Thunder City (7 page)

He had finished his meal and was reading the book he had brought, volume III of Gibbon, when he became aware that Bernardo, his waiter, was standing in front of his table. The old fellow was reluctant to interrupt his reading by addressing him or clearing his throat.

“Yes?” He marked his place in the book with his finger.

“Your pardon, Don Salvatore. A young gentleman wishes to approach your table.”

Borneo looked past the fat waiter but did not recognize the stocky young man standing inside the entrance. He wore work clothes stained with grease and sweat.

“Did he say what his business is?”

“No, sir.” Bernardo appeared mortified that he had not this information to report.

“What is his name?”

The waiter closed his eyes, the better to concentrate upon the pronunciation. “Harlan Crownover.”

“Crownover?”

“Si, Don Salvatore. That is what he said.”

Borneo closed his book. “Tell the young gentleman I would be delighted if he would join me. And please bring us a bottle of your best Chianti.”

“Chianti?” The fat fellow beamed.

“Yes, Bernardo. On certain occasions, health must walk behind.”

A
T THE DAWN OF THE
century, news items relating to the manufacture and operation of automobiles were researched and written by sports reporters. Articles on “motoring” appeared beside photographs of gangle-jointed baseball pitchers and lists of first-, second-, and third-place finishers in the bicycle races on Belle Isle. Motormen were identified as fellows in goggles, ankle-length dusters, and leather gauntlets, a uniform as distinctive as the leather helmets and padding worn by college football players, and their arcane jargon peppered their interviews with the frequency of
knucklers
and
breadbaskets
in boxing pieces.

Like most sporting men, these figures, manufacturers and race-car drivers alike, congregated in places that catered to them in herds. When Ransom Olds’s auto plant on Jefferson burned to the ground and the owner was sought for comment, when the rumor took flight that Henry Ford had decided to make a third run at the automobile business and reporters wanted to ask him why this attempt should be any more successful than the others, when one or the other of the Dodge brothers was out on bail on a complaint of discharging a firearm in a crowded restaurant and his side of the story was required, the men on the sports desks at the
News, Times,
and
Free Press
had only to send their reporters to one of five bars set yards apart along Detroit’s Campus Martius downtown. This was the toplofty designation set aside for the stretch of Woodward Avenue where the Seventh and Twentieth Michigan marched on their way to put down the Southern Rebellion, and where older residents remembered gathering in 1865 to bow their heads in memory of the martyred Abraham Lincoln.

The Normandie, around the corner on Congress, offered a Louis Quatorze atmosphere of gilded paneling, a Brussels carpet, and bottles of imported liqueur, sparkling in rainbow colors along the back bar. On Woodward, Louie Schneider’s served dark ale and bitter German beers beneath Wagnerian prints, with the smell of sauerkraut sunk stud-deep into the walls. The Metropole was redolent of good cigars and aged brandy, its woodwork polished to an improbable finish, as if mirrors had been melted and poured over every horizontal surface. Up the block, across from the white porcelain and gleaming stainless steel of Sanders’ ice cream store, stood Churchill’s, paneled in mahogany, trimmed with brass, and decorated with cut crystal and Julius Rolshoven’s
Brunette Venus
reclining in nothing but a beaded frame behind the bar. The illuminati of the motor crowd went to the other places to celebrate the invention of a new fuel pump or to commiserate with one another upon a bank foreclosure; the vintage wines and single-malt Scotches of Churchill’s were reserved for impressing prospective partners or closing a deal involving thousands. Most of the auto men were separated by only a few years from a time when the batwing doors at the end of the entryway were as close as they dared come in their greasy overalls and muddy work boots.

But ever and again they returned to the Pontchartrain. In the bar of that upstart hotel, in the company of prizefighters in photographs and Theodore Roosevelt’s abstemious portrait scowling above the beer pulls, they drank, ate the free lunch, compared war stories, and to the chagrin of hotel manager Bill Chittenden, who feared for the Persian rugs in the lobby, occasionally brought in pieces of their engines for the admiration and advice of their colleagues. There were dents all over the bar’s glossy oaken top where pistons had slipped through oily fingers and where manifolds and short blocks had been heaved up and slammed down with too much force. Most bars smelled of beer and cigars and moustache wax; the Pontchartrain smelled also of gasoline.

