Rant

living proof of your parent’s limitations. Their less-than-masterpiece.
    Echo Lawrence: His mother looked down at little Rant from the full height of standing straight, and she said, in a deep voice Rant had never heard, a voice that would echo inside him for the rest of his life, she said:
    “You disgusting little monster.”
    That afternoon, Rant quit being to his mother what his “Bear” was to him. That was the real moment he was born. The start of Rant as a real person.
    For the first nap of his new life, that afternoon, Rant fell asleep.
    From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms ( Historian): That next Thanksgiving dinner, after the black widow spiders had stung old Granny Esther to death, Irene Casey abandoned her seat in the kitchen. However, Rant’s Great-grandmother Hattie stood next in succession for a place at the adult table. The line of succession was as clear as the names and dates written inside the family Bible.
    Shot Dunyun: How creepy is this? By the end of that Thanksgiving, old Granny Hattie’s twitching and scratching. The fox-fur piece she wears to every occasion—two or three red-fox pelts with the fucking heads and feet stuffed, pinned so they run around her neckthe shitty thing is jumping with fleas.
    It’s beyond creepy. People that old, it only takes a gust of wind to kill them. A broken hip. A bee sting. Just one mouthful of tuna bake gone bad. Like black widow spiders, flea bites, you’re talking another natural part of the glorious redneck lifestyle. It could’ve been chipmunks or marmots or deer mice, rabbits, sheep, or rock squirrels, but something in their natural world’s left its fleas behind. First, Granny Hattie complained about a sore throat and a headache. A stomach ache. Hattie is gasping for breath. An hour in the hospital, and she’s dead of pneumonia.
    From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: The last rat-borne epidemic of bacterium Yersinia pestis occurred in Los Angeles in the years 1924 and 1925. It was traced to the widespread practice of destroying prairie-dog colonies by introducing animals infected with the plague. By the 1930s, 98 percent of the native marmot population was destroyed, but the remaining 2 percent remain asymptomatic carriers of bubonic plague.
    Echo Lawrence: He used to wake up with a yelp. In his nightmares, Rant said his grandmother’s little flirtation veil, the black lace would start to shift. The hat seemed to come alive, tearing itself to shreds, and the black threads crawled down her cheeks, biting, and his Grandma Esther, screaming. In those dreams, Rant could hear dogs bark but not see them.
    Sheriff Bacon Carlyle ( Childhood Enemy): Them dreams was his feeling guilt, plain and simple. Over Rant’s killing those old women. Over spreading his infection.
    Shot Dunyun: Those little fluff balls that look so cute in nature films, every year an average of twenty people cross paths with a plague-infected ground squirrel or chipmunk. Their lymph nodes balloon, their fingertips and toes turn black, and they die. The people, I mean. Not the fluff balls.
    Echo Lawrence: Go ahead, ask Irene Casey about Rant’s bedroom wall. She ended up hanging wallpaper. To her, dried snot was worse than asbestos.
    Even as an adult, in his own apartment, the wall above Rant’s bed wasn’t anything you’d ever want to touch.
    Irene Casey ( Rant’s Mother): Near as I recall, we did put up wallpaper in Buddy’s bedroom, when he was going on three or four years old. A pattern of cowboys roping horses, and some cactus, on a background of chocolate brown, something that wouldn’t show dirt. Awful dark, but practical for a boy’s room.
    The rest, about a wall covered with dried boogers—that never went on. Buddy was a beautiful child. A regular little angel. We did paste stars on his ceiling, those stickers that glowed in the dark, little cowboys under the stars. That part is true, but the rest…I wouldn’t never call my baby a monster or no curse from the Devil.
    And Buddy wouldn’t never tell folks that story.
    3–Dogs
    Bodie Carlyle ( Childhood Friend): Wintertime, Middleton dogs run in a pack. Regular farm dogs hereabouts, they’ll tear off and disappear, except you can hear them howling and barking at night. Other dogs, people car-dump them at the side of the road.
    Abandoned. City folks figure any dog can fend for itself, turn wild, but most mutts will starve until they’re hungry enough to eat the shit left by some other varmint. The