Over and Under (17 page)

Tom stared into the woods more intently than normal as we walked, fishing rods in our hands and guns across our backs. We were actually going to fish, we hadn’t been lying about that. But from now on, just as Tom had said that night at the museum, every walk in the woods would also be a search for Sanders and Kruer. He studied the path for any sign of them as we walked to Silver Creek, walking a half step slower than normal and peering through the trees. My thoughts about the bombers were vivid at night, when I remembered the dark silhouettes of them running in front of the fireball, or their somehow menacing black-and-white yearbook photos reproduced in the newspaper. When I was trying to fall asleep, Sanders and Kruer represented everything that was dangerous and out of control in my town. But out there in the bright sunlight, with Tom and my Springfield beside me, I tried to get into the spirit of the hunt without feeling any real fear, or even excitement. The woods seemed utterly, completely normal. Actually finding a couple of killers out there just seemed too unbelievable to be frightening.

After a while, Tom began scratching his head and
clearing his throat as we walked, and I got the feeling he had something to tell me.

“Did you hear about Taffy Judd?” he finally asked.

“No. What?” I was certain she was lost in a cave.

“She’s gone,” said Tom, the regret clear in his voice. “Her mother and sister, too. Their dad was beating the shit out of all of them last night, all liquored up. Taffy ran down the road to Miller’s in the middle of the night with a broken arm and called the sheriff on the pay phone. Dad heard it all on his police radio—says that drunk might have killed them all if Taffy hadn’t got away.”

“Shit,” I said, picturing poor Taffy running down the dark road, her arm at a funny angle, wincing as she put a nickel in the phone with her good arm. I was relieved beyond words that she hadn’t died in the cave. At the same time, I was sickened by the thought of her brutal father hitting her. I knew Taffy could get away from him, especially if he was slowed down by cheap booze. If she got hurt, I knew it had to be because she was trying to protect her sister and mother. And now she was gone.

“I guess their dad beat them up all the time,” said Tom.

“He did?”

“That’s what Dad said, said it like everybody in town knew about it. He said Judd spent so much money on booze that their mom had to get food from the church.”

“I guess that’s why Taffy didn’t talk much in school,” I mumbled.

“How’s that? Because she was hungry?”

“And she was probably worried all the time, about what her dad was going to do to them every night when
he got home from Kirtley’s, or wherever he got liquored up.”

“The cave was probably the safest place she could go,” said Tom, and I realized it was true, despite the fact that I was so worried about her getting hurt down there.

“Where are they now?”

“Their dad’s in jail. No tellin’ where the rest of them ended up. Maybe she’s got family somewhere. I hope.”

“Yeah,” I said. People rarely left Borden, at least for any period of time longer than an army enlistment contract. So it took a few seconds for me to comprehend that I might not ever see her again. And I didn’t even have a picture to remember her by.

“Shit,” I said. We’d stopped walking. Tom stared at the ground sympathetically, hands on hips.

“I’m sorry, man.”

I shrugged, trying to fight off the gloom, or at least put on a brave front. I was surprised at the force of my sadness, the feeling of loss. I could tell by the careful way Tom was handling the situation that he wasn’t surprised by my reaction.

“She’ll be back,” Tom said unconvincingly

“Sure.” We resumed walking.

Tom and I pushed through the weeds to a wide spot in Silver Creek where we’d had some recent luck with bluegill and small but tasty channel catfish. It was a popular spot among knowledgeable locals, so I was relieved to see that Tom and I had it to ourselves, at least for the moment. I really didn’t feel like talking to anyone. The creek was pinched and fast moving at both ends of the pool, but the
water where we fished was wide and deep—the pool was roughly in the shape of a giant eye. We leaned our guns on a fallen tree that ran along the bank, a natural bench, dug some grubs up from under a rotten log with our hands, dropped our baited hooks in the water, and waited. The sweltering heat didn’t encourage conversation.

After a time, Tom reeled in out of sheer boredom, and got his line snagged on some floating weeds. He pulled hard, trying hard to free the hook from a variety of angles, because neither of us had brought along any spare tackle. Finally, with his rod bent almost completely over on itself, the line snapped.

