Page 27 of Working for Keeps

We find the drawings in Wendel Pike’s garage at eleven-forty at night.

Four drawings, cloth-backed, brittle at the folds, the ink gone the color of strong tea. FORGE CREEK IRON WORKS, PRIMARY STAMP HALL. And in the corner of each one, in a box, in a draftsman’s tiny capitals: A. PIKE, ENGR. And under that, the stamp, and under the stamp, the date.

March 1911.

I sit back on my heels on the freezing concrete and I look at the section elevation: the river-stone foundation arches, seven of them, hand-poured and continuous, and above them the load-bearing timber frames, twenty-two inches on center, holding up a floor that has been shaking under hydraulic presses since before the First World War.

The plant Halvorsen built in 1952 is sitting on top of a plant nobody has thought about in eighty years. Two inches of spring settle every year on foundations laid when Taft was president, and Mick Hayes has known that settle in his boots his entire working life and told Chicago about it, and Chicago has never come down here to look.

“Vera,” Mick says but I can’t say anything.

I flatten my palm on the paper. “That’s it,” I murmur. “That’s the ordinance, word for word.”

Tuesday I go to work and lie.

I sit in the office trailer and I build Roland Keller the most beautiful, useless compliance log of my career. Third-shift baselines. Time-motion tables. A workforce deployment schedule with four hundred names on it that I know is a list of people I am trying to save, formatted in a way that makes it look like a list of people I am preparing to fire. I send it at 4:57 p.m. with a note that says On track. Steward engaged. Recommend we hold the differential discussion open through next week.

Keller replies in eleven minutes. Good girl.

I go into the bathroom of the office trailer and throw up.

Mick lies better than I do, which is to say he lies like a man being slowly filleted.

I go down onto the floor Wednesday morning to run a time-motion study I do not need, because Roland Keller wants to see one and because I have discovered that I cannot sit in that trailer for another hour.

That is how I come to be standing eleven feet away, with a stopwatch in my hand and a clipboard I am not writing on, when Artie Vasquez stops Mick Hayes at the foot of Line Three.

I can’t hear all of it over the presses. I don’t have to.

Artie has his hardhat pushed back and his hand on Mick’s elbow, and he is talking to Mick like a man with nothing to worry about, which is the worst way anybody has ever talked to anybody. He’s smiling. He’s got a lunch sack in his other hand. He says something, and Mick says something back, and Artie laughs.

Then Artie says, “Anything out of Chicago?”

It floats right over the top of the machine noise and lands in my ear like a dropped wrench.

And Mick, who has known for two days that the paper is signed, that Artie’s insurance ends in August, that the men on this floor are being kept in their chairs by the two of us and nobody else, hooks his thumbs into his tool belt and says:

“We’re still talking.”

“Good.” Artie squeezes his elbow. Twice, the way you’d pat a dog you were proud of. “You’ll get it done. You always do.” He starts to move off, then turns back, and his whole face opens up, and I have to look down at my clipboard. “Hey. Consuelo’s scan is on the eleventh. She wanted me to say thanks. For the schedule thing. Letting me take the mornings.”

“That’s nothing, Artie.”

“It’s not nothing.” He knocks his knuckles once against Mick’s chest, right over the union pin. “Not to us.”

And he walks away down the yellow safety lane, whistling.

Mick doesn’t move for a long time.

I stand eleven feet from him with a dead stopwatch in my hand, and I watch the biggest man in this valley stand absolutely still on his own factory floor with his jaw locked and his eyes shut.

He opens his eyes and looks at me.

But he doesn’t come over. He can’t, not when there are forty men on this floor and every one of them knows what I am.

He looks at me for about three seconds, and then he turns and goes back to the feeder track, and picks up his wrench, and starts working.

Two more days.