Edsel

by Loren D. Estleman

  “But that’s the standard tour. You could have just gone in with everyone else.”

  “I was in line when you showed up. I still can. I guess you’ve got better things to do than hold my hand.”

  “No, I’m cleared for the day.” A fissure appeared in her high marble brow. “We can skip the stamping plant. A lot of people find it disturbing; all that noise, after the heat of the foundry. Some of the older tourists—”

  “I’m fifty-five,” I said. “Not a hundred. I can take off my coat and stick my fingers in my ears. If you need a note from my doctor—”

  “Caramba!” She gestured with both hands like Ricky Ricardo, and that’s when I noticed the withered arm. “Let’s go.”

  I accompanied her down the front steps and into the parking lot, where she unlocked the passenger’s side of a new sky-blue Lincoln Capri convertible and clattered around to the driver’s side on three-inch heels. On a metallic day when our breath made gray jets she wore no coat, and I felt old in my fleece-lined leather jacket. The current generation seemed impervious to the extremes of climate, going bareheaded in January and wearing pink angora in the gluey heat of August. Some kind of revolution was in the making and I couldn’t shake the conviction that I was the enemy.

  The plastic seat was cold and stiff and the windows began to cloud as soon as we were both shut in, but the heat came on instantly when she turned the key and switched on the blower. I was just old enough to appreciate the improvement over the black boxes of my youth, which when they finally warmed up roasted the passengers in front while compelling those behind to wrap themselves in the ubiquitous backseat blanket. As for the rest, I missed warm durable mohair, ugly as it was, and I couldn’t comprehend the functions of half the instruments in the dash.

  She drove well and without awkwardness, even though shifting required extending her short left arm its entire length to grasp the steering wheel while she worked the lever with her right. I noticed she drove a steady ten miles over the fifteen-miles-per-hour limit posted throughout the complex. She hummed the whole while in a way that suggested she was unaware she was humming. We were pulling into the lot outside the steel mill when I finally identified the tune: “Sixteen Tons.”

  My memories of that hangarlike room were cast in orange. Actually it was gray and buff brown, like every other factory since the invention of the steam engine, a color that happened rather than being planned; but the walls and ceiling and the forest of posts that separated them writhed in the reflected glow from the vats of molten steel, which for all the world could have passed for tomato soup coming to a boil. There, workers in hard hats, gauntlets, and thick denims soaked through with sweat stirred cascades of iron pellets shaped like rabbit droppings into the mix, skinned off the impurities when they floated to the top, and poured the steel, no longer red now but white-hot, into molds to form ingots the size and shape of refrigerators.

  “The ingots weigh between five and sixteen tons,” said Miss Sherman, apparently still oblivious to the tune she had been humming moments before we mounted the high catwalk. “Sixteen hours from now the steel we’re looking at will be gassed up and driven off the line.”

  One of the men stirring the steel glanced up at us without stopping his labor. We were a few minutes ahead of the regular tour, alone on the catwalk, and he probably thought we were VIPs. His face was burned a deep cherry red and carried no expression. I thought of the faces I had seen in photographs of the survivors of Hitler’s death camps, of their lack of hope or relief or any other sign that they knew they had been rescued. Then I remembered his hourly wage was higher than mine and I decided I was trying to get too much out of a face I had never seen before and would probably never see again.

  On to the other end of the building and the stamping plant, where the temperature went down and the decibel level soared. Far below the catwalk, workers, many of them women, fed sheets of steel into machines whose piledriver-like stampers rose between gleaming hydraulic lifters and slammed back down, punching out fenders and door panels with a noise like freight trains colliding. Miss Sherman leaned in and cupped her hands around her mouth. I smelled tuberose.

  “If you’re wondering how they stand the noise, most of them are married.”

  I gave her a look that made her blush. She leaned in again.

  “I’ve taken the tour six times. Someone always asks and that’s the standard answer.”

  I shouted back. “It was the standard answer in nineteen thirty-two.”

