Edsel

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Did Battle leave yet?” Scheffler asked the guard inside.

  “Which one’s he?”

  The captain slapped my shoulder. “You’re on your own. They generally bug out as quick as they can, to avoid the loonies. If he’s in here you’ll find him.”

  “Thanks, Fred.”

  Left alone, I surveyed my desert island. A mist of steam and shower spray dampened the air, puddles stood on the tile floor teeming with God only knew how many varieties of microscopic life. A number of athletes in sundry stages of undress stood in front of open lockers and sat on the wooden benches pulling on socks and fastening buttons. One, as large as the Fisher Building, with a helmet of tight golden curls and tattoos spread all over his shoulders and upper arms like blue ivy, straddled the aisle leading to the showers in just his jockstrap, curling a rusty eighty-pound dumbbell in one hand; on the upswing both his biceps and his immense penis swelled as if pumped full of air by a bellows. I tore my eyes from his crotch and spotted Anthony Battle emerging stark naked from the shower.

  The weightlifter blocked my path. Before I could call out, my quarry had vanished on the other side of the bank of lockers to my left. I hustled that way, banging my shin on a bench. The pain came slowly, like the reverberation of a big bell. I was limping by the time I reached him.

  “Mr. Battle?”

  He swung open a locker with his surname stenciled on a strip of masking tape on the door and threw his towel in it. When he moved, each of the muscles involved demonstrated its function. I thought of a stamping machine I had seen at Henry Ford Museum, a working exhibit with part of its outer skin cut away to show the various moving parts in action. He was six inches taller than I, with large hands and broad meaty feet. I tried to ignore other parts. There is no greater feeling of exposure than to find oneself fully dressed in a room full of naked members.

  “Who are you?” He turned toward me, squaring off. His eyes were as hostile as any I’d seen. Even the juvenile thug’s had been dreamy and impersonal all the time he was beating me up.

  “My name is Minor. Fred Scheffler got me in here. He’s—”

  “I know Fred. He a friend of yours?”

  I couldn’t tell if he thought that was a good thing or not. I leaped. “Yes.”

  After a second he nodded. “Fred’s okay.” He turned away and stepped into a pair of white boxer shorts. “You see the bout?”

  “Tough break. You out-wrestled the Russki six ways from Tuesday.”

  “Son of a bitch missed his cue. I was running out of things to do instead of pin him.”

  “You don’t want to be champ?”

  “Not my turn. What you want?”

  I exhaled. “I need to meet with one of your bosses. I thought you could arrange an introduction.”

  “What, the World Wrestling Guild? Spend a nickel.” He put on a white Oxford shirt with a button-down collar. It had a twenty-two-inch neck.

  “No, the Ballistas.”

  “Don’t know them.”

  “Lionel Banks says they own your contract.”

  “You know Lionel?”

  “Just slightly. He said—”

  “Who are you?” He was facing me again.

  “I told you, Connie Minor. I’m with Ford.”

  “Henry Ford the Second?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What, you work on the line?”

  “No, I’m an executive.”

  “You know Henry Ford?”

  I was starting to get it. “Pretty well. We have lunch. About the Ballistas.”

  “Not here.” He tucked his shirt inside a pair of Lee jeans. “You hungry?”

  “We’re ten minutes from Carl’s Chop House. I’ll drive. We can come back for your car if you have one.”

  “I got a better place in mind. They don’t take reservations and you don’t got to rent no jacket and tie.”

  “Just say where.”

  “My dump. The food’s so good I married the cook.”

  14

  “I WASN’T ALWAYS NO wrestler,” Battle said. “Oh, I wrestled some at Mumford, that’s where I picked up the moves. Coach told me I’d’ve been All-State if they let me on the mat with white kids. I trained to box. Joe Louis, he my main man. Then I got squashed flat by some kid from Chicago in my first round at Golden Gloves.”

