Over and Under (28 page)

Over his shoulder, I saw movement on the dark wall of the fort. A rifle swung into place, then froze as the shooter took aim. After a flash and a crack, a .22 caliber bullet penetrated Mack’s head, rattled around, and turned everything inside to soup.

At some point in the middle of the night it had all come together for my father. All the information had been collecting there in his unconscious mind, where the engineer’s brain went to work on it, assembling and rearranging the pieces until it all finally made sense: my questions about Sanders and Kruer, my concerns about where our loyalty belonged, even Tom’s missing groceries. Maybe it was the distant sound of Sanders’ crazy gunshots that finally made it all crystallize for him—my dad would say all his life he didn’t know exactly what woke him up. Whatever it was, he ran into my room, saw I was missing, saw the window I’d left open, and grabbed my M6 off the rack because it was close by and seemed more potentially useful than an encyclopedia. He shouted to my mom to call the sheriff, forgetting that she wasn’t there, she was back at the shelter helping out the battered women of southern Indiana on an overnight shift. He ran downstairs, and then into the woods, following the path he’d seen Tom and I take so many times, and maybe even remembered from his own youth.

He ran down the Buffalo Trace, where he heard me scream as Sanders jammed the burning stick into my neck. He followed the sounds to the fort, then crawled to the edge of the limestone wall. He chambered a shell from the buttstock. He put Sanders in his sights, from about
fifty yards away, out of breath and in shock at the scene, with only the unsteady light of a dying campfire to see by. Dad then inhaled gently, focused on the front sight, held his breath, softly squeezed the trigger, and put a .22 rimfire bullet precisely in the middle of Mack’s skull.

That was the best shot I ever saw.

Dad slid down the wall of the fort and pulled the corpse off of me. He helped me stand. As he pulled the twine off my hands, Solinski appeared at the edge of the opposite wall.

“Is he okay?” shouted Solinski. Two of his flunkies were at his side, out of breath, handguns drawn. Solinski himself was in better shape, breathing hard but not panting, his .45 still in its holster on his hip.

Dad looked me over again, then right into my eyes before responding to Solinski. “I think he’s fine, praise the Lord.” Solinski bounded down the wall like a deer and came to my side. His eyes fell to the throbbing burn wound on my neck. It enraged him. He looked down at the dead body of Sanders and for a moment I thought he was going to kick it.

“Where’s Kruer?” he asked me.

I misunderstood—I thought he was asking about Tom.

My father knew what he meant. “Where’s Guthrie Kruer?” he asked.

Still in shock, I looked slowly around the camp, and their eyes followed mine, as if we might see him hiding somewhere in the debris. They stepped closer, a little breathless, desperate to hear from me exactly what was going on.

And, in an instant of certainty, I did know exactly where Kruer was. I knew just as clearly that my father, and maybe
even Solinski, were good men. My father had just saved my life, and I believed Solinski would have done the same. I tried to remember why I should keep the truth a secret, why telling these two men the location of a killer would be some kind of betrayal. I pictured in my mind what I knew had happened, and my eyes drifted to the path that led out of the camp, to the spot where Guthrie had gone to piss, to where Tom had waited for him. Tom had hidden in the dark for hours, waiting for his chance. When his cousin had finally appeared, Tom had stepped out of the bushes, and had helped Guthrie, and only Guthrie, escape. I had never more clearly thought Tom’s thoughts, felt how he felt while hunched over in the darkness, listening to the gnats whine in his ears, waiting to see Guthrie and show him a path out of the valley that only the two of us, and Taffy, knew. I raised my hand to point, ready to explain everything to Solinksi and my father.

At that moment they both raised their eyes to the heavens in wonder, their faces illuminated by a beautiful bright crimson light that glowed brilliantly for precisely seven seconds.

Solinski took off toward the flare. My father and I followed, trailed by Solinski’s lumbering men.

We found Tom sitting calmly on a large limestone outcropping along the trace. His M6 was leaning against the rock, some smoke still curling out of the barrel. He was alone.

“Tom, are you okay?” asked my father.

“Yessir.”

“Where’s the other one?” barked Solinski. “Where’s
Kruer?” His team huffed and puffed their way up next to him. Tom shrugged in response. Even in the dark, I saw the bright orange clay on his boots.

