Edsel

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I’m asking the Rembrandts downstairs to concentrate on the front of the car and leave the back out of the ads.”

  “Change of heart?”

  “Choice of evils. As weird as it looks up front, those boomerang taillights look like a pair of inflamed ingrown toenails. People can only take so much that’s new and revolutionary at a time.”

  “Why don’t we just hide the whole thing behind a bush and save us all a lot of trouble?” His smile was still in place. I think he’d forgotten he was wearing it.

  “I didn’t say it was bad. People get scared when you throw something at them from left field; that’s why those bullet-shaped concept cars never go into production. They make jokes. We don’t want them laughing so hard they can’t sign the finance papers.”

  “It’s your campaign. I just hope your sour attitude toward the car isn’t going to affect your promotion.”

  “I don’t know how I feel about the car. I didn’t know how I felt about blue mouthwash, but the manufacturer sold out its warehouse in a month and re-upped with Slauson, asking for me specifically. All I did was stick a green parrot in the ad. It didn’t have anything to do with mouthwash, but it distracted people so they didn’t think they’d be gargling Windex. No salesman worth the name thinks of himself as one. When I draw up a campaign I’m a customer. Maybe they sense that. Maybe you did too and that’s why I’m selling cars instead of mouthwash.”

  “Okay, no ingrown toenails in the advertising. Anything else you want me to suggest to the boys in design? Maybe drill some holes in the front fenders?” He sat back, relaxing his mouth. I knew then why Roosevelt had selected him from among all the young geniuses in his stable to represent American interests in Palestine. He had the same control over his moods that a contortionist has over his body. I disliked him thoroughly.

  Later, in my worst humors, I would blame everything that happened with the Edsel on Reader’s Digest.

  In its issue for July 1954, the magazine, which was too small to hide behind at the dentist’s office but too large to carry in one’s pocket, ran an article under the byline of an M.D. warning of the health hazards attendant upon smoking cigarettes, including the possibility of contracting lung cancer. Readers who believed that sort of thing either quit cold or switched their allegiance to Winston, which had hit the market recently with a dandy little gimmick involving a built-in plug filled with shredded fibers designed to “filter” the impurities out of the tobacco lest they defile unsullied tastebuds. The effect, some smokers told me, was similar to sucking the stuff through a bedsheet, but this was the market that turned cartwheels over Ivory Soap because the careless way it was milled caused it to float in the bathtub, and the feature caught on with some who didn’t want to give up the weed entirely. Pall Mall, Lucky Strike, and Chesterfield reacted to the slump in their sales by coming out with their own filtered variety. Philip Morris, ever the rebel, canceled its long-time sponsorship of I Love Lucy.

  Roger Greene, the cigarette company’s advertising director, had clucked his tongue over the faltering sales figures, decided that the television comedy’s viewers were laughing too hard to take advantage of the corporation’s product, and severed the association with a polite statement to the press extolling the program’s virtues but declining to give reasons for bugging out.

  This was the show America stayed home to watch, the one whose episode surrounding the birth of Little Ricky knocked Eisenhower’s inauguration clean off the Nielsen charts; the show whose producers squared off with Senator McCarthy and came out on top in the popularity contest when Lucille Ball stepped forward to confess a youthful membership in the Communist Party. If Tailgunner Joe couldn’t shoot down the zany redhead, how to justify her sponsor’s decision to toss the program into the groping hands of the gang of merchandisers who went to sleep nights dreaming of hearing their products’ names spoken by those pontoon-shaped lips?

  Explanations didn’t matter in the end. Although the show remained at the top of every list until it was torn literally in two by its divorcing stars, the mania toned down after the departure of its original underwriter. Call it perplexity or doubt or fear of being caught laughing after everyone else had stopped, but the funny lines and situations never again reached the heights of audience hysteria they had found in the past, and in time rang as tinny as the canned track that accompanied them.

