Over and Under (14 page)

“Is that a Remington 870?” someone behind me asked about the security force’s gun of choice. Some of the men stepping off the bus actually had bandoliers of shells crossing their chests. A small group of strikers pressed against the fence and soon they were all chattering about the guns on the other side.

“Looks like a Wingmaster to me.”

His friend squinted in concentration. “Nah, it’s a Mossberg 500.”

“How can you tell?”

“My daddy shot a Mossberg all his life—I’d know that gun a mile away.”

“Randall, get over here!” A short man with a handlebar mustache sauntered up to the fence.

“Randall, are those Mossbergs or Remingtons?”

Both men stepped aside deferentially so that Randall, apparently the shotgun expert in the group, could step up to the fence.

“You can’t tell for sure from here,” said Randall after a moment. “But I’d guess they’re Remingtons.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t expect these boys economize on their guns.”

“We’ll just have to wait until they get closer to be sure,” said the Mossberg advocate. And by the end of the evening, I knew, the gun-loving men of Borden would have identified and evaluated every piece of armament inside the fence.

Unlike their leader, the rest of the guards did glance over at us as they got off the bus. They looked at the strikers, with their faded work shirts and scruffy beards, with complete disdain. The soldiers, or whatever they were, gathered around the bus until their leader, who was walking briskly toward them from the gate, shouted something. They quickly formed into two columns. When he got in front of them, he gave a brief talk that I strained my ears unsuccessfully to hear. He shouted another order, and the men ran to the bus and began to unload box after box of equipment, rolls of canvas, and plastic trunks full of supplies.

I looked at Tom to see if he was as impressed as I was.

Silently, he mouthed
“Thugs.”

The rest of the crowd on the picket line was coming to the same realization, muttering to each other about the latest development, so there was a short delay before we realized that the bus was not completely done unloading passengers. Stepping off quickly, in work boots and jeans, were a group of men who looked vaguely familiar. They walked hunched over, almost jogging, from the bus to the front door of the factory with their backs to us.

“Holy shit,” said a man behind me, the first to realize what we were seeing.

“Turn around you cowards!”
said another, and by now the whole picket line was up against the fence.

“Scabs!”
many in the crowd shouted at once. They tried to count them as they ran through the door.

“I don’t believe it,” said another man behind me.

“Assholes!”
someone yelled when it seemed as if the last man had hurried off the bus into the safety of the factory walls.

A few seconds passed, and then the last scab stepped dramatically off the bus. Unlike the rest, he was in no hurry to rush inside and he made no effort to keep his back to the picket line. He had on crisp new bell-bottom jeans and a short-sleeved work shirt that was almost completely unbuttoned, showing off his skinny, hairless chest. He turned and faced us with a huge grin on his face. Most of the redness on the side of his face was gone. It was Ray Arnold.

“Ray, you pussy!”
someone shouted.

Ray beamed. In his posturing, in being the sole focus of our attention from the other side of a fence, and even in his skinniness, Ray strongly reminded me of the scenes I had
seen of British rock stars getting off airplanes in front of a mob of delirious fans.

As the insults reached their crescendo, Ray, still smiling, raised both hands with a flourish, and happily flipped us all off with both middle fingers.

Despite their anger, about half the crowd couldn’t help but laugh.

The thugs and the scabs fell into a routine over the next few days. Four of the thugs strolled around the outside of the plant, in two pairs, at all times. One carried a shotgun. The other wore a wide, army-green web belt that held a baton, mace, and a radio that crackled constantly with military jargon. They never spoke to the strikers, never responded to the occasional insult that was thrown their way. Except for the blond man, they all looked vaguely alike, so it was hard to detect exactly when the guard changed, but it seemed like they worked a six-hour shift, more or less, just like the picketers on the other side of the fence. When they were off watch, they disappeared into the plant. Dad told me they had set up a barracks inside, eating in the cafeteria, showering in the locker room, and sleeping on rows of cots that had been set up in the now-empty receiving area. Despite my pleas, he would not take me to see it.

