When I say the posters were everywhere, I mean that we were not the only people in possession of the poster. And I don’t just mean Coalfield, although the town was now covered in the thing that Zeke and I had made, the posters like a swarm of cicadas, sticking to everything.
We were eating dinner one night, watching channel 4, and the host, who had come back to Tennessee after serving as the sidekick for, I shit you not, Pat Sajak’s disaster of a talk show, was talking about the poster. And my mom said, “Oh my god, I cannot believe this. Hobart is going to be . . . just the worst.”
The host mentioned Coalfield, and there was some footage of our town, the square, our poster, but then there were videos of the streets of Nashville, a row of the posters flapping in the wind. And I noticed, even from that distance, that it wasn’t really our poster. First, it was on bright orange paper, which I thought made it look spooky in a silly way, like Halloween. But, also, the hands were different, less detailed. The whole poster lacked detail. It looked, honestly, like shit. Some reporter on the street was now holding one of the posters up for the camera, which focused on it, and the second half of the phrase read, “we are the New Fugitives,” and I thought, What the hell is that?
“That’s not right,” I said out loud, and my mom looked at me.
“What’s not right?” she asked.
“It’s just . . . I mean, the line is different from the ones in Coalfield.”
“Oh,” she said, squinting at the TV. “It looks right to me. Gold seekers? Shantytown?”
“The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers—”
“No, I know, Frankie,” she said, but I just kept going, “—we are fugitives and the law is skinny with hunger for us.”
“Okay,” my mom said.
“Skinny with hunger,” Andrew said, already on his third bowl of Hamburger Helper. “Skinny with hunger. I like that. Skinny with hunger.”
“I do, too,” I said, not even looking over at him, “but that said new fugitives, and . . . well, that’s not what the poster says.”
“Well, that’s what that poster says,” Charlie offered.
“Yeah . . . ,” I replied, not sure how to explain. Or, no, I knew how to explain, but I also knew that I couldn’t really do it.
AND IT WAS STRANGE, BUT AS I STARTED TO GET MAD, ZEKE seemed lighter, more calm. To his mind, the fact that there was at least one other person in Coalfield putting up the posters made it easier for us to deny our involvement. Even if we got caught, we were just stupid kids trying to imitate what we’d seen. We were so impressionable. So stupid. So desperate. We just wanted to be cool because we were so uncool, and you’re not going to call our parents are you, Officer?
Needless to say, I did not care for this at all. I would not let that happen. But if it meant that Zeke’s teeth weren’t constantly chattering while we sat next to each other, if it meant that he stopped thinking that he’d actually seen a black van drive by, then I guessed it was okay. It let me keep doing what I needed to do. And it made him a little more excited about what we’d made together, that other people liked it.
Zeke and I sat in my car, the windows down, still baking, our sweat crystallizing, and I watched as he used all his different pencils, and he drew those hands, over and over. I loved watching the quick little movements, that singular moment when you realized what the lines were amounting to. And how, from that moment on, no matter what you did, no matter how you turned your head, you couldn’t unsee it. For some reason, it was a magic trick that I never got tired of. As soon as he was finished, I’d ask him to do it again, and he’d simply flip to the next page in his sketchbook. It wasn’t automatic, it wasn’t rote. Each time, he thought about it, considered what he was doing, and I would sit and wait, trying to pinpoint the second that my eyes could see what I knew was coming. It was July. The summer wasn’t going to last forever. Or maybe it would. I had no idea.
BRIAN TOLD US THAT HE SAW LYLE TAWWATER, WEARING AN Oakland Raiders T-shirt and black sweatpants, hanging up the poster on a gas pump at the Golden Gallon. Lyle was twenty-two and had broken his back in high school when his four-wheeler flipped. His sister had been riding behind him and was still in a coma at a hospital in Knoxville. And Lyle, this quiet little country kid, got real weird when he got out of the full-body cast, started going to flea markets and buying old fixed-blade knives and remaking them into strange, almost medieval-looking devices of violence, which he then sold at craft festivals. He always had the slightest fuzz on his upper lip, the most delicate blond hairs, but his eyes were crazy.