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."
10–Werewolves
Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D. (Epidemiologist): Among the oldest superstitions practiced by ancient cultures was the warning to never drink from a pool frequented by wolves. Nor did our ancestors scavenge from any game animal—say, a deer or an elk—which had been felled by a pack of wolves. Either of these transgressions—or simply being bitten by a wolf—it is believed would transform one into a legendary half-human, half-canine monster, bloodthirsty and savage: a werewolf.
In the same manner that Old Testament prohibitions against eating pork and shellfish no doubt saved ancients from a miserable death by trichinosis or salmonella, these early wolf superstitions warned them away from any trace of saliva most likely to carry the Lyssavirus, a genus of morphologically similar, negative-stranded RNA viruses historically infecting mammal reservoirs worldwide.
Denise Gardner (Real Estate Agent): I can still see Margot stomping out the door to meet her friends. All of them dressed up in black lace and fishnet stockings, like every night was Halloween.
The little creature would be hanging on her sweater like a furry accessory. A brooch. Those horrible little claws of it, clutching the wool of her black sweater, or some nights Margot would pin up her hair and let the bat nest on top, or swing alongside her face like a single earring. All her goth friends wanted them…Leathery little vermin—I mean the bats, not Margot's friends. Bats made the perfect creepy little pet for a vampire teen. All her friends had them. Shame on us, but we didn't know any better. Pet shops couldn't sell them right next to the puppies and kitties if they weren't safe. That's what Sean, my husband, said.