Over and Under (22 page)

Tom caught up with me about a mile down the path. I hadn’t known where I was going, but Tom somehow had.

“I didn’t even see you leave,” he said.

I shrugged.

“That was a bad scene down there.”

“Yeah.”

“You want to …”

I glared at him, just waiting for him to ask if I wanted to go back to the fort.

“Not that,” he said. “You want to go see the sword? I hid it in the cave.”

Maybe because of my thoughts about Taffy, I had actually started to think of the cave as a kind of refuge. And no matter what was going on in my head, a centuries-old German sword was still pretty cool. I didn’t say anything to Tom one way or another, but as he took the lead and
started riding toward the cave, I followed. We stood up our bikes outside the cave and walked inside.

In the first room, in the middle of the floor, sat Taffy’s glowing lantern.

We walked right up to it. My spirits soared as I thought for a second that maybe she was back in town. “Taffy!” I shouted. I was so happy that I didn’t even notice the smell of Pall Malls and cheap whiskey until it was too late.

It grew dark again as he moved behind us, between us and the entrance.

“Which one of you is her boyfriend?” slurred Orpod Judd.

Tom and I both jumped backward.

“You’re her boyfriends, aren’t you? I recognize your bikes, you little shits.”

Tom and I backed up against the hole. We were planning, I thought, on grabbing a hidden flashlight and heading down to the chute, where we knew Taffy’s dad couldn’t follow. I was ready to go. It’s funny how fast my perspective had changed. A few days before I had vowed never to go through that crevice again. Now it was my escape route.

“Now, where is she?” he asked. “I’m sure she called her
boyfriend
, I’m sure her
boyfriend
knows where she is. Which one of you is going to tell me where I can find that bitch mother of hers?” His words came out a little breathlessly. “I knew you’d come back.”

Suddenly Tom moved backward, and I moved with him. He reached behind us to grab the flashlight behind the stalagmite so we could jump down through the hole and escape. Taffy’s dad gave a phlegmy laugh.

“You looking for this?” he said. He pointed the beam of the flashlight to Tom’s arm, rooting around in the hiding place behind the stalagmite. We both turned to look at him.

With a kind of animal quickness, as soon as we were facing him, Judd hurled the flashlight at us, end over end. Tom moved his head just in time, as it smashed into the stalagmite and broke into a million pieces. Tom continued to root around frantically behind the stalagmite, reaching as far back as he could.

“Oh, I found that, too,” Judd said, smirking. Tom stopped. “Yeah, I found your big sword, pretty cool. Were you planning on using that on me? I wish I would’ve left it there.”

Tom abandoned the stalagmite, and lunged for the lantern. But the cave was too small. Orpod Judd just took one step forward and waited.

“Come on, you little dick,” he said. “I’m gonna teach Taffy’s boyfriend a lesson.”

Instead of diving to grab the lantern, Tom took one long step forward and kicked it as hard as he could. It hit Judd right in the gut, breaking and spilling fuel on his shoes. I don’t think it hurt him, he was pretty well anesthetized, but he was definitely surprised, and his brain did have a hard time processing the new information in the dark. Tom backed up and I followed him through the second chamber and down into the blackness of the chute.

It was a more controlled descent this time, because of what Taffy had taught us, even though this time we were in a world of absolute darkness, the kind of total blackness contained only in caves. Taffy’s dad yelled at us from above.

“I’m gonna get you, boyfriend! I’ll be waiting right here. And when you see Taffy and that mother of hers, tell her I’m gonna get them, too!”

I wasn’t worried at all about Taffy’s dad coming down there. I was amazed he could fit through a normal doorway, much less the small hole we’d dug for ourselves. But I wondered how long we would have to sit in the darkness.

A small rock fell on my head.

“Ow,” I said.

“I got you, didn’t I, boyfriend!” Judd cackled and threw a handful of rocks after us.

I thought I saw a vague outline of Tom to my left, but when he spoke, he was actually on my right. “Move over here,” he said.

I scooted over, and just as I did a huge rock rolled through, and from the sound, it split in two as it landed and rolled away in pieces. We listened silently as rocks of various sizes tumbled through the chute and onto the floor.

“How long?” I whispered.

