Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

6–The Tooth Fairy

Bodie Carlyle (Childhood Friend): Don't laugh, but one landmark summer, a stick of licorice cost you five dollars in gold. A regular plastic squirt gun set you back fifty bucks.

The spring of the Tooth Fairy upset the whole, entire Middleton standard of living.

First happened is Rant come to my house a Saturday, with his Scout kerchief tied round his neck, and him telling my mom we needed the entire day to collect old paint cans for a recycling merit badge.

Before thenabouts, Rant and me was just-neckerchief Scouts. If all your folks could buy you was the yellow kerchief for round your neck, you was the bottom rung of Cub Scouting. Other boys, well-off boys, had the midnight-blue uniform shirt. Rich boys had the uniform shirt and pants. Milt Tommy boasted the regulation Scout knife and scabbard, the Scout belt with the brass buckle, and the compass that you could hook to hang off the belt. Wore his shoulder sash sewed all over with merit badges to every meeting.

Brenda Jordan (Childhood Friend): Promise not to tell, but a time we were dating, Rant Casey told me about a stranger. The time his Grandma Esther lay dying, a stranger drove up the road from nowheres. Said he'd look after Esther, and he told Rant where to find the gold. Just a tall old man, Rant says.

That old man told he was Rant's real, true daddy, come visiting from the city. That stranger told how Chester Casey was nobody.

Bodie Carlyle: Didn't matter how hard you earned it, a Scout merit badge with all that fancy 'broidery still cost five dollars. Rant and me weren't getting none of those badges.

That summer, we pushed a wheelbarrow, going to farms to knock on doors. Asking: Can we take away any rusted cans of old, dried paint folks might have stacked round the place? Cub Scouting scrap-metal project, Rant tells them, and folks smile, only too happy to be rid of old cans. All Saturday, until Rant and me collect us a pile in his folks' barn.

Rant screwdrivers the metal lid off one can, and the insides is solid pink paint left over from a bedroom ain't been that color since forever. Forgot colors of handed-down rooms of farmhouses all over. No surprises. Just dead paint. Until Rant pries open a can and the insides is packed with newspapers, some balled up, some papers is wrapped tight round something hard. Rolled open, inside the newspaper balls is old bottles. Black-blue glass from old-time-ago bottles. Little face-cream and medicine jars.

The newspaper feels soft as pool-table felt, not white paper but yellow, full of crimes to end all crimes, wars and plagues preached to be the end of the world. Every year of newspaper announcing another new end of the world.

Hartley Reed (Proprietor of the Trackside Grocery): One kid, the Jordan girl, she brung in a handful of gold coins. Most of them Liberty Head dollars going back to 1897. Found out, later on, she'd took a rock and hammered apart her grandma's dentures. Traded those loose teeth for this "Tooth Fairy money," the kids called it. Brung the coins to me, and took home a dollhouse come special-order from the Walker's catalogue.

Bodie Carlyle: Inside them paint cans is stuffed coin money. Gold and silver coin money, packed tight to stay quiet. Some stamped with eagles fighting snakes, and some coins with pretty girls or old men, the girls showed standing, hardly dressed, but the old men showing just their wrinkled face.

"Gold bugs," Rant says, folks not trusting governments or the bank. Nor neighbors, nor family. Nor wives. Lonely alone misers, Rant says, stockpiling gold and silver and heart-attacking with their life's secret unshared.

Rant says you can't call it robberying if the owners is dead and if the right and lawful heirs wasn't loved enough to get told about the money being hid. Pirate treasures. Those paint cans lined up on shed shelves, rusting in barns and the trunks of abandoned cars.

Turns out Rant knowed the money was around, not in every paint can but enough, knowed it for a long time, but didn't bother to fetch any cans until he'd figured how to reason us having such riches. Two just-neckerchief Scouts, without scratch to buy the merit badges coming to us, now spending gold and silver money with dates on it going back a hundred and more years.

Hartley Reed: Supply and demand. Nobody pointed a gun to make those kids spend their money. Funds was their money, to buy whatever they wanted. Just natural, when demand increases so do prices. When you get every kid in town bidding up cherry Fizzies, the cost is bound to inflate.

