Over and Under (9 page)

“Going with Taffy?” It took me a second to spit it out. Tom grinned at how completely he had rattled me.

“I’m just screwing with you.”

“Fuck off,” I said. I tried to get the conversation back on track—I really wanted to hear Tom’s thoughts on the matter. “But if Mom and Dad are married, and Mom’s
not… I guess I don’t understand why it would bother my dad at all when she talks to the sheriff.” Or why it bothered me so much.

Tom gave me the shrug I was used to seeing. It was a shrug that said:
I’ve explained it as best I can. You’ll have to figure it for yourself.
I wanted to believe what Tom was saying, but I couldn’t forget that Tom didn’t know the entire story. I considered telling him about Sheriff Kohl’s phone calls, but stopped myself for fear of what conclusion he might draw.

“You think they’re out here somewhere?” I asked after a few quiet minutes of walking.

“Who? Sanders and Kruer?”

“Yeah.”

“No doubt.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“We saw them running into these woods, right? And they haven’t caught them yet. That means they’re still out here.”

“My dad says they’re in Louisville. Maybe they hitchhiked or took another truck.”

“What truck? Nobody got their truck stolen. And they couldn’t go hitchhiking with all those guns. Nope, they’re out here.”

“Maybe we should tell somebody what we saw. We saw them run away, right? We’re eyewitnesses and we should tell the sheriff.” It was something that had been nagging at me, a guilty act that tied me to Don Strange’s death.

“No way. What could we tell them? We saw Sanders and Kruer run into the woods? They already know that. If
we go to the sheriff, we’ll just get ourselves in a shitload of trouble. It won’t help anybody.”

“I guess they’ll get caught then. Every deputy in Clark County is tromping through the woods.”

Tom laughed. “There’s a million places they could hide. What if it was us? My cousin grew up out here just like us, and he could stay hid from a dozen fat-ass deputies just like we could.”

“What about Sanders?”

Tom scowled. “I don’t know. Sanders is crazy, and if they get caught it’ll be because of him. But I still think they could stay out here a long, long time.”

“I’m not so sure.”

At that moment, a helicopter flew right over us. They’d gotten close before, but this time the noise swelled to a painful level as it flew directly overhead, seemingly just a few feet above the treetops. Tom ran ahead and began jumping up and down and waving his arms, the throbbing noise of rotors deafening as it passed. “Here we are! Here we are! It’s us, the bombers! I did it!” The downdraft from the chopper violently kicked up the dead leaves left over from last fall, and enough dust that we had to shut our eyes tight. For all the noise and the wind, we barely saw it pass above the thick foliage, like a small dark cloud passing quickly in front of the sun.

“See? They’ll never find ’em,” said Tom when the noise had faded enough to speak, winded from his theatrics. “A chopper couldn’t see ’em through the trees if they wanted to get caught. I don’t know why they’re even bothering. They’ll have better luck with the fortune-teller, at least
until October.” The brown, papery leaves floated slowly back to earth in a cloud around Tom. He put his hands on his hips, thoughtfully taking in the scene.

“Let’s find ’em,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s me and you find ’em. You know we can.” He was smiling, already caught up in the idea.

I thought it over. I wanted to see the killers of Don Strange in jail. Guthrie Kruer was Tom’s kin, not mine, and while I felt a strong loyalty to Tom, I felt no secondhand loyalty to his cousin. I didn’t have an extended family. Don Strange was as close as I got, a presence in my home and in my life for as long as I could remember. He hired my father at the plant a million years ago, and he gave me a two-dollar bill the day he died. If we found Sanders and Kruer, I could tell Sheriff Kohl, he could arrest them and make everything right again.

Tom’s motives were undoubtedly different. He certainly didn’t want to deliver his cousin into the hands of law enforcement. Maybe he thought he could somehow help Guthrie Kruer. If Tom was acting in part out of loyalty to his cousin, however, and I was acting out of the same kind of feelings for Don Strange, I think we shared a bigger motivation in common. Finding two fugitives in the woods just sounded like a cool thing to do. It was exciting, secret, and dangerous, a kick-ass adventure we’d embark on without giving much thought to consequences, a cave we’d enter without any idea of where it might lead.

“Okay,” I said. Tom looked pleasantly surprised. “Let’s find them.” I suddenly felt and smelled that cool ribbon of cave air, and noticed for the first time that Tom
was carrying a flashlight. I realized with a start that our hunt for Sanders and Kruer might already be in progress.

