Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

9–Fishing

Bodie Carlyle (Childhood Friend): Living, alive animal fur is what my fingers would finally come across. Rant just egging me to push my arm deeper into the ground. My fingers slippery with grease. Most of me sun red, stretched out on the sand, my hand's crawling down, colder than cool, into the dark of a varmint hole. Skunk, maybe. A coyote or gopher den.

Rant's eyes on my eyes, he says, "Feel anything?"

My hand blind, touching a tangle of sagebrush roots, smooth rocks, then—hmmm—fur. The soft hairs moving off, out of my reach down the tunnel.

Rant saying, "Go after it."

A gust of wind takes off with our crumpled sheet of tinfoil still greasy from Mrs. Casey's leftover meatloaf. The ground beef and oregano we each worked our digging hand through, the meatloaf wedged deep under our fingernails and slippery between our fingers. And my hand, lost somewheres underground, stretched beyond where I figured it would get, I reach to feel that fur and the rattle of a fast heartbeat underneath. That heartbeat almost as fast as mine.

LouAnn Perry (Childhood Friend): History is, the girls Rant liked, he used to kiss. Boys, he took them out animal-fishing. Both ways it was a test of your faith.

Bodie Carlyle: Summers, most folks would go fishing, over along the river in hot weather; Rant would head the other way.

It wasn't nothing to find Rant walked straight all morning out in the desert, laid down flat on one side, his arm disappeared up to the elbow in some dirty hole. Didn't matter what critter—scorpion, snake, or prairie dog—Rant would be reaching blind into the dark underground, hoping for the worst.

That black widow spider on Easter Sunday, since it didn't kill him, Rant figured to hunt down what might. "I been vaccinated against measles and diphtheria," Rant used to say. "A rattlesnake's just my vaccination against boredom."

A cottonmouth bite he called "my vaccination against doing chores."

Pit vipers, just about half the time they forget to inject their venom. According to books, Rant says, rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, they truly are more scared of you. A human being, giving off so much heat, that's what a pit vipers sees. Something so big and hot shows up, and it's all a snake can get done to unfold those swing-down fangs and—kah-pow—sink them in your arm.

Nothing more pissed off Rant than getting a dry bite. Pain but no poison. A vaccination without the medicine. Those double holes marching up his arms, ringed around his shins, no red welts. Dry bites.

Instead of river fishing, Rant walked out beyond the back porch, beyond the barrel for burning trash, past the machine shed, out into the fields leased out for alfalfa, the Rain Bird sprinklers—tick-tick-ticking—shots of water into the hot sunshine. After the alfalfa came the horizon of Russian-olive trees, shaggy with their long silver leaves. Over that horizon come the sugar beets. After the beets, another horizon. Beyond that, a barbed-wire fence piled solid with tumbleweeds trying to get inside. Kotex and rubbers snared and flapping, full of Middleton spunk and blood.

Beyond that, another horizon. Three horizons outside the Caseys' back door, you found yourself in the desert. Rant called his walking out to get animal bit, he called it: "gone fishing."

Irene Casey (Rant's Mother): The fire ants should've been a red flag. Buddy never come in the house without his hands and feet being all over a red rash of ant bites. Pain you'd expect to make most kids cry, Buddy wore it no worse off than a heat rash.

Bodie Carlyle: His folks didn't hear the half of it. Rant could roll up his sleeve at school and count off the bites: red ant, hobo spider, scorpion.

"More of my vaccinations," Rant used to say.

All through ninth grade, Rant would ask to be excused from playing Friday dodgeball against the twelfth-graders on account of a fresh rattlesnake bite. While the rest of us got creamed to hell, Rant would pull off one sweat sock and show the coach a fat, red foot. The two poke holes leaking clear ooze you'd take for venom.

Between him and me, this was his vaccination against playing dodgeball.

To Rant, pain was one horizon. Poison, the next horizon. Disease was nothing but the horizon after all them.

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms (Historian): The black widow spider only kills about 5 percent of those it bites. An hour after the bite, the neurotoxin a-latrotoxin spreads throughout the victim's lymphatic system. Your abdomen contracts into a solid washboard of rigid muscle tissue. You might vomit or sweat profusely.

