Over and Under (21 page)

“What?” His smirk faded.

“It’s true,” said Kruer, who had returned to his seat on the tree stump.

“Well, why didn’t you tell me before? I was about to eat the motherfucker!” In his anger, Sanders actually lunged for the .38, snatching it off the stump. We all were startled.
It was not the action of someone who had grown up around guns, someone who was familiar with the damage they could cause and the very narrow set of problems they were designed to solve. I think it was the disbelief in all our stares, including Kruer’s, which caused Sanders to drop the gun to his side, although in his jitteriness he scared me still, as he unconsciously tapped the cocked gun against his thigh and muttered nonsensically into the darkness.

Kruer ignored him and gently put the turtle on its feet. It marched calmly into the darkness.

Tom and I also made our escape.

Exhilaration flooded my system, as it always did in the aftermath of one of our close scrapes.

“Can you believe that?” Tom said as we ran. “Can you believe we really found them?”

“So what do we do now?” I asked.

Tom pretended not to hear me, refusing to allow me to interfere with his jubilation.

The next morning, I rode my bike down Cabin Hill to the picket line. Tom eagerly waved me over as I approached. Two of the strikers were causing a ruckus by heatedly arguing over the communal radio, a dusty thing liberated from someone’s workstation in the factory. It now sat between them, on an overturned steel drum on the shoulder of Highway 60. When the strike began, the spirit of solidarity was so strong on the picket line that no one could have imagined a fistfight between two strikers. Now it appeared that fully half the crowd was cheering for one.

On one side of the radio was Johnny Steinert, a popular, recent graduate of the high school. He’d been a four-year starter on the basketball team, where his height made up for skinny limbs that seemed to be almost devoid of muscle. Upon graduation, Johnny had taken over a spot in the paint room. Johnny’s mom, we all knew, had died of cancer when he was a baby, and no one ever mentioned Johnny without saying what a good job Johnny’s dad had done in raising him, and what a good boy Johnny had turned out to be. He wore a CAT hat and a faded IU T-shirt commemorating Coach Knight’s perfect season three years before. His curly blond hair stuck out wildly
from around the cap, making him look like a slightly roughed-up Roger Daltrey. Johnny was holding his hands over the radio, theatrically refusing to allow anyone to change the station. “My Sharona” by the Knack was the song causing all the trouble.

Johnny’s adversary was Russ Knable, who glared at Johnny with hands on hips and close, dark eyes set deep in a fleshy face. Russ’s blue work shirt stretched over the kind of beer belly that, while big, looked as hard as sculpted marble. He and Orpod Judd competed for the title of meanest drunk in Borden. Russ did, however, seem to represent the majority as he demanded that the radio be returned to the bland voice of Milton Metz prattling endlessly on WHAS 840 AM about the heat and the upcoming state fair. I suppose if these men had wanted to listen to music, they would have preferred something from Nashville. To be honest, though, they were sober people who even in good times rarely allowed themselves something as frivolous as music, even if it was sung by somebody respectable, like Porter Wagoner or George Jones. They listened to music at church. The rest of the week they preferred weather and news.

“Hey,” I said, riding up next to Tom as the volume of the argument began to overtake the music.

“Hey,” he said back. We were right at the edge of the strikers, and I could tell Tom was evaluating how much he could say without pulling back away from the crowd. He was almost jittery he wanted to talk about it so badly. “Let’s go back there right now,” he finally said to me with a raised eyebrow.

“Shit no,” I replied. I didn’t even want to think about it.
I’d been up all night trying to decide whether to tell my parents about the encounter, but it seemed like too much to reveal all at once:
Tom and I sneak out of the house periodically in the middle of the night. We witnessed the plant explosion. We’ve located the men who killed Don Strange.
Try as I might, I just couldn’t figure out how I would begin the conversation. I knew it would be difficult to just forget everything I knew about Mack Sanders and Guthrie Kruer, maybe the most difficult thing I had ever done. But I had decided to give it a shot.

“Why not? Come on!” said Tom.

