Over and Under

by Tucker, Todd

  The fort was a large circle of huge rectangular stones standing on end that had been a centerpiece of our childhood war gaming. The whole formation was about fifty yards in diameter. The interior of the fort was sunken, lower than the surrounding ground. From the outside, the dark, mossy rock walls of the fort were only a couple of feet high. From the inside, they were as high as ten feet. This made the fort a place of supreme natural cover. From the outside, you could barely see it. From inside, you had the perfect hiding spot, a place where you could stand completely upright and not be seen outside the circle. Years ago, Tom and I had discovered that we could stand at opposite ends of the circle whispering, and the sound would be amplified as if we were standing right next to each other. It was a weird place, a place that compelled you to think about things like human sacrifice and primitive religion. Once Tom and I snuck up on four sweaty day hikers from Louisville in the fort, as they stood in the middle of the circle and contemplated their “discovery.” When Tom and I jumped down from the wall, they all yelped and nearly jumped right out of their pricey-looking backpacks. And that was in broad daylight.

  Because of the low ground inside, one theory held that the fort was a remnant of a cave that had collapsed in on itself. The more popular explanation, and the one that Tom and I always chose to believe, was that the fort had been constructed centuries before Christopher Columbus by a Welsh prince named Madoc.

  Most versions of the legend went something like this: a thousand years ago or so, Madoc, the illegitimate son of a Welsh king, left Wales and discovered the New World with a group of colonists. Putting ashore around what would be called Mobile Bay, Alabama, Madoc and his crew made their way inland, leaving a string of crude fortifications along the way. They stopped to make their permanent home near the Ohio River. By the time the next batch of Europeans arrived, three or four centuries later, the Welshmen had been completely assimilated by the Indians and the land, although the European explorers were surprised to discover Indians who fished from basketlike boats reminiscent of old Wales. In 1803, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark began their famous expedition in southern Indiana, where Silver Creek meets the Ohio, in my county, a county named for William Clark’s brother. Two years into their journey, Lewis and Clark were stunned to discover on the plains a dying tribe of fair-haired Indians who spoke a language that sounded eerily like Welsh.

  Like so many things hidden in our woods, scholars dismissed the legend of Madoc, always explaining away the evidence as it would occasionally come to light. During the construction of the Big Four Bridge across the Ohio River in 1888, a leather bag of ancient Roman coins was discovered buried in the murk. In 1968, a helmet with Welsh inscriptions was discovered during the development of a shopping mall in Clarksville. The coins, said the professors, must have been lost by a collector. The helmet was fake. And our fort, as creepy and geometric as Stonehenge, was a sinkhole.

  Tom scampered off the path onto the gentle slope that led to the wall of the fort, hunched over to stay low. I followed him. Tom got to the wall slightly before I did, and what he saw surprised him so much it stood him up straight.

  “Oh, shit.” he said. I reached his side and looked down. Inside the bowl of the fort was a neat camp: a Coleman two-man dome tent, two nylon jungle hammocks slung between some slight trees, and a campfire that we hadn’t seen until we were on the wall.

  “Shit.”

  Someone grabbed my elbow. An instant later, someone lunged at Tom noisily and did the same to him, as he tried to jerk away.

  “Hello, boys,” said the one grabbing Tom. Without even looking, I knew with absolute certainty that the one grabbing my arm was Guthrie Kruer. Only a local could have snuck up on me like that.

  As they pushed us down into the fort, I took stock of the guns spread throughout their camp. There was a .22 Winchester rifle with a nice scope leaning on a tree. Next to that was an expensive twelve-gauge shotgun designed for turkey hunting, every inch of it camouflaged with green splotches in an attempt to gain an advantage over the tricky birds. On a tree stump next to the tent lay a shiny stainless-steel .38 Colt revolver. I was terrified, but not by the guns themselves. It would have been far stranger for Tom and I to come upon adults wandering around in the woods without guns. What alarmed me more was what the men had planned for dinner. A sizable box turtle had been placed on its back near the fire so it couldn’t get away, its leathery legs moving helplessly in the air. Next to it was a scrawny but neatly cleaned rabbit crucified on a spit made of twigs. It was a puny thing, something no normal person would have bothered to shoot, much less eat. That wasn’t the scary part. As every Borden boy knew, until the first week of November, rabbits were out of season. Sanders and Kruer were killers and fugitives, I already knew, but that scrawny, contraband rabbit was to me an ultimate sign of lawlessness and desperation.

