Four

The hunt was on for the “bombers,” as everyone called them, and we finally had a story on our hands big enough to demand coverage from the Louisville TV stations. On their morning news broadcasts, all three channels showed footage of the roadblocks manned by the state troopers until dawn, the abandoned pickup truck that belonged to Guthrie Kruer, the scorched hole in the factory wall, and, finally, a close up of the grimy ball cap picked up on factory grounds after the explosion. On the front, it read LOCAL 1096, and on the inside, in boyish ballpoint pen, it read M SANDERS.

Activity was at such a fever pitch that morning that Tom and I had trouble deciding which aspect of the manhunt we wanted to personally witness. Reverend Nichols had announced he would host a revival meeting so that we all might repent, and lots of kids had gone down to watch the volunteers set up the huge tent down by the river. The sheriffs of both Floyd and Harrison counties pitched in with their helicopters, and the choppers were taking off and landing in the Little League field, throwing up massive clouds of brown dust we saw from on top of Cabin Hill.

We decided in the end to go see the psychic from Louisville who had shown up to help the investigation. We made our way to the modest crowd that surrounded her at the edge of factory property, in the front, in view of the picket line. She was a tall woman with frizzy gray hair and a flowing black dress. She delayed her vision for a few minutes so the crowd could grow to an acceptable size. She then asked for silence, took the famous ball cap from an embarrassed-looking deputy, and held it in one hand with her eyes tightly closed. After inhaling deeply, she pointed to the northeast, exactly opposite the direction we’d seen the bombers run. She handed out business cards while we applauded.

After that, Tom and I decided to walk back to the cave to retrieve our bikes. The thrill of the psychic soon passed as we found ourselves alone in the quiet woods. Men had been pouring into the forest all day looking for the killers; we’d watched them enter in droves. But just a few steps into the woods Tom and I felt profoundly alone. It seemed the wilderness had no trouble completely absorbing all the fugitives, the search parties, and the curious. The sudden hush and the slower pace of travel on foot made us reflective.

“When did you find out about Mr. Strange?” I asked.

“The phone rang. Not long after we got back. The union was calling everybody, telling them about the explosion and an emergency meeting tomorrow. At the institute.”

“Did your dad say anything?”

“Nah. And I didn’t ask. He wasn’t even talking to Mom about it. After the phone call, he just sat on the porch until the sun came up.”

“He said it was all talk last night.”

“I guess he was wrong about that.”

“Is he going to talk to the sheriff?”

Tom shot me a look. “Why would he talk to the sheriff?”

“Because…”

“What about you?” he said a little sharply. “Is your dad talking to the sheriff?”

“Why would he?”

Tom shrugged. “Because he’s a manager? I don’t know. He’s probably in charge of the plant now. And it seems like your mom is always talking to the sheriff. Aren’t they friends or something?”

I felt my cheeks turning red. “I guess. They do talk a lot. Sometimes Dad gets mad, they talk so much.”

“He’s probably jealous,” said Tom.

“My mom wouldn’t do anything like that!” The thought of those midnight phone calls burned at the back of my mind. My overreaction lightened Tom’s mood instantly.

“I didn’t say your mom’s doing anything,” he said, laughing, “but that doesn’t mean your dad’s not jealous. Think about it. The sheriff with his badge and his gun, your mom gives him all this attention—of course your old man gets up tight about it. Think… what if you were going with Taffy and she was always talking to some other guy, always telling you how cool he was?”

“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.

The good professor lived until 1906, pouring his money and his heart into the school that became so famous and beloved that the town changed its name in his honor. Thousands of Hoosier farm kids benefited from his generosity. The experiment couldn’t continue, however, without his leadership and his money. Shortly after his death, his priceless geological collections were given to the Smithsonian, and the school closed.

The Borden estate donated his land and buildings to the public school system. The grand Victorian mansion that had housed the institute stood abandoned at the edge of the Borden Elementary School’s parking lot, looking uncomfortable next to its brick-and-steel descendant. Other than the high school and the factory, the institute remained the biggest building in town. Public meetings were often held in the institute’s ornate first-floor auditorium, when the town’s two voting booths were shoved in a corner and covered with sheets. I don’t think William Borden would have been surprised that his institute couldn’t outlive him—it was a bold, almost outlandish experiment to provide a free college-level education to the hill kids of our rural counties. But I think Borden would have been happy to see that his building was still at the center of town life, and witness to much of our drama, as it was the day after Don Strange’s death, when Local 1096 called an emergency meeting at the institute, and Tom and I snuck in to listen.