  The apartment was on Crystal Street, a neighborhood I hadn’t visited in twenty-five years. I had followed the wrestler’s 1950 Chevy there from the Olympia in the Skyliner. The scabbed-over building he lived in might have been the same one I’d entered the last time. The railroad flat whose kitchen we were sitting in, with all the rooms opening off one another in a straight line like a cattle chute, might have been the same apartment; I’d only been there once, and that time I was carrying fifty thousand dollars in a beat-up suitcase to ransom a gangster, so I hadn’t paid close attention to details. The kitchen was comfortably shabby, with chickens on the yellow wallpaper turning brown as it neared the old pump-up gas stove and bare floorboards showing through holes the size of my head in the stained linoleum, and womb-warm in the spring cold. I felt as if I could sit at that rickety wooden table forever, with Ginny Battle’s thick beef stew and crumbly cornbread warm in the pit of my stomach and a jelly glass full of her husband’s homemade wine in front of me.

  Mrs. Battle was no prom queen, thick-set and flat-featured with gray in her coiled hair, but she smiled easily, and after the first awkward moments of shyness and confusion over the unexpected presence of a stranger in her house, had greeted me openly and sat me down at a steaming plate the moment my Mackinaw was off and hanging on the peg. I couldn’t tell if all this hospitality came naturally or if she had spent years working to offset her husband’s prepossessing appearance and native distrust. Whichever was the case, within minutes I felt more at home than I had anywhere in years.

  “It was Mr. Carlo offered me a contract,” Battle went on, topping off our glasses from the jug he’d produced from under the sink. “I was carrying a hod then, where the Highwayman’s Rest was going in on Lone Pine. Friday nights we had pick-up fights in the gravel pit down the road; it was betting on myself paid back this loan I took out to get me to the Gloves.”

  He shook his head. What with all the top-offs I’d lost track of how many glasses either of us had drunk, but the movement was wobbly. “Let me tell you, them bricklayers and rough carpenters can’t fight for shit. I stepped inside them windmills and chopped ’em up like kindling. Mr. Carlo, he come by one night and seen me. Axed me afterwards if I ever thought about the ring. I told him what happened when I got in with real boxers. He says, “That’s ’cause you got no speed. All you need for the rings I got in mind is strength, and you got plenty of that.’

  “Grass Lake was my first match, this little pole barn way out in the middle of a field. I never seen no professional wrestling matches, so I done with the guy what I done in school, step-overs and half-nelsons, pinned him in about six minutes. Crowd didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, kept yelling for airplane spins. Mr. Tony—you know Mr. Tony? He Mr. Carlo’s brother—Mr. Tony right away wants to dress me up in a leopard skin and stick a spear in my hand, bill me as King of the Zulus. King Solomon’s Mines, that’s his favorite picture. Mr. Carlo he says no, no gimmicks. So here I am, and let me tell you, it beats carrying a hod.”

  I said, “I hope it pays better.”

  “We’re remodeling the kitchen next month. Already got me one of them two-tone Kelvinators ordered. Take a hinge at the fambly room.”

  I’d been careful with the wine because of my blood sugar, but it whacked me in the forehead with a baseball bat when I got up and I had to grip the back of my chair until the vertigo cleared. The next room was paneled in tan plastic with a wood grain printed on it. The carpet was wall-to-wall gold shag and there was more of that floating furniture that had begun to take over American living rooms, a table lamp with a revolving shade that simulated a forest fire when it was switched on, and a Philco television
set with an exposed picture tube sticking up from the chassis like a one-eyed beast rising from a swamp in something starring John Agar. I gripped the door frame against another dizzy spell.

  “Straight out of House and Garden” said Battle, standing behind me. “This here’s just the start. Gonna rip that chicken shit off the kitchen walls and paint it Harvest Yellow. Formica everywhere. I growed up in a place with a kitchen just like we got now, but he sure as hell ain’t. What you doing up, Champ?”

  The newcomer was a boy, very dark, who had wandered in from the next room down digging a fist in one eye. He had on blue pajamas with feet and a red Superman insignia on the chest. He was about two years old.

  “Charlie, you bad child.” Ginny Battle pushed past us and picked him up, putting him over her shoulder.

  “I heard Unkie.”

  The wrestler strode forward and rubbed the boy’s head, a little too hard. Charlie’s face screwed up. “There, there, Champ. Joe Louis he don’t cry. My brother’s kid,” he said to me as Ginny carried the wailing child out of the room. “He in jail and nobody done know where the mother is.”

  “Good-looking kid. Can we go back into the kitchen?”

