Over and Under (27 page)

“Did you have a good time with the kids upstairs?” my mom asked in the car. “You seem out of sorts.”

“It was okay. Didn’t those women even say thank you?” I asked quickly, wanting to change the subject and knowing that Mom was a stickler for common courtesies.

“They’ve got plenty of other things to worry about,” she said. “I go in there now and again so they can get a decent meal without having to say please or thank you to anybody.”

“How did Taffy get here?”

“The sheriff called me the night it happened. I went and picked them up at the Kohls’ house, drove them to the hospital, then here.”

“What was the car ride like?”

My mom took her eyes off the road briefly to look at me. “What do you think it was like?”

“Were you mad?” I asked.

“I was very, very sad.”

“How did the sheriff even know about this place?”

“I told him about it,” she said. “Before this shelter came along, there was nowhere for these poor people to go. Sheriff Kohl, he could put the men in jail for a night, maybe a weekend, but they’d always get out eventually.”

“That is sad.”

“Sheriff Kohl had to go see the same poor women, the same scared kids, over and over again. Sometimes every drunken weekend.”

“Why don’t they just leave?”

“These women don’t have anywhere else to go,” said my mother. “They truly don’t. Anybody that took them in would be risking their own family’s safety.”

“So Sheriff Kohl asked for your help?” I asked.

“He came up to me three years ago and told me he wanted to do something to help these women, and asked me if I had any ideas. He was willing to try anything.”

“Why did he ask you?”

“He’d seen the ERA signs, everyone in town knows about my politics. So I guess he thought, who else am I going to ask? And at first, I didn’t have any help to offer. But I asked around, and I found a group of people who knew about this shelter. They agreed to let me bring women and kids from Borden here.”

“I’ll bet Sheriff Kohl was glad to hear about this place.”

“Overjoyed. He even kicks in part of the jail’s food
budget when we’ve got somebody here, to help make ends meet.”

“That’s cool,” I said.

“He’s a good man,” my mom said. “He’s not doing it for political reasons—no one in Borden knows about it. The only vote he gets out of this deal is mine.”

“Has Sheriff Kohl ever been out here to see what it’s like?”

“He has no idea where it is. No one in Borden does. Except me,” she said. “And now you.”

I thought about the kiss and fought the urge to rub my cheek. “Now that I know about this place, can I come back? To help?”

A slight smile crossed her lips. “We’ll see.”

When I got in Mom’s car that morning, I thought I knew what the details of my fourteenth summer’s final, dramatic chapter would be: rescued from a final rendezvous with Sanders, done with the fugitives forever, I would finally get to meet the cool, rambunctious, extended family I was entitled to. Turns out I was wrong on all counts.

I guess it was silly to think that getting grounded would keep Tom in his room all night. It’s not as if in normal times we had parental permission to climb out our windows in the middle of the night and run off into the woods. I thought that we were done with Sanders and Kruer because I badly wanted to think that, and I still believed it when I lay down to go to sleep that night. The tapping on the window surprised me when it came.

I slid the window open. “What are you doing?”

Tom looked surprised by the question. “Let’s go.”

“I thought you were grounded.” I heard the silliness of it myself.

“Come on, let’s go,” he said, impatient.

“To take them the buckshot?”

“To help Guthrie Kruer.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t go back,” I said. “They killed Don Strange.” Tom noticed that I was echoing the words of Solinski, and it pissed him off.

“Are you coming or not?” he asked after a long pause.

“No,” I said finally. “I’m all done with it.” I could tell it didn’t completely surprise him. That hurt me more than anything.

“But you’ll keep it all a secret, right?” he asked. “Everything?”

I thought it over. “I’ll keep it a secret,” I said. “On one condition.”

“What’s that?” He was fuming now.

“I don’t want to know any more about it. Leave me completely out of it from now on.”

Now it was Tom’s turn to look hurt. “Okay,” he said. “It’s a deal. You keep this a secret, and you won’t hear another word.” He actually stuck out his hand and we shook on it, a formality we had never before thought necessary in our commitments to each other. As he was leaving he turned around. “You should have just pretended to be asleep if you didn’t want to come out.”

He climbed silently off my porch. The night was moonless and dark, but I could still see him as he quickly crossed our yard, until he disappeared into the woods like a puff of smoke.

For hours, I lay there with my window open and thought it all over. I worried about my father’s warning, about losing a friend because of the strike. Taffy was in a shelter, and I might not ever see her again. I worried about Tom, alone in the woods with two killers. I worried about the plant moving to Mexico and how Tom would ever pay his dad back for all those groceries. I don’t know how much time passed. With no moon in the sky or shadows on my walls it was impossible to judge. I just know it was very late when I first heard the dull pop of distant gunshots.

I jumped out of my bed, leapt into my jeans and sneakers, flew through the window and off the porch, and
started running down the trace. With my arms extended for balance as I crossed the old fallen tree across the gap, I hardly slowed down. I heard random shots all the way, louder as I ran, but as I got deeper into the woods, I heard also crazed screaming between shots. I ran up to the edge of the fort.

“Where are you, Guthrie!” Sanders screamed into the empty fort. He kicked the tent into a heap. I was surprised and confused. And stupid, I suppose. Without really thinking about it, I just climbed down into the fort. In a way, I felt a kind of kinship with Sanders. Both of us just wanted to know what the hell was going on.

“What the hell?” he said as he saw me coming down the wall. He looked absolutely skeletal, his crazed eyes bulging out of his head.

“It’s me,” I said.

He smiled in a way that said:
now I’ve got this all figured out.
I walked right into the middle of the fort, right to Sanders. The neat camp was wrecked, as if without Guthrie present the forces of chaos had immediately taken over. I could see no sign of Tom—or Guthrie. Mack had the camouflaged turkey gun in hand. I could smell gunpowder thick in the air; the discharge gases had pooled inside the fort on the windless night.

