Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, and drove to the little guard kiosk at the employee lot, which is not the same thing as driving to the plant, and asked Norma to print me the gate tape.
Nine weeks that shift manager had been in the building, and he never learned that our lot has an arm on it.
It’s been there since the insurance company made us put it in. You badge or you punch a code, the arm goes up, and a little printer in that kiosk spits a line onto a roll of paper. Vehicle in, vehicle out, time, plate. Norma tears the roll off Sunday nights and rubber-bands it and throws it in a milk crate, and there are about eleven years of those rolls in that crate because nobody has ever once told her to stop.
Tuesday night, 1:52 a.m., three vehicles in. None of them ours.
The contract cleaning outfit he’d been so hungry to bring in. On site at two in the morning for what he’d later call a walk-through, which is a funny hour for a walk-through, and which is the exact stretch I was on the far end of the shop running the sweeper, which the sweeper’s own hour meter will tell you if anybody cares to look.
They went out at 2:26. Seventy dollars went with them, out of a break-room locker with a bad latch that I had written up on a maintenance slip three separate times since February.
I’d seen the headlights. That’s what I’d been keeping to myself. A man who has worked nights for twenty-nine years knows every set of headlights that has any business in that lot, and those didn’t.
Norma printed it. Took her four minutes. She’d have printed it for him too if he’d ever once said good morning to her.
The plant manager had it in his hand by nine. The cleaning company had it by noon and the money was back on his desk by three, and no, nobody pressed charges, and honestly by then I didn’t much care about the seventy dollars.
Because of who it belonged to.
Locker 22 is a kid named Trey Bohannon, twenty-three, second-year machinist. His mother died in January and he has been putting money in that locker in cash every week toward a headstone, because his people don’t use banks and he wasn’t about to explain that to anybody.
When it got out on the floor what that seventy dollars had been for, the night crew did what night crews do. They passed a coffee can.
Eleven hundred and forty dollars in two days, out of a shop where nobody is rich. Second shift heard about it and put in too. They set the can on the break-room table Thursday with the lid taped on and one line written across it in grease pencil:
“Trey — your mother gets her stone. Don’t argue with the night crew.”
That boy sat down on the floor of the break room in his coveralls.
The stone went in in May. Half the shop drove out to Fultonham for it on a Saturday, in their good shirts, and stood in the wet grass for a woman most of them never met.
They gave me my keys back and finally fixed the latch on locker 22.
Twenty-nine years of quiet nights taught me this much: a man in a hurry sees a thief. Everybody else in that building saw a boy trying to bury his mother right.