Chapter 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 fire-brands, 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 carry ing 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...