Over and Under (25 page)

“My buddy there wants to take off right now, doesn’t he?” Sanders spoke suddenly, snapping me back into the present. I realized with a start that it was just me and him alone by the fire. He smiled.

“Yeah.”

“We can’t do that. Not right now.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Outside these woods, they’re all looking for us, right? How far you think we’d get in broad daylight?” His words
tumbled out, as if he couldn’t control them once he began talking.

“Go at night,” I said, eager to help him escape. I knew from experience how one could disappear into the woods after sundown.

“Can’t do that, either,” he said. “Those asshole thugs keep patrolling these woods at night between us and the highway; we’d never get past ’em.”

“Go to Kentucky,” I said.

He snorted. “How am I supposed to do that? You think anyone would notice me and Guthrie walking across the Kennedy Bridge?”

There was another way, I thought, but for some reason I stopped myself from telling him. I looked down at the fire instead. The silence grew unbearable. I could only think of two things to talk about with Mack Sanders, and one of them was the killing of Don Strange. I decided to talk about the other one.

“What was it like?” I asked.

Sanders cleared his throat and spit. “You mean settin’ the explosion?” he said proudly. “Awesome.”

“No,” I said. “Losin’ a nut.”

“Oh,” he said. He stopped short, and then wagged his tongue in an attempt to look devilish. “The bitches like it,” he bragged. “You know what I mean?”

“No,” I said. “Why do they like it?”

He shrugged. “No, I’m just messin’ with you. You can’t really even tell without looking close. The doctor says it shouldn’t affect anything, as far as having kids or anything. Said that’s why the good Lord give us two.” He shrugged again.

Some more silence passed. “How bad did it hurt?” I asked.

“It hurt,” he said. “How do you think it felt?”

“What did they do with the one that got torn off?” It was a part of the story I’d always been curious about.

“What is wrong with you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just curious.”

“Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? Asking me about my nuts. You want to see?” He stood up with his hands poised on his zipper.

I stared down at the ground, mortified with embarrassment. “No!” I said. “I was just curious.”

“Seriously, I’ll show you if you’re that goddamn curious, you homo.”

“I’m sorry!” I was ready to run off if he unzipped.

Sanders stopped suddenly, perhaps moved by my genuine terror or by his own memories of that day. He sat down heavily again on his log. He sighed and for a while we just watched the fire burn. He lapsed into a kind of stillness I hadn’t seen from him before, all his kinetic energy turned potential, his eyes half closed in thought. I hoped he would remain calm until Kruer and Tom returned. They’d been gone a long while and I wondered what they were talking about.

“We didn’t mean to kill Strange,” Sanders muttered, still looking somberly into the fire. “Now we can’t ever go back. We didn’t know he was in there. I liked that old man.” A huge mosquito landed on his cheek, stabbed him, and began sucking his blood. Sanders didn’t react.

“Why’d you do it?” I asked.

He thought it over for a moment, but it seemed like he couldn’t find words strong enough to express his feelings.
“Because …” he said, his brow furrowed, staring hard at the fire. “Because I hate that place.” He spat a sizable goober onto the top of a smoldering log, and waited until it completely sizzled away before he spoke again, mumbling so softly I could barely hear him.

“We didn’t know he was there. We just wanted to shake things up, maybe give those assholes something to think about. What the hell was he doing in there that time of night, anyway?” Flames curled around the log as Sanders wallowed in regret. I felt again like I had to say something.

“My dad says Mr. Strange would go in at all hours.”

“Your dad works at the plant?” Sanders snapped back to life, energized by a piece of information his predatory instincts recognized as significant. He slapped at the mosquito, and a teardrop of blood ran down his cheek.

I had said too much. I nodded my head to answer his question, trying to look unshaken.

“Where at? What part of the plant?” He was smiling broadly, pressing me now, pushing his way through the crevice to which I had led him.

“Finish room,” I mumbled. A log popped.

“Me too!” he said with sudden, artificial enthusiasm. “What’s his name?”

I stammered.

He leaned in close. “Come on, man, what’s your dad’s name?”

