Over and Under

by Tucker, Todd

  “Does that clear everything up?” he asked.

  “I guess. But I’m still not sure: are we for or against the strikers?”

  Dad started to answer when Mom interrupted. “Go wash up. Dinner’s almost ready.”

  As I went into the bathroom I heard Mom and Dad both laughing. I washed my hands and arms up to my elbows, watching the orange dirt spiral down the drain, to our septic tank, back to the southern Indiana underground. Mom was putting the pork chops on the table when I came back downstairs, along with baked beans, kale, and biscuits. Dad said grace and before his hands were unclasped I was digging in. My parents shook their heads as always at the amount of food I could cram into my small body.

  After we ate, I helped clean up. Our normal after-dinner card game would have to wait because of Dad’s meeting. Instead, we sat down together to watch the news on WHAS-11, one of three Louisville TV stations we picked up—we were blessed with good reception on top of Cabin Hill. The big story was about the court-ordered busing of schoolkids in Louisville, which had just begun. Rocks were thrown, signs carried, and overflowing Catholic schools with names like Trinity and Saint X were turning away panicked white families in droves. The broadcast ended with Chuck Tyner’s forecast: hot and humid.

  “How come they’re not saying anything about the strike?” It was the only news in Borden; every night I was surprised it wasn’t covered on TV.

  “Things have to get pretty bad way out here before we make the Louisville news,” my dad said.

  The doorbell rang. Before my parents could react, I sprang from the couch. Anybody who really knew us came in through the back door, by the kitchen. An actual ring of the doorbell was always startling and a portent of drama. I opened the door so fast that our visitor’s finger was still on the doorbell button. He looked at me through his thick safety glasses and smiled.

  “Well, hello, Andy,” he said. “You’re growing like a weed!” It was Don Strange, the plant manager.

  Three

  Don Strange was my dad’s boss at the coffin factory. I suppose he was everybody’s boss. I had never thought of him in that way, however, until the strike began forcing me to divide everyone into the categories of labor and management. Before the strike, I thought everybody in the factory had some unique and equally important individual skill, like the Superfriends, or the members of KISS. Some men went into the woods to cut trees down. Some men, like Tom’s dad, worked on the trim line, screwing in handles and hinges. My dad was an engineer on the finish line—he could look at a coffin rolling out of the oven and tell you immediately if the primer was weak, if there was dust in the clearcoat, or if the oven temperature was off by ten degrees. Mr. Strange’s skill was making them all work together.

  Dad had been correct in saying that Mr. Strange had been to our house many times, but those suppers always retained a certain formality, as indicated by his coming to the front door. Mr. Strange and Dad always began and ended each evening with a handshake, and Mr. Strange always brought some small wrapped gift for my mother, items that would be meticulously displayed the next time he came to visit, small fancy soaps or a set of brass coasters. Those evenings were a lot like the suppers that Tom’s mom would cook for their parish priest. They were friendly, even congenial, but not quite comfortable.

  Dad and Mr. Strange did spend one day a year together outside the factory. For as long as I could remember they’d attended the Oaks together, the traditional day for locals to enjoy the festivities at Churchill Downs one day before the complete mob scene of the Derby. And every year after the race, Dad would come home and regale us with the story of how Mr. Strange would carefully study the horses in the paddock, and bet only on the horse taking the biggest prerace shit.

  “Hello, Mr. Strange,” I said, offering my right hand to shake, just as he had once coached me in his office. His grip was gentle, but his skin was rough from having handled a million board feet of fine lumber over a lifetime, eyeing each piece for knots and feeling the grain as it came out of the mill room. He was elfish, shorter than me, with ears that stuck out and giant glasses that accentuated the smallness of his head. Like a lot of tiny old men, he seemed to be cold all the time. On that steamy August evening, he wore a red-and-black-checked flannel hunting jacket. I knew from past visits that the inside pocket of the jacket was lined not with shotgun shells but with rolls of wild cherry Life Savers.

