Over and Under (15 page)

“And how are you this mornin’?” she asked once she regained the power of speech.

“Just fine, ma’am,” he said, waiting for her to take the five-dollar bill from his fingers. “How are you?”

“We’re so glad you’re here.” Patsy lowered her voice to
a stage whisper. “It’s about time somebody taught those yahoos a lesson.”

The thug again offered her his money without comment, but Patsy wasn’t done yet. She was certain she’d found a fellow traveler in her hatred of Borden natives, and she wasn’t about to let him go without some commiseration.

“The unions are ruining the country, I believe.”

“That could be, yes, ma’am.” His halfhearted agreement seemed just an attempt to bring the conversation to a close. But Patsy was just getting started.

“The Teamsters? Known communists. Longshoremen? Known communists. Autoworkers? I tell my little girl: you see this spool of thread? It costs fifteen cents. If we give everybody more money for making it than they deserve, then the spool of thread will cost a dollar. ‘Momma, nobody can pay a dollar for a spool of thread,’ she tells me.” Patsy cackled at her daughter’s precociousness.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So we’re real glad you’re here.” Patsy actually clasped his hand in both of hers, like a grateful flood victim greeting a national guardsman. Her voice dropped to where we could barely hear her, although I sensed that she intentionally maintained it just high enough for us to make out her words. “You teach those rednecks a lesson.”

“I’m not here to teach anyone a lesson,” said the thug, escaping from her grasp, still smiling tightly. “I’m just here to protect company property.”

Patsy cackled again and winked. “Of course you are,” she said knowingly. “Of course you are!” She finally gave the man his change.

Tom and I had worked our way over to the door by the time he finally made his escape from Patsy. I read “Solinski” on his nametag as he passed.

“You boys stay out of trouble, okay?” he said. He flashed a pointy-toothed smile and winked at us as he left. Through the door, I watched him stride to catch up with Taffy, who was walking dejectedly down the road. He twisted off a can of RC from his six-pack and gave it to her.

When Tom and I returned to the picket line, the people of Borden were once again abuzz with excitement. The WAVE 3 Action News Team had arrived in a van painted gloriously with NBC’s peacock logo. The Action News Team was unloading their equipment, while Borden’s own Dieter Sajko did the same: six fat, tired-looking bloodhounds he had in the back of his ancient Ford Bronco. It seemed a little late for hounds to pick up the trail, and I suspected the event was being staged solely for the benefit of the news crew.

Sajko lived at the edge of town in a ramshackle converted barn. He somehow eked out a living raising bloodhounds and grinding tree stumps around the county. Sajko must have known in advance that his performance was to be televised—he was wearing an uncharacteristically clean shirt and what looked like a new straw hat. Sheriff Kohl stood to the side and nodded approvingly as Sajko tried to coax his dogs into at least looking like they gave a shit. Sajko took the notorious Mack Sanders ball cap from the sheriff, rubbed it in the muzzles of his confused-looking dogs, and then took off running with them into the woods beyond the bean field in front of the plant. It was
exactly the opposite direction that Tom and I had seen the “bombers” go—I thought Sajko might be taking his cue from the psychic. The scruffiest-looking member of the news crew trotted after them with a bulky camera on his shoulder, and Tom and I followed on our bikes.

The hounds briefly got into the spirit of things, howling dramatically as they ran in front of Sajko. Their enthusiasm didn’t last long. The hounds ran to the edge of Muddy Fork, the nearest body of water. There they sat down, exhausted and gasping for breath, and lapping occasionally from the creek when they could muster the energy.

Dieter Sajko stepped between his hounds and the television camera. “They gone,” he declared. “Lost the scent on the water. Probably gone to Lou-a-vul.”

The sheriff and his deputies nodded soberly in agreement at Dieter and the small crowd that had caught up with us. I hoped the dogs were right, but I couldn’t forget that image of the men running in the opposite direction, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the threat scrawled on our garage door. The cameraman knelt down and put his camera on the ground, to get a low angle shot of the panting hounds.

