Irene Casey: Granny Esther touches the top of her hair, two fingertips feeling between the strands of her hair, stepping the curls one way, then the other, until she touches a spot that makes her mouth drop open and her eyes clamp shut. When she opens them, Buddy says, his grandma's eyes, they're blinking with tears.

She clicks open her purse and fishes out a tissue. When Esther presses the tissue on top of her head, Buddy says, when they looked at the tissue, they seen a red spot of fresh blood. It's then Esther told him, "Fast as you can, run get your pa." Esther Shelby lowered herself to one knee; then sitting, then laying in the dust on the shoulder of the road, she says, "Boy, be fast!"

Echo Lawrence: Rant says his granny told him, "Run fast, but if you ain't fast enough, remember I still love you…"

Cammy Elliot (Childhood Friend): Kill me if I'm lying, because I ain't, but Middleton dogs turned wilder when the wind blowed too hard. A real gust of wind and all the trash cans go over. Dogs love that.

The first lesson a gal learns in sixth grade is what a septic tank can't digest. Any female trash, you have to wrap it in newspaper and bury it, special deep, in the garbage. The honeywagon comes to pump out your tank and he finds more than just natural waste, it's an extra cost.

'Course, when the wind blows over a garbage can, depending on the household, you have dirty Kotex flapping everywhere. Those gusty days, it's everybody's Aunt Flo has come to visit. Pads and napkins walking off, a regular army drove by the wind. Wrapped and losing their newspaper, they're showing dark blood coated with sand and cockle burrs. Pin-cushioned with cheatgrass seed. Every trash can that blows over, that army of throwed-away blood gets bigger, marching in the one direction of the wind. Until they come to a fence. Or a cactus.

Shot Dunyun: Close by, Rant could hear the dog packs barking and snapping. He didn't want to leave his grandma, but she told him to get going.

Cammy Elliot: No lie. A regular three-strand barbed-wire fence will look Christmas-decorated with those white puffs. Walk too close and you'd see the condoms snagged there, same as so many dead party balloons. Flapping green or gray or light blue, every rubber with some white mess still hanging heavy in the end.

Flapping at you in the wind, snagged on those pricks of sharp wire, you got panty liners and big strap-on, heavy-day pads. Smooth and ribbed rubbers. Brands of condoms and sanitary napkins you never saw on the shelf at the Trackside Grocery.

Old blood and chunks so black it could be road tar. Blood brown as coffee. Watery pink blood. Sperm died down to almost-clear water.

Blood is blood to most folks, mostly menfolks, but you'd be hard-pressed to match any two tampons pinned on a mile of barbed-wire fence.

Here and there, you'd find pubic hairs. Blond, brown, gray hairs. A good wind kicks up and all the folks of Middleton, we're hanging out, same as birds on a telephone line. Like some 4-H display at the county fair.

Sheriff Bacon Carlyle: If you ask me, the worst part was keeping your dogs inside the house. Folks didn't even need to see the spunk and blood snagged out on the barbed wire to know the wind had dumped somebody's trash. The dogs would turn crazy, whining and digging at the bottom of doors, scratching the paint and wearing out the rugs, to get at that smell so faint only a dog nose would pick it up.

It's different than needing to go outside and do their business. Dogs smell those rubbers and pussy plugs swinging in the hot wind, and dogs start to slobber.

God forbid you open that door. Most folks got right on the phone, blaming each other for the mess and calling someone else to come pick up.

Cammy Elliot: Country around here, it's so flat folks can see from anywhere to anywhere just by looking. Regular folks hold to too much dignity to go hiking out in the face of a Sex Tornado. Nobody wants the community watching them harvest the shame like so many ripe tomatoes.

It's either all the folks pick up their own, or nobody will.

Always, a big showdown. A decency stalemate.

Mary Cane Harvey (Teacher): If I wasn't still teaching, Lord, the tales I could tell you about Buster Casey. An exceptional young man.

Sheriff Bacon Carlyle: Don't forget how some folks, including the FBI, was saying his Grandma Esther was Rant's Victim Number One.

Mary Cane Harvey: Buster never got higher than a C in any language-arts course, but there was a sense that Buster would build you the entire world out of just sticks and pebbles and the few words he'd learned. I'd compare it to Tramp Art that men make in prisons, or sailors used to make on voyages that took months. For example, scale models of the Vatican built out of wooden matchsticks, or the Acropolis assembled from sugar cubes glued together. These are artworks based on limited materials and tools, but requiring enormous amounts of time and focus. Monuments to patience.

Bodie Carlyle: To show you how popular Rant got by senior year, one night our dogs took to howling and digging at the door. The wind was blowing, and you didn't need sunshine to see it was the usual Sex Tornado.

Rant came knocking at our kitchen door. While my mom was on the phone laying blame, Rant waves me to come outside. Throwed over one shoulder, he's lugging an empty burlap bag.

Seeing the gunny sack, my mom shakes her head no at me. But I kick the dogs away from the door and trail Rant into the dark outside, the wind snapping our hair, snapping our shirt collars up on one side.

At the fence line, a wad of white stuffing is flapping in the wind, wild and alive as a rabbit in a trap. Condoms flapping like gray tongues tipped with spit. Rant plucks a rubber free and holds it under his nose, the foamy spunk too close to his top lip, and he sniffs. He says, "The Reverend Curtis Dean Fields." He smiles and says, "I'd know that stank anywhere."

Rant drops the trash into his bag. He plucks a pussy plug, this one with just an itty-bitty dot of red in the middle of that white pillow. The red looking black in the moonlight, Rant sniffs it and frowns.

He sniffs again, with his eyes closed this time, and says, "It's LouAnn Perry, all right, but she must be back taking those fluoride pills…"

Rant offers me the red dot, but I shake my head.

Before anybody decent has showed up to help, Rant's picked the length of our back fence, guessing every dick and pussy.

Mary Cane Harvey: There's so little to stimulate young people in Middleton. Social life is centered around the church or school events. The grange hall hosts a get-together every weekend, sometimes a cakewalk come springtime, and a craft fair going into the holiday season. Or the Cub Scouts will organize a haunted house as a fund-raiser around Halloween.

Bodie Carlyle: Rant Casey had a dog's sense of smell. A human bloodhound, he could track anything. From staying out late at night, he could smell even better. By being the most popular boy in school, he knowed the name behind every smell. And by twelfth grade, all these talents, they finally started working together to his advantage.

"Look at this," Rant says, and shows me a white pillow with a tight red flower in the center. Little as a violet. Without even sniffing it, he says, "Miss Harvey from English class."