Dad fell into a routine, too, returning to the plant every morning, piecing together coffins with the small crew of scabs who were now clocking in and receiving paychecks once again. The scabs rolled through the gate every morning behind the tinted windows of the Shively Security bus, and went home at night the same way. Exactly how many
scabs there were was a matter of some secrecy. “About a dozen” was all my dad would tell me. According to gossip on the picket line, the number was growing by about one scab every three days. If anyone was more than five minutes tardy for the morning shift on the picket line, it was automatically assumed that he was on the scab bus, and all of his traitorous tendencies were discussed at length, at least until he showed up at the line rubbing his eyes and apologizing for oversleeping.

Despite the predictions of the strikers, Dad and his small crew of scabs somehow managed to finish some caskets. “We’re getting ’em done!” he announced excitedly at dinner. The very act of production seemed to cheer him. “More than I thought, even with that small group. With so few men in there, there’s no screwing around, everybody’s dead serious. It’s slow, but all the lights are on, the ovens are running, and by God, we’re makin’ boxes!” Dad pounded his fist on the table in excitement. The scabs may have been dead serious but Dad was darn near giddy. “The teamsters won’t cross the line to pick them up, but I’ll find a driver.”

The happy optimism in my dad’s voice was still in my ears when I rode up to the picket line the next morning. It was pleasantly cool for August, and the morning fog had not completely burned off. The men on the line were burning the first cigarette of the day and passing around a thermos of coffee, treating the start of their shift on the picket line exactly like the start of a workday. The scabs had arrived on their bus at dawn, greeted by some perfunctory jeering, but their appearance each morning had already assumed the status of just part of the daily routine.

Few strikers paid any attention when the empty flatbed truck pulled around to the back of the factory. A few trucks had come and gone, some removing equipment damaged by the explosion. The truck parked out of sight for about two hours, by which time Tom and I, like everyone else on the line, had completely forgotten about it.

When it pulled back out from behind the plant, to our shock, it was loaded with coffins, each snugly secured in its shipping container, the logos oriented neatly in the same direction. We rapidly counted the boxes as the truck rolled up, arriving at a consensus total of thirty-six.

“How’d they do it?” everyone was asking. There was genuine confusion all around. I believe every single person on that line thought it impossible to build a coffin without their individual presence on the line, much less the full group. That the company could without them produce any coffins, much less a full truckload, violated a fundamental tenet of the strike.

“There were some raw boxes in the warehouse,” someone answered. “Still, they would have to trim them up, completely finish them. That would be the hard part.”

“There must be more guys in there than we thought,” somebody said angrily, “there’s no way fifteen guys could finish thirty-six caskets in this much time.”

“It looks like you’re wrong about that.”

The heavily laden truck pulled up to Highway 60, and waited for a break in traffic. There was a momentary surge in hope as the truck sputtered and stalled. They watched breathlessly to see if there would be some kind of divine, mechanical intervention to strike that Kenworth dead and halt the progress of the scab caskets. Without
even getting out of the cab, however, the driver turned the key, restarted the engine, and pulled smoothly onto Highway 60. We heard him shift through his gears as he accelerated down the highway, on to a distributor’s warehouse on Dutchman’s Lane in Louisville. I knew that because Dad had exuded about the details of the shipment the night before.

The picket line lapsed into complete, despondent silence.

While the thugs seemed to be more or less restricted to plant property, Tom and I saw the blond thug in Miller’s on his first afternoon in Borden. Needing a break from the scorching heat, Tom and I pooled our spare change and determined that we had enough between us to split a can of Big Red at the store. More important than the cold drink itself, being actual paying customers meant that the bitchy Miller girls would have to allow us to hang out and enjoy their air-conditioning for a few minutes, a luxury neither of us had at home. The store advertised its AC on its main sign, a cartoon of a fan blowing on an ice cube, right next to the cartoon of the store’s famous five-hundred-pound wheel of cheese, a smiling rat gazing at it lustfully. Despite the folksy friendliness that the signs promised travelers up and down Highway 60, the Miller girls—Patsy, Loretta, and Maybelle—were the nastiest people in Borden. Vern Miller, their father and the store’s third-generation owner, had very successfully raised his little girls to believe that they were Borden royalty, superior to the mere factory workers and farmers who surrounded them. They wore rabbit fur coats in the winter and spent
their summers at the family condo in Destin, Florida. They became frustrated to learn as adults that despite their innate superiority, they could not leave Borden, but were required to stay and run the store. They lived for running off local kids who lingered too long, lest they suck up the air-conditioning and sully the atmosphere of the store for the tourists on their way back to Louisville.

