Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, drove down to that gate, and the second shift steward was standing in the middle of the drive with his arms crossed and about sixty men behind him, and not one machine running inside that building.
They hadn’t walked out. That’s the part I want said right, because the word strike got thrown around in town and it wasn’t that. Every one of those men clocked in on time. They just would not start their lines until somebody in that office looked at what Ray Sipes had brought with him.
Ray runs the vending route for the whole county. He’d been in that break room at ten after three the afternoon the money went missing, restocking the machines, and he’d signed the log at the guard shack going in and coming out like he has every Wednesday since 2008.
And he’d seen it. He told my crew chief on the phone at six that morning and then he drove forty miles to say it standing up.
He’d watched a fellow in a white hard hat with a visitor badge open the petty cash box on the shelf over the coffee maker, count out of it, and put it in his jacket. Ray figured it was a manager doing manager business and thought nothing of it until his route driver’s audit tape came off the machine that Friday with a time stamp on it and my name was already all over Anderson as a thief.
The white hard hats that week belonged to the outside security firm the new manager had brought in to price out our jobs.
The plant manager came down and stood in the drive in his shirtsleeves in the cold and read the guard shack log out loud, and then he read the sign-in from the security firm, and the two of them agreed with each other right down to the minute.
The kid who took my flashlight was in his office by ten and out of the building by Friday.
They gave me back pay and my keys and a jacket with a patch on the chest that says thirty years and my last name under it, which I did not ask for and have not taken off since October.
But the thing I keep is what was in the pocket of it when they handed it to me. Somebody on second shift had folded a piece of paper down small and stuck it in there, signed by more men than I can count, some of them fellows I trained in 1998 who have grandkids now.
You walked us all out to our trucks through thirty winters and never once asked for a thing. You didn’t have to ask this time either. — the night crew
I’ve read that thing so many times it’s coming apart at the folds.
Thirty years I thought the job was doors and gates. Turns out I was building something in the dark the whole time and never knew it, and it took a kid half my age with a bad idea to show me.
I’m back on nights. Same rounds, same route, same coffee at two. And every fellow on that shift still gets walked to his truck.