Chuck Palahniuk - Rant - The Oral History of Buster Casey

Old blood and chunks so black it could be road tar. Blood brown as coffee. Watery pink blood. Sperm died down to almost-clear water.

Blood is blood to most folks, mostly menfolks, but you'd be hard-pressed to match any two tampons pinned on a mile of barbed-wire fence.

Here and there, you'd find pubic hairs. Blond, brown, gray hairs. A good wind kicks up and all the folks of Middleton, we're hanging out, same as birds on a telephone line. Like some 4-H display at the county fair.

Sheriff Bacon Carlyle:If you ask me, the worst part was keeping your dogs inside the house. Folks didn't even need to see the spunk and blood snagged out on the barbed wire to know the wind had dumped somebody's trash. The dogs would turn crazy, whining and digging at the bottom of doors, scratching the paint and wearing out the rugs, to get at that smell so faint only a dog nose would pick it up.

It's different than needing to go outside and do their business. Dogs smell those rubbers and pussy plugs swinging in the hot wind, and dogs start to slobber.

God forbid you open that door. Most folks got right on the phone, blaming each other for the mess and calling someone else to come pick up.

Cammy Elliot:Country around here, it's so flat folks can see from anywhere to anywhere just by looking. Regular folks hold to too much dignity to go hiking out in the face of a Sex Tornado. Nobody wants the community watching them harvest the shame like so many ripe tomatoes.

It's either all the folks pick up their own, or nobody will.

Always, a big showdown. A decency stalemate.

Mary Cane Harvey ( Teacher ):If I wasn't still teaching, Lord, the tales I could tell you about Buster Casey. An exceptional young man.

Sheriff Bacon Carlyle:Don't forget how some folks, including the FBI, was saying his Grandma Esther was Rant's Victim Number One.

Mary Cane Harvey:Buster never got higher than a C in any language-arts course, but there was a sense that Buster would build you the entire world out of just sticks and pebbles and the few words he'd learned. I'd compare it to Tramp Art that men make in prisons, or sailors used to make on voyages that took months. For example, scale models of the Vatican built out of wooden matchsticks, or the Acropolis assembled from sugar cubes glued together. These are artworks based on limited materials and tools, but requiring enormous amounts of time and focus. Monuments to patience.

Bodie Carlyle:To show you how popular Rant got by senior year, one night our dogs took to howling and digging at the door. The wind was blowing, and you didn't need sunshine to see it was the usual Sex Tornado.

Rant came knocking at our kitchen door. While my mom was on the phone laying blame, Rant waves me to come outside. Throwed over one shoulder, he's lugging an empty burlap bag.

Seeing the gunny sack, my mom shakes her head no at me. But I kick the dogs away from the door and trail Rant into the dark outside, the wind snapping our hair, snapping our shirt collars up on one side.

At the fence line, a wad of white stuffing is flapping in the wind, wild and alive as a rabbit in a trap. Condoms flapping like gray tongues tipped with spit. Rant plucks a rubber free and holds it under his nose, the foamy spunk too close to his top lip, and he sniffs. He says, "The Reverend Curtis Dean Fields." He smiles and says, "I'd know that stank anywhere."

Rant drops the trash into his bag. He plucks a pussy plug, this one with just an itty-bitty dot of 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 down-below 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 hand-draw 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.

Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher ):Before Rant had started kindergarten, but after he'd started sleeping in a regular bed, every day his mother put him down when the little hand of the kitchen clock was on the two, until the little hand was on the three. Yawning or not, Rant had to stay on that bed, up in his attic room, with his pillow propped against the wall. In bed, he hugged a stuffed rabbit he called "Bear."

Picture the moment when your mom or dad first saw you as something other than a pretty, tiny version of them. You as them, but improved. Better educated. Innocent. Then picture when you stopped being their dream.