Over and Under (23 page)

I stopped at the entry to the living room as Tom continued in, drawn to the sword like a magnet. There was a
cluster of framed family photos atop the TV. One caught my eye: Taffy in a pink dress, maybe a year younger, smiling brightly at the camera and tilting her head in response to the command of the unseen photographer. I slowly lifted the photo up, careful not to knock any of the others down, as Tom inched his way closer to Orpod’s recliner.

Something about being there in the same room with Orpod Judd excited me in a dangerous way; I wanted to hurt him for what he had done to Taffy, and there he was, completely vulnerable. Even so, he was still scary; I don’t think it was just the tiny cramped room that made him look big. Tom walked within inches of Judd’s giant, dirty big toe sticking through its torn sock. He kept his eyes on Judd the entire time, even as he went behind him to the bookshelf. After verifying that Judd remained unconscious, Tom turned, rose up on his toes, and grabbed the sword by the handle.

At that moment, the theme song and the credits for
Billy Jack
ended, and, after a pause, the television began emitting a loud, steady hum to go along with the colored bars of its test pattern. It was just enough to wake Orpod Judd up.

His eyes fluttered open. Tom was frozen behind him, his hand on the sword, but Judd was facing me. I turned to run, but he was quick, and my feet got tangled for an instant in a dirty T-shirt crumpled on the floor. Even seriously drunk, Judd knew what he was doing—it was not the first time he had chased a quick, agile kid through the trailer. He didn’t try to grab me, from which I could have twisted away. Instead, he hit me full-speed with the bulk of his big body, sending me flying into the door of the
master bedroom and onto the floor. When I opened my eyes, he was on top of me. I was vaguely aware that I still held Taffy’s picture.

“Hey, look who it is.” He panted heavily, his breath sour. “Taffy’s boyfriend.” His eyes were unfocused. A smile crossed his dimpled face. I was rolling, twisting, trying to get away, but he was stronger than me, and he just kept pushing me back and forth with his bearlike left hand, keeping his other hand raised, waiting for a good shot with a weird kind of patience. “I thought you might try to get in here.”

When he finally hit me, it was with the practiced violence of a hunter gutting a deer, or a fisherman cutting the head off of a bluegill: it was something he had done many, many times before. I also noticed that he was slapping me with his meaty hand open, not with a fist. Maybe he’d learned that a slap left fewer marks; maybe he thought he’d be more likely to make solid contact with an open hand than with a fist.

Pain exploded on the right side of my face as he made contact. He hit me so hard my whole body hurt, right down to my toes.

“How’d you like that?” He was breathless, not with the exertion, but with excitement. “You seen Taffy lately? How ’bout that mom of hers?” He slapped me again, harder, on the same side of my face. I was struggling, but the fight was going out of me. I covered my face with my arm and just hoped that he would wear himself out.

I felt a shadow come over us, and when I opened my eyes, I saw that Judd felt it, too, although he didn’t want
to turn away from me to see the cause. The sword came down right where his thick neck met his shoulder. Tom did not decapitate Orpod Judd, but he would have had the tip of the sword not caught the low ceiling of the living room, tearing off an asbestos ceiling tile as he swung it down. Even with that loss of velocity Tom hurt Judd badly. Blood shot from his shoulder, some of it falling on my face and into my mouth. Even badly hurt and surprised, Judd still had the animal skills to take a shot at Tom. He rolled off of me and against the wall, and tried to pull Tom’s legs out from under him with a sweeping motion of his long caveman arm. Tom jumped over him sword in hand, helped me to my feet, and in seconds we were out the bedroom window and back in the woods.

In the darkness outside, it was impossible to tell how bad I looked. I could feel that my face was swollen, and with my tongue I felt a couple of loose teeth. My face stung, but I knew I would live. My far bigger problem was how I was going to explain the injuries to my mother and father. There was no way I was going to hide something like this. Before Tom and I separated at my house, we talked it over, and decided reluctantly that there was only one plausible way to explain it when that moment arrived.

