Over and Under

by Tucker, Todd

  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.

  We watched the backside of the factory, breathing hard, knowing that we were relatively safe where we stood. One step into the protective canopy of the forest, at night, on a path we knew by heart, and no one alive could catch us. Another close call with Tom, another escape.

  “Oh, hell, I stink,” I said, catching my breath. Oily musk covered me; the snake had emitted torrents of it as we fought.

  Tom was about to respond when he saw something, and my eyes followed his. Against the brown wall of the factory, barely visible, were the black silhouettes of two men running as fast as they could toward us, their arms pumping, a ball cap flying off one of their heads. They were chasing us, I was sure.

  We both braced, ready to turn and run into the woods.

  We saw the explosion before we heard it. I had to completely shut my eyes against the flash. In the second it took my eyes to adjust, the sound reached us, a massive whomp that moved across the soybean plants like a gust of wind. Steel drums lifted by the blast crashed to the ground, some of them spilling their contents in a gush, then bursting into flames themselves. In the nucleus of the fireball, we saw the men still running toward us, their silhouettes growing as they neared.

  I felt a swell of heat on my back as we turned and bolted into the woods. We took the same path we had taken on the way down, our feet barely touching the dirt on the trace as we flew up the hill. When we reached my house, Tom continued running, as we parted ways without a word. I shot up the porch railing, onto the roof, and through my window. I stripped down and attempted to control my breath as I jumped into bed.

  I forced myself to calm down. My breath slowed, my heart stopped racing, and I settled down to the point that I could once again hear the ticking of the clock in the hallway. Except for that, the house was quiet, and I felt profoundly sad that because of what I’d seen, the quiet would not last. I reeked because of the snake, and something else, something bubble gum-sweet that took me a second to identify. It was the odor of burning varnish.

  Finally, inevitably, I heard the muted ringing of the telephone next to my parents’ bed through the wall. It rang again, and again, finally pulling my father from sleep. I heard him fumble for the handset and answer with a hoarse “hello.” More mumbling was followed by a wide awake “Jesus Christ!” He hung up. Mom asked a question. Change spilled from his pockets as he pulled on yesterday’s pants. I heard heavy footsteps across the bedroom, and then a pause.

  Into that series of familiar noises came a sound unusual but still recognizable. I heard my father drag a heavy box out from under his bed, open it, close it, and then slide the box back. I knew the sound. My father was getting into his footlocker, the only private space he had in the house. The footlocker contained two old love letters from Mom, four Purdue yearbooks, three issues of Playboy, and one .38 Smith & Wesson revolver.

  Don Strange was dead. He had returned to the plant after the meeting with my father. Dad said that he had no idea why, that ever since his wife had died Mr. Strange had trouble sleeping and was always going to the plant at odd hours, to catch up on paperwork or look over some piece of machinery that had popped into his head in the middle of the night. My mother needed reassurance that Mr. Strange wasn’t working at the plant that night because of her, that he hadn’t followed her order, as relayed by my father, to keep plant business at the plant. My father swore up and down that he had ignored my mother’s request, an oversight for which she was profoundly, tearfully grateful. It was almost dawn by then, the woods outside our house turning from black to washed-out gray. Mom poured coffee as Dad told us what he had seen down the hill.

  “By the time I got there, every volunteer fireman in Borden was standing along Sixty,” he said. “Their trucks were blocking the road, every
one of them with its light on top, swirling around, making it hard to see anything.” Dad’s voice was scratchy. “The hook and ladder was through the gate already, all their hoses were running through the front door by the lobby. Something was leaking—there was a huge puddle of water that almost covered the front lot. I fought my way to the front of the crowd by the fence, and found Dave Grosheider,” he said. Grosheider was our fire chief.