  Kruer positioned me with surprising gentleness next to the campfire, then walked over to the tree stump, pushed the Colt revolver aside, and wearily sat down. Sanders, who had Tom, shoved him beside me, and placed his hands on his hips in an attempt to look authoritative.

  “What are you boys doin’ out here?” he said loudly. “Shootin’ and carryin’ on?” Tom and I didn’t have our guns with us. It confirmed that he must have been the one watching us earlier that afternoon, the source of the mysterious noise.

  “Nothin’,” I said, with as much bravado as I could muster. Tom didn’t say anything. My mind was running a thousand miles an hour, as I calculated the best escape route from the camp, the best way over the wall of the fort, the best way to run from this mess. There was one rock I knew, behind us, that had some indentations that might serve as toeholds in a pinch. I wondered how fast I could fly up and over it with a running start. If I made the slightest move, no matter how crazy, I knew Tom would follow me. My muscles tense, I stood on the balls of my feet, ready to do the same for him.

  “Well, as you young men know,” he continued, “this here is Borden Casket Company property, and you boys are trespassing!” He jabbed his finger at the smudged BCC company logo on his dirty jacket, which I hadn’t noticed up to that point. “We’re guards for the company.”

  I didn’t look at Tom, but if I hadn’t been so scared I would have laughed. I wanted to tell Sanders that I’d seen the actual guards hired by the company, and that they had a more stringent dress code. He continued.

  “We’re security guards, and I might just have the police come out here and take you boys to jail.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll tell them you’re poaching rabbit.”

  As Sanders stepped closer, Tom punched my side in warning, which surprised me—he was usually the first to challenge anyone in authority, as he had earlier in the day with Solinski. This seemed to be one of those rare times when he sensed real danger. Sanders got in my face, and everything about him, including his breath, smelled like campfire smoke. It was as if he were about to burst into flames himself.

  “Don’t sass me, you little shit,” he said, poking me in the chest. My instincts told me that I was about to get the shit kicked out of me. I leaned back slightly, ready to bolt. Just in time, Kruer came off his tree stump and calmly pulled his partner back. He shook his head as he regained his composure, and returned to the script he had apparently prepared for our little meeting.

  “Well, you seem like good boys,” he said, incongruously just seconds after calling me a little shit. Sanders seemed to think we actually bought into the charade, that there might be two guards out there camping in the woods. There was something tangibly off about him. I would recognize it later in life as a characteristic of real craziness, the inability to keep track of even the reality inside your own head. He cleared his throat and spit a gob far into the darkness. Kruer looked on, completely miserable at the spectacle. “I’ll tell you what I can do. Just leave, don’t come back here, and don’t tell anyone about our little talk. If you do that, then I won’t have to get the police involved. Okay?” He gave us a lupine smile.
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  “Sure,” I said, the relief obvious in my voice. I wanted nothing more than to get away. Tom and I started to back slowly away from the fire.

  “Hey,” said Kruer quietly. “Are those twenty-twos? Can you spare some?” He had heard the shells jingling together in Tom’s pocket. Surprising me, Tom reached in his pocket, pulled out the small handful of shells, and walked over so he could drop them in his hand. He gave Tom a weak smile in return, and closed his fingers around the gift.

  Tom and I continued walking out of the fort with fake assuredness. We climbed up the rock I had been thinking of; my toes did fit neatly into the crevices I had remembered. We could have scooted up it in a hurry had that been necessary. As soon as we climbed to the top of the wall, Tom turned and shouted back at the men.

  “You don’t want to eat that turtle,” Tom yelled.

