Wheels

by Arthur Hailey

  The policeman’s face bulged again with anger. If he had not been there, the black cop knew, his partner would have smashed his fist into the frail young black face leering at him.

  The black cop told Rollie Knight, “Beat it! You flap your mouth too much.”

  Back in the prowl car the other policeman fumed, “So help me, I’ll nail that bastard.”

  The black officer thought: And so you will, probably tomorrow or the next day when you’ve got your regular sidekick back, and he’ll look the other way if there’s a beating or an arrest on some trumped-up charge. There had been plenty of other vendettas of the same kind.

  On impulse, the black cop, who was behind the wheel, said, “Hold it! I’ll be back.”

  As he got out of the car, Rollie Knight was fifty yards away.

  “Hey, you!” When the young black man turned, the officer beckoned, then walked to meet him.

  The black cop leaned toward Rollie Knight, his stance threatening. But he said quietly, “My partner’s out to get you, and he will. You’re a stupid jerk for letting your mouth run off, and I don’t owe you favors. All the same, I’m warning you: Stay out of sight, or better—get out of town ‘till the man cools.”

  “A Judas nigger cop! Why’d I take the word from you?”

  “No reason.” The policeman shrugged. “So let what’s coming come. No skin off me.”

  “How’d I leave? Where’d I get wheels, the bread?” Though spoken with a sneer, the query was a shade less hostile.

  “Then don’t leave. Keep out of sight, the way I said.”

  “Ain’t easy here, man.”

  No, it was not easy, as the black cop knew. Not easy to remain unnoticed through each long day and night when someone wanted you and others knew where you were. Information came cheap if you knew the pipelines of the inner city; all it took was the price of a fix, the promise of a favor, even the right kind of threat. Loyalty was not a plant which flourished here. But being somewhere else, absence for part of the time, at least, would help. The policeman asked, “Why aren’t you working?”

  Rollie Knight grinned. “You hear me tell your pig friend …”

  “Save the smart talk. You want work?”

  “Maybe.” But behind the admission was the knowledge that few jobs were open to those with criminal records like Rollie Knight’s.

  “The car plants are hiring,” the black cop said.

  “That’s honky land.”

  “Plenty of the blood work there.”

  Rollie Knight said grudgingly, “I tried one time. Some whitey fink said no.”

  “Try again. Here.” From a tunic pocket the black cop pulled a card. It had been given him, the day before, by a company employment office man he knew. It had the address of a hiring hall, a name, some hours of opening.

  Rollie Knight crumpled the card and thrust it in a pocket. “When I feel like it, baby, I’ll piss on it.”

  “Suit yourself,” the black cop said. He walked back to the car.

  His white partner looked at him suspiciously. “What was all that?”

  He answered shortly, “I cooled him down,” but did not elaborate.

  The black policeman had no intention of being bullied, but neither did he want an argument—at least, not now. Though Detroit’s populace was forty percent black, only in most recent years had its police force ceased to be nearly a hundred percent white, and within the police department old influences still predominated. Since the 1967 Detroit riots, under public pressure the number of black policemen had increased, but blacks were not yet strong enough in numbers, rank, or influence to offset the powerful, white-oriented Detroit Police Officers Association, or even to be sure of a fair deal, depart-mentally, in any black-white confrontation.

  Thus, the patrol continued in an atmosphere of hostile uncertainty, a mood reflecting the racial tensions of Detroit itself.

  Bravado in individuals, black or white, is often only skin shallow, and Rollie Knight, inside his soul, was frightened.

  He was frightened of the white cop whom he had unwisely baited, and he realized now that his reckless, burning hatred had briefly got the better of ordinary caution. Even more, he feared a return to prison where one more conviction was likely to send him for a long time. Rollie had three convictions behind him, and two prison terms; whatever happened now, all hope of leniency was gone.

  Only a black man in America knows the true depths of animal despair and degradation to which the prison system can reduce a human being. It is true that white prisoners are often treated badly, and suffer also, but never as consistently or universally as black. It is also true that some prisons are better or worse than other prisons, but this is like saying that certain parts of hell are ten degrees hotter or cooler than others. The black man, whichever prison he is in, knows that humiliation and abuse are standard, and that physical brutality—sometimes involving major injury—is as normal as defecating. And when the prisoner is frail—as Rollie Knight was frail, partly from a poor physique which he was born with, and partly from accumulated malnutrition over years—the penalties and anguish can be greater still.

