Sendoff for a Snitch (5 page)

I shrugged. “Wet. Just as glad it’s not colder. It’d be one hell of a snow storm, Or worse, an ice storm.”

He made a last mark on the clipboard, stepped behind the lifts, and started to slip the pencil into his shirt pocket. “I hear we’re in for some flooding. They might even close the bridges.”

I hung up my clipboard and held out my hand to take the pencil back. I’d need it throughout the shift, especially if I ended up loading and unloading trucks. “True, that,” I said, thinking of the water in my basement apartment. How deep would it be when I got off work?

Holding out the pencil, he said, “You run into any impassible roads on your way in tonight?”

“I walk,” I said. “A lot of water in the streets. But not so’s you couldn’t drive through it.”

He nodded. “Got to be careful, though. Sometimes it looks like it’s just a few inches on the road, near a stream or a culvert or something, but you try to drive through it, and it don’t take all that much to float you right off the road and downstream a bit.”

“Dangerous,” I agreed, wondering why he was carrying on this conversation with me. He usually ignored me.

“Yeah,” he continued. “And the underpasses can get flooded, too.”

When I’d moved the truck the morning before, the drains in the underpass were already sluggish. It had rained all day. I wondered what it was like now.

The other lift driver on that shift, Diffy, came careening around the corner. Because the electric lifts run silently, we hadn’t heard it approach. Bert and I both jumped back to avoid being hit.

Diffy slid his forklift into the docking bay, bumping the wall with a resounding thud. Several of the clipboards tumbled from their nails.

“Hey, dude,” Bert said. “Watch it there. You almost nailed us.”

I went over, picked up one of the fallen clipboards, and put it back on its nail.

Diffy leapt off his lift and came back, drawing himself up to his full height in front of Bert. “What’re you doing standing in the aisle?” he asked. “That’s asking to be hit.”

“No, it’s not,” Bert protested. “You got to be in the aisle sometimes.”

“Yeah? What’re you doing jawing with this jailbird?”

I straightened up and looked toward him. “I don’t want no trouble,” I said.

Diffy turned toward me and spit on the floor. “Wasn’t talking to you,” he said. “Probably do the world a favor, though, if I ran into you and put you out of commission. Save a couple of kids. You can bet I wouldn’t talk to you.”

Last thing I needed was getting in trouble over something stupid at work. But I was in the union now, so I couldn’t be fired for just anything. And Bert was a witness to this. So I raised my eyebrows and said, “No? Who you talking to now?”

A mulish expression came over Diffy’s face. “You, punk.”

“Oh. I must have been mistaken. I thought I just heard you say you wasn’t going to talk to me.”

Bert snickered.

Diffy’s face turned red, and he turned to Bert. “You think you’re so smart. You think you’re gonna run the forklift on overtime tomorrow? I’ll see you don’t. I’ll get the shift.”

Bert just grinned. “Go for it. I turned it down, anyhow. They’re not running our shift tomorrow, so it’d have to be day shift. I’m not going home just to be back in less than eight hours.”

Fists clenched, Diffy turned on his boot heel and stomped away.

“What’s the matter with him?” I asked.

Bert shrugged. “He got caught smoking back by the exhaust fan. Thinks I turned him in.”

“Did you?”

“Nope. Foreman was looking for him, and I told him which way Diffy was headed last I saw him. What else could I do? But I didn’t know what he was doing back there.”

“What was he smoking?”

“I dunno. Cigarette, I suppose. But could have been a blunt or something.”

I picked up another fallen clipboard and hung it up. “You’d think that’d mellow him out some.”

“Yeah. But it doesn’t seem to have.” Bert climbed on Diffy’s abandoned forklift and straightened it out.

I pulled the plug out from the wall, attached it, and made sure it was charging.

“Thanks, man.” Bert picked up that clipboard from the floor. “Can I borrow the pencil again? He didn’t fill this out, and if there’s any grief about drivers not taking care of the paperwork on this shift, I’ll get caught up in it.”

I handed it over. “You gonna put his name down?”

