Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, and drove out there at six with a padlock in a sandwich bag on the seat beside me.
I asked for Roselyn Pfeifer in the tool crib office, because Roselyn signs out everything that leaves that crib and has since 1998, and because what I needed was a piece of paper, not a speech.
Here is what I had been sitting on and what I was not going to say out loud for that manager for free.
That break-room locker had a Master lock on it that Junior Kessler has had since he came on in 2009 and that he never once locked, because Junior is sixty-one and has never locked anything in his life. On the Tuesday morning it came up short, that lock was hanging on the hasp shut tight, and it was not the same lock.
Same brand, same look. Brass instead of steel gray, and the shackle was clean and the body had no paint on it and Junior’s had a smear of orange primer on it from a job in 2014 that I have looked at a thousand times while I swept that room.
I found the old one in the scrap bin by the compactor that same night, cut through the shackle with a bolt cutter, and I put it in my pocket, because I keep things, which my wife says is a sickness and which turned out to be worth twenty-nine years.
Somebody cut a lock, took the money, and put a new lock on so it’d look like nobody had been in there.
New padlocks come out of the crib. You cannot walk into that building with one in your pocket unless you bought it yourself, and nobody buys a padlock.
Roselyn pulled the requisition book. One padlock, brass, issued at 6:40 in the morning on that Tuesday, signed for in pen by a young hire on second shift who happens to carry the floor manager’s last name, because he is the man’s nephew and everybody in that plant knew it and nobody said it.
She made a copy for me and one for the plant manager and one for herself, which tells you what Roselyn thinks of that manager.
They put the cut lock and the requisition slip side by side on a desk and it was over in about an hour.
The plant manager called the whole first shift into the aisle by receiving on Friday. He said the name. He said the contract bid was dead. He said twenty-nine years should have bought me one question before it bought a guard at the door, and that the failure was his and the floor manager’s and nobody else’s.
They were both gone inside a month, the manager and the boy.
They gave me nine days of back pay and my keys, and the boys on second shift had that cut padlock mounted on a scrap of oak with a brass plate under it that hangs in the break room to this day.
THE OLD MAN SWEEPS UP EVERYTHING, INCLUDING THE EVIDENCE. 29 YEARS. ASK HIM FIRST NEXT TIME.
I still empty that bin by hand. You would not believe what people throw away.