Bodie Carlyle: The inflation is how Rant figured to launder our pirate treasure. Starting with our most best friends in fifth grade, we asked around: Who had a tooth loose? Any kid with a coming-out tooth—cha-ching—we gived him a silver or a gold coin and tell him to say the Tooth Fairy brung it. Fifth grade, most kids figure the Tooth Fairy's a lie, but our folks ain't told us as much.

Every weekend, we're collecting paint cans, pushing that wheelbarrow down longer roads to get to more far-off farms, isolated spreads where the real left-behind money's gone to pile up.

And every week, we're giving kids more gold and silver to tell their folks is from the Fairy for a baby tooth.

Most folks knowed here's a lie, but moms and dads not wanting to admit their own lying about the Tooth Fairy and Santy Claus and all. Us lying to our folks, them lying to us, nobody wanted to admit to being the liar.

None of the other fifth-graders ratted on Rant or me, since they want to keep the money and figure more's coming.

Everybody caught trapped in the same Tooth Fairy lie.

You can get plenty of folks telling the same lie if they got a stake in it. You get everybody telling the same lie and it ain't a lie, not no more.

Livia Rochelle (Teacher): A year I was teaching fifth grade, the Elliot girl brought me a gold coin and asked how much it was worth in trade for Tootsie Rolls. We looked up the coin in the library, and it was a two-and-one-half dollar Liberty Head, dated 1858. The obverse side showed a woman's profile, crowned across her forehead with the word "Liberty," and thirteen stars going around her.

According to the book we checked, that gold piece was valued at fifteen thousand dollars.

My fear was that she'd stolen the coin, so I asked how she'd come to have it. That Elliot girl, she told me the Tooth Fairy left it in exchange for a tooth she'd lost, and she pointed a finger to show me a gap in the side of her smile. A molar toward the front was gone, just a baby tooth.

Bodie Carlyle: Bicuspids brung five dollars, gold. A molar, ten. Silas Hendersen claimed to lose twelve incisors, nine canines, and sixteen wisdom tooths in the passing of that summer vacation. Was older kids selling their teeth to fifth-graders for a half-cut of the Fairy money. Kids 'tempting to pass off horse tooths, dog tooths, big cow tooths chewed down to the stub and roots. Got so Rant Casey turned tooth expert. Knowed a silver filling from mercury amalgam. A real broke tooth from a pried-off crown. Piled up in Rant's bedroom, he had soup cans of folks' teeth, then cigar boxes, shoe boxes, then shopping bags. The Middleton Tooth Museum.

Making all the fifth grade rich, it didn't look as suspect, Rant and me being rich. But for every gold or silver coin we passed on to a kid, we held back two for each of us. Rant holding back double what I did, not spending his.

After plenty of money come into play around town, what Rant and me spended only looked reasonable. Regular, compared to the new standard of living.

Team captains took money on the side, so even the loserest ball player could pitch an inning. Teachers at Middleton Elementary would take a couple hundred under the table in exchange for a report card of straight A's. Was babysitters bribed a hundred dollars in sterling silver so kids could stay up, watching movies past midnight.

Livia Rochelle: Mr. Reed at the Trackside Grocery was only too happy to sell them candy. Another reflection of the time, the grocery took out the "Gifts for M'Lady" section and extended the toy and hobby selection all the way down to frozen foods. For a year, it seemed as if half the store was candy bars and air rifles and dolls. You had to drive clear to Pitman Mills for a new filter for your furnace, but the Trackside stocked seventeen different colors and sizes of bottle rockets.

Bodie Carlyle: We learned folks will sell anything to anybody if the money's enough. Inflated the whole entire Middleton economy. Flush with Tooth Fairy cash, kids didn't clamor to mow lawns. Returnable pop bottles and beer bottles piled up alongside the shoulder of roads.

Hereabouts, folks called it the «trickle-up» theory of prosperity. All the kids rich. All the adults smiling and wheedling and playing nice to get that money.

Looking back, we sparked a boom and rebirth of little downtown Middleton. Kids buyed new bikes, and the Trackside finally paved its parking lot. Kids going back to school that fall, they wore lizard-skin cowboy boots. Rodeo belt buckles studded with turquoise. Wristwatches so heavy they made a kid lope to one side when he walked.

