“I went to the union about them,” she said. She had hardly known what a union was. John Lewis, the CIO, that was all. She discovered the central office in the phone book.

The CIO headquarters were housed in an old frame building with dusty floors. A man was sweeping up some debris. She was directed to an office where a man wearing a gray fedora sat behind a scored oak desk. There was nothing on it except a telephone and an ashtray. Sunlight knifed through a torn shade and left a scar upon the floor.

“I’ve just been fired from this place,” she had said.

“Hold it. What’s your job?”

“I was sorting rivets.”

“That’s not a category.”

“The men who own the shop hired nine girls. They collect rivets from the airplane factories, then sort them according to size, and the ones that aren’t damaged they sell back.”

“What rivets?”

“The ones they use in airplanes. When they’re riveting, the rivets fly all around. They lose a good many.”

The man laughed. The sound of it echoed in the big empty room. “Americans, they’d sell brimstone in hell,” he said. “If there was a place where there was nothing, nothing, you understand, and there were two citizens of our country standing there in that nothing, one would rent out standing space to the other, and the other would tax him for running a space-renting business.”

“They paid us nine dollars a week,” said Annie.

“Well, you can’t go far on that kind of wage.”

“They kept promising us piecework.”

“Mexicans? I mean were the other girls mostly Mexican?”

“All except me.”

The man looked shrewdly at his desk, then took a cigar from his jacket pocket. He lit it and threw the cellophane wrapper on the floor.

“Reason I ask is because they couldn’t get away with it if the girls weren’t Mexican. See, anybody else would know better.” He grinned at her.

“I’m not Mexican and I took the job because I needed the money.”

The man stared at her. She thought she knew what he was thinking—you’d have to be Mexican for nine dollars to make a difference.

“I didn’t say you were. Not that it’s a disgrace. I’m what they call in Pennsy a hunkie. All right, gimme the address.” She wrote it down on a piece of crumpled paper he took from his pocket. “Maybe we can scare them,” he said. “Listen, there’s lots of good jobs. And there are going to be lots more, once we’re in the war.”

“War?”

“My Christ! Listen, don’t think they’re not going to pass that selective training and service act! How old are you?”

“Nineteen,” she lied.

“How come you come to us?”

“I didn’t know where else to go,” she said backing toward the door. “I’d heard about you.”

“You heard about us, eh?”