The meeting was scheduled to begin at nine P.M., which was a problem for me: too late to be allowed out of the house, too early to sneak out. To top it off, my parents were still jumpy and protective because of the “bombing,” and they were well aware of the union meeting that night. They didn’t want me anywhere near it, so there was no way I was going to get down the hill by telling the unvarnished truth. I had to use an excuse I had been saving for extraordinary circumstances.

I waited until our regular game of Authors to ask. It was Dad’s favorite game and one he insisted on playing around the kitchen table after dinner whenever our schedules permitted. The game was similar to Go Fish, but it was played with special cards that each represented one of four books written by thirteen different authors. In other words, instead of attempting to collect all four jacks, or all four twos, you collected A Child’s Garden of Verses, Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped. Thus, over the course of my childhood, I memorized forever the names and watercolor portraits of thirteen authors and their fifty-two great works of English literature.

“Can I stay out late tonight?” I asked between hands.

“Why?” my dad asked in a tone that sounded very close to “no” already.

“Tom and I want to watch the Perseid meteor shower.” This got his attention. He laid his cards flat down on the table. I knew that my sudden interest in astronomy sounded unlikely, but it also sounded scholarly enough for my parents to get their hopes up. Still, I saw the seeds of suspicion in my father’s eyes as he peered at me from across the table. I tried to stay calm. I was attempting to bullshit a true space groupie about a meteor shower.

“You want to watch the Perseid?” he asked.

“Yessir,” I said. “It’s a clear night and this is the peak time of year to watch them.” I paused. “It’s very interesting.” My mom now placed her cards on the table to better assist Dad in his evaluation.

“This is something you’ve taken a recent interest in?” he asked.

“We talked about it in school before summer break,” I said, “and I marked it on my calendar. I’ve been reading about meteors ever since, and now I’d like to actually see one.”

“I see,” said my father. “So you’ve made a study of this.”

“Yes,” I said. “Meteors are cool.”

Dad and Mom looked at each other, and I wondered if I had laid it on too thick. I still had my chief advantage intact. Dad really wanted to believe me.

“Yes, they are cool,” my father said, not yet convinced. “Tell me, since you’ve been looking into it, what are meteors made out of?”

“Most are made out of stone,” I said, regurgitating the information I had reviewed in the junior Britannica just before coming downstairs. “Some are made out of iron and nickel.”

My father nodded his head, impressed, unable now to keep a hopeful smile from flickering to life. But the logical, skeptical half of his brain still needed convincing.

“So, if you found a rock in the middle of the woods tomorrow that you suspected was a meteor, could you know for sure? How could you prove it came from outer space?”

“If I found it in the woods, it wouldn’t be a meteor, it’d be a meteorite.” He nodded approvingly. “You could look for the spherical chondrules in the rock, which don’t show up in earth rocks.” This was good, but I extracted one final piece of trivia from the Britannica that had lodged on the precarious edge of my short-term memory. “And, if it was an iron-nickel meteorite, the metallic crystals would be arranged in the Widmanstatten pattern.”

“Widmanstatten pattern?” my father said. I thought he was going to cry he looked so happy.

“Look to the northwestern sky,” he told me as I left.

I rode my bike down Cabin Hill Road, the setting sun shimmering behind me, and up to Tom, who was waiting beneath one of the towering tulip poplars outside the front entrance of the institute.

“How’d you get down here?” I asked him, proud of my meteorite fiction and wanting to share it.

“I rode down with my dad.” He gestured toward his father’s truck. An early load of firewood poked out from under the green tarp that covered it. Of course, I thought. Tom’s family didn’t think of union meetings as dangerous gatherings to be avoided, saving him the trouble of fabricating a lie.

In fact there were dozens of spectators milling around the outside of the institute. Union wives socialized on the lawn in jeans and pro-union T-shirts. Other locals who lived nearby had wandered over, as they probably always did whenever something big enough to require the use of the institute’s auditorium was going on. Many had shown up to witness the rumored arrival of representatives from “the National,” high-level union men spoken of in tones both reverent and apprehensive. For a second, my heart raced as I thought I saw Taffy’s blond hair in the crowd, but in an instant, I knew it wasn’t her: the girl I saw was too graceless to be Taffy, who could move like a cat and disappear in a crowd like a rabbit in a field. Seconds later, when I saw her dad arrive, I gave up all hope of seeing her.

