Over and Under (29 page)

“You remember the first time I brought you up here? When you were seven?” My dad was catching his breath and smiling. He’d laid out all our mushrooms on the ground in a row, in order of size.

“You bet.” He’d suggested to me then that I sit on the chair in the tomb as he told me the legend of the curse. Barges on the Ohio, I learned, shine their searchlights on the tomb as a show of respect when they pass that section of the river. As Dad told me this, we watched a searchlight crawl up the hill looking for the tomb.

“If you’re sitting on the chair when the light hits it,” Dad told me, just as the light reached the edge of the tomb, “you’re cursed!”

“You jumped out of that chair so damn fast.” He laughed hard at the memory. “God you were pissed at me.”

“I just couldn’t believe you’d let your only son get cursed.”

“I was just trying to make sure my only son didn’t grow up addled with superstition.”

“Thanks. It worked.”

In the distance, a barge came into view through the
trees. It slowly pushed downstream, fully loaded with coal. Its big yellow searchlight clicked on.

“So …” Dad said, “you want to have a seat?”

“No,” I said.

“Me neither.”

At home, Mom was thrilled with our harvest. We decided not to even wait for dinner, as she sliced the morels in half, dipped them in egg, coated them in crushed saltines, and fried them crisp in butter. She piled them high on a steaming platter while Dad and I waited, forks in hand.

That night, after a game of Authors, I got ready for bed still pleasantly stuffed from the fried morels. When I turned my light off, my eyes adjusted just enough as I walked to my bed that something outside caught my eye, a variation easy to detect in a landscape I’d seen a million times. I walked a step closer to the window.

It took a second more, as my eyes completely adjusted to the dark, to see it well. Someone was across Cabin Hill Road, hiding in the tall weeds that had gone brown already after the first hard frost. I waited a moment to be sure. It was a decent hiding space, tall weeds growing up in front of a ditch, it would have been the kind of place a duck hunter might choose as a natural blind if it were located next to water. The intruder lifted his head just slightly, to check out the house, and I was certain. It had to be Judd.

My breath caught. Judd hunkered back down, waiting—for what? It was already completely dark, I had spotted him only because of the moonlight. More likely, I decided, he was waiting for all the lights in our house to go off, so he could catch us all sleeping.

I didn’t look but I could sense my M6 in its rack, the .22 shells lined up neatly inside the stock. I contemplated the shot. It wouldn’t be easy, complicated as it was by the downward angle and the seventy-five yards or so between us. But I knew I could do it. Through the weeds I couldn’t get a precise look at Judd, but would instead have to aim for the “center of mass,” as they said in the shooting magazines. I would only get one shot, and it would have to be perfect. I imagined myself loading the single jewel-like shell in my gun, pulling the hammer up to the .22 position. I visualized myself cracking open the window, just enough to get the barrel through and the sights clear. Taking my time, setting up the shot. Exhale…pause…squeeze. I imagined the sound of the shot, and the half-second or so it would take the bullet to fly downrange, Judd hearing it but not having time to react, right before it slammed into him, hopefully in his chest or his neck, a head shot probably being too much to hope for. I pictured him falling forward, through the weeds, his hiding space revealed, his blood bright on the dry, dusty gravel.

Dad appeared at my side. “What’s up?” He’d come upstairs to say good night.

I pointed out my window toward the weeds, without taking my eyes off the target. Dad squinted, unable to see him at first. “What?” He was confused. “I don’t see anything.”

“Judd.” I mouthed the word, my throat too dry to say it.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

Just then Judd broke from the weeds. He was still hunched over, in an attempt to be stealthy, but there was
too much open ground between him and the house. His long stringy hair flopping, hunched over as he ran, he looked even more like a caveman than normal. He was heading for a small maple tree, the last bit of cover between him and our house.

“What the hell? It is him,” my father said.

I started walking around Dad, toward the gun rack.

“What?” said Dad.

I pointed at my M6.

“Good Lord, Son, that’s not how we handle things here in civilization.” Mom appeared in the doorway. “My dear,” he said, “please call the sheriff.” Dad then walked casually down the stairs, flipped on the porch light, and threw open the front door.

