Over and Under (20 page)

“I think it was George Kruer who saved the day,” she responded. “If he hadn’t come up when he did …”

“What?” my father barked. He was angry that others had rescued me, a job that belonged to him: George Kruer pretending to be my father. “Are you saying Kruer saved Andy’s life?” He made it sound like the most ridiculous idea in the world.

“I’m saying it’s a possibility. There are a lot of angry, desperate people out there right now.”

“And is that my fault? What would you have me do about it?” His language always took a turn for the formal when he got defensive, a habit that infuriated my mother.

“First, you can stop the stupid jealousy.”

My father threw his hands in the air in frustration and walked away just as I came down the stairs.

For the next few minutes the tension was stifling. My parents weren’t exactly fighting any longer, but they were battling. In the kitchen, Mom slammed drawers and cabinet doors as she furiously neatened. Dad turned the volume of the television up louder than the level they had agreed upon after years of complicated marital negotiations.

I sat next to Dad and watched President Carter on the eleven o’clock news. To my shock, the president was actually in southern Indiana—he was making a surprise visit to the river town of English, in Crawford County, which had been stricken by floods. I couldn’t believe the president would stop by English, which flooded each and every year, and not come up to Borden where a real crisis brewed.

“Look at that,” I said, wanting Dad’s opinion on why the president had chosen their tragedy over ours. “English.”

“Godforsaken place,” my dad grunted.

“Why do you think…” I started to ask. I gave up, though, as Mom roared into the family room behind the vacuum cleaner, and not even Dad’s extra volume could compete. He pretended to watch the news unaffected, but I went up to my room.

I read about the labor movement in my red
Britannica.
There was information about CIO organizer John L.
Lewis, a name I vaguely remembered my mother referring to reverently. There was a definition of picketing that didn’t sound the least bit familiar:
workers march up and down in front of the company building carrying signs telling the public that the employer is “unfair” to them.
All told, the article was about as exciting and as useful to me as the information on Labrador, Canada, that followed it, and explained little of the drama in my town or in my home. I fell asleep trying to discern the difference between a business agent and an organizer.

Tom tapped on my window. I’d been sleeping lightly, knowing he was coming. I stood up and listened for a moment, verifying that no one else was awake. I slipped out quietly and followed him down the porch.

“I think your dad saved my ass,” I whispered as we crossed the yard.

“I knew something happened, he was gone so long, then he comes home and mumbles to my mom for an hour in the kitchen. What happened?”

“Two rednecks shot up our mailbox,” I said. “But they were talking to me before that, when your dad came up and ran them off.”

“Shit! What do you think would have happened if he hadn’t showed up?”

I thought it over. “I don’t know. I don’t know if they would’ve shot me.”

“They wouldn’t have shot you,” said Tom. He thought I was bragging to say so.

“They were pretty drunk. Maybe they would have beat
me up, if they would have found out who I was before your dad got there.”

“How would they find out who you were?” said Tom.

I wasn’t about to confess that I was going to tell them myself, a tactical mistake I could not imagine him ever making. “I don’t know,” I said. We crossed the threshold from mowed grass into primeval forest. The sounds of domesticated animals, lowing cows and lonely hounds, faded as we entered a world of wild noises: crickets, cicadas, and swarms of the undiscovered and unidentifiable.

We soon approached the bend where we’d heard the branch snap. We stopped talking and began watching our steps, avoiding any noise that would give us away. I heard Silver Creek gurgling in the distance when Tom turned off the path.

I knew suddenly where he was leading us. Tom had mentally drawn a line through the noises we’d heard in the woods as they raced away from us, and that line led down the hill to an odd rock formation we had always called “the fort.” We stopped talking as we got close, walking slowly and flat-footed to remain quiet. I started paying close attention to my breath, and to every twig in the path, achieving a kind of silence I only could at night. Tom, just in front of me, did the same, absolutely noiseless as we approached the fort. I saw it in front of me. Actually I saw it by not seeing it, a darkness near the ground where it obscured the silhouette of the trees beyond. We’d been to the fort a thousand times, but as the hair stood up on my neck, I realized that I had always before avoided it in the dark.

