Over and Under (13 page)

He and Dad shook hands formally. Kohl shook his head sadly as Dad showed him the garage door. “That’s a real shame, Gus,” he said. He spoke as if it were the result of some unpreventable natural disaster.

“I appreciate your coming up here so fast.”

“You know I came as soon as I heard,” replied the sheriff. “And when you and I are done, I’m going to start making calls. We’ll make a list of who wasn’t at the funeral and who wasn’t on the picket line. We’ll question everyone in town if we have to.”

“I know you will, Sheriff,” said my father, nodding his head. “Here, I want to show you something.”

He took the sheriff to the shed out back where a half-used can of varnish sat open on the step. Wadded up inside was my basketball net, which the perpetrator had taken down and used to smear the ungrammatical threat on the door.

“I noticed the net was down when we pulled up,” said my father.

“That’s great, Gus. Nice observation.” The sheriff meticulously wrote the information down as if it were the clue of the decade. It dawned on me that the two men were treating each other with a kind of exaggerated courtesy, as if to prove to each other that there was no problem between them, or to prove who was the bigger man. The three of us walked silently back down to the driveway.

I had waited patiently, but now it seemed like the sheriff was wrapping things up, and I thought the important question, the only question, had not been asked. I blurted it out.

“Did the bombers do it?” I asked.

Dad and the sheriff stopped and looked at me, both with very similar startled looks on their faces. It was as if they had no idea what I was talking about.

“The bombers?” I said again. I pointed into the woods by the driveway. The sheriff and my dad were looking at me as if I were inquiring about the odds of a unicorn galloping out of Hoosier National Forest.

The sheriff spoke first. “Son, I don’t believe we have to worry about them. They’re long gone.”

“Why do we think that?” I asked. “Didn’t you find their truck here in town?”

“I’ve got no reason to think they would want to stick around,” the sheriff said. “There’s other ways they could have got to Louisville.”

“Like what?”

My dad stepped in. “They could have got a ride. Hitchhiked. Maybe they had another car nobody knew about.”

“Well, who else could have done this?” I asked, pointing at the garage door.

The sheriff rubbed his forehead. “Son, unfortunately, there’s more than one man in this town right now who might have done something this stupid. But I intend to catch him.” He actually reached out and tousled my hair.

We continued our walk to the sheriff’s car. I was just about to speak up again about the likelihood of the bombers lurking in our woods when the sheriff surprised all of us. Instead of heading back to his Crown Vic, he turned and walked up to the front of the house where my mom had been standing, maintaining her distance. He bounded up the steps while my mom dropped her hands to her front in a startled gesture. Sheriff Kohl took her limp right hand in his.

“I am so sorry about this, Cricket,” he said. She bit her lip and looked to the ground, trying to avoid any more crying.

Sheriff Kohl left, and my parents spent the rest of the day avoiding each other, no easy trick in that small house. I thought about what Tom had said right before we discovered Taffy in the cave, how my dad might be jealous of the sheriff, just because my mom admired him and because he was the sheriff, a man with a badge and a gun who could do things my dad never could. Like arrest the man who made her cry. For the first time, it sort of made sense to me.

During the extended silence, I had lots of time to think. Of course I still didn’t even consider telling Mom and Dad about what Tom and I had seen the night of the explosion. But I still didn’t think that night was some isolated incident
that Tom and I could just walk away from, like our other close calls and near misses. Maybe it had implications that were still rippling toward us.

Starting at ten P.M., I watched the normally forbidden
Fantasy Island
alone in the family room, while Mom sewed buttons onto a small pile of shirts in the kitchen and Dad read Michener in bed, unable to sleep until their fight was resolved. Mom didn’t normally let me watch the show because she thought it licentious. Dad opposed it purely on intellectual grounds. But they were at opposite ends of the house, like boxers in their corners, leaving me to my own devices in the center of the ring. When the telephone rang, I easily got to it first.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Andy?’

“Yessir,” I said, not recognizing the voice.

“This is Sheriff Kohl—”

“Did you find who painted on our garage door?” I interrupted.