  “Why not?” yelled Sanders with a smirk. “Haven’t you ever heard of turtle soup?”

  “Those box turtles eat poison mushrooms,” said Tom. “The poison builds up in the meat. It don’t hurt them, but it’ll kill you.”

  “What?” His smirk faded.

  “It’s true,” said Kruer, who had returned to his seat on the tree stump.

  “Well, why didn’t you tell me before? I was about to eat the motherfucker!” In his anger, Sanders actually lunged for the .38, snatching it off the stump. We all were startled. It was not the action of someone who had grown up around guns, someone who was familiar with the damage they could cause and the very narrow set of problems they were designed to solve. I think it was the disbelief in all our stares, including Kruer’s, which caused Sanders to drop the gun to his side, although in his jitteriness he scared me still, as he unconsciously tapped the cocked gun against his thigh and muttered nonsensically into the darkness.

  Kruer ignored him and gently put the turtle on its feet. It marched calmly into the darkness.

  Tom and I also made our escape.

  Exhilaration flooded my system, as it always did in the aftermath of one of our close scrapes.

  “Can you believe that?” Tom said as we ran. “Can you believe we really found them?”

  “So what do we do now?” I asked.

  Tom pretended not to hear me, refusing to allow me to interfere with his jubilation.

  Eight

  The next morning, I rode my bike down Cabin Hill to the picket line. Tom eagerly waved me over as I approached. Two of the strikers were causing a ruckus by heatedly arguing over the communal radio, a dusty thing liberated from someone’s workstation in the factory. It now sat between them, on an overturned steel drum on the shoulder of Highway 60. When the strike began, the spirit of solidarity was so strong on the picket line that no one could have imagined a fistfight between two strikers. Now it appeared that fully half the crowd was cheering for one.

  On one side of the radio was Johnny Steinert, a popular, recent graduate of the high school. He’d been a four-year starter on the basketball team, where his height made up for skinny limbs that seemed to be almost devoid of muscle. Upon graduation, Johnny had taken over a spot in the paint room. Johnny’s mom, we all knew, had died of cancer when he was a baby, and no one ever mentioned Johnny without saying what a good job Johnny’s dad had done in raising him, and what a good boy Johnny had turned out to be. He wore a CAT hat and a faded IU T-shirt commemorating Coach Knight’s perfect season three years before. His curly blond hair stuck out wildly from around the cap, making him look like a slightly roughed-up Roger Daltrey. Johnny was holding his hands over the radio, theatrically refusing to allow anyone to change the station. “My Sharona” by the Knack was the song causing all the trouble.

  Johnny’s adversary was Russ Knable, who glared at Johnny with hands on hips and close, dark eyes set deep in a fleshy face. Russ’s blue work shirt stretched over the kind of beer belly that, while big, looked as hard as sculpted marble. He and Orpod Judd competed for the title of meanest drunk in Borden. Russ did, however, seem to represent the majority as he demanded that the radio be returned to the bland voice of Milton Metz prattling endlessly on WHAS 840 AM about the heat and the upcoming state fair. I suppose if these men had wanted to listen to music, they would have preferred something from Nashville. To be honest, though, they were sober people who even in good times rarely allowed themselves something as frivolous as music, even if it was sung by somebody respectable, like Porter Wagoner or George Jones. They listened to music at church. The rest of the week they preferred weather and news.

  “Hey,” I said, riding up next to Tom as the volume of the argument began to overtake the music.

  “Hey,” he said back. We were right at the edge of the strikers, and I could tell Tom was evaluating how much he could say without pulling back away from the crowd. He was almost jittery he wanted to talk about it so badly. “Let’s go back there right now,” he finally said to me with a raised eyebrow.

  “Shit no,” I replied. I didn’t even want to think about it. I’d been up all night trying to decide whether to tell my parents about the encounter, but it seemed like too much to reveal all at once: Tom and I sneak out of the house periodically in the middle of the night. We witnessed the plant explosion. We’ve located the men who killed Don Strange. Try as I might, I just couldn’t figure out how I would begin the conversation. I knew it would be difficult to just forget everything I knew about Mack Sanders and Guthrie Kruer, maybe the most difficult thing I had ever done. But I had decided to give it a shot.

