Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, drove down to that gate, and I had twenty-eight composition books in a milk crate on the passenger seat.
I did not ask for the manager. I asked for Sonny Petrosky, who is seventy-four and who has sat on that co-op’s board since his father sat on it, and I set that crate on the table in the office where they do the fish tickets.
My daddy was a union man at Conneaut and the one thing he taught me that stuck was that a working man writes things down, because his word will get weighed against somebody else’s word someday and paper doesn’t get nervous.
So every night for twenty-eight years: date, weather, who came through that gate, what time in, what time out, what boat, what they took off the dock. In pencil. Never missed one.
The cash box came up short three weekends running. What Sonny and I did that morning was lay my books next to the fuel dock’s meter tickets, which is a thing nobody had thought to do because nobody knew my books existed.
Every one of those short weekends, a name shows up in my log coming through the gate between one and three in the morning with a boat that had no business being out. And every one of those nights, the meter on the diesel pump moves two hundred, three hundred gallons — and there’s no ticket written for it. No trip ticket, no fuel slip, nothing on the co-op’s books at all.
Somebody was selling our diesel off that dock in the middle of the night for cash, and when the cash box came up short it was because he was skimming that too, on the same nights, out of the same trips.
The name in my books on every wrong night was one of the young dock hands. And the reason he had a gate key at one in the morning is that the new manager had handed out four of them the month he started, without telling the board, because he was already staffing up for the outside firm he wanted to bring in.
Sonny called a board meeting for that same Thursday night and had the fuel records pulled and the meter read.
They did it in the fish house with the crew there and the doors open. Sonny read the meter numbers, then he read four lines out of my composition book from October, and then he named the man and said the co-op would be filing on him. The manager tried to say something about hearsay and Sonny told him a log kept every night for twenty-eight years by the same hand is not hearsay, it is a record, and that the co-op’s insurance carrier had already told him as much on the phone that afternoon.
The manager was gone in two weeks. I got my keys and nine days of pay.
The crew got me something. It’s sitting in the office in a case now, and it’s a leather-bound ledger with my name pressed into the cover in gold, and there’s a card taped inside the front of it.
Gramps — keep writing it down. Turns out it’s the only thing in this place nobody can argue with. — the night crew
I use it. First entry, first line, the night I came back: clear, calm, thirty-nine degrees, all gates locked at 11:40, nobody through.