Ms. Got Rocks (7 page)

C
hapter 7

“
W
ho the heck is that?” Rocky was still in her sleeping bag on her bedroom floor. She could hear a car coming up the driveway. Both the dogs were up and making squeaky noises. Margie and her Border Collie Pokey must be almost at the cabin.

“Jeez, I overslept,” Rocky commented to the excited dogs.

“Good morning, Rocky, I got called into work, and Pokey is acting like a doofus this morning. Can you baby-sit her for me today? If I leave her alone, she will probably eat the bathtub or something stupid like that. I think she wants to play with your dogs. She has been squeaking since we turned onto the county road,” Margie was speed talking while Pokey was climbing all over her clean uniform.

“Sure, let her out. Phoebe will wind her down. Pokey Girl will be happy to go home tonight,” Rocky said as Pokey ran across the meadow to see what Phoebe was doing.

“In the back are some lawn chairs, I thought you could use some more. I had planned to spend today with you looking for chairs at Furniture Are Us, but duty calls and all that stuff,” Margie said as she started backing the car around.

Rocky fetched the lawn chairs out of the back, and with a wave and a blown kiss; Margie was off and down the driveway in a cloud of dust.

The eggs were cooking when wall phone rang giving Rocky a start and a chuckle at herself.

“Ms. Clancy this is Terry Spellman, I have the Auburn Times?” Mr. Spellman spoke with the question mark on the end of each sentence to ensure his listener understands.

“Yes, this is she.” Rocky answered.

“I need a photographer tomorrow; there is a rally, or maybe a strike by the woman employees of Unistat. Maybe you saw it on TV last night?” Terry asked.

“No Terry I missed that, I was scaring off a claim jumper, and I don’t have a TV,” Rocky answered.

“Oh, well, anyway, can you go down there and get some photos, and call me on the cell phone? Give me the description of what you see? You do have a cell phone, don’t you?” he asked.

Rocky chose to ignore his almost snide patronizing remark.

“Sure, I have a cell phone,” Rocky answered remembering that she was again unemployed. “How much are you paying and where do you want me to go?”

Terry brightened up when he was assured that she was in the twenty-first century. Little did he know that she,on any given occasion did not have the vaguest notion where she last left her cell phone.

Rocky and the newspaper man settled on the deal, and he outlined the scope of the photos that he would like to have shot.

"By the way, how did you know I was a photographer and get my home number?"

"I ran into Marge in the parking lot."

*   *   *

Unistat was a unionized factory, which manufactured gelatin capsules then filled them with powdered vitamins. The product was sold under various generic store brands. Unistat employed several hundred men and women.

One would never know it was even located on the outskirts of a peaceful upscale suburb of Sacramento, except at quitting time when the streets became thronged with Unistat employees anxious to get home.

Unistat was peaceful until several weeks ago, when a new hire in the payroll department uncovered that her sister, working on the filling line, received a dollar less per hour than the man working next to her.

The new hire, searching further, checked each of the women union employees’ payroll records. She discovered that they too, brought home less money than the male worker in the same job category. The payroll new hire told her sister what she found.

The sister promptly went to her shop steward to report this. Her shop union rep told her he had not heard of such a thing and would get back to her.

The next morning her newly hired payroll clerk sister was terminated and escorted by two security guards off the Unistat property.

Soon the women working at Unistat knew what had happened. Not only was the sister asking questions, but each woman employee was asking questions. Not just asking questions of the shop steward, but of the company supervisors.

Each day the answers became increasingly vague and sometimes non-existent. The women met together one evening in small groups or by cell phone, they planned a work slowdown, even though they acknowledged it was an illegal action unless sanctioned by their union.

They slowed down the next day and the following day. By Friday, any woman involved in any sort of discussion of the matter or who had asked questions was terminated. They went directly to the union hall, which was closed for the day. It was also closed each day the following week.

A group of women contacted the state labor agency and the national office of their union, and took a number for service.

After three weeks, the former employees still had not received a response from their union nor the company.

In the meanwhile, the women planned to peacefully picket the factory in the morning. They wanted to make it easy for the media to get the video on the noon news. The organizing committee had done a crackerjack job contacting each newspaper and TV station within a one hundred mile radius of the factory.

That was how Rocky found herself on the bright summer morning in Sacramento. She stood under the apricot trees on the edge of a large crowd of media trucks, cables, and microwave dishes. The media group was surrounding a smaller crowd of women carrying signs.

Chapter 8

The previous day, at the same time as Rocky was driving home to Whiskey Gap, another group was meeting. This meeting was held in a vacant retail space in a strip mall across Sacramento from the Unistat factory.

A group of glum looking non-descript men sat on metal folding chairs in the stuffy, tobacco smoke laden room. The six men had been sitting for an hour. They were waiting for the man with the job instructions. They are assigned to the Unistat labor action. These half dozen men did not work for Unistat or the Union. They did not know each other, nor did they feel any loyalty to the man who hired them. They would follow instructions from the Boston Cochetti family, get paid and then blend into wherever it was that they had appeared from.