In my room I stared at Taffy’s photo for a good ten minutes before hiding it in my nightstand drawer, a place of honor it retained through many years and many night-stands in dorms and apartments throughout the Midwest. I fought the temptation to turn on my light for a better look. The glass was broken and the photo was creased down the middle, but all told the picture had made it out
of that trailer in better shape than I. I went to sleep profoundly happy for that.

Mom came in to check on me at some point during the night, and saw the bright, bloody faceprint on my pillow. “Son, tell me right now who did this to you,” she said, shaking me awake.

“What?” I said through swollen lips, in one futile, final effort to pretend it was no big deal.

“Come take a look at yourself.” She hustled me into the bathroom to look in the mirror. Dad shuffled in behind me in his pj’s, rubbing his eyes, curious about the commotion.

The visible damage had gotten worse during my few hours in bed. My face was redder, the worst parts were purple, and I had developed a full-blown black eye, with tiny lines of blood inside my eye to go along with it. Everything was swollen. I had to admit, along with my mother, that I looked horrible. My only regret was that school was out and I couldn’t show it off to my friends.

“Who did this?” my mother demanded again.

“Good Lord,” my father said, as it all came into focus. Mom turned me around. She was so mad I thought she would blacken the other eye.

“Tell me right now.”

I waited, hoping I wouldn’t have to use the plan Tom and I had devised, but as we had determined, there was no other believable option. And we certainly weren’t going to start telling the truth.

“Tom did it,” I said. “We got in a fight after we left the picket line and he kicked my ass.”

Mom gasped. Dad scratched his head, aware, even
though the story made perfect sense, that there was some other story out there, somewhere.

The next day at lunch, as I painfully sipped iced tea through a straw, Dad told Mom something funny he’d heard at the plant.

“Sheriff Kohl was down at the plant today, told me a heck of a story. Orpod Judd called the police in the middle of the night, said he’d been attacked.” Dad was smiling broadly.

“I’m sure he was stinking drunk,” said Mom, as I stared down at my BLT.

“You’re right about that. He said the bombers broke into his trailer and robbed him.”

“The bombers?”

“That’s what he said. And he did have some nasty wound to his neck apparently, looked like it needed stitches, but he refused to go to the clinic. Just wanted to talk about the robbery, file a report, asked for the name of the Casket Company’s insurance agent. He actually thought that somehow the company’s insurance should pay for it. That’s why Kohl was telling me about it.”

“What on earth could there be in that trailer worth stealing?”

“That’s the really funny part,” said Dad. “He said they’d stolen an antique sword from him, worth, in Judd’s estimation, five thousand dollars. Cut him with it and ran. Of course he had no receipt or anything proving he ever owned such a thing.”

“A sword? Mercy.” Mom and Dad both laughed. “How does the sheriff think he got the cut to his neck?”

“He’s not sure, and it was a nasty wound, apparently. Figures Judd just did something stupid while he was drunk. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Lord knows.”

The conversation then thankfully turned to the high price of gasoline, and I was able to breathe again.

I thought it over in my room after hurriedly finishing my sandwich. Judd had probably wanted to get his loss on the record, stupidly reasoning there might be some insurance company somewhere that might compensate him for the loss of something he had never owned. Perhaps Judd blamed the bombers because he didn’t want to admit he was waylaid by a couple of kids, and didn’t know exactly who we were, making it harder, in his dense mind, to file an insurance claim. On the other hand, I thought, maybe he didn’t tell the sheriff because he knew exactly who we were, and wanted to take care of us himself.

I was, of course, banned from seeing Tom. Mom and Dad decided not to call Tom’s parents, as Tom and I had anticipated, not wanting to humiliate me further after my ass-kicking nor complicate matters further with our neighbors. While they never asked me directly, they were certain that the fight had something to do with the strike, a manager’s kid versus a striker’s kid, superimposing their struggle over ours. I passed the day watching game shows and reading the same library books over and over.

The most surprising part of my exile from the woods was how much I enjoyed it. I didn’t have Tom pulling me toward the fugitives, the cave, or Orpod Judd. I discovered that I liked being out of danger, safe in my house,
with just Bob Barker and my parents to keep me company. There had been a notion in my mind since we saw George Kruer fighting at the picket line, a notion that I should not be keeping all these secrets, and that things would continue to get worse until I unburdened myself. That thought grew steadily, all day, nurtured by indoor lighting and my mom’s home cooking.

