Over and Under (6 page)

We jumped over the low stone wall that surrounded the cemetery, and by the light of the graveyard’s single security light I saw that Tom’s dad had not exaggerated. It was a whole train full of them, one per flatcar, gun barrels raised jauntily and pointing in the general direction of the high school. The tanks extended as far as we could see in both directions.

“Holy shit,” we both said. We dodged gravestones as we sprinted to get closer.

The tanks were painted a dark forest green—we were still painting our tanks for jungle duty rather than the sandy colors of the desert in 1979. We got close enough to one to read the indecipherable sequence of white numbers stenciled on its body. It was beautiful, unblemished. The wheels were fascinating to me. I had seen tanks on television, and drawn them on notebooks, so I knew what they looked like in a cartoonish, GI Joe kind of way. Up close, though, I saw how the wheels linked into the track, and how heavy-duty that track appeared. I had always imagined the
track of a tank to be a kind of conveyor, like one of the soft belts that carried caskets around the factory. In fact, the belt was a complicated interlocking flat metal chain, a machine unto itself. The pieces of the belt looked like steel teeth, and they fit together as precisely as a mosaic. It looked like a device designed to crush rocks into powder.

A ladder of steel rungs led up the side of the tank. The second I saw those rungs, I knew where Tom would end up.

“Let’s go on up,” he said, reading my thoughts.

“No. No damn way.”

“Why not?” He was astonished that I would pass on such an opportunity.

“Too dangerous.”

“What’s dangerous about it?” he asked. “We’ve gone up on train cars before. Dozens of times.”

That was true—once we had spent an afternoon climbing inside musty L&N boxcars looking for hoboes. All we found was a used condom, the meaning of which Tom had to explain to me.

“These are tanks!”

“What’s the difference? The thing ain’t gonna start shooting just ’cause we climb up on it.”

“No way.” I shook my head.

He reached for the bottom rung and started climbing up.

“Tom!” I said, a little loudly. He didn’t look down as he continued on up.

He climbed all the way up to the turret, the highest point. He scurried all over it, examining the thing in detail, searching for weaknesses in the armor. “Look here,”
he said pointing, “there’s little windows in this thing.” He peered inside. “I bet I can get in there.” He began tugging on the hatch. That was more than I could take. I followed him up.

It truly was irresistible for a couple of hillbilly kids like us: all the appeal of a new gun and a new car combined. There were hooks and loops all over it, everything made from thick steel, every component looking indestructible, right down to the thick glass of the armored searchlight. Tom was straining against the top hatch with all his strength, trying to muscle it open. What kind of trouble Tom could get us into from the inside of an army tank I could not imagine. Fortunately, the army’s prudent tank designers had made it difficult for attackers to open from the outside. Still, given enough time, I think Tom would have gotten us in.

The car suddenly clanked forward as the train began moving, onward down the line to Fort Knox, Kentucky, I suppose, or farther. Tom and I scrambled down, and at the bottom of the tank jumped well clear, a practiced maneuver designed to avoid an awkward landing with an arm or a leg across the tracks.

The cars jerked forward again, and again, groaning and creaking until finally the whole train was rolling slowly forward, the massive power of the unseen engine overcoming the inertia of a hundred army tanks. Tom watched a little wistfully as the tanks rolled past, while I tried to hide my relief. The flatcars clickety-clacked by us with increasing frequency, then the caboose, yellow light pouring from its windows, through which we glimpsed two tired-looking men hunched over a cribbage board.
Then it was gone, leaving behind in Borden only the lonely sound of its whistle.

It wasn’t until the whistle faded that we first noticed the lightning in the distance. It was always harder to detect incoming storms at night, when you couldn’t see the approaching line of dark clouds, but even in darkness the quickness of this storm’s approach was alarming. Tom and I weren’t scared of getting struck by lightning or swept away in a tornado; we’d weathered plenty of storms outdoors and knew how to take shelter and survive. But neither of us wanted to sneak back into the house soaking wet at two o’clock in the morning. Tom and I began a slow trot across the cemetery in the direction of home. I noticed it wasn’t windy, which was also odd, given the amount of lightning to the south.

