Over and Under Read online

  ALSO BY TODD TUCKER

  The Great Starvation Experiment:

  The Heroic Men Who Starved

  So That Others Could Live

  Notre Dame Vs. the Klan:

  How the Fighting Irish Defeated

  the Ku Klux Klan

  Over

  and

  Under

  Todd

  Tucker

  Thomas Dunne Books New York

  St. Martin’s Press

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  OVER AND UNDER. Copyright © 2008 by Todd Tucker. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.stmartins.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tucker, Todd, 1968-

  Over and under/Todd Tucker.—1st ed.

  p. cm

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-37990-2 (alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-312-37990-0 (alk. paper)

  1. Boys—Fiction. 2. Male friendship—Fiction. 3. City and town life—Fiction 4. Labor disputes—Fiction. 5. Indiana—Fiction.

  PS3620.U33 O94 2008

  813’.6—dc22

  2008012472

  First Edition: July 2008

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my son

  Andrew Jackson Tucker

  The trigger pull of the M6 Scout is a bit stiff for the smallest youngsters, but using four fingers at first, and later two on the unique squeeze bar trigger works well. The gun’s accuracy is quite good, too—a helpful trait in preventing discouragement in a young shooter.

  —Hunting Digest, “The Best Guns for Kids,” Fall 1977

  Prologue

  I was eight years old when Mack Sanders lost a nut in the mill room of the Borden Casket Company. Dad told me a vague version of the story the night it happened, but along with the rest of the town, I soon knew every gory detail. It was 1973, the day before the Kentucky Derby, and Sanders had tickets to the big race.

  Sanders was right out of high school, so new at the plant that maybe he hadn’t yet developed a proper respect for the horrible things that can happen to a man in a building full of industrial woodworking machinery. Maybe if he’d made it even one more week, he would have started to notice the large number of men around him with fewer than ten fingers, or ragged purple scars across their cheeks. Vern Schumacher in payroll, for example, cheerfully delivered Mack his paycheck every two weeks with an empty sleeve safety-pinned to his shoulder; he was waiting out retirement in a desk job he’d gratefully accepted after a run-in with a band saw. Who knows what Sanders might have learned given a little more time. I just know that what did happen to Sanders made even Vern Schumacher count his blessings.

  Sanders had been assigned to a noisy green Torwegge ripsaw, a machine powered by a five-horsepower motor bolted to the concrete floor. The motor was old, but like every piece of rotating machinery in the plant, it was lovingly maintained by a cadre of meticulous German mechanics who believed with moral certainty that all machines could last a century or more with proper care. Just days before the accident, responding to a barely audible rattle, maintenance man Oscar Schmidt had checked the speed of that very motor using a strobe light designed for the purpose. Waiting until after sundown so that the ambient light would be low, he pointed the light at the chain and adjusted its speed until the rapidly moving links appeared frozen in space, their speed synchronized perfectly with the blinking of the strobe. Oscar thus verified the speed of the motor: 1,600 revolutions per minute, exactly as designed. He concluded that the noise he’d heard was caused by the metal chain that connected motor to saw in a rapidly moving, well-oiled loop. Some of the links had become worn and barbed with age, causing noise as the malformed links meshed and unmeshed with the sprockets of the saw and motor. Oscar made a note to order a replacement chain from Louisville Mill Supply as he returned to the shop.

  Sanders worked the day shift in the mill room, where he was pulling down the highest wages a new guy could anywhere in the plant. As shitty as the work could be—hot, dusty, and loud—Sanders knew he was lucky to have it. Especially as his unemployed, pot-smoking buddies from the class of ’72 proved irresistible to the local draft board. With his pride, six dollars an hour, and a free yearlong vacation in Southeast Asia at stake, Sanders threw himself into the job every day, attacking his pile of wood in a sweaty frenzy. The day before the Derby was no exception as he fed the ravenous saw, sweated through his Neil Young T-shirt, and tried to avoid looking at the clock.

