The Union Man

Ray Delgado came in the employee entrance off the alley at two in the afternoon for the swing shift and clocked in and tied on his apron in the locker room, and while he tied it he watched which of the men would meet his eye and which would not.

He was forty-four. He had worked the back of the house in the downtown clubs since he was a boy, dishwasher first, then pantry, then the line, and now he ran the garde manger at one of the big ones on Virginia Street, cold side, salads and the carving and the banquet plating, twenty years a cook in rooms the customers never saw. He had a wife and two kids and a house off Wells Avenue with eleven years still on it, and he had, folded in his shirt pocket under the apron, a small stack of cards that the union man had given him, the kind a worker signed if he wanted the kitchen and the housekeeping and the bar to have a contract, and Ray had been carrying the cards for three weeks and had gotten eleven of them signed and needed a great many more.

The eleven had not been easy. The eleven had cost him friends, almost, men who had gone tight in the face when he brought it up because they were afraid, and they were right to be afraid, because in this state a man could be let go for almost any reason or none, and everyone in that locker room knew of someone who had talked union on a Friday and not had a job on a Monday, with nothing anybody could do about it.

He thought about the old strike sometimes, the one in forty-nine. He had been twenty-two, a dishwasher, and the culinary and the bartenders had walked out over the Fourth of July to time it with the rodeo, the whole town’s restaurants and bars dark in the middle of the biggest week of the year, and for a few days it had felt like the workers held the thing in their own hands. Ray had stood the line with the older men and felt it. And then it had ended, and the owners had not forgotten, and a few years later the businessmen had pushed through the law, the right-to-work law, so that no union in Nevada could ever again make a man join or pay his share, and that had been the answer to forty-nine, and it had worked. A union could win an election and sign a contract and still starve, because half the men it bargained for would take the raise and keep their dues in their pocket, and you could not blame a man with a mortgage for that either.

Marco from the line sat down beside him on the bench, lacing his shoes.

“You still carrying those cards,” Marco said, low.

“Still carrying them.”

“Frank signed?”

“Frank won’t. Frank’s got the boy at the university, he won’t risk it.”

Marco was quiet a moment. “My cousin says the new governor was supposed to be the labor man. O’Callaghan. The unions all went for him.”

“He’s the labor man until it’s the casinos,” Ray said. “I read it in the paper same as you. There’s a thing going on down in Vegas with the dealers and he came right out against it. The dealers are a different fight, that’s their business, but it tells you where he stands when it’s this business. The labor man is the labor man until the chips are on the table. Then he’s a Nevada man.”

Marco laced the other shoe. He did not say whether he would sign. Ray had learned not to push it in the locker room, where there were ears.

The shift was a banquet, four hundred covers, a convention of insurance men in the big room, and Ray worked the cold line hard through the dinner rush and did not think about the cards at all for three hours, which was a mercy, because the work took everything and gave back the clean tired feeling of a service done right. He plated the salads and ran the carving station and kept his people moving, and the food went out, and the insurance men ate it and never once thought about the room it came from or the men in it, which was how it was, which was the whole thing in a sentence.

At the break near ten he stepped out the employee door into the alley for air. It was cold. The back of the casino rose up over him, windowless, the neon of the front of the house throwing a glow up into the sky beyond the roofline, and down here in the alley there was just the hum of the kitchen fans and the dumpsters and a couple of porters on a smoke.

One of them was a young man named Ortega, dish room, maybe twenty, new. He had not signed. Ray had not even asked him yet, had figured him too new and too scared.

Ortega looked at Ray in the alley light and then looked away and then looked back, and said, quiet, “Frank told me you got cards.”

Ray stood very still. “I might.”

“My father did the line in forty-nine,” Ortega said. “He told me about it my whole life. The few days they had it in their hands.” He looked down the alley and back. “He said I should find the man with the cards.”

Ray reached up under his apron, into his shirt pocket, where the small stack was, and his cold fingers found the top card, and he stood there in the alley with the kitchen fans humming and the neon glowing up past the roof, and he did not yet know if this was the start of the turn or just one more card in a fight he might lose, but he took it out, and he held it out to the kid.

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