Page 32 of Working for Keeps

“Four days!” That’s Kowalski, off the finishing line, up on his feet with his hardhat in his fist. He has two girls at the elementary school and a brother-in-law in Pueblo who has been telling him for a year there’s work down there. “Four days you sat on it? My wife took a second job in March, Mick⁠—”

“Put it to a vote!” somebody shouts from the wall. “Right now! We walk tonight, we chain the gates, and we make those sons of bitches come look at us⁠—”

Half the room comes off the wall at that, and my hands want to go up with them, because it is the exact thing I wanted to do on Monday at nine o’clock in the morning and I would have led them out that door myself.

“Mick.” It’s Toby, close in, low, his hand on my arm. “Mick, I can’t hold ’em.”

And then a voice comes out of the middle of the room, flat and clear and not angry at all, which is what makes everybody stop.

“How do we know she’s not lying to you too?”

It’s a kid. Twenty-three, maybe. Bo Rasmussen, third shift, six months on the line, and he has got a baby at home and a face like a closed door.

“That’s a fair question,” I say.

“It’s the only question.” He doesn’t blink. “She’s a company woman. She came here to gut us. You’ve been in a room with her a week and a half and now you’re up there telling us to sit still and trust the paperwork.” He looks around. “It’s what I’d tell us, if I was them.”

The hall goes quiet.

“Where is she?” somebody says.

The question I have been waiting for since I came through that door.

“She’s not here,” I say.

“Why not?”

“Because this is my hall and this is my reckoning, and if she stood up here beside me, every man in this room would spend the next hour looking at her instead of at me, and I’d let you, because it’d be easier.” My voice comes out harder than I mean it to. “I lied to Artie Vasquez. Not her. Me. She’s the one who drove the file here at nine o’clock on Monday morning when she could have sat in that trailer and cashed the check, and she’ll be in that boardroom tomorrow at nine with her whole career in her hands, and she asked me if she should come tonight and I told her no. So if you want to throw somebody out of this hall, boys, throw me. I’m the one who’s standing here.”

Nobody answers that.

I put both hands flat on the table.

“Here’s why I did it. And then you’ll vote.”

I turn the filing over. I hold up the top sheet with Lila Moreno’s stamp on it, still smelling of ink.

“Page nine of our own agreement. Section fourteen, Clause B.” I say it so every man in this hall hears the trap close. “If we walk off that floor before the dispute window opens, and it does not open until the sale is recorded, that’s a material breach. Chicago terminates the contract for cause. It freezes the pension fund. It voids every dollar of severance.” I look at Red, who has kept this hall since before I could shave. “An empty local, and nobody left to keep it for.” I look at Artie. “The insurance ends the same day, not in August. Consuelo’s scan on the eleventh is a bill you pay yourself.” I look at Bo Rasmussen, who has a six-month-old at home. “Every man in this room walks out with a lunchbox and nothing else, and Chicago thanks us for it, because it saves them nine million dollars.”

The silence in the hall changes shape.

“So they want it,” I say. “They need it. They’ve needed it since the day they signed. They sent a woman down here to keep us arguing about shift differentials so we’d stay in our chairs, and when she turned on them, they got impatient.” I look at Toby. “Who dropped that envelope on the dock?”

Toby’s mouth opens. Closes.

“Courier,” he says. “No name. This morning.”

“This morning. The last business day before the transfer window opens.” I let that sit in the room. “They leaked it to us themselves, boys. That paper in your hands is not a leak. It’s bait. They mailed us our own execution order because they were counting on us to swing at it. Tonight. In this room. Exactly like this.”

Somebody at the back says, very clearly, “Jesus Christ.”

“And I couldn’t tell you,” I say, “because the second any one of you knew, we’d have been in that lot by noon, and I’d have been out front of you, because that’s my instinct too, and my instinct was wrong. So I took it. I sat on it. Four days, and I lied to Artie on the floor of that plant on Wednesday morning, and I will carry that for the rest of my life, and none of you have to forgive me for it.”

“But I didn’t sit on it for nothing.”

And I tell them.

I tell them about Wendell Pike’s garage at midnight and his father’s cloth-backed drawings from March of 1911. I tell them about the seven river-stone arches under the stamp floor that most of them have walked over every working day of their lives without knowing they were there. I tell them about the 1914 ordinance, and Lila Moreno’s stamp, which came down at four minutes past three this afternoon, which makes the brick shell of Halvorsen Works a protected municipal historical asset that cannot be touched for three years without the state preservation board, and that board is more than two years behind.