I shook my head again. I can’t say I was surprised that Tom wanted to go back to the fort, but his urgency hit me like a punch in the stomach. I felt like I wasn’t living up to the responsibility of being Tom Kruer’s best friend. As bad as that felt, it wasn’t going to get me back to the fort. From the crucified rabbit to the smoky breath of Mack Sanders, there was absolutely nothing there I wanted to experience again.

“We don’t even have to talk to them,” said Tom. “Let’s just go spy on them, check ’em out, see what they’re doing.”

“I ain’t going back,” I said quietly.

“Come on!”

“No way.”

Out of the corner of my eye, as I tried to think of a way to make Tom drop the subject, I saw thugs moving in formation inside the fence. The entire force was coming out of the plant in kind of a trot, jogging deliberately toward the main gate. There was a rustle of lawn chairs as the picketers turned their attention from the fight over the
radio to their approach. For the moment, rock ’n’ roll won the day, as the Knack continued belting out their hit from tinny speakers. The thugs assembled in two rows, one on each side of the driveway just inside the gate.

“We can go tonight,” whispered Tom. “After dark. How about it?”

I had no intention of actually saying a word about Sanders and Kruer to anybody, but I felt an almost physical need to make Tom shut up about them. “Maybe we should tell someone where they are,” I said. “Maybe I should tell my dad. Or the sheriff.”

Tom’s face fell in an expression of complete betrayal. I wasn’t sure if it was because Guthrie Kruer shared his last name, or because they all shared a union, or because Sanders and Kruer were the most remarkable discovery yet that we’d made in the woods: telling anyone about them would be like standing up in front of our class and talking about the secret passage we’d crawled through to Squire Boone Caverns. Tom wanted to explore our new discovery in secret, map its every corner. I wanted to forget about it and never go back.

“I won’t tell anyone,” I recanted quickly. “I promise. But I’m not going back.” Tom was shaking his head, still speechless from my threat to snitch.

We heard shouted orders inside the fence in Solinski’s commanding, raspy voice. The thugs came to attention. Solinski then strode between the two columns to the gate and opened it, reminding me again that he arrogantly kept the thing unlocked. Solinski didn’t look at the strikers as he walked up. They had to pay attention to him, he seemed to be saying, not the other way around. Most of
the strikers were now on their feet to get a better look at whatever was going down. The state troopers in their cruiser, I noticed, on the other side of Highway 60, were also craning their necks for a better view. Whatever Solinksi was up to, they weren’t in on it.

“Clear the driveway!” Solinski suddenly shouted in our direction, startling us all. The strikers had gotten into the habit of drifting from the shoulder of Highway 60—public property—and onto the driveway—BCC private property—during the day, after the daily delivery of scabs in their armored Shively Security bus. The strikers always grudgingly moved back again to the shoulder before the end of the shift so that the bus could leave amid a course of halfhearted jeers. It seemed Solinski was expecting midday visitors.

At first, some of the strikers actually stepped obediently aside in response to Solinski’s command. They were a group of men raised to respect authority and follow orders. Then they remembered who was giving the order, and quickly got back into character.

“Screw that,” mumbled Russ Knable. His adrenaline was already jacked up from the battle with Johnny, and he happily took the lead in the confrontation with Solinski. He strolled with exaggerated ease to the center of the driveway, and crossed his short, muscular arms against his chest. A couple of his friends moved reluctantly behind him in support.

“Step aside,” said Solinski. “You’re on company property.”

Russ looked around at his comrades with an eyebrow raised before turning back to face Solinski. “Fuck you,
Sarge,” he said. A ripple of nervous laughter went through the picketers.

“Move or I’ll move you.”

“Goddamn that would make me happy,” said Russ, and you could tell he meant it. He spread his feet slightly and clenched his fists.

Solinski stood patiently for a few seconds. He seemed to be waiting for Knable to make the first move, certain that he would. Sure enough, Russ suddenly stepped forward, fists up, eyes wide, more alert than I’d ever seen him, every inch the savvy bar fighter as he took small steps to move in close, surprisingly deft for his size. Knable feinted to his left, and Solinski responded, turning just a tiny bit. Russ ducked his head and went inside, as he had to because of Solinski’s much larger reach, and punched Solinski hard in the ribs. Knable turned his whole body as he struck, efficiently putting his considerable weight behind the punch. Solinski grunted in pain.