  Late that afternoon, a small forklift delivered to Sanders the day’s last load of wood. Eager to begin his big weekend, Sanders grabbed the biggest board off the top of the stack, and, in an attempt to keep up with the men on either side of him who had been doing the work for decades, Sanders fed too much lumber into the saw at once. The large maple board got cockeyed and jammed itself with a squeal between the saw blade and the housing. The powerful motor groaned with displeasure but kept running. Sanders tried to muscle the board out, but couldn’t. From where he stood, he had a hard time getting a good angle; the big motor on the floor was right where he needed to stand.

  Sanders should have just turned the saw off and asked for help at that point, but he didn’t. He’d gotten wood stuck before, and had always managed to get it out by himself. Turning the saw off would cause a bell over his machine to ring, an alert designed to get maintenance men or the foreman over to see what was wrong: everybody called it the “idiot alarm.” A new guy took enough crap in the plant already without inviting it on himself like that. He also didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to move him to a lower paying, less demanding job in the finish room or the trim line. As the outside of the saw blade spun against it, the board started to heat up, and Sanders knew that soon the smell of wood smoke would draw more unwanted attention than a clanging bell.

  Knowing he had just a few minutes left before the foreman made his way over to see what was impeding the flow of lumber through the plant, Sanders decided to try something different. To reach a better position, he stepped atop the motor housing, about two feet off the ground, with one foot on each side of the rapidly moving drive chain. Now the offending board was sticking out right at his navel, and he was able at last to get a good, solid grip on the thing, and pull.

  He had positioned himself so well that the wood popped right out, surprising him. Holding on to the big heavy plank, Sanders tried to keep his balance, but he overcompensated when shifting his weight forward. His feet slipped on the motor housing, which was made slick by a coating of sawdust as fine as talcum powder. He fell hard, landing with his full weight on the rapidly moving metal chain, a leg on each side.

  It all happened in an instant. With a buzzing sound, the jagged metal links ripped through the denim crotch of his jeans like a chain saw. Sanders instinctively put his hands down, gashing them badly on the chain. Events were now unfolding at 1,600 revolutions per minute, and even in his panic, he had no hope of reacting in time. The chain chewed through his jockey shorts as easily as the denim, and then moved on to the tender flesh of his scrotum. With those three scant layers of protection removed, one of the lightning-fast metal links, its outer edge worn into a hook-shaped barb, snagged his left nut, ripped it off his body, and flung it twenty yards through the air.

  They say there wasn’t a place in the plant where you couldn’t hear the screaming. Guthrie Kruer, another new employee who was working nearby, was one of the few men pres
ent to act fast. He sprinted over and hit the big red emergency stop button, but by then the nut was flying across the mill room, never again to be a part of Mack Sanders. It hit the far wall with a splat, left a bright red starburst of blood, and fell straight down into a pile of wood shavings.

  From his hospital bed the next morning, Sanders told his brother to go on to the Derby without him. He also gave him a week’s wages and strict instructions: bet it all on Secretariat to win. Danny Sanders, however, convinced that he had received a heavenly sign, bet every dime on Forego, the only gelding in the field. Forego finished just out of the money. We all know what Secretariat did. Six years later, when Tom Kruer and I went into the woods searching for Mack Sanders, he was still pissed off.

  One

  The strikers cheered as the tractor dragged the ancient Chrysler Newport in front of the main gate. Virgil Stemler, his long skinny arms straining with the effort, sloshed gasoline all over the car from a dented metal can. Mack Sanders followed closely behind him, jittery and playing to the crowd as he tossed a lit match onto the hood, then another, then another, jumping backward with each attempt, until whoosh, the rusty car burst reluctantly into flames. Sanders threw the matchbook to the ground and whipped around to accept our applause as the fire swelled behind him. There was something scary about his enthusiasm, and I wondered how many were like me, clapping only because I didn’t want Sanders to pick me out of the crowd. Tom and I watched, along with half the population of Borden, Indiana, as a streak of greasy black smoke climbed straight into the sky, almost high enough to be seen beyond the heavily wooded walls of the valley that surrounded us.