“What happened, boy?” Dad put his hands on Tom’s shoulders. “Why’d you shoot the flare?”

Tom paused before responding.

“I got lost,” he said.

At that, my father stepped back and looked at Tom, and then at me, and shook his head. Somewhere beneath our feet, I knew, Kruer was running or crawling through the cave, through the wide end of the crevice, to Squire Boone Caverns; through the Christmas Tree Room, perhaps slowing briefly to pay his respects as he passed the dusty casket. Then across the shallow stream where the eyeless fish swam, to the door set loosely in the rock, to the fishing boat with the good oars and the Kentucky sticker, across the muddy Ohio, to freedom.

They never found him.

By the time Sheriff Kohl showed up, just as dawn was breaking, Tom and I had been next to each other on that rock just long enough to get our stories straight. We’d been able to speak when Dad turned to Solinksi to mutter about the night’s events, or when the two of them jogged into the woods a few yards to investigate a noise. We’d whispered the outline back and forth until we’d constructed a version of the night’s events that was, if not entirely believable, at least possible.

“We snuck out to go frog gigging,” Tom told Sheriff Kohl. There were in fact several of the three-tined spears throughout the camp. I noticed that even at this odd hour,
after a decent hike into the woods, Kohl’s uniform was still immaculate, the creases of his pants crisp. There was a single bur clinging to his knee, and I had to fight the urge to pick it off for him.

“Mack Sanders snuck up on us and grabbed me,” I said.

“And I ran away to get help,” said Tom.

There was a long pause. “And that’s when you got lost?” asked the sheriff.

Tom nodded his head. The sheriff turned to me, perhaps more hopeful that I might reveal the whole truth. “And you never saw Guthrie Kruer?”

“Never did,” Tom and I said together.

The sheriff scratched his head, unwilling to push me too hard for some reason, perhaps because of the strange dynamics between him and my dad. He would come out to the house a few times in the coming weeks, and to Tom’s, to question us separately, but the frog gigging story held, and after a while nobody saw any productive reason to tear it apart, even if nobody quite believed it.

“Well,” said Sheriff Kohl, looking at the eastern edge of the woods, just starting to turn pink. “We should get you home, Tom, I am sure your parents are in a panic.”

Tom slid off the rock, picked up his gun, and started walking in front of the group down the trace.

“You sure you know the way?” asked Sheriff Kohl. Tom didn’t turn around.

My father was promoted to plant manager soon after. After a few touchy meetings with the Habigs, the strike ended with a thirty-cent-per-hour across-the-board pay raise. Their main demand met, the union declared the
strike an unqualified victory. Solinski and his men left in their souped-up bus on the same dewy Monday morning that the school buses of Borden swung back into service.

Tom and I began high school surprised to find ourselves segregated from each other. I was placed in Borden’s modest college prep program while Tom sailed through regular classes. I don’t know what classes Taffy would have been in; she was gone. That first morning of school I began my lifelong habit of scanning crowds for her straw-colored hair and Pink Floyd T-shirt, to no avail. When I asked Mom about her absence, she said that was pretty typical, people in those situations have to get away while they still can, and no she didn’t know how to find Taffy and wouldn’t tell me if she did. My banged-up face was still impressive enough to entertain my classmates, all of whom wanted to hear the story from me. The wounds from Orpod Judd and Mack Sanders had faded around the edges and blended together, and the only story I ever told anyone was the story of frog gigging, Sanders, and the fort. While that story was a lie and Sanders was dead, however, Orpod Judd was still very much alive, and still always lurking at the back of my mind.

I would see him sometimes, fat and mean, strutting through town like he was proud of what he had done. I tried to convince myself again that he didn’t know or had forgotten who I was, but I never could quite believe it. I was bigger, too, as high school went on, no longer the scrawny fourteen-year-old he’d beaten down in his trailer. But once someone gets the better of you like that, I learned, it’s very hard to unlearn the fear.

Judd was cunning, never doing anything that we could take to Sheriff Kohl. There were petty harassments: slashed tires, silent phone calls in the middle of the night, all our pumpkins smashed in the garden once while we were at church. Nothing I could prove, nothing I even bothered to say to anyone other than Tom, because I knew no one else would believe that Orpod Judd was still after me.

