Free Over and Under by Todd Tucker Page A

And Guthrie Kruer’s truck was stalled at the iron bridge.Sheriff Kohl already checked the trailer they both live in. It’s empty and all their guns are gone.”
    “Guthrie Kruer and Mack Sanders killed Don Strange?” I asked.
    “That’s right.”
    It caught me off guard to hear the last name of my best friend like that. Not that it was that big of a coincidence; the hills were filled with Kruers, along with a few other key German surnames like Huber and Stemler. Since they were all robustly Catholic and had millions of kids, you pretty much had to be in the family to understand exactly how they were all interrelated. Their allegiances to each other showed in weird, subtle ways. I knew Tom’s family, for example, drove their cars all the way to Floyd Knobs for repairs because some Kruer cousin owned a garage out there.
    Guthrie Kruer had established himself that last December as something of a minor local celebrity. Like about half the adult male population of Borden, Kruer was a volunteer fireman. Acting loosely in that capacity, he had once climbed to the top of the Borden Casket Company’s water tower to free a turkey buzzard that had gotten snagged in the tower’s Christmas lights. The bird was scared shitless and squawking pitifully as Guthrie Kruer approached it—we were all certain the bird would knock him to his death with its giant dark wings. A
Courier-Journal
photographer happened to be passing through town that day, on his way back from a school board meeting in Salem, and he saw the crowd gathered and snapped a dramatic photo that appeared on the front page of the Louisville paper the next morning: a small man standing gracefully at the top of the rounded water tower, his armsoutstretched for balance, the giant bird mirroring him as it spread its wings gratefully and flew away. Tom tried to explain to me at the time exactly how they were related to each other, the gossamer-thin line of blood that connected them back to the different shipments of Kruers that came over from Bavaria in centuries past. The story was confusing even to him and he finally gave up and just identified Guthrie Kruer as his “cousin,” which satisfied us both.
    Mack Sanders, on the other hand, was an outsider. Even though he had lived in Borden as long as I could remember, I was always aware of the fact that he came from somewhere else—I think it was Tell City. He had no family in the area. I guess most people in Borden were like me, in that when I heard the name Mack Sanders, the thing that leapt immediately to mind was that the boy had just one nut. The only other thing I knew about Mack Sanders was that Guthrie Kruer was his best friend.
    “Where are they now?”
    “They must have grabbed somebody else’s truck,” said Dad. “Or maybe they hitchhiked. I’m sure they’re in Louisville by now, probably headed south.” It was a keystone of our local philosophy that all things evil either came from Louisville or ended up there.
    I knew better. I pictured them creeping along the edge of the woods, just inside the trees, to the truck where they’d staged it at the iron bridge. It was a good choice—few people drove on that section of road in daylight and nobody drove at night, when you couldn’t see to dodge the gaping holes in the bridge’s planking. I pictured them there, panicked, turning the key over and over, within earshot of the sirens and maybe even the voices on thepicket line. I was sure they had parked the truck there, ready to flee to Louisville, just like Dad suspected. When it wouldn’t start, they did just what I would have done. They grabbed their guns and took off into the woods. They would live off whatever fish, rabbit, and squirrel they could catch, and maybe a can or two of Dinty Moore Beef Stew if they’d really been thinking ahead when they loaded up the truck. They were killers, and I hated them for murdering Don Strange. I wanted them found and punished. But something bloomed alongside the