There was only one handsome man in the group of hardened for hire men. His name was Callaghan and he was not what he seemed.

*   *   *

For fifteen minutes, the women paraded around the perimeter of the parking lot, waving their hand-printed signs and chanting slogans.

Several men wearing tailor fitted suits appeared in the second story windows of the building. The men using bullhorns called down to the crowd and asked them to leave the property.

The voices of the women began sounding increasingly shrill as they became louder to be heard over the men in the windows.

Rocky was still on the fringes of the media, calmly taking photos that came within what Terry assigned.

Shortly, the men in the windows stopped asking the women to leave. They began telling them that the parking lot was private property and the women would leave.

Rocky was feeling the hair on the back of her neck rise. Something in the situation was not right.

The men at the windows shouted a repeat of their demand that the group of women leave immediately, but this time they added a phrase.

They added, “Leave before someone gets hurt."

When Rocky heard that phrase she immediately moved forward away from the TV cameras and simultaneously speed dialed the newspaper’s phone number.

In her right hand Rocky had the camera with her finger on the button, taking shots as fast as the camera could re-cycle.

“Terry, this is Rocky at Unistat. Call the Sacto. police or Sheriff. This situation is getting ugly.”

“What is happening? Describe what you see,” Terry asked.

“To the left of me is a group of approximately fifty women carrying signs. They are not moving, just shouting slogans at the building where moments ago men in suits with bullhorns were standing at the windows.”

“To my right is another group, they are slowly moving forward toward the locked gate in the chain link fence. The gate leads into the factory proper,” she continued to report.

“The TV and news people are running forward to get a better look. You can smell that something is going to happen.” Rocky reported in a calm voice that was still easy for Terry to hear.

At this point Rocky was being physically propelled along with the other reporters by the crush of the people behind them. A security guard walked to the locked gate and yelled to the women. There was so much noise coming from every direction Rocky could not hear what was said to report it to Terry.

“The security man is waving his arm, like he is shoving the women back. I still cannot hear exactly what he is saying,” Rocky reported to the newspaper owner.

The women at the front of the group were pushing the gate. They in turn were pushed from behind by the remainder of the crowd. The security man had left the area and returned to the security stand.

Rocky was tall enough she could see that the man was talking on the phone. He looked as scared as Rocky felt.

“Terry, I’m scared. This group is going to take down that fence. Hold on, I have to change hands. Did you call the cops for me?” she asked.

“Yeah, I did, they are going to be there soon,” Terry replied.

“Great, I’m getting really bad vibes here,” Rocky was shouting into the phone but she didn’t realize that she was shouting.

The reporter next to her said, “Yeah, something cool is about to go down, dude. It will be in time for the noon news. This is great.”

The man pulled forward of Rocky and pushed his way between another group of media.

Rocky was approaching the back of the crowd now. She was standing on the curb of the parking lot. Out of the corner of her eye, while she was frantically switching cameras, she glimpsed movement from across the street. She turned and watched a group of seven men cross the street coming at an easy lope toward the back of the crowd of media workers.

She held the shutter down and the camera whirred into auto mode and the  photos zipped through with the action.

The action had crossed the street and to Rocky’s right. The men were moving in and around the media toward the women demonstrators. The men were making no excuses nor were they showing any consideration in how they moved. They moved with a purpose.

“Terry, I’m going over right behind the men, I’m going in right behind them. Is your Worker’s Comp Insurance current?” Rocky joked.

“Hell yeah, Baby, it is paid, and are you sure you want to do this, I mean I want you to do this, but shit this is more than you signed up for?” Terry asked her, as she moved forward with the men.

“Too late for that Terry, I’m filming and I’m right behind the last man. They are running now and pushing people aside. They are still moving through the media people. I can barely see the lead man, and he is at the back of the group of women employees,” Rocky continued reporting.

“The demonstrators are facing the group of men. The men are shouting something at the women, I can see their mouths working but it is so noisy I can’t hear them,” she yelled into the cell phone to Terry in Auburn.

“Terry are you getting this, is the recorder going?” Rocky asked.

“Rocky, I’m getting each word.” Terry’s voice through the cell phone was fairly drowned by the screams of the women in the front line.

A TV reporter was running next to Rocky, she could hear the woman say over and over, “Oh shit.”

Rocky yelled to her, “My sentiments exactly, can you see what is happening?”

“Yes, those guys are shoving the women back from the gate. This situation is getting nastier, it is getting out of hand,” the TV news lead commented.

“Where are the cops, my editor called them a little while ago?” Rocky asked the back of the TV news star’s head as the slender blonde pushed her way in front of Rocky.

Rocky moved into the slipstream of the slender blonde and followed her flying elbows to the front of the media pack.

“Terry, I’m right at the front and those guys are carrying sticks, club things, like cop nightsticks. The whole crowd is being shoved back from the gate. Terry, stay on the line, I’m going to hold the phone up so you can hear what they are yelling at the women.”

Rocky held her little yellow cell phone in the air, and within moments the phone was smashed from her hand and landed on the asphalt parking lot, then someone in the milling crowd stepped on it. The mass of people was now trying to move away from men in the front.