  “My Lord, you’re getting big,” he said. I felt my dad walk up behind me. Mom marched up the stairs without greeting our visitor, a breach of courtesy that startled us all. Mr. Strange gave my father a look that told me he understood what was going on far better than I did.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Come on in, Don,” said my dad.

  “No, wait a minute.” The twinkle returned to Mr. Strange’s eye. “I want to talk to this young man here for a minute. Are you still runnin’ around in those woods every day?”

  “Yessir, near every day.”

  “You huntin’ squirrel?”

  “In season.” He had clear blue eyes for an old man, even through the thick lenses.

  “Fishin’?”

  “I just went fishing on Sunday.”

  “What’d you get?”

  “Nothing but a gar.” I held my hands up to indicate the size. A gar was another of our peculiar indigenous species, another I didn’t know was peculiar at the time. It was a long, thin stone-age fish with an alligatorlike snout and hundreds of needle-sharp teeth. It liked to cruise right below the surface, sometimes snapping at our fishing line where it touched the water, spitefully severing it with its impressive chops.

  “You know how to cook a gar?” asked Mr. Strange.

  I turned to look back at my dad, who had always told me that you couldn’t eat a gar. Their bones were like their teeth, sharp and plentiful. Dad was smiling in a way that told me I was about to hear a joke he had heard a thousand times before.

  “Well, I’ll tell you how,” continued Mr. Strange. “First, you nail it to a board, you got that?”

  I nodded.

  “Then, you leave it out in the sun for two weeks, okay?”

  “Okay…”

  “Then, you throw away the gar and eat the board!”

  I laughed hard. It might have been an old joke, but I had never heard it. I couldn’t wait to tell Tom.

  “You keep an eye on those trees for me while you’re out in the woods, okay?” said Mr. Strange as my laughter subsided. “Especially the small ones.”

  “I will.”

  “And let me know if you spot a mahogany. I need one of those down at the plant, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, laughing again. I knew mahoganies came from some jungle somewhere, one of the few hardwoods we had to import.

  “Here’s an advance reward for when you find one.” He handed me a two-dollar bill from his shirt pocket. I’d never seen one before, and at first I thought it was some kind of joke, like those million-dollar bills with Jimmy Carter on one side and a peanut on the other.

  “Don, don’t,” my dad said seriously. He had that small-town tendency that found all exchanges of money somehow dirty. Mr. Strange shushed him away. “They gave me that crazy thing at the bank this morning. Don’t you think the boy deserves some kind of reward for finding me a mahogany?”

  “Thanks, Mr. Strange,” I said, folding the bill in half after briefly studying the engravings on both sides.

  “Go hide that where your daddy can’t find it,” he said.

  I stepped back to let Mr. Strange into the house. He passed in a fragrant cloud of Old Spice and pipe tobacco. Dad had arranged his files neatly on the coffee table, each stack topped with a chart drawn in mechanical pencil on graph paper, along with some neat drawings of equipment lineups and tooling arrangements. My father, like many engineers of that precomputer generation, was a wonderful illustrator, evidence of his ease with the physical world. I walked upstairs before suffering the embarrassment of being told to leave, but I stopped to look down a
t a comforting scene.

  Both men were hunched over Dad’s drawings, both with their glasses down on the tips of their noses, both pointing to precise positions on the paper with the sharp tips of their pencils. They looked serious, but utterly natural, and not at all worried. I had seen my dad attack problems that way countless times before, an engineer’s technique: charting, calculating, and dissecting the data until out of sheer exhaustion, the solution surrendered itself. Now, I assumed, the problem they were working on was how to keep the plant from moving to Mexico.

  “So we could produce with as few as fifteen men?” said Mr. Strange. He seemed pleasantly surprised.

  “With the right fifteen men. For a little while. Until we use up the preassembled boxes we’ve got in storage.”

