Found A Homeless Genius To Save My Company novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cardboard Box
Rex arrives to thank the man who once bought him a coat and finds him walked out of his own company with a banker's box; Rex steps in, and the old man confesses in the car that he took eleven million.
I drove to Wichita in January to say thank you to a man I hadn't seen in eleven years.
Hartung Aero sat behind a chain-link fence on the south side, gray and low, with its name in steel letters over the doors.
I parked beside a plow pile and walked in with my hands in my coat pockets.
I had practiced the speech for eleven years and I still didn't know where it started.
The lobby was full.
Two hundred people stood shoulder to shoulder in work jackets and lanyards, and nobody was talking.
At the top of the stairs a man in a charcoal suit held a sheet of paper.
A woman in a cream blazer stood beside him with a tablet against her chest.
"By order of the board," the man said, "Loyd Hartung is removed from every position at this company, effective this morning."
A murmur went through the crowd.
An old man came down the stairs between two security guards.
He was broad and stooped, with a white crew cut and a tan work jacket worn thin at the elbows.
In his arms he carried a banker's box with a coffee mug on top and a little model plane sticking out of the side.
I knew the shape of his shoulders before I saw his face.
I had followed those shoulders across a parking lot when I was eleven years old.
"Badge," the guard said.
Loyd Hartung looked at the man in the suit.
"Grady, I built that stairwell with my own hands."
"Your badge, Dad," the man said, and held out his palm.
Loyd unclipped it slowly and laid it in the hand.
Grady dropped it into a clear evidence bag the woman was holding open.
"You're not allowed on the floor, the stand or the annex," she said.
Her voice was perfectly even.
"Lorna," Loyd said. "Your mother planted the maple out front."
"Our mother is dead," Lorna said. "She doesn't need the maple."
Somebody in the crowd made a sound like a sob.
The guards took Loyd by both arms and started him toward the doors.
He was sixty-eight and his hands were shaking on the box, and the guard on the left gave him a shove between the shoulder blades.
The box slid.
The little plane fell out and snapped a wing on the tile.
Loyd bent to get it, and the second guard pulled him upright by the jacket.
I hadn't decided to move.
I was just there, between the guard and the old man, with my hand closed around the guard's wrist.
"Let go of him," I said.
The guard was twice my width and he looked at my hand.
"Sir, this is a private company event."
"Then take your hand off a private citizen."
I said it quietly.
The guard let go.
Everyone in the lobby was looking at me now, including the man in the charcoal suit.
"Who are you?" Grady said.
I bent, picked up the plane, and set it back in the box.
The broken wing was smaller than the one I remembered him fixing for me, and I almost laughed.
"He's a friend," I said.
"Mr. Hartung doesn't have friends here anymore," Lorna said.
"Then he's got one on the sidewalk."
I took the box out of his arms.
He looked up at me with his pale blue eyes.
There was nothing in them but the tiredness of a man who had carried too much for too long.
I thought he didn't know me.
The last time he had really looked at me I was eleven years old, with a red nose and a hole in my sleeve.
"Son," he said, "you shouldn't."
"Come on, sir."
I walked him out through the double doors and nobody stopped us.
The cold hit.
The lot was clean and bright and he stood in it with no hat, in his thin jacket, looking back at the building.
"They've got my truck, too," he said. "I walked here."
"I've got a rental. It has heat."
He looked at me.
He looked at my face for a long time, at the scar through my eyebrow, and then away.
"I appreciate it," he said. "But you've picked the wrong man to be kind to."
I opened the passenger door.
He lowered himself in, and I set the box in his lap.
I turned the heat all the way up before I said anything.
"Mr. Hartung. I was going to come in and thank you for something. It doesn't matter now."
"Don't thank me." His voice cracked.
"Whatever it is, don't."
"Why not?"
He stared through the windshield at the plant and the long gray fence and the maple tree out front with snow on its branches.
"Because they're right about me," he said.
"The board, Grady, Lorna. They're right."
His hands tightened on the box.
"I took eleven million dollars from this company."
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