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.
7–Haunted House
Bodie Carlyle (Childhood Friend): The only gold money Rant spent was, one day he pushed a wheelbarrow down the road, all the way to the Perry Meat Packing plant.
Reverend Curtis Dean Fields (Minister, Middleton Christian Fellowship): Inside the grange hall, the annual haunted house consisted of old oilcloth tarps, smelling from train diesel, hung up to make a pitch-dark tunnel you'd walk inside. How folks hung the tarps, it made the tunnel turn right and left, turning back on itself to confuse you and make the walk last long as possible. Kids waited at the start, and Rant took them through one at a time. Kid stuff inside. At the far end was a party with a costume contest, cake, and candy. One year, a piñata.
Inside, the tunnel was pitch-dark except when lights flashed to show something scary. The far end was most dark, and Rant would blindfold you. He'd put your hand in a big mixing bowl full of cooked elbow macaroni stirred with cold butter, and he'd tell you, "This is brains." You'd feel a bowl of grapes coated with corn oil, or peeled hard-cooked eggs, and Rant would say, "These is pulled-out eyeballs." Pretty tame stuff these days. Hard for a kid's imagination, standing in the dark, feeling a bowl of warm gelatin water while Rant Casey says, "This is fresh blood…" Anymore, it's pretty hard for imagination to make that seem horrible.