  Coupled, at this moment, with these fears was the young Negro’s knowledge that a police search of his room would reveal a small supply of marijuana. He smoked a little grass himself, but peddled most, and while rewards were slight, at least it was a means to eat because, since coming out of prison several months ago, he had found no other way. But the marijuana was all the police would need for a conviction, with jail to follow.

  For this reason, later the same night while nervously wondering if he was already watched, Rollie Knight dumped the marijuana in a vacant lot. Now, instead of a tenuous hold on the means to live from day to day, he was aware that he had none.

  It was this awareness which, next day, caused him to uncrumple the card which the black cop had given him and go to the auto company hiring center in the inner city. He went without hope because … (and this is the great, invisible gap which separates the “have-nots-and-never-hads” of this world, like Rollie Knight, from the “haves,” including some who try to understand their less-blessed brothers yet, oh so sadly, fail) … he had lived so long without any reason to believe in anything, that hope itself was beyond his mental grasp.

  He also went because he had nothing else to do.

  The building near 12th Street, like a majority of others in the inner city’s grim “black bottom,” was decrepit and unkempt, with shattered windows, of which only a few had been boarded over for inside protection from the weather. Until recently the building had been disused and was disintegrating rapidly. Even now, despite patching and rough painting, its decay continued, and those who went to work there daily sometimes wondered if the walls would be standing when they left at night.

  But the ancient building, and two others like it, had an urgent function. It was an outpost for the auto companies’ “hard core” hiring programs.

  So-called hard core hiring had begun after the Detroit riots and was an attempt to provide work for an indigent nucleus of inner city people—mostly black—who, tragically and callously, had for years been abandoned as unemployable. The lead was taken by the auto companies. Others followed. Naturally, the auto companies claimed altruism as their motive and, from the moment the hiring programs started, public relations staffs proclaimed their employers’ public spirit More cynical observers claimed that the auto world was running scared, fearing the effect of a permanently strife-ridden community on their businesses. Others predicted that when smoke from the riot-torn, burning city touched the General Motors Building in ’67 (as it did), and flames came close, some form of public service was assured. The prediction came true, except that Ford moved first.

  But whatever the motivations, three things generally were agreed: the hard core hiring program was good. It ought to have happened twenty years before it did. Without the ’67 riots, it might never have happened at all.

  On the whole, allowing for errors and defeats, the program
worked. Auto companies lowered their hiring standards, letting former dead-beats in. Predictably, some fell by the way, but a surprising number proved that all a deadbeat needed was a chance. By the time Rollie Knight arrived, much had been learned by employers and employed.

  He sat in a waiting room with about forty others, men and women, ranged on rows of chairs. The chairs, like the applicants for jobs, were of assorted shapes and sizes, except that the applicants had a uniformity: all were black. There was little conversation. For Rollie Knight the waiting took an hour. During part of it he dozed off, a habit he had acquired and which helped him, normally, to get through empty days.

  When, eventually, he was ushered into an interview cubicle—one of a half dozen lining the waiting area—he was still sleepy and yawned at the interviewer, facing him across a desk.

  The interviewer, a middle-aged, chubby black man, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, a sports jacket and dark shirt, but no tie, said amiably, “Gets tiring waiting. My daddy used to say, ‘A man grows wearier sitting on his backside than chopping wood.’ He had me chop a lot of wood that way.”

  Rollie Knight looked at the other’s hands. “You ain’t chopped much lately.”

  “Well, now,” the interviewer said, “you’re right. And we’ve established something else: You’re a man who looks at things and thinks. But are you interested in chopping wood, or doing work that’s just as hard?”

  “I dunno.” Rollie was wondering why he had come here at all. Soon they would get to his prison record, and that would be the end of it.

  “But you’re here because you want a job?” The interviewer glanced at a yellow card which a secretary outside had filled in. “That’s correct, isn’t it, Mr. Knight?”

  Rollie nodded. The “Mr.” surprised him. He could not remember when he had last been addressed that way.

