Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): Rant's father used to go, "If something looks like a true accident, can't nobody be mad at you."

Irene Casey: Men do have the tendency to rush, always pushing to get a job done.

Echo Lawrence: Here's a single girl's secret—the reason you eat dinner with a man on a first date is so you know how he's going to fuck you. A slob who gobbles down the meal, never looks at a bite, you know not to crawl into bed with that guy.

Bodie Carlyle: Mrs. Casey baked birthday cakes that made you blush out of shame for your own lazy ma. Sometimes, a chocolate-cake locomotive pulling a steam train with one boxcar made of cherry cake and one boxcar made of vanilla, then flatcars and tanker cars, all different flavors, until they ended with a maple-flavor cake caboose. It's good luck, folks say, finding the toothpick stuck inside a cake. But you don't bother tasting her cake and you'd be tasting pine splinters and blood.

Logan Elliot (Childhood Friend): Truth was, if you didn't chew her food, then her food chewed you.

Irene Casey: The way I figure, as long as food tastes better than it hurts, you're going to keep eating. As long as you're more enjoying than you are suffering.

Basin Carlyle: Potlucks over by the grange hall, you'd expect them to be a social event with folks talking and catching up. Don't hate me for saying it, but anytime Irene brung her chicken bake or three-bean salad, instead of socializing, folks would be too busy picking trash out of their mouths. Her cooking was decent, but it replaced a mess of good gossip. Instead of folks harping on who blacked the eye of his wife, or who was stepping out on her husband, by the end of every potluck, you'd have maybe just a little pile of real trash next to each plate. A trash heap of pits and stones and paper clips. Whole cloves, sharp as thumbtacks.

Edna Perry: Come Christmas, foreign folks have a tradition of baking a cake with a itty-bitty Baby Jesus hid inside. Folks say the person who finds the Christ child will be special blessed in the next year. Just a little plastic baby-doll toy. But Irene Casey used to fold into her batter as much scoops of Baby Jesus as she did flour and sugar. Put a Christ child in every bite. Could be she only wanted more folks to feel lucky, but it never looked right, folks burping up whole packs and litters of naked pink plastic Saviours. Birthing those wet babies out their lips. Big tooth marks bit down and gnawed on our Saviour's smiling face. Christmas potluck at the grange, and folks sitting at long tables with red crepe-paper decorations and those spit-covered Christ babies coughed up everywhere, it never looked all that holy.

Basin Carlyle: The same as how it's not always the good child that you love most—sometimes it's the child that causes you the most trouble—folks only remembered the food Irene Casey brung to potluck. Other food, better food, like Glenda Hendersen's walnut bars or Sally Peabody's baked pear crumble, just because they didn't half choke you to death, you never gave that food a second thought.

Echo Lawrence: This once, after I'd had an orgasm, inside of me is a pressure, not a pain, more like that feeling when your tampon turns sideways. Like I might have to take a piss. Rant put two fingers inside and takes out something pink. Bigger than a tooth. Smooth and shiny with spit.

Even naked, we were never touching. Dried sticky or wet slimy, between his skin and mine, you could always feel a thin layer of sweat or spit or sperm.

Still propped on both his elbows, Rant's looking at something cupped in his hand.

As if he's just sucked this pink object out of me.

So, of course, I have to sit up and look. But it's a joke.

A little doll. A baby made of pink plastic. And Rant says, "How did that get in there?" His mother's mantra.

He grins at me, says, "This here makes me the lucky king…"

It almost didn't matter that his spit gave me rabies.

13–Sporting

Bodie Carlyle (Childhood Friend): Monday mornings, I'd feel wore out from staying plugged in all Sunday night, cramming for Algebra II. Mr. Wyland hands out six or eight hours of homework to boost, and I'd always leave it for the last minute. My eyes closed, I can still hear the voice of the primary witness, the gal who boosted those lessons. Since you can't out-cord thoughts—only sensory junk like taste, smell, sounds, and sights—the primary witness talks through every step of every equation, yakking away, while you watch her hand holding chalk, scratching the numbers on a blackboard.

Her voice saying, "When X equals the cosine of Y, and Y is of greater value than Z, the determining factor of X must include…" And by then, I'm asleep. Still boosting, but sawing logs. Monday mornings, all I learned was the smell of chalk dust. The tap-tapping of each time her chalk hit the board to make a new line. Not a Smart Board, not even a whiteboard, that's how cheap: a chalkboard. Decades later, I could tell you that primary witness was right-handed and wore a long-sleeve red sweater rolled back a ways at the wrist. Always, the taste of black coffee in her mouth. A Night-timer's hand, somebody told me. No tan on the back. The back and knuckles and palm, all the same color.

Only thing that kept me from failing was, Rant Casey knowed even less than shit, and Mr. Wyland graded on a curve. Most Mondays, before daylight, Rant would come knock on my bedroom window. Beyond a couple horizons we'd walk, until Rant found his hole. With one sleeve rolled up and everything to the shoulder of him stuffed underground, Rant would ask me to teach him. Algebra. History. Social studies. He blamed it on the spider bites, the poison, or having rabies, but he complained his port didn't work. He'd plug in but couldn't boost nothing.

Danny Perry (Childhood Friend): Rant Casey would go down on his belly in the sand, plant his elbows on either side of a burrow, and poke his nose inside. Just from the stink, sniffing some dirty hole, Rant could tell rabbit or coyote or skunk or deadly spider. Could even tell you what kind of spider.

To be Rant Casey's friend was always some test. For guys, you had to shove your hand in his choice of dark hole, far up as your elbow, not figuring what you'd find.

Bodie Carlyle: Us in the desert, watching the light wash up from the horizon, fire colors, I told Rant about the federal I-SEE-U Act and how pale and spooky the algebra hand looked. A hand never out in the sun. The taste of a stranger's coffee still in my mouth.

And Rant says, "Shit." He stuffs his free hand down the front of his pants and grits his teeth.

"Spider-bite boner," he says. "Always happens." And he twists around inside his crotch to hide it.

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms (Historian): Chronic priapism is one lesser symptom of a-latrotoxin poisoning. By exploiting his poison-induced erections, Rant was liquidating any collateral he had left in the community. He could never go back home, but he would never have to. Something the wealthy know that most people don't is that you never burn a bridge. Such a waste. Instead, you sell it.