By the time we reached the stone wall of the cemetery, it was raining steadily. We heard thunder, still in the distance but getting closer with each rumble. The temperature dropped so noticeably that I visualized the blue line of the cold front moving across us on a weather map. The lightning was so steady that it was like a strobe light, making Tom look robotic as he ran beside me. The trees themselves were still curiously motionless—my experience told me that the wind should be howling in ahead of the rain as the storm barreled down the Ohio Valley like a marble in a pipe. The storm was weird, and that made us run faster, sometimes slipping on the dirt path that was rapidly turning to mud.

We came to a small clearing in the woods, a recently cut patch of forest peppered with low, fresh stumps. Tom saw something and grabbed my arm. I skidded to a halt with him.

In the middle of the field in front of us, four yellow balls of light rolled erratically along the ground. Each was roughly the size of a grapefruit. They weren’t rolling with the light wind—they zigzagged in random directions, sometimes jumping a few feet into the air before dropping back to the ground.

“What the hell?” whispered Tom. I won’t lie—I was a little afraid. More than that, I felt a real sense of wonder, even when one of the balls began rolling directly toward us.

It rolled almost to our feet, and then floated up to eye level. It was not blindingly bright, only about as intense as a sixty-watt lightbulb. A low buzzing sound came from inside it. All around us I smelled ozone, the smell of electrical failure, a Lionel train set gone bad. As that ball hovered directly in front of our eyes, I was afraid, but I also wanted to feel it. Somehow I knew it would be cool to the touch. As I started to reach out, the ball fizzled and disappeared with a pop.

That snapped us out of our trance. It also announced the onset, finally, of a raging, severe, dangerous storm. We resumed our headlong run, now through the driving rain and constant flashes of lightning that illuminated trees bent over at impossible angles. Occasionally the rain paused to give way to hail, which made a sound like popping popcorn as thousands of icy beads pelted the muddy ground. Thunder crashed, and then echoed a dozen times as the sound bounced from one side of the valley to the other and back. Once or twice I thought I saw more of the light balls bouncing along with us through the woods, but we didn’t stop to investigate. When we got to my house, Tom kept running without a word, and I felt bad that he
had to continue on by himself even though that sort of thing didn’t seem to bother him. I shot up my front porch, through my window, tossed my soaking wet clothes in a pile on the floor, and jumped into bed.

Even as I got between my blankets, I heard the bleating weather radio alarm in my parents’ room—a not uncommon occurrence during the spring tornado season. What happened next, however, was unusual.

Dad burst into my bedroom, wearing just his pajama bottoms, his eyes wild. “Get to the basement!” he yelled, making no attempt to hide his own fear. I ran down the steps with Dad so close behind that I worried he might trample me. Mother was waiting there with a flashlight and a portable radio tuned to 840 WHAS.

The state police had confirmed the touchdown of a powerful tornado in Henryville. It was heading our way. The frantic late-shift weatherman counted down the minutes until the twister reached Borden, his words disappearing into static with each burst of lightning. Suddenly it was there, and the screaming wind all around us really did sound like a train, just like people always say. We had an old Buck stove in the basement, and at the wind’s peak, the stove’s little iron doors flew open and a blast of cold, wet ash shot across the floor. Then, just as quickly, the storm was gone. The exhausted weatherman began a new countdown, the minutes until the tornado reached Pekin. I peeked inside the stove. It was pristine, sandblasted clean by the ash and the freak wind.

After things quieted down in the basement, and we all caught our breath, Dad led me back up to my bedroom with his hand on my shoulder. I think he felt bad about not
keeping his cool when he woke me up. “Good night,” he said softly as we reached my room. Just as he was getting ready to step out, he saw the soaking wet pile of clothes in the middle of my room. A puddle had formed around them. He looked at me, then back at the clothes. He shook his head, shut my door, and never said a word about it.

