You Fired the Backbone of Detroit novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Eleven Men and a Forklift
Marty walks out of Garland with eleven men and a forklift; then the casting supplier says Garland has bought his contract.
On Thursday morning I heard a forklift coming down Mound Road, and I knew who was driving it.
Nobody else beeped the horn in the rhythm of a polka.
The forklift rolled through the broken roll-up door of my department with a pallet of tool chests on its forks.
Marty Pawlak sat behind the wheel in a Detroit Lions jacket, grinning.
Behind him, a crew of men in Garland work shirts filed in carrying toolboxes, a welder's mask, a coffee maker and a space heater.
"You're late," I said.
"I had to finish my paperwork," Marty said. "The paperwork was me, quitting. Out loud. In front of Lyman's HR lady."
"You have four kids."
"Five in March."
"Marty."
"My wife said she'd rather eat beans with a man who can look at himself than steak with a man who can't."
He climbed down and hugged me so hard my feet left the floor.
"Put me down, you lunatic."
"You smell like a pigeon."
"There's a pigeon," I said.
"Is that a pigeon?" asked a tall welder behind him.
The pigeon looked at all of us, and then it left through the hole in the roof like it had somewhere better to be.
"Gentlemen," Marty announced, "this is our new employer's idea of an engineering facility."
One of the twin brothers on the crew kicked a rusted barrel and it fell over with a boom.
"I've seen worse," the other twin said.
"Where?"
"My ex-wife's kitchen."
They all laughed, and I looked at them for a second before I could talk.
These men, each with a mortgage or a kid or a bad back.
Every one of them had walked out on the biggest employer in Detroit because of what I said on a podium.
"Guys," I said. "I don't have money to pay you yet."
"Lyman took my pension too," I said. "I'm not a good bet."
"You have a plan," said the oldest of them, a quiet machinist with gray in his beard.
"I have a drawing."
"Same thing, if you're the one drawing."
"Where do you want the heater?" Marty asked.
By noon the pigeon droppings were scraped off the floor, the lift was working, and the broken door hung from a new chain.
Somebody put a radio on the workbench.
Marty argued with the twins about polka versus classic rock until the machinist turned it to the news.
I stood at the old lift with a sheet of butcher paper and a carpenter's pencil, drawing the engine bay in full scale.
Clifford Rainey came across the lot at one o'clock carrying a box of donuts.
"I didn't have a budget," he said, setting it on the bench. "But I had a gas station card."
"Mr. Rainey, I owe you a thank-you."
"You owe me a car."
He looked around the annex and at the twelve of us moving in it.
He had to wipe his eyes with his sleeve, and he pretended it was dust.
"My father started this company in a garage with fourteen men," he said. "I forgot what that looked like."
Marty shook his hand.
"Sir, we're your problem now," he said.
"God help me."
Cleo came in behind her father in a charcoal blazer, with a pencil behind her ear and a tablet under her arm.
The twins stopped arguing.
"That's the boss's daughter," one of them whispered, as if she were royalty.
"She's the head of design," I said.
"She's looking at you like you're a sandwich," Marty muttered, and I elbowed him in the ribs.
Cleo set the tablet on the bench and turned it so I could see.
"These are my surface studies for the body," she said.
"I did them on my own time over three years. I want your opinion before I show anyone else."
I looked at the screen.
It was the Nine.
It wasn't the one on my glass wall, but a cousin to it, lower and wider and sharper.
The roofline did something I had never dared to do with a mid-engine car.
My mouth went dry.
"This is better than mine," I said.
"It's not better. It fits yours."
"When did you start?"
"The week I saw your toolbox."
She looked at me for one long beat and I felt the room get smaller.
"Hey," Marty said, very loudly, to nobody. "Who wants a donut?"
Her phone rang.
She frowned at the screen and answered it, stepping to the doorway with one finger in her other ear.
I went back to my butcher paper, but I kept one eye on her.
Her shoulders went rigid, and then slowly she turned around.
"Say that again," she said into the phone.
She listened.
"When?" she said. "Since when?"
Clifford had stopped chewing.
Cleo ended the call and stood still for a moment.
"That was our casting supplier in Toledo, the only foundry that pours the Anvil engine block to Nick's spec," she said.
"What about him?" her father asked.
"Garland bought his contract this morning. He said he's sorry, and he can't pour another block for us. Not now, not for any price."
Nobody said anything.
Out on Mound Road, a truck went by with its radio playing.
"Well," Marty said finally. "That was fast."
I put down the pencil.
Three days into my department, and Lyman Byers already knew exactly where I lived.
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