by Tucker, Todd
Tom and I turned our bikes around and easily beat the crowd back to the picket line, which was now largely deserted. Inside the fence, I saw that the thugs were ignoring the running of the hounds. Solinski had a large topographical map laid out on a picnic table, the site of summer lunches and smoke breaks during happier days. Two of his RC cans were holding down the corners. Solinski was pointing out coordinates and drawing lines for his men. I could tell even from a distance that it wasn’t a map of Louisville: the large blue band of the Ohio River snaked around the very bottom edge of it. It was a map of Clark County. Solinski didn’t believe Sajko’s lazy dogs any more than Tom and I did.
That night after dinner had been cleaned up and the Sanka had brewed, Dad shuffled and dealt our well-worn deck of Authors cards.
“I’m feeling lucky tonight,” said Dad, sorting his hand.
“The Alhambra?” I asked Mom.
“No,” she said. I drew a useless Pendennis off the pile.
“The Scarlet Letter?” Dad asked me. I slid it across the table.
“Yes!” he said, as he happily laid out Hawthorne’s four major works on the table.
“How’d they do it?” I asked suddenly. Dad looked at Mom, and I could tell that not only did he know exactly what my vague question meant, but that they had anticipated and planned for it. One of the many things I didn’t like about being an only child was that it was nearly impossible for me to surprise my parents.
“How’d they do what?” Dad asked, buying time.
“The explosion at the factory,” I said, pretending to sort my cards. “How’d they make it blow up?”
My father looked to my mother again, confirming the strategy they had decided earlier about what and how much to tell me.
“Do you remember the finishing ovens?” my father asked. “Where the caskets roll between coats?”
I nodded. That was in my father’s area of the plant, the area I knew the best. The coffins rolled single file on a belt through the paint booths, which applied each coat of prime, color, and finish. Then the caskets crept slowly through the warm ovens at a precisely calculated temperature, and rolled out the other side with the color more firmly affixed. Or something like that. My father had been largely unsuccessful in his attempts to interest me in the complexities of finishing fine wood coffins. Even so, I did distinctly remember the ovens. While I grew up in a town where virtually everybody paid their bills with money made from the sale of expensive wooden caskets, there was something spooky to me about that unending column of them rolling slowly through a glowing oven.
My father continued. “They lit a candle at one end of the finish line. Then, they blew out the pilot light on the oven, and turned up the throttle valve on the gas all the way. The place filled up with a cloud of natural gas, and when the cloud reached the candle, it ignited, and exploded.” He paused, took a breath, then continued to explain to me how Don Strange died.
“Don was standing outside his office when it exploded. Maybe he heard something. Maybe he smelled gas. Maybe he was just getting ready to leave.”
“So what actually killed him?” I asked.
“The explosion.”
“No, I mean, how? Was he burned up? Did something go through his head?”
My mother was horrified. “Andy, don’t be morbid.”
“No, it’s okay,” said my father. “It was the explosion. The blast threw him across the finish room, into a concrete wall. Broke almost every bone in his body. It was enough to kill him five times over.”
I pretended to focus on the unaffiliated array of Alcotts, Twains, and Sir Walter Scotts in my hand, and not on the image of tiny Don Strange helplessly flying across the finishing room and slamming into a hard wall.
“They’ll pay for what they did. Sooner or later,” my father said. “Although I would have thought they could catch at least one of them by now, Sanders or Kruer.”
“How do you know they’ll get caught? How can you be so sure?” I wanted to know it was certain; if there was no doubt, then I was all freed from any responsibility to come forward and tell the authorities what Tom and I had seen.
“Wherever they end up, somebody will rat them out,” my mom said quickly.
I was mystified by her reaction. “Don’t we want them caught?”
“Of course we do. I just don’t like the way people are lining up to turn them in.” Her Kentucky accent had sharpened in the same way it did when she spoke about Phyllis Schlafly.
My father sighed. “They’ll get caught without anybody’s help—they’ve hardly proven themselves master criminals.”
“Maybe,” my mom said.