“Uh-huh. Sure ain’t gonna put mine down, the way he was driving that thing. If he tore anything up, I don’t want to get blamed.”

The factory whistle signaled the shift change. I took my pencil back and stuck it in my pocket again. Then I swung up on the forklift and eased it out into the aisle.

“Thanks, man,” Bert said again and waved as I pulled off.

I waved back.

John would keep an eye on things on the shop floor. It was a light shift. He’d move what he could with a hand lift and come get me if he needed me to move anything.

But before I headed to the shipping room, I swung by the plating room. Four operators worked in a continual thunderous rhythm, removing shiny finished products from the moving hooks in front of them and replacing them with dull, unfinished shelves. The hooks then rose to a series of steaming tanks of chemicals which would clean them and electroplate a shiny finish. The operators would no sooner have loaded one set of hooks than the next set, carrying its finished parts, would be in front of them. Two pallets stood in front of each work station, one for the finished parts and one with the parts that needed to be plated.

Those pallets were too heavy for John to move with a hand lift. The platers took almost a whole shift to set up and another to tear down, so regardless of how few workers showed up for the shift, they would run the whole time.

Hank, the plating room group leader, waved me over to his office and shut the heavy door. The din from the platers still rattled the window in the door and meant we had to shout, but at least we could carry on a conversation.

“What the hell’s going on tonight?” he asked, gesturing at a messy pile of paperwork on his desk.

When I was new here, Hank had taken me under his wing and taught me how to run the platers. I owed him. He’d worked at Quality Steel for several decades, most of them in the plating room. He couldn’t read worth anything, but he had compensated over the years by developing a phenomenal memory for information given orally. Now that almost everything was in writing, though, he struggled with deciphering his instructions. Like Kelly, he worried that he’d lose his job if any supervisors realized he couldn’t read. Loyalty, hard work, and common sense meant nothing to the young suits who ran around rearranging the work.

“I know they’ve rescheduled things a bit. Some extra trucks are coming in, trying to get some product out before they shut down the bridges. If they do.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me at all if they do,” Hank said. “You seen them big chunks of ice floating in the river?”

I picked up the paperwork. “Nah. I didn’t get over that way.” I sorted through it quickly, grabbed the stapler on his desk, and stapled each multi-sheet set of specs and directions. He could read numbers all right, so I took my pencil stub and started numbering them.

“First, these wire baskets. Five thousand of them.” I circled the stock number and the quantity and put a big “1” in the corner of the paper.

He nodded and took those papers.

“Then these big shelves. You know, the ones that are almost five-foot long. Thirty-five hundred of them.” Once again, I circled the relevant numbers and wrote a big “2” on the front of the first page. “They want nine hundred forty of those bins with the hooks on the back. You know, the ones that like to get caught on the edges of the plating tanks.” I wrote a big “3” on that.

He grimaced. When something got caught, the plater would have to be shut down and the operator would have to climb up to the catwalk surrounding the tall tanks to fish it out. They would take a lot longer than the timekeeper thought they should, and the entire operation would fall behind schedule. Happened every time we ran those shelves, but there was never any allowance made for it, so Hank would be left trying to explain why his crew hadn’t reached their quota.

“Thanks,” Hank said gloomily, putting the papers in a careful pile back on the desk.

I left the office and climbed back on the lift, driving down the aisle in front of the platers. Two of the operators nodded a greeting, but the noise level was too high to say anything. The other two operators were not accustomed to running the platers and were struggling to keep up with the never-ending parade of plated parts and empty hooks. They had to concentrate on their work and couldn’t spare even a few seconds for a glance in my direction.

Assuring myself that all the platers were stocked with parts, I drove out to the shipping room to see what Kelly and I needed to do. Truckers liked to be out on the road early, before traffic out on the roads picked up for the day. If anyone else was out in this weather.

Semis were backed into several of the truck bays. Kelly was picking up loaded pallets from a row and loading them into a trailer. The driver, his cowboy hat pushed back on his head, was checking his paperwork against the load.