Another common symptom is priapism. It's nature's cure for erectile dysfunction. Rant never told his parents, but that Easter was the first time he'd ever experienced an erection. Sex and insect venom were completely collapsed in his childhood psyche.

Echo Lawrence (Party Crasher): That's the secret behind Rant's craving for snakes. Even in the city, he needed to find a black widow or a brown recluse before he was worth anything in the sack. Getting a "booster shot," he used to call it.

Don't try this at home, but the result is a dick that stays hard for hours. On demand, and big as a gearshift. A little calcium gluconate and everything goes back to normal.

Sheriff Bacon Carlyle (Childhood Enemy): The only why Rant Casey got himself bit was to catch a buzz. Poison being just another drug to abuse. Another high. Speaking as an officer of the law, I can tell you an addicted addict ain't like regular folks. By the end of this story, you'll be pretty near shocked what Rant done to get and stay strung out.

Bodie Carlyle: Don't ask me. I never did figure out the attraction. While other kids was sniffing gasoline or model-airplane glue, most summer days, Rant would be belly-down in the sand next to a sagebrush. Most kids around here, they'd be escaping from reality, while Rant was trying to get ready for it.

Those dirty holes, under those rocks he'd tip up a crack, those places where he couldn't see, that was the future we was so scared about. After he'd stuck his hands into the dark, and not died from it, after then Rant wasn't so scared. He'd roll up one pant leg and point his foot out straight. He'd sit in the desert and poke this bare foot down in a coyote burrow, slow, the way folks test bathwater with their big toe. In case it's too hot or cold. Watching him, Rant would plant both hands braced in the sand, his eyes shut tight, holding one big breath inside his chest.

In the bottom of that hole, a skunk, a raccoon, a mother coyote with pups, or a rattlesnake. The feel of soft fur or smooth scales, warm or cool to the touch, then—kah-pow—the mouth grab of teeth, and Rant's whole leg would shake. And Rant never pulled back, not the way most folks would, doing more damage as the teeth hung tight. No, Rant let the mouth let loose. Maybe snatch tight a second time. Sink deep. Let go. Get bored. Then a sniff of warm breath against his toes. Underground, the feel of a wet tongue licking up his blood.

Out of that hole Rant would pull his foot, the skin tore up and mangled, but licked clean of dirt. His clean skin bleeding—drip-drip-drip—pure blood. His eyeballs nothing but big black pupil dialed all the way open, Rant would be pulling off his other shoe and sock, rolling up the second pant leg, and shoving another bare part of himself into the dark to see what might happen.

The whole length of summer, Rant's toes and finger would be frayed skin, fringed with dripping blood. One bite of venom, one little squirt of poison at a time, Rant was training for something big. Getting vaccinated against fear. No matter the future, any terrible job or marriage or military service, it had to be an improvement over a coyote chomping on your foot.

Echo Lawrence: Get this. The first night I met Rant Casey, we were eating Italian, and he says, "You never been snake-bit?"

He's wearing a coat, so I have no idea about how mutilated his arms look.

As if this is my shortcoming, he keeps goading me, saying, "I can't believe a person could live so long and never been sprayed by a skunk…"

As if mine has been a life of utter caution and deprivation.

Rant shakes his head, looking and sighing at his plate of spaghetti. Then, turning his head sideways and giving me a look with only one eye, he says, "If you never been rabid, you ain't never lived."

The nerve of him. Like he's some redneck holy man.

Get him. He couldn't even work a three-speed mounted on the steering column.

Until that night, he'd never seen ravioli.

Dr. David Schmidt (Middleton Physician): The little screw-up, that Casey boy, he was presenting symptoms before he bothered to let his folks know he'd been bit. With rabies, the virus is carried in the saliva of an infected animal. Any bite or lick, even a sneeze, can spread the disease. Once you have it, the virus spreads through your central nervous system, up your spine to your brain, where it reproduces. The early stage is called the «eclipse» phase of the disease, because you present no symptoms. You can be contagious as all getout, but still look and feel normal.

