Over and Under

by Tucker, Todd

  Flashlights came into view, the beams swinging casually back and forth. They were coming directly from the highway, following the wide, easy path that ran to Silver Creek, a path kept clear and flat by a regular parade of fishermen and day hikers. The bulk of the group was walking together up front in a jovial mob. We heard their voices, which were lighthearted: laughter sprinkled with occasional good-natured bitching.

  Behind them, a tall silhouette walked alone and trained his flashlight with more deliberation. A few times, the beam pointed right at us, although we knew from that distance no one could see us, especially hunkered down as we were behind the fort’s limestone wall. Even though the fire was out, I worried about a log popping, giving us away. The lone thug hesitated, almost as if he sensed that we were near. He grew frustrated with the noise coming from his teammates in front.

  “Shut the fuck up!” he shouted ahead. They instantly quieted. No one challenged his authority, although it was clear from their continued, casual pace that no one else really expected to find anything of interest during their midnight hike. I knew the voice. Of course it was Solinski.

  They continued to walk down the path. Although they were no longer talking, their careless footsteps continued to make an unholy racket. Soon, they all passed from view, and the sound faded in the distance.

  “Solinski,” I whispered.

  “We have got to get out of here!” Guthrie hissed to Sanders. “They’re getting closer every night.”

  “We will,” said Sanders, his sharp teeth flashing in the moonlight. “Tomorrow night, after our little buddies here come back with what we need.”

  “Goddamn,” whispered Guthrie.

  “Go on,” Sanders said to us. “You kids go on and get home. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “With the shells?” said Tom.

  He paused for just a second. “Right, with the shells.”

  “Guthrie told me about the bird,” Tom said, after we had hiked a safe distance away.

  “The bird?” I asked.

  “The bird, the bird,” Tom said. “The buzzard he rescued from the water tower.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “He couldn’t stand the sound,” Tom said. “That’s why he went up there. Said he couldn’t believe nobody planned on doing anything. All the other firemen were just standing around down there in the parking lot, listening to the thing squawk, waiting for it to die.”

  “I remember,” I said. “It was freezing cold, right before Christmas. There wasn’t a place in the valley you could go without hearing it.”

  “Guthrie said after a few minutes, he decided he had to climb up there—he seriously thought the sound of it was going to drive him crazy.”

  “It didn’t even sound like a bird.”

  “He said he just had to climb up the tower and make it stop.”

  “Save it?” I asked.

  “Save it or kill it.”

  We both thought that over as we crawled over and under a series of trunks and limbs that had been lying across the path most of our lives.

  “How about you?” Tom asked suddenly. “What did you and Sanders talk about? When I went with Guthrie to piss?”

  “Sanders said he doesn’t want to leave,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Said they’ll be seen by the cops in the daytime, or caught by the thugs at night,” I said.

  Tom thought that over. “Then I wonder how come he’ll be ready to leave tomorrow if we just give him a box of buckshot,” he said. “Surely he’s not planning on shooting his way out of here.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s a good question.”

  Tom mulled it over in the deepest, smartest part of his brain, the part of my brain I didn’t have full access to. I knew he continued to work on the problem even as he asked me his next question.

  “Did Sanders say anything else? What else did you talk about while you two were alone?”

  I thought about Sanders closing in, circling me, on the verge of discovering the identity of my father.

  “Nothing,” I lied. “What else did you and Guthrie talk about?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  Nine

  I slept soundly that night, deeper than I’d slept in days. I had a dream where I could jump miles into the air. I had to grab the skinny top branches of trees as I passed to avoid flying into space. I looked down as I hung on, and saw Tom, Guthrie, and Sanders sitting around the fire inside the fort without me. They looked around for me, but none of them thought to look straight up, where I was safely hidden in the treetops. Beyond the fort I saw the cave entrance, a small black void tucked into the thick foliage. The Buffalo Trace snaked in and out of view, in curves that I suddenly realized were not at all random, as they appeared from the ground, but in fact led the buffalo herds efficiently through the hilly topography, around the biggest crags and across the few level plateaus. In the middle of the eye-shaped pool in Silver Creek, the giant, lonely carp came to the surface for a gulp of air, his mirrored scales reflecting the moonlight.