  Philip Morris left in March 1955. That same year Winston Churchill resigned and Ike suffered his first heart attack. That confidence born of victory in Europe and Asia, which had survived the tragicomedy of Korea and the first successful atomic blast by Russia, stumbled. Housing starts fell off for the first time since Hiroshima, the birth rate slowed. Couples still shopped for new cars, but walked right past the medium beauties in the showroom, heading for the economy line at the back of the lot. Not fear, not quite that; but caution, which when spoken aloud amounted to the same thing to the biggest bull market of our century. If Lucy wasn’t invincible, who was?

  PART FOUR

  The Sixteenth Hour

  25

  WHEN I CALLED ON Carlo Ballista I had been merely reluctant to rebuild my old burned bridges to the Underworld. The prospect of a second meeting with Albert Brock after all these years inspired something closer to terror.

  Tempting as it was, I couldn’t delude myself that the lead I’d given J. W. Pierpont had banished that wizened little bloodhound from my life forever. If I didn’t have something solid for him when he came snuffling back my way, he’d leak the confidential material he’d swiped from my office and pull the plug on my future at Ford. Then there was the bone I’d promised Stuart Leadbeater to get his teeth out of Anthony Battle’s throat. Knowing all this, I still let forty-eight hours pass between the time Frank DeFilippo called me at my house offering to set up an interview with Brock and the time I called back to tell him to go ahead.

  A quarter of a century had elapsed since the day I interviewed a young striking laborer for the Banner. At the time he was bleeding from impromptu negotiations with Dearborn police and rented hoodlums involving brass knuckles and blackjacks. None of these details survived editing, and when the article appeared it had been chopped and twisted in favor of management. Brock had spent the intervening years bulling his way up from the iron seat of a Mack truck into first the local, then the national leadership of the American Steelhaulers. Under his direction the union had expanded far beyond its origins among a handful of trucking companies to embrace such unconnected occupations as airport baggage handlers, migrant farmworkers, pipefitters, Linotypists, and garment cutters. From his third-floor office among the Pewabic tiles and fussy Dutch Modern architecture of the Guardian Building, he controlled two and a half million votes, and the story was widely circulated that he had placed the country in the hands of the Republicans in 1952 after Adlai Stevenson snubbed him at a Democratic fundraiser in the Book-Cadillac Hotel.

  All this had taken twenty-five years, of which the time we had spent in each other’s company came to less than a two-hundred-thousandth part; yet I had no doubt he’d recognize and remember me as one of the last of his fellow creatures in whom he’d placed his trust and had that trust betrayed. He’d held smaller grudges as long. The local joke ran—and few laughed when it was told—that through Brock’s contacts in the Brotherhood of the Broken Windpipe, North America’s postwar freeway system was stronger for the number of these disappointments who lay buried in concrete from Portland to Poughkeepsie.

  He lived modestly in one of the older homes in St. Clair Shores, a tall narrow saltbox that would need repainting in another year, and which predated the community’s founding. This was no effort by French pioneers in bateaux, but by Jewish and Italian visionaries in long black Lincolns with Tommy guns in the trunks, seeking a safe place to raise their children away from the street wars they had fought since the Eighteenth Amendment passed. The house stood on a quarter-acre lot on one of the less fashionable streets, two blocks removed from the lake, and was a source of surp
rise for those few journalists who were granted an interview there and came expecting to find the nation’s number-one labor chief bronzing himself beside the pool of a marble villa guarded by blue-chinned lower primates in black suits with gun harnesses. Actually the guards sat around in their undershirts watching television in the four other houses that comprised the block. Brock owned them as well. Frank DeFilippo had told me that the old signal system had recently been replaced and that all that was required to seal off the block was a call to the radiophones installed in the big Chryslers parked at both ends. Vehicular roadblocks were more effective than a drawbridge and attracted less attention.

  This was a legacy of the attempts on the lives of the Reuther brothers. To date no one had challenged Brock for the Steelhaulers presidency. The rank-and-file would have voted for him three days after he was dead, counting on the rock to move.