Orpod Judd glared at Tom and me as he walked by, his watery eyes appraising me so intently that I had to look away. In the middle of that jovial crowd, he was noticeably alone, given wide clearance by his union brothers on an evening when brotherhood was on conspicuous display. Judd was fat, but the fat seemed to disguise a body that was still strong despite the years of abuse and encroaching disintegration. His head slowly turned to watch us as he followed the crowd inside, a movement that reminded me of the snake I had shared a pipe with the night before. Like the snake, Judd seemed to be a purely physical being, without thoughts deeper than attacking threats and surviving. I had never spoken to Orpod Judd, but from the way he glowered I thought he must know me, aware of my connection to Taffy and the cave in some instinctive or supernatural way. Then it occurred to me that he recognized my bike. I breathed a sigh of relief when he disappeared inside the doorway.

None of us on the lawn could see anything that was actually happening inside the building, as security was being enforced at the door by two burly but friendly-looking strikers who were checking the union cards of each person going inside. Tom and I watched as a self-important Courier-Journal reporter tried to bluster his way past, to no avail. He left in a huff as the men at the door looked embarrassed by the commotion.

“We’ll never get in through the front door,” said Tom.

Especially since one of us is the son of a manager, I thought.

It pissed me off. A big event was taking place inside the institute, in our town, and I didn’t like being excluded, as I was now in all things having to do with the union. I was as determined to get inside the institute as I was opposed to family secrets. I wanted to hear what the union had to say about the death of Don Strange and those responsible. And if hanging out with Tom all my life had taught me anything, it was this: you can usually get yourself from one place to another if you want to get there bad enough.

Tom was examining the building with a critical eye. “Let’s go around back.”

I rode around slowly, following Tom, the tread of my bike tires crunching on the dusty gravel of the driveway. In back we saw a number of potential entrances, narrow doors that looked like they had been designed for servants back during the institute’s glory days. I wondered who waited inside those doors now. Guards with guns? Cops? I was constantly being warned by those around me that I had an overactive imagination, and I tried to keep it in check, but the fact was that men who belonged to this group had killed a man, and the criminals were still at large. I worried that my staid German neighbors had imaginations that were not active enough. Disaster had already struck in Borden, and I saw no reason why it couldn’t again. Everyone but Tom and me seemed to have accepted on faith that Sanders and Kruer were gone, the trouble they caused a tragic but fleeting event, a lightning strike. I feared it might be more like a drought, something that could linger and worsen indefinitely.

Tom walked up to one of the small back doors and tugged on the knob. To my shock, the door swung open, and we looked right at the wide back of a man in a blue work shirt and jeans. Past him several other men stood in a relaxed circle inside a large, old-fashioned, institutional kitchen. It took the man just a second to feel the breeze at his back. When he turned around and saw us, he attempted to hide the dewy can of Falls City beer in his hand.

“You run along now,” he said, his eyes darting guiltily from Tom to me and back, his free hand reaching to shut the door quickly. He certainly wasn’t a guard or a cop—he was a regular dude sneaking a beer and a cigarette while locked safely away from a reproachful and possibly Baptist wife. Still, he might as well have been an armed sentry as far as Tom and I were concerned. The other back door opened into the same kitchen, no doubt, in view of the same men, who had every reason to keep us clear of their impromptu stag party.

“Hell’s bells,” said Tom. He scratched his chin and searched the building for another point of vulnerability.

My eyes followed his to a low roof that provided a small area of shelter for one of the narrow back doors, this one at the very back corner of the building. I imagined it as a haven for a uniformed deliveryman in a pouring rain a hundred years ago. Above the small roof was a second-floor window. This was a tactic we knew well—my porch roof was the starting point for many of our recent adventures. We ambled over for a better look.

“How can we get up there?” I asked. In keeping with the grand scale of the institute, the door was tall and the small roof above it seemed out of reach.

Tom jumped at the roof with his hands up in the air. Even with his considerable athleticism, it was futile.

“Can you lift me?” he asked.