  I woke disappointed, unable to fly. The elation of my dream evaporated, making room for the dense, heavy dread that kept me earthbound. I still knew the location of Don Strange’s killers, and I still was supposed to meet them one more time, to deliver whatever buckshot shells Tom could lay his hands on. I didn’t want to get out of bed. Doing so would put me one step closer to a reunion with Mack Sanders.

  I suddenly realized that it was the unfamiliar sound of male voices arguing downstairs that had awoken me. Sunlight streamed in my window, telling me that I’d slept late. I looked out and saw Mr. Kruer’s truck in the driveway. I slipped out my bedroom door and halfway down the stairs to listen.

  “We’re trying to get by on twenty dollars a week from the strike fund,” said Tom’s dad bitterly. “That was a week’s worth of groceries for us.” There was a note of desperation in his voice, something I was sure he wouldn’t have allowed himself in front of Tom. Or me.

  I saw my dad hesitantly reach for his wallet. George Kruer waved his hand in disgust.

  “I didn’t come here for your money, Gus,” he said. “Just tell Andy that Tom can’t come out. He’s grounded until he decides to tell me what he did with all that food, and until he comes up with the money to pay for it.” He walked out the front door and stomped down the porch steps.

  Dad sighed, his hand still on his wallet. He spotted me on the steps.

  “Come on down here, buddy,” he said wearily. I did. My mother had found her way into the front room, dressed to go somewhere. She was wearing new jeans and a shirt that was old but freshly ironed. She had earrings in as well, a rarity. They were the kind of clothes she’d wear to help paint the church or to assemble gift baskets for the poor: old but not too old, nice but not too nice.

  “What on earth did Tom do with all those groceries?” asked Dad.

  I shrugged, choosing to remain silent rather than lie.

  “Sounds like Tom’s dad doesn’t even know you two were in a fight. Doesn’t know you weren’t together at all yesterday.”

  I shrugged again.

  “Do you two have a friend who needs food? We can help if you let us know.”

  My silence hurt Dad’s feelings deeply. He knew that I had secrets, of course, that fact didn’t bother him by itself. I spent days on end in the woods with my best friend, and he realized that we had built up whole volumes of stories together that he would never know. This was different, though. He was asking me something directly, and I was refusing to tell him. It was a new kind of conversation for us, and neither one of us knew quite how to handle it.

  “Well, whatever you’ve been doing, you’re not doing it today,” he said, when it became clear that I wasn’t going to volunteer any more information. “Tom’s grounded, and so are you, until you boys find a way to get along with each other, and pay for all that food.”

  My parents watched me closely, and I did my best to hide my true feelings about the punishment:
unbridled relief. I couldn’t leave the house and neither could Tom I didn’t ever want to see Mack Sanders again, I didn’t want to satisfy his mysterious need for buckshot, and I didn’t want him to ask me again what my father did at the plant. Tom getting grounded was the best thing that could possibly happen to me. My parents were suspicious, I saw, and curious, but they couldn’t quite put the pieces together, and were in the process of writing off the whole grocery theft as one of those illogical acts of mischief that could never be completely explained. I walked upstairs fighting the urge to clap my hands.

  My father drove away soon after that, some plant business to attend to. A few minutes later, Mom knocked on my bedroom door and walked in.

  “Put on something respectable,” she said. “You’re coming with me.”

  “What are we doing?” I asked.

  “It’s a secret,” she said seriously. I started to laugh. “No, really,” she said. “It’s secret. I wouldn’t bring you if I didn’t have to, but there’s no way I’m going to leave you here alone with all this craziness going on. Have I got your attention?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “You have to promise me that you won’t tell anyone what you see today.”