“He’ll wear out soon enough,” said Tom. “He doesn’t have any light now, either. And I get the feeling with all the crazy shit in his head, he’s not going to want to stay in the dark for long.”

Sure enough, the rocks gradually stopped falling down. We kept waiting, and I actually began to hallucinate fully formed shapes in the darkness. I saw the outlines of cars, bedroom furniture, and Halloween pumpkins. When I turned my head, they stayed right there. I heard Tom breathing next to me, and I thought if that stopped, the one real sensory input I had left, I would surely go crazy.

“Let’s try it,” Tom said finally.

We both stood, and felt along the wall until we found the handholds we had learned just once before. It actually felt good to be pressed up against the solid wall of rock, something so real and unmoving. I continued up, occasionally feeling Tom’s shoes brushing against my face.

Once we got our heads into the chute, we could see a little light. The chute was half filled with rocks and dirt, almost as if Orpod Judd had tried to fill it in after us, trapping us forever, and then gave up because it took too much effort. Tom looked around for a good long time before climbing out, making sure Judd wasn’t lurking in some corner. He reached behind the stalagmite.

“Goddamn it,” he said. “That asshole took my sword.”

When I got home, the Buick with Jasper plates was in the driveway. I pictured the owners driving back out through the gate with Dad in the backseat, an image I found somehow humiliating. I vividly imagined them driving slowly and silently through the protective cordon of Solinski’s men as the strikers watched them with pure hate in their eyes. I snuck in the back door of our house, just catching a look at the backs of their heads before sneaking up the stairs.

They were Ross and Worth Habig, heirs to the company, part of a large third generation of Habigs who divided up the ownership. My father told me once that he remembered Daddy Habig from way back when, “intimidating but fair,” he said, but it had been a generation since anyone with the name Habig had actually worked in the plant, or had done anything to help turn a tree into a
coffin. I learned, as I eavesdropped on the steps, that the brothers had insisted against my father’s recommendation on not only seeing the damage at the plant firsthand, but on driving right through the front gate and the picket line.

“I told you there’d be trouble,” my dad said. “We should have gone around back.”

“And what, Gus? Walk into the plant through a hole in the back wall?” There was silence before Ross Habig continued. “I appreciate your concerns, Gus, believe me I do, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to sneak into the factory that my granddaddy built, the factory that I own.”

“Well, we should have at least told the police to be prepared.”

“I don’t trust those yokels,” said Ross. My dad sighed in exasperation. The state police were complete strangers from the Seymour post. The Habigs saw anyone from south of Indianapolis as potentially complicit.

“I understand why you didn’t want to go around back,” said my dad, though I knew he’d been tactfully sneaking inside in just that way every morning. “I just didn’t want trouble. Now Knable is all smashed up, the police are involved …”

The other Habig spoke up. “Let them investigate. Knable threw the first punch. You can still use force to defend yourself in this state. At least for now you can.” I heard in his voice the same kind of prideful indignation that I heard from the strikers. Their voices dropped to a murmur, and from where I sat on the top of the stairs I could not for a time make out their words. Soon enough, though, emotions surged and I could hear them again.

“Come on, Ross,” I heard my father say. “This company’s been in your family a hundred years.”

“You know, I’m not the only owner,” said Ross Habig.
“We’re
not the only owners. We’ve got two sisters and another brother, each of whom owns just as much of this company as we do. Between us, we’ve got fourteen kids—they’re all owners, too, even the little ones. At our last stockholders’ meeting, it occurred to my siblings that they’re getting a three percent return on their stake in this plant. They can beat that by selling out and putting their money somewhere else. Anywhere else.”

“They want to sell the plant and what…” my father said. “Put their money in the stock market?” He made it sound like they planned on becoming drug dealers.

“They don’t feel any loyalty to this place,” said the other brother, the quiet one. “They don’t even live in Indiana. They just see a tiny profit that keeps getting tinier, every year. Some of them have wanted to cash out for years, but we’ve been able to fight that off—barely. When my father was alive he used to stand up at every stockholders’ meeting, give the revenue numbers, and practically dare anyone to bring up the idea of selling out. None of them ever did.” I’d seen portraits of their ancestors in the front office, each with a tiny brass light illuminating a frowning man in an old-fashioned black suit. It didn’t surprise me to hear that the children and grandchildren had been afraid to present these men with a plan to liquidate their life’s work.