  Having supplied Agnes’ brother-in-law with my license plate number and a description of my car, I entered the block unaccosted and parked against the curb directly in front of the house. On the lawn, a small dark-haired boy dressed like Dennis the Menace, in overalls and a striped shirt, looked up from the toy truck he was playing with as I started up the sidewalk to the front door. “Papa’s in back.”

  I thanked him and followed a path that had been worn in the grass around the side of the house. I had read somewhere that Brock’s eldest son by his first marriage had a daughter older than this four-year-old uncle. The union leader had been widowed a year or so before marrying a young lady landscape architect from Melvindale.

  At the end of the path stood a building of much more recent vintage than the house and one-fourth as large. I took it to be a garage because of the wide flayed-open doors, and it was that, but from the built-in bench that lined all three solid walls and the number and variety of tools glittering on their pegs I concluded that it was also a workshop, extremely well equipped. The rest of the space was taken up by a midnight-blue 1938 Packard convertible, as long as a pier with a tan canvas top and wire wheels. Cars had gotten smaller since the reign of its kind; I doubted the shop’s doors could have been shut with it inside. This posed no problem, as no auto thief with brains enough to cross two ignition wires would have dared to try to make off with it.

  The hood was folded up on the right side and a short blocky figure in a greasy sweatshirt and green work pants was bent over that fender, racheting a socket wrench at an awkward angle beneath a manifold I could have eaten off of and cursing in the breathless voice that came with that constricted position. Approaching, I noted that Albert Brock had gained weight since our first encounter, most of it through the middle and across the seat. Well, so had I, and my suit didn’t hide the fact as well as the ones he wore when he appeared on TV.

  I stopped on the concrete pad in front of the building, not sure whether I should move any closer or say anything. I felt suddenly as if I’d stumbled upon a bear in the middle of its feed, and I remembered a piece of advice Frank Buck had once given me, about making a lot of noise when walking through bear country because the animal didn’t take being startled with any sort of grace. Right about then my throat began to tickle. I swallowed and tried to think moist thoughts. Finally I thought, To hell with it, and coughed discreetly into my fist.

  “Hand me the pliers, will you?” Brock said then. “They’re on the bench by the headgasket.”

  Fortunately the time I had spent on the floor at River Rouge enabled me to distinguish between the headgasket and a smutty carburetor lying among its entrails a little farther down. He seized the pliers from my grasp without looking and delivered eight or ten ringing raps to something inside the engine with the heavy head. Not feeling sure enough of my ground to ask why he hadn’t just asked for one of the dozen or so hammers that hung on the walls, I said nothing. The shop smelled of old grease and new steel. Betty Grable grinned at me over a creamy shoulder from a calendar nailed above a collection of fan belts. It was a 1942 calendar, foxed and spotted with rust stains. The backs of Betty’s million-dollar legs looked ulcerated. She’d been hanging there so long I doubted that Brock was even aware of her. For the first time in my life I felt I had something in common with Betty Grable.

  The man under the hood barked a final triumphant oath, wriggled a little to place the toes of his sneakers in contact with the concrete floor, and straightened. The difference in our heights was infinitesimal. I’d forgotten how small he was, how compact the package that had grasped the flickering candle of the American labor movement and made of it a blazing torch, illuminating the dehumanizing conditions of the working man and burning away the veneer that protected his exploiters from the public. If you didn’t know any of that you’d think he was just a man of fifty, shorter than average, muscular but running to fat with graying crewcut hair and a face that hadn’t seen a razor in twenty-four hours. You might have taken him for a retired truck driver, and you’d have been right; but if you thought he was nothing more you’d have been as wrong as those broken enemies whose pieces lay strewn on Capital Hill and along the interstate. As for me, I saw little of the bruised idealist I’d spent an hour with over bootleg beer in the spring of 1931. But then I suppose he saw even less of the underfed and headline-hungry journalist he’d been with during that hour. The main difference between us was he’d invested the time between then and now propelling the world through its revolutions and rotations like a log-roller, while I’d spent it trying to hang on. It was a fearsome difference.