  We walked out of the plant, out into the quiet and natural light and clear welcome cold of the Michigan winter. “Next stop, assembly,” she said, fishing her keys out of her pocket.

  The Dearborn Assembly Plant was half a mile long. In honor of the sixteenth hour in the conception, gestation, and birth of the automobile, we shuffled along the catwalk, following one of the fifty-three Fairlanes rolling off the line per minute from chassis to finished automobile. Torches splattered sparks, air wrenches whimpered, doors slammed like firecrackers going off in close order. Windshield, engine block, seats, steering column, and all the rest of the fifteen thousand parts joined as smoothly as a demolished building reassembling itself when the film is run backward through the projector. Of all the hundreds of thousands of hours that came and went at Rouge, the sixteenth was the least plausible, the hardest to explain, the most like magic. At the end of the tour a red-and-white Fairlane glistening like water took on gas and burbled away, driven by an employee in white cotton coveralls with the Ford logo scripted across the back.

  Miss Sherman consulted her wristwatch, a man’s model with a big luminous dial. “Just short of two hours. We beat the regular tour by five minutes. You don’t ask many questions.”

  “I used to gig frogs here before the plant was built. When the last Model T rolled off the line I covered it for the Detroit Times. If there’s anything you want to know; all you have to do is ask.”

  “I don’t understand. I had a ton of letters to get out, and if I know the temporaries in this town most of them will be there waiting when I get back. Why did Mr. Zed assign me to shepherd you if you know more about the place than Mr. Ford?”

  “Ask him. I came here planning to go through with the suckers.”

  “I will. Believe me, I will. Are you hungry?”

  “Are you buying?”

  “Mr. Zed’s buying. I draw up his expense sheets. How about Carl’s Chop House?”

  “Janet, you are a corporate drudge after my own heart.” We left the place of miracles.

  8

  THAT SATURDAY NIGHT I TOOK Agnes DeFilippo to see Woman’s World at the Fox. Clifton Webb played the president of an automobile company who invites three prospective vice-presidents and their wives to New York City for the purpose of identifying the pick of the litter. It was one of those TechniStereoScope jobs without a mountain range or a cast of thousands to justify the wide screen, so the actresses all wore big poofy skirts and the actors spent most of their time standing around large rooms with ten feet separating them hoisting martinis to use up space. The feature was sandwiched between a Coming Attractions trailer for The Creature from the Black Lagoon and a Popeye cartoon from the Roosevelt administration. Afterward we reported to the snack counter at Woolworth’s for hamburgers and coffee.

  “I thought you had an expense account,” Agnes said, wiping a patch of ketchup from the corner of her mouth. “I dressed for an expense account.”

  Her dress looked like crushed charcoal, with a full skirt and a tight top that left her collarbone exposed when she took off her shawl. It was a nice collarbone for fifty, including a brown mole on the left side. I had on a windowpane sport coat and a blue tie rashed all over with red fleurs-de-lis. We had been the only ones so attired in a theater full of sweatshirts and dungarees with the cuffs turned up. I wasn’t sure just when people stopped dressing to go to the movies, but it seemed to have happened around the time the first FOR SALE sign went up in front of one of the old motion-picture palaces. In another
generation we’d be attending them in swimsuits. If we were attending them at all; the place had been one-third empty for the early-evening show.

  I blew across the top of my cup. “You’re not a client. When I’ve made my stripes I’ll buy you a house in Miami on Mr. Ford’s ticket, but right now I’m the new kid in school. What did you think of the picture? Personally I’m glad Van Heflin got the job, even though in real life he’d bankrupt the company with all those ethics. If I were Clifton Webb I’d have given it to Fred MacMurray.”

  “I liked June Allyson’s dresses.”

  “The hell you did. She looked like Shirley Temple with a thyroid condition. What did you really think?”

  “I’m wondering why you took me to see that particular film.”

  “I thought you’d like to see a woman’s picture for a change. You said you were sick of westerns.”

  “That’s not a woman’s picture. The men called all the shots. The women were either scheming shrews or simpering little ninnies. If that’s what Hollywood thinks women want to see, it’s no wonder movies are in trouble.”