“Well, not yet.” He cleared his throat during an extended pause. “Andy, I need to speak to your mother.”

“Oh …” I said, the realization coming over me as Mom and Dad made their way to the phone. It was one of those calls. Mom stood at my elbow.

I handed the phone to her. “Sheriff Kohl,” I said. “He doesn’t know who painted on our garage door.”

She took the phone. “Yes, Sheriff, this is Cricket.” She listened for a few minutes with her back to me. “Yes…Sure enough…Oh my.” She shook her head seriously. “I’ll be right there.”

Within minutes she was stepping into her shoes by the back door and running a brush through her hair while Dad and I watched.

“I’ll get back as soon as I can,” she said, the first words she had said to my father since her conversation with Sheriff Kohl hours earlier. She sounded apologetic.

“Take as long as you need,” my father said. They hugged before she left.

As she drove down Cabin Hill Road, I turned to my dad.

“You know I can’t say,” he told me. “Don’t even ask.”

Later, I tried to stay awake but Mom still hadn’t returned home by the time I drifted off into a restless sleep filled with questions.

When I awoke the next morning Mom was back, scrubbing the threat on the garage door into an unrecognizable brown smear with 409 and a bristle brush. I rode away on my bike and met Tom down on the picket line.

“What happened?” he said. I wondered how much he knew.

“Somebody wrote on our garage door.”

“What’d they write?”

“‘You’re next.’ Except they misspelled ‘you’re.’”

“Shit,” he said. “Who do you think did it?”

“I’ve got an idea.”

Tom scowled. “What do you mean by that?”

“You’re the one who thinks they’re out in the woods still. Maybe they snuck up to our house during the funeral and did it.”

“They’re out there trying to lay low. It’d be retarded to
come out of the woods to write some stupid threat on your garage. And besides, my cousin doesn’t have anything against your dad.”

“Did he have anything against Don Strange?”

Tom was getting pissed. “There’s plenty of other dudes in this town who would write that.”

“That’s pretty much what the sheriff said.” We stared at each other for a second. Like most good friends, I suppose, we sensed whenever we reached a line we couldn’t cross together. We stopped ourselves from going further. We shrugged, and let the argument pass.

We cruised around the outside of the strikers, a bigger group than normal that included some wives and other townspeople still hungry for news about the biggest thing to hit Borden since the ’37 flood. The blast damage wasn’t visible from the front of the plant, but Mr. Strange’s death and the giant hole in the factory were part of every conversation.

“Maybe the company did it,” said an old man with a lazy eye. “For the insurance money! Make us look bad!” Everyone around him agreed halfheartedly that it was a possibility.

“Well, they must be geniuses then,” said a young man with bushy Peter Frampton hair and bell-bottom Levi’s. “Because it sure makes us look like shit.” Several laughed bitterly. The picket line no longer had the genial small-town friendliness of a 4-H fair. With the barely concealed tension and smoldering resentment, it felt more like an auction at a foreclosed farm.

Looking back now, I realize that many of the families must have been running out of money about then—we had
passed the two-week point in the strike, when the final paycheck had run through its normal lifespan. Hamburger was being stretched with cornflakes and crackers. Gardens were being cultivated with more than the usual vigor. The men on the picket line were looking ahead to September’s bills and wondering how they would pay them.

I think some of the men were also afraid of something more fundamental than getting their pickups repossessed. Before the explosion, the strikers seemed powerful to me, with the confidence of men in firm possession of the moral upper hand. They were just trying to get their fair share, they often said, and I believed them completely. The exorbitant retail prices of the coffins they manufactured had been a popular topic of conversation around the fire drum, and multiplying those prices by the number of coffins manufactured per day astounded me just as it astounded them. To deny the laborers who made it all possible a thirty-cent per hour raise seemed not just cheap, it seemed irrational. Surely, we all thought, it was just a matter of time before the owners came to their senses, met the demands, and everybody got back to work.