  I began to feel stable again as soon as the family room was behind me. I hoped he wouldn’t invite me back when the kitchen had been done over; the place didn’t have a fire escape. But seeing him smile when his nephew had toddled into the room had been worth a little spinning. It had been like a sudden bloom in the desert.

  The smile was gone by the time we were seated again at the table. “No job never meant nothing to me, not even this one, till that boy come along. That’s how come I’m talking to you.”

  “I was under the impression I came here to talk to you.”

  “How bad you want to see Mr. Tony and Mr. Carlo?” He lifted the jug.

  I put my palm over my glass. I had put in two years’ penal servitude at the Detroit Times, running steadily more dotty errands for William Randolph Hearst, for agreeing to something with a full glass in front of me.

  “I’m just doing someone a favor,” I said. “It’s not even part of my job. I’ve eaten your wife’s cornbread and I’ve grinned at your brother’s son, but if the cops nabbed me for driving under the influence of your homemade burgundy tonight I wouldn’t be able to get myself out of jail, let alone that boy’s father.”

  “Marcus got ninety-nine years in Jackson for slitting a man’s throat for writing down the wrong number when he took his dollar. It weren’t the first man he kilt and if all it took to spring him was I raise one finger I go straight to Mr. Carlo’s tailor and axe him to sew ’em all together tight. It ain’t him I want out. It’s me. You know Stuart Leadbeater?”

  I felt dizzy again. So many names had been buzzing through my head lately I was about to give up swatting them. It must have shown on my face, because Battle went on without waiting for an answer.

  “He a lawyer with the city. I don’t know what he does there, but he had something on with that crime committee that come through here a few years back. I guess that’s how come he knows so much about Mr. Tony and Mr. Carlo and the people that works for them. Anyway he’s running for county prosecutor or somesuch.”

  I nodded. I recognized the name now vaguely.

  “He come here to my home last month. All dressed up he was, and polite. Brung a stuffed turtle for little Charlie. Said he knows me through Mr. Carlo, which could be, I seen men dressed up like him come and go back of the Highwayman’s. I axe him to sit down and drink some of my wine, but he says no thanks, he just come to axe me a question. I say, what question? He says does I think a Communist should have the right to raise a child in the U.S. of A.? I say no sir, I doesn’t. He says then what does I think I’m doing raising my nephew?”

  “You’re a Communist?”

  “That’s what I say. I say, I’m a Communist? He says according to the policy of the House, uh …”

  “The House Un-American Activities Committee?” It was the first time I’d pronounced the phrase without smiling. The first time I’d heard it I’d wondered out loud if there were a corresponding Un-Russian Activities Committee in the USSR.

  “Yeah, them. He says according to their policy, any citizen aware of treasonous activity who fails to report that activity to the proper authorities is himself guilty of treason.” He closed his eyes as he picked through the thicket of words; a boy reciting the state capitals by rote.

  “What treasonous activity?”

  “That’s what I say. I say, what treasonous activity? That’s when I find out the World Wrestling Guild is under congressional investigation as a suspected front for the American Communist Party.” It was a larger crop of syllables than he was accustomed to harvesting and it had him sweating worse than the bout he had fought that evening.

  “What good are professional wrestlers to the Communists?”

  “I didn’t think to axe that one, but he tells me anyway. Mr. Stuart Leadbeater, he likes to talk. You know when wrestlers get on the TV and start calling each other names, saying how they’s fixing to tie each other in knots and things at the Olympia Saturday night at seven-thirty? Mr. Stuart Leadbeater he says they’re talking in code.”

  “Code.”

  “You know, like Orphan Annie on the radio, relaying military information and such. That’s when they ain’t corrupting the folks watching at home, feeding them all that pinko shit instead of just telling ’em when and where Dick da Bruiser’s fixing to twist off Haystack Calhoun’s head and stuff it up his ass.”

  “He thinks that?”

  “Shit, who know what a lawyer’s thinking? All’s I know is if I don’t start paying attention to who’s running down the U.S. of A. in the locker-room and taking down their names and giving ’em to Mr. Stuart Leadbeater he going to put my name on a list and give it to the newspapers and TV. Little Charlie, he can’t read but he likes to look at pictures in the paper. One day he turns a page and sees mine with a hammer and sickle next to it.”

