by Tucker, Todd
I pointed out my window toward the weeds, without taking my eyes off the target. Dad squinted, unable to see him at first. “What?” He was confused. “I don’t see anything.”
“Judd.” I mouthed the word, my throat too dry to say it.
“What on earth are you talking about?”
Just then Judd broke from the weeds. He was still hunched over, in an attempt to be stealthy, but there was too much open ground between him and the house. His long stringy hair flopping, hunched over as he ran, he looked even more like a caveman than normal. He was heading for a small maple tree, the last bit of cover between him and our house.
“What the hell? It is him,” my father said.
I started walking around Dad, toward the gun rack.
“What?” said Dad.
I pointed at my M6.
“Good Lord, Son, that’s not how we handle things here in civilization.” Mom appeared in the doorway. “My dear,” he said, “please call the sheriff.” Dad then walked casually down the stairs, flipped on the porch light, and threw open the front door.
Through my window I watched Judd stop cold in his tracks.
“Mr. Judd, how are you this evening? Can I get you a cup of coffee?” All his life, this was my father’s way of saying “you appear to be drunk.”
Judd stood up straight, startled by my father’s forthright greeting. He walked to the front door like he had legitimate business, and disappeared from view beneath the porch roof. “Mr. Gray, I have a matter I need to discuss with you.” Judd was being humorously formal. In all his plans, I am sure, he had not expected to be invited inside for a cup of coffee. Even with that great effort, however, Judd could not control his slur, as he was seriously, dangerously drunk.
“What can I do for you?” Dad asked.
“I have reason to believe your boy knows the location of my children,” said Judd. “I don’t care about that bitch wife of mine, but a man’s got a right to see his offspring.”
“I can assure you no one here can tell you where your family is.”
“And… I believe your son also knows the location of my sword.”
“Your what?” I heard suppressed laughter in Dad’s voice.
“Those little shits broke in my trailer and stole my sword,” said Judd. He had exhausted his supply of fake cordiality. I couldn’t believe my dad was down there trying to talk to him like a normal human being.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Your boy knows what I’m talkin’ about, why don’t you let me talk to him?” I heard movement on the porch, the shuffling of feet, like he was trying to get by my dad into the house.
“Mr. Judd, I think you better get on home,” my father said, still completely affable. There was a tone in my dad’s voice that I identified, to my surprise, as pity. “I’ll talk to Andy, and you and I can discuss this over a cup of coffee, tomorrow in my office.”
“I ain’t going home till someone tells me where my kids are at. A man’s got a right to see his offspring!”
Dad sighed. “I really think you ought to go now.”
There was suddenly another shuffle, louder, and I looked again at the gun on my wall. Then Dad and Judd both appeared back in view, as Dad steamrolled him backward. Judd was big and strong, I knew, but so, I realized with some surprise, was my dad. Dad was just manhandling Judd backward, not trying to do any fancy moves, just steadily forcing the man across the front porch. Judd hit the railing, and Dad gave a final shove, cracking the railing and forcing Judd to flip over it backward, where he landed hard in our perfectly trimmed evergreen bushes. Partially upside down, Judd waved his arms as he struggled to overcome the fulsome bush and his own disorientation to get to his feet. With his feet in the air, I saw a knife sticking out of Judd’s boot. Even so, he was so diminished in that position that it didn’t shock me entirely when Dad actually leaned over the rail and offered a helping hand. Judd Anally pulled himself upright into kind of a squatting position over the bush.
Before Judd could accept Dad’s hand, the sheriff pulled up, lights spinning but with no siren. Judd hung his head in despair, no doubt tabulating the many terms of probation and parole he had just violated. Kohl trotted up to the porch and quickly cuffed him, deftly removed his boot knife and dropped it on the ground, and then led him to the backseat of his cruiser. I could tell by the way Judd carefully ducked his head as he slipped into the backseat that it was not the first time he’d executed that move. With Judd safely locked in the back of the car, Kohl came back up to talk to my dad. Mom and I made our way downstairs.
“What did Mr. Judd want?” the sheriff was asking my dad. “Besides trouble?” They were handing Judd’s knife back and forth as they talked, examining with a critical eye the sheath, its metal boot clip, and the sharpness of the edge.