“Then how will I get up there?”

“I’ll pull you up after me.”

It seemed risky. It was not yet dark, and just on the other side of the building were a dozen or so folks who could saunter around the corner at any second and catch us in the act. Opening a back door was innocent enough. A manager’s son scaling the building to get to a second-floor window so that he could eavesdrop on a closed union meeting would be harder to explain. Tom either didn’t think about those possibilities or didn’t care.

I positioned myself with my back to the brick wall, and interlaced my fingers in front of me so that Tom could use them as a step. He stepped into my hands with one foot, and then deftly put the other foot on my shoulder. He continued his climb as he reached up to grab the edge of the small roof, which was now just slightly higher than his shoulders. I felt his full weight for just a moment, then he pulled himself up and swung his legs onto the roof. The whole maneuver took just seconds.

He lay on his stomach, and extended his arms to me. They were out of reach. When I jumped, our fingertips brushed, but we could not connect solidly enough for him to pull me up. Tom scooted out farther over the edge, to the point where if I did manage to grab his hands, I was pretty sure I would pull him off. We heard clapping and whistling from the front of the building, as some heroes of the union arrived. I pictured the beer drinkers in the kitchen hurriedly finishing their brews before the official business of the evening began.

“What now?” I whispered.

“Keep trying,” Tom said, scooting out farther.

“It’s not going to work,” I said. “Go on in by yourself.”

Tom thought it over for a minute. “Bring your bike over here,” he said.

I wheeled my bike directly under the roof, and stood it up on its kickstand.

“Climb up and stand on the seat,” he said.

“Stand on the seat?” It seemed like some kind of circus trick.

“Just climb up real quick, it’ll just take a second, then I can reach out and grab you.”

I decided to give it a try, just to humor Tom, because I thought there was no chance of it working. I put my feet on the pedals, facing away from the handlebars, and then, with my arms outstretched for balance, stepped onto the bike seat. I stood like that for a full second or two, and it was only because I hadn’t expected it to work that I wasn’t prepared to grab Tom’s outstretched hands. I jumped clear of the bike as I lost my balance. I readied for another try, this time with every intention of making it up to the small roof.

Feet in the pedals, feet on the seat—I was up. I grasped Tom’s forearms, and he grabbed mine, a perfect linkup, and he hauled me quickly onto the roof. My bike fell over with a clatter as my feet left the seat. Suddenly we were both on the small roof, with barely enough room to stand.

Tom turned to the window and began trying to open it—it occurred to me that it might have been a good idea to try that before devoting so much effort to getting us both on the roof. While it was locked in some way, the window frames were so old that the small lock just tore away from the crumbly wood, and the window opened with a screech. Tom jumped in and I followed, closing the window behind me, verifying that no adult on the ground was staring up in horror at us as we broke into the building.

We jumped down from the sill quickly to get out of the sight of anyone outside, kicking up a dry cloud of dust as we landed. It didn’t take long for our eyes to adjust—it was still not completely dark out, and the room was full of large windows. What we saw amazed us.

It seemed that the Smithsonian had not taken all of Professor Borden’s collections. The built-in cabinets lining the walls were crammed with leather-bound books, intricately carved wooden boxes, and a full complement of antique lab equipment: beakers, tubes, and delicate-looking scales. In addition, the room held three parallel rows of large, ornate lab tables. On top of every one stood stuffed and mounted animals. The professor seemed to have had a particular fondness for exotic rodents, all of them posed by the taxidermist with snarling faces to better expose their long, sharp teeth. Most spectacularly, on the walls above the cabinets, were mounted a score of antique swords and knives, a row of them completely circling the large room. Far, far away, I heard the bang of a gavel and a muted baritone cheer.

“Holy shit,” whispered Tom.

“Look at all this stuff.” It was difficult to decide where to begin.

First I walked carefully to what appeared to be the room’s only door, hoping I could lock it. I was afraid that at any minute someone would burst through it and roust us before we had a chance to take even a brief inventory. Wary of squeaks, I stepped carefully across the dusty wood floor, taking note as I passed of the crates and drawers I wanted to open later, when there was more time, if there was ever enough time. Next to the door, which I was disappointed to see held no lock, I found a glass-enclosed cabinet containing a number of artifacts relating to the institute itself. I got the impression that at some point decades earlier, a local historian had created the small display to inform visitors about the history of the Borden Institute.

