I tended to think the latter.
Rusted Metal
Tom Riley, the brewery’s night watchman, was just arriving at work. There was a touch of corn snow in patches on the ground and Tom’s boots crunched as he headed down the backstairs to the employee’s entrance. It was Wednesday night and it was a cold one. The wind blew hard and had an icy edge to it that stabbed deep into your lungs. It was normal weather for mid-January-but not for the end of October.
Tom paused before the employee’s entrance to listen to the wind whipping the trees like an enraged master. The trees creaked and groaned under the assault, lashing and scratching at the brewery’s gray cinder block walls with leafless branches. He worked to force his key into the frozen lock with numb hands. Finally he succeeded and the door opened, immediately the comparative heat of the brewery’s interior washed over him like hot breath.
He stepped inside, stamping his feet and blowing on his hands. It was 11:30 pm precisely when he clocked in, and John Shepler, the night foreman, was waiting for him.
“Barely made it tonight, Riley,” Shepler remarked while knocking a cigarette out of his pack with an experienced flick of the wrist. Shepler was a thin-armed man in his late thirties who smoked and sweated constantly. He wasn’t supposed to leave until Tom was on duty and he always resented every extra minute that he was forced to wait. He leaned back against the bulletin board next to the time clock and lit up.
“But I made it, didn’t I?” Tom replied with a winning grin. Shepler didn’t smile back, so Tom added: “Sorry, it comes hard to get out of bed for the dead shift when you pass up fifty.” Shepler wasn’t supposed to smoke inside, but Riley was willing to let it go if it got the bastard out of the plant quicker.
Shepler still wasn’t smiling. He crossed his skinny arms and puffed on his menthol cigarette. He gazed at Tom with dull, piggy eyes. Tom wondered whether the foreman was only an obnoxious prick at the end of his shift, or if he was like this all evening long.
There was silence between them while Tom took his cap and gun belt out of his locker. He snapped his big, four-battery flashlight into place and checked the revolver. The pistol was supposed to be just for show, but Tom always kept a stash of spare cartridges in his breast pocket. When he was dressed he swung the locker shut. The unoiled hinges screamed in the silence of the closed brewery.
Shepler still hadn’t said anything. He drew deeply on his cigarette and gave a brief, rumbling cough. Tom hoped he would just put on his coat and go. Technically, the foreman outranked him, but now that he was pushing sixty Tom was past the days of licking boots. Especially for piss-ants like Shepler.
“There’s been a break-in downstairs. We think some kids did it.”
“Where?” Tom’s tone became serious. This sort of thing was his department. Inwardly he smiled, this explained why Shepler hadn’t left for home the moment Tom had arrived. Shepler shrugged a hunched pair of bony shoulders and took another puff before answering. Tom cinched up his gun belt impatiently and with a little more purpose than usual.
“They came in through a window-way in the back. I guess they busted up some cartons, took some stuff.” He took a faded bandana out of his back pocket and mopped the sweat from his brow. The brewery was always warm because of all the boilers and refrigeration units, but no one sweated as much as Shepler.
“Did you call the cops?”
“Nope, didn’t seem worth it. They didn’t get anything of value anyway. Just a pile of crap back there, everything from adding machines to antique bottle-cap presses. Hell, that stuff has been gathering dust back there for forty years or so.”
Tom nodded and rubbed his lower lip against his teeth. The stuff was probably valueless, except possibly as scrap. He recalled too, that Shepler had had a few run-ins with the law in his time and was never one to be too fond of alerting the police. He reflected silently that it was just as well, at least this way word of it would probably never reach high management and cause some college boy with nothing better to do to try to make a name for himself by “tightening up plant security”. Tom knew that any changes in the security system were likely to begin with the removal of old fossils like himself.
“Who discovered the break-in?” Tom asked.
“Nick Moore did. He said he was looking back there for empty crates, but I say he was looking for a quiet place to sit on his lazy ass and smoke dope. Anyway, he’s the one who found the broken window.”
Tom nodded and frowned down at his shoes while tucking his shirt in. Then he looked up at Shepler sharply. “Does anyone upstairs know about this yet?”
“Nope. And they ain’t going to, either.”
“Well, I think you ought to take me down there and show me where it happened.”
Shepler took a deep drag on his cigarette, as if it were his last. The tip flared orange then dimmed. He exhaled in a big smoke-filled sigh. “Alright,” he said resignedly.
They headed through the boiler rooms to Tom’s tiny office first to find a flashlight for Shepler to carry. There was no question of turning on the overhead fluorescents. The management was clear on that-no one was to waste the power it took to fire them up without some major reason. And that certainly did not include the convenience of a couple of night employees. By the time they had reached Tom’s office and crowded inside, Shepler was already puffing as if he had just run the hundred. Tom silently thanked himself again for never having taken up smoking and began rummaging behind his desk for the flashlight.
Shepler picked up a book laying open and face down on Tom’s desk. He read the cover and gave a barking cough into his closed fist. “You still read this shit, Riley?” he asked holding up the book.
Tom glanced up from behind his desk. The book was a copy of Jack Vance’s Maske: Thaery. The sight of his book in Shepler’s bony hand, moist from recent bouts of coughing, pulled Tom’s face into an immediate scowl. With an effort he contained himself. He noticed that Shepler had already managed to close the book and lose his place. His nostrils flared in annoyance.
“Didn’t know you were a literary critic, Shepler,” he remarked, letting loose on the sarcasm.
Shepler snorted, put the book down on the desk with a negligent toss and stepped out of the office into the hallway. He hitched up his drooping pants and said, “Don’t need to get all butt-hurt about it.”
John Shepler was a man who had better things to with his time than read books. Tom doubted that he read the text on his favorite porn sites. He found a suitable flashlight and a set of fresh batteries in his top desk drawer behind a box of extra-large paperclips. He locked up his office and handed the flashlight to Shepler, who took it without looking at him. Tom got out his own and they both headed toward the stairs in silence.
The break-in had occurred way in back of the dingiest, most cluttered portion of the brewery’s very dingy and highly cluttered basement. Tom was intent on the window the moment Shepler put his light on it. Leaving Shepler in a narrow aisle-way formed by towering stacks of moldering cartons, he climbed over a worn-out bottling machine caked with dust and grease.
When he reached the window he examined it closely. A cold gust of wind ruffled his hair and whistled over the opening. The window had been smashed alright. The reinforcing wire netting inside it had been torn through in the middle. As he examined the window his eyes narrowed and his lips drew taunt to one side. The glass seemed to be broken outward, rather than inward. The wire in the glass was twisted and left hanging outside the basement.
He quickly stooped and played his light on the small drift of snow that had leaked through to lie between the keys of broken IBM typewriters and on the stained cement floor beneath them.