“They found Mack’s ball cap at the factory. With his name written in it. Plus, several people came forward and said Sanders was making a lot of crazy threats at the union meeting that very night.”
“Like I said. Union people around here are pretty quick to turn on one of their own.” I wanted her to elaborate on her own upbringing, where people presumably knew how to throw a proper strike.
“Well, God bless the people around here for that,” said my father. “There are folks on our picket line who don’t cotton to murder and arson.”
“God bless them?” my mother asked.
“God bless them.”
We went back to our card game.
Six
During the night, the phone rang and woke me from a deep sleep. I heard Mom hurriedly get ready and drive away, presumably to help Sheriff Kohl again with one of his secret midnight requests. It occurred to me as I drifted back to sleep that the frequency of the sheriff’s calls was increasing as the strike went on.
That call was a hazy memory when a metallic pounding woke me the next morning. Through my window, I saw Mom out by the road hammering a small blue sign on a metal stake into the ground. I pulled on my shorts, rubbed my eyes, and walked out front to see what she was advocating. It looked almost like one of the pro-strike signs that dotted the lawns throughout town. It wasn’t. When I got closer, I read in red and white letters: ERA—VOTE YES!
“I thought that already passed.” I remembered her celebrating something similar years before, and a mention of the amendment in school.
“Not just yet.”
“What’s ERA gonna make us do?”
“It says you can’t deny me my rights because I’m a woman.”
I thought it over. “Are you sure that’s not the law already?”
“It passed Congress in seventy-two. Now thirty-eight states have to ratify it for it to be part of the Constitution.”
“How many states have passed it?”
“Thirty-five.”
“How about Indiana?” I asked.
“Indiana was the last one, number thirty-five, two years ago.”
“If Indiana already passed it, why put the sign up?”
“Moral support. And because we’re running out of time—1982 is the deadline.”
“Cool,” I said. “You’ve got three years to get three states. That shouldn’t be too hard.”
“You wouldn’t think,” she said, giving the sign a final whack.
We walked back toward the house together. The sign was largely a symbolic gesture, I knew, even apart from Indiana’s fait accompli. Only the Kruers lived between us and the end of Cabin Hill Road: few registered voters would pass and be influenced by my mom’s efforts. Mom had put a similar sign in the yard years before, at some other key point in the amendment’s legislative life. Of the few folks who drove by it, some asked Dad why our house was for sale.
Dad was furiously chopping through shrubs next to the house, in the center of a green cloud of unwanted foliage. Since the strike began, our yard had achieved a kind of glory, more edged, fertilized, and weeded than it had ever been before. Mom exchanged her hammer for a hoe and began hacking between the rows of our vegetable garden. I suppose she imagined recalcitrant state legislators as she worked. I volunteered to pluck the ravenous worms from the tomato plants, avoiding their sharp horns
and the green slime they oozed in panic as I dropped them to their doom in a small bucket of water. It felt good to be out in the heat working together. I was so intent on my chores that Mom saw Tom walk up the driveway before I did.
“Hello, Mrs. Gray,” he said. He was shirtless, as usual, with a fishing pole in his hand and his M6 rifle slung behind his back. He gave me a quick, sly look, and I knew why he was there. We were going searching for the fugitives.
“Hi, Tommy,” she said, smiling. While Tom’s dad and mine might have been on opposite sides of our little labor war, neither family made any attempt at curtailing our friendship. Neither family was capable of that kind of cruelty, for one thing. For another, it would have been futile, short of locking us both in our rooms. And we had well-traveled escape routes for that eventuality as well. In any case, my parents genuinely liked Tom and had no interest in keeping us separated. And they had no idea, of course, that we were looking for something bigger than bass and squirrel.
“Can Andy go fishing?” Tom asked my mom. Dad had worked his way over to us. He was wiping sweat from his brow with one hand, holding hedge clippers with the other.
“How are you, young man?” he asked.
“Fine, sir.”
“Your folks?”
“They’re real good,” Tom said automatically. “I thought Andy and me would go fishing.”
