The Write Up Before My Pension Vested
LeRoy Hovde had sold the plant to a holding company out of Milwaukee three years before, when his knees finally told him no plainer than words could, but the sale papers had one clause in them that every man on the floor knew about because Gib had told it to me himself the week it closed: Hovde kept an office in the building, unpaid, honorary, call it whatever you want to call it, and he kept the right to walk the floor any Friday morning he pleased for as long as he was living, because he said a building with his father’s name cut into the cornerstone was not something he was handing over clean the way you’d hand over a used truck.
He came in most Fridays around seven, right when third shift was handing off to first, and he walked the whole floor slow, shaking hands, asking after wives and grandkids by name, same as he’d done for fifty years.
I waited for him by the time clock that Friday with eleven days left on my clock and the one copy still folded in my shirt pocket, soft at the creases by then from being carried and unfolded so many times.
“Mr. Hovde.”
“Russ Kowalczyk.” He said my whole name the way he always had, never shortened it, never fumbled it, not once in thirty-one years, which is its own kind of respect that a man my age notices and remembers.
“You’re looking like a man with something on his mind.”
“I am. I need five minutes, and I need you to read something before you put your glasses on and have anybody tell you what it says first.”
He took the paper from my hand right there by the time clock with the shift changing all around us, men clocking in and clocking out, lunch pails banging against the lockers, and he did not put his reading glasses on right away.
He held the paper out at arm’s length first and squinted at the heading the old way, the way men who grew up before readers were common do, and then he reached slow into his coat pocket for the glasses, and the whole floor seemed to get quiet around just the two of us, waiting on an old man to finish reading one page.
He read it twice. I watched his jaw work the second time through, same as Gib’s had.
“Job abandonment,” he said, not really asking me, more like he was tasting the words to see if they were true.
“Russ, in thirty-one years I don’t believe I’ve ever once heard your name next to a word like that.”
“You haven’t. Gib sent me to Twelve that night, Mr. Hovde. DeShawn was standing right there and heard him say it. I locked Four out proper before I left it. There wasn’t a minute of that whole night where anybody’s safety or anybody’s parts were at risk, and there wasn’t a minute of it where I wasn’t doing exactly what a foreman told me to do.”
“Gib here this morning?”