Chapter 12 #2
“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.
I set it on the table in front of Red, with the point still open, and the hall goes so quiet I can hear the fluorescent tube ticking overhead and the baby in the doorway starting to fuss.
“You’re right,” I say to Bo. “You can’t tell. That’s what four days of lying buys a man. It buys you not being able to tell. And it doesn’t matter how good my reasons were, because you weren’t in the room when I decided, and I decided anyway, and that’s the one thing a steward can’t do.”
I push the pin across the wood.
“So it’s on the table. Take it. I’m not asking you to trust me. I’m past being able to ask that.”
I look out at them. Kowalski, Danny, the wall of canvas and iron dust and forty years of my life.
“I’m asking you to look at the paper instead.
Not at me. At Lila’s stamp. At the date on it.
At Section fourteen, Clause B, which is in your own contract and has been for seventy years, and which you can read for yourselves without taking one word from me or from her.
Add it up yourselves. If you walk tonight, they win, and they win everything, and it costs them nothing.
“Take the pin. Vote me out. Elect a new steward before the shift bell, I’ll second the motion myself. But don’t walk off that floor tomorrow, because they are begging you to.”
I put my hands in my pockets so nobody can see them shake, and I step back from the table.
And I wait.
It’s Artie who stands up.
He does it slowly. He is fifty-eight years old and he has been on that line since he was nineteen and he takes his time about it, and the room lets him, because it’s Artie.
“I’ve been angry for about six hours,” he says, “and I’d like to stay angry, because I’m good at it.” A couple of men laugh, low and ugly and grateful. “Mick lied to me on Wednesday. He’ll pay for that with me for a long time. He knows it. Look at his face.”
He turns around and looks at the hall.
“But I’ll tell you what he didn’t do,” Artie says.
“He didn’t take the easy one. The easy one was walking us out the gate on Monday, and standing out front with a bullhorn, and being a hero for about nine days, and then we all go home with nothing and he still gets to keep his pin.
” He lets that sit. “He took the one that cost him. He came in here and told us himself, on his own legs, before anybody made him, and he put the pin on the table before anybody asked for it. That’s not a man managing us. ”
He looks at Bo Rasmussen.
“Bo. You’re right that you can’t tell. So do what he said. Look at the paper.”
He picks up a copy off the nearest chair, and he holds it up over his head, and his hand is shaking.
“They mailed us this,” Artie says. “They mailed it to us. Nobody hands you a knife because they want you to put it down.”
Nobody moves.
Then Red Holloway reaches over, and picks the pin up off the table, and turns it over once in his big cracked fingers.
“I’m going to be sore about this until I’m dead,” he says. “I’d have called the strike by noon Monday and cost every one of you your pension and felt like a damn hero doing it.”
He looks at the paper in Artie’s raised hand.
“And I said my piece about the woman,” he says, “and I’m not taking it back, because it needed saying. But I’ve been reading company paper since before most of you were born, and nobody at Vantor Industries wrote that ordinance in 1914 to trap this local. I’m voting the paper.”