  Tom and I, both fourteen years old, pedaled around the edges of the crowd on our dirt bikes. It was August 1979, the second week of the strike, just before the start of ninth grade and high school. Like almost every other kid I knew, my dad worked at the plant, but I had somehow up to that point been unaware of the tectonic forces that had pulled and pushed us into our respective roles that summer. My ignorance met its end at about the same time that doomed Chrysler did. Before the summer was over, I would learn the differences between management and labor, scabs and thugs, and see the most amazing gunshot of my life.

  My best friend’s full name was Thomas Jefferson Kruer. I’m Andrew Jackson Gray. That’s not as strange a coincidence as it might seem outside the valley; I had many friends named for the heroes of democracy. I also knew an Elvis, an Aron, and a Presley, a smattering of John Waynes, and two grown men who went by “Peanut.” I couldn’t remember a time when Tom and I weren’t friends, and we had been around each other so much that I often knew his thoughts, and he more often knew mine. That’s not to say Tom couldn’t surprise me. Frequently he would suggest an idea so crazy or so dangerous that I would stare in disbelief as he grinned and waited for me to come around to his way of thinking.

  Tom and I wheeled around the outside of the crowd to get a better look, popping wheelies as we went. There were quite a few other kids from school there. I waved to Steve Koch, a classmate whose brother had died in Vietnam when we were all in kindergarten. I remembered him proudly showing us a set of dog tags in the cafeteria. Steve was laughing and wrestling Mark Deich, who was tossing Steve around like a rag doll. Mark had for some unknown reason a droopy, half-paralyzed face, but despite that affliction he was the undisputed strongest kid in our class, and one of the happiest.

  With a start, I spotted Taffy Judd at the edge of the crowd, as always in her faded Pink Floyd T-shirt, the one with the rays of light coming out of the prism. I wanted to get a better look at her, but she was moving quickly along the perimeter of the crowd, almost as if she didn’t want anyone to get too good a fix on her location. Taffy and I sat next to each other in second grade, and were for a time madly in love with each other. When we were given an assignment to write about what job we wanted when we grew up, I guaranteed myself weeks of unmerciful teasing by scrawling in crayon that I wanted to be a doctor, with Taffy as my nurse. Taffy agreed with that vision of the future, and drew a neat picture of herself in white holding hands with a smiling Dr. Gray. Our brief romance ended the next week when she caught me sharing my sandwich with Theresa Gettelfinger and hit me in the head with her lunch box. As brief as it was, my friends still occasionally gave me shit over Taffy. That was one of the reasons I tried to be subtle as I watched her.

  As we got older, Taffy got harder and harder to spot in a crowd, lingering in the background as she did on the picket line, elusive and on the edges of the action. She lived in a trailer on a sliver of swampy land between Muddy Fork and Highway 60. Her dad, Orpod Judd, worked at the plant when he wasn’t faking workmen’s comp injuries or doing time for some variety of drunken mayhem. Poverty was easy to hide in Borden, where even the very few of us who were certifiably middle class chose to live simply. Taffy had all the telltale signs, however, even beyond the limited wardrobe and the run-down trailer home: she didn’t have to drop change into the pie plate for her school lunch every day, she seemed to fight the same cold all winter without a doctor visit, and in the school directory she shared a phone number with all the poorer kids of Borden. It was the number of the pay phone in front of Miller’s General Store, the common phone for those in the nearby trailers who couldn’t keep one of their own turned on.

