Over and Under (19 page)

“Yessir,” I said. “I’m starving.”

“Good, good, good!” he said, punching me hard on the shoulder. We found our way to the table, as the rest of the clan rattled downstairs, shouting, fighting, and laughing as they came. A fat, slumbering baby was placed next to Mr. Kruer at the head of the table, and he would occasionally give the bassinet a gentle poke with his toe to rock her as we ate.

I saw no signs of financial strain beyond my glass of peach Kool-Aid, though I diligently searched the kitchen for differences between labor and management. Our houses certainly were dramatically different. Local folklore had it that the farmer who built our house had modeled it on his daughter’s dollhouse—it did have more gingerbread trim and a more steeply pitched roof than was typical in the area. I saw no overt pro-union posters or anything like that
in Tom’s house—although I remembered his dad did have a faded Local 1096 sticker on the bumper of his truck. Another difference: hunting trophies—deer, bass, and turkey—hung in an arc over the Kruers’ fireplace. My mom didn’t allow dead animals on the wall and we never used the fireplace. When I asked why once, after a winter evening at Tom’s, she said that anyone who had ever depended on game for food and wood for heat found it hard to get pleasure from such things. “It’s the same reason I don’t put an outhouse in the front yard and plant daisies around it,” she told me.

“Have some more.” Tom’s dad ladled more beans into my bowl. “You’re practically family.”

“Thank you,” I replied, as much for the family comment as for the food.

Tom’s mother correctly interpreted my gratitude. “Oh, being a Kruer is no big deal,” she said. “Look how many of them there are!”

I laughed, but that was really it, the biggest difference between our two houses: the number of nieces, nephews, and cousins pictured on the walls. Weddings, confirmations, baptisms, and first communions were commemorated on every inch of available wall space, interchangeable German faces and forced smiles looking back at me in their stiff sport coats and wide clip-on ties, usually with a dour Catholic priest close by in the frame. At my house, one whole side of the family was a secret, which by itself kept the number of family photos down. But even on my dad’s side, the families tended to be small. Tom was one of six kids. Tom’s dad was the youngest of ten, and had slept in a sleeping bag in the middle of their small living room until
his oldest brother got married, moved out, and started cranking out kids of his own. Tom’s mother was a Huber, one of the biggest clans around. I remembered my dad saying once that “Grays are custom made; Hubers are mass produced.” I concluded that there was some kind of complicated link between unionism, Catholicism, and large, devoted families.

“Are you looking forward to high school?” Mr. Kruer asked me as I worked my way through my third bowl of beans.

I rolled my eyes, making him laugh.

“But you do so good in school!” said Mrs. Kruer. “Aren’t you proud of yourself? I always see you on the honor roll in the
Banner-Gazette.”

“I guess so,” I said. In fact, schoolwork was something I put absolutely no effort into, and consequently took little pride in. They might as well have asked me if I was proud of last month’s lunar eclipse.

“He’s humble,” said Mr. Kruer. “He’s smart in school. Just like his daddy was.”

“Thank you,” I mumbled, looking down at my bowl. The rest of the kids quickly took up the conversation, rapidly increasing the volume, as if they sensed my embarrassment at the praise and wanted to help me out. The noise built steadily until one of the sisters called one of the brothers a “dumb-ass.” After an infinitesimal moment of silence came a tidal wave of yelled accusations and counteraccusations. At that point, all of the siblings except Tom and the sleeping baby accepted Mrs. Kruer’s invitation to leave the table. They clamored upstairs where the argument continued.

“Good riddance,” said George Kruer as the kitchen went suddenly quiet. “Now, Andy, weren’t you telling us how smart you are?”

“Leave the boy alone,” said Mrs. Kruer as he and Tom laughed.

“All right, all right,” said Mr. Kruer. He held up an empty coffee cup. “Momma, is there any…”

He stopped in mid-request.

We followed his eyes to the front window. A rattling truck with two unaligned headlights passed the house. The truck slowed at the foot of the Kruers’ driveway, and then the struggling engine gunned and then it continued on to where the road ended, just out of our sight. Since Tom’s house was the last on the dead-end road, it was something we paid some attention to, but it was not quite unusual enough to be alarming, especially in the summertime. Sometimes hunters parked back there. More often it was kids looking for an isolated place to make out, drink beer, or smoke a joint. I knew if enough time passed without seeing that truck heading the other direction, Tom’s dad would walk back there to investigate with a .38 tucked in his belt.