Tom and I turned our bikes around and easily beat the crowd back to the picket line, which was now largely deserted. Inside the fence, I saw that the thugs were ignoring the running of the hounds. Solinski had a large topographical map laid out on a picnic table, the site of summer lunches and smoke breaks during happier days. Two of his RC cans were holding down the corners. Solinski was pointing out coordinates and drawing lines for his men. I could tell even from a distance that it wasn’t a map of
Louisville: the large blue band of the Ohio River snaked around the very bottom edge of it. It was a map of Clark County. Solinski didn’t believe Sajko’s lazy dogs any more than Tom and I did.

That night after dinner had been cleaned up and the Sanka had brewed, Dad shuffled and dealt our well-worn deck of Authors cards.

“I’m feeling lucky tonight,” said Dad, sorting his hand.

“The Alhambra?”
I asked Mom.

“No,” she said. I drew a useless
Pendennis
off the pile.

“The Scarlet Letter?”
Dad asked me. I slid it across the table.

“Yes!” he said, as he happily laid out Hawthorne’s four major works on the table.

“How’d they do it?” I asked suddenly. Dad looked at Mom, and I could tell that not only did he know exactly what my vague question meant, but that they had anticipated and planned for it. One of the many things I didn’t like about being an only child was that it was nearly impossible for me to surprise my parents.

“How’d they do what?” Dad asked, buying time.

“The explosion at the factory,” I said, pretending to sort my cards. “How’d they make it blow up?”

My father looked to my mother again, confirming the strategy they had decided earlier about what and how much to tell me.

“Do you remember the finishing ovens?” my father asked. “Where the caskets roll between coats?”

I nodded. That was in my father’s area of the plant, the area I knew the best. The coffins rolled single file on a belt
through the paint booths, which applied each coat of prime, color, and finish. Then the caskets crept slowly through the warm ovens at a precisely calculated temperature, and rolled out the other side with the color more firmly affixed. Or something like that. My father had been largely unsuccessful in his attempts to interest me in the complexities of finishing fine wood coffins. Even so, I did distinctly remember the ovens. While I grew up in a town where virtually everybody paid their bills with money made from the sale of expensive wooden caskets, there was something spooky to me about that unending column of them rolling slowly through a glowing oven.

My father continued. “They lit a candle at one end of the finish line. Then, they blew out the pilot light on the oven, and turned up the throttle valve on the gas all the way. The place filled up with a cloud of natural gas, and when the cloud reached the candle, it ignited, and exploded.” He paused, took a breath, then continued to explain to me how Don Strange died.

“Don was standing outside his office when it exploded. Maybe he heard something. Maybe he smelled gas. Maybe he was just getting ready to leave.”

“So what actually killed him?” I asked.

“The explosion.”

“No, I mean, how? Was he burned up? Did something go through his head?”

My mother was horrified. “Andy, don’t be morbid.”

“No, it’s okay,” said my father. “It was the explosion. The blast threw him across the finish room, into a concrete wall. Broke almost every bone in his body. It was enough to kill him five times over.”

I pretended to focus on the unaffiliated array of Alcotts, Twains, and Sir Walter Scotts in my hand, and not on the image of tiny Don Strange helplessly flying across the finishing room and slamming into a hard wall.

“They’ll pay for what they did. Sooner or later,” my father said. “Although I would have thought they could catch at least one of them by now, Sanders or Kruer.”

“How do you know they’ll get caught? How can you be so sure?” I wanted to know it was certain; if there was no doubt, then I was all freed from any responsibility to come forward and tell the authorities what Tom and I had seen.

“Wherever they end up, somebody will rat them out,” my mom said quickly.

I was mystified by her reaction. “Don’t we want them caught?”

“Of course we do. I just don’t like the way people are lining up to turn them in.” Her Kentucky accent had sharpened in the same way it did when she spoke about Phyllis Schlafly.

My father sighed. “They’ll get caught without anybody’s help—they’ve hardly proven themselves master criminals.”

“Maybe,” my mom said.

“They found Mack’s ball cap at the factory. With his
name
written in it. Plus, several people came forward and said Sanders was making a lot of crazy threats at the union meeting that very night.”

“Like I said. Union people around here are pretty quick to turn on one of their own.” I wanted her to elaborate on her own upbringing, where people presumably knew how to throw a proper strike.