When I got closer, I could hear the rain drilling down on the truck bay overhang and the roof of the trailer. I shivered, thankful that I had brought the dry socks and jeans to change into. The socks were damp and getting damper by the minute, but damp was a far cry from squishy wet.

I wasn’t looking forward to this shift.

Chapter 5

J
ohn was talking to a small knot of truck drivers, and he gestured me over.

“We need to finish loading them,” John said. “They’ve got to get over the river, and at the rate the rain is coming down, they might close the bridge any time. Check the packing lists and see what you have to get from the warehouse.”

I nodded. “Are we expecting shipments tonight?”

“We were,” John said, glancing down at his clipboard, “but it’s anybody’s guess whether they’ll be able to get here.”

I drove over to the dispatcher’s office, darkened and locked on this shift. Outside the door, a computer sat on a shelf, ready to spit out the multi-page packing lists. I climbed down, punched in a code and the date and shift, and stepped back while it spit out a huge volume of paperwork. I held my hand out to catch the sheets as they came out.

When I’d first come to work here, just a few months ago, the packing lists had been hand-generated, one-page affairs with a straightforward list of what the shipment should consist of and the quantity. Some genius in the front office had redone the system so that a computer program took care of assembling the packing lists and bills of lading. It also was supposed to track inventory and make all kinds of information available at a glance. And of course, it created the complicated work orders for Hank in the plating room.

It may have worked well for the office staff. As far as we were concerned, the computer didn’t tell us jack shit. All we were authorized to do was punch in a set of numbers and watch the reams of paper flood out. If we weren’t careful to catch all of it as it spewed forth, a cross-current in the drafty shipping area would catch some sheets of paper and blow them around. Even if we could gather them all—and I think there were still a few caught high in the rafters from before we’d all realized this—we’d have to try to reassemble them. Since they didn’t have headings or page numbers, that could be quite a chore.

Now, instead of one handwritten page, we got a whole stack of paperwork we had to decipher. I didn’t mind so much, since I could read pretty fast, but some people, like Hank and Kelly, had trouble shifting through all that stuff to find the information they needed. But what did the office staff care if those of us who actually did the work had a harder time of it?

We had two clipboards available, but management didn’t deign to provide staplers or paperclips here, and the clipboards held only so much.

I folded down the corner of each set of papers and tore a narrow strip in the folded corner, then twisted it. It was an effective system that held the sheets together, the system we used in prison to keep voluminous stacks of legal paperwork organized. Staplers were kept locked in desk drawers accessible only to staff. Paper clips, which in practiced fingers made great handcuff keys, were completely forbidden.

Since I knew Kelly would have trouble with the packing lists, I tried to catch up with her a couple of times a shift to help her with the paperwork. She got mad sometimes, since she didn’t like to admit she couldn’t do it on her own.

Kelly finished loading the truck. The driver checked his load, signed a receipt, and handed it to Kelly. She glanced at it and folded it, then slipped it down the neck of her sweatshirt, tucking it on top of her large bosom.

The driver closed and locked the back doors and climbed into his cab. His lights came on as he pulled away.

A blast of driving rain blew through the open door. Kelly hurried over to hit the button that brought the overhead door down.

I thought about my apartment. How high would the water get? Where was I going to go if staying there wasn’t possible? I could ask Kelly if I could camp out at her place for a while, but I was a bit afraid of what it would do to our volatile up-and-down relationship.

As it was, Kelly treated me like a regular person, not a paroled convict. An equal. I was eternally grateful to her. Would all that change if she knew I didn’t have a place to stay? She might see me as super-needy. I didn’t think I could stand having her feel sorry for me.

Not only that, but she was the only woman I’d ever slept with.

I didn’t want to jeopardize a budding relationship, either with pity or too much togetherness.

The apartment would either be okay or it would not. Nothing I could do about it now, though, other than to hope the water stopped rising before it ruined the furniture, not to mention the heating, plumbing, and electrical systems in the building. If the sanitary sewers backed up in addition to the storm drains, the whole place would be completely uninhabitable for a considerable length of time, even if the landlord decided to spend the money to get it cleaned up. I had to stop obsessing about it.