  A pair of pimple-pocked youths in black leather and Brylcreem and their ponytailed dates were gallumphing through the record section looking for Bill Haley and the Comets, loudly. I swiveled my stool to keep them in the tail of my eye. Young people had become a threat in ways more direct than the traditional.

  “Movies are in trouble because for the price of ten Saturday nights anyone can put a box in his living room that spews out Clark Gable, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Gorgeous George all week long. That’s why the people who still go to them dress like bums and talk all the way through the feature. They think they’re still home.”

  She blinked and shook her head rapidly. “For just a second there you sounded like my father. The nurses in the home don’t even listen to him any more.”

  “I always wanted to be an old fart.” I took a bite out of my hamburger and put it down. Ground meat had changed commercially since the war. It no longer had texture. They had chopped and harrowed it so fine the raw patties must have looked like unbaked oatmeal cookies.

  “Well, congratulations.” Her forehead broke into a stack of creases that didn’t go away when it relaxed. That depressed me somehow. I was more sensitive to signs of decomposition in my contemporaries than I was in myself. “I am worried about you, you know. You treat change as some kind of contagious disease. If you thought you could avoid it by bundling up and breathing bottled oxygen, you would.”

  “I don’t mind change when there’s purpose in it. I’m not opposed to change. I just changed jobs.”

  “No, you changed employers. You’re still a flack. Or I think you are. You still haven’t said just what it is you’re doing for Sonny. And don’t tell me you’re the one who fixes the radios so they turn off when they go under a bridge.”

  I felt my face wince and poured coffee into it to cover up. That popular condescending nickname for the scion of the Ford family had never bothered me before I went to work for him. I’d used it myself once or twice. I belonged to that age group that didn’t run down the man who signed its paychecks, or at least I hoped I did. I wasn’t even sure I could spell sycophant, let alone be one. “I’m supposed to see to it that Ford doesn’t become a division of GM. Aside from that I’ve been told to avoid specifics.”

  “Ah. Another Cadillac.”

  This time I didn’t cover up worth a damn. She grinned beatifically. “Come on, Connie. They’ve been wanting to crack the luxury-car market ever since the old man died. The Lincoln didn’t do it; it’s what you drive until you can afford a Caddy. So Junior wants to put a car in every driveway in Grosse Pointe, and he’s hired you to do the grunt work. Impressive. Very impressive. So how come my delicate stomach juices are gnawing at a raw onion instead of caviar?”

  “If you can find it up on the menu I’ll get some to go.”

  Someone jostled me hard. I swiveled my stool to beg his pardon and bumped into a black-jacketed post-pubescent stinking of sweat and motor oil. I’d lost track of Young America during the conversation and now he and his companion, a hefty redhead in a two-tone Pershing High School jacket whose cream-colored leather sleeves covered all but the tips of her fingers, crowded onto the stools on either side of us. There was a vacant pair of stools at the end of the counter, but the pair had ignored them.

  The boy grinned past me at his date. Pink tongue showed where his front teeth were missing. “Pass the salt.”

  Red skidded the grenade-shaped shaker his way, bumping up Agnes’ elbow as she did so. Toothless poured salt into a tin ashtray in front of him and set down the shaker with a bang.

  “Pass the ketchup.”

  Bumping me with his shoulder, Toothless lunged for the red plastic squirter and rolled it down the counter. Red grabbed it and squeezed half a cup of the viscous contents onto the Formica top. A drop flew off the nozzle as she jerked the container upright and landed on Agnes’ sleeve. She jumped.

  “Pass the pepper.”

  I caught the shaker on its way down to the boy.

  He leaned his body against mine. I smelled beer as strongly as if from an open keg. He was sweating pure Schlitz. “Hey, Gramps, I asked for the pepper.”

  “Grow up, son. Get a job. Find a wife. Have kids. Grow old and die.” I slid off the stool and took Agnes’ elbow.

