Over and Under (4 page)

“Holy shit,” said Tom, as we slapped the dirt off ourselves. It was the peculiar bright orange mud that was characteristic of our local caves. We were coated in the stuff from head to toe.

“That sucked,” I said, trying to sound unfazed.

Tom moved across the chamber, to where the crack entered at the other end. “I wonder if there’s a better way through,” he said, eyeing the length of it across the wall. I remained silent in a way that let him know I had no intention of crawling into that crack ever again. “It looks wider over here,” he said.

“Not to me.”

Suddenly Tom heard something I didn’t. “What was that?” he whispered.

A moment later, a dozen smiling, jabbering tourists rounded the corner, led by a man in the faux park ranger’s shirt and wide-brimmed hat of the Squire Boone tour guide. As they came into view, hidden electric lights clicked on, dramatically underlighting the chamber’s formations in garish green and blue. The guide was walking backward, talking to the group, so the paying customers saw us before he did: two filthy, orange boys squinting at the light, one of them wearing nothing but his Fruit-of-the-Looms.

The guide turned to face us and there was a split second when we all just stared at one another. Then Tom and I sprinted directly toward them as the group eagerly parted.

We hauled ass down the well-lit tour path. Ahead of us we heard the squawk of someone shouting through a walkie-talkie and saw the herky-jerky movement of a flashlight in the hands of someone at a dead run. Tom took a quick right and I followed him, into a room that was lit
with green and red lights, a room whose theme I remembered from a past school trip as having something to do with a pile of rocks shaped like a Christmas tree. Through that room and into the next: we ran directly toward the dusty coffin of Squire Boone, propped up on what looked like sawhorses, when Tom took another sharp turn. We splashed across a shallow, slow stream—I wondered what the sad blind fish might think of the commotion—and into the safety of an unlit, untraveled passageway, where deep, loose gravel made running tough. I knew the tour guides would hesitate before following us this far off the path. I also knew from Tom’s speed that he must have had some notion of where he was going. I trusted him completely; his sense of direction in the caves was uncanny.

We ran like scalded dogs up the path, until I saw narrow lines of light ahead of us, the unmistakable, welcoming brightness of natural sunlight. The two lines of light intersected at a perfect right angle, a beacon of something that had to be man-made. We got closer and I saw that the light outlined a metal door set into the rock by some enterprising cave owner, an attempt at keeping nonpaying customers like us out. It was not, however, designed to keep anyone in. Tom and I hit the door with our shoulders at the same time and it flew open, hurling us into the blinding sunlight, the heat, and the blanketing humidity.

We slammed the door behind us and quickly assessed the situation. We were alone, for the moment. Tom and I ran to the top of a low ridge to get a better look at the landscape and to figure out exactly where we were. We saw the tall knobs in the distance, heard traffic on Highway 60, and saw the slightest discoloration of sunset on the western
sky. We knew that the Ohio River, and beyond that Kentucky, must be just over the next ridgeline. A small aluminum fishing boat with a Kentucky license sticker on its bow was turned over by the cave door, another indication that the big river was nearby. As we ran by the boat, we stopped long enough to lift it up, to confirm that there were good oars stored beneath it, and that it looked generally river-worthy. Despite our mad rush, taking inventory of a discovery that valuable in the woods came automatically.

Having fixed our position in the woods, we ran all the way back to my house, staying off the roads and hidden in the trees because of Tom’s pants-less condition. At my house, both cars were in the driveway, meaning both Mom and Dad were home, which I still wasn’t used to at this early hour. Tom and I snuck in the back door when I heard Mom vacuuming in front. We didn’t have to sneak by any siblings—to my perpetual dismay, I was an only child, a rarity in a land of sprawling German-Catholic clans. In my room, Tom put on a pair of my pants and old sneakers over his orange-stained socks. Tom’s pants and shoes, I knew, would be forever preserved in the cave, or at least until disturbed by another reckless boy or some wondering archaeologist centuries in the future.