“Bunch of drunken nonsense,” my dad said. “Thinks we know where his kids are.” He didn’t say anything about the sword.
“You want me to charge him with assault? Destruction of property?” The sheriff waved his hand over the broken porch railing.
“No.” Dad scoffed, shaking his head.
“You sure? He did have a knife.”
“Just let him sleep it off,” said Dad. “I don’t need to see the man put in prison for being a stupid drunk.”
The next morning I walked out to see where Judd had been hiding in the weeds across Cabin Hill Road. I wanted to see the spot he’d chosen, how well he’d picked his ground. Up close, it wasn’t a great blind, with thin weeds to the front and no cover at all on the other three sides. The grass was still flattened where Judd had been sitting, watching our house, my window. Something caught my eye in the weeds as I kicked around. I bent to pick it up. It was a black Zippo lighter. I flipped it open and spun a flame to life with one crunch of the knurled brass wheel.
I knew right away I wouldn’t tell Dad about the lighter. He would say it didn’t mean Judd was going to burn our house down, and that I couldn’t even know for certain that the lighter belonged to Judd. And it certainly wouldn’t change his conviction that his way of handling Judd had been right, and mine wrong. I shut the lighter and threw it as far as I could into the woods.
Judd didn’t take my dad up on his offer for a conversation over coffee. In fact, he never showed up for work at the factory again. He did, however, find a credulous insurance agent two days later, took out a $20,000 insurance policy on his trailer, and then set it on fire with Coleman camp fuel. He was promptly tried and thrown in prison for insurance fraud. Of all the strange endings in Borden, perhaps the oddest to me is that when Orpod Judd finally got put behind bars, it was for a white-collar crime.
For our last two years of high school, Tom took the long bus ride every day to Prosser, a vocational school in Clarksville, for their Manufacturing Technology Program. The events of 1979 had definitely changed us both, and our lives were on somewhat divergent paths, but we were by no means done having adventures together in those deep woods, and we continued to spend the summers and weekends hunting, fishing, and getting ourselves in and out of serious trouble.
The story of Guthrie Kruer entered town lore, taking its place alongside the legends of William Borden and Prince Madoc. Folks periodically spotted the bloodthirsty Guthrie running through the woods like Bigfoot, and kids scared each other to death with stories of the crazed fugitive by the campfire, in parked cars, and on stormy nights. Variations of the legend became plentiful. Some argued that Sanders and Kruer were innocent of blowing up the plant and killing Don Strange. The most plausible alternative offered was Orpod Judd, because of his known tendency to set things afire. Even today, some say Sanders and Kruer are both still alive, and some say they’re both dead. That particular story seemed like it might be proven true during my sophomore year of college, when a group of local cavers found a skeleton crouched inside a tiny anteroom in Marengo Cave, a skeleton that was presumed to be that of the long-lost Guthrie Kruer. It was carefully removed to the University of Louis
ville, where scientists determined that the small, brown bones belonged not to Tom’s cousin but to a one-thousand-year-old Hopewell Indian woman.
My father’s rescue of me also became part of Borden mythology, and he was constantly invited to brag about his marksmanship, invitations he always politely declined. He never allowed pride in that remarkable shot to overcome the profound fear he had felt at that moment when he saw me in an ancient Welsh fort with a gun in my face. He and Mother carefully monitored me for signs of post-traumatic stress, but the pink, arrow-shaped mark on my neck appears to be the sole lasting scar of the episode. That, and I can’t stand the smell of wood smoke, something that I guess is almost universally regarded as pleasant.
Reminders of the strike around town became rare. The hole in the back of the factory was repaired, and within a year the brown paint had faded and evened out to the point that no one could tell precisely where the breach had occurred. I’d see Russ Knable around town sometimes, when he wasn’t working, and I’d have to fight the urge to stare at a face that seemed somehow misaligned. The Little League field where helicopters had taken off and landed the day after the explosion was renamed Strange Field. A brass plaque with Mr. Strange’s name and lifespan was bolted to the dugout wall while two fidgety T-ball teams lined up along the baselines to pay their respects. Like most of the important things in Borden, the strike was rarely talked about because everybody already knew everything about it.
