HOM: Blue Light Special

I was hired as a night watchman at Kmart, or rather, what was going to be Kmart. It was under construction and the shell was up but that was about all. My boss was a one-armed engineer named Williams, and I liked him a lot. He was a gold mine of information about processes & procedures and little info-bits like the fact that the floor of the store was surveyed to be six inches above the 1964 flood level. I saw a laser level in action for the first time when the workers put n the suspended ceiling and was impressed by its ease and accuracy, that being a time when lasers were both rare and expensive. I got a nice little black lab cross pup from a family near Whitefish, out of Mountain Trader ad. He was my pick of the litter, bold and smart. I named him Zeke, and he went to work with me almost every night. The inside of the building was a great place to train him and he was excellent company. I taught him to retrieve and also to sit & stay on command, and then track me down when I called him. He was a very smart pup! Mostly the job was pretty boring, and about the only excitement was when Lyn would stop by, sometimes for a visit, sometimes for a fight, sometimes for a visit that degenerated into a fight. I remember that the roof leaked, and the contractor added several layers of roofing without fixing it. I was told they finally had to give up and live with the leak because they couldn't safely add any more to the thickness of the roof. Eventually Williams moved on and the new boss was a little guy with a goatee & an attitude. He moved a trailer onto the lot to live in & decided I was disposable. It was early spring, work on the store was winding down and jobs were opening up again so I guess it was time for me to move on. TBC (Me) (Blacktail Books)