I walked with Tom to the intersection of Cabin Hill Road and our driveway, the relief from having gotten away unscathed starting to settle in. I saw a turkey hop deeper into the woods as we approached, effectively disappearing into the green. Had it been winter, after the leaves fell and the scrub died off, we could have watched that turkey run for a thousand yards, and followed its tracks in the snow for miles. We could have seen right through the trees down to
Highway 60, perhaps even to the black smudge on the road where the Chrysler had burned. It was August, though, and the woods were choked with vegetation; the turkey could feel secure. I couldn’t even see the deep gorge that marked our property line, barely a half mile away.

“Want to eat supper here?” I asked.

“Nah. I’m eating with my dad on the picket line—they’re cooking burgers.”

“Cool.” I was insanely jealous. “Hey,” I asked, always eager to be part of the strike conversation. “What’s a ‘scab’ anyway? Are they the guys that beat everybody up?”

“Nah,” said Tom, “those are the thugs. The scabs are the guys that steal everybody’s jobs.”

With that, Tom walked off, occasionally reaching back to hike up my slightly too-large jeans.

As I walked into our house through the basement door, I heard that the vacuuming had stopped. My parents were in the kitchen arguing in tense low voices. They fought so seldom that I could tell they weren’t very good at it—their rhythm was off, inexperienced as they were in disagreeing with each other on any matter of substance. It was far more common, if I came home unexpectedly early, to find them blushing on the couch and straightening their clothes.

“I don’t want you turning our home into some kind of headquarters,” my mother whispered. My ears perked up at this. I imagined midnight gatherings, code words, and trench coats: a speaking role finally in the strike drama. My father laughed in a way that let both my mother and me know we were being ridiculous.

“Cricket, he wants to talk to me here. What was I supposed to tell him? He’s been over here a thousand times.”

“Tell him he can come over for supper any time he likes, but to keep work at the plant. Where it belongs.”

My father muttered something that sounded like a muted capitulation as I reached the top of the stairs. Despite the strike, Dad was in his work clothes: a short-sleeved white dress shirt; a striped, wide tie hanging loosely around his neck; and some kind of eyepiece on a lanyard, a device that measured the degree of gloss on finished caskets. Stacks of folders and envelopes embossed with the Borden Casket Company logo were on the kitchen table in front of him. Mom turned away from both of us and began noisily stacking clean glasses in the cupboard.

My mother was from Kentucky, but other than that her childhood was almost a complete mystery to me. Not only had I never met a single blood relative of my mother’s, I’d never even seen a family photograph. I didn’t know how many siblings she had, what her father did for a living, or what town she’d called home. Once in a great while Mom would drop some tiny clue about her past: a story about a brother in a bloody fistfight, a family legend about a relative’s coffin washed away in a flood, a sad memory of charity packages at Christmastime. I grabbed each fragment as it came my way, hoping someday to assemble them into a full mosaic that would tell me her story, which was, after all, half of my story. I was entitled to it.

Not all the gaps in my mother’s story took place in the murky past. She was an ardent admirer of Sheriff Kohl’s, had worked on his campaign, and Sheriff Kohl had the
honor of being the only nonfemale candidate for office to ever have a sign in our front yard. The sheriff admired my mother as well, singling her out at campaign events for praise and long, laughter-filled conversations. Mom periodically took calls from him in the middle of the night, quick calls that resulted in her hurriedly leaving us, sometimes until the next morning when she would come home frazzled and exhausted. I tried and tried, but could never think of a single good explanation for Mom’s behavior. And I knew from Dad’s example that I was not to ask about her secrets, no matter how much they bothered me.

Because she was not from Borden, my mother was also a mystery to our neighbors. Without their ancestors knowing her ancestors, they could only make vague guesses about her true nature, about whether she might be prone to cancer, drinking, or dishonesty. Her self-taught feminism kept the neighbors off-balance as well—she went to meetings and rallies in Louisville, she liked to loan books by Kate Millett and Betty Friedan to the unsuspecting, and she confused cashiers everywhere with Susan B. Anthony dollars. Let it be said, however, that in Borden, Indiana, in 1979, her feminism was too bizarre to seem threatening. Down Old Township Road, Red Vogel liked to paint welcoming messages to UFOs on the roof of his mobile home; my mom’s behavior was regarded similarly. It was strange, but more or less harmless. My mother was beautiful, well-liked, and active in church and at my school. Cricket Gray was just somewhat unknowable to my neighbors, as she was to me.

