Over and Under (7 page)

I processed what he was saying, and understood right away. Sneaking up on the picket line from the front of the plant would be impossible—we’d have to cross Highway 60 and another soybean field, which offered little natural cover, especially in the bright moonlight, and especially a hundred yards away from a group of bored men whose eyes had thoroughly adjusted to the dark. The logical alternative was to sneak through plant property and approach the picket line from behind, from inside the plant’s gates. I knew how Tom meant to do it. He was already in motion by the time I realized it.

We crossed the soybean field quickly, very aware of how exposed we were in the bright moonlight. At the back of the plant a railroad spur entered through a massive sliding chain-link gate. It was shut and locked.

“Pull on it,” said Tom. I pulled at the gate as hard as I
could, and Tom tried to slide through the tiny gap I created, but couldn’t. There were two sets of chain wrapped tightly around it, and judging by the shininess of the chain, I guessed that it was a new security measure in place because of the strike.

Tom lowered himself to the ground and tried to slide under the gate between the rails of the tracks. He could almost make it, but not quite. I saw the bottom wires of the fence dig into his belly as he tried to slide by. He pulled himself back, bleeding and frustrated.

We trotted around the fence looking for other ways inside. Climbing over it was impossible—the fence was topped with a swirl of razor wire. Tom looked thoughtfully at a drainage pipe that penetrated the berm beneath the fence. I saw where it came through on the other side, a distance of about twenty feet. Without hesitating, Tom dove into the pipe. I followed.

Although it hadn’t rained in weeks, there was about two inches of stagnant water in the bottom of the pipe. It smelled like an old basement, with an underlying chemical sourness that made me wonder what this pipe might be carrying away from the factory besides rainwater. Small, sharp gravel covered the bottom, like rocks in a creek bed. The pipe itself was corrugated, and the hard ridges also made it painful to crawl along. Because of the small diameter, I could only move my elbows and knees a few inches forward with each step, falling on an elbow when I raised a knee and vice versa as I made slow, uncomfortable progress. There was no way to hurry. It was completely dark. Halfway into the pipe, I couldn’t see anything. I just
kept telling myself that if I crawled forward long enough, I would eventually come out the other side.

Finally, I did, rolling out of the pipe and unfurling my cramped limbs. Tom was waiting for me patiently, pulling some tiny rocks out of his elbow. With that, we were officially trespassing on Borden Casket Company property.

I had been to the plant many times, and was vaguely aware of the major functional areas: mill room, assembly, trim, and finish. Inside the fence, though, I was as confused and disoriented as I had been in the cave—and Tom was just as sure-footed. I followed him around two buildings, stopping when he stopped, listening when he listened, until we turned a final corner and saw the picket line, across the asphalt expanse of the front lot. The strikers were just outside of the fence.

There were four men standing around a dwindling fire in a fifty-five-gallon drum. We were too far away to hear the conversation, but something in their stances made it clear that two of the men were arguing. In profile, all four men had the same lean build, and a ball cap pulled down low. The two antagonists were standing rigidly, facing each other directly across the barrel. The lawn chairs were pushed back out of the way. One man pointed his finger with a jabbing motion at the other, who stood unflinching with his hands on his hips. The two noncombatants stayed silent and took turns taking off their ball caps and rubbing their heads with concern. An upside-down picket sign leaned untended against a chair and in the firelight I read 1096:
LOUD AND PROUD
! A knot popped in the barrel and sent a covey of orange sparks into the air.

Tom ran across the parking lot until he reached a stack of steel drums organized neatly under a sheet-metal roof. I followed him. In our new location, we were close enough to hear the men but well hidden by the barrels.

“So help me, those crazy assholes are going to get themselves killed,” said the man pointing his finger. “Those boys don’t have a lick of sense between ’em.”

“No one thinks it’s a good idea, Ray,” said the other. That was him—the man with his hands on his hips was Tom’s dad. He was speaking slowly to Ray Arnold, trying to calm him down. Arnold was a well-known hothead; a skinny, nervous guy who was always ready to start a fight, no matter how many times he got his ass kicked.