A photograph of William Borden himself was at the center. He had a heavy beard and the comfortable smile of a wealthy man who knew exactly how lucky he was. Another document on display seemed to be an old bulletin for prospective students: The building is new and is one of the finest in the State. It is finely finished and well furnished. Afine Stereopticon has lately been added by Prof. Borden, with views of a great number of places of historic interest in this and other countries. The bulletin was signed by the principal of the institute, Francis M. Stalker. One of our five named roads in Borden was Stalker Street, and now I knew why.

Next to the bulletin I found Borden’s autobiography, Personal Reminiscences. I flipped through the first few pages, and scanned the part of the book that described his childhood in New Providence. The old philanthropist wrote that three major events from his youth were “indelibly impressed” on his mind. The first was the cholera epidemic of 1832. A friend of his had to quit school in order to help his father build coffins, a foreshadowing of what would become the town’s main enterprise. The second event was a plague of gray squirrels on a biblical scale in 1833, requiring organized squirrel hunts that slaughtered upward of three thousand of the animals every day: perhaps the origin of the good professor’s interest in stuffed rodents. The migrating squirrels were so insensible to danger that they allowed themselves to be killed with clubs. The final event was a spectacular meteor shower in 1834 of such intensity that sleeping people were awakened by the great light. One witness proclaimed, “Oh, my God, the world is on fire!” Borden went on to write, “Never did rain fall as thick as meteors fell toward the earth that day.”

I was shocked at the coincidence, since a meteor shower had been my pretense for getting out of the house that night. “Look at this!” I called to Tom. He didn’t respond.

I looked across the room to see that he had hastily stacked two crates onto one of the lab tables, and from that wobbly perch was attempting to pull a sword from its mount near the ceiling.

I hurried over. “What are you doing?”

At that moment he freed the sword with a grunt, lurched backward, and regained his balance atop the teetering crate, barely avoiding the fall that would have impaled one or both of us. He carefully climbed down to the floor, sword in hand.

“Look at this thing,” he said, awe in his voice. The blade was large and straight, and sharp on both sides. The flange above the grip was slightly gilded, but most of the gold had worn or faded away. The metal had darkened in some places, as if it had been exposed to smoke, but the entire length of it was surprisingly smooth and unpitted—I wondered if that was an indicator of the quality of the steel. A small yellowing tag dangled from the handle, identifying it in old-fashioned script: Sword, Probably German, 1525-1550.

“Feel.” Tom handed it to me.

It was surprisingly light, weighing no more than my Springfield M6. Although I had never held a sword before, I could tell that it was superbly balanced at the grip—the thing begged to be swung through the air. Also like my M6, the German sword was almost completely unornamented, having been designed purely to serve its function. I assumed that function had been to hack apart invading godless hordes. It took my breath away.

“I’m keeping it,” said Tom as he took it back, already knowing I would object.

“You can’t do that,” I said, although my less scrupulous self was already scanning the walls for the sword I would most like to steal. A curved blade in the corner, like something Sinbad might use, caught my eye.

“Why not?” said Tom. “We keep stuff we find all the time.”

“It’s different when you take something that’s been lost, or left out,” I said. “This is a museum! This would be stealing.” I heard an agitated rumble from the crowd below. Someone must have said something controversial. Tom and I didn’t care. If Jesus Christ himself were addressing Local 1096, I’m not sure we could have torn ourselves away from all that medieval weaponry.

“This ain’t a museum,” said Tom. “This is no different from finding something in the woods. Locking stuff up in this room was the same as throwing it away.”

“This stuff belongs to someone.”

“I thought he left everything to the people of Borden,” said Tom, throwing me off by demonstrating a knowledge of William Borden. “This stuff is sitting here because everyone has forgotten about it.”

“It doesn’t belong to us,” I said. “And this isn’t like digging up potatoes in some field or stealing melons. That thing is really valuable—taking it would be stealing.”

“I’ll bet Professor Borden would want me to have it.”

“Where are you going to keep it?” I asked, thinking I had found my trump card. As hard as it would be for me to hide a gigantic four-hundred-year-old German sword from my parents, it would be impossible for Tom in that army barracks he called a bedroom. “Why don’t you leave it here until we figure out what to do with it?”