“Well, God bless the people around here for that,” said my father. “There are folks on our picket line who don’t cotton to murder and arson.”

“God bless them?” my mother asked.

“God bless them.”

We went back to our card game.

During the night, the phone rang and woke me from a deep sleep. I heard Mom hurriedly get ready and drive away, presumably to help Sheriff Kohl again with one of his secret midnight requests. It occurred to me as I drifted back to sleep that the frequency of the sheriff’s calls was increasing as the strike went on.

That call was a hazy memory when a metallic pounding woke me the next morning. Through my window, I saw Mom out by the road hammering a small blue sign on a metal stake into the ground. I pulled on my shorts, rubbed my eyes, and walked out front to see what she was advocating. It looked almost like one of the pro-strike signs that dotted the lawns throughout town. It wasn’t. When I got closer, I read in red and white letters: ERA—VOTE YES!

“I thought that already passed.” I remembered her celebrating something similar years before, and a mention of the amendment in school.

“Not just yet.”

“What’s ERA gonna make us do?”

“It says you can’t deny me my rights because I’m a woman.”

I thought it over. “Are you sure that’s not the law already?”

“It passed Congress in seventy-two. Now thirty-eight states have to ratify it for it to be part of the Constitution.”

“How many states have passed it?”

“Thirty-five.”

“How about Indiana?” I asked.

“Indiana was the last one, number thirty-five, two years ago.”

“If Indiana already passed it, why put the sign up?”

“Moral support. And because we’re running out of time—1982 is the deadline.”

“Cool,” I said. “You’ve got three years to get three states. That shouldn’t be too hard.”

“You wouldn’t think,” she said, giving the sign a final whack.

We walked back toward the house together. The sign was largely a symbolic gesture, I knew, even apart from Indiana’s fait accompli. Only the Kruers lived between us and the end of Cabin Hill Road: few registered voters would pass and be influenced by my mom’s efforts. Mom had put a similar sign in the yard years before, at some other key point in the amendment’s legislative life. Of the few folks who drove by it, some asked Dad why our house was for sale.

Dad was furiously chopping through shrubs next to the house, in the center of a green cloud of unwanted foliage. Since the strike began, our yard had achieved a kind of glory, more edged, fertilized, and weeded than it had ever been before. Mom exchanged her hammer for a hoe
and began hacking between the rows of our vegetable garden. I suppose she imagined recalcitrant state legislators as she worked. I volunteered to pluck the ravenous worms from the tomato plants, avoiding their sharp horns and the green slime they oozed in panic as I dropped them to their doom in a small bucket of water. It felt good to be out in the heat working together. I was so intent on my chores that Mom saw Tom walk up the driveway before I did.

“Hello, Mrs. Gray,” he said. He was shirtless, as usual, with a fishing pole in his hand and his M6 rifle slung behind his back. He gave me a quick, sly look, and I knew why he was there. We were going searching for the fugitives.

“Hi, Tommy,” she said, smiling. While Tom’s dad and mine might have been on opposite sides of our little labor war, neither family made any attempt at curtailing our friendship. Neither family was capable of that kind of cruelty, for one thing. For another, it would have been futile, short of locking us both in our rooms. And we had well-traveled escape routes for that eventuality as well. In any case, my parents genuinely liked Tom and had no interest in keeping us separated. And they had no idea, of course, that we were looking for something bigger than bass and squirrel.

“Can Andy go fishing?” Tom asked my mom. Dad had worked his way over to us. He was wiping sweat from his brow with one hand, holding hedge clippers with the other.

“How are you, young man?” he asked.

“Fine, sir.”

“Your folks?”

“They’re real good,” Tom said automatically. “I thought Andy and me would go fishing.”

“Must be some big fish you’re after.” He grinned and pointed at the gun. Tom shrugged and smiled back. I ran up to my room and got my gun and my fishing pole, and ran up alongside Tom, now identically equipped.

“Look at these two,” my father said.

“Can I go?” I asked.

“Certainly,” said my father. “Be careful. Be home for supper.”

Mom and Dad watched us walk off, and I could tell that the scene gave them profound pleasure.