Now Is Not the Time to Panic(25)

“I guess I kind of thought that we didn’t want anyone else to understand it, right? Like, it’s just us. We’re the only ones who know what it is.”

He thought about it for a second. “I mean, yeah,” he continued, “but, like, I kind of wanted other people to not understand it in ways that they assumed a really cool artist had made it. I didn’t want them to not understand it in a way that they think we’re devil worshippers who abduct kids.”

“But it’s not that. Whatever they think, we know what it really is,” I told him.

“I’m just—” he said, but then started staring out the window. I thought maybe a police cruiser had pulled into the parking lot, but the coast was clear.

“Here, just, like, give me that poster,” I said, and I took the folded-up poster he was still holding. I smoothed it out on my lap. “I’m just going to hang this up. We’ll feel a ton better if you can see me hang it up and, you know, we don’t get arrested on the spot. And then maybe I’ll put up a few more. There’s a lot in the bag, and we’ll just see where that takes us.”

“There’s one up,” he said, now pointing at the change machine built into the brick wall at the front of the unmanned car wash station.

“Well, like, we can put up more,” I said. “That’s no big deal. Or somewhere else. Whatever.”

He grabbed the map and held it up for me. “We never put a poster here,” he said.

“Yeah, no, I think we did,” I said.

“No, we never put one here,” he said, pointing at the spot on the map, pristine, unmarked.

“Maybe I did?” I offered.

“Did you?” he asked, his voice cracking just a bit.

“I don’t know. I don’t remember doing it. Maybe in my sleep?”

“Frankie, seriously, did you put up that poster?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

We both got out of the car and walked over to the change machine. The edge is a shantytown. The hands. Our blood, speckles of it. It was our poster. I stared at it. But it wasn’t our poster. I pulled it off the machine, and I noticed immediately that the paper was not the crappy discount copy paper we had in the garage. It was nicer. Fancier. A little more weight and heft. The color was pristine white, too, not the yellow tint of our posters. We walked back to my car, and I checked it against the copy I’d taken from Zeke.

“Oh, well, okay, that’s . . . it’s not ours,” I finally said.

“Then whose is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Somebody took one of our posters and made more copies, I guess.”

“They made copies?”

“I guess, Zeke! Jesus, I don’t know.”

Zeke thought about this for a second. The idea that someone else might get credit for the poster seemed to alarm him, but the idea that someone else might get the electric chair for making the posters seemed to temporarily assuage his anxiety. “So they stole it?” he finally asked.

“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.”