Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, drove down to that gate, and I did not have to say one word, because Denny Kobielski was already standing in the security office with a paper sack and his reading glasses on.
Denny and I went through boot camp at Great Lakes in 1983. He runs the counter at a pawn and loan on Gallia Street now, three days a week, because sitting still makes him mean.
In that sack was a pawn slip and two ticket stubs and a Xerox of a driver’s license.
A Snap-on ratchet set, a Milwaukee right-angle drill, and a torque wrench with a yard inventory number stamped on the handle, brought in on a Thursday afternoon by a fellow who did not know that in a town this size the man behind the pawn counter used to stand watches with the man he was setting up.
Denny had recognized the yard number before he’d finished writing the ticket. He gave the boy his money, because he wanted him to come back, and then he called four people, and by ten o’clock that night half the retired first class petty officers in Scioto County knew whose tools those were.
That’s what a Navy town is. That manager had been there six weeks with a clipboard. He had no earthly idea that the pipefitter on dock two and the crane operator and the fellow who runs the paint shed all came up alongside me, and that a word from men like that goes further in Portsmouth than anything he could type.
By seven that morning there were nineteen men in that office and not one of them raised his voice.
The yard shop runs tool control on brass — every tool that leaves that crib gets a numbered brass chit hung on the board with a man’s name behind it, the way the Navy taught every one of us to do it, and that board is photographed at the end of every shift because I photograph it, on my rounds, with the yard camera, and have since 2009.
Nine hundred photographs a year for sixteen years, on the yard’s own server, that nobody had ever looked at once.
The chit for that torque wrench was hanging behind the name of a maintenance hire the security manager had brought over with him from his last job.
They had it wrapped up by noon. The tools came back off Denny’s shelf and the yard paid him what he’d given out, which he tried to refuse and which the yard manager made him take.
They did it at shift change on the dock, with both crews standing there in the cold. The yard manager said the name, said the outside firm was done, and said thirty years should have bought me one question and it had not.
Then Denny, who was not asked to speak and who spoke anyway, said one line and got back in his truck.
You want to know who’s honest in this town, don’t check his file. Ask the men who stood watches with him at nineteen.
I got my keys, my flashlight, and nine days of back pay. The security manager was gone before Thanksgiving.
I still photograph the chit board every night at the end of my rounds. Denny says I’m a suspicious old man. I told him I learned it from the Navy, same as he did.