The silence at the dinner table was broken when Tom’s dad stood up, backed two steps away from the table, and farted explosively.

“Good Lord, George,” said Tom’s mom, her mouth open in horror. Tom was laughing so hard he had to put his forehead down on the table.

“I thought it was okay as long as I wasn’t at the table,” said Mr. Kruer, his arms stretched out apologetically. “Isn’t that the rule?” He tapped the pack of Swisher Sweets in his shirt pocket and pointed at the back door.

“Yes, please,” said his wife. “Go outside and be disgusting.”

“You’re the one who made beans,” he said. He quickly exited out the back door, a huge Cheshire cat grin on his face.

“Andy,” said Mrs. Kruer, “do me a favor and don’t tell your momma and daddy what it’s really like over here.”

I couldn’t think of a polite response, so I finished what remained of my beans, wiping the bowl clean with a chunk of corn bread. At that point, I decided I’d better honor my mother’s request that I not make a pig of myself. I started to move toward Mrs. Kruer at the sink with my bowl in hand.

“Thank you for dinner, Mrs. Kruer.”

“Sit yourself down,” she said, rejecting my attempt to help clean up. “I’ve got six kids to help me clean up this mess.” It did not appear to me that any of them intended to help her. It sounded more like they were upstairs destroying the cabin’s entire second story.

“Well, I better get going, then,” I said.

She wiped her hands on the dish towel and pulled me into a close hug. She smelled pleasantly of smoked ham.

“Thanks again,” I said.

“Tom, walk him home,” she ordered. Tom started to get up.

“No, that’s okay,” I said. “Really.” I was actually looking forward to a few minutes of silence, a little solitude. A couple of hours in Tom’s frenetic house sometimes did that to me. At the door, Tom and I gave each other a quick look to confirm that we’d see each other later that night.

I walked alone up the Kruers’ long, dark, gravel driveway
to Cabin Hill Road, a good quarter-mile hike in itself. I turned right, toward my house. I could have walked in a quicker, straighter route over a well-traveled path in the woods, but I didn’t feel like stumbling onto the source of that earlier mysterious noise Tom and I had heard, whether it was Solinski, the fugitives, Taffy’s dad, or some other supernatural horror. At least not without Tom or my M6 at hand. The gravel road looked blue in the moonlight. I kicked the bigger rocks with the tip of my shoe as I walked, seeing how far and how straight I could send them down the road.

I heard the truck coming back the other way before I saw it. The roar made it sound a lot faster than it was; in fact, it was crawling toward me in a slow-moving cloud of yellow light and acrid smoke. I could have turned and hustled back to the Kruers, but, not for the last time, fear of looking like a pussy kept me standing in harm’s way.

The rider was leaning out the passenger-side window to speak to me as the truck pulled alongside. He was wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves ripped off. A sloppy homemade purple tattoo of a skull grinned at me from his shoulder. All I could see of the driver was the red tip of his cigarette glowing in the darkness of the cab’s interior. A double gun rack in the rear window held a twenty-gauge shotgun above a large carpenter’s level.

“How you doin’, boy?” the passenger said out the window with exaggerated friendliness. He had hazy, drunk eyes and the sour smell of liquor rolled out of the cab.

“Just fine,” I said. The truck sputtered like it was about to die, but then coughed itself back to life. It backfired. I jumped, making the man giggle.

“Hey, ain’t you Mr. Gus Gray’s boy?” he asked when the truck quieted back down. A drunken smile exposed gums stained by years of chaw.

“Why?” I asked. Something in the way he emphasized the word “mister” made me hesitate.

“Come on now,” he said. “You’re Gray’s boy, ain’t you?”

I was about to tell him that in fact I was, when George Kruer appeared suddenly at my side.

“Can I help you with something?” he said in a loud voice, a cigar clinched in his perfect teeth. He put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close.

“We’re looking for Gus Gray’s house,” said the passenger again, dropping the fake smile and glowering defensively at us now. “We know he lives up here somewheres. We just want to tell him somethin’.”

“All right,” said Tom’s dad. “I’m Gus Gray. Now what the fuck do you want?”

