Over and Under (18 page)

Solinski laughed a bit, but then turned serious. “Let me tell you two something,” he said, clearly addressing his comments to Tom more than me. “They aren’t heroes. Those are bad men. They killed a guy—one of your own. If you do see them, I don’t care if you tell me. I don’t even care if you tell the cops. But tell someone. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. Tom glowered and didn’t say anything.

Solinski resumed his inspection of my gun. He found the latch for the buttstock storage compartment and popped it open.

“This is great,” he said. “A .22 and a .410. You guys must be the envy of the neighborhood.” The word “neighborhood” marked Solinski as an outsider. Borden was too small
to have neighborhoods. I appreciated the compliment nonetheless.

I shrugged my shoulders with false modesty. “It’s a good smallbore,” I said. “Rabbit and squirrel.”

“Screw that,” said Solinski. “A .22 is the most deadly caliber, did you know that?”

I shook my head.

“Bigger bullets, they have enough energy and momentum to go right through the human body. If they don’t hit anything important, they’ll just pass right through, leave a big hole but pretty much no other damage.”

“Huh,” I said. Solinski sounded like he knew what he was talking about.

“A .22, though, once it penetrates, it won’t have enough energy to come out the other side. It’ll just rattle around inside the body, pretty much turning everything inside to soup.”

Solinski saw the metal cap of the flare round and pulled it out with two big fingers.

“A flare?” he asked, smiling.

I grinned and nodded.

“I didn’t even know they made those for .410. That’s really cool.”

I nodded again—I thought so, too. “It’s small,” I said.

“Trust me,” said Solinski, “if you shoot that thing at night, people will see it. I’ve seen flares save lives, plenty of times, getting guys out of really tough spots.”

“Where was that?” I asked. Tom was pacing around the trailhead, annoyed with me for extending the conversation, but I was dying to hear where Solinski had seen flares save lives. I was pretty sure I knew the answer, but
I wanted to hear him say it. In my little hometown in 1979, there were plenty of young men walking around with tattoos like Solinski’s, but none of them ever wanted to tell me anything about it.

“Vietnam,” he said, confirming my theory. “Sometimes they’d send us into the bush to rescue downed pilots. If we got close, or if things got too hot, the pilots would shoot flares from their .45s so we could find ’em in a hurry. They’d shoot those things up, and everybody would go running toward it. On both sides.” I followed his eyes upward, half expecting his memory to conjure up a burst of light in the sky. “What color is it?” He asked suddenly, like he wanted to change the subject.

It took me just a moment to understand what he was asking. “Red,” I answered.

“Well, if I ever see a red flare out here, I’ll come running for you.”

I was embarrassed at how comforting I found that. I nodded my head quickly.

“We need to go,” said Tom impatiently.

Solinski handed my gun back to me. “Here you go. Those things are cool. You be careful with them.”

“Yessir,” I said.

“We need to go,” Tom said again. I started walking to him at the head of the path.

“Do you guys really know how to shoot those things?” asked Solinski. There was no mistaking the note of playful taunting in his voice. I looked at Tom. After the briefest of pauses, Tom walked to the water’s edge, breaking down and loading both chambers of his gun as he did. I did the same. We stood on each side of Solinski.

I wanted to impress Solinski with my marksmanship. I hurriedly scanned Silver Creek and the opposite bank for a target that would be sufficiently showy.

I was in luck. In the far side of the pool, drifting with the swift current, a small snapping turtle passed by. Just its head stuck out of the water, a target roughly the size and shape of my thumb. It moved fast in the water, from left to right.

I pulled the selector up, from the safe position to the .22. I raised the gun to my shoulder, got the picture in the small circle of the rifle sight, and led the turtle, all in one motion. I squeezed the trigger and blew the turtle’s head clean off. It exploded into a puff of green and red mist that lingered over the surface of the water.

“Jesus Christ,” said Solinski, sucking in his breath in surprise. My gunshot echoed across the valley.

The crack of my rifle flushed out three bats from whatever small cave they were sleeping in across the creek. They came flying directly at us, panicked enough by the noise to venture out into broad daylight.

Tom raised his gun. Bats, we had long since determined, were the hardest of all God’s creatures to shoot. Unlike a duck or a goose, or my turtle, they didn’t travel in cooperative straight lines. Bats, especially bats crazed by fear, flew in unpredictable swooping zigzags.