The second boom come at Christmas, with Santy Claus stuffing gold and silver in the stockings of fifth-graders, didn't matter good or bad.

Livia Rochelle: In my classroom, I tried to impress on the students that reality is a consensus. Objects, from diamonds to bubble gum, only have value because we all agree they do. Laws like speed limits are only laws because most people agree to respect them. I tried to argue that their gold was worth infinitely more than the junk they wanted to trade for, but it was like watching Native Americans sell their tribal lands for beads and trinkets.

The children of Middleton really were driving our economy. Within the week, that little Elliot girl was sneaking Tootsie Rolls in class. By junior high school, she had a face like raw hamburger meat.

Echo Lawrence (Party Crasher): The spooky part is, except for Rant, most people in Middleton had no idea how far someone had gone to acquire that gold.

Mary Cane Harvey (Teacher): The children told me about one woman selling shaved ice in a paper cone with cherry syrup, two cones for a gold dollar. You'd watch kids take two bites and drop the rest in the playground grass.

Money you don't work to earn, you spend very quickly.

Brenda Jordan: The Tooth Fairy come different to every family. At the Elliots', they wrapped a lost tooth in tissue and slept with it under a pillow. In the morning, inside that tissue was the money. The Perrys, they dropped the tooth in a glass half full of water and set it on the kitchen windowsill. In the morning, instead of the tooth was money. The Hendersens done the ritual same as the Elliots, but they used a lace doily they called "the tooth hankie." The Perrys always used the same glass, a fancy cut-glass jigger they called the "tooth glass." My family, we put the tooth in water but we left it sitting, overnight, on the bedside table. Near a window left open a crack for the Fairy to fly inside.

The sole and only time I almost told on Rant Casey was one night I changed my tooth in the glass for an 1897 Morgan silver dollar. But in the morning, it was just a regular quarter-dollar, dated modern. I knowed my folks had switched and took the real money, but I had to act happy.

Cammy Elliot (Childhood Friend): Adults lying about the Tooth Fairy. Kids lying. Everybody knowing that everybody was lying. Then adults selling helium balloons for a hundred bucks to kids who didn't know any better. Adults stealing from kids, then merchants stealing from folks. Greed on top of greed.

Cross my heart, the summer of the Tooth Fairy destroyed all credibility anybody had in Middleton. Since then, nobody's word stands up. To everybody, everybody else is a liar. But folks still smile and act nice.

Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): That next Thanksgiving, Rant's Granny Bel is in line for a seat at the adult table. Then his Uncle Clem. Then Uncle Walt and Aunt Patty. Rant says his mom stood there and counted on her fingers—four, five, six relatives would have to die before she'd eat like a grown-up.

Before the end of that Thanksgiving dinner, Rant's Granny Bel was already sweating with fever. Bel's running a fever of 105 degrees, but complaining of the cold. Her other symptoms include dizziness, fatigue, and muscle aches. Rant says Granny Bel can't catch her breath because, it turns out, her lungs are filling with fluid. Her kidneys have failed. Halfway to the hospital, Rant says his Granny Bel's stopped breathing.

Echo Lawrence: It turns out, lucky Grandma Bel's been infected by a killer virus. It's called the "hantavirus," and you get it from something Rant called the "white-footed mouse." The mouse shits, and the shit dries into dust. You breathe the shit dust, and the virus kills you inside of six weeks.

She's an old lady wearing red lipstick, with powder on her nose.

Rant says the county tested the talc in Bel's compact, and of course it was half mouse shit. The dried, ground-up dust of wild-mouse turds. The powder puff was loaded with shit dust. Mystery solved. Kind of solved.

Shot Dunyun: Don't get the idea Rant Casey was some kind of naturopathic serial killer—spiders, fleas, mice, and bees—but you could make that argument.

Bodie Carlyle: Just a little part of my gold bought me that midnight-blue Cub Scout shirt and pants, bought the Scout knife, the belt, and the compass. Since Milt Tommy was a sixth-grader and didn't get no treasure, I paid him a hundred bucks in gold for his sash with every merit badge already sewed to it. Every badge from First Aid to Good Citizenship.

Folks really will sell you anything for the right price.

And I learned a cash-bought merit badge ain't worth shit.