  “Dave told me there’d been some kind of explosion, a hole blown in the back wall, and that they had extinguished a small fire out on the back loading dock. He asked me about hazardous materials in the plant, that kind of thing, told me that he had three search parties inside the factory already, looking around, making sure there weren’t any more fires. I started to tell him where the gas shutoffs are, the main breaker panels, where the drums of naphtha and alcohol are. Then there was kind of a murmur through the crowd, and everyone looked up.” Dad sighed jaggedly before he continued. It was the saddest, most defeated sound I ever heard my father make.

  “One of the search parties was coming out the front door. The fireman in front was carrying a body. He’d taken his coat off and laid it across his arms, so I couldn’t see much, but I could tell it was a person—I could make out the shape of a head beneath the coat, and I saw feet hanging out the other end.” Dad rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “He looked so tiny, we all thought he had a child in his arms.”

  “Who did it?” I asked too suddenly.

  “Maybe nobody did it,” said Mom. “Maybe it was an accident. One of those furnaces blew up before, you remember that? When all the windows along Sixty broke?”

  “No, he’s right, it was somebody.” Dad looked at me a little curiously. “And we know who. Mack Sanders lost his ball cap running away. His name was written inside of it. And Guthrie Kruer’s truck was stalled at the iron bridge. Sheriff Kohl already checked the trailer they both live in. It’s empty and all their guns are gone.”

  “Guthrie Kruer and Mack Sanders killed Don Strange?” I asked.

  “That’s right.”

  It caught me off guard to hear the last name of my best friend like that. Not that it was that big of a coincidence; the hills were filled with Kruers, along with a few other key German surnames like Huber and Stemler. Since they were all robustly Catholic and had millions of kids, you pretty much had to be in the family to understand exactly how they were all interrelated. Their allegiances to each other showed in weird, subtle ways. I knew Tom’s family, for example, drove their cars all the way to Floyd Knobs for repairs because some Kruer cousin owned a garage out there.

  Guthrie Kruer had established himself that last December as something of a minor local celebrity. Like about half the adult male population of Borden, Kruer was a volunteer fireman. Acting loosely in that capacity, he had once climbed to the top of the Borden Casket Company’s water tower to free a turkey buzzard that had gotten snagged in the tower’s Christmas lights. The bird was scared shitless and squawking pitifully as Guthrie Kruer approached it—we were all certain the bird would knock him to his death with its giant dark wings. A Courier-Journal photographer happened to be passing through town that day, on his way back from a school board meeting in Salem, and he saw the crowd gathered and snapped a dramatic photo that appeared on the front page of the Louisville paper the next morning: a small man standing gracefully at the top of the rounded water tower, his arms outstretched for balance, the giant bird mirroring him as it spread its wings gratefully and flew away. Tom tried to explain to me at the time exactly how they were related to each other, the gossamer-thin line of blood that connected them back to the different shipments of Kruers that came over from Bavaria in centuries past. The story was confusing even to him and he finally gave up and just identified Guthrie Kruer as his “cousin,” which satisfied us both.

  Mack Sanders, on the other hand, was an outsider. Even though he had lived in Borden as long as I could remember, I was always aware of the fact that he came from somewhere else—I think it was Tell City. He had no family in the area. I guess most people in Borden were like me, in that when I heard the name Mack Sanders, the thing that leapt immediately to mind was that the boy had just one nut. The only other thing I knew about Mack Sanders was that Guthrie Kruer was his best friend.

  “Where are they now?”

  “They must have grabbed somebody else’s truck,” said Dad. “Or maybe they hitchhiked. I’m sure they’re in Louisville by now, probably headed south.” It was a keystone of our local philosophy that all things evil either came from Louisville or ended up there.

