The only evidence is that I’m still here. And the poster is still here. And I know because I still have the original poster, with my blood and Zeke’s blood on it. And if I start to lose a sense of myself, if I start to drift outside my life, I take the original poster and I make a copy on the scanner/copier/printer in my own private office, and I go somewhere, anywhere in the entire world, and I hang it up. And I know, in that moment, that my life is real, because there’s a line from this moment all the way back to that summer, when I was sixteen, when the whole world opened up and I walked through it.
Ten
COALFIELD WAS NOTHING. THERE WAS NOTHING TO IT. IT WAS rural in the way that a lot of rural places existed in the mid-nineties, which is to say that it had a Wal-Mart and fast food and little subdivisions of houses of various levels of wealth and then fields and fields of soybeans. You would not come here unless you were visiting family or you got a job working at the Toyota factory or the air force engineering base a few towns over. What we had, everyone else had, too, and who wanted that? So it was such a strange sensation when Coalfield, because of us and whatever we’d done, became a place that mattered.
People made it a priority that summer to visit Coalfield. College kids, so handsome and tan, always a little drunk or high, showed up from Georgia and North Carolina, emptied out of cars, and just, like, walked around our town. They looked for the posters, and when they saw one, they stole it or took a picture of it. The Royal Inn, which was usually just for construction workers and weird sex stuff, was now completely full at all times, parties around the pool that the management hadn’t even bothered to fill. Old hippies in RVs showed up with coolers filled with soggy sandwiches and orange soda, and they would set up a picnic in the state park and watch everyone else either put up or pull down posters. There were teenagers from all the surrounding counties, wearing T-shirts by bands like Napalm Death and Marilyn Manson and Soundgarden and Korn, and they had our poster in their hands, and they searched for a place to hang it.
Bethy Posey, who was crazy pregnant, which I could not imagine in this heat, and who was the same age as me but tiny like a doll, though now with a giant belly, had set up a table where she sold Xeroxes of the original poster. A dollar a copy. She had these customized versions with the word fugitives whited out and you could write your own name in the blank space and hang it up and take a picture of it. Her ex-boyfriend, Danny Hausen, who was training to be a professional wrestler, had done some posters where instead of the beds with the children, he had drawn Bart Simpson or Elmo or the UT Vols symbol.
It was a little like Lollapalooza, this kind of all-day event, but underneath that was this humming sensation, people waiting for something to happen. And so, of course, something occasionally did. Someone set fire to a tree in the square and it burned to nothing before the fire department even got there. Someone saw a black van parked at the Bi-Lo and this whole crew of townspeople beat the absolute shit out of it with baseball bats and hammers, and the cops had to show up to get everyone to disperse. At the public pool, a man kept throwing these fake gold coins at people and talking about how gold seekers were minions of the devil, and Latrell Dunwood tried to drown the guy, and it took six terrified lifeguards to stop him. The Poster Posse crouched in the bed of a jacked-up truck and drove all through the town, threatening to murder anyone who looked even the slightest bit like a fugitive or a gold seeker. The Presbyterian church’s sign read IS GOD SKINNY WITH HUNGER FOR YOU? and Zeke said, “Shouldn’t it say, Are you skinny with hunger for God?” and I was like, “Zeke, please.”
It was absurd.
It’s impossible to overstate how bizarre it was. There are now so many home videos on the internet of that summer, people just aimlessly wandering around, screaming out the phrase that I wrote. Discarded posters were constantly fluttering in the wind, blowing down the streets because people didn’t really care if they stayed up.
It was also thrilling.
Zeke and I would drive all over town. I was spending all my money on gas. And every single poster that I saw, I didn’t even have to think about it. It became a reflex. I just knew. They were mine. Or mine and Zeke’s. What was the difference?
It was also frustrating as hell because it had been our thing, and no one else understood that.
They thought it was everyone’s thing, and that made me want to drown someone in the public pool or set them on fire. I had wanted people to care, to notice, but I hadn’t wanted them to put their own hands all over it, to try to claim it. But how do you stop something like that? You just tried to make more of it so you didn’t lose your claim to what was inside of you.