  “Why not? Come on!” said Tom.

  I shook my head again. I can’t say I was surprised that Tom wanted to go back to the fort, but his urgency hit me like a punch in the stomach. I felt like I wasn’t living up to the responsibility of being Tom Kruer’s best friend. As bad as that felt, it wasn’t going to get me back to the fort. From the crucified rabbit to the smoky breath of Mack Sanders, there was absolutely nothing there I wanted to experience again.

  “We don’t even have to talk to them,” said Tom. “Let’s just go spy on them, check ’em out, see what they’re doing.”

  “I ain’t going back,” I said quietly.

  “Come on!”

  “No way.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, as I tried to think of a way to make Tom drop the subject, I saw thugs moving in formation inside the fence. The entire force was coming out of the plant in kind of a trot, jogging deliberately toward the main gate. There was a rustle of lawn chairs as the picketers turned their attention from the fight over the radio to their approach. For the moment, rock ’n’ roll won the day, as the Knack continued belting out their hit from tinny speakers. The thugs assembled in two rows, one on each side of the driveway just inside the gate.

  “We can go tonight,” whispered Tom. “After dark. How about it?”

  I had no intention of actually saying a word about Sanders and Kruer to anybody, but I felt an almost physical need to make Tom shut up about them. “Maybe we should tell someone where they are,” I said. “Maybe I should tell my dad. Or the sheriff.”

  Tom’s face fell in an expression of complete betrayal. I wasn’t sure if it was because Guthrie Kruer shared his last name, or because they all shared a union, or because Sanders and Kruer were the most remarkable discovery yet that we’d made in the woods: telling anyone about them would be like standing up in front of our class and talking about the secret passage we’d crawled through to Squire Boone Caverns. Tom wanted to explore our new discovery in secret, map its every corner. I wanted to forget about it and never go back.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” I recanted quickly. “I promise. But I’m not going back.” Tom was shaking his head, still speechless from my threat to snitch.

  We heard shouted orders inside the fence in Solinski’s commanding, raspy voice. The thugs came to attention. Solinski then strode between the two columns to the gate and opened it, reminding me again that he arrogantly kept the thing unlocked. Solinski didn’t look at the strikers as he walked up. They had to pay attention to him, he seemed to be sa
ying, not the other way around. Most of the strikers were now on their feet to get a better look at whatever was going down. The state troopers in their cruiser, I noticed, on the other side of Highway 60, were also craning their necks for a better view. Whatever Solinksi was up to, they weren’t in on it.

  “Clear the driveway!” Solinski suddenly shouted in our direction, startling us all. The strikers had gotten into the habit of drifting from the shoulder of Highway 60—public property—and onto the driveway—BCC private property—during the day, after the daily delivery of scabs in their armored Shively Security bus. The strikers always grudgingly moved back again to the shoulder before the end of the shift so that the bus could leave amid a course of halfhearted jeers. It seemed Solinski was expecting midday visitors.

  At first, some of the strikers actually stepped obediently aside in response to Solinski’s command. They were a group of men raised to respect authority and follow orders. Then they remembered who was giving the order, and quickly got back into character.

  “Screw that,” mumbled Russ Knable. His adrenaline was already jacked up from the battle with Johnny, and he happily took the lead in the confrontation with Solinski. He strolled with exaggerated ease to the center of the driveway, and crossed his short, muscular arms against his chest. A couple of his friends moved reluctantly behind him in support.

  “Step aside,” said Solinski. “You’re on company property.”

  Russ looked around at his comrades with an eyebrow raised before turning back to face Solinski. “Fuck you, Sarge,” he said. A ripple of nervous laughter went through the picketers.

  “Move or I’ll move you.”

  “Goddamn that would make me happy,” said Russ, and you could tell he meant it. He spread his feet slightly and clenched his fists.