take a solid shit most of that year.
    Echo Lawrence: Before he died, Rant gave me a white hardboiled egg. He said he’d written something on the shell with white wax, but it’s impossible to read, white wax on a white shell. If anything happened to him, Rant said only then could I dye the egg and read the message.
    By now, that egg is so old I’m afraid to touch it. If the shell cracks, with the smell that’ll come out, I’ll be evicted.
    Bodie Carlyle: After Rant took off to the city, after he died, the FBI come and grilled me. You should’ve seen how their eyes lighted up when I told them about the Easter hand grenades.
    Irene Casey ( Rant’s Mother): The winter after Chet quit mowing the yard, all winter, dog packs used to come roll on their backs. To work the stink into their fur. The same dogs that tore up Grandma Esther. Makes no sense, how dogs can