Page 30 of Working for Keeps

It is an ugly cast-iron thing, the handle worn smooth, and she inks it and she brings it down on the top sheet with a bang that goes through my whole body like a struck bell.

FILED. FORGE CREEK PERMITS & PLANNING.

“Congratulations,” Lila says. “Halvorsen Works is a protected municipal historical asset.” She sets the stamp down. Her hand is shaking slightly, and she looks at it, annoyed. “Nobody can lay a finger on that brick for three years without the state preservation board, and the state preservation board has a backlog you could park a train in.”

I can’t speak, and Lila Moreno has already gone back to her rubber plant.

Mick stands up.

He doesn’t come to me. He stands there in the middle of the little municipal office with his hands at his sides, looking at the stamped page, and four days of held breath go out of him, and what comes in behind it is what we agreed to on Monday morning in a cinderblock room.

“Toby,” he says. “Red. Artie. Everybody. Tonight, seven o’clock, the hall.” He is already turning. “Lila, I need to use your phone.”

That is when his own phone goes off in his pocket.

He looks at the screen. Something in his face changes. Drops, closes, hardens. My stomach goes down a shaft.

“It’s Toby,” he says.

He answers it and says, “Yeah,” and listens.

I watch the color leave the face of the biggest man I have ever known.

“Say it again,” Mick says. “Slow.” His eyes come up and find mine and they’ve gone black. “Who brought it?” He listens. “No. Don’t touch it. Toby. Toby, listen to me. Do not let Red make that call. Do not let anybody make that call. I’m eleven minutes out.”

He hangs up.

“An envelope came to the loading dock this morning,” he says. “Courier. No name. Addressed to the local executive committee.” His voice has gone flat and quiet. “Eleven pages. Signed Friday, three-thirty. It’s been going round that floor since the ten o’clock break.”

The floor tilts under me.

Somebody in Chicago put that in a courier’s hands last night so it would land on that dock this morning, on the last business day before the transfer window opens, two days after Keller replied to my compliance log with the words good girl, and they timed it to reach the floor while two hundred men were on shift.

“Mick,” I whisper. “Keller leaked it.”

“I know,” he says.

“He wants the strike. He needs the strike. If they walk before the window opens, he gets the breach, he gets the pensions, he gets everything, and the filing doesn’t matter because there’s no union left to⁠—”

“I know,” Mick says.

He picks up my hundred and forty stamped pages off Lila Moreno’s counter and puts them under his arm, and he holds the door open for me, and his face is the face of a man walking into the only fight of his life that he cannot win by being right.

“Now I go tell my whole local that I’ve known since Monday,” he says.

Twelve

Mick

Somebody’s wife is standing in the doorway of my union hall with a baby on her hip because there was nobody to leave him with, and nobody has told her to leave.

Behind her, along the cinderblock walls and backward on the folding chairs, second shift straight up from the floor with the iron dust still on them and third shift in from their kitchens, are two hundred and eight men on four hours’ notice out of a local of four hundred across three shifts, and every one of them has read the paper.

The photocopier in the corner is still warm. Somebody ran forty copies before I got here.

Artie Vasquez is in the front row with his hardhat between his boots and his hands hanging.

Red Holloway is standing at the front, tall and stooped, white beard, most of his weight canted off the hip that never set right after the fall took him off the bridge steel forty years ago. Arms crossed. He does not sit down when I come in.