Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

33–Werewolves IV

Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): Talk about bullshit. Looking back on this. It's beyond bullshit, but sometimes I don't think when I brush my teeth, and I'd spit the toothpaste into the toilet instead of the sink. Force of habit. I never think how spit is really saliva, and I never consider how my dog used to drink out of the toilet.

Jayne Merris (Musician): You remember what people were like. One rumor said Nighttimers picked up apples for sale in grocery stores, licked the apples, and put them back, hoping to infect Daytimers. Other rumors said Nighttimers would spit from high-rise windows during the day.

Neddy Nelson (Party Crasher): The Berlin Wall…the Great Wall of China…that zone dividing Israel from the Palestinians…North from South Korea—isn't that what the eight o'clock curfew became?

Galton Nye (City Councilman): The main problem I have with Nighttimers is they get on their high horse and call me a bigot. Nobody can call me prejudiced. For their information, my own daughter is a so-called Nighttimer, my own little girl. Since almost three years ago.

Neddy Nelson: How soon was it before Daytimers assumed every Nighttimer carried rabies? In food service? In health care? What about child care? Can you name one Daytimer who still hired nighttime labor?

Shot Dunyun: My dog I had was a three-year-old pug named Sandy. She used to chase a tennis ball until she'd be so tired I'd have to carry her home from the park. She'd sleep the whole trip back.

I knew I couldn't boost peaks, and I knew what that meant, but talk about being stupid.

Jayne Merris: You remember? You heard rumors about people not knowing they were infected, kissing their husbands and wives, parents kissing their kids good night and giving them rabies. Churches that shared a common wineglass during Communion, that was another story that made the rounds. How all Catholics or Baptists had rabies.

Shot Dunyun: My pug, Sandy, every day she'd sleep on my bed, her little head on the pillow next to my pillow. Like a little bulldozer, she'd plow her way under the covers, turn around by my feet, then push her way out until just her head was showing. Talk about personality. Sandy even snored like a little person. She knew «fetch» and "roll over" and "wait."

Galton Nye: Despite how much her mother and I tried to warn her, she rejected us. We tried to teach our little girl right from wrong. We begged her not to throw her life away on some silly teenager act of rebellion. We made it abundantly clear that day versus night was entirely a conscious lifestyle choice, but she wouldn't hear a word of it.

Neddy Nelson: Are you aware that, before his gruesome experiments on Auschwitz concentration-camp prisoners, Dr. Josef Mengele had been a well-respected anthropologist? Did you know Mengele had traveled through Africa, collecting human blood and viral samples? That his lifelong dream had been to identify factors that proved a difference between the blood of different races? Then to create a race-specific plague?

Did you know that much of Mengele's findings came to the United States as part of Project Paperclip, where the CIA granted pardons and gave new identities to Nazi scientists if they agreed to share Mengele's research?

Jayne Merris: To insult somebody, the worst thing you could say was "Don't be such a Drooler." Or "Don't go all rabid on me." Instead of holding outlaw, elite status, Nighttimer culture became an object of disdain. The way to dismiss anything was to say: "That is soooooo nighttime…"

Galton Nye: Our little girl graduated the salutatorian of the Christian Pathways Academy. That means her grade-point average was second highest out of a class of almost forty students. She was a junior youth minister at our church, three years running, and she played varsity soccer her senior year, first string. Her mother and I hired a so-called private detective—this was the week after her running off. All the detective ever gave us for our money was a picture of her in some junky car with the boy, "Just Married" written in white under her window, and her wearing a veil and laughing. The boy had on a white shirt and bow tie. After all the dreams we had for giving our little girl a big church wedding, that picture broke her mother's heart.

The Bible says, "Weep you not for putrid refuse all the better lost."

Five thousand dollars for that one blurry picture, and all it bought us was heartbreak. At the least, we know that Nighttimer son-of-a-bitch finally married her.

Shot Dunyun: I don't give a shit what the song says, sometimes a kiss is not just a kiss. That's for sure. My theory is that, every time a bat or skunk bit Rant, he'd by accident let the rabies go a little farther before he'd get treated. If he was trying or not, Rant hatched some bug that medical science couldn't touch.

Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D. (Epidemiologist): The only two untreatable rabies-type viruses were the African strains Mokola and Duvenhage, prior to the identification of the Rant serotype.

Galton Nye: The Bible says, "…thus if poisoned be the child not of service beneath the parent." You just keep that in mind.