  “Let’s begin by finding out about you.” The interviewer drew a printed pad toward him. Part of the new hiring technique was that applicants no longer had to complete a pre-employment questionnaire themselves. In the past, many who could barely read or write were turned away because of inability to do what modern society thought of as a standard function: fill in a form.

  They went quickly through the basic questions.

  Name: Knight, Rolland Joseph Louis. Age: 29. Address: he gave it, not mentioning that the mean, walk-up room belonged to someone else who had let him share it for a day or two, and that the address might not be good next week if the occupant decided to kick Rollie out. But then a large part of his life had alternated between that kind of accommodation, or a flophouse, or the streets when he had nowhere else.

  Parents: He recited the names. The surnames differed since his parents had not married or ever lived together. The interviewer made no comment; it was normal enough. Nor did Rollie add: He knew his father because his mother had told him who he was, and Rollie had a vague impression of a meeting once: a burly man, heavy-jowled and scowling, with a facial scar, who had been neither friendly nor interested in his son. Years ago, Rollie had heard his father was in jail as a lifer. Whether he was still there, or dead, he had no idea. As for his mother, with whom he lived, more or less, until he left home for the streets at age fifteen, he believed she was now in Cleveland or Chicago. He had not seen or heard from her for several years.

  Schooling: Until grade eight. He had had a quick, bright mind at school, and still had when something new came up, but realized how much a black man needed to learn if he was to beat the stinking honky system, and now he never would.

  Previous employment: He strained to remember names and places. There had been unskilled jobs after leaving school—a bus boy, shoveling snow, washing cars. Then in 1957, when Detroit was hit by a national recession, there were no jobs of any kind and he drifted into idleness, punctuated by shooting craps, hustling, and his first conviction: auto theft.

  The interviewer asked, “Do you have a police record, Mr. Knight?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m afraid I’ll need the details. And I think I should tell you that we check up afterward, so it looks better if we get it correctly from you first.”

  Rollie shrugged. Sure the sons-of-bitches checked. He knew that, without being given all this grease.

  He gave the employment guy the dope on the auto theft rap first. He was nineteen then. He’d been put on a year’s probation.

  Never mind now about the way it happened. Who cared that the others in the car had picked him up, that he’d gone along, as a backseat passenger, for laughs, and later the cops had stopped them, charging all six occupants with theft? Before going into court next day, Rollie was offered a deal: Plead guilty and he’d get probation. Bewildered, frightened, he agreed. The deal was kept. He was in and out of court in seconds. Only later had he learned that with a lawyer to advise him—the way a white kid would have had—a not guilty plea would probably have got him off, with no more than a warning from the judge. Nor had he been told that pleading guilty would ensure a criminal record, to sit like an evil genie on his shoulder the remainder of his life.

  It also made the sentence for the next conviction tougher.

  The interviewer asked, “What happened after that?”

  “I was in the pen.” It was a year later. Auto theft again. This time for real, and there had been two other times he wasn’t caught. The sentence: two years.

  “Anything else?”

  This was the clincher. Always, after this, they closed the books—no dice, no work. Well, they could stick their stinking job; Rollie still wondered why he had come. “Armed robbery. I drew five to fifteen, did four years in Jackson Pen.”

  A jewelry store. Two of them had broken in at night. All they got was a handful of cheap watches and were caught as they came out. Rollie had been stupid enough to carry a .22. Though he hadn’t pulled it from his pocket, the fact that it was found on him ensured the graver charge.

  “You were released for good behavior?”

  “No. The warden got jealous. He wanted my cell.”

  The middle-aged Negro interviewer looked up. “I dig jokes. They make a dull day brighter. But it was good behavior?”

  “If you say so.”

  “All right, I’ll say so.” The interviewer wrote it down.

  “Is your behavior good now, Mr. Knight? What I mean is, are you in any more trouble with the police?”

  Rollie shook his head negatively. He wasn’t going to tell this Uncle Tom about last night, that he was in trouble if he couldn’t keep clear of the white pig he had spooked, and who would bust him some way, given half a chance, using scum bag honky law. The thought was a reminder of his earlier fears, which now returned: the dread of prison, the real reason for coming here. The interviewer was asking more questions, busier than a dog with fleas writing down the answers. Rollie