Now Is Not the Time to Panic(31)
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.
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.