You Fired the Backbone of Detroit novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Bracket
Nick lays a cracked bracket on the CEO's podium in front of 300 workers and is fired for cause; at the gate a stranger offers him a job.
The cracked bracket weighed about two pounds, and I carried it up to the podium in my bare hand.
Three hundred people stood on the Garland plant floor for the shift-change speech.
Lyman Byers, our CEO, was halfway through telling them how proud he was of them.
He wore a gray suit that cost more than my truck.
I walked through the crowd, and people stepped aside without being asked.
Eighteen years I had worked in that building, and nobody had ever stepped aside for me.
I set the bracket on the podium, right on top of his notes.
"What is this, Nick?" Lyman asked, still smiling for the cameras.
"A rear subframe mount," I said. "The new one, with the thinner steel."
"I'm in the middle of a speech."
"I put it on the test rig Tuesday. It cracked at a third of the rated load."
The floor went very quiet.
Somewhere behind me, a forklift beeped and then stopped.
"Your engineering group will review the data," Lyman said.
"I am the engineering group for this part," I said. "I told you Tuesday, and I told the supplier to hold the shipment."
"You what?"
"There are four thousand of these on a truck at the dock. I won't sign them."
Lyman looked at the bracket, then at the crowd, then at me.
The smile did not leave his face, but his eyes went flat.
"Mr. Danner has strong feelings about steel," he told them, and a few of the executives laughed.
Nobody on the floor did.
"Saving nine dollars a car is how you pay for this plant," Lyman said.
"Nine dollars a car is how you put one of these on the highway," I said.
I picked the bracket up and held it over my head so the back rows could see the crack.
"That's somebody's mother in the back seat," I said.
A woman near the front put her hand over her mouth.
Lyman leaned into the microphone.
"Nick Danner, you are terminated for cause, effective now."
I had known it was coming.
I still felt the floor tilt under my boots.
"For cause means no pension," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I expected.
"For cause means exactly that," Lyman said.
Eighteen years of pension, gone with one sentence.
Two guards in gray shirts stepped up on either side of me.
"My locker," I said. "I need my notebook."
"Your locker was emptied twenty minutes ago," Lyman said.
He reached under the podium and lifted out a black notebook with a cracked spine.
My notebook.
Ten years of drawings were in that notebook, every sketch of the car I had wanted to build since I was twenty-six.
"Everything in here was drawn on company time," Lyman said, turning the pages with one finger. "It belongs to Garland."
"Those are mine," I said.
"They were mine the second you clocked in."
He handed it to a man in a suit without looking at him.
Something in my chest went very cold and very clear.
I did not swing at him.
I wanted to, and every person in that building could see I wanted to.
I turned instead and faced the three hundred.
"If you work on the rear line, check every mount before it goes in the truck," I said. "I mean it. Check every one."
"Escort him out," Lyman said.
The guards took my arms.
From the back of the room came a loud clang.
A hard hat went skidding across the concrete floor and stopped at Lyman's shoes.
"Marty," somebody said, in a whisper that carried.
My best friend, Marty Pawlak, stood on the line with his arms crossed, red-faced and shaking.
"You're gonna regret that, Lyman," he yelled.
Lyman said something to the nearest executive, and two more guards started toward Marty.
I didn't wait to watch.
They walked me down the long corridor and past the photo wall with my face in it.
Then they pushed me out through the side door.
The door shut behind me with a heavy click.
It was October, cold and raining, and I stood in the east lot with a cardboard box a guard had shoved into my arms.
There was a coffee mug in it, a pair of safety glasses and a photo of my dad.
No notebook, no pension, no job.
I stood there while the rain soaked through my flannel.
The gate was thirty yards away, and I had no idea where I was walking.
A car idled at the curb beyond the gate, long and black, with its wipers going.
The driver's door opened.
A woman got out in a black coat, with her black hair cut blunt at the jaw and the rain beading on it.
She looked at me.
"Nick Danner," she said. "I'm Cleo Rainey, from Rainey Motor Works."
She held out a white card.
"Come to Warren on Monday at seven in the morning," she said. "Bring a pencil."
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