Tom mulled it over. “Shit, I did want to go looking for Sanders and Kruer tonight.”

“You did?” That was news to me.

“Yeah…you said you wanted to, remember?”

“I just didn’t know we were doing it tonight.”

“Every time we’re in the woods, we’re going to be looking for them.” I could tell he briefly considered stalking them with sword in hand, but thought better of it. “That’ll have to wait. I’m taking this thing and hiding it in the cave.”

I had to admit that was a good hiding place—no one knew the caves of the area as well, and the thing would actually probably be preserved better in an arid cave than in the musty second floor of the Borden Institute. I thought of my imaginary archaeologist finding the old German sword in the future, an object whose presence in a Clark County cave would be even harder to explain than Tom’s shorts and shoes.

Suddenly the door burst open into the room. Tom and I instinctively ducked down, like rabbits in a bramble. I knew we hadn’t been seen, we were that quick. But I wondered if someone had heard us walking around up there, or arguing, and were now searching for us. If so, it wouldn’t take long to find us.

The intruders shut the door slowly, and then crossed the room, to the windows, one row of tables in front of us. We saw their frayed bell-bottom jeans and work boots as they walked by.

The man in front walked right to the window where we had come in. He opened it a crack.

“This’ll do just fine,” he said. I recognized the voice. It was Ray Arnold, the man who’d fought with Tom’s dad the night before. I heard the metallic clink of a Zippo lighter opening, and then a few seconds later the sickly sweet smell of Clark County weed drifted through the old classroom.

Tom and I looked at each other with some relief. They weren’t up there to bust us; they were there to spark up. If we jumped up and yelled “boo!” they’d probably run out of the room. Tom and I carefully leaned back so we could sit against the tables and wait the potheads out. Tom had the sword lying across his crossed legs.

“This is better than listening to that bullshit downstairs, ain’t it?” Ray exhaled loudly. “Jesus Christ, I am sick of it.” Tom carefully stuck his head around the corner to get a better look, and I did the same.

It was the first time I’d seen a grown man after a genuine ass-kicking. Ray Arnold didn’t quite have a black eye, not the perfectly round, perfectly black, comic-book variety, anyway. Half his face was dark red, however, almost as if it had been scraped badly on the asphalt. I noticed, too, in the way that he put his Zippo back in his pocket, that his fingers appeared to be hurting, as if maybe he’d gotten in a few good licks of his own. He was as wild-eyed as he sounded, with long thin hair and a ragged mustache that twitched when he spoke. With him was Lonnie Vogel, a stocky maintenance man at the plant who also grew Christmas trees on his family farm to make a few extra bucks during the holidays—we got our Scotch pine from him every year. Lonnie delicately took the joint back from Ray Arnold.

“We need to be careful,” said Lonnie. “If we drop this thing in here the whole place will burn to the ground in about five seconds.”

They both chuckled at that.

“So help me,” said Ray, “if one more of those dipshits calls me his brother, I am going to kill him.”

“Yep,” said Lonnie with a sigh, clearly preferring that they not waste a good joint talking about the strike.

“They ain’t my brothers,” Ray continued. “Truthfully, most of ’em are assholes. I might cross the line just to piss ’em off. Just to piss off that dickhead George Kruer.”

Tom and I shot each other looks. Tom was grinning.

“You’re not serious,” said Lonnie, releasing a lungful of smoke.

Ray thought it over. “I didn’t want this strike. And I’ve never told no one no different.”

“You can’t cross the line.”

“Look, man, I’ve got a hungry baby at home and a wife who won’t get off my ass. I was going along with this bullshit, thinking we might get a raise after a week or two, but now they’re killing folks. Hell, I liked Don Strange!”

“I did, too,” said Lonnie thoughtfully.

“Now they’re killing folks, and no raise we get is ever going to make up for the money we’re losing on strike, and I am sick of it.”

“So you’re just going to walk across that line by yourself.”

“I wouldn’t be by myself,” said Ray. “I guarantee you that. I ain’t the only sorry asshole in Borden who needs a paycheck. I’d like to see George Kruer’s face when I take a whole shift back into the plant. You’d follow me across, wouldn’t you?”

Lonnie Vogel thought long and hard, so long I thought he might have forgotten Ray’s question. “I don’t know, Ray,” he said finally. “My dad would kill me if I ever crossed a picket line.”