Harlan Crownover found the bar nearly deserted at half past three Saturday afternoon. He’d expected nothing else, but he’d hoped for better. His news was too good not to share, but too big to wait until evening, when
the
ball game let out at Bennett Park and the room filled with friends and strangers stinking of bleacher sweat and mustard, rushing the season by wearing straw boaters before Memorial Day; the Jefferson Avenue elite, most of whom would not set foot in the Pontchartrain, sniffed and said the next thing you knew some motorman would show up at the opera house in a woolen bathing suit.

At that hour, Harlan shared the dim interior with the bartender, a new man whose name he hadn’t yet learned, a pair of strangers in derbies smoking cigars over brandy snifters in a booth at the back, and Horace Dodge, seated at the bar with a shot glass in his hand. Harlan sighed and went over to sit next to him. In general he found the Dodges, John and his brother Horace, loud, obstreperous ruffians, whose natural inclination to seek trouble wherever it resided, and to create it where it did not, was refined by drink into methods of torment not normally encountered outside the child’s battlefield of the playground. No one who told the story was sure whether it was John or Horace who had fired his revolver at the feet of a bartender at Schneider’s in order to persuade him to demonstrate an Irish jig, but it sounded more like John, who of the two was the more honest bully. Horace was the kind who crept up behind a victim on hands and knees for his partner to push the fellow over his back.

This Harlan had learned from observation rather than experience, for he was exempt from their hectoring by reason of his birth. These two sons of the owner of a machine shop in rural Niles, Michigan, were always polite in their rough-hewn way to Harlan, a second-generation heir to an American business dynasty, whose father had saved the company from ruin and in the process created a national institution. To them he was old nobility, and their behavior toward him was the traditional bowing and scraping of the typical bully before a power greater than his. If they called him by his first name and pounded him on the back in greeting, it was merely an American face-saving substitute for tugging their forelocks. They were equal parts proud of having attracted his company and contemptuous of him for having lowered himself to associate with the likes of them. He in his turn found them as comfortable to be around as a pair of iron stoves stoked up to white heat.

Horace’s round fleshy face, when he turned to answer Harlan’s greeting, was flushed as deep as the flame-colored roots of his hair, a lock of which had sprung free from the sweatband of his derby and dangled Napoleon-like over his bulbous forehead. The flush, together with the pink tint in the whites of his eyes, indicated that the shot glass in his hand had been filled more than once. The brothers, beefy and running to fat, still in their thirties but with broken blood vessels in their cheeks as if they’d been drinking heavily for forty years, had big appetites and thirsts to match. The hand with which Horace took Harlan’s in a bone-pulverizing grip was broken-knuckled, with years of grease under the nails, and nicked all over with old white-healed scars and fresh bleeding ones; owners of one of the most successful machine shops in the Midwest, the Dodges couldn’t resist picking up a wrench and barking their knuckles alongside those of their employees. Harlan considered this democratic streak their one saving grace.

He didn’t bother to ask Horace what he was drinking.

He and John invariably started their day with boilermakers, then around noon jettisoned the beer in favor of straight rye. Harlan, who disliked strong drink, ordered a bock.

“I got the money,” he said, when the beer had been brought and the bartender had retired to the opposite end of the bar.

“No shit, how much?” Horace raised his glass and knocked the top off a fresh refill.

“Five thousand.”

“I’ll be damned. From the old man?”

“No.”

“Not the bank. They all run when they hear Henry’s name.”

“No.” He swallowed some beer and tried not to make a face. Ford’s temperance was a raw spot with both Dodges and he didn’t want his potential partners to think he was opposed to alcohol. “Do you know if Mr. Ford is coming in today?”

“What for? He don’t drink, he don’t eat, he don’t smoke. The only reason he makes cars is so he don’t have to stay home and fuck.” He jerked down the rest of his drink in one movement and signaled the bartender with a finger.

“Why do you do business with him if you disapprove of him?”

