Come on. Talk about the worst question Shot could ask.

Neddy Nelson: You tell me, how in 1844 did the physicist Sir David Brewster discover a metal nail fully embedded in a block of Devonian sandstone more than three hundred million years old?

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: You might see Middleton from the air, flying between New York and Los Angeles, and you'll always wonder at how people can exist in such a place. Envision ratty sofas abandoned on porches. Cars parked in front yards. Houses half off their foundations, balanced on cinderblocks, with chickens and dogs sleeping underneath. If it looks like a natural disaster has occurred, that's only because you didn't see it beforehand.

Neddy Nelson: How do you explain the fact that an Illinois housewife, Mrs. S. W. Culp, broke open a lump of coal and found a gold necklace embedded inside it?

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Despite the dreary scenery, it's all very sexual, these towns. It's only the individual who attains an early beauty and sexuality who becomes trapped here. The young men and women who acquire perfect breasts and muscles before they know how best to use that power, they end up pregnant and mired so close to home. This cycle concentrates the best genetics in places you'd never imagine. Like Middleton. Little nests of wildly attractive idiots who give birth and survive into a long, ugly adulthood. Venuses and Apollos. Small-town gods and goddesses. If Middleton has produced one remarkable product in the tedious, dull, dusty history of this community, that extraordinary product was Rant Casey.

Echo Lawrence: "The big reason why folks leave a small town," Rant used to say, "is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out."

Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere.

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: The central metaphor for power in Middleton, and especially within the Casey family, was the staging of their Christian holiday meals. For these events—Easter breakfasts, Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners—the family members were divided between two distinct classes. The adults dined with antique china that had come into the family generations before, plates with hand-painted borders, garlands of flowers and gold. The children sat at a table in the kitchen, but not actually one table, more a cluster of folding card tables butted together.

Echo Lawrence: In the kitchen, everything was paper, the napkins and tablecloth and plates, so it could all be wadded up and shit-canned. When the Casey adults sat down to break bread, they always said the same blessing: "Thank You, God, for these blessings of family, food, and good fortune which we see before us."

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Aging family members still stalled at the children's table prayed for salmonella. For fish bones stuck in windpipes. The younger generations held hands and bowed their heads to pray for massive strokes and heart attacks.

Echo Lawrence: Rant used to say, "Life's greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you."

Shot Dunyun: Before Party Crashing nights, when our team would go out for dinner, Green Taylor Simms would watch and sneer while Rant ate every food with the same fork. Rant wasn't a dumbshit, he just never got past using a plastic spoon.

Behind Rant's back, Green used to call him "Huckleberry Fagg."

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Mr. Dunyun refers to Rant as "The Tooth Fairy."

Echo Lawrence: Get this. Around midnight in Middleton, Shot Dunyun and I parked at the turn-off to their farmhouse, next to a mailbox with «Casey» painted on it. In the middle of a lot of crops, the house was white with a long porch along the front, a steep roof, and one dormer window looking over the porch: Rant's attic bedroom with the cowboy wallpaper.

Bushes and flowers grow close to the foundation, and mowed grass spreads out to a chain-link fence. We could see a barn painted brown, almost hidden behind the house. Everything else is wheat, to the flat circle of the horizon going around every side of Neddy's Cadillac. Shot fiddled with the radio, hunting for traffic updates.

From DRVR Radio Graphic Traffic: Just a heads-up. Watch out for the two-car fender bender along the right shoulder, westbound at Milepost 67, on the City Center Thruway. Both vehicles appear to be wedding parties, complete with the tin cans tied to their rear bumpers. Traffic is slow, as drivers rubberneck to watch the brides and grooms scream and throw wedding cake at each other. Be on the lookout for bridesmaids and white rice in the roadway…

Echo Lawrence: Shot fell asleep, snoring against the inside of the driver's door. I kept waiting for a sign Irene Casey was still alive and no mysterious stranger had strangled or stabbed her to death yet.

Neddy Nelson: Tell me how in 1913 did the anthropologist H. Reck discover a modern human skull buried in Early Pleistocene soil of the Olduvai Gorge? Explain how modern human skulls have also been unearthed from Early Pleistocene and Middle Pliocene strata in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Ragazzoni, Italy, respectively?

Shot Dunyun: We walked around their cruddy cemetery, a mess of lawn-mowered weeds, but we couldn't find Rant's grave. How weird is that? We found the best friend's name in a phone book, Bodie Carlyle, then found his trailer at the end of a dirt road. Tumbleweeds piled window-deep against it, and a pit bull chained and barking in the dirt yard. This was hours before sunrise. We didn't even knock on the trailer door.

Echo Lawrence: Forget it. I never did see Irene Casey. We didn't even knock on her door. For all we knew, she was already dead inside that farmhouse.

Wallace Boyer (Car Salesman): Sell cars long enough and you'll see: Nobody's all that original. Any lone weirdo comes from a big nest of weirdos. What's weird is, you go to some pigsty village in Slovakia, and suddenly even Andy Warhol makes perfect sense.

Echo Lawrence: Give me a break. At dawn, that redneck sheriff pulls up next to our car and bullhorns that we're in violation of the federal Emergency Health Powers Act and the I-SEE-U curfew. We didn't want to leave Mrs. Casey unprotected, but the Big Chief Sheriff points his gun at us and says, "How about you-all come into town for some questioning…"

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: In Middleton, sleeping dogs have the permanent right-of-way.