Neither the news nor my junior
Britannica
said anything about the strange glowing spheres. I learned from old-timers and other less authoritative sources that it was a natural phenomenon called “ball lightning.” Some books said that ball lightning was a myth, but I’m here to tell you that it’s not. After scouring the library, I did manage to find one other reliable eyewitness account:
On the Banks of Plum Creek
, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. During a raging blizzard, three balls of light rolled down the In-gallses’ stovepipe. Ma chased them around the house with a broom before they disappeared. It’s one of the more dramatic episodes in the whole Ingalls saga not depicted by a Garth Williams sketch. I presume that’s because he had no earthly idea how to draw such a thing.

Our close call with the Daisy Hill tornado kept Tom and me content and safe in our bedrooms at night for almost the entire summer. This August night looked clear, however, and Tom had reason to give covert operations another try.

I slipped out of bed, trying to avoid floor creaks that would give me away. I pushed open the window.

“Hey,” I whispered.

“Hey,” he whispered back. “Come on, there’s something
going on down at the picket line tonight.” I quickly slid on my shoes, which Mom had arranged by my bed.

I climbed out the window, closed it behind me, and followed Tom silently down the porch roof. The porch light put the front yard in a yellow oval. From the porch, everything beyond that arc seemed invisible in the darkness. I had learned, however, in our past expeditions, that once beyond the reach of the porch light, my eyes adjusted so that I could see pretty well. In that weird way, the electric light actually blinded us, and I was eager to get beyond it and into the dark woods where I could see again.

“What time is it?” I asked once we were safely in the trees. There was always a feeling of relief when we could talk normally and not worry about waking a parent. The moon was bright and the sky unusually clear. The humidity that could press down on Borden for weeks at a time in the summer had lifted, leaving the night crisp and beautiful, a preview of the rapidly approaching fall.

“I think it’s about one in the morning,” he said.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his eyes glowing with excitement. “I went down to eat a burger during my dad’s shift on the picket line, and he sent me right back home—wouldn’t let me listen to anything anybody was saying. When he got home, I heard him mumbling something to my mother, and the way she acted, it must have been pretty bad, whatever it was.”

I could tell there was something else. “And?”

“And …” he said, pausing to build the suspense. “I’m not the only one who snuck out of the house tonight.”

“What?”

“I heard my dad start his truck and drive away about a half hour ago.”

We cleared the deep gorge that marked our property line, taking turns to briskly walk across a large fallen ash that spanned it, our arms extended for balance. We then picked up the Buffalo Trace, walking side by side again. We remained silent for the next half mile down into the bottom of the valley.

We came off the Buffalo Trace and fought our way through a few feet of undergrowth, and then carefully stepped over an old barbed-wire fence into a well-tended field of soybeans, a carpet of the bushy low plants stretching into the darkness. Across the field loomed the back wall of the factory, well-illuminated by the moonlight, but still forbidding with all the big sodium arc lights turned off. Tom and I knew that the graveyard shift was normally the most hectic time in the big back parking lot, as the eighteen-wheelers were loaded and unloaded in a chaotic scene that resembled some kind of military evacuation. At the eastern end of the lot during happier times, empty trucks with the Borden Casket Company logo (“dedicated to the dignity of life”) backed up to the loading docks to the tune of their grumbling engines and unintelligible amplified announcements. When the light above each bay turned from red to green, the trucks were loaded with expensive wooden caskets swaddled in elaborate shipping containers. At the other end of the lot the lumber trucks maneuvered, flatbeds weighed down with tree trunks, one type of wood per truck. In the middle of the lot the drivers met in small, jovial groups, drank coffee,
smoked cigarettes, and laughed their asses off, enjoying what I was sure was the coolest job in the world. I knew from Dad that the coffins they manufactured went all over the world. It amazed me to think that those drivers, neighbors of ours when they weren’t on the road, might finish their coffee, rub out the butts of their Kools on the ground, and then drive to Los Angeles, New York, or any of those other large cities I knew from TV.

On that night, though, because of the strike, the place was dark. Tom started walking toward the plant, carefully stepping between the soybean plants to avoid crushing them.

“What are we doing?”

“I want to sneak up on the picket line to see what’s going on.” He pointed toward the back of the plant.