“That’s a crock of shit,
Kruer.
Lots of people thought it was a good idea, all that tough talk. People
loved
it.
Ate… it…up!
Funny how none of those pussies managed to show up here tonight.”

“Let’s all settle down,” said Tom’s dad quietly.

“Why’s that?” said Ray, leaning toward the drum. “You think it’s a good idea, too? Tear up some company shit? Break the law? You want to help those dumb-asses shut this factory down forever?”

Tom’s dad didn’t say anything, but I felt the two of them glaring at each other. Ray’s blood was up.

“So help me,” pronounced Ray, “if they show up down here for any goddamn reason, I will use that thing.” He pointed to an object beneath his lawn chair, something Tom and I couldn’t see from our hiding place. “Union or no union, I will use that thing. Then I will get on that CB in my truck, I will call the cops, and I will tell the whole damn
world who thought this bullshit up, and who thought it was a good idea.”

“We don’t know if they’re going to do anything,” said George Kruer. “It just sounded like a lot of big talk to me…”

“They sounded pretty serious to me,” interrupted Ray.

“Let George talk, Ray,” said one of the men who had mostly been quiet.

Tom’s dad continued. “It’s just a lot of big talk from some pissed off kids.”

“What if it wasn’t just talk?” said Ray. “What if you’re wrong? Maybe I should call the sheriff right now and tell him who’s saying what at the union hall these days.”

There was a long silence before George Kruer spoke again. “Ray, I’m going to strongly recommend you don’t say a goddamn word.”

Tom and I turned to face each other. Neither of us had ever heard his dad speak that way before. He had done two tours in the army, we knew, and he would have looked tough, with his muscled arms and their smeared, indecipherable tattoos. It was all mitigated normally by his perpetual smile and the somewhat girly Bruce Jenner haircut that Tom’s mom gave him on the front porch. From here, though, behind the drums, we heard a different George Kruer, the Kruer we’d seen in yellowing Polaroids with bandoliers of ammo crossing his chest and jungle foliage in the background. He sounded like a pure badass. I once again felt myself getting jealous over our fathers’ relative positions in the strike.

Unfortunately, as I turned back to face the picket line,
hunched over as I was, I lost my balance slightly and put my hand out to brace myself, as if I unconsciously thought the drum in my face was as solid and immovable as a tree of the same diameter. The fifty-five-gallon drum in front of me, however, was completely empty, nearly weightless, and I pushed it firmly into the empty drum in front of it. The two drums banged together with a sound as loud and resonant as a church bell.

“Shit!” said Ray. “That’s them!” He ran over to his chair and grabbed what was beneath it. For a split second, as he aimed it at us, I was certain it was a gun. Then he turned it on.

It was a spotlight, the kind of million-candlepower thing that hooked to a car battery and was used by poachers to stun deer. It sure as hell stunned us. Tom and I ducked back down behind the drums, temporarily blinded. I knew we couldn’t be seen, shielded by the drums, but as my night vision slowly returned, I saw we were trapped by two impossibly bright bands of white light streaming by each side of the shelter. If we moved, we’d be spotted immediately.

“It’s them!” screamed Ray. “Stop! I’m calling the police!” The light jerked as he shouted, the shadows cast by it dodging and weaving crazily. I heard a rattle as he banged against the chain-link fence. The light was so bright individual pebbles cast long shadows in the parking lot. We were pinned.

And then suddenly we were free. Ray briefly turned the light on Tom’s dad, either in his excitement or in an unwise act of aggression, giggling as he did it. Tom’s dad promptly smashed it to the ground, where it shattered
and extinguished with a loud pop. He and Ray Arnold immediately began the fistfight they had both been preparing for all night, and the other two men began their equally anticipated pulling of the men apart. As much as we both wanted to watch George Kruer kick somebody’s ass, Tom and I took the opportunity to skedaddle.

I was sure the whole time we ran that murderous guards were following us, running right behind me with guns drawn. I was paranoid, out of my element on the treeless asphalt instead of in the woods where I knew what the hell I was doing. In the woods, we had to evade pissed off people on occasion: farmers from whom we borrowed watermelons, an occasional Department of Natural Resources ranger, and, of course, angry Squire Boone Caverns tour guides. That was fun, and it even felt slightly heroic, just a more exciting form of the escape-and-evade games we had always played in the woods, whether we called it Capture the Flag, Cowboys and Indians, or Outsmart the Commie Invaders. Running with Tom across the company parking lot felt radically different. As the chain-link fence raced by in my peripheral vision, I felt like a juvenile delinquent, and that made me feel vulnerable.