“I don’t disapprove of no one. John and me are the kind that other folks disapprove of. Ford’s all right, I guess. If he works out that problem with the rear axle he might even sell somebody a car. I just don’t like no one preaching at me any day but Sunday.”

“He’s a bit of a stick.”

“That’s why he ran away from his old man’s farm. If he stayed put longer than a minute, somebody would of strung a fence to him.”

“Where’s John?” It occurred to Harlan as he asked the question that he’d never before seen the brothers separated. Most of the time they even dressed identically, as if they were twins.

“Learning to be a typewriter.”

“A what?”

“He went and bought him a typewriting machine and locked himself up with it for two days, but he said he couldn’t bang it any faster than a turtle fucking a snail. He went and enrolled himself in a course at the YMCA.”

“Can’t he afford a secretary?”

“He says dictating letters and then having them typed and then reading them takes too long. I think he just likes having another contraption to play with. I bet he took it apart and put it back together three times in them two days. Also it keeps him from thinking about Ivy.” John Dodge’s wife had died the previous October. His and Horace’s mother, seventy and confined to a wheelchair, had promptly moved into John’s house to care for his three children.

“He’s going to work himself to death.”

“If he does, he’ll die rich. Me too. Every penny we make goes back into the plant. We’re putting up a new building at Monroe and Hastings.”

“I wondered what was going in there. What was wrong with the Boydell Building?”

“It shrunk. We just took over all the machinery at Canadian Cycle and Motor.”

“You bought them?”

He drank and shook his head. “They swapped us their equipment for the royalties they owed me for that bicycle ball bearing I invented. We needed a place to put it, so we’re building one.”

“It seems like the only industry that’s doing any building in this town is automobiles. I wish I could get my father to open his eyes.”

“Well, you can forget that.”

Other customers were trailing in. Harlan didn’t recognize any of the faces, although Horace nodded to several and twisted around on his stool once, to pump the hand and slap the shoulder of a thick-necked young man in a gray flannel suit with a humorous expression on his face. When the fellow left to claim a booth, Harlan asked who he was.

“Barney Everitt. He runs the upholstery shop at Olds.”

“Olds burned down.”

“Sooner or later everything does. That don’t mean you leave the business. And just because your old man don’t throw in with you don’t mean you got to go it alone. John and I took over the shop because the old man couldn’t juggle the books with both hands and his feet.”

Harlan laughed and spun his glass between his palms. “I could never do that.”

“Why the hell not? If we didn’t, the shop would of closed down. Family’s family, but a man’s business is his living.”

“Crownover Coaches isn’t a machine shop in Niles.”

“Suit yourself. You can’t stop a man from hanging himself if he’s bound and determined, John says.” Horace drank.

Henry Ford walked in ten minutes later. Lean and bony-looking in a charcoal three-piece suit too heavy for the weather and a round collar, he appeared taller than he was, and older than his years, his hawk nose, deep-set eyes, and straight slash of a mouth giving him the resemblance of a Maine farmer dressed for church. Horace spotted him first and hailed him. Harlan saw a brief expression of pain cross Ford’s face when he recognized the younger Dodge. Recovering quickly, he strode over and shook the man’s hand. Horace’s bone-mauling grasp appeared not to distress him. When it came Harlan’s turn to stand and greet the newcomer, he found out why; years of tinkering in his backyard with wrenches and pliers and countless laps with his hands gripping the wheel of a racing car had strung Ford’s fingers with steel wire. Harlan’s own loading-dock grip barely answered.

“I want to talk to you about that rear axle,” Horace said.

“I’m working on it,” Ford said.

“I got a couple of ideas.”

“So have I.” His eyes moved nervously in their sockets. They had a steely sheen, not unlike Horace’s patented ball bearings. “Mr. Crownover and I have a spot of business to discuss.”

Harlan, who had not had an appointment with Ford, responded to the implied plea. He spotted the two derby-hatted strangers sliding out of their boom and, excusing himself to Horace, steered Ford in that direction, cutting off John Kelsey, the wheel maker, and a companion. Kelsey muttered an oath, but without conviction; Harlan had heard the man was too tenderhearted even to expect anyone but himself to wash his underwear. An unconventional business attracted unconventional men.