  “Not even Dad?” I said.

  “He knows all about it.”

  “Can you at least tell me where we’re going?”

  She hesitated. “Jeffersonville.”

  The yards got smaller with each mile as we drove toward the city on Highway 60. The undefined property lines around the houses in Borden gave way to the large fenced yards in Sellersburg, and finally to the small industrial city of Jeffersonville, where dreary split-levels and duplexes sat next to each other on identical rectangular lots, each surrounded by chain link to protect the integrity of a microscopic yard. I was certain that from one of those front yards I could hurl a baseball over three complete houses. I tried to imagine what it would be like to live within those kinds of constraints, and I couldn’t. On some blocks, black kids ran around, much less fascinated by me than I was by them. Each time Mom slowed the car for a red light or a stop sign, my heart raced, certain that I was about to pull into the driveway of my secret cousins. I hoped there were dozens.

  My mother steadfastly refused to tell me why we were going to Jeffersonville. My wildest hopes were confirmed, however, when we passed by Jeffboat, her brother’s employer according to Dad, and THE WORLD’S LARGEST INLAND SHIPBUILDER, according to their huge sign. I saw the skeletons of giant coal barges inside the fence as laborers crawled like ants along their ribs, showers of sparks occasionally flying from their welding rods. Green glimpses of the Ohio and the Louisville riverfront skyline flashed between buildings: Kingfish, the Galt House, the ornate Belknap Hardware warehouses. I tried to spot the Belle of Louisville, the steam-powered paddle wheeler that took tourists up and down the river.

  Rolling past the shipyard, we entered Jeffersonville’s oldest neighborhood, a row of old mansions facing the river, homes that had once belonged to riverboat captains back when captains were treated like astronauts, the masters of the most expensive and powerful technology of the day. Conspicuous wrought-iron balconies and widow’s walks seemed to indicate that many of the captains had grown fond of New Orleans’s architecture during their long voyages downriver. Some of the mansions showed every day of their age, with peeling paint and bowed roofs. Others had been lovingly restored to their full glory.

  We pulled into the driveway of a house that was somewhere in between. While some of the paint was peeling, and many of the shingles needed replacing, there was a solid-looking new front door, and a freshly planted flower bed around an unlabeled mailbox. New young trees had been planted in the yard, tiny seedlings in a neat row along the street. There was a gate at the end of the driveway, too, the only one I’d seen on the street, and that excited me more. I wondered why my cousins would need it. Was Uncle Russell still in danger because he crossed that picket line all those years ago? My mother put the car in park, and turned to face me.

  “Promise me again that you’ll never tell anyone about this place,” she said.

  “I promise.”

  “It’s incredibly important that you keep this a secret,” she said.

  I nodded my head, so excited I could no longer speak.

  My mother left the car running and got out. I was surprised to see that she had her own key to the padlock on the gate. No one came out to greet us. After she pushed the gate open, she pulled the car through, got out, and then re-locked the gate behind us.

  Mom held my hand as we walked to the front door, a move that would normally have mortified me, but seemed somehow appropriate given the seriousness of what we were about to do. I wondered how my cousins would see me, what we would talk about. Could they come out to Borden sometime and run around with me and Tom? Surely they would now that we knew each other, all the time probably. Tom and I could teach them how to shoot and fish, and they could teach us whatever it is that city kids know how to do. I wondered if one of the johnboats tied up at the pier across the street belonged to them.

  A sophisticated-looking intercom box was installed near the front door. Mom pushed a button, got an immediate response from within, and said her name. After a slight delay, I heard the clicking and sliding of a series of locks and latches being undone.

  The door came open and a ruddy, solid-looking woman hugged my mother dramatically in the foyer. She had the straight hair, no makeup, and earnest face that were the telltale characteristics of my mother’s feminist friends. “Hello, sister,” she said. But I knew she wasn’t the kind of sister I was looking for.

