That last night I see Wax, the last thing he says to me is, "Try and not forget me, baby." And he blows me a kiss, pulling away, steering out into the flow of traffic.
I haven't Tag Teamed a night since then. All I hope is that's the last time I ever see Karl Waxman.
Neddy Nelson: Couldn't you guess that old-time gods and saviors like Apollo and Isis and Shiva and Jesus are just losers with beater Torinos and Mustangs who went Party Crashing and found a way to "sever their origins"? Maybe they all started as real nobodies, but as their reality faded, a new story piled up around them?
Tina Something: Soon as I got home, I phoned the gaddamn police detective that's been bugging me. The detective says he's never heard of any Karl Waxman.
Allan Blayne: The stupid thing I said to the girl, it was just a reflex. In my capacity as a crewman, after we had her freed and wrapped in a blanket, I told her, "You are one lucky young lady."
Tina Something: In every gaddamn photo I have of me and Wax, he's gone, just disappeared. They're only photos of me, smiling, with my arm looped around nothing. My lips puckered, kissing air. When I try, I can't even tell you if his eyes were brown or green. Ask me again in a few months and a hundred bucks says I've never, ever heard of Karl Waxman.
Shot Dunyun: The way Rant told it to me, Simms didn't want him to go back in time to fuck anybody. Now that Simms was his own super-hybrid, he wanted to be immortal. Simms wanted Rant to go back in time and kill his mom. Well, I guess—their mom.
37–Resolving Origin
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms (Historian): In Middleton, sleeping dogs have the permanent right-of-way… both metaphorically and literally.
Echo Lawrence (Party Crasher): So we went back to Middleton. To see the Middleton Christian Fellowship. The Sex Tornado. If we were lucky, the Tooth Museum and the wild dogs.
Neddy Nelson (Party Crasher): Didn't we go to Middleton to see if Irene Casey was dead? Wasn't our real reason to see if Rant had fulfilled the mission Simms sent him to do?
Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): We parked Neddy's Cadillac at the end of a gravel driveway that ran to a white farmhouse on the horizon, Rant's house. All around that house, the yard where Rant had buried those stinking Easter eggs for his dad to find with the lawn mower.
Echo Lawrence: We parked in the middle of the night and watched the house with a dark outline of Irene in the yellow square of the kitchen window. One of her hands holding a shape in her lap, while her other hand touched the shape and pulled away. Touched and pulled away. Her head bowed down, the light behind her, embroidering. We watched until Shot and Neddy fell asleep.
Shot Dunyun: Until Echo fell asleep.
Irene Casey (Rant's Mother): For Christmas one year, my mother and Granny Hattie gave me a sweater they'd made. I figure it was Hattie who'd knitted it, and my mother who'd embroidered the fancy detailing. Satin-stitched down the front were pink roses, padded with felt, with green cord-padded stems. All complicated. Mixed in the roses were violet periwinkle blossoms, made with long and short stitching. Scattered in the background were so many navy-blue bullion knots and smaller French knots, they made the white yarn of the sweater look light blue. Not a single pucker or stray bit of floss.
It was a sweater for indoors, maybe for church on Sunday. Looking back, I should've pressed that sweater behind glass, inside a picture frame, and hung it on the wall. It was that kind of masterpiece.
I couldn't wait to show it off, but my mother said not to leave the house. After family started to arrive for Christmas dinner, all the aunts, uncles, and cousins, the house got so crowded I had no problem sneaking out.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: I hesitate to even comment further on this pathetic person, this Rant Casey. It's regrettable that I ever discussed with him my theories about Liminal Time. Beyond that, he suffered hallucinations brought about by a terrible chronic disease, and died a horrible death in the deluded belief that it would be his salvation. Even as we depict him as a victim and a fool, our attention and energy create Casey as a martyr.
Irene Casey: Down along the river, in the trees along the Middleton River, I used to walk and pretend the water was the sound of traffic. I'd pretend I lived in a city, full of noise, where anything wonderful could happen. Anytime. Not like Middleton, where my mother and aunts locked the doors at sundown. Even with our closest neighbors, the Elliots, a half-mile away, my mother pulled all the curtains in the house before she'd turn on a single light.
My mother and my aunts grilled me about never talking to strangers.
But there were never no strangers. Not in Middleton.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: To date, fourteen troubled people have driven their automobiles into obstacles and over precipices, dying in apparent imitation of Rant Casey. On a personal note, I deeply resent Mr. Casey casting me as a serial rapist and murderer.
Irene Casey: Usually, the river was noisy and windy, but not that day. That Christmas, it was silent, froze. The ground was so hard you didn't leave footprints. No wind swept the dead leaves or clattered the bare tree branches. You were like you were walking through a black-and-white photograph of winter, without sound or smells. Like I was the only alive thing moving, walking along the river path. My breath blowing out ghosts. The air so dry everything sparked my fingers with a shock of static.
Near as I recollect, such a black-and-white day, my eyes must've been starved for color, since they saw the littlest flash of gold. Way out on the center of the froze river, the thin ice over deep water, my eyes seen just that littlest bright speck of gold.
Tina Something (Party Crasher): Green Simms would tell you that Rant was insane. He's very much part of the elite, and he doesn't want to see that threatened by any new order.
Irene Casey: With one tennis shoe, I toe-kicked the shiny gold spot, round and bright. A coin. I pulled my long sweater sleeve, I slid the cuff back to keep it from getting dirty, and I stopped to touch the coin. To see if it was maybe chocolate. A chocolate-candy pirate coin wrapped in gold foil from the Trackside Grocery. With my other hand, I reached behind and held my hair together at the back of my neck. To keep the hair from falling in my face.
The river ice, gritty with dirt, but slippery under my shoes. Under the ice, water so deep it looked black.
With two fingers, I pinched the coin out of the dirty frost.
From somewhere in the woods and cattails along the riverbank came barking, dogs snarling and snapping.
Between my teeth, the coin was hard, not breaking, sticking to my lips with the cold. A real coin. Treasure. My tongue tasting gold, dated—
And: "Hello."
Someone said, "Hello."
Dogs you couldn't see, off a ways, howling.
In back of me, a man came walking upstream on the deepest stretch of water, flat as a glass road. Ice all around us. He said, "Well, don't you look nice…" The Christmas sky floated over him, blue as embroidery floss.