Tom dove into the drainage pipe and I followed right behind. As we crawled, I saw that Tom had refined his technique. He was shooting through the pipe twice as fast as I could, stagnant water flying up in his wake. He disappeared in front of me and I was alone, about halfway through, with Tom standing outside whispering frantically at me to hurry up, his voice amplified and metallically sharp inside the pipe. Maybe it was my slightly longer limbs, but no matter how hard I exerted myself, I couldn’t speed up, I
could only lift my elbows and knees a few inches, move them forward, and do it again, making exhausting, painful, slow progress.

I felt something beneath my thigh move as I trudged forward. I was so out of breath and hell-bent to escape that I ignored it at first, until I put down my leg again, and felt it farther up and probing urgently, toward my head. There was something alive with me in the pipe, something big, and I knew with a bolt of pure, nauseous dread what it had to be. It was racing forward with the exact kind of panic I felt, both of us determined to get out and get away from each other. I pushed up on my elbows as far and as fast as I could, smashing the back of my head into the top of the pipe. My face was still just inches from the snake’s head when he slithered forward from under my chest.

He was a copperhead. As dark as it was inside the pipe, the snake was big enough and I was close enough to see that clearly: the penny-colored head, the hard cat’s eyes. He was huge, too; even as his head came even with mine, I felt him tugging his tail beneath my knee. With that knee, I had unintentionally pinned him, enraging him, but I couldn’t raise my knee without lowering my face, already just inches from the snake. He began to spasm with panic, his tail jerking under my knee with surprising force. He twisted and turned his head toward mine, and I saw in the slits of his eyes something more primitive than hate. Ready to strike, he stretched his mouth open wide, exposing his bone-white, hook-shaped fangs.

I shot my hand out and grabbed his neck, which caused the rest of my body to fall on top of him. The full length of my torso was now pressing on him, as he contorted crazily
beneath me. I was holding the head away from my face, but barely, and he was jerking toward me with his mouth open, trying with every instinct in that tiny brain to sink his fangs into one of my veins. I tried to kill him with the hand I had around his neck. I squeezed as hard as I could but it didn’t have any affect other than wearing out my grip, and I knew that whatever I did, I could not let go. I tried to press my thumb through his skull, but the thing had been engineered too well to be killed that way—it was like trying to push my thumb through a walnut. I tried pulling his head away, while keeping the rest of him pinned beneath me, to see if I could pull him in half, but again, the constraints of the pipe, the sturdy design of the snake, and my inadequate strength made it impossible.

Abandoning the idea of pulling the snake apart, I pulled up my knees, and discovered that with snake in hand, I had still advanced six inches or so down the pipe. I went to my belly again, this time anticipating the feeling of the snake fighting beneath me, and moved forward farther, keeping eye contact with the snake the entire time. I worked my way down the pipe with snake in hand, and finally realized that Tom had been yelling at me the entire time—and not all that much time had passed. By moving like a snake myself, I slowly, painfully, slithered to the end of the drainage pipe.

At the end of the pipe, I put the snake out first, and then tumbled after, keeping him at arm’s length. He sensed freedom, the sudden open space and cooler air, and as I tumbled out of the pipe he wrapped his tail around my arm.

“What the …” Tom tried to take in what was going on. Before he could help, I threw my arm down as hard as I
could and let go of the snake’s head, flinging it to the ground.

It could have hung on to my arm with its tail, turned, and sunk its teeth into me at last, but my instincts were correct in sensing that the snake wanted to be separated as badly as I did. It quickly slid into the high grass, disappearing in seconds.

“Let’s go,” I said, as Tom stood staring. I wanted to get away as fast as I could. The factory seemed a very dangerous place for us.

We flew across the soybean field, to the edge of the woods before we stopped and turned around for a last look to make sure we hadn’t been followed.