On the drive in from Cheney, he tuned to classical music. Brahms, the readout informed him. Something new for him; he didn’t know why. Maybe that he read classical music was soothing. The engine noise seemed to have fixed itself, or, maybe, the tick-ticking had been his imagination. This was no time for auto repairs, but he was better off than some guys.
            At the plant, Brogan gave him a sign and asked him to take the front gate.
            “Looks like another hot one,” he told Brogan.
            Brogan nodded and pulled another sign from the box for Alex who came up just then.
            “Alex,” he said.
            “Hey, dude,” Alex said. “You guys hear Petrovich got work in Seattle?”
            Petrovich had four kids. “No man ought to have four kids these days,” Brogan told the two.
            He carried the sign on his right shoulder and walked the line on the edge of the unpaved street at the front gate. They’d pulled the shades in the office windows. Were they watching in there? The office girls? The bosses? Sixty-two voted to go out and 19 voted to stay. All 19 Mormons crossed the line. Now the 62 were slipping away. That’s how they beat you. More guys inside than out, then they vote to decertify.
            He felt no anger toward the owners. Their father, a Mormon and a union machinist himself, built the business. The morning after the vote, both brothers came out to the delivery area at the back of the plant. The guys were busy out there, loading toolboxes into pickups.
            “Please don’t do this,” the older brother said.
            He felt sorry for the pair. The California lawyer the brothers hired to drive north and teach them how to break unions was a different story. He imagined smashing that bastard in the face. He switched the sign to the left shoulder.
            The production foreman, Allensby, drove through the gate and waved. He remained on the job, but his sympathies were with the men out here. He’d been a union machinist himself. Now he was management. Couldn’t blame him for that.
            The next car he didn’t recognize. It carried a Utah license plate. That would be a scab, driving up to look for work. He stepped to the side of the car, tapped on the window and bent to peek in, careful to smile. A young kid in there looked scared, but he rolled the window down a crack.
            “How you doing in there?” he said. “Hot ain’t it?”
            “Okay,” the boy said.
“Looking for work?”
            “Yeah.”
            “You know we’re on strike here, don’t you?”
            “No. Not till now. I just drove in.”
            “Yeah. Well, we are as you can see.”
            “Sorry,” he said.
            “We’d like you not to take a job here. Stand with us.”
            “I need work,” he said.
            “Yeah, me too.”
            The youth frowned at his hands on the steering wheel. “I got kids.”
            “Me too.” He didn’t tell the kid his boys were with his ex in another state with another man.
            The kid looked away, frowned out the windshield and shrugged, “I need work.”
            “Can’t talk you out of it?”
            The kid shook his head.
He stepped away from the car window. The effort had caused sweat to break on his forehead. “Go ahead on in, then. Wish you wouldn’t.”
            “Sorry,” the kid said, but he wasn’t. He was looking out for himself like anyone does.
            The afternoon wore on. The sun beat down on the striker, and he walked off plant property to stand in the shade of the two oaks on the property next door, a home occupied by an old woman who came out from time to time. She wore baggy out-of-date dresses and waved to the pickets. She said she was on their side, but maybe that was only fear talking. Her car was gone today looked like. The garage door stood open. He looked at what she had in there—rakes, a hose, garden tools, shovels hung on a wall. A lawn mower. Not much worth anything.
            He laid his sign on the grass and pulled the sling shot from his back pocket. His friend Spencer had made it for him when he told Spencer about the strike. The slingshot was a beautiful thing. Spencer had sanded the forked stick till it was smooth. The rubber smelled new and the oiled leather pad was supple. Before the accident, Spencer worked on rail gangs in the Columbia Gorge in hot summer weather like this. Spencer believed foremen drove rail gangs hard in order to make them furious. The bosses hoped they would work off their rage, laying track. Spencer said he’d crewed on an angry rail crew that set a one day record for mileage. Spencer said they’d all wanted to kill that boss.
            The striker searched around in the street gravel for a right sized rock, found one and walked to where he could see a gap between the two oaks in the woman’s yard. Making sure he was out of sight of the plant, he fitted the rock into the pad of the slingshot and pulled back until his hand touched his cheek. He aimed over the house into the parking lot on the side of the plant and released. The rock arched out of sight. He heard the ringing sound of struck metal and then what sounded like a ricochet. That one was for Spencer he thought. He shoved the slingshot back into his hip pocket, picked up the sign and put it on his right shoulder. He carried it into the hot sun at the front gate, certain they would lose the strike.

A Navy veteran and CNC machinist, George Thomas earned his MFA at Eastern Washington University. His work has appeared in Anglo-Welsh Review, Willow Springs, Bellowing Ark, Crab Creek Review, Kestrel, Illuminations and North Dakota Quarterly.