The fort was a large circle of huge rectangular stones
standing on end that had been a centerpiece of our childhood war gaming. The whole formation was about fifty yards in diameter. The interior of the fort was sunken, lower than the surrounding ground. From the outside, the dark, mossy rock walls of the fort were only a couple of feet high. From the inside, they were as high as ten feet. This made the fort a place of supreme natural cover. From the outside, you could barely see it. From inside, you had the perfect hiding spot, a place where you could stand completely upright and not be seen outside the circle. Years ago, Tom and I had discovered that we could stand at opposite ends of the circle whispering, and the sound would be amplified as if we were standing right next to each other. It was a weird place, a place that compelled you to think about things like human sacrifice and primitive religion. Once Tom and I snuck up on four sweaty day hikers from Louisville in the fort, as they stood in the middle of the circle and contemplated their “discovery.” When Tom and I jumped down from the wall, they all yelped and nearly jumped right out of their pricey-looking backpacks. And that was in broad daylight.

Because of the low ground inside, one theory held that the fort was a remnant of a cave that had collapsed in on itself. The more popular explanation, and the one that Tom and I always chose to believe, was that the fort had been constructed centuries before Christopher Columbus by a Welsh prince named Madoc.

Most versions of the legend went something like this: a thousand years ago or so, Madoc, the illegitimate son of a Welsh king, left Wales and discovered the New World with a group of colonists. Putting ashore around what would be
called Mobile Bay, Alabama, Madoc and his crew made their way inland, leaving a string of crude fortifications along the way. They stopped to make their permanent home near the Ohio River. By the time the next batch of Europeans arrived, three or four centuries later, the Welshmen had been completely assimilated by the Indians and the land, although the European explorers were surprised to discover Indians who fished from basketlike boats reminiscent of old Wales. In 1803, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark began their famous expedition in southern Indiana, where Silver Creek meets the Ohio, in my county, a county named for William Clark’s brother. Two years into their journey, Lewis and Clark were stunned to discover on the plains a dying tribe of fair-haired Indians who spoke a language that sounded eerily like Welsh.

Like so many things hidden in our woods, scholars dismissed the legend of Madoc, always explaining away the evidence as it would occasionally come to light. During the construction of the Big Four Bridge across the Ohio River in 1888, a leather bag of ancient Roman coins was discovered buried in the murk. In 1968, a helmet with Welsh inscriptions was discovered during the development of a shopping mall in Clarksville. The coins, said the professors, must have been lost by a collector. The helmet was fake. And our fort, as creepy and geometric as Stonehenge, was a sinkhole.

Tom scampered off the path onto the gentle slope that led to the wall of the fort, hunched over to stay low. I followed him. Tom got to the wall slightly before I did, and what he saw surprised him so much it stood him up straight.

“Oh, shit.” he said. I reached his side and looked down. Inside the bowl of the fort was a neat camp: a Coleman two-man dome tent, two nylon jungle hammocks slung between some slight trees, and a campfire that we hadn’t seen until we were on the wall.

“Shit.”

Someone grabbed my elbow. An instant later, someone lunged at Tom noisily and did the same to him, as he tried to jerk away.

“Hello, boys,” said the one grabbing Tom. Without even looking, I knew with absolute certainty that the one grabbing my arm was Guthrie Kruer. Only a local could have snuck up on me like that.

As they pushed us down into the fort, I took stock of the guns spread throughout their camp. There was a .22 Winchester rifle with a nice scope leaning on a tree. Next to that was an expensive twelve-gauge shotgun designed for turkey hunting, every inch of it camouflaged with green splotches in an attempt to gain an advantage over the tricky birds. On a tree stump next to the tent lay a shiny stainless-steel .38 Colt revolver. I was terrified, but not by the guns themselves. It would have been far stranger for Tom and I to come upon adults wandering around in the woods without guns. What alarmed me more was what the men had planned for dinner. A sizable box turtle had been placed on its back near the fire so it couldn’t get away, its leathery legs moving helplessly in the air. Next to it was a scrawny but neatly cleaned rabbit crucified on a spit made of twigs. It was a puny thing, something no normal person would have bothered to shoot, much less eat. That wasn’t the scary part. As every Borden boy knew, until the first
week of November, rabbits were out of season. Sanders and Kruer were killers and fugitives, I already knew, but that scrawny, contraband rabbit was to me an ultimate sign of lawlessness and desperation.