The driver spoke for the first time. “That ain’t Gus Gray,” he growled. He then gunned the truck, and without another word they jerked away from us as loud as a rocket, backfiring and throwing gravel behind them each time the engine caught and propelled them down the road.

A few seconds later we heard the truck’s roar subside. I can’t say I was completely surprised when I heard a shotgun blast, followed by the roar of the truck driving into the distance.

George Kruer and I ran down the road. Our mailbox had been obliterated; the white post stood headless. My dad and mom were already standing there inspecting the damage by the time we ran up. Dad saw me run up.

“Get inside!” he shouted.

“I was at the Kruers …”

“Goddamn it, go inside!” Dad had the same look in his eyes he had the night of the tornado—mortal danger swirled in the air and he didn’t want my participation; he wanted me locked safely away. I tried to sputter out what had happened as he pulled me by the elbow down the driveway.

Sheriff Kohl drove up. I broke free from Dad, and stepped aside to put the cruiser between us. As he stepped back, Dad seemed to notice for the first time that George Kruer was there, too, looking at the ground sheepishly.

Kohl rolled to a stop and stepped slowly out of his car. He stared at the splintered remains of our mailbox.

“Good Lord.” He looked at Dad. “Did you see them?”

“No. We didn’t see anything.”

“I saw them,” I said. All eyes swung to me. “I talked to them.”

I told my story: the conversation with the men and how George Kruer heroically ran them off. Mom’s jaw dropped. Kruer concurred tersely and then walked home.

The sheriff broadcasted my description of the truck on his radio, and just a few minutes later his deputy radioed back to report that he had arrested the men as they pushed their stalled truck across the railroad tracks at the bottom of the hill. We found out later that one of them, the driver, was in fact a dues-paying member of Local 1096, and worked for my dad in the finish room. My dad said he couldn’t remember anything he’d ever done to piss the man off. The other was just a troublemaker from out in the county who did just enough construction work to keep himself in Sterling Beer and Levi Garrett tobacco. In addition to being charged with
destroying our mailbox and drunk driving, the sheriff charged them with the vandalism to our garage door. They denied everything except the drunk driving.

My parents sent me upstairs when the sheriff left. They did their best to keep their voices low.

“My God,” my father said downstairs. I heard the fear in his voice, the recognition of the escalation: first the garage door, now a gunshot. At the same time, now that the immediate crisis had passed, I knew he would try to explain in that engineer’s calm way why the world was still a rational place. Once at King’s Island in Cincinnati, Dad and I rode the tallest wooden roller coaster in the world, both of us crammed into the same small car. The entire time, while I laughed and screamed, he talked of vector addition and potential energy, newtons and ergs. The funny thing was, he enjoyed the ride every bit as much as I did. It was just the way he saw the world, and his role in our family: to analyze, to study, to strip situations of their drama. It was Mom’s role to resist.

“They painted a threat on our garage door! Two crazy men were threatening Andy!”

“I know…I know.”

“With a couple of loaded guns in their truck and a fifth of whiskey in their bellies!”

Dad paused. “Sure enough, you mix enough whiskey and gunpowder together with those rednecks and a lot of bad things can happen.”

“Thank God for Sheriff Kohl. He caught them in two minutes.”

At my mom’s mention of the sheriff, something shifted
in Dad’s voice. “Well, if he’d been doing his job right, maybe he would’ve stopped them before they even got up here.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“If you let these people set cars on fire in the middle of a state highway, I guess we shouldn’t act surprised when they think they can drive up and down Cabin Hill Road looking for trouble and get away with it.”

“These people?”

“Yes,
these people.
People who blow things up. The people who killed Don Strange. The people who are up here shooting our mailbox while Sheriff Kohl is calling bingo down at the Mason’s Lodge, or whatever the hell he was doing.”

“I’m grateful Sheriff Kohl is in this town, or I do believe everything would be worse. I am sure of it.”

“Cricket, I am proud of you for helping him out, especially these last few weeks, I truly am.” I wondered what he meant by that. I was certain it had something to do with the midnight phone calls.

“But?”

“But I swear sometimes I get tired of living in Sheriff Kohl’s campaign headquarters. The fact is, if there was law and order in this town the way there ought to be, Sheriff Kohl wouldn’t have to ride up here and save the day.”