  Toothless grasped my arm, squeezing the bicep. I let go of Agnes and splayed a hand against his chest. That was where I went wrong, if you discount catching the pepper shaker. It should have been his chin, and instead of my hand it should have been the stool.

  I remember the first blow and the second. After that I lost count. I remember being on the floor and something hard and sharp hitting me in the side that turned out to be the pointed toe of a motorcycle boot. I remember Agnes shrieking obscenities, being surprised at how many she knew, and I had a flash of her hitting Toothless with her purse—holding it like a sap, not swinging it by its strap like an old lady—and Red grabbing her from behind and trying to claw her face with ragged nails. I have no recollection of seeing counter help or any other store personnel, although I was told later a security man broke it up with a hammerlock and his service revolver. I passed into and out of this world in the back of an ambulance in need of shock absorbers, banging and rocking over dips and breaks in the pavement, with Agnes looking down at me through tendrils of hair hanging loose in front of her face. Stutters of light from passing street lamps found most of the cracks in her makeup, which still depressed me.

  Somewhere in there I dreamed a memory, of lunch at Carl’s Chop House on Howard with Janet Sherman after our tour of Rouge. She spoke sketchily of her childhood and schooling in Toledo, followed by her first employment at Ford as a secretary-typist, while delicately trimming scraps of lettuce from the edge of a tuna sandwich with her fingers. Finding the sandwich too big to handle, she had stopped to cut it in half. The operation forced her to lean a way over in order to brace the fork with her short arm, an awkward maneuver that she somehow made appear graceful. She was an extraordinarily pretty woman who had obviously spent hundreds of hours practicing such activities with the object of de-emphasizing them and distracting attention from her deformity. She was intelligent as well and spoke knowledgeably of things related to the history of the company she worked for that she could only have learned secondhand. If, as I assumed, her physical imperfection explained the lack of a ring on her left hand, she had made the best of that situation with interest, abandoning the typing pool in less than two years for a position as executive secretary to Henry II’s least-dispensable Whiz Kid. And I was pleased to learn that this far on the wrong side of middle age I could still be aroused by admirable attractive women. Funny what you think of when you’re bleeding.

  In movies and on the clothes-closet sets of television, injured characters are always awakening to the sight of some concerned-looking doctor. In real life it’s more often to the slack weary face of a bored cop. Mine, looming over me in the harsh white
light of the emergency room at Henry Ford Hospital, had on the same uniform that had been handed him when he’d finished training a dozen or so years before. Far from having grown into its tired folds and gathers, he had come to resemble them. His face looked as if he could turn around inside it without disturbing any of its pockets or creases. Even his eyes were set so far back behind the bunting of their lids I couldn’t find them. I might have caught him in mid-turn.

  “Mr. Meaner, I’m Officer Kozlowski. Think you’re up to telling me what happened back there at Woolworth’s?”

  I had to maneuver my lips out of the way of my words. They felt so swollen I was surprised I couldn’t see them. “If you know where it happened, I guess you know what.” I was hoarse as a dust devil. If I could have tumbled off the gurney I’d have crawled over to the cinderblock wall and licked the condensed moisture from the mortar between the blocks.

  “The store turned the puke and his little whore over to the precinct. You going to press charges?”

  “I used to know a Kozlowski in the detective bureau. Any relation?”

  “Probably. Everybody in the family’s been some kind of cop. My mother’s still working Dispatch in Royal Oak. We’re holding them two for A-and-B. You want to forgive and understand them and set them on the right path, or would you rather we stick their butts in juvie? Personally I don’t give a shit. Either way we get to deal with ’em all over again.”

  “Could you get me a drink of water?”

  “We’re not supposed to give you nothing. Croakers get awful sore. So how about it, you pressing the rap? ’Cause chances are their parents live in Grosse Pointe and when we pull them out of whatever party they’re at to take the pukes home they’ll slap a suit on you for cutting little Buster’s toes with the busted ends of your ribs. This way you get something back.”

  “How’s Agnes?” I was ashamed of not having asked first thing. My face was throbbing and every time I inhaled someone sank a hat pin in my side up to the head.