We walked quickly to the cleared ground in front of the cave entrance, where our bikes were neatly parked. “There’s still time to watch the helicopters if we hurry back,” I said. Tom was standing at the edge of the clearing, alertly studying the scene.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Tom kept staring at me and the bikes, waiting for me to catch on. I finally did.

We hadn’t left our bikes standing up. We had left them well hidden in the brush. Now here they were, leaning on their kickstands in plain sight. I looked at the bike tracks in the dirt, following Tom’s eyes. Barely visible, a set of footprints led right from the bikes to the the cave. Tom ran to the entrance, but I hesitated.

“What?” he said.

“Maybe we shouldn’t go in there.”

“You think Sanders and Kruer moved our bikes?”

“Somebody moved them. Maybe they were going to ride them out of here when they heard us talking.”

“I thought you wanted to find them.”

“I do. I just think we need to…think this through.”

“Let’s find out who moved our bikes.” He was utterly unconcerned that two fugitives might be waiting for us inside the cave, nerves shot and guns loaded.

We walked through the main chamber and slid down through the first chute. We got to the hole that Tom had dug out the day before, and without hesitating Tom slid through it feetfirst. I didn’t have time to argue. Tom had the
only flashlight. I climbed into the hole, and tried to slow my fall, remembering the scary drop from the day before. I was able to slow myself a little at first, but as soon as my feet came out of the hole, swinging in the empty air, my groping hands lost their grip. My fingertips slid smoothly down the end and I fell once again through the air and landed squarely on my ass, precisely in the same spot as the day before. When I shook my head to clear the stars, Tom was already probing the darkness with his flashlight.

I got up and ran over to him. “Do you see them?”

He didn’t try to answer my question. “Where are you?” he yelled. The question echoed through the chamber, and down the tunnels we hadn’t yet explored. “Don’t worry!” His voice was playful, neither threatening nor frightened.

The sounds of our breathing and the underwater stream blended together into a steady rush in the darkness. Then, from an unseen corner of the cave, came a hiss, like air escaping from a punctured bike tire. From the same corner, a glow swelled until the entire chamber was visible to us for the first time. The room was even bigger than I thought, filled with more towering formations than I thought, but I couldn’t take it all in right away. Instead, I just squinted at the center of the glow, where high above us sitting on a small stone ledge, dangling her scrawny legs and holding a Coleman lantern, sat Taffy Judd.

“Hi Andy.” She surprised me by sounding so at ease. Although I did still carry a small scar below my ear from her lunch box, I had otherwise always thought of Taffy as quiet, cautious, and a little mysterious. In the cave, she seemed almost bouncy. She looped the handle of the lantern around her wrist, turned to the wall, and scurried straight down.
Although there were no perceptible handholds, she moved as agilely as a cat. She walked over to us.

“Sorry I was hiding,” she said. “I thought you were my dad.”

Tom and I stared openmouthed and wondered how to begin the conversation.

“Have you been down here before?” asked Tom. The answer was obvious.

“Lots of times. I could tell someone had been down here yesterday, I found your bikes. I also saw where you dug out the hole a little to get in here.”

“Fell flat on my ass through that hole,” I said. “Twice.”

Taffy laughed. “Yeah, I saw,” she said. “You don’t have to do it that way.” She put down the lantern and walked over to the wall where we’d come in.

She scurried up the wall, again without the benefit of any visible handholds or protrusions. She put two hands up to the lip of the chute from where I had plummeted, which overhung the wall slightly, and pulled herself up and in, athletically and gracefully. “Come over here and look,” she said.

When we were closer, she climbed down slowly, taking her time so Tom and I could see where she placed her hands and her feet. When her arms were over her head, her Pink Floyd T-shirt raised to show her belly, making me gulp. Tom teasingly elbowed me, but I wasn’t about to turn away. After having her repeat the descent a few more times than necessary, Tom and I were able to imitate her path, and in a few minutes we were zipping up and down the wall and even improvising slight modifications to the route. Taffy knew how to get around every inch of that cave, a tribute to both the
clear bright light of her lantern and the many hours she must have spent down there practicing.

“Hey, watch this,” said Tom, trying to cross the wall horizontally from the chute to the ledge where we had first seen Taffy. He moved slowly but surely across the wall, his arms straining. It seemed as he got close that he was holding up his entire body with just his fingertips. When he made it to the ledge he pulled himself up, exhausted.

