Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, and drove out to the plant and asked at the gate for the two people from corporate who had been in the conference room all week, because they already had my name and they already had a case number.
That is why I did not argue in front of the crew. Not because I was beaten. Because I had been told, in writing, by a lawyer in another state, not to discuss the matter with anyone at the facility.
Eleven weeks earlier I called the ethics line on the back of my badge.
A sweeper is the one who empties the scrap hoppers, so a sweeper is the one who watches every load leave, and I had been watching loads leave that did not match the tickets since about March. Copper, mostly. Off the back dock, on a Thursday, twice a month, going out on a truck that was not the regular hauler.
I did not know what to do with that for a while. I am sixty-three years old and I have never once been the man who reports anybody.
What I finally did was write down plate numbers and dates in a spiral for seven weeks and then call the number.
They gave me a case number. They told me it could take months. They told me not to discuss it, especially not with plant leadership, and that if anybody took action against me I was to call the same number the same day.
So when that young man had me by the collar in front of the night crew over sixty-five dollars out of a locker, I said one thing to him, which was that I understood.
I called the ethics line from the parking lot before I ever started the truck.
They were already there. That was the part I did not know, standing in that break room, and it is the reason I slept that night. The two people in the conference room had been in that building since Monday pulling scrap tickets and gate logs.
Eleven weeks of a spiral notebook against forty minutes of a man deciding an old janitor was the easy answer.
I did not get a big scene out of it and I did not want one. I sat in a conference room for two hours on a Friday and answered questions and gave them the notebook, and I asked one thing, which was that nothing happen to the two kids on the dock who loaded those trucks, because they loaded what they were told to load.
Nothing did.
The sixty-five dollars was a fellow on second shift with a locker two down and a gambling problem he has since told people about himself. Nobody pressed anything.
They gave me my years unbroken and the week’s pay, and the corporate people put the scrap process on a two-signature system that I would have written myself if anybody had ever asked me.
The floor manager does not work in this state anymore. I did not ask about it and I have not looked.
The spiral is gone, they kept it. I bought another one at the drugstore on the way home and I have been writing in it ever since, out of habit, and I intend to keep doing it until they take my broom away.