What I could do, when I got off from work, was go buy some tarps, bungie cords, and rope, and I’d be able to get some more of the stuff, like the mattress, hung up high enough that it stayed dry. Maybe.

We worked through the night. I pulled stock and assembled loads, lining up the pallets and crates in the order we expected to load trucks. When Kelly got swamped with work, I switched to loading trucks.

As we got nearer to eight a.m., one last truck backed into a bay. The driver came in, shaking rain off his hat. “Done closed the bridge, right after me,” he said. “Almost didn’t make it. Water’s high, and you can hear them damn chunks of ice crashing into the bridge supports.”

“You want me to load you, even if you can’t get back across the bridge?”

“Hell, yeah. I’m going east, then south. I don’t need to go back over it again.” He chewed and looked around for someplace to spit. “Make sure you get it right this time. Last time, somebody here made a mistake.”

I hoped it wasn’t on our shift. We hadn’t heard anything about it. “You got the wrong stuff?” I asked. “Or you were short?”

He laughed. “That’s just it. I was over by one crate. So I just let it be. Made me a few bucks. But it’s likely that where there’s one mistake made, others will be, too. And not always in my favor.”

The missing crate might not show up until the warehouse was inventoried, and by then, no one would be able to figure out what had happened to a single missing crate. I wondered why he hadn’t just kept his mouth shut.

“That guy Aaron, who works here. You seen him tonight?”

I looked warily at the driver. “Didn’t show up for work tonight. But it’s overtime. He don’t want to, he don’t have to work it.”

Aaron had been missing a lot of work lately. Anybody else would have been fired. Anybody who wasn’t a police informant.

“Damn,” the guy said. “He told me he’d be here tonight.”

Kelly was busy loading root baskets at the other end of the dock, so I found his shipment, which I’d assembled earlier, and swung the lift around to pick up the first pallet.

The driver pulled out his log book and a pen and sat down at a rough-hewn table the packing crew used for breaks. “Gonna write me some fiction here,” he said.

When I looked over, he was slumped over the table asleep. I wondered if he was looking to buy some crystal meth from Aaron so he could keep awake. And how safe he would be out on the road. Either with the meth or without it.

I finished putting the last bit on the truck and went over to shake his shoulder and wake him up.

“You can’t be done yet,” he said. “I just sat down here.” He insisted on taking the packing list and scrambled over the load, checking every pallet. I called John over to okay it.

That part wasn’t totally necessary, but John was right there, and if it made the driver happy and meant he was less likely to complain later, it seemed like a smart move.

John initialed the packing list and stepped over to straighten out the top row of a crate by the packing line. The crew was working a man short and had to hustle to keep up with the conveyor belt delivering the finished parts.

The driver slammed the doors to the trailer shut. “You tell Aaron I’ll be back here one night next week, hear? And that Denver wants to see him. That’s me. Nick sent me. We got business to finish up.” He rubbed his red eyes with the back of his hands. “He can’t hide forever, and there’s a lot of people looking for him.”

I nodded, even though I had no intention of conveying the message. I wondered what kind of trouble Aaron had managed to get himself into now. He sure had a knack for it.

Tearing off the sheets that the dispatcher would need in the morning, I slipped them through the slot in the door of the locked office. John watched the semi’s taillights disappear through the gate and then walked to the edge of the loading dock and peered down. “Oh, my Lord.”

I went over and looked down with him. At least a foot of dark, foul-smelling water was pooled against the building at the foot of the bay.

John shook his head. “Them storm drains must be completely backed up. It’s been years since we’ve had flooding anything like this. I just hope they don’t overflow into the regular sewers. That’d be a real mess.”

Remembering the water on my apartment floor, I had to agree with that assessment. I fervently hoped the same thing.

Near time for us to punch out. Day-shift workers were milling around the time clock, gloomy at the prospect of spending an entire Saturday at work, even if it was time and a half. But they’d be glad they’d done it next Friday when the paychecks came.