  “Stop worrying about it. The press isn’t any better now than it was when I left it, but they’re not stupid enough to mouthpiece some city shyster with his name on a ballot.”

  “That’s what you say. I tell Mr. Carlo about it, he puts his arm around my shoulders and says if it looks like that’s going to happen he’s going to have to let me go on account of the way it would look.”

  I shook my head, slowly to keep down the sloshing. “A gangster with public relations worries. I never thought I’d live that long.”

  “I don’t know what them are. Mr. Carlo he says commies means feds and he don’t want no trouble with feds. Feds got Frankie Orr kicked out of the country. Handle it, he says. I don’t care how, just handle it. I can’t fight no lawyer, mister. I didn’t even finish high school.” The hostility was gone from his eyes. Now they belonged to a diseased bull that had no concept of what was happening to it.

  “I finished college and I can’t fight a lawyer any better than you. I’m no fixer.”

  “You’re tight with Henry Ford the Second. That’s what you said. Whose town is this here if it ain’t Henry Ford the Second’s?”

  “I was putting on some at Olympia,” I said. “I was invited to lunch with him once. I didn’t even eat. For that matter, neither did he. I’m just one more Indian in a great big tribe. If I asked him to fix a lawyer for a professional wrestler I know he wouldn’t even bother to laugh me out of his office. He’d just push a button and someone else would come in and do it for him. I’m sorry, Battle. I want to talk to your bosses, but not bad enough to promise something I can’t even dream of delivering.”

  He said nothing. There was nothing on his face; not hurt, not anger. A child should have that much empty space to draw pictures on.

  “If it means anything, I think Leadbeater is all blow. Wrestling is big right now and he’s looking for a little reflected light. Chances are he’s made the same pitch to every wrestler on the circuit. If you don’t tumble he’ll just draw a line through you
r name and go on to the next.”

  “You believe that?”

  I thought about it. I shook my head again and to hell with the liquid splashing around inside. “No. When they get that political germ they’re like bull terriers. They aren’t trained to let go to begin with.”

  He nodded then, and went on nodding as if he’d forgotten to stop. He wasn’t the lug he let on. If they gave out diplomas for knowing about men and evil there would be sheepskin all over the streets of Blacktown. “What you want with Mr. Tony and Mr. Carlo?”

  “The same thing Stuart Leadbeater wanted with you. I just want to ask them one question.”

  There was a long silence. Finally he said, “I don’t guess I get to hear it.”

  “It won’t mean anything to anyone who doesn’t have the answer I want.”

  “You got a number I can call?”

  I fished a Ford Motor Company business card out of my wallet and wrote my home number on the back of it. “Anytime after six.” I held it out. When he didn’t take it I laid it on a dry spot on the table. I was standing now, but he wasn’t looking up at me. He wasn’t looking at anything there in the room.

  “I call you,” he said. “It might be a while. I don’t talk to them that often.”

  “You heard me when I said I can’t help you.”

  “Maybe I had to talk about it. Maybe that’s worth more than shit.”

  “Maybe not.”

  He stopped nodding.

  “I’ll make some calls,” I said. “I used to know some people. It probably won’t come to anything, but the more people know what Leadbeater’s up to, the better that might be for you.”

  He didn’t say thanks. I was glad for that. I thanked him for the meal and asked him to say good-bye to Mrs. Battle and took my Mackinaw off the peg. The hallway outside the apartment smelled of old meals and human waste. The eternal cycle.

  15

  THE SAYING WENT THAT you could set your seasonal calendar by the changes in Michigan’s climate. When the wind lashed your face like a willow branch when you turned a corner, it was the first of March. When you awoke in a puddle of grease with your eyes gummed shut, July had come. Snowflakes the size of silver dollars outside the window meant you had three weeks’ shopping before Christmas. And when the sopping fog that drifted north from the marshland bordering the Ford River Rouge plant burned off before you left the house, it was time to take your straw hat and striped blazer out of storage. On just such a morning, I rode an upholstered elevator with a chrome steel frame from the echoing ground floor of the Ford Administration Center to the twelfth floor. My companions, if you’re the kind that bothers to note details, were Israel Zed, Henry Ford II, and four of the gray-suited young men who had helped exhume the company that had put the world on wheels from the La Brea Tarpits of its founder’s own making.