My father, on the other hand, was an open book, born and raised in Borden, but educated at Purdue where he
received a degree in aeronautical engineering—he used to say that he was too dumb at the time to realize it was a smart guy’s degree. I had heard repeatedly all the mild escapades of his youth, not just from him, but from all of our neighbors who had grown up with him and witnessed it all: the time he tripped on the stage at junior high school graduation, the time he’d gotten his car stuck in the mud on prom night, the successful carpet cleaning business he’d run during summers home from Purdue. Neil Armstrong had been a classmate of his in West Lafayette. Everybody in Borden knew it.

Although my father had employed his degree for twenty years making wooden coffins instead of rocket ships, he still liked to pepper his speech with space-age terminology. When people asked him why he had gotten a good education like that only to return to Borden, he would say that he had “failed to achieve escape velocity.”

He spied me on the steps. “What’s going on, my man?” Mom didn’t turn around from the cabinets she was furiously organizing.

“Nothin’,” I said. He could tell I was happy to see him, hours before he usually got home, and this in turn made him happy. He grabbed my arms and pulled me closer in a kind of half-hug. “What’s going on?” I knew my dad had a tendency to be pathologically honest under direct questioning.

“I’ve got a little meeting here tonight,” he said. “No big deal.”

“Here?” I said. I knew it had to have something to do with the strike. “Who with?”

My father suddenly noticed my orange hue, and took the opportunity to change the subject. “Good Lord, you
are filthy,” he said with real admiration in his voice. “What have you been doing all day?”

I tried to think of what I had done that day that would alarm my parents the least. “Tom and I saw them burn up a car down at the picket line.”

“You watched?” His grip on my arms tightened. Mom turned around, real concern in her eyes.

“Whose car did they burn? Don’s?” she asked.

“It was a junk car,” my father said dismissively, over-compensating in his attempt to sound casual about the whole thing. “I heard it didn’t even have an engine in it.”

“Did Sheriff Kohl come?” my mother asked me.

“Of course not,” Dad said sourly, “they could burn that plant to the ground and Kohl wouldn’t risk losing a vote by turning his siren on.” His comment seemed designed to piss off Mom.

“I guess you think he should go down there and crack some heads,” my mother snapped. “You want him to break out the clubs? Beat some people up to save a junk car?”

“I want him to keep the peace,” my father said. “I think I heard him say he’d do that in one of the eight hundred campaign speeches I had to sit through.”

The whole exchange had confused the hell out of me. “Don’t we want the strikers to win?” I asked. “Tom’s dad says they work their butts off and the owners make all the money.”

There was an extended tense silence. I could tell I had said something wrong. In a spastic kid’s errant strategy, I decided it was best just to keep talking. “Tom’s dad says they deserve doctor cards, and that they have to do something now if they ever want to get ahead.”

My mother put her hands on her hips and eyed my father. Dad chose his next words carefully.

“What none of us want,” he said in measured tones, “is for that factory to close. The strikers don’t realize that a lot of factories like ours are going south, or to Mexico, or even further.”

“How could the Borden Casket Company move away from Borden?”

“It will if the owners wake up tomorrow and decide that keeping the plant here isn’t worth the trouble,” he answered. “Then where will Borden be? Where will Tom’s dad be?”

“Oh,” I said. Everything I had heard on the picket line suddenly seemed wrong. “Maybe you should go down on the picket line and tell them all that.”

“Son, they won’t listen to me down on that picket line. I’m management.”

Now I was really confused. “I thought…” I strained for the right words. Unlike Tom, I had not mastered the vocabulary of collective bargaining. “I thought you
worked
there.”

After a pause, Mom and Dad both burst out laughing. Although I was still confused, I was happy that my words had somehow swept the tension out of our little home just as I had brought it in. Dad began talking in a more relaxed, instructive tone, the same tone he used to explain to me why water towers were necessary, how the refrigerator worked, or why all rocks, no matter how big, take two seconds to fall fifty feet.