“I don’t know how it works,” I admitted. “Is it stealing to make a copy of it? I mean, we made copies of it. We have the original. We made it. Someone else is just, like, sharing it.”
“Why, though?” Zeke asked.
“Because it’s awesome,” I reminded him. “We made it and people like it, or at least someone likes it. So they’re making sure other people see it.”
“I guess I just didn’t think about this,” he said.
“We’re okay, Zeke,” I said. “Nothing is going to happen to us. Nothing bad, at least.”
He took our copy of the poster, smoothed it out again, and then reached into the backpack for the tape. All by himself, he walked back to the change machine and put up our copy of the poster. He looked at me, still watching him from the car, and he gave me a thumbs-up. And we drove around Coalfield, and we didn’t come home until the backpack was empty.
A FEW DAYS LATER, THE TENNESSEAN RAN AN ARTICLE IN THE Local News section that had the headline TROUBLING STREET ART VEXES SMALL TOWN. The article itself reasserted the concerns that the art was in some way related to some heretofore unknown cult. Whether it was a local chapter of a national cult or a homegrown one, the reporter could not definitively say. A lawyer for Billy and Brooke （Brooke’s uncle, who only did personal injury lawsuits and had a radio commercial that said, “If you’ve been wronged, I’ll make it right”） provided an official statement that the two upstanding youths were now unsure of the validity of the exact details within their original statement, possibly due to unknowingly ingesting psychedelic drugs. They did, however, stand by the assertion that three people, who called themselves “fugitives” or “the fugitives,” had abducted them. A Methodist preacher was quoted as saying that the King James Bible had only a few references to fugitives （or a word synonymous with fugitive） and “none of them are particularly pleasant.” The reporter mentioned that the local police force had noted a rash of calls from concerned citizens who had seen a black van or mysterious figures dressed in black, but nothing had come of the subsequent investigations. An art professor at Watkins College said the poster had “echoes of street graffiti popular in large cities like New York and Philadelphia” and that the creators seemed to have some awareness of culturally relevant artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. When asked about the possibility of occult imagery in the poster, the professor offered, “I mean, sure, that’s definitely in there, too.”
I had no idea who Basquiat was. I’d seen some Keith Haring artwork in a magazine somewhere, but I didn’t think what we’d made looked anything like that, weirdo big-headed dancing figures. It made me a little angry. It was a small thing, but I wanted to know if the professor thought the poster was any good.
In the final paragraph, the reporter quoted Teddie Cowan, the county sheriff, saying, “Now is not the time to panic, but, also, there seem to be dark forces at play, and I will do everything in my power as an upholder of justice to root them out and send them as far from Coalfield as is humanly possible.”
And though I was alone in the house, my family all at work, I could see Zeke in my mind, a true vision of him. He was standing on my front porch, holding a copy of this newspaper in his hand, waiting for me to tell him that everything was okay, that we were not in trouble. And I would tell him that, the minute I opened the door and saw him, his weird mouth, his big eyes. I’d immediately tell him that this was a good thing. We’d made something good. I’d tell him that we were invincible, that nothing bad would ever happen to either one of us. And I’d tell him that the only thing that we could do, because there really was no other choice, was to put up more of the posters. The only way to keep ourselves safe, I would tell him, was to make more of them.
Nine
A HEAT WAVE HAD ROLLED IN, AND I WAS SWEATING CONSTANTLY, from, well, obviously, the actual heat, but also from the wild feeling that things were quickly moving beyond my control. I was trying to figure out how to keep everything from falling apart, to hold on to this thing that I’d made, but that was getting harder and harder. And so I was perpetually red-faced, itchy, my shirts soaked with sweat. My whole mouth felt electric. My stomach hurt all the time, and to deal with it, I just ate more Pop-Tarts and Cheetos Puffs, and that made it worse. I’d written fifty pages of the novel in a week; I could not stop. I needed a story that I could control, that wouldn’t keep going when I stopped writing it.