Neddy Nelson: Have you read that Kissinger report he's supposed to have submitted to the National Security Council in 1974? The one where Henry Kissinger warns that the greatest threat to the future of Americans is overpopulation in Third World countries? How's it go? We need the minerals and natural resources of Africa? Pretty quick now, those banana republics will fall apart as their populations rise too high? The only way America can protect its prosperity and political stability will be to depopulate the Third World?

Should we be surprised that the AIDS virus showed up about 1975?

Do you understand what the term «depopulate» means?

Jayne Merris: Under the I-SEE-U Act, the antiexclusion laws guaranteed equal access to all public places for people of day or night status; but if you ask me, people got so paranoid about sweat on gym equipment, things like that, spit on apples, that the nicer places—bars, restaurants, salons—they just closed up at night.

The two cultures shared the same city, but they kept drifting farther and farther apart.

Neddy Nelson: How do you explain this—the first explosion of AIDS infections in Africa started in missionary hospitals where Christian volunteers reused the same needles to vaccinate local kids against smallpox and diphtheria? Does that sound familiar? Could be millions of kids. Doesn't this explain how, between 1976 and 1980, the infection curve rose from 0.7 percent to 40 percent in some parts of West Africa?

Does that scenario make you want to rush out to any public clinic and stand in line for a free vaccination of anything?

Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: Any vaccination carries a small risk of post-treatment encephalitis, so it was inevitable that a few individuals immunized with a pre-exposure prophylactic did develop mild rabies symptoms and required additional treatment. The sheer numbers of people vaccinated made patient tracking impossible, and, yes, at least two persons died as a likely result of their immunization.

Shot Dunyun: Another morning, I'd wake up and the pillow next to mine was soaked in spit, my dog's drooled that much in her sleep. Pugs slobber a shitload, so I didn't give it another thought. Talk about denial.

Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: Rumors within the target community exaggerated and misinterpreted the vaccination-related deaths, and this dampened their enthusiasm to fully participate in further treatment programs, virtually guaranteeing a constant, significant reservoir of the virus within the nighttime population.

Shot Dunyun: Rant Casey used to say, "No matter what happens, it's always now…" Talk about cryptic.

I think what Rant meant was, we live in the present moment of reality, and no matter what's come before, no matter how much we loved a person or a dog, when it attacks us we'll react to that moment of danger.

Neddy Nelson: Doesn't it seem weird that a government report recommends depopulating Africa, and by the end of the twentieth century entire generations were dying? Isn't it suspicious how former European colonies with rich natural resources, stuff like gold and diamonds, countries like Botswana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, were most hard hit by the AIDS epidemic?

Shot Dunyun: A great dog like I had, and I let her drink my spit. Sometimes I'm light-years beyond stupid. That's for sure.

One evening, I woke up to the ten-minute curfew siren, and Sandy was standing on my chest with her pug face dripping spit on my neck. Her black lips curl back to show every tooth down to the yellow root. Her breathing feels hot on my face, and the same way she jumps to fetch a tennis ball, I watch Sandy crouch, ready to lunge at my throat. The minute she springs, I throw the sheets and blankets over her, and I bundle her up so she can't get out. Sandy's never weighed more than a sixteen-pound bowling ball, so I pick her up in that sack of blankets, only she's gone all werewolf, snarling and clawing inside, and my blankets are so old they're nothing but lint. One of her little pug paws, it claws through so I can see her black toenails. The blankets are wet with her drool, so it's like holding a little wolverine inside a bag of wet tissue paper. One more claw and she'll be out and biting me. Just to stun her, maybe knock her out, I swing the bundle so it hits the wall. Sandy's still snarling and thrashing inside, so I swing the bundle against the wall a second time. She keeps fighting, so I keeping hitting her against the wall, until my neighbor on the other side is pounding back. The one-minute curfew siren goes off, then the curfew bell. The wall, where I'm hitting the bundle of blankets, that spot is smeared with red. The bundle, where it's been hitting, the blankets are soaked through with red. Dripping red. My neighbor's still pounding and yelling for me to shut up, but Sandy's not moving or making any noise. It's nothing like in Old Yeller.

Talk about panicking. Now you can see what a thoughtless, bullshit idiot I am.

Neddy Nelson: Can you shrug off the fact that, before the rabies outbreak, the relatively younger Nighttimer community was about to outnumber the population of the Daytimers? Wouldn't a good epidemic do to Nighttimers what AIDS did in Africa? Wouldn't it devastate the political power of a rising community and preserve the existing power structures?

Galton Nye: We don't know if she's infected or not, but we're not taking our chances. We have our own health to worry about. I'm not saying her mother and I don't still love her, but the night she walked out with that so-called boyfriend of hers, our daughter was dead to us.

God bless her, but if our little girl shows up here some night, our door's staying locked.