Now Is Not the Time to Panic(27)

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.

Brian asked Lyle if he was a fugitive, and Lyle smiled and put his index finger to his lips. He got back into his car and said, “I’m one of ’em,” and drove off. Brian had removed the poster and showed it to me. It wasn’t a Xerox of our poster, but Lyle’s own version, the lines so dark and angry, almost vibrating. He’d re-created my phrase exactly, but the hands looked skeletal. And in the bed was a single person, a little girl, hooked up to machines.

I imagined Lyle, still living with his mom, sitting in his room and making more than a dozen copies of this poster by hand. It didn’t make me sad for some reason. I mean, Lyle had always made me sad, to have ruined your life and the life of the person you loved most in the world because you took a turn too fast. But this felt like a kind of grace. I wondered how many he would have to hang for his sister to awaken from her coma. Whatever the number, however unlikely, it seemed worth trying.

And Zeke and I saw this girl, Madeline, hanging posters without any real fear of being caught, just stapling them to trees in the park. Madeline had been a cheerleader in junior high but then, I don’t know exactly why because I wasn’t aware of the complex negotiations required to be popular, she’d quit and started hanging out with the theater kids. She wasn’t a goth, not really, because I don’t think anyone really knew exactly what that was. I mean, she listened to Nine Inch Nails. She wore a lot of black eyeliner. We didn’t know what to call that, but we just knew that Madeline was suddenly not the Madeline who had been the sturdy base of the pyramid during pep rallies. She was transformed.

I can’t quite articulate how, in so many ways, Coalfield controlled how the outside world came to you. Like, you never really knew about punk until you heard Green Day on the radio, long after they were popular, and if you loved that, maybe you started doing a little work. I mean, we did not even have MTV in our cable package. You had to buy a Spin or Rolling Stone, and you started to work backward, learning about the Sex Pistols. And once you knew those two bands, you had to work harder to fill in the middle, and if you were lucky, somebody’s cousin had given them a tape of Minor Threat and they gave you a dub of it. Or you went to Spinners and just looked endlessly at the used cassette tapes until you picked one that had an interesting cover, and maybe you just happened to buy Black Flag’s My War. But, no matter what, you were never quite experiencing anything in a linear way. And you were always kind of embarrassed because you knew other people, people in Nashville or Atlanta (who could even conceive of New York City), knew all of this, in the exact order it was meant to be consumed, and so you didn’t really talk about it. You kept it all locked up inside of you and suddenly you were sending cash in envelopes to record labels you read about in MRR and you got a 7" record of some punk band in Wisconsin that would never record another song.

It was like this for me with books. After I’d read every single Nancy Drew book twice, I found The Chocolate War in the school library, and I told the librarian that I liked it and so she gave me The Outsiders. And then my mom gave me Flannery O’Connor, and I started grabbing anything I could find and I had no idea what other people thought was good or what was important. And so I almost never told anyone what I liked because I was terrified that they would tell me how stupid it was. Every single thing that you loved became a source of both intense obsession and possible shame. Everything was a secret.

Madeline saw me staring at her, and she just smiled. I don’t think she even knew who I was. But she made devil horns with her right hand and mouthed the words We are fugitives, and I nodded.

Zeke asked, “Who is that?”

I shook my head. “Just some dumb girl,” I replied, and we drove to find a place that had a hidden spot that would accept what we’d made.

And we did find places. We did not stop. Zeke really got into taking empty two-liter Coke bottles and painting them gold and then making these lovely illustrations of wolves and flowers and intricate patterns with his fancy paint pens. We’d roll up one of the posters and slide it into the bottle and seal it up. Then we’d bury them around town, like time capsules. Each one we marked on the map with a little drawing of an hourglass. And each one was a different length of time. We’d open this one in five years. This one in ten. This one in twenty. Forty. Fifty. We were so young. It didn’t seem that impossible to us, to jump on a plane, meet up in some run-down park with a single swing and a broken jungle gym, in our sixties, and dig up this time capsule, just so we could say, “We made that. It looks just like I remember.” And then we’d bury it, leave it for someone else to find.

The cops were patrolling more frequently, but it still felt so unreal and they were looking for a black van, for hulking, greasy-haired roadies for Iron Maiden. And other teenagers, maybe even adults, had started doing it. The Kroger, which had a copier that was five cents a copy, no longer allowed people to use the machine, by request of the police. The library also had a copier, but they refused to keep their patrons from using it, although now this one librarian, Ms. Ward, who had the craziest dyed-black hair and must have been in her eighties, had to look at every document that someone wanted to copy. You could just drive thirty minutes to Manchester or some town that was big enough that you could go into a Kinko’s and do whatever the hell you wanted. There was this little group of men, a very very sad militia, who would drink beer and then patrol the streets and tear down the posters and make a dinky little fire and sit around it and feel like they were protecting the town. And they were loud as hell, and they got winded walking too much, so then they’d jump into their trucks, and the police started assigning a patrol car just to make sure that they didn’t shoot anyone, and so it was fairly easy to navigate all of this. And we mostly did it in the daytime, when no one cared, when no one saw us.