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?