“Must be some big fish you’re after.” He grinned and pointed at the gun. Tom shrugged and smiled back. I ran up to my room and got my gun and my fishing pole, and ran up alongside Tom, now identically equipped.
“Look at these two,” my father said.
“Can I go?” I asked.
“Certainly,” said my father. “Be careful. Be home for supper.”
Mom and Dad watched us walk off, and I could tell that the scene gave them profound pleasure.
The guns slung across our backs were our prized possessions, and we often took them along with us in the woods, when both our meager budgets and our parents allowed us the use of live ammunition. Tom and I had both received the guns the previous Christmas. Up to that point, I had spent that holiday season in a funk, depressed again about the low population inside the Gray house. Starting at about Thanksgiving, I imagined generations bumping into each other in the tiny front rooms all over Borden, the folks repeating themselves to be heard over the noise. Our house was so quiet on Christmas mornings that we could hear the high-pitched whining of my dad’s electronic flash recharging between photographs. Tom’s house was so crowded that two of his younger siblings had to eat Christmas dinner on an ironing board in the living room, because the dining room table, the kitchen table, and two card tables weren’t quite big enough for the whole clan. I always longed for that: a huge family with stupid traditions, family recipes, black sheep, and crazy uncles. The feeling was especially strong during the holidays. But Mom’s family was a mystery, and my father was an only child, like me. Crowded, chaotic Christmas mornings were something I’d never have.
Adding to my gloom was the giant foil-wrapped Hershey Kiss I’d been unable to give Taffy for Christmas. Right before school let out, I’d lingered in Miller’s for thirty minutes until the store was completely empty except for me and Patsy. Then I snatched the kiss off the shelf, hurriedly picked a card, and rushed to the register, eager to complete the transaction before any of my friends could wander in and bust me. Patsy sensed my discomfort and took her time counting my quarters and dimes, but I was able to leave the store unseen. I imagined myself giving it to Taffy at school the next day, the look on her face as she accepted the gift, the resumption of the romance that had been interrupted by a misunderstanding over a shared sandwich with Theresa Gettelfinger.
But Taffy didn’t show up for school the next day, or the next day, and then we were on Christmas break. I’d been unable to muster the nerve necessary to deliver the present to her home. The kiss was hidden in my top dresser drawer, making me think about Taffy every time I got a pair of socks, all of which soon smelled vaguely of chocolate. My parents must have sensed my moodiness when they decided to get me the best Christmas present of my life.
When I came downstairs Christmas morning, the gun was leaning unwrapped against the fireplace, so casually that it took me a few minutes to notice it. It was, in its own way, fairly nondescript, all black metal without a piece of wood on it. As soon as I spotted it, I grabbed it and read the Springfield Armory name and logo etched into the side, two crossed cannons in a circle. On the other side was SPRINGFIELD ARMORY M6 SURVIVAL. As Mom and Dad watched, I broke the weapon down, looking at every part from every angle, memorizing the curves and colors of each component, and especially the way everything fit together in a meaningful, logical way. It’s hard to explain how strongly I wanted to know immediately everything about that gun. A few years later, in a sweltering Indiana University dorm room, I would study a creased photograph of my first love with the same kind of devotion.
The gun was a Springfield M6 Scout. It was entirely made of metal, including the stock—the whole thing had a blocky, utilitarian look. It had two barrels, over and under, a .22 rifle barrel over a slightly larger .410 shotgun. I had seen double-barrel guns before, but always with two barrels of the same caliber. I associated the configuration with old-fashioned guns, museum pieces or heirlooms manufactured before pump-action or semiautomatic mechanisms, when it took two barrels to get two shots off quickly. My gun was clearly no antique, however, as indicated by the complete lack of wood or ornamentation in its manufacture. A knurled knob moved the firing pin on the hammer to one of two positions: the lower position for the shotgun, the top for the .22. The front sight was also selectable, a small “l” of metal that could be flipped up to a small “v” for the shotgun, or a tiny “o” peep sight for the rifle, both of which were labeled as such with tiny, almost microscopic numbers. While it was obviously not a Daisy BB gun, it wasn’t all that much bigger: thirty-two inches long and just four and a half pounds, according to the “Your New M6 Scout” operator’s manual that I rapidly memorized. The strangest thing about the gun’s appearance was that it lacked a trigger. In its place was a kind of squeeze bar. A black nylon sling ran from the very back of the stock to the end of the barrel.