After high school, I determined that I would not be able to make a living using marksmanship, my sole natural talent. I got a degree in business instead, while Tom got a good job at the factory, as mill room supervisor. We stayed closely in touch through college, hunting a couple of times a year, and fishing whenever we could. I sometimes asked him if he’d heard anything about Taffy, if she’d found her way back to Borden after her dad finally got put away. There was never a trace of her, not even a rumor.
Tom kept his promise. He never told me the details about the night he helped Guthrie Kruer escape, and he never told me if he knows where Kruer is right now. And I kept my promise. I never told anyone, not even my parents, what I knew about Kruer and Sanders. I’ve tried a few times to sort out in my mind the legal issues involved, harboring fugitives and lying to the police, just to start. In truth, I’ve never really worried about that part of it. I’ll keep my secret because it’s not really mine to give away. And because I know Tom has never doubted me for a moment.
The summer I graduated from IU, Tom married Shelly Stemler, and I was right up there at the front of St. Mary of the Knobs with him, the only person in the front half of the church, including the priest, who wasn’t a blood relative of either the bride or groom. As the only non-Catholic in the bunch, I had to step awkwardly aside as the rest of the wedding party took communion. While I waited, I saw Don Strange’s grave through the window, a stained-glass depiction of a suffering saint.
After college, I swapped my redneck for a trader’s red jacket, and took a job at the Merc in Chicago, where I participated in huge, abstract financial transactions related vaguely to the price of milk. As a mental exercise, I try sometimes to calculate the effect my actions are having on the shelves of Miller’s General Store. I ride a train home at night to a condo that’s pure big-city sophistication, without a Mason jar or lard bucket in sight, although my M6 is tucked deep inside my closet, in violation of a dozen gun laws, city and state. I just can’t bring myself to get rid of the thing.
I’ve hung on to that kiss from Taffy as well, and the lingering feeling that we both were cheated out of something special. I still scan crowds for her, as my eye-rolling friends will attest, especially in bars where beer and seventies rock are both being served in overly generous quantities. It is not a completely insane notion. Lots of Indiana kids attracted to bright lights and skyscrapers end up in Chicago, and I have, once or twice, actually spotted other Borden expatriates walking down Rush Street, or in the bleachers at Wrigley. But I never see Taffy. I’ve tried to just be grateful for what I have, the photograph and the kiss. But I know now what I think Taffy completely realized at the time. It was a kiss good-bye.
A few times a year I make the long drive back from Chicago to Borden to see Mom and Dad, and Tom’s growing family—he’s up to four kids now. I like to drop by his place unannounced, so they don’t make a big deal of getting the kids scrubbed clean and dressed up. I like walking over from my parents’ house and just watching for a few seconds before they all spot me, the scruffy, shirtless boys shooting arrows into hay bales, the tomboy daughters trapping lizards in Mason jars. Tom always meets me on the front porch with a smile and a firm handshake, looking more like his dad every time I see him.
Shelly, like my mother, has a strict no-dead-animals-in-the-living-room policy, but a few reminders of those eventful days are still visible in their home. Tom keeps his dad’s union card in a small frame right by his high school diploma. On the same wall is a picture of Tom and me together on our dirt bikes just before the strike, shirtless, smiling, and bushy-haired, the Borden Institute looming in the background. The most striking memento of that summer is proudly displayed over the fireplace, above a mantel crowded with framed photographs of sons and daughters in white celebrating the holy sacraments. On wrought-iron hooks, looking not at all out of place, hangs an ancient German sword.
Acknowledgments
I have thanked two friends in this section of all my previous books: Doug Bennett of New Albany, Indiana, and Professor Tom Buchanan, of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. In this case, I am especially grateful to Tom, for running around with me in the woods of southern Indiana when we were kids, for encouraging me always as a writer, and for on more than one occasion pulling me out of a cave.
Also, of course, thanks to my parents, Ken and Laura Tucker, two of the world’s great readers, and my wife, Susie Tucker, for always having faith in me and this book.
A huge thanks to all the folks in the publishing business who helped see this through. Frank Scatoni and Jennifer de la Fuente of Venture Literary, for taking a chance on this book and helping it through the first few revisions. Most of all, thanks to Peter Wolverton of Thomas Dunne Books, who tirelessly worked with me to make this book better. I am lucky to have worked with you.