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.”