The gun was designed to be compact. It broke open in the middle to load, and in the same way it could be folded almost completely in half. In the buttstock was a waterproof storage compartment for storing ammunition: a single row of nineteen holes, fifteen for .22 shells, and four larger ones for .410 shotgun shells. I owned a Crossman pellet gun, and a BB gun, too, both designed to mimic the look of real guns as closely as possible. But here was the real thing, right in front of me, and it was all mine. I could scarcely believe my luck.
“You be careful with that,” my father said. “Like they taught you.”
Dad was referring to the gun-safety class Tom and I had taken side by side the summer before, the summer of ’78. At the time we were a little curious about why our fathers had enrolled us. We’d both been shooting our fathers’ guns for years, under their careful supervision, and a respect for firearms and an intimate knowledge of the damage they could cause was a part of our lives. Like Tom, I had already felt the exhilaration and the shame of a well-placed shot, killing my first rabbit with the Crossman pellet gun, gingerly examining the limp, bleeding carcass to confirm what I had done. (We were both so bothered by the experience that we independently asked clergymen for solace. Tom’s priest told him killing the rabbit wasn’t a sin because the rabbit didn’t have a soul. Reverend Nichols told me it was okay because God gave man dominion over the animals.) We didn’t think some class had anything to teach us about the power of guns. Nonetheless, Tom and I weren’t going to argue with an opportunity to hold and shoot our fathers’ guns for a week.
For the class, I used my father’s lever-action .22 Marlin rifle, and Tom shot his dad’s old Remington. The class was held in the cinder-block “clubhouse” of the Georgetown Conservation Club, and was filled with city kids fro
m New Albany and Jeffersonville, most of them wearing amberlensed shooting glasses and pristine Cabela’s vests. On the first day, when we stood to introduce ourselves one by one, the kids snickered at Tom and me, either at our presidential names or our hillbilly accents. We had to wait through three days of classroom training before we could show them up. We might talk funny up in the hills, they would learn, but we could shoot like Sergeant York.
The safety classes were excruciatingly thorough and repetitive—to this day I can recite the three fundamental rules for safe gun handling verbatim: ALWAYS keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. ALWAYS keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot. ALWAYS keep the gun unloaded until ready to use. We were motivated to study by our knowledge that a passing grade on the written test was required before we could go out on the range. The firing point was in sight and in earshot, just outside the windows of the classroom where we vowed repeatedly to Know Our Target and What Is Beyond. The occasional pop-pop-pop from outside was a tantalizing incentive to study hard.
All but two of our classmates passed the written test. One of those who failed was a chunky loudmouth from Clarksville who had told us all at every turn that he already knew everything about guns and didn’t need the class; he surprised us by crying in humiliation when the instructors announced his failure. The other washout was a nervous, skinny youngster from Georgetown. Throughout the course he had asked the instructors earnest and specific questions about the potential for self-inflicted wounds on the range. When they announced that he had failed the written test and would not be shooting, he let out a heartfelt sigh of relief.
The instructors then marched the rest of us out on the range where Tom and I immediately asserted our superiority. We were naturals. The rules the other kids had to think about individually with each shot—focus on the front sight, breathe, relax, aim, squeeze-the-trigger-don’t-jerk-it—came automatically to us. While the other kids were learning to their surprise how loud a real gunshot is, and how sharply a little .22 rifle can kick you in the shoulder, Tom and I actually thought about the wind direction and the inch of angle the bullet dropped on its way downrange to the paper bull’s-eye. I could actually see my bullet leave the barrel and the arc it traced as it flew downrange. When I told the instructors, they said it wasn’t possible, but Tom said he could see it, too. The instructors soon took a special interest in the two of us, as we punched holes in the centers of ever more distant targets while our classmates struggled to keep their rounds out of the dirt.