Through my window I watched Judd stop cold in his tracks.

“Mr. Judd, how are you this evening? Can I get you a cup of coffee?” All his life, this was my father’s way of saying “you appear to be drunk.”

Judd stood up straight, startled by my father’s forthright greeting. He walked to the front door like he had legitimate business, and disappeared from view beneath the porch roof. “Mr. Gray, I have a matter I need to discuss with you.” Judd was being humorously formal. In all his plans, I am sure, he had not expected to be invited inside for a cup of coffee. Even with that great effort, however, Judd could not control his slur, as he was seriously, dangerously drunk.

“What can I do for you?” Dad asked.

“I have reason to believe your boy knows the location of my children,” said Judd. “I don’t care about that bitch wife of mine, but a man’s got a right to see his offspring.”

“I can assure you no one here can tell you where your family is.”

“And… I believe your son also knows the location of my sword.”

“Your what?” I heard suppressed laughter in Dad’s voice.

“Those little shits broke in my trailer and stole my sword,” said Judd. He had exhausted his supply of fake cordiality. I couldn’t believe my dad was down there trying to talk to him like a normal human being.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Your boy knows what I’m talkin’ about, why don’t you let me talk to him?” I heard movement on the porch, the shuffling of feet, like he was trying to get by my dad into the house.

“Mr. Judd, I think you better get on home,” my father said, still completely affable. There was a tone in my dad’s voice that I identified, to my surprise, as pity. “I’ll talk to Andy, and you and I can discuss this over a cup of coffee, tomorrow in my office.”

“I ain’t going home till someone tells me where my kids are at. A man’s got a right to see his offspring!”

Dad sighed. “I really think you ought to go now.”

There was suddenly another shuffle, louder, and I looked again at the gun on my wall. Then Dad and Judd both appeared back in view, as Dad steamrolled him backward. Judd was big and strong, I knew, but so, I realized with some surprise, was my dad. Dad was just manhandling Judd backward, not trying to do any fancy moves, just steadily forcing the man across the front porch. Judd hit the railing, and Dad gave a final shove, cracking the railing and
forcing Judd to flip over it backward, where he landed hard in our perfectly trimmed evergreen bushes. Partially upside down, Judd waved his arms as he struggled to overcome the fulsome bush and his own disorientation to get to his feet. With his feet in the air, I saw a knife sticking out of Judd’s boot. Even so, he was so diminished in that position that it didn’t shock me entirely when Dad actually leaned over the rail and offered a helping hand. Judd Anally pulled himself upright into kind of a squatting position over the bush.

Before Judd could accept Dad’s hand, the sheriff pulled up, lights spinning but with no siren. Judd hung his head in despair, no doubt tabulating the many terms of probation and parole he had just violated. Kohl trotted up to the porch and quickly cuffed him, deftly removed his boot knife and dropped it on the ground, and then led him to the backseat of his cruiser. I could tell by the way Judd carefully ducked his head as he slipped into the backseat that it was not the first time he’d executed that move. With Judd safely locked in the back of the car, Kohl came back up to talk to my dad. Mom and I made our way downstairs.

“What did Mr. Judd want?” the sheriff was asking my dad. “Besides trouble?” They were handing Judd’s knife back and forth as they talked, examining with a critical eye the sheath, its metal boot clip, and the sharpness of the edge.

“Bunch of drunken nonsense,” my dad said. “Thinks we know where his kids are.” He didn’t say anything about the sword.

“You want me to charge him with assault? Destruction
of property?” The sheriff waved his hand over the broken porch railing.

“No.” Dad scoffed, shaking his head.

“You sure? He did have a knife.”

“Just let him sleep it off,” said Dad. “I don’t need to see the man put in prison for being a stupid drunk.”

The next morning I walked out to see where Judd had been hiding in the weeds across Cabin Hill Road. I wanted to see the spot he’d chosen, how well he’d picked his ground. Up close, it wasn’t a great blind, with thin weeds to the front and no cover at all on the other three sides. The grass was still flattened where Judd had been sitting, watching our house, my window. Something caught my eye in the weeds as I kicked around. I bent to pick it up. It was a black Zippo lighter. I flipped it open and spun a flame to life with one crunch of the knurled brass wheel.

