Page 33 of Working for Keeps

I tell them Cardinal Holdings has twelve weeks and a performance clause, and that the whole purchase collapses the day they figure out they can’t get a bulldozer within a hundred feet of that wall.

I tell them the plant cannot be demolished. Not this year. Not in three.

And then I tell them the last part, which is the only part that matters.

“It doesn’t hold if we walk,” I say. “If we’re in breach, they don’t need to demolish anything. They liquidate the contract, they sell the shell as is to whoever wants a haunted building, and they take your pensions on the way out the door as payment for their trouble. The filing only saves us if we are still standing on that floor, in contract, doing our jobs, at nine o’clock tomorrow morning when Chicago gets on that screen.”

I put the paper down.

“They need us to swing. So we don’t swing. We stand there. We run the line. We hold, and we let them find out at nine tomorrow morning that the ground they bought can’t be cleared, and we let their money walk away from them.”

Red Holloway uncrosses his arms. He doesn’t move for a second. Then he does what I have known all evening he was going to do.

“I’m going to say something out loud,” Red says, “because if I don’t say it here, every man in this room takes it home and says it in his own kitchen, and that’s worse for everybody.”

“Say it.”

“Where did the ordinance come from.”

“Vera Warden found it.”

“Vera Warden found it.” He lets it stand in the room. He isn’t performing. Red Holloway has never performed a thing in his life. “Wednesday night I was on that stamp floor and I told Danny Moreno your truck had been sitting outside City Hall in the middle of a working day, and that if that woman was turning you around, somebody in this local had better say so before we were all standing in a parking lot. I said it behind your back. I’m saying it to your face now, and it’s the only improvement I’ve got to offer you.”

Nobody in the hall makes a sound.

“You’ve had a company officer in your ear for ten days,” Red says. “And she has handed you a plan that requires this local to do nothing at all. Sit down. Keep your hands on the machines. Don’t fight. And to keep us doing it, you looked Artie Vasquez in the face on your own floor and lied to him.” He looks at me steady, and the worst of it is that there is no cruelty in him anywhere. “Now maybe every word of it is true, and I hope to God it is. But you have to see what it looks like from where I’m standing, son. It looks exactly like what a smart company does to a shop it needs quiet.”

“I see it,” I say.

“I know you do. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Then he turns around to the hall, because he is Red Holloway and he has never once let his own doubt do his voting for him.

“Motion to hold the floor,” he says. “No stoppage. Nobody walks. Everybody works his shift tomorrow. All in favor.”

The hands go up.

I stand there and I count them, and I know before I’m halfway across the room that it isn’t there.

Toby is counting too, from the side, his lips moving. He gets to the back wall and he stops and he looks at me, and his face does something I have never seen it do.

“Eighty-eight,” he says.

It needs a hundred and five.

Two hundred and eight men stand in a cinderblock room and look at the floor, and my ears are ringing, and I have lost my local.

“Well,” Red says. “Now we know.”

And Bo Rasmussen, from the middle of the room, with his hand still down, says:

“I’m not calling you a liar, Mick. I’m saying you already did it once this week and you had good reasons, and I’ve got a six-month-old, and I don’t know how to tell the difference.”

He isn’t being cruel. That’s the thing that takes the legs out from under me. He is twenty-three years old and he is being completely, devastatingly reasonable.

So I stop arguing.

I take the pin off my henley.