IT ONLY GOT WORSE. THAT WEIRD DAD MILITIA, THE POSTER Posse, were constantly drunk, standing over the faint little fire that was burning on the sidewalk, and one of the men, Mr. Brewer, who worked in the sporting goods section of Wal-Mart, saw a black blur move quickly across the street, and he raised his shotgun and it went off, what they had taught us in the mandatory hunter safety course in eighth grade was an accidental discharge. He ended up shooting Mr. Henley, the auto shop teacher at the vocational school, right in the face. And though he didn’t die, Mr. Henley spent the rest of the summer in the hospital and lost his right eye. Worse, two of the other men, one a deacon at the Presbyterian church, fired several rounds in the direction of where Mr. Brewer had shouted that he saw the dark figure. One of the bullets went through a window of the house across the street and grazed an elderly woman’s neck. If the police hadn’t already been on the scene, watching over the men to make sure they didn’t burn down the whole block, she would have bled to death.

What Zeke and I couldn’t figure out exactly, though we were still putting up posters with the same regularity, was how the whole town was continually papered over with what we had made. People were also just spray-painting bits of the incantation, or trying to re-create the hands, the paint dripping down, looking more like cow udders. I tried to consider which teenagers in Coalfield would be weird enough to do all this, what burnouts or druggies or goths or jokesters would be willing to perform such a feat, but I started to think that maybe it didn’t matter who you were. Maybe it was just like any strange, zeitgeisty experience. You saw it was happening and either you resisted it (or blasted someone in the face with a shotgun) or you let it overtake you. And either way, whatever you did, it kept going, for as long as it wanted. And I hoped it would be forever.

We were eating corn dogs in my car, parked at the Sonic Drive-In, where the carhops wore roller skates and brought the food to your car on trays. Brian, who was a fry cook there, said the hot dogs were good because they fried them twice. Zeke paid for all of it. I was running lower than usual on funds because I hadn’t been taking as many babysitting jobs, but Zeke simply told his mom how much he wanted that day, and she would produce the money without question.

“Are you guys rich?” I asked him. I knew he went to private school, but that only spoke of a wealth that was beyond me. He considered the question.