Kruer positioned me with surprising gentleness next to the campfire, then walked over to the tree stump, pushed the Colt revolver aside, and wearily sat down. Sanders, who had Tom, shoved him beside me, and placed his hands on his hips in an attempt to look authoritative.

“What are you boys doin’ out here?” he said loudly. “Shootin’ and carryin’ on?” Tom and I didn’t have our guns with us. It confirmed that he must have been the one watching us earlier that afternoon, the source of the mysterious noise.

“Nothin’,” I said, with as much bravado as I could muster. Tom didn’t say anything. My mind was running a thousand miles an hour, as I calculated the best escape route from the camp, the best way over the wall of the fort, the best way to run from this mess. There was one rock I knew, behind us, that had some indentations that might serve as toeholds in a pinch. I wondered how fast I could fly up and over it with a running start. If I made the slightest move, no matter how crazy, I knew Tom would follow me. My muscles tense, I stood on the balls of my feet, ready to do the same for him.

“Well, as you young men know,” he continued, “this here is Borden Casket Company property, and you boys are
trespassing!”
He jabbed his finger at the smudged BCC company logo on his dirty jacket, which I hadn’t noticed up to that point. “We’re guards for the company.”

I didn’t look at Tom, but if I hadn’t been so scared I
would have laughed. I wanted to tell Sanders that I’d seen the actual guards hired by the company, and that they had a more stringent dress code. He continued.

“We’re security guards, and I might just have the police come out here and take you boys to jail.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll tell them you’re poaching rabbit.”

As Sanders stepped closer, Tom punched my side in warning, which surprised me—he was usually the first to challenge anyone in authority, as he had earlier in the day with Solinski. This seemed to be one of those rare times when he sensed real danger. Sanders got in my face, and everything about him, including his breath, smelled like campfire smoke. It was as if he were about to burst into flames himself.

“Don’t sass me, you little shit,” he said, poking me in the chest. My instincts told me that I was about to get the shit kicked out of me. I leaned back slightly, ready to bolt. Just in time, Kruer came off his tree stump and calmly pulled his partner back. He shook his head as he regained his composure, and returned to the script he had apparently prepared for our little meeting.

“Well, you seem like good boys,” he said, incongruously just seconds after calling me a little shit. Sanders seemed to think we actually bought into the charade, that there might be two guards out there camping in the woods. There was something tangibly off about him. I would recognize it later in life as a characteristic of real craziness, the inability to keep track of even the reality inside your own head. He cleared his throat and spit a gob far into the darkness. Kruer looked on, completely miserable at the
spectacle. “I’ll tell you what I can do. Just leave, don’t come back here, and don’t tell anyone about our little talk. If you do that, then I won’t have to get the police involved. Okay?” He gave us a lupine smile.

“Sure,” I said, the relief obvious in my voice. I wanted nothing more than to get away. Tom and I started to back slowly away from the fire.

“Hey,” said Kruer quietly. “Are those twenty-twos? Can you spare some?” He had heard the shells jingling together in Tom’s pocket. Surprising me, Tom reached in his pocket, pulled out the small handful of shells, and walked over so he could drop them in his hand. He gave Tom a weak smile in return, and closed his fingers around the gift.

Tom and I continued walking out of the fort with fake assuredness. We climbed up the rock I had been thinking of; my toes did fit neatly into the crevices I had remembered. We could have scooted up it in a hurry had that been necessary. As soon as we climbed to the top of the wall, Tom turned and shouted back at the men.

“You don’t want to eat that turtle,” Tom yelled.

“Why not?” yelled Sanders with a smirk. “Haven’t you ever heard of turtle soup?”

“Those box turtles eat poison mushrooms,” said Tom. “The poison builds up in the meat. It don’t hurt them, but it’ll kill you.”