  “It’s already junk,” Tom said critically of the burning car, snapping me out of my thoughts about Taffy. It was true. Even as they reveled in their unfamiliar roles as labor firebrands, my flinty German neighbors would no sooner destroy a functioning automobile than they would torch a church. Besides, along with strawberries and Christmas trees, junk cars in Borden were always a surplus crop. I followed him up to a rough-looking trio of older strikers in lawn chairs, all with Local 1096 ball caps and bulges of Skoal in their lips. They used the sticks of their picket signs to push themselves noisily backward as the fire grew too hot.

  “Why are we burning a car?” he asked them. His directness impressed me. I was afraid to admit that I found the whole ceremony a little mysterious. Like me, Tom was shirtless, tanned to a dark brown, and wearing shorts made from last year’s jeans. His young body was on the verge of carrying knotty, showy muscle like his father, and he looked athletic and efficient, his body honed by exploring every corner of our valley with me every day, on bike and on foot. His hair was bushy and long, not because that happened to be the fashion of the moment, but because his mom couldn’t get him to sit still on the front porch for the twenty minutes she needed to give him a proper trim. His eyes were bright and alert, more so than mine, a giveaway to the reasonably perceptive that he was the smarter one of our pair. Other than that, on those rare occasions when we ran into strangers, they often thought we were brothers. So I guess we looked alike.

  “Why are we burning a car?” Tom asked again. The old men looked at one another, almost as if for a moment they couldn’t think of a good reason themselves.

  “That Sanders kid is nuts,” said one of the men in what was not quite an explanation.

  “He ain’t been right since…the accident,” said another. We all took a moment to be thankful for our intact testicles.

  Tom persisted. “So why are we burning a car?”

  “To keep the scabs out!” said the third man, as if the official answer had suddenly dawned on him. He looked to his friends for affirmation and the bills of their caps dipped in agreement. I didn’t know what a scab was, but it didn’t seem to me that we were in any danger of being overrun by them. The parking lot of the Borden Casket Company was empty, except for the old Ford truck that belonged to Don Strange, the plant’s general manager. I presumed he could see the car’s flames from somewhere inside the empty factory, though we could not see him.

  Tom was fascinated by the vocabulary of the strike. He shared with me each term he picked up—that morning he had explained “cost of living” to me. He knew by heart his father’s shifts on the picket line as well, six hours every day and a half. I couldn’t help but feel the sting of being left ou
t when he talked about that. For reasons that had not yet been explained to me, my father was never on the picket line.

  “Will the sheriff come?” he asked. I was curious about the same thing. Sheriff Kohl was famously stern—he once ticketed New Albany High School’s basketball coach for cursing during a sectional championship game. I, too, was surprised that he would allow car burning in broad daylight along our busiest road. At the same time, the sheriff was a mysterious source of tension inside my home. I would not have brought the matter up on my own.

  The striker threw a gap-toothed leer to his friends at Tom’s mention of the sheriff. He leaned forward. “Ain’t you Gus Gray’s kid?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “The sheriff won’t come here. Don’t you worry about that.”

  He was right. That old Newport burned right down to the wheels and Sheriff Kohl never came.

  I was well into adulthood before I realized just how isolated we were up there in Borden, deep in the Hoosier Valley, at the edge of Clark and Washington counties. The rest of Indiana had been scraped clean by an advancing glacier during the last ice age, leaving the land geometrically flat and ready to divide into rectangular fields of beans and corn. Right at the Washington County line, the glacier stopped and retreated, so the primeval hills to the south were spared, all the way down to the Ohio River. Like parallel rows of barbed wire, the hills wrapped us up tight in protective layers of rolling, inconvenient geography that kept road-pavers and subdivision-builders at bay. When I doubt it now, and think that the isolation was some figment of my imagination, an idealization of a rural childhood when the size of my world was limited by how many miles I could ride my dirt bike, I remind myself of some of the creatures that Tom and I used to trap, shoot, and pull from the floating snares we made out of milk jugs and treble hooks. There were critters in Borden you just wouldn’t see anywhere else.