“Cool!” she said, clapping her hands. “I’ve never done that!” I felt a twinge of jealousy, and started searching the walls for an impressive maneuver of my own.

We all stopped cold as a noise rolled to us from what seemed like a very faraway normal world. The low voice was so deep and powerful that it almost sounded like the cave itself was growling at us.
“Taffy…Get your ass up here!”

Taffy ran to the lantern in the center of the cave, I followed, and Tom scurried down from the ledge. In his rush he fell the last five feet or so and landed with a grunt—I hoped Taffy had noticed his misstep. He ran to us just as Taffy was turning down the lantern almost completely, until the room-filling sphere of light shrunk to a bright orange marble right in the middle of us, one that barely illuminated our six hands around it.

“It’s my dad,” whispered Taffy. “He’s been on a tear since the strike. I come down here when I have to, to get away from him.”

“Taffy!”
we heard again, closer this time, right up against the hole.
“Get your ass up here!”
I embarrassed myself by cringing.

“Don’t worry,” whispered Taffy, laying her hand on my
arm. “He can’t fit his fat ass down here. But I better go now.” To my dismay, she removed her hand and headed toward the crevice we’d almost gotten trapped in, taking the muted lantern with her.

“You can get to Squire Boone Cavern through there,” Tom said, trying to be helpful.

“I know,” she said.

“We almost got stuck down there for good,” I said. “Be careful.”

“It’s wider on this end,” she said, without turning around as she walked to the far corner of the room, confirming Tom’s theory from the previous day. “You can almost walk to Squire Boone without bumping your head this way. Bye, Tom. Bye, Andy.” I tried to convince myself that there was some special, suggestive emphasis in her pronunciation of my name. The small orange light bounced through the crevice and disappeared. A few feet inside, she turned her lantern back up, and the crevice suddenly turned into a jagged bright band across the black cave wall, like a horizontal bolt of lightning frozen in a photograph. Tom and I watched the light slowly fade as she got farther away from both us and her scary father, who continued to rant above us.

Tom and I waited silently in the dark until the yelling stopped. After waiting a while longer, Tom turned his flashlight on and we slowly climbed out, using our new knowledge of the cave, ready to drop back down the hole if there was any sign of him. But he was gone. He had left behind a large oval puddle of piss, in the middle of which floated a bent cigarette butt. He had apparently walked right through it on his way out, leaving a set of giant wet
footprints in the dirt. “Even a dog knows better than that,” Tom said.

At the first chute, Tom carefully placed his flashlight back in its hiding place behind the stalagmite, turning to verify it was completely hidden as we exited. Outside, squinting at the sunlight and immediately starting to sweat in the humidity, we saw to our relief that Orpod Judd was long gone. The only trace of Taffy’s father was that both our bikes had been knocked roughly to the ground.

We were all more or less acquainted with our little town’s history. It was originally named New Providence, after the capital of Rhode Island, not the biblical concept. It still today shows up as New Providence on some Indiana maps. The town took its modern name from William W. Borden, a self-taught geologist and farmer’s son from the area who went west, to Leadville, Colorado, during the Gold Rush and was one of the lucky few to actually make his fortune there, cleverly exploiting silver claims that had been neglected by wild-eyed gold seekers. He sold his interest in the mining company after just two years in Leadville, and returned to Indiana a millionaire, with more than enough money to “carry out certain ideas for the advancement of learning and the benefit of my fellow man, which I had for some time entertained.” That according to my personal copy of Borden’s
Personal Reminiscences
, published in 1901.

The “certain ideas” of Professor Borden, as he was by then known, were remarkably progressive for his time and place. He founded the Borden Institute in 1884, a school chartered to provide the farm children of the area an
advanced education at little or no cost. This was a generation even before the casket company, when the area was widely known as “the strawberry district” and offered few opportunities beyond a life of backbreaking labor with hoe and plow. Not only did Borden’s institute teach Cicero, Virgil, “public declamation,” and, of course, geology, it taught these things to both boys and girls. It was as if Professor Borden knew that someday his achievements would be evaluated by the steely eyes of my feminist mother. The curriculum, while advanced and demanding, was loosely structured, allowing students to progress at their own pace and define their own courses of study, radical concepts all in 1884.