The yelling was less organized and more frantic than chanting. She could barely see the men advancing toward the group of women who were directly in front of her.

The men had the wooden batons held in front of them and were pushing the crowd back.   Rocky raised her camera over her head and again put it into auto shoot for several seconds.

“The most appropriate word for the crowd movement would be swirling,” Rocky shouted to Terry. The women in the front of the group are being pushed back into the second bunch. The second group is dividing and each side is moving back. The whole crowd is swirling and very confused around me.” Rocky continued reporting and photographing the scene.

Suddenly the first rank of women was only five feet in front of Rocky. She could, at last see the faces of the men attempting to dissolve the group of women.

The overweight man in the middle of the line had a face fire red with anger. Rocky wondered for an instant if he was going to collapse right there. She brought her camera down to her face level and took one frame of the furious face of the man. When she clicked that one off, the man gave a yell to the rest of the group.

“Now!” he yelled.

He raised his nightstick and brought it down on the shoulder of the woman directly in front of Rocky. Rocky caught a perfect shot of that happening. At that point, the man saw Rocky and the camera. Shoving aside the very obviously injured woman in front of him, he was striding over his victim and the short distance toward Rocky.

“Bitch, give me that camera” he demanded of Rocky.

“I’m with the Auburn News,” Rocky was waving her press pass ID directly in front of his eyes.

“I don’t give a fuck if you are Queen of the May, I want that camera. Either give it to me now or I’ll take it from you. Come on bitch, you won’t like it if I have to take it away from you,” he yelled at Rocky, spitting on her in the process.

The TV cameraman was slowly backing away from Rocky to get a better angle on the shot. The camera operator was wondering why Rocky was standing there, she was rooted to that spot as the women ranks were now either even with her or behind her.

Out of the corner of her eye Rocky could see several of the men using the batons at their waist level; the target was the forearms and elbows of the women.

She turned to get a photo of the beatings happening in that direction. For a moment, Rocky thought she recognized one of the men. There are not many men with that shining black collar length hair. Rocky was not even sure who it was registering in her brain, there was so much confusion around her.

The large man in front of her was now yelling in her left ear. He was so close to her it would not be any reach for him to touch her. Something warned her now would be a good time to move away from the front line of women.

As Rocky stepped backward on the periphery of the yelling and noise of the crowd she heard the tiniest sound bite of an angry Irish accent.

As Rocky was moving backward away from the man she now recognized, she thought, “Why is he here?”

This was not the time to think it through, Rocky was the apparent target of the man with the stick. She could see the stick move overhead and she swung her camera out of the way, but she exposed her head by doing that.

One of the cameras was still running on automatic. Rocky hoped that she got the shot. She pulled Margie’s little digital camera from her pocket and held it in her other hand, she clicked through the memory chips on the red faced, blue eyed large man as he lifted the nightstick.

The man with the sleek black hair was running toward the angry red faced man and Rocky.

“Hey man, leave that one alone. Hey, stop, don’t do that.” Callaghan roared as he pushed his way toward Rocky.

“Stop right now, you asshole. That one is a press photographer and she is my woman. You lay a finger on her, I’ll kill ya man.” Callaghan was near the angry enforcer and had the baton back and up poised for a swing at the man directly in front of Rocky.

The man threatening her turned his whole body toward the tall man running toward them.

Rocky, who was still standing like a load of rocks watched as the most handsome man she had ever seen and man who tried to jump her claim was wedging himself in front of her. She felt his spread hand across her breasts, pushing her with such force away from his back that he had knocked her breathless and stumbling to the pavement.

Rocky staggered crablike back, then regaining her balance sitting on her butt,she clicked off two more shots on the digital. She only stopped shooting because the camera was making peeping sounds, as she stood behind Callaghan.

“Rochelle, get your arse outta here. Now. Go.” Callaghan was shouting at her with a thick Irish accent.

He offered her one hand to get off the ground and the other one remained on the chest of the big angry man. It flashed through Rocky’s mind that Callaghan looked like a referee in a boxing match.

“Okay, Pal, any friend of yours is a friend of mine,” the large red faced man said, raising his hands in submission while backing away from Callaghan. He turned around and ran to the nearest knot of women and again raised his nightstick.

“Bloody Neanderthal,” Callaghan shouted after the man. Callaghan’s deep blue eyes were snapping with irritated, annoyed energy.

“What are you doing here?” Rocky shouted at her rescuer.

Rocky was totally confused at the incongruity of the hunk of an Irish claim jumper from a couple of days ago, appearing in a parking lot of a pharmaceutical company in Sacramento California on the very day of a labor action.

“Get out of here now, Got Rocks. It is over for you, you have your bloody photographs. Go,” Callaghan shouted at her. She could barely hear him over the crowd noise. His icy eyes were snapping as he threw his sleek hair away from them.

“Dammit, woman, do you never do as you should? Go. This isn’t done here, and you don’t need any more than what you have,” he implored.

Callaghan had turned his back on the men and was squared off in front of Rocky. He threw his arm around her waist and turned her to face the street. He hustled her across the parking lot through the throng of confused frightened women.