“It is you,” he said. “I’ll be damned.” He had calmed suddenly, like I’d seen once before, his eyes half closed and his arms hanging loosely as he muttered.

“Where’s Tom?” I asked. Mack smiled again. Then he swung the gun like a baseball bat, hitting me squarely in the temple.

I came to, but it was so dark, and I was so groggy, I couldn’t even tell what direction I was facing. My hands were tied painfully tight behind my back. I rolled over, putting my face right into something hairy and foul. I lifted my head high enough to see I had rolled right onto the crusty pelt of the poached rabbit we’d seen on that first night, now stiff with age and half buried in leaves. I rolled the other direction, and found myself looking up directly into the deranged face of Mack Sanders.

“Wake up, sleepyhead,” he said. “I want to finish this before anyone notices you’re gone.”

I noticed for the first time the dark, jagged scar across the palm of his hand, where he had grabbed the chain in panic the day his nut was ripped off. “Finish what?” I mumbled.

Sanders ignored me. “You never did answer me the other night. What’s your daddy’s name?”

“What?” I asked. Panic swept the cobwebs from my head. Sanders pulled a glowing stick from the fire that still burned near where the tent had stood.

“You heard me. What’s your daddy’s name?”

“George Kruer,” I sputtered.

He scratched his chin theatrically, as if thinking it over. “Bullshit,” he said, and jammed the sharp, glowing end of the stick into my neck. Everything went white as I screamed in pain. The sound bounced right back at us from the curved walls of the fort, and I heard the scream, even in my pain, like it belonged to someone else. When I stopped, he was leaning over me, his face just inches away. “The other little asshole is Guthrie’s cousin. Now, tell me again, what’s your daddy’s name?” he whispered.

“Gus Gray,” I whimpered.

He exploded. “
I knew it!”

“No,” I said. “It’s not what you think…”

“I knew we never should have trusted you little shits!”

“No…”

“Shut up!”
he screamed. He was pacing around me, pulling fingers through his dirty hair.

“Did you know that I’m the one that wrote on your garage door?” he said after calming himself down slightly. He laughed loudly. “Snuck up there when I knew everybody would be at the funeral. What a joke! Your daddy was my manager! And you were right here, sittin’ on a log right next to me.”

“I didn’t…”

“Next question,” he snapped. “What did you guys do with Guthrie? Is he sittin’ in the sheriff’s office right now, drinkin’ coffee and rattin’ me out?”

I must have looked genuinely confused enough to buy myself a few seconds. “He’s gone?”

“That’s right, shithead, like you didn’t know. We were waiting here to take you little assholes hostage. Guthrie was being such a big pussy about the whole thing, I gave in when he said he wanted to wait for a moonless night, which sounded like typical hillbilly bullshit to me. Then he up and disappears while we’re waiting for you. Went to take a piss and never came back.”

“Hostage?”

“You little assholes were going to be our insurance policy. You think we really needed buckshot?”

I nodded.

“Guthrie said that you guys might be smart enough to
avoid coming back here. I think he hoped that was the case. I guess he was half right.”

Sanders threw the stick back into the fire in disgust. He had his back to me, and was uncharacteristically quiet. I watched him walk away from the fire, out of my view. I struggled against the twine around my wrists, but it was too tight. When Sanders came back into the dim orange light, he was carrying the turkey gun again, chambering a shell. A little bit of my blood and hair were stuck to the barrel.

“I don’t know anything!” I screamed. “I don’t know where they are!”

“How many people have you told about our spot here?” he asked.

“No one!” I said. “I promised I wouldn’t!”

“The hell you wouldn’t!” he shouted.

“Take me hostage! I can get you out of here.”

His eyes showed a glimmer of hope, but he heard something, either in his own broken mind or in the still air, that made him abandon any hope of escape.

“Guthrie’s probably tellin’ ’em all now it was all my idea. They’re on their way now. I think I can hear ’em!”

He was ranting, but when he paused, I actually thought I heard them, too, the sound of men tromping through the woods in a hurry, without trying to be quiet. I knew they were too far away to help me but I tried anyway.

“Help!”
I screamed.

“It’s too late for both of us, little man.”

I imagined Solinski at the front of the group hearing my scream, running my way. I just didn’t have time. I
tried to roll away from Mack, but bound up as I was, he just stepped over me and I rolled right into his booted foot. He laughed at my hopelessness as he straddled me. He pointed the turkey gun at my face, and smiled. I saw his finger strain against the trigger, and I saw the surprise in his eyes when it didn’t move. He took his eyes off me for just a second and lifted the gun to locate the thumb safety.

That’s when I sat straight up and rammed my head as hard as I could into his one nut.

Sanders fell over clutching his crotch and I struggled to my feet, my hands still tied tight behind me. I ran to the far edge of the fort, where I had on that first night climbed the stone with toeholds that I thought might have saved me. As Sanders groaned in pain and rose to his feet, I ran flat out at the wall as if sheer adrenaline, speed, and desire could propel me up and over, or as if I could jump to the stars like I did in my dream. I actually got a toehold with my first foot, and then a little higher with my second. For one brief second, my head rose above the level of the wall. Flashlights bobbed in the distance, moving fast, but much too far away. My momentum spent, unable to climb farther with my hands tied, I fell straight back down into the fort, on my back with a thud, right at Sanders’s feet.

“Nice try, my man. Really. Nice try.” He chambered a shell in the turkey gun, fingering the safety, ready to shoot this time. I was looking right into the barrel.

“Don’t do it,” I said.

He actually thought it over for a moment. “What have I got to lose?” he asked. He squinted and prepared to shoot.