Ray Arnold thought it over. “That’s true. Your old man would shit. Well, I’m sure somebody would come with me. I can’t be the only one who sees how retarded this whole thing is.”

There was thunderous applause downstairs, and a chant began: Ten ninety-six! Ten ninety-six!

Ray started whispering in rhythm: “Ten ninety-six! We’re all a bunch of pricks!”

They both giggled hysterically, as they finished up the last of Ray’s small joint. “Thanks, dude,” said Lonnie. “That was good.”

Ray sighed theatrically. “Let’s go downstairs and see what we just agreed to.” They tromped out of the room, considerably less carefully than when they came in. Ray pulled the door shut behind him as he exited.

Tom and I stood up. A thin layer of reefer haze floated at chest height.

“I’m keeping it,” he said, picking up the argument where we’d left it.

We stared at each other a moment, Tom knowing full well that he always won these debates. A new chant began downstairs that we couldn’t make out. Combined with Ray and Lonnie’s departure, it led me to think the meeting was reaching a climax. We had to make our move soon, whatever it was.

“We need to go,” I said. I ached for the Sinbad sword on the wall, but knew I couldn’t bring myself to steal it, anymore than I could prevent Tom from taking his.

“Then let’s go,” he said, leading the way across the room with sword extended.

We got to the window, and I let Tom go out first. I followed, and carefully closed the window behind me, taking one last look at all the treasure I was leaving behind. The sun had gone down, which was good news for Tom now that he was officially committing grand theft. Tom knelt down on the small roof. Leaning as far as he could over the edge, he dropped the sword straight down. It stuck in the dirt cleanly right by my bike’s front tire, its weight driving the point into the gravel driveway. Tom jumped down after it, hanging briefly on the roof’s edge by his fingertips before dropping down with a grunt. From above, I watched him pull the sword from the ground like young King Arthur.

I dropped down beside him Tom was positively glowing.

“How are you going to get that thing home?” I asked.

“I’ll hide it in the back of my dad’s truck. I’ll take it out tonight and hide it in the woods, take it to the cave when I get a chance. Next time, though, we’re goin’ lookin’ for them.”

“I still don’t think you should have taken anything from a museum,” I said self-righteously.

Tom laughed. “Well, you did.” He pointed at my hands.

And I had. Without realizing it, I had taken the copy of Borden’s Personal Reminiscences. So we were both thieves.

Tom ran over to his dad’s truck and shoved the sword under the tarp just as the doors of the institute burst open and union men began rolling out, smiling and lighting one another’s cigarettes. We turned to face them, trying to look casual.

“What’d you decide?” Tom asked two of the strikers as they passed.

“We’re all sorry about Don Strange,” said one of them. “We’re buying flowers out of the strike fund.”

“And we’re staying on strike until hell freezes over,” said the other. Those strikers close enough to hear him cheered.

I rode my bike home with the book shoved up my pants leg. My father was waiting for me in the living room, lying on the couch and reading Chesapeake. I could tell the second I walked in, from the quiet and from the general sense of emptiness, that Mom was not home, perhaps instead at one of her feminist gatherings in Louisville, or on a secret errand for the sheriff.

Dad greeted me with an eager smile. “Did you see any?”

For a second, I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Then it all came back to me, along with the fear that my stolen book was about to fall out of my pants leg, and that Dad would be able to smell the fine bouquet of Ray’s weed coming off my clothes. He waited for an answer.

“They were falling like rain,” I said.

Numerous historic preservation groups tried to save the institute, but in the end its own grand scale worked against it, making it prohibitively expensive to renovate, and too big to be of any real practical use in our small town. Despite the fact that the building had been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1973, it was condemned by the state fire marshal. Since it was so close to the grammar school, local officials finally decided to demolish the building in 1983, calling it a safety hazard to the romping schoolchildren nearby. I stood in the parking lot and watched them destroy it the day before leaving for college. In all, William Borden’s building had lasted ninety-nine years, which I think to a geologist would seem like just the blink of an eye. What remained of Professor Borden’s collections were carefully inventoried by the preservationists, crated up, and sent three hundred miles away, to the Field Museum in Chicago. So, looking back, I think Tom was right. I’m glad at least one of those swords is still in Borden, and yes, I think Professor Borden would be happy about it, too.