“Well, shit.”

We both turned and started looking into the tree branches behind us, looking for any hooks that had been snagged and abandoned by fishermen before us. It was amazing what some guys would leave behind just because they didn’t feel like climbing a tree.

With nothing visible close by, Tom began walking along the bank, looking in the weeds and along the water’s edge for anything remotely usable, even an old rusty hook that might be sharpened on a rock.

“Here we go,” he said, about halfway to the end of the pool. He was leaning down almost to the dirt, where a length of fishing line was running from a small tree near the shore into the water. Tom tugged it, hoping that a hook in relatively good condition would be at the other end.

As he pulled, the whole thing came out of the water. It ran all the way across the creek, where it was tied to a branch on the opposite shore. A dozen leaders baited with red worms dangled from it on swivels at neatly spaced
intervals. On two of them, tiny bluegills shimmered in the sunlight, twitching and fighting to escape.

I put my pole down and ran over to look. “What the hell?”

“It’s a trot line,” he said, excited. “That’s smart—fishes all day for you, you just come haul them in at night! You lay low, don’t have to worry about anybody seeing you out here.”

“Do you think …”

Tom was grinning wildly. “Who else could it be?”

“We can’t be sure, anybody could have made this thing…”

“Let me ask you something, Andy. We’ve been fishing here a long time, right? Years and years? Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

I had to shake my head. “Still…”

“Well, if we watch this thing long enough, I guess we’ll find out who it belongs to. We need to come back at night. Goddamn, a trot line—what a great idea.” He unsnapped the nearest leader, and let the line go. It dropped back into the water until only a few inches of it were visible again, the short distance from the waterline to the baby tree. “Holy shit, that is cool.”

We walked back over to our log. Tom grabbed his pole in a kind of happy daze, convinced we had found our first concrete evidence of the bombers. He tied on the leader and cast it into the pool, still using the red worm that the bombers, or whoever, had used. He stared across the water contemplating the possibilities. The complete lack of action made it easy to get lost in thought. We fished silently and fruitlessly for an hour, listening for any sign of
the bombers, glancing occasionally at what we could see of the trot line. Soon, I was again pretending to concentrate on my line while thinking only of Taffy.

“Look at that,” Tom said, after a long period of quiet. I saw what he was talking about, a big, slow hit on the surface of the water, right in the center of the eye, the large ripples expanding outward. The waves weren’t the frantic work of a bass snapping its hungry lips at a fly, but something big and lumbering.

“Was it a turtle?”

“I think it was a carp,” Tom said. “A huge one.”

We both reeled in our hooks and threw them in the general direction of the fish, to no avail. Then it hit the surface again, and this time we could actually make out the gaping white mouth. Its pale whiskers broke the surface, and just below we could make out the body, widening and disappearing into the deep. It was a monster.

“How’d that hog get in here?” I asked.

“Probably came down the creek as a baby,” said Tom. “Grew up to where he was trapped in this pool by his size.”

The activity of the big fish on the surface stopped, it having either filled its stomach or heard our voices.

We tried again tossing our hooks in front of it, hoping at least to provoke the fish into rising to the surface again so we could take another look at it. Already I was losing the image in my mind, forgetting the actual size of the thing. I was about to give up when Tom suggested a new course of action.

“Let’s jump in and look at it,” he said.

“What?” I had been fishing my whole life, and no one had ever before suggested just jumping into the water and taking a look around. It was the kind of original thinking that made Tom both fun and a little unsettling to hang out with.

“I’m serious,” Tom said. “The water’s pretty clear. The pool’s not that big across. Let’s jump in and see if we can see it.” He was standing on the log, waiting for me to follow his lead. As was so often the case, Tom’s idea was so far out in left field that I couldn’t even formulate a rebuttal. The heat also made the idea of jumping into the cool water sorely tempting. I removed my shoes, stood up on the log, and on the count of three, we jumped in together.

I sank slowly to the bottom with my eyes closed. The cold of the water quickly soaked through my shorts. The current pushed me downstream with surprising force, pressing me into a sideways lean. When my feet hit the gravelly bottom, something tiny and hard scurried to escape from under my heel. I opened my eyes.