Ross Habig continued. “Since my father died, they’ve really started pushing for it. This strike, and the money
we’re going to lose because of it, is just the excuse they need. There’s a meeting in Indy in September. If the strike is still going on, we’re going to have a massive loss on the books—our first full-year loss since the Depression. I’m not sure we’ll be able to hold them off.”

“My daddy used to tell me about how they’d time the strikes to coincide with deer season,” my dad said. I could hear the forced smile in his voice, another attempt to put everything in a less threatening perspective, just as he had with my mother the night our mailbox was beheaded. “We’ve had labor problems before.”

“They’ve never killed one of our plant managers before,” said Ross Habig.

That pretty much ended the conversation.

As I lay down in bed that night, I prayed I wouldn’t see Tom Kruer at my window. Or Orpod Judd, or the fugitives, the sad, bleeding ghost of Don Strange, or any of the other terrifying specters in my life. I prayed to Jesus Christ that Solinski or Sheriff Kohl would find the fugitives, which would relieve me of any responsibility I had to rat them out. Just to cover all the bases, I even tried to fake my way through a Catholic prayer, to the Blessed Virgin Mary, asking for those same things. I felt guilty about it, guilty for wanting to betray Tom, guilty for not telling my mom and dad what I knew, guilty about Don Strange’s unavenged murder. And when the tapping on the window came, I did pretend to be asleep for a little while, until the tapping came again, more urgently, and I finally went to the window.

“Come on,” Tom said when I finally slid it open. “We’re going to get my sword back.”

We approached the single-wide trailer from a backyard, if you could call it that, that had been stripped bare both by a complete lack of care and by the dozen or so dogs who slept, trampled, and shit on the premises. The dogs who weren’t sound asleep cowered from us as we approached, as if accustomed to frequent, random beatings. What few touches of hominess there were made it that much more depressing, as they reminded me of how hard it must have been for Taffy to try and live her life there. A small clay flowerpot with a smiley face finger-painted upon it, cracked in two by the back door. A sandbox devoid of sand was at the end of the driveway, filled with stagnant water and floating beer cans. A rope swung from a tree limb, its swing nowhere in sight.

Blue light from a television flickered through the small window by the back door. Tom approached, peaked in, and waved me over.

Through the smeared glass, we saw an unconscious Orpod Judd sprawled across a decaying recliner on which the stains had become indistinguishable from the faded pattern of the upholstery. He was wearing only his underwear, over which his sizable belly rolled. A beer bottle was in his hand, and two were on the floor.
Billy Jack
was wrapping up on the WDRB late movie as he drunkenly dozed.

Close behind him were three nearly empty bookshelves. On the lowest was a collection of commemorative Derby glasses. On the second shelf was a small, cheap-looking
revolver and an ashtray. On the top shelf, reflecting the light of the TV, was Tom’s sword.

Tom tugged at the back door. I doubted it was locked, but like everything else at the trailer the door was in such poor repair that it wouldn’t operate properly. He tugged harder but gave up for fear he would make a noise and wake up Judd. We ran around the side.

At the very end of these trailers, I knew, was the “master bedroom,” which was perhaps a slightly presumptuous term for it. The bedroom did have its own door, and even a window, which Tom found was cracked open against the heat. He pushed it open more, and although it squeaked, it was too far from the living room, the TV was too loud, and Orpod Judd was too drunk to be awoken. Tom pulled himself in, and I followed.

The bedroom stank of cigarettes and body odor. The mattress was bare and the lone, stained pillow had no case. Near the bed, several cigarettes had been rubbed out directly on the worn carpet. I wondered how much of the squalor had occurred during the short time Orpod Judd had lived there alone, and how much was a result of the crazed night he broke Taffy’s arm. Tom began slinking out, toward the living room.

The floor of the mobile home, like others I had been in, creaked in a way that reminded me of a boat at sea. The hallway that divided the master bedroom from the rest of the trailer was narrow; Tom and I had to skulk single file into the living room as the song “One Tin Soldier” marked the end of the movie.