Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, and I did not go to that plant. I drove to the post office on Center Street and waited outside in the truck until Verna Kittle unlocked the doors at eight-thirty, because Verna has worked that window for thirty-one years and Verna is the only person in Marion who could tell me what I needed to know.
Here is what a night janitor knows.
That break room locker sits nine feet from the outgoing mail bin. Not the mailroom — the little wire basket by the time clock where anybody can drop a bill or a birthday card and the shipping clerk runs it through the meter at noon and it goes out with the freight.
At twenty past one that morning I was buffing the corridor by the time clock, and a fellow in a contract crew vest came out of that break room, put a padded envelope in that basket, and went back to sweeping like a man who’d remembered to pay his water bill.
Padded envelope. One-thirty in the morning. Nobody mails anything at one-thirty in the morning.
Verna pulled it up in about four minutes. The plant’s postage meter stamps every piece with the meter number, the date, and the time it was run, and that piece was metered at 11:52 the next morning and scanned at the Marion processing plant at 6:14 that evening, addressed to an apartment in Bucyrus.
Tracking number and all. She printed it for me and would not let me pay for the copies.
I drove to the plant with that printout at nine-thirty and asked for Dean Ostrander in Human Resources, who I have known since his daddy ran the tool crib, and I laid it on his desk and told him to check the name on the return address against the contract crew roster.
Same name. He’d mailed the money to himself, because he wasn’t fool enough to carry it past a guard shack, and he was exactly fool enough to run it through the company meter.
They pulled the time clock records to go with it. He’d punched out at 1:41.
The plant manager called the whole first shift together in the aisle by the receiving door on Friday, which he has never done in the eleven years he’s been there, and he said the man’s name, and he said the contract bid was dead, and he said twenty-eight years should have bought me one question and it hadn’t, and that was on him and on nobody else.
The floor manager was gone by the end of the month.
They gave me nine days of back pay and my keys. And the Monday I came back, somebody on second shift had run a strip of blue tape down the handle of my floor scrubber and lettered a name on it in paint marker, and it’s still there, and it says THE WARDEN, which they have called me behind my back since about 2009 and which I was not supposed to know about.
Under the tape, folded up, was a card.
Twenty-eight years and none of us said a word while you walked out. We’ll be quicker next time. Nobody sits in this break room without you. — 2nd shift
Twenty-eight years I figured I was just the fellow who cleaned up after everybody. Turns out a plain man doing the same right thing every night for half his life is a hard record to argue with, and it doesn’t take a lawyer to read it.