I didn’t really believe in a god, but I believed in penance, in reconciliation. And I knew what I needed to do was to stop hanging up my poster. And maybe that was why it hurt when I pushed Lyle out of my mind, because I wasn’t going to stop, and it pretty much solidified the fact that I was a bad person. I was a bad person and I wasn’t even trying to fight it.
I held the poster up to the light. Maybe my penance would be to make a hundred copies of it, to keep posting it, for Lyle, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t my poster. It didn’t have any power over me.
I had to fold Lyle and his sister into our own poster, to put up twice as many. I wondered how many people could fit inside of our poster. Our poster. Me and Zeke. If I died, I really hoped Zeke would keep making them. If he died, I knew for a fact that I would. That’s maybe what made me so sad about Lyle. His sister was in that hospital bed, far away from him; he had been alone when it happened. It was better, I decided, to have someone else.
IT ONLY GOT WORSE. THAT WEIRD DAD MILITIA, THE POSTER Posse, were constantly drunk, standing over the faint little fire that was burning on the sidewalk, and one of the men, Mr. Brewer, who worked in the sporting goods section of Wal-Mart, saw a black blur move quickly across the street, and he raised his shotgun and it went off, what they had taught us in the mandatory hunter safety course in eighth grade was an accidental discharge. He ended up shooting Mr. Henley, the auto shop teacher at the vocational school, right in the face. And though he didn’t die, Mr. Henley spent the rest of the summer in the hospital and lost his right eye. Worse, two of the other men, one a deacon at the Presbyterian church, fired several rounds in the direction of where Mr. Brewer had shouted that he saw the dark figure. One of the bullets went through a window of the house across the street and grazed an elderly woman’s neck. If the police hadn’t already been on the scene, watching over the men to make sure they didn’t burn down the whole block, she would have bled to death.
What Zeke and I couldn’t figure out exactly, though we were still putting up posters with the same regularity, was how the whole town was continually papered over with what we had made. People were also just spray-painting bits of the incantation, or trying to re-create the hands, the paint dripping down, looking more like cow udders. I tried to consider which teenagers in Coalfield would be weird enough to do all this, what burnouts or druggies or goths or jokesters would be willing to perform such a feat, but I started to think that maybe it didn’t matter who you were. Maybe it was just like any strange, zeitgeisty experience. You saw it was happening and either you resisted it （or blasted someone in the face with a shotgun） or you let it overtake you. And either way, whatever you did, it kept going, for as long as it wanted. And I hoped it would be forever.
We were eating corn dogs in my car, parked at the Sonic Drive-In, where the carhops wore roller skates and brought the food to your car on trays. Brian, who was a fry cook there, said the hot dogs were good because they fried them twice. Zeke paid for all of it. I was running lower than usual on funds because I hadn’t been taking as many babysitting jobs, but Zeke simply told his mom how much he wanted that day, and she would produce the money without question.
“Are you guys rich?” I asked him. I knew he went to private school, but that only spoke of a wealth that was beyond me. He considered the question.
“I mean, I think so? Yes. I, like, wasn’t sure when I was in Memphis, but now that I’m here this summer, in Coalfield? You know, looking around? I’m pretty sure we’re rich.”
Zeke was the kind of rich that I could tolerate, someone who didn’t seem to know what that money could do for him. Maybe at a private school in Memphis, your mom a violin prodigy, the levels of wealth and privilege were such that it wasn’t as helpful as I’d hoped. All that mattered to me, besides the fact that he could buy me four corn dogs if I asked, was that if things really got bad, if we got caught, his money might get us out of a jam.
As we drank our Ocean Waters, these horrible and wonderful blue coconut sodas served in an insulated cup so huge that if you drank all of it at once, you would fall into a coma from the sugar, Zeke and I talked about what we always talked about, trying to remember little bits of our past, trying to adequately explain ourselves to another person. I told him about my stocking that we hung up at Christmas, how the triplets’ had little nutcrackers on them, blue and red and green, but mine was this angel who looked dead, its eyes closed and hands folded over its heart. Zeke told me about a mouse that he’d found in the backyard when he was six, injured by a stray cat, and how he’d kept it in his room and tried to feed it, until his mom found it dead under his pillow the next day. It was like, we had covered the big narratives, the ways our families had fallen apart, how we felt so different from everyone else, how desperately we wanted to make something important, and what was left was the actual stuff that mattered, that one night I’d had a nightmare and stumbled into the triplets’ room and asked all three of them to let me sleep with them until Charlie, finally, let me crawl into his little twin bed. How in the morning, Andrew and Brian made fun of Charlie, and how he had slammed their heads together like Moe in the Three Stooges, and how I felt charmed by this, the first time my brothers’ violence felt sweet to me.