  “My first new car was a thirty-eight Packard.” He wiped off the socket wrench and pliers with a streaked chamois and hung them on the pegboard. “It was a black hardtop. I couldn’t afford a convertible. This one’s going to be a graduation present for my daughter. I’m putting a governor on the throttle. It’s too much car for a girl otherwise.”

  “I had a Packard. It got out and scratched.”

  He wiped his hands with the cloth, watching me. He had long since lost the baby fat that had rounded his face in youth, making it the only thing about him that wasn’t square. The corners of his mouth turned down harshly and his eyes glittered like nail heads in splintered wood. “Drink before noon?”

  “Depends on the drink.” I thought it best not to mention the diabetes. I didn’t know why.

  “Beer’s all I keep out here. If you want anything stronger we’ll have to go inside.”

  “Beer’s fine.”

  He laid the chamois on the bench, pulled open the door of a ten-year-old Westinghouse refrigerator with coils on top, took out two bottles of Schlitz, and levered off their tops with a Coca-Cola opener screwed to the bench. He handed a bottle to me. “If you want a glass, I got one here with screws and shit in it. I can empty it out.”

  “From the bottle’s okay.” I thanked him and tipped it up. The beer tasted like stewed barbed wire. It had been a long time since my last one and I’d never liked the stuff to begin with. I watched him drink and flick foam off his upper lip with a grease-stained knuckle. “About that piece in the Banner.”

  “Your editor fucked around with it. I figured that. Not right away, though. I didn’t know much about the press then. Later I learned a lot. What happened to you?”

  “Not much, unfortunately.”

  He waited for more. His silence and motionless eyes were hard to ignore but I didn’t elaborate. Effective though it was across a bargaining table, as a journalist I recognized the tactic and withstood it. Finally he took another slug from the bottle. “Frank DeFilippo said you had something important to ask. This is the first personal day I’ve taken in months, so I guess we might as well get with it.”

  I appreciated the way he phrased the command. “Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Brock. It’s about Walter Reuther.”

  “Did he send you?”

  “No, but he’s the—”

  “Because if he did you can go back and tell him—don’t tell him nothing. He’s a pissant publicity hound. When things don’t fall his way at headquarters he runs to the press and bawls his eyes ou
t. You’d think he was the only one ever got stepped on by strikebreakers, just because he had his pet photographers on hand at Miller Road. I was in Detroit General for six weeks after Wally Chrysler’s gorillas hauled me out from behind the wheel when we blockaded Dodge Main and bounced me up and down Joseph Campau, but nobody took my picture. Now they’ve named a freeway after that cocksucker Chrysler, and I got a subpoena to testify in front of the fucking McClellan Committee on labor racketeering.”

  “There weren’t any photographers around when Reuther got shot.” I hoped I sounded more bold than I felt. His casual dismissal of the ancient wrong that had given me nightmares about approaching him had surprised and relieved me, leaving me unprepared for the outburst. His face had darkened two shades and the corners of his mouth had bent down farther, pulling deep creases all the way to his nostrils. In the timbre of his voice I heard something of the haranguing tone he must have used to reach the last cauliflower ear at the extreme edge of a crowd of frostbitten and disheartened strikers when the union was young. When we were all young. The blood had been black between Reuther and Brock since that time, when the publicity-savvy UAW firebrand had aced out his meat-and-potatoes rival for the top spot in the organizing committee, deciding Brock to follow his star into the even more primitive domain of the long-haul trucker. Those who had been around long enough to remember that old feud claimed it was that same rancor that had driven Brock to the top, and his union to the national contract that remained the envy of every labor organization in the country. The implicit accusation, that there would be no Albert Brock if there were no Walter Reuther, was the fire that burned eternally without consuming.

  Calming himself, Brock ran his fingers through his hair without displacing a strand of the stiff bristly fiber. “Even so I wouldn’t put it past the fucker to forget to stand out of the way when his own man put a bullet through his window.”