This eclipse phase can last a couple days to years and years. And all that time, you can be infecting folks with your saliva.

Bodie Carlyle: Instead of boosting peaks, Rant wanted to go fishing. He used to say, "My life might be little and boring, but at least it's mine—not some assembly-line, secondhand, hand-me-down life."

Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): Getting bit by a rattlesnake, that's pretty low-tech.

Dr. David Schmidt: The intolerable aspect was that Buster Casey was a popular boy. He must've been. In the past ten years, we've treated six cases of rabies infection in a male. All six cases being Buster himself. But we've had forty-seven infections in girls, most of those girls he attended school with, and two of those being his female teachers. Out of those, three chose to terminate pregnancies by unnamed fathers at the same time.

LouAnn Perry: Any way you look at it, Buster was a hazard to have around playing Spin the Bottle.

Polk Perry (Childhood Neighbor): History is, Rant Casey had rabies more of his life than he didn't. And hatching that much of any bug in your brain had to make him some crazy. Still, there's plenty of folks who find crazy people to be very attractive.

LouAnn Perry: Buster didn't never get me pregnant, but he gave me rabies plenty often. First time, standing under the mistletoe at the school Christmas pageant, fifth grade. One kiss, me wearing my red velvet jumper with underneath it a white blouse, standing in the middle of the front row onstage, and singing "Oh Holy Night," singing notes sweet as any angel, my hair blond as angel hair in curls going halfway down my back, me the picture of sweetness—and I had rabies.

Courtesy of Buster Casey.

Dr. David Schmidt: In all fairness, I can't blame all the infections on that one boy, but we haven't had a single case of rabies since Buster Casey left town.

LouAnn Perry: Loads of girls went rabid my exact same way. Maybe half our class, freshman year. Brenda Jordan blamed her rabies on bobbing for apples during a Halloween party, taking her turn behind Buster, but fact is—she kissed him.

Buster Casey was for some girls what snakes was for him. A kind of place your folks tell you never to go. But a kind of small mistake that'll save you from a bigger mistake later on.

Mistakes like kissing Buster, most times it's a worst mistake if you don't make them. After a good-looking boy gives you rabies two, three times, you'll settle down and marry somebody less exciting for the rest of your life.

Echo Lawrence: For our second date, Rant wanted to rake up leaves in a park. One of the surefire ways to contract rabies is to mess with bats. Look under enough leaves and you'll find a bat to bite you. Keep that in mind the next time you go to jump in a pile of dead leaves.

LouAnn Perry: History is, that boy was very popular. Except maybe with his daddy.

Shot Dunyun: How weird is that? A sexually conflicted thirteen-year-old rattlesnake-venom junkie with rabies—well, it's safe to say that's every father's worst nightmare.

LouAnn Perry: History is, Buster Casey was the kind of mistake a girl needs to make while she's still young enough to recover.

Bodie Carlyle: Us out in that desert, three horizons apart from the rest of the world, Rant's still looking into my eyes, saying, "You feel a heartbeat?"

Me, feeling fur. Petting fur. Underground. Buried. That hand of me still pale as bone. Slippery with the smell of meatloaf grease.

Me in the sun, sunburned, I still nod yes.

Rant smiling, he says, "Don't pull out."

The feel of that fur, soft and warm, until—kah-pow—the punch of something pushing through the slack between my thumb and next finger, that web of skin there sunk through with something sharp, and my arm shaking so hard it hammers the tunnel walls already tight around my elbow, far up as my shoulder, me collarbone-deep in pain and trying to pull out.

Rant's hands around my chest from behind, hauling me out of the ground.

The hole in my hand, not two punched marks. Not the little horseshoe of a coyote bite. The blood's pulsing out just one hole, big and straight across.

Rant, looking at the blood and the dripping straight-across hole, he says, "You been bit." He says, "Jackrabbit bit."

Both of us trickling blood out of little holes in our hands and feet, watching our blood leak out in the sand under the hot sun, Rant says, "This here," he says, "far as I'm concerned, this is how church should feel."