Tom pulled the trigger on his gun, unleashing a tight cone of birdshot into the sky. There was a small explosion of black dust as lead pellets shredded one of the bat’s wings. It fell straight down and landed on the surface of the water with a satisfying slap, and began floating quickly downstream. Without taking the gun off his shoulder, Tom
pulled the selector up to the .22 position, and changed his stance infinitesimally to accommodate the different shot. To fire the shotgun, he’d held it loosely against his body, allowing it to swing with the moving target. To shoot the rifle, he turned rigid, his entire frame a stable supporting tower for his weapon. He shot the dead bat out of the water with a perfectly aimed .22 bullet. Its carcass cartwheeled out of the water and landed with a splat on the mud of the far bank. Tom and I lowered our smoking rifles and looked at Solinski.

“Goddamn,” he said, as the three rapid shots rang in our ears. There was real wonder in his voice. “You boys can shoot.”

Tom allowed himself a smile at the praise, even coming as it did from the head thug.

“We need to go,” Tom said again.

“Why were you such a jerk?” I asked as we walked.

Tom shrugged. “I don’t like him. I don’t like any of them.”

“Why?” I asked.

Tom was starting to scowl, the way he always did when I asked my third or fourth question about the same thing. “Those guys are trying to bust the union,” Tom said.

“What’s that mean?”

“My dad just wants to do his job, and they won’t let him.”

“I just don’t know why you had to be such a dick.”

“Did you hear what I just said?” he said. “They’re fucking with my dad’s job!”

“But your dad went out on strike, right? They didn’t fire him.” Tom didn’t respond. “And, come to think of it, isn’t Solinski just doing his job?”

Tom stopped walking. He seemed a little apologetic. “It’s confusing,” he said.

“It really is.”

“I don’t understand everything about why they went on strike, or why the company won’t just give them what they want. Dad’s tried to explain it to me a million times, and there’s a lot of it I just don’t get.”

“Same here.” I was glad to hear that he shared some of my confusion.

“But I do understand one thing,” said Tom.

I waited. “What’s that?”

“I know what side I’m on.”

We walked thoughtfully, as I digested this key difference between us.

As we neared the edge of our property, five cleared acres unprotected by the thick canopy of leaves, the light became brighter and the air became incrementally warmer and more humid. The gray gravel band of Cabin Hill Road was visible through the trees.

“You want to eat supper at my house?” asked Tom as we walked.

“Sure,” I said. I loved the chaos of family meals at Tom’s. He was the oldest of six uncontrollably energetic kids, all of whom, boy and girl, looked exactly alike except for height. The last time I’d been there for dinner, after we’d eaten, Tom yelled “Hop on Pop!” and the entire mob of them jumped on his dad at once, knocking him out of his
chair. They tried to keep him pinned to the ground as he hurled shrieking, laughing kids across the room, while Tom’s mother ordered them all to stop and hit whatever heads came in range with a wooden serving spoon. It was somewhat of a contrast to our postdinner game of Authors.

“We only have Kool-Aid to drink right now,” said Tom as we walked. “Kool-Aid and water. The milk is just for breakfast and for the baby.”

“Okay…” I said. It seemed like a strange thing to point out, but I could tell Tom attached importance to it.

“Saving money,” he continued. “Mom says no Coke until the strike’s over.”

“That’s a good idea.” I liked Kool-Aid, anyway. “I’ll tell my mom she should do that, too.”

Tom laughed and stopped walking. It was one of those times he was absolutely mystified by how dense I could be. “You don’t need to save money,” he said. “Your dad is still getting paid. He’s been getting paid this whole time.”

Once again, Tom’s knowledge of the strike left me in the dark. “Even when the plant was completely shut down?” I asked.

“Because he’s management,” Tom explained patiently.

“Well, I guess it’s sort of fair. My dad didn’t want the strike.”

“Neither did my dad. He voted against it. Thought they could work everything out with the plant open. But he still won’t get any money until they go back to work.”

“Your dad was against the strike? But that night we heard him talking—”

“I know,” said Tom, interrupting me.

“Was it because one of the bombers is a Kruer? Is that why your dad got in a fight with Ray down there?”

Tom shrugged.

“Or was it because they’re all in the union together?”

“Maybe,” said Tom. “It’s confusing.” I knew this time he meant that it was confusing only to me.