To their credit, the place was an authentic general store. You could buy anything in there from mantles for your Coleman lantern, to a gallon of milk, to a tiny jar of Testor’s blue paint for your model airplane. Miller’s, along with the hardware store next door, pretty much made up Borden’s entire retail economy, so maybe the Miller girls were even a little crankier than normal, as they felt the financial pinch of the strike. Or maybe they could sense that Tom and I had only enough money for one can of soda between us. Or maybe they’d heard that my mom bought her groceries at the Kroger’s in New Albany. In any case, as Tom and I walked in the door and gratefully sucked in a breath of that artificially cold air, we were greeted by an unusually venomous stare from Patsy Miller at the cash register. We ignored her, and casually strolled through the store, past the giant wheel of cheese on its wooden spool, back to the lit coolers where we could begin our slow, deliberative soda-selection process.

To my surprise, Taffy Judd was also back there, at the cooler, staring longingly at the soda. It was the first time we’d seen her since the cave.

“Hey Taffy,” Tom and I both said, startling her. She turned to face us with a slight smile.

“Hey Tom. Hey Andy,” she said quietly. She went back
to staring at the dewy rows of icy soda cans: A&W, Welch’s Grape, Orange Crush, and Big Red, each too cold to hold more than a minute with bare hands. Taffy seemed like a different person than the girl we’d seen in the cave, confident, laughing, climbing those walls with dazzling agility. Here, she seemed just like I remembered her at school: small, a little tired, a little sad. And beautiful.

“Thirsty?” I asked her, after I failed to come up with anything more clever.

“You bet,” whispered Taffy.

Patsy Miller yelled at us from the register. “You kids get out of here if you don’t got no money. I ain’t a babysitter.”

“We got money,” said Tom.

“What about you? You’ve been back there twenty minutes, little girl.”

“We’ve got money,” I said, trying to match Tom’s defiant tone.

“Let me see it.”

We stepped forward, reaching in our pockets. We pulled out our grimy nickels and dimes, and displayed them for Patsy in the center of our sweaty palms.

Patsy grunted in acknowledgment. She then looked back at Taffy. “What about you, sugar? I know you don’t have any money, do you?”

Taffy glared at Patsy, studiously avoided looking at Tom and me, and then walked briskly to the door. Patsy watched her triumphantly. Taffy slammed her hands into the door as she left, making it fly open and ring the attached bell crazily.

“You best not break that door!” screamed Patsy. “You don’t have enough money for a Coke, I know you don’t have enough to fix that door!”

As Patsy screamed, and before the bell had even stopped ringing, a shadow filled the doorway. I thought for just a moment that Taffy might be coming back to tell Patsy what she could do with her ice-cold Coke cans. But the shadow grew and grew, until it was replaced by a towering, huge man. It was the blond guy, the chief thug.

“Hello, boys,” he said with a smile. Tom and I stared openmouthed. “Ma’am,” he said nodding at Patsy, who gave him an enormously pleased and surprised smile in return, her anger at Taffy evaporating before our eyes. As she started moving around nervously behind the register, I swear I thought she was looking for a pen so she could get his autograph.

He seemed bigger than the other men I knew: I thought as he walked by the blushing Patsy that he would bang his head on the overhead racks of cigarettes. He was scary. Not because he was a stranger—strangers came into Miller’s all the time, tourists looking for local color. At least those people, though, had the courtesy to act uncomfortable or perhaps even charmed by the simple hill folks of the area. This guy was neither uncomfortable nor charmed. He picked up a pound of baloney, a loaf of bread, and a cold six-pack of RC Cola with the ease of a man who might just do it every day for the rest of his life. He took his food to the register. Patsy, as I suspected, was not content to just bag his baloney and give him his change.