I knew right away I wouldn’t tell Dad about the lighter. He would say it didn’t mean Judd was going to burn our house down, and that I couldn’t even know for certain that the lighter belonged to Judd. And it certainly wouldn’t change his conviction that his way of handling Judd had been right, and mine wrong. I shut the lighter and threw it as far as I could into the woods.

Judd didn’t take my dad up on his offer for a conversation over coffee. In fact, he never showed up for work at the factory again. He did, however, find a credulous insurance agent two days later, took out a $20,000 insurance policy on his trailer, and then set it on fire with Coleman camp fuel. He was promptly tried and thrown in prison for insurance fraud. Of all the strange endings in Borden, perhaps the
oddest to me is that when Orpod Judd finally got put behind bars, it was for a white-collar crime.

For our last two years of high school, Tom took the long bus ride every day to Prosser, a vocational school in Clarksville, for their Manufacturing Technology Program. The events of 1979 had definitely changed us both, and our lives were on somewhat divergent paths, but we were by no means done having adventures together in those deep woods, and we continued to spend the summers and weekends hunting, fishing, and getting ourselves in and out of serious trouble.

The story of Guthrie Kruer entered town lore, taking its place alongside the legends of William Borden and Prince Madoc. Folks periodically spotted the bloodthirsty Guthrie running through the woods like Bigfoot, and kids scared each other to death with stories of the crazed fugitive by the campfire, in parked cars, and on stormy nights. Variations of the legend became plentiful. Some argued that Sanders and Kruer were innocent of blowing up the plant and killing Don Strange. The most plausible alternative offered was Orpod Judd, because of his known tendency to set things afire. Even today, some say Sanders and Kruer are both still alive, and some say they’re both dead. That particular story seemed like it might be proven true during my sophomore year of college, when a group of local cavers found a skeleton crouched inside a tiny anteroom in Marengo Cave, a skeleton that was presumed to be that of the long-lost Guthrie Kruer. It was carefully removed to the University of Louisville, where scientists determined that the small, brown bones belonged not to
Tom’s cousin but to a one-thousand-year-old Hopewell Indian woman.

My father’s rescue of me also became part of Borden mythology, and he was constantly invited to brag about his marksmanship, invitations he always politely declined. He never allowed pride in that remarkable shot to overcome the profound fear he had felt at that moment when he saw me in an ancient Welsh fort with a gun in my face. He and Mother carefully monitored me for signs of post-traumatic stress, but the pink, arrow-shaped mark on my neck appears to be the sole lasting scar of the episode. That, and I can’t stand the smell of wood smoke, something that I guess is almost universally regarded as pleasant.

Reminders of the strike around town became rare. The hole in the back of the factory was repaired, and within a year the brown paint had faded and evened out to the point that no one could tell precisely where the breach had occurred. I’d see Russ Knable around town sometimes, when he wasn’t working, and I’d have to fight the urge to stare at a face that seemed somehow misaligned. The Little League field where helicopters had taken off and landed the day after the explosion was renamed Strange Field. A brass plaque with Mr. Strange’s name and lifespan was bolted to the dugout wall while two fidgety T-ball teams lined up along the baselines to pay their respects. Like most of the important things in Borden, the strike was rarely talked about because everybody already knew everything about it.

After high school, I determined that I would not be able to make a living using marksmanship, my sole natural talent. I got a degree in business instead, while Tom got a
good job at the factory, as mill room supervisor. We stayed closely in touch through college, hunting a couple of times a year, and fishing whenever we could. I sometimes asked him if he’d heard anything about Taffy, if she’d found her way back to Borden after her dad finally got put away. There was never a trace of her, not even a rumor.

Tom kept his promise. He never told me the details about the night he helped Guthrie Kruer escape, and he never told me if he knows where Kruer is right now. And I kept my promise. I never told anyone, not even my parents, what I knew about Kruer and Sanders. I’ve tried a few times to sort out in my mind the legal issues involved, harboring fugitives and lying to the police, just to start. In truth, I’ve never really worried about that part of it. I’ll keep my secret because it’s not really mine to give away. And because I know Tom has never doubted me for a moment.