  “How many of those do we have?” asked Mr. Strange.

  “Two hundred and seven. I counted them myself.”

  “Well, that’s something,” said Mr. Strange with a sigh. “We could fill some orders, anyway. Keep the wolves at bay for a little while longer. What about bringing in outside men?”

  My dad shook his head vigorously. “No. They wouldn’t know what to do—it would take weeks to train them.”

  “Plus, you don’t want to bring in scabs,” said Mr. Strange.

  “No, I do not. Do you? I don’t want to be responsible for that. I’d rather just wait a little bit and see if we can’t get some of our own to cross the line. I’ve got some men in mind I might call, men I think might be willing to go back to work. Fellows I know need the paycheck. I’m not sure Cricket would ever talk to me again if I hired scabs, not to mention what the good men of Local 1096 would do to them.”

  “Trust me, Gus,” said Mr. Strange, “the good men of Local 1096 won’t take it any easier on their own when they start crossing that line.”

  After a pause, their talk began to focus again on the various ratios, coefficients, and tooling arrangements necessary to start making coffins flow again through the factory. I retreated up the stairs.

  In my room, I started reading a library book about the great maritime explorers: Magellan, da Gama, Captain Cook. Like many kids in the heartland, I was fascinated by the whole idea of an ocean. Exhausted by my own explorations, and comforted by the rumble of deep voices coming from downstairs, I fell asleep before it was dark, the book still in my hands.

  I had a nightmare that night about being stuck in the cave. I was in the crevice, unable to move, the light from my flashlight slowly dimming as the batteries died. Dad was somewhere in the cave, unaware of the danger I was in or unable to help. Just as my light winked out for good, Tom tapped three times on my bedroom window, waking me, rescuing me.

  I shook my head as I regained my bearings. I saw only a silhouette through my window, but I knew it had to be Tom. He had climbed up our porch railing and onto the porch roof, which went right up to my bedroom. Before my heart had even slowed down from the nightmare, it began to race again in a familiar combination of dread and excitement, the way it always did before I blindly followed Tom into the unknown.

  There comes a time in every boy’s life where his capacity for getting into trouble suddenly exceeds his ability to get out of it. For Tom and me, that moment had arrived that spring, when we discovered we could sneak out of our bedrooms in the middle of the night. We had performed the feat exactly three times. The first two times we didn’t go anywhere. We’d skulked a few feet into the woods, listened to the owls hoot and the crickets chirp, and reveled in our daring. Then I had carefully climbed up to my window and gone back to bed. The third trip was more dramatic. That time we’d been scared so bad that we’d gone almost the whole summer without sneaking out again. That was in May, before the strike, on a night when Chuck Tyner had warned in his six o’clock forecast that the atmosphere was “unstable.”

  It had seemed peaceful enough when we set out. The moon was out but hidden by thin clouds, a white smudge against the sky. “Where are we going?” I asked. It was clear Tom had a destination in mind.

  “The railroad tracks out by the cemetery,” he said excitedly. “Dad said when he got home from work that a train full of tanks was stopped there.” His dad worked swing shift before the strike, getting off at midnight.

  “Tanks?” I was picturing cylindrical tank cars full of ethanol, or corn oil, or any of the other agroproducts that constantly rolled through town. “What’s the big deal?”

  “No: tanks. Army tanks, Sherman tanks.”

  We sped up to a trot, not wanting to miss the tanks if they were only stopping briefly in Borden. I was skeptical. I’d seen hundreds of trains pass through town, and I’d never seen a tank onboard. I had a hard time even picturing such a thing. Still, strange things had been known to roll through town. There was the time, for instance, when the Ringling Brothers Circus train stopped for an hour in the middle of the night on its way to their winter home in Florida—Patsy Miller still talked about the bearded lady and the tired-looking midgets who ambled down from their car and into the store to buy coffee and cigarettes. If there was a train full of tanks, we both wanted to see it.

  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 w
ith 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.