Rant

red in the middle of that white pillow. The red looking black in the moonlight, Rant sniffs it and frowns.
    He sniffs again, with his eyes closed this time, and says, “It’s LouAnn Perry, all right, but she must be back taking those fluoride pills…”
    Rant offers me the red dot, but I shake my head.
    Before anybody decent has showed up to help, Rant’s picked the length of our back fence, guessing every dick and pussy.
    Mary Cane Harvey: There’s so little to stimulate young people in Middleton. Social life is centered around the church or school events. The grange hall hosts a get-together every weekend, sometimes a cakewalk come springtime, and a craft fair going into the holiday season. Or the Cub Scouts will organize a haunted house as a fund-raiser around Halloween.
    Bodie Carlyle: Rant Casey had a dog’s sense of smell. A human bloodhound, he could track anything. From staying out late at night, he could smell even better. By being the most popular boy in school, he knowed the name behind every smell. And by twelfth grade, all these talents, they finally started working together to his advantage.
    “Look at this,” Rant says, and shows me a white pillow with a tight red flower in the center. Little as a violet. Without even sniffing it, he says, “Miss Harvey from English class.”
    The howl of invisible dogs on the wind, the sound slipping around us.
    It’s Miss Harvey, he can tell, on account of the red shape. “Makes a ‘pussy print,’” Rant says, one finger drawing around the outside of the red stain. “A hundred times more personal than your fingerprint.” The stain, he says, looks exactly like a kiss of her downbelow parts.
    You didn’t have to ask how Rant knowed the shape of Miss Harvey’s parts. Same as animal tracks in the snow or sand, he could handdraw you the kiss of a wide-ranging variety of local pussy. Native-born or just passing through. Just seeing how far a rubber was rolled down, Rant could reckon what dick it come off.
    A ways off, in the kitchen window of my house, you could see my mom’s outline standing at the sink, one elbow raised up and poked out sideways, her hand holding the outline of the telephone pressed to the side of her hair. Maybe watching us. Probably watching us. Rant plucked another wad of white, splashed with a dark stain. He sniffed it and looked back toward my house.
    I asked him, “Who is that?” and nodded at the old blood.
    This new pussy print, a flower bigger than Miss Harvey’s, a sunflower compared to her little violet. And Rant opened his bag, saying, “Forget it.”
    No, really, I said, and reached for it. “Let me smell.”
    Rant dropped the sunflower-big stain into his burlap bag. He walked a step away from me, walking down the fence line, saying, “I’m pretty sure it’s your mom’s.”
    My mom, watching. Her ear still looking for blame over the phone.
    Walking out with Rant Casey, time had a habit of getting stopped. That moment, another when time got stuck. That moment forever and always doomed to keep happening in my head. Those stars, the same old hand-me-down stars as folks still wish on now. Tonight’s moon, the same exact moon as back then.
    Sheriff Bacon Carlyle: Between the time it took Rant Casey running to church, and the time we took getting back to old Esther, the dog packs had already found her. Irene’s mama. They left her something awful to come pick up.
    Bodie Carlyle: If Rant Casey ever fucked my mom, I didn’t never have the balls to ask.
    2–Guardian Angels
    From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms ( Historian): The hound dog is to Middleton what the cow is to the streets of Calcutta or New Delhi. In the middle of every dirt road sleeps some kind of mongrel coonhound, panting in the sun, its dripping
    tongue hanging out. A kind of fur-covered speed bump with no collar or tags. Powdered with a fine dust of clay blown off the plowed fields.
    To arrive at Middleton requires four solid days of driving, which is the longest period of time I have ever experienced inside an automobile without colliding with another vehicle. I found that to be the most depressing aspect of my pilgrimages.
    Neddy Nelson ( Party Crasher): Can you explain how in 1968 the amateur paleontologist William Meister in Antelope Spring, Utah, split a block of shale while searching for trilobite fossils, but instead discovered the fossilized five-hundred-million-year-old footprint of a human shoe? And how did another fossilized shoe