I was mulling it all over when we heard a branch crack behind us. We stopped moving and looked at each other silently. There was a large rustle off the path, a movement of the leaves and litter of the forest floor out of harmony with the gentler rhythms caused by the small breeze all around us. Another stick broke, farther off—there was acceleration in the movement, acceleration in a direction directly away from us. And it wasn’t a deer. Even the biggest bucks were more graceful than that. I’d seen panicked record-setters sprint right by my face without breaking a twig.

“Let’s go,” whispered Tom, pivoting toward the noise.

“Do you think it’s Solinski?”

“It could be. But he’d be crazy to sneak up on us like that after seeing how we can shoot.”

“Sanders and Kruer?”

I could tell he was trying not to get his hopes up. “Could be Judd. Could be a lot of things. Let’s go find out.”

I hesitated. “We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Whoever it was, he was following us. Or maybe we just crossed his path and scared him. But either way, he knows we’re here now. We need to be the ones sneaking up to do this right. Plus …”

“What?”

I hated to be the one to say it. “It’s suppertime. We have to get home.”

“Goddamn it.” Tom sighed in frustration, and ran his fingers through his hair, reluctant to give up the hunt so easily. “You’re right,” he said finally. “Okay. Let’s get home, eat supper. We’ll go find ’em tonight.”

I verified both chambers of my gun were empty, put it on safe, and carefully laid it on the gun rack in my room below my encyclopedias. My father had been known to spot-check the gun to make sure that it was both clean and safe, especially when he could smell the tang of a recently fired weapon wafting from my room. Before heading back downstairs, I pulled down the red “F” volume of my encyclopedia and scanned the article about fish. Carp, I learned, can live up to forty years. That lonely hog in Silver Creek may be down there still. I ran downstairs.

“Can I eat supper at Tom’s?” I asked my mom.

She looked me over. “Put a decent shirt on,” she ordered.

I paraded by my mom in three shirts of gradually increasing quality until she finally granted her approval.

“Have a good time,” she said. “Don’t be a pig.” Tom was waiting outside. By the time we got to his house, my stomach was growling from hunger.

Tom lived in a big log cabin at the very end of the graded portion of Cabin Hill Road. The road turned into an old logging road at that point, really just two ruts through the forest, before reconnecting with the Buffalo
Trace about two miles into the woods. While our house sat in the middle of about five cleared, neatly mown acres, Tom’s log house was in the middle of the trees, looking almost as if it had sprung from the soil itself. The Kruers saw spectacular amounts of wildlife from their front porch, owing to the fact that one time, long ago, their hilltop had been an orchard. Gnarled, feral apple trees, along with abundant wild persimmons, carpeted the forest floor with fruit irresistible to deer, fox, and raccoons. An excitable family of flying squirrels lived in their rafters, and Tom’s dad would sometimes pound on the wall with his fist to initiate an aerobatic display. Tom’s father had built most of their home with his own hands, and much of the lumber came from trees he had cleared on the property. We stepped up to the porch, passing by what looked like a half-buried bathtub on end, home to a blue-and-white plaster statue of the Virgin Mary. A Wiffle ball was jammed between Mary’s head and the edge of the tub.

The house had three tiny bedrooms upstairs: one for Tom’s parents, one for the two girls, and one for the four boys, who slept in two sets of bunk beds. The land around the house had been in Tom’s family forever. Above their fireplace, Tom’s dad had constructed a mantel out of a thick timber he had salvaged from the crumbling remains of his great-grandfather’s cabin on the edge of the property. On one of the timbers
GW KRUER
had been carved deeply into the wood by his namesake a century before.

The second I walked in I could smell dinner—a giant crock of beans and hamhocks that had simmered all day. Tom’s mother was pulling a black iron skillet of corn bread from the oven when she saw us.

“Well, look who it is!” she said.

“Andy Jackson!” said Tom’s dad, coming into the kitchen to see us. He was a naturally good-looking guy, his hair always neat and in place, and a smile that was the result of good genes and not orthodontia. Like my father, he looked more rested than I was used to seeing him, and at the same time a little manic, as if the surplus energy was starting to fight its way out. I was sure he was thinking about the last time we’d seen each other, the tense conversation with my father after Don Strange’s funeral, and was trying to compensate for that unpleasantness. Of course, like me, he had secret memories of the night of Don Strange’s death, and I’m sure he was also trying to compensate for that. “You gonna help us eat these beans?” he practically shouted.