“It doesn’t have to be like this, though,” she continued. “I know parts of the story, but you know all of it. That’s what I want to talk to you about. I want to get a sense of how this came to be. I want to know how you did it. Why you did it. And what you think about it now.”
“I don’t know how to answer any of that,” I told her.
“I think you do,” she said. “I think maybe this is something you think about a lot.”
“Well . . . yes. That’s true. But I still don’t know how I’d answer any of those questions.”
“That’s okay. I’d just love to meet, to talk, one-on-one. Off the record at first, even. Whatever you want.”
I could feel the world getting smaller and smaller, and that scared me because I’d already made myself pretty small to ensure none of these memories got out of me. To have the larger world shrinking down made it worse, to know that people were searching for you.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Frankie,” she tried, just as I was hanging up, “I think you need to talk about this. People died. It’s . . . it’s a big deal.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
And the memories sped up even more. And that made me angry, that they were moving too fast for me to even recognize those moments. I sat on the sofa. The room smelled fresh, like fabric softener, and I closed my eyes and I willed the memories to slow down. I made them go at the exact speed as it happened then, like I was stepping right back into it, and I promised myself that I wouldn’t let it get away from me.
Eight
THE NEXT DAY, I PICKED UP ZEKE AND WE DROVE AROUND TOWN. Zeke was playing a cassette he’d brought from Memphis, a mix by someone named DJ Squeeky, this slowed-down voice saying, over and over, “Burn, baby, burn, baby, burn, baby, burn.” It felt hypnotic, the way the whole world seemed wavy and shimmery, the windows down, the heat oppressive, and then we’d see another one of our posters, and everything would speed up for a second. My backpack was filled with more copies, but Zeke was worried, afraid that we’d get caught. We put a few in mailboxes of houses that were obviously empty, marking the spots on the map, but mostly we just drove.
I’d never felt particularly connected to Coalfield; I mean, I felt anchored to it, like the years I’d spent here would make it harder for me to live anywhere else, but I never felt shaped by it. Everyone thinks the South is, like, Flannery O’Connor. They think it’s haunted. And maybe it is, deep down, in the soil, but I never saw it that way. We had a McDonald’s. I don’t know how else to say it. There was no bookstore, okay, fine. The museums we had were of the Old Jail Museum or Military Vehicle Museum or Railroad Museum variety. We had a Wal-Mart. I wore normal clothes. And as I drove Zeke around my town, I pointed out things like “I fell off that merry-go-round and knocked out a baby tooth,” or “That shoe store is eighty years old and if you buy a pair of shoes, you can put a wooden coin in this machine and a mechanical chicken will poop out a plastic egg that has candy in it,” or “I stole a heavy metal magazine at that Bi-Lo because I wanted a poster of Lita Ford for my room.” I felt like maybe I kind of loved the place. Or, no, I just wanted Zeke to love it. And if he didn’t, if the old-timey pharmacy where you could get cherry limeades didn’t impress him, I’d tape one of our posters under the counter and then how could he not feel something like love for it?
While we made seven consecutive loops around the town square, Zeke told me that his grandmother had heard about the posters at her Bible study meeting the night before. Some old lady had found one and brought it to the meeting. “They all think it’s got something to do with the devil,” Zeke said. “Devil worship, something like that.” One of the ladies was convinced that the words were a play on a verse from Revelation, so they spent the whole class trying to locate it, poring over the Bible, never finding what they wanted.
“Everyone thinks it’s from something,” I said.
“Everything is, kinda, from something,” he replied.
“Well, duh, but this is from me. Just me.”
“And me,” he said, smiling.
“And you.”
At the Creekside Market, we bought two bottles of Sun Drop and a handful of grape bubble gum. We checked the bulletin board and our poster was still there. When I stared at it, the poster turned wavy, like a mirage. I reached into my book bag, and when the guy working the counter looked away, I put up another poster, right on top of the other one. I felt the aura double, maybe quadruple, and I got a little dizzy. I drank half of the Sun Drop right there, standing in the market, just glug-glug-glug like I was dying of thirst, and then I stumbled outside, into the heat. This was the beauty of obsession, I realized. It never waned. Real obsession, if you did it right, was the same intensity every single time, a kind of electrocution that kept your heart beating in time. It was so good.