Now, with Mr. Strange’s death and the giant hole in the back wall of the factory, the moral clarity on the picket line had been muddied. The factory workers I knew were God-fearing, law-abiding men. From the beginning, the strike had conflicted with their congenital inclinations to obey authority and work to exhaustion every day. These men had awoken one day to discover that they were allied with at least a few who would set explosions and kill people. It was a troubling revelation to those who had voted for the strike
swept up in a wave of righteous indignation. And, of course, somewhere out there were the men who had actually killed Don Strange. They had their own reasons for being afraid, like prison and eternal damnation.

“Look,” said Tom. He pointed across Highway 60 to where a state trooper cruiser from the Seymour post was parked, two grim-looking out-of-towners with crew cuts sitting inside. It seemed to confirm that the picketers were now thought of as dangerous men.

Unlike the strikers, I was heartened to see that the troopers had not left after Don Strange’s funeral. Like my father, I had come to doubt that local law enforcement was willing or able to protect Borden from itself during the strike. The writing on our garage door was a direct threat that I knew my dad wasn’t laughing off, even if he had laughed off my theory that the bombers might have done it. The night after the funeral, I heard him checking all our door locks before he went to sleep, a new addition to his ten-thirty routine. I felt incredibly vulnerable as I lay there that night in my bedroom, endangered by the walls and windows that my parents thought would protect us. I knew all too well that the house gave anyone on the outside the advantage, the ability to approach us from any direction without being heard or seen. I seriously considered asking my parents if I could sleep outside until the strike was over, where I at least had a chance of detecting an intruder’s approach: a stick cracking, whispered voices carrying on the wind, careless silhouettes crossing a ridge. From the outside, I could evade intruders or stalk them if I wanted to, my M6 cleaned and ready. Of course, Mom and Dad would never
allow it. I looked at the two bored troopers with their crew cuts and half-closed eyes, and tried to believe they could somehow protect us.

Almost as the thought popped into my head, reinforcements arrived on a yellow school bus.

Where the name of the school would normally be were painted the words
SHIVELY SECURITY
. The tires seemed thicker and knobbier than normal. The windows looked modified, too, tinted and strengthened, and closed tight despite the heat. The bus pulled right up to the front gate, stopping with a hiss from its air brakes. There was a dramatic pause. Then, with a squeak just as innocent as if it were getting ready to discharge a gaggle of first graders, the door swung open.

A huge man stepped down the stairs of the bus, turning sideways to fit. He was wearing black canvas pants and a bulletproof vest that accentuated the size of his barrel chest. Under the vest he wore a black sleeveless T-shirt that showed off his beefy arms. On one shoulder was tattooed the logo of the United States Marine Corps, the eagle and the globe. As he exited, he turned, and I saw Asian script tattooed on the other. His pants were tucked into shiny black combat boots. While he was unarmed, there was something unmistakably military in his bearing. He had a blond flattop and a freckled, incongruously boyish face that looked out of place atop that huge body. The strikers, like me, watched him, rapt.

Without acknowledging any of us, he walked to the padlocked gate, pulled a single tiny key from his front pocket, and unlocked it. He pulled the chain through the hasp, and pushed the gate open. Like everything at the
factory, the gate was exquisitely well-maintained and oiled; it swung open without a sound. He waved his arm dramatically at the unseen bus driver.

“Move it!”
he barked, making all of us jump. The bus’s brakes squeaked, and it slowly rolled inside as he waited at the gate.

Once the bus was safely on plant property, the blond soldier closed the gate behind it. He did not relock it. Instead, he casually threw the chain and the padlock on the grass beside the driveway in a way that almost seemed arrogant, as if he were saying to us that it would no longer be necessary to lock up now that he had arrived.

The bus rolled to a stop in the center of the vast, empty front parking lot, not far from the empty barrels where Tom and I had hidden. The passengers inside began filing out. All of them were dressed like the blond man, but there was something about them that seemed less authentic. It was the difference between my unadorned M6 and the stickers and meaningless painting on the BB gun I had owned before. That’s not to say these guys weren’t heavily armed. Every other man getting off the bus was carrying some kind of pump-action shotgun.