Hobart said that the mayor, who was also the morning DJ at WCDT who handled the segment called, I am not joking, Rough Trade, where people called in to barter goods and services, had asked for the National Guard to come to Coalfield to maintain order, but nothing was happening yet because it wasn’t really violent, or not violent in the way that would be improved by having a nineteen-year-old in camouflage trying to corner some other nineteen-year-old in a Blind Skateboards T-shirt. The cops had pretty much given up. I cannot imagine how many people they charged with vandalism in the first few days, but eventually the amount of work required to deal with it overwhelmed our dinky little police force. My brothers told me that some cops were just making people give them fifty dollars so they wouldn’t get arrested, and they must have made at least a few thousand dollars doing this. All the restaurants were full. Kids sold Kool-Aid in paper cups and Little Debbie snack cakes from wagons that they pulled up and down the sidewalks. Action Graphix, which mostly sold trophies for Little League and signs for new businesses, had made a bunch of T-shirts with our poster on it and sold them from a van, a white minivan, that they drove around town. People were making money. Not me and Zeke, but other people. It was, I guess, good for Coalfield, but the people who lived here, who had never left and had no intention of ever leaving, began to feel trapped, afraid to leave their houses. So many people in Coalfield had guns, knives, fucking compound bows. They liked to show them off even when nothing was at stake. It seemed inevitable that someone was going to get hurt in a spectacular way, and I could feel the weight of that, but it wasn’t like I could stop anything. If I admitted what we’d done, what would change? Would anyone even believe us?
My brothers were strangely unaffected by the panic. And, truly, my brothers lived for chaos, for anything that let them break or bend or stretch the world around them. They were just bored, or maybe it was more that they were mystified by the poster and it made their heads hurt. They tried to have sex with the college girls who showed up, and I think they probably did. They smoked weed and drank handles of George Dickel and watched the proceedings from afar. They did not even seem to remember that they had stolen a copier a year before, had no desire to participate. It was all beyond them. And I can’t tell you how much this pleased my mother. Whatever was going on in Coalfield, her family was not responsible. The triplets had not done anything, and she dared the authorities to try and accuse them. Of course, she knew that I was weird, and she knew that Zeke and I were driving around all the time when we weren’t hiding in my room, but she never seemed to consider that I had made this thing. She thought I was having sex. She thought I was in love. Under any other circumstances, I would have been so irritated by this, but since people in the fucking Rotary club were now destroying black vans with baseball bats to get at the Satan worshippers inside, I was slightly relieved that I wasn’t suspected.
Zeke’s mom, on the other hand, had barricaded herself in her childhood room, leaving Zeke to watch The Price Is Right with his grandmother, who wildly overestimated the price of everything, in the mornings, and then, after he’d hung out with me all day, he’d watch taped episodes of her favorite show, American Gladiators, with her, both of them uncomfortably marveling at the physiques of the gladiators. “Turbo looks a little like your grandfather as a young man,” she once told him. “Of course, no one wore clothes like the gladiators in those days.”
There was this unspoken rule in our relationship that I did not ever go over to his grandmother’s house. I think it was that he was slightly embarrassed of his mom’s catatonic grief and his grandmother’s oblivious passivity, and he much preferred the jumbled, messy nature of my own family, where you could be weird and no one was going to make you feel bad about it, or at least they wouldn’t hold on to it for long. He was always kind of wide-eyed around my brothers and my mom, like he didn’t know families could be like this, and I think he liked that close proximity. Like, if an angry mob came for us, better to be here, where my brothers would at least seriously fuck up some people before they dragged us out of the house. Plus, his mom and grandmother never left the house, and my mom and brothers were almost never around during the day, so it just made more sense to hide in my room and talk about secret fantasies we had for the future.
In my room, both of us propped up in bed, on top of the covers, the fan blowing air that was just slightly cooler than the air outside right into our faces, it felt like we could ignore what was happening in Coalfield just long enough to not feel crazy. I was writing a little story to go along with this drawing that Zeke had done of a black van that had this sludgy purple liquid spilling out of the open side door. The story was about a guy, a bizarro Timothy McVeigh, who crammed vans full of dark magic, incantations, and left them in front of TV stations to unsettle the airwaves. And Zeke was drawing the cover to the novel that I was trying to finish, hoping that the professional font and the image of my evil Nancy Drew would spur me to the end of the story.