Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, and drove out to the plant for the twenty-eight years of service banquet, because the owners were flying in from Wisconsin for it and because I have never once in my life failed to show up somewhere I said I would be.
I did not go there to argue with a thirty-four-year-old in a quarter-zip.
What I brought with me was the tour wand.
A watchman does not just walk around. There are stations bolted to the walls in that building, twenty-two of them, and you carry a wand and you touch each one, and it records the station number and the date and the time down to the second. The insurance carrier requires it. It is the whole reason the premium is what it is.
The petty cash box is in the front office. The manager said the money went between two and three in the morning, and he said it loud, the way a man does when he is performing.
Between 2:04 and 2:58 that morning I hit stations 11 through 19. That is the whole back half of the plant, the paint line and the two dock doors and the roof access, four hundred yards from the front office, and every one of those touches is stamped in a wand that downloads to a computer in the maintenance office that I do not have a password for.
Dan Hurlbut in maintenance has the password. He came in at six that morning on his day off and pulled it, printed two copies, and put one in his own pocket.
They gave me the clock at the banquet. That is what they do, twenty-eight years and you get a clock, and the owner’s son read out the little speech about the man who kept the place safe while the town slept.
Then Dan Hurlbut asked if he could say something before they cut the cake.
He put the printout on the table in front of the owners. He did not editorialize, Dan does not have it in him. He said, here are the stations, here are the times, this man was on the other side of the building for the entire hour, and he was told to sign a resignation Tuesday night or go out in handcuffs in front of his crew.
The room went so quiet you could hear the compressor cycle.
The seventy-five dollars was never really a mystery once anybody bothered to look. The manager had let two of his own new hires into the front office to use the copier after hours, which is against the policy he had written himself six weeks earlier.
He was gone by the end of the month. Nobody told me and I did not ask.
The owners asked me to come back with my years whole. I told them I would come back on nights only, which is the only shift I have ever liked, and I did that for two more years and then I hung it up.
The clock is on the mantel. It runs about four minutes fast and I have never adjusted it.
The printout is in the drawer under it. Dan gave me his copy too. He said a man ought to have a spare.