  “You must be Andrew,” she said to me as she released my mother from her clinch.

  “Andy,” I said, trying to look beyond her into the house. It was almost devoid of furniture. It was unmistakably old, but the place had a fresh-scrubbed, dust-free cleanliness to it.

  “Andy, we’re glad you could come.”

  We walked inside.

  Past the front room, we entered a spacious kitchen. Two women sat silently at a card table and smoked, a communal pack of Parliaments and a Bic between them. One had a relatively fresh black eye, an eye that was still vibrantly bloodshot from the blow. Neither woman said anything to us as we walked in. They didn’t have the swaggering, theatrical toughness of my mother’s friends on their way to a protest march. When my mom went out of the house without makeup, she had to announce to us that she was making a political statement, because her skin was so fair on its own we could never tell otherwise. The women at the card table had bags under their eyes, wrinkles, and hair that had been brushed back just enough to keep it out of the way of their smoking. They wore baggy T-shirts, old jeans, and house slippers. Their tough stares looked completely earned to me as they looked up, knowingly evaluated the fading wounds on my face, and then dismissed me with taps of their cigarettes on the edge of the clay ashtray. My mother nodded at them.

  She then enthusiastically grabbed a yellow bucket from under the sink and a large green sponge—in her eagerness, she seemed to have almost forgotten that I was in the room. She talked with the woman who had answered the door about what she was going to accomplish that day: clean and line the cupboards, and cook a turkey noodle casserole before leaving. I had noticed this internal conflict before in my mother, the battle between her studied feminism and her native southern genius for cooking and cleaning. She was a virtuoso in the kitchen, as well as a tireless scrubber and organizer. While she reminded my father frequently that she shouldn’t be required to do all the cooking, she couldn’t even let him toast his own Pop-Tart, so painful was it for her to watch him fumble around in the kitchen. As she turned on the faucet and began running steaming water into the bucket, she suddenly remembered that she had to do something with me. Our hostess recognized the problem at the same time.

  “I’ll take him upstairs, with the other kids,” she said. She put a hand on my shoulder and we walked together up a creaking grand staircase.


  She led me to a cavernous room on the third floor, and then with a pat on my shoulder abandoned me. A few toys were scattered across the vast floor. An old chandelier hung from the middle of the high ceiling, a chandelier so old that it had actually used candles for light—a telltale black smear on the ceiling above it reminded me of the Indian fire pits we’d seen in caves. The chandelier, the vast size of the room, and the smooth wood floor made me think it might have been a ballroom in its glory days, with musicians in the corner and an armada of steamboats moored just outside the window. Some modern educational posters had been tacked to the wall: the letters of the alphabet, Spanish numbers uno through diez, cartoonish portraits of the thirty-nine presidents.

  There were three other kids in the room, looking just as out of place as the posters. One was a little blond girl who turned toward me with a big pretty smile. A slightly chunky boy in the middle of the room ignored me as he energetically rolled Matchbox cars across the floor and into the far wall. The third girl, the oldest, had her arm in a cast and straight straw-colored hair that fell across her face. She looked down at the floor. Even if she hadn’t been wearing the Pink Floyd T-shirt, I would have recognized her immediately. I’d spent hours studying her photograph.

  “Hi, Taffy,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything back.

  “What’s your name?” asked the little girl. She seemed excited to have company. I realized that the pretty, cheerful little girl was Taffy’s younger sister—she looked just like her.

  “Andy,” I said. “Andy Jackson Gray. What’s your name?”

  “Becky.”

  “Becky Judd, right?”

  “We’re not supposed to say,” she said, still cheerful. I couldn’t take my eyes off Taffy and her stark white plaster cast. The other boy, ignoring us all, was now trying to roll a car into the one he had already crashed across the room, a difficult shot from that distance. “Why are you here?” Becky asked.

  I was still trying to figure that out myself. “My mom’s downstairs cleaning,” I said, as close as I could come to an explanation.