But Solinski turned, too, anticipating the punch, stepping back with it, neutralizing some of its power, although I thought it would have leveled most men. Even as he moved backward Solinski was pulling a short black billy club from a loop on his belt. When Knable stepped forward to deliver the next punch, Solinski raised the club in the air, and smashed it down across his face.

Even after the bloodshed and death that would end that summer, it remained the single most violent act I ever witnessed. It sounded like a wooden bat being dropped on a concrete driveway. In movies, people are always hit directly on the top of the head, a blow that delivers them into unconsciousness as neatly as a dose of anesthetic. This was
much less hygienic. Solinski’s club crossed Knable’s face diagonally. He immediately buckled in pain, dark blood and snot pouring from his mouth and nose in a thick stream onto the asphalt, like hot oil from an engine after the plug has been pulled. A large tooth poked up from the center of the expanding puddle of fluids. His right eye immediately swelled shut and turned purple. He kept his feet for a second before his knees quivered and he crumpled to the ground, his two hands cupped in front of his face as if he thought he could retain anything he caught. The two state troopers were now frantically running across the highway, their own clubs drawn, dodging the cars that were slowing down to take a look. Through the waves of heat that were rolling off the asphalt, it looked like they were swimming toward us.

Club still in hand, Solinski eyed the two strikers who had joined Knable in the driveway. They immediately abandoned the fight to pull their badly hurt friend onto the shoulder. The state troopers arrived, and the stunned silence of the crowd changed instantly to vocal outrage.

“Did you see that?” they shouted, pointing frantically at Solinski. “Did you see that?” Johnny Steinert, one of the few calm people in the crowd, was on the shoulder, holding Knable’s head with one hand and a wadded up T-shirt over his nose with the other. Dark blood was still pouring from his face into the grass. I fought a strange urge to explain to Solinski what he’d done, what a horrible mistake he’d made.

Solinski was inching backward toward the gate, facing the crowd warily, while the state troopers tried unsuccessfully to calm everybody down. Behind Solinski, the
two rows of thugs stood stone-faced. Someone heaved a glass Coke bottle at Solinski; he jabbed it out of the air with his club, smashing it to the ground. I saw two men sprinting to the pay phone at Miller’s, whether to call in reinforcements or an ambulance I didn’t know. Because of the military discipline on their side of the fence, and the accelerating chaos on ours, the cops found themselves naturally aligned against the strikers. The two overmatched troopers tried to back the crowd away from the driveway, along roughly the same boundaries that Solinski had tried to enforce. As they pushed back on the surging crowd, one of the troopers talked into a radio, and I saw in his eyes real fear that the situation was cartwheeling out of control. I felt the same fear. I began eyeing routes through and around the crowd, should an escape become necessary. The noise from the crowd rose to a menacing high buzz, but Solinski stood his ground. A full pint of Early Times zipped by his head. He deftly turned to dodge it. It crashed behind him at the feet of the other thugs, and the smell of cheap whiskey floated through the air.

Suddenly, a car turned into the driveway. It was a shiny brown Buick, with two somber old men in the front seat, their eyes looking straight ahead. One of the whitewalled front tires crunched over Knable’s tooth and the puddle of his blood. The car drove slowly through the two rows of Solinski’s thugs, and he closed the gate behind them. He marched his troops back into the factory without another look in our direction.

“Who is that?” I said to no one in particular.

“The owners, I believe,” one of the strikers said bitterly. “Looked like Dubois County plates. They used to
come here about once a year, stand up on a workbench, tell us what a great job we’re doing.” Russ Knable recovered enough to begin blubbering in pain through his smashed, swollen lips.

The Buick, now safely inside the guarded, gated confines of plant property, cruised slowly across the deserted parking lot, the bloody front tire leaving a dark, glossy tread mark with each rotation. Standing in the middle of the lot to greet the visitors, holding a clipboard and wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt, was my father.

Without saying a word to Tom or anyone else, I turned and rode my bike as fast as I could, terrified that someone on the picket line might discover who I really was, outside the gates, beyond Solinski’s protection.