Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, and drove back out there at six-fifteen with a flat pry bar and a flashlight in the floorboard of my truck, and I asked for Wendell Stiles, who has run the tool room since 1994 and who is the only man in that building nobody argues with.
I told him I wanted five minutes and two witnesses and a broom.
That cash box sits on top of a steel cabinet in the shop office. The cabinet is 1970s, it’s bolted to nothing, and the back panel does not sit flush against the wall — there’s a gap you could drop a letter through, and there is a gap between the panel and the bottom shelf too, on the inside.
When somebody stuffs that box too full and slaps the lid, bills slide. They go over the back edge and down the inside of that cabinet and out the bottom, and they land in the dust behind it where the floor scrubber has never once reached because the cabinet’s too heavy to move and I have swept around it with a broom handle for twenty-nine years.
I have known about that gap since about 2006. I’ve fished out a five here, a ten there, and put them back in the box, and told two different office girls about it, and neither one of them did anything, because who has time.
The man who’s been stuffing that box too full since March is the new floor manager, who does not count it out and does not band it and slaps the lid down hard because he’s always going somewhere.
Wendell got Dale Fetters from second shift and a girl from payroll, and the four of us pulled that cabinet off the wall at ten after seven in the morning.
Four hundred and eighty dollars on the floor behind it. In dust and paper clips and a Christmas card from 2011.
Some of those bills had been down there long enough to go soft. And the ones on top were folded the way you fold a stack when you’re jamming it into a box in a hurry.
Nobody stole one dime. Not me, not the young guys he never asked, not anybody. That building had been quietly eating its own cash box for the better part of twenty years and calling somebody a thief over it.
The plant manager came down and looked at the money on that floor and did not say anything for a while. Then he sent for the floor manager and asked him, in front of us, how he counted it out, and the man said he didn’t, and that was the whole hearing.
He read it to the whole shift at the Friday start-up. He said the box was never short of anything but a lid that shut right. He said twenty-nine years should have bought one question and it hadn’t. And then he asked me to stand up, which I did not care for at all.
They gave me eight days of back pay and my keys and had a plate made for the cabinet, which is the part I still laugh about.
THIS CABINET HAS TAKEN MORE MONEY OUT OF THIS SHOP THAN ANY MAN IN IT. COUNT IT, BAND IT, DON’T BLAME THE FELLOW WITH THE BROOM.
New box, new cabinet, bolted to the wall. I still sweep behind it. Habit’s a hard thing.