Everything was running as smoothly as it could. I made a round to make sure all the work stations had what the machine operators needed to start the new shift and cleared a few pallets of finished goods back to the warehouse. There were a few wet spots on the floor, and as I watched, big drops splashed from the ceiling at least thirty feet overhead and plunked onto the worn wooden floor. The roof was leaking. I’d never seen it do that before.

Satisfied that everything was taken care of for the minute, I parked the lift, leaving it running, and made a quick stop in the men’s room.

The jacket that I’d left hanging on a hook was bunched up on the floor under the bench. Who would do that? Maybe it had fallen off the hook and someone had just kicked it out of the way.

Swearing under my breath, I picked it up and shook it out. It was still pretty wet, but at least it no longer dripped. I hung it back up. I knew I’d have to be wearing it in less than an hour.

The blue jeans were also kicked under the bench. I hauled them out, too, and hung them back up. The socks were nowhere in sight. I looked around, then checked the stalls. Sure enough, there they were, floating in one of the toilets. That had to be a deliberate move.

Shaking my head, I fished them out. They were good wool socks, expensive and almost new. I rinsed them out in the sink and then hung them back on hooks.

Messing with my stuff was just stupid, senseless vandalism. It was probably some of the idiot kids on the day shift, who might think it was a great joke. I knew a few people on my own shift, like Aaron, who had the same moronic sense of humor, but they weren’t working tonight. Most of the shift were serious, somewhat older people who appreciated the jobs. I debated about taking the clothes with me, but they might get in the way. Instead, I took everything off the hooks, bundled them together, and stuck them way back in a corner under the bench where someone would have to really look to see them.

I’d taken a longer break than I’d intended or was entitled to, so I headed back out to the shop floor.

No more trucks showed up. If anyone had phoned in, the calls would have gone to the dispatcher’s office and been recorded. With the offices closed on our shift, no one answered the company phones.

The day foreman, Bucky, came in and started his pre-shift rounds. When he got to the shipping room, he stood and watched me. I was removing a filled pallet from the packing line. I pulled it out, moved it across the floor, and dropped it.

Usually, the line boss from the packing crew would go to the stack of empty pallets against the wall and put one in place when they needed it, but they were running short-handed. John—and common sense—had told me to help out where I could.

Swinging the forklift around, I took a small stack of pallets and moved it closer to the end of the packing line. Then I got down, grabbed one off the pile, and put it in place so the packers didn’t have to stop their work.

“Thanks, man,” the line boss shouted over the clanking of the overhead conveyor.

I got back on the lift and headed back to the filled pallet I’d dropped. Bucky was standing next to it, tapping a pencil on his clipboard.

“Where the hell’s Kelly?” he asked.

I looked around. “Loading that truck, down there,” I said, pointing to the last bay all the way down the dock.

“Then what the hell are you doing moving stuff around here?”

I blinked. “John told me to help out here.”

“You call this helping?” He gestured at the lines of pallets and crates waiting to be loaded on the trucks that hadn’t come in. “You’re just letting the work pile up here like this? Kelly would never do that.”

He might be a foreman, and by definition always right, but it didn’t seem to me like Kelly would disassemble the carefully arranged lines of picked stock, each grouped according to its scheduled pick up time, each with its packing slip folded neatly into a plastic envelope clipped to the front pallet. Although the trucks might not arrive like they were scheduled, sooner or later, they’d show up. Taking everything back to the warehouse, putting it back in its place, and then reassembling the shipments made no sense to me.

“You’ll have to ask John,” I said. “He sets the priorities. I just do what he tells me to do.”

Bucky wrinkled his forehead and frowned down at his clipboard. I sat on the idling lift, wondering if I should go get some more work done, or stay and listen to what he had to say. Technically, as a foreman, he was my supervisor, even if he was from another shift. For sure I didn’t want to get written up for insubordination for either driving off or contradicting him.

John ambled up, rubbing his tired eyes. The papers on his clipboard were rumpled and smudged.