Your audio customers will say, "Listen," or "That sounds good," or "Talk to you soon." For example, that Shot Dunyun guy: Makes almost no eye contact, but if you talk fast, sound excited, he'll get all worked up.

Your touch-based customers will tell you, "I can handle that." They'll say, "Got it," or "Catch you later." That's the young kid, Neddy Nelson: Stands too close to you, and he's always tapping you, touching you with his fingers, to make sure you'll listen.

In really effective pacing, a salesman adopts the learning style of the customer—visual or hearing or touch—to the point of looking up or sideways or down at the ground while you talk. Your goal is to establish common ground. Not everybody enjoys baseball or even fishing, but every person is obsessed with himself.

You are your own favorite hobby. You're an expert on you.

All a good salesman does is make eye contact, mimic your body language, nod or laugh or grunt to prove he's spell-bound—those noises or gestures, they're called "verbal attends." A salesman only has to prove that he's just as obsessed with you as you are with yourself. After that, the two of you share a common passion: you.

There's lots more comes after that: embedded commands, objection bridging, hot buttons, tie-down and add-on questions, control questions…you name it.

Any good salesman will tell you: Before a customer cares how much you know, that customer wants to know how much you care.

And your truly effective salesman, he knows how to fake that he really, truly does give a shit.

Bodie Carlyle (Childhood Friend): Living, alive animal fur is what my fingers would finally come across. Rant just egging me to push my arm deeper into the ground. My fingers slippery with grease. Most of me sun red, stretched out on the sand, my hand's crawling down, colder than cool, into the dark of a varmint hole. Skunk, maybe. A coyote or gopher den.

Rant's eyes on my eyes, he says, "Feel anything?"

My hand blind, touching a tangle of sagebrush roots, smooth rocks, then—hmmm—fur. The soft hairs moving off, out of my reach down the tunnel.

Rant saying, "Go after it."

A gust of wind takes off with our crumpled sheet of tinfoil still greasy from Mrs. Casey's leftover meatloaf. The ground beef and oregano we each worked our digging hand through, the meatloaf wedged deep under our fingernails and slippery between our fingers. And my hand, lost somewheres underground, stretched beyond where I figured it would get, I reach to feel that fur and the rattle of a fast heartbeat underneath. That heartbeat almost as fast as mine.

LouAnn Perry (Childhood Friend): History is, the girls Rant liked, he used to kiss. Boys, he took them out animal-fishing. Both ways it was a test of your faith.

Bodie Carlyle: Summers, most folks would go fishing, over along the river in hot weather; Rant would head the other way.

It wasn't nothing to find Rant walked straight all morning out in the desert, laid down flat on one side, his arm disappeared up to the elbow in some dirty hole. Didn't matter what critter—scorpion, snake, or prairie dog—Rant would be reaching blind into the dark underground, hoping for the worst.

That black widow spider on Easter Sunday, since it didn't kill him, Rant figured to hunt down what might. "I been vaccinated against measles and diphtheria," Rant used to say. "A rattlesnake's just my vaccination against boredom."

A cottonmouth bite he called "my vaccination against doing chores."

Pit vipers, just about half the time they forget to inject their venom. According to books, Rant says, rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, they truly are more scared of you. A human being, giving off so much heat, that's what a pit vipers sees. Something so big and hot shows up, and it's all a snake can get done to unfold those swing-down fangs and—kah-pow—sink them in your arm.

Nothing more pissed off Rant than getting a dry bite. Pain but no poison. A vaccination without the medicine. Those double holes marching up his arms, ringed around his shins, no red welts. Dry bites.

Instead of river fishing, Rant walked out beyond the back porch, beyond the barrel for burning trash, past the machine shed, out into the fields leased out for alfalfa, the Rain Bird sprinklers—tick-tick-ticking—shots of water into the hot sunshine. After the alfalfa came the horizon of Russian-olive trees, shaggy with their long silver leaves. Over that horizon come the sugar beets. After the beets, another horizon. Beyond that, a barbed-wire fence piled solid with tumbleweeds trying to get inside. Kotex and rubbers snared and flapping, full of Middleton spunk and blood.

Beyond that, another horizon. Three horizons outside the Caseys' back door, you found yourself in the desert. Rant called his walking out to get animal bit, he called it: "gone fishing."

Irene Casey (Rant's Mother): The fire ants should've been a red flag. Buddy never come in the house without his hands and feet being all over a red rash of ant bites. Pain you'd expect to make most kids cry, Buddy wore it no worse off than a heat rash.

Bodie Carlyle: His folks didn't hear the half of it. Rant could roll up his sleeve at school and count off the bites: red ant, hobo spider, scorpion.

"More of my vaccinations," Rant used to say.

All through ninth grade, Rant would ask to be excused from playing Friday dodgeball against the twelfth-graders on account of a fresh rattlesnake bite. While the rest of us got creamed to hell, Rant would pull off one sweat sock and show the coach a fat, red foot. The two poke holes leaking clear ooze you'd take for venom.

Between him and me, this was his vaccination against playing dodgeball.

To Rant, pain was one horizon. Poison, the next horizon. Disease was nothing but the horizon after all them.

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms (Historian): The black widow spider only kills about 5 percent of those it bites. An hour after the bite, the neurotoxin a-latrotoxin spreads throughout the victim's lymphatic system. Your abdomen contracts into a solid washboard of rigid muscle tissue. You might vomit or sweat profusely.

Another common symptom is priapism. It's nature's cure for erectile dysfunction. Rant never told his parents, but that Easter was the first time he'd ever experienced an erection. Sex and insect venom were completely collapsed in his childhood psyche.

Echo Lawrence (Party Crasher): That's the secret behind Rant's craving for snakes. Even in the city, he needed to find a black widow or a brown recluse before he was worth anything in the sack. Getting a "booster shot," he used to call it.

Don't try this at home, but the result is a dick that stays hard for hours. On demand, and big as a gearshift. A little calcium gluconate and everything goes back to normal.

Sheriff Bacon Carlyle (Childhood Enemy): The only why Rant Casey got himself bit was to catch a buzz. Poison being just another drug to abuse. Another high. Speaking as an officer of the law, I can tell you an addicted addict ain't like regular folks. By the end of this story, you'll be pretty near shocked what Rant done to get and stay strung out.

Bodie Carlyle: Don't ask me. I never did figure out the attraction. While other kids was sniffing gasoline or model-airplane glue, most summer days, Rant would be belly-down in the sand next to a sagebrush. Most kids around here, they'd be escaping from reality, while Rant was trying to get ready for it.