The Card I Laid on His Desk

Mr Odom’s Desk

Mr. Odom’s office is a glass box that looks out over the floor so he can watch the presses while he does his paperwork.

He was at his desk with a coffee and a stack of reports when I knocked on the frame of the open door.

He looked up.

He is a tired man in his late fifties who came up off the floor himself a long time ago and has the look of a man who misses it.

He waved me in.

I did not make a speech. I had practiced one in the truck and I threw it away.

I walked across his office and I laid the card on his desk, turned so he could read it, and I smoothed it flat with two fingers.

“That is the fix Buck read out last night,” I said. “I drew it. It was in the Bright Idea box since spring. I’d like you to look at the date.”

He set down his coffee. He picked up the card careful, the way you pick up something old, and he read it. The sketch. The arrows.

The note about the clutch.

Then his eyes went up to the corner, to the pencil, to March the ninth, and I watched him read that date twice.

Through the glass wall of his office I could see Number Six out on the floor, shut down and taped off, still waiting on its fix.

He could see it too.

He looked from the card to that press and back to the card, and something in his face closed like a door.

“March,” he said, quiet, not really to me.

“March,” I said. “Before Dale.”

He was still a minute. Then he asked me, careful, if I was sure this was the same idea Buck had read out.

I told him it was word for word, because it was my words, and I told him about the part revolution clutch note, which was not a thing Buck would have known to write, which was not a thing most of the floor would know.

I said if he pulled the fix Buck turned in, he would find that same note on it, because Buck copied it off me.

Mr. Odom looked at me a long moment.

He has a way of looking at you where you can see him deciding whether you are the kind of person who makes things up.

I let him look. I had nothing to hide and a date in pencil to stand on.

“You put this in the box in the spring,” he said. “And nobody came to you.”

“Nobody ever comes to the box,” I said. “That is the whole trouble with it.”

He did not say it was a shame or that he would look into it.

He opened the drawer of his desk and laid my card inside it, flat, and closed the drawer slow.

Behind me, out in the hall, I heard the first shift horn blow, and I heard a heavy step stop short in the doorway.