One of the last times I saw Judd was my junior year of high school, when he threw me into a rack of potato chips inside Miller’s. I was in there with Tom, looking to spend a ten-dollar windfall I had gotten from winning a speech contest at the library. Tom and I were big by then, probably fifty pounds heavier than when he’d chased us through his trailer two years earlier, both of us finally starting to put on muscle and height that I suppose would have been attractive to a coach, had Borden High School been big enough to have a football team. Whatever our size, Judd had surprise and ruthlessness on his side. He came up fast behind us, before we could see him, and threw a hip into me so hard I fell and knocked down the entire rack of chips. Startled, on my back, I could smell Cheetos as I watched Tom force Judd back away from me.

Loretta Miller yelled from the register: “Andy Gray, your daddy is gettin’ a bill for all those snacks!” I suppose she knew she’d never get a dime from Judd.

A small crowd gathered. Past Tom, Judd extended one of those long caveman arms with a “What, me?” smirk on his face, as if it were all just an accident. I refused his hand, and he skipped out of the store without a word, as I
got to my feet and brushed crumbs off my legs. It was another warning shot from Judd, I knew, a reminder that we still had a score to settle. Without his wife and two daughters to beat up, I was sure Tom and I were the focus of his most violent fantasies. Just as he had the night we stole back the sword, he was just pawing at me, putting me in position, waiting for his shot.

Soon after the incident at Miller’s, Orpod Judd set his truck on fire in his driveway, and tried to collect from the good folks at State Farm. The insurance company was reluctant to pay—it seems Judd watched the truck burn down to its wheels from a lawn chair before doing anything, and then called the agent to ask about his coverage before calling the fire department or the sheriff. Judd was drinking more and more, and his natural atavistic strength seemed to be bleeding away. Everyone knew that Orpod Judd’s story would not end happily. I found myself looking at it as a kind of race, where I was just trying to stay out of Judd’s way until the clock ran out and he finally went to jail, or walked in front of a truck, or set himself on fire.

On an October Saturday, at the beginning of my senior year of high school and as the leaves reached their full glory, Dad appeared in my doorway. I was lying on my bed, staring into space, thinking about nothing. Abject idleness was the one aspect of adolescence that my father could not tolerate.

“Let’s hike to the tomb,” he said, clapping his hands. “Scare up some morels.” I stepped into my boots.

The hike to Captain Frank’s Tomb was one of our old favorites, especially in the fall when the white morel
mushrooms stood out starkly against the brown blanket of leaves. It was not a long hike, but it was just vigorous enough, traversing up one of the steepest sections along the banks of the Ohio.

We walked slowly along, keeping our eyes low, enjoying the cool fall air and the scenery, the green band of the Ohio just visible through the trees behind us as we climbed. Although I’d been on these mushroom hunts with my dad countless times, he still carefully inspected every mushroom I plucked before dropping it into our bulging paper sack, verifying that it was indeed a morel and not one of its deadly look-alike cousins. Before long, we’d arrived at the tomb, our spot to rest and take inventory before hiking back home.

The tomb looked like an undersized stone picnic shelter, a small version of what you might see in the state forest, with the unusual addition of a limestone throne inside. Just outside the structure were the remains of several camphres, confirmation that many before us had made the same pilgrimage. Captain Frank had been a prosperous turn-of-the-century steamboat captain who retired at the height of the paddlewheel era, when the riverfront was crowded with the mansions of men who’d made fortunes on the river. Captain Frank loved the Ohio so much that in his will, he arranged to be interred sitting down and facing the river. He constructed himself a tomb on a bluff not all that far from where Tom and I had made our hurried exit from Squire Boone Caverns. Inside the crypt he made a stone chair, where he was seated in death, watching the boats for all eternity through a small opening in the wall.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but in fact the crypt was so bizarre that it became a kind of tourist attraction, with people hiking out from town for a peek in the window to see the good captain’s rotting corpse, and to knock chips off the walls for souvenirs. Soon enough, Captain Frank’s scandalized family tore down one wall of the tomb and had him moved to a more respectable gravesite, one in which he’d be buried lying down and facing heavenward like a good, normal Christian. But the vacant tomb remained, its front wall knocked down, the rest intact.