That night, after dinner, my father tried to broach the subject of my fight with Tom during our game of Authors. He was not a man who believed in silently mulling over one’s problems.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. I managed to get the word out pretty well, my lips had deflated back down to only slightly over their normal size.

“Haven’t seen this much of you around the house since the blizzard,” Dad said, as Mom pretended to contemplate her cards.

I shrugged again. “It’s been kind of nice, really.
Huckleberry Finn?”

“How’s Tom been doing?” he asked. “I mean, before …”

“Okay,” I said. I tried to think of something else to say on the matter. “They’re drinking Kool-Aid because of the strike.”

There was an awful silence. “It’s okay,” I backtracked. “They like Kool-Aid.”

My dad grimaced and placed his hand on my mom’s knee. It was her turn.

“The Pickwick Papers?”
she asked me, clearing her throat.

“Nope.”

“The strike will be over soon,” she said. “And everything will get back to normal.” It felt good to hear the certainty in her voice.

“Do you think they’ll ever catch Sanders and Kruer?” I asked. My observant, caring parents immediately detected the hopefulness in the question, and they nearly guessed right about why I would ask such a crazy thing.

“Is that what’s bothering you, boy?” my father asked, relief pouring into his voice.

“I wouldn’t mind seeing them caught, I guess.”

“They wouldn’t hurt you,” said Mom.

My father shot her a quick look before turning a sympathetic grin back on me. “Those dumb-asses are probably two hundred miles away from here by now!” My mother reflexively elbowed him in the ribs upon hearing the cuss word, but Dad continued jubilantly. “The sheriff sent dogs into the woods and everything! They’re long gone! Don’t you worry about them!”

“I guess,” I said quietly.

“Your father’s right,” my mom said. “If they were out there, somebody around here would surely rat them out.”

My father walked upstairs with me on my way to bed. With each step, I considered telling him everything: about Kruer and Sanders, about Orpod Judd, about the night Don Strange died. The lies were piling up so high that I could no longer find my way around them. I loved Dad, believed to the core of my being in his reasonable nature. The man had an engineer’s passion for order and process, and I had no doubt that in the black-and-white rule book of the world, I was supposed to tell someone that I knew
where two killers were bivouacked in the woods. As I felt him walking close behind me on the steps, at the end of a long, boring, enjoyable day, I had a hard time believing that disclosing everything to him would be so bad.

But it would betray Tom. My own mother, it seemed, would also regard me as a rat. I had heard the expression “get it off your chest” before, and now I really knew what it meant—the secrets weighed on me with a physical force, slowing my steps and making it hard for me to breathe. Maybe being away from Tom a full day had somehow weakened my resistance. I had to tell Dad everything, and even if my best friend and my mother disagreed, I could at least take comfort in Dad’s approval.

“’Night, Andy,” my dad said, rubbing my back as I lay down.

“’Night.” Cicadas chirped outside the window. A muted pulse of heat lightning briefly illuminated my father’s serious face.

Dad continued to sit on the edge of my bed, sensing that I needed to talk more.

“Are we against the strikers?” I asked.

He sighed. “That’s complicated. You know I’m management, so most of those guys on the picket line see me as the enemy. But I don’t wish those men any harm. Fate has put us on opposite sides of this thing. May God let it end soon.”

“Why are you management?” I asked. “You went to high school with Tom’s dad, right? How did you two end up on different sides?”

My dad shrugged and thought it over. “I guess part of it’s because I have a college degree,” he said. “There
aren’t too many of those around here, so that’s why they made me a manager when I came back from Purdue.”

“Why do you have a degree?” I asked. I wanted to reduce the differences all the way down, all the way back to something solid and irreducible.

Dad thought about it. “It’s hard to say. My parents always wanted me to go to college, although I suppose a lot of parents feel that way. I did well in high school. I guess I probably did okay on some standardized test somewhere along the line, got into college prep classes. Some luck, I guess. Some hard work.”