  I knew better. I pictured them creeping along the edge of the woods, just inside the trees, to the truck where they’d staged it at the iron bridge. It was a good choice—few people drove on that section of road in daylight and nobody drove at night, when you couldn’t see to dodge the gaping holes in the bridge’s planking. I pictured them there, panicked, turning the key over and over, within earshot of the sirens and maybe even the voices on the picket line. I was sure they had parked the truck there, ready to flee to Louisville, just like Dad suspected. When it wouldn’t start, they did just what I would have done. They grabbed their guns and took off into the woods. They would live off whatever fish, rabbit, and squirrel they could catch, and maybe a can or two of Dinty Moore Beef Stew if they’d really been thinking ahead when they loaded up the truck. They were killers, and I hated them for murdering Don Strange. I wanted them found and punished. But something bloomed alongside the rage as I imagined them, two best friends living off the land, tending a campfire, checking snares, and cleaning their guns. It was such a strong feeling, and so unexpected, that it took me a second to recognize it. I was jealous.

  “I thought that fireman was carrying you,” said Dad suddenly. He looked up from his coffee, directly at me. Every line in his face was darkened, as if ash from the explosion had set into his wrinkles, exaggerating his age. “For one split second, I was absolutely sure of it. I couldn’t figure out why in the hell you would be down at the plant in the middle of the night.”

  He stifled a sob with a drink of coffee. Mom rubbed his shoulders.

  Everything changed after that.

  Four

  The hunt was on for the “bombers,” as everyone called them, and we finally had a story on our hands big enough to demand coverage from the Louisville TV stations. On their morning news broadcasts, all three channels showed footage of the roadblocks manned by the state troopers until dawn, the abandoned pickup truck that belonged to Guthrie Kruer, the scorched hole in the factory wall, and, finally, a close up of the grimy ball cap picked up on factory grounds after the explosion. On the front, it read LOCAL 1096, and on the inside, in boyish ballpoint pen, it read M SANDERS.

  Activity was at such a fever pitch that morning that Tom and I had trouble deciding which aspect of the manhunt we wanted to personally witness. Reverend Nichols had announced he would host a revival meeting so that we all might repent, and lots of kids had gone down to watch the volunteers set up the huge tent down by the river. The sheriffs of both Floyd and Harrison counties pitched in with their helicopters, and the choppers were taking off and landing in the Little League field, throwing up massive clouds of brown dust we saw from on top of Cabin Hill.

  We decided in the end to go see the psychic from Louisville who had shown up to help the investigation. We made our way to the modest crowd that surrounded her at the edge of factory property, in the front, in view of the picket line. She was a tall woman with frizzy gray hair and a flowing black dress. She delayed her vision for a few minutes so the crowd could grow to an acceptable size. She then asked for silence, took the famous ball cap from an embarrassed-looking deputy, and held it in one hand with her eyes tightly closed. After inhaling deeply, she pointed to the northeast, exactly opposite the direction we’d seen the bombers run. She handed out business cards while we applauded.

  After that, Tom and I decided to walk back to the cave to retrieve our bikes. The thrill of the psychic soon passed as w
e found ourselves alone in the quiet woods. Men had been pouring into the forest all day looking for the killers; we’d watched them enter in droves. But just a few steps into the woods Tom and I felt profoundly alone. It seemed the wilderness had no trouble completely absorbing all the fugitives, the search parties, and the curious. The sudden hush and the slower pace of travel on foot made us reflective.

  “When did you find out about Mr. Strange?” I asked.

  “The phone rang. Not long after we got back. The union was calling everybody, telling them about the explosion and an emergency meeting tomorrow. At the institute.”

  “Did your dad say anything?”

  “Nah. And I didn’t ask. He wasn’t even talking to Mom about it. After the phone call, he just sat on the porch until the sun came up.”

  “He said it was all talk last night.”

  “I guess he was wrong about that.”

  “Is he going to talk to the sheriff?”

  Tom shot me a look. “Why would he talk to the sheriff?”

  “Because…”

  “What about you?” he said a little sharply. “Is your dad talking to the sheriff?”

  “Why would he?”

  Tom shrugged. “Because he’s a manager? I don’t know. He’s probably in charge of the plant now. And it seems like your mom is always talking to the sheriff. Aren’t they friends or something?”