Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, drove down to that gate, and I could not see the fence.
They’d covered it.
Photocopies, hundreds of them, taped and zip-tied and wired to the chain link the whole length of the drive, curling in the wind at seven in the morning. Every one of them a page out of the gate sign-out sheet.
You have to understand what that sheet is. It’s nothing. It’s the clipboard by the guard shack door where a man writes his name and his time when he comes out to the lot on a break or leaves early. Thirty years of them in a filing cabinet nobody has opened since the Clinton administration.
And for thirty years, the men wrote in the margins.
Thanks for the jump, Ray. Ray — left my thermos, don’t throw it out. Ray, my girl was born at 4:10, tell second shift. Somebody’s ex-wife’s phone number in 1999 with a line drawn through it. Deer season standings. A man in 2004 who wrote sorry about your dad and nothing else, because that’s what men do instead of saying it.
Delmer’s boy works in the office now and he pulled that cabinet at four in the morning and they ran the copier until it jammed twice.
Forty-some men standing out there in the cold with their lunch pails, and not one of them clocked in.
In the middle of it, at eye level, right by the gate latch where you couldn’t miss it, they’d taped one page by itself. December of 1997, the night of the ice storm, in handwriting I knew before I got out of the truck — Walt Rausch, second shift, dead since 2011:
“Left 2:40 a.m. Car wouldn’t start. Ray drove me the 14 miles to Alexandria and turned around and came back and finished his shift. Put that in the book because he sure won’t.”
I stood there and read a wall of my own life and I am not going to pretend I held up.
Corporate had a woman down from Indianapolis before nine. She didn’t get past the fence for twenty minutes. Then she went inside and asked the one question nobody had bothered with: where is the voucher book for the petty cash?
Because that box isn’t a box. Every dollar out of it needs a voucher signed by two people, and the book lives in the same drawer. Eighty-five dollars had gone out on a voucher eleven days before, signed once, no receipt ever turned in, in the handwriting of the man who’d stood in front of my whole crew and threatened me with handcuffs.
He hadn’t stolen it, exactly. He’d spent it on lunch for a vendor and never squared it, and when the count came up short he needed the shortage to be somebody’s fault faster than he needed it to be true.
He was gone by Friday. I didn’t watch him go and I didn’t want to.
They gave me my keys and my flashlight and asked what they could do for me. I said don’t throw out that cabinet.
They didn’t. It’s in the front lobby now behind glass, and there’s a brass plate on it, and I hate that brass plate, and I’d fight anybody who tried to take it down.
Thirty years I thought I was just the man who locked the doors. Turns out I’d been signing my name in the margin of forty men’s lives the whole time, same as they’d been signing in mine.