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.