The water was clearer than I’d expected. Rays of sunlight hit the smooth surface about two feet above our heads, and broke into sparkles that danced across the muddy bottom Weeds grew around the edges of the pool and swayed with the current, and I could see all the way to the steep walls of the far bank. Dancing bubbles marked where the swift water of Silver Creek tumbled into the pool, the trot line invisible in the turbulence. And directly across from us hovered the enormous carp.

It was huge, at least twenty-five pounds. Its large, mirrorlike scales reflected the sunlight with a greenish glow. It stared at us, swinging its big, flat tail calmly from side
to side. Its large lips were turned downward in a mild frown. The fish was unhappy to share his pool with us, but seemed to recognize that we couldn’t last down there for long. We stared at each other until my lungs burned. As my breath finally ran out, the carp’s mouth opened slightly, allowing a perfectly spherical bubble to follow me as I pushed up and shot to the surface.

Tom popped up right after me. We both gasped for breath.

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “Did you see the size of that thing?” Tom didn’t respond, and I turned to see what had his attention.

Calmly sitting on our log, his booted feet dangling nearly to the water, was Solinski, the head thug. Solinksi was inspecting Tom’s rifle, and mine was across his lap.

I was too stunned to move—I wouldn’t have been more surprised if I saw Solinski sitting on Tom’s living room couch. Tom was already climbing out of the water and heading toward him, seething.

“Hello, boys,” said Solinski with a smile, wholly un-threatened by Tom’s outrage.

Tom grabbed his gun away, so Solinski picked up mine and resumed his inspection.

“An M6,” he said. “I’ll be damned. I’ve never seen one before.”

I was out of the water and standing by him, but I didn’t have the nerve to snatch it away like Tom had. I just stood there and dripped.

“Did you know these were designed for air force bomber pilots?” he said. “So that when they crashed in Siberia or
whatever, they could hunt their food and chase away the polar bears for a few days. That’s why they’ve got this squeeze bar instead of a trigger,” he said, pointing at it. “So you can shoot it with mittens.”

“Yeah, we know,” said Tom. He was so emphatic that I am sure Solinksi could tell he was bullshitting. In fact, I had always thought the small gun was designed for kids. Solinski’s information made the gun seem even cooler, and I was grateful to him for that.

“I saw you two in the store, remember?” asked Solinski.

“No,” said Tom. Now he was just being obnoxious.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. I didn’t mean it to sound confrontational. I really wanted to know.

“I’ve been out here a lot. Walking around, getting to know the area, enjoying the scenery. I should ask you what you’re doing here,” he said, in an equally friendly tone. “You’re the ones trespassing on Borden Casket Company property.” It was true, and Tom and I both knew it. The company owned vast tracts throughout the county. Every now and then we’d stumble upon and ignore an orange-lettered sign in the middle of the woods that read
YOU ARE NOW TRESSPASSING ON BORDEN CASKET COMPANY PROPERTY.
Since none of the land was fenced, and since the property lines ran helter-skelter throughout the valley, the company had always let the locals hunt and fish, just as they always had. As long as they didn’t damage any of the company’s slow-growing assets, nobody seemed to mind.

“Are you here to run us off?” I asked. Tom remained sullen, inching slowly toward the trailhead at the edge of the woods.

“Not at all,” said Solinski. “I’m just out here taking a walk through the woods.”

“You’re looking for Sanders and Kruer,” said Tom.

Solinski looked each of us over carefully, then shrugged. “They’re in Louisville, haven’t you heard?”

We didn’t say anything.

“Personally, I don’t know about that,” continued Solinski. “If it was me, looking at the map, I would have headed this way—into the hills. Especially if I grew up around here and knew people around here. Knew these hills. Like you two.”

I smiled in spite of myself, proud to have my expertise acknowledged.

“Have you seen anything?” Solinski asked, leaning close to me. “Camphres? Tents?” I was consciously fighting the urge to glance in the direction of the trot line when Tom jumped in.

“You’ll be the last guy we tell,” he said, practically shouting.