I was fumbling for an answer when Tom and Guthrie came running back into camp. “Put out the fire!” whispered Guthrie. Mack hesitated for just a second, looking at me, wanting to continue the interrogation. He then lunged for an old five-gallon bucket that they had filled with creek
water and placed next to the fire. He doused it, placing us in total, smoky darkness.

“What’s going on?” whispered Mack as we headed to the wall of the fort. Both Sanders and Kruer brought rifles with them.

“Voices,” said Guthrie. “The thugs again. Closer this time.”

By then we heard them. Men shouting, small branches snapping, larger ones being pushed out of the way. They certainly weren’t trying to be sneaky. A marching band wouldn’t have made more noise. Sanders shouldered his rifle, using the rock wall of the fort for support. He was trying to impress us, I could tell, but his awkwardness with the weapon had the opposite effect. When he raised the gun, his cheek was too close to the stock, an uncomfortable and potentially painful stance an experienced shooter would have avoided. His index finger probed the trigger guard for the safety, but he finally had to take the rifle off his shoulder to locate it. Sanders clearly didn’t know anything about his gun, and he didn’t even know enough to be embarrassed by that.

Flashlights came into view, the beams swinging casually back and forth. They were coming directly from the highway, following the wide, easy path that ran to Silver Creek, a path kept clear and flat by a regular parade of fishermen and day hikers. The bulk of the group was walking together up front in a jovial mob. We heard their voices, which were lighthearted: laughter sprinkled with occasional good-natured bitching.

Behind them, a tall silhouette walked alone and trained his flashlight with more deliberation. A few times, the
beam pointed right at us, although we knew from that distance no one could see us, especially hunkered down as we were behind the fort’s limestone wall. Even though the fire was out, I worried about a log popping, giving us away. The lone thug hesitated, almost as if he sensed that we were near. He grew frustrated with the noise coming from his teammates in front.

“Shut the fuck up!” he shouted ahead. They instantly quieted. No one challenged his authority, although it was clear from their continued, casual pace that no one else really expected to find anything of interest during their midnight hike. I knew the voice. Of course it was Solinski.

They continued to walk down the path. Although they were no longer talking, their careless footsteps continued to make an unholy racket. Soon, they all passed from view, and the sound faded in the distance.

“Solinski,” I whispered.

“We have got to get out of here!” Guthrie hissed to Sanders. “They’re getting closer every night.”

“We will,” said Sanders, his sharp teeth flashing in the moonlight. “Tomorrow night, after our little buddies here come back with what we need.”

“Goddamn,” whispered Guthrie.

“Go on,” Sanders said to us. “You kids go on and get home. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

“With the shells?” said Tom.

He paused for just a second. “Right, with the shells.”

“Guthrie told me about the bird,” Tom said, after we had hiked a safe distance away.

“The bird?” I asked.

“The bird, the bird,” Tom said. “The buzzard he rescued from the water tower.”

“Oh,” I said.

“He couldn’t stand the sound,” Tom said. “That’s why he went up there. Said he couldn’t believe nobody planned on doing anything. All the other firemen were just standing around down there in the parking lot, listening to the thing squawk, waiting for it to die.”

“I remember,” I said. “It was freezing cold, right before Christmas. There wasn’t a place in the valley you could go without hearing it.”

“Guthrie said after a few minutes, he decided he had to climb up there—he seriously thought the sound of it was going to drive him crazy.”

“It didn’t even sound like a bird.”

“He said he just had to climb up the tower and make it stop.”

“Save it?” I asked.

“Save it or kill it.”

We both thought that over as we crawled over and under a series of trunks and limbs that had been lying across the path most of our lives.

“How about you?” Tom asked suddenly. “What did you and Sanders talk about? When I went with Guthrie to piss?”

“Sanders said he doesn’t want to leave,” I said.

“Really?”

“Said they’ll be seen by the cops in the daytime, or caught by the thugs at night,” I said.

Tom thought that over. “Then I wonder how come he’ll be ready to leave tomorrow if we just give him a box of
buckshot,” he said. “Surely he’s not planning on shooting his way out of here.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s a good question.”

Tom mulled it over in the deepest, smartest part of his brain, the part of my brain I didn’t have full access to. I knew he continued to work on the problem even as he asked me his next question.

“Did Sanders say anything else? What else did you talk about while you two were alone?”

I thought about Sanders closing in, circling me, on the verge of discovering the identity of my father.

“Nothing,” I lied. “What else did you and Guthrie talk about?”

“Nothing,” he said.

I slept soundly that night, deeper than I’d slept in days. I had a dream where I could jump miles into the air. I had to grab the skinny top branches of trees as I passed to avoid flying into space. I looked down as I hung on, and saw Tom, Guthrie, and Sanders sitting around the fire inside the fort without me. They looked around for me, but none of them thought to look straight up, where I was safely hidden in the treetops. Beyond the fort I saw the cave entrance, a small black void tucked into the thick foliage. The Buffalo Trace snaked in and out of view, in curves that I suddenly realized were not at all random, as they appeared from the ground, but in fact led the buffalo herds efficiently through the hilly topography, around the biggest crags and across the few level plateaus. In the middle of the eye-shaped pool in Silver Creek, the giant, lonely carp came to the surface for a gulp of air, his mirrored scales reflecting the moonlight.

I woke disappointed, unable to fly. The elation of my dream evaporated, making room for the dense, heavy dread that kept me earthbound. I still knew the location of Don Strange’s killers, and I still was supposed to meet them one more time, to deliver whatever buckshot shells
Tom could lay his hands on. I didn’t want to get out of bed. Doing so would put me one step closer to a reunion with Mack Sanders.

I suddenly realized that it was the unfamiliar sound of male voices arguing downstairs that had awoken me. Sunlight streamed in my window, telling me that I’d slept late. I looked out and saw Mr. Kruer’s truck in the driveway. I slipped out my bedroom door and halfway down the stairs to listen.

“We’re trying to get by on twenty dollars a week from the strike fund,” said Tom’s dad bitterly. “That was a week’s worth of groceries for us.” There was a note of desperation in his voice, something I was sure he wouldn’t have allowed himself in front of Tom. Or me.

I saw my dad hesitantly reach for his wallet. George Kruer waved his hand in disgust.

“I didn’t come here for your money, Gus,” he said. “Just tell Andy that Tom can’t come out. He’s grounded until he decides to tell me what he did with all that food, and until he comes up with the money to pay for it.” He walked out the front door and stomped down the porch steps.

Dad sighed, his hand still on his wallet. He spotted me on the steps.

“Come on down here, buddy,” he said wearily. I did. My mother had found her way into the front room, dressed to go somewhere. She was wearing new jeans and a shirt that was old but freshly ironed. She had earrings in as well, a rarity. They were the kind of clothes she’d wear to help paint the church or to assemble gift baskets for the poor: old but not too old, nice but not too nice.

“What on earth did Tom do with all those groceries?” asked Dad.

I shrugged, choosing to remain silent rather than lie.

“Sounds like Tom’s dad doesn’t even know you two were in a fight. Doesn’t know you weren’t together at all yesterday.”

I shrugged again.

“Do you two have a friend who needs food? We can help if you let us know.”

My silence hurt Dad’s feelings deeply. He knew that I had secrets, of course, that fact didn’t bother him by itself. I spent days on end in the woods with my best friend, and he realized that we had built up whole volumes of stories together that he would never know. This was different, though. He was asking me something directly, and I was refusing to tell him. It was a new kind of conversation for us, and neither one of us knew quite how to handle it.

“Well, whatever you’ve been doing, you’re not doing it today,” he said, when it became clear that I wasn’t going to volunteer any more information. “Tom’s grounded, and so are you, until you boys find a way to get along with each other, and pay for all that food.”

My parents watched me closely, and I did my best to hide my true feelings about the punishment: unbridled relief. I couldn’t leave the house and neither could Tom I didn’t ever want to see Mack Sanders again, I didn’t want to satisfy his mysterious need for buckshot, and I didn’t want him to ask me again what my father did at the plant. Tom getting grounded was the best thing that could possibly happen to me. My parents were suspicious, I saw, and curious, but they couldn’t quite put the pieces together, and
were in the process of writing off the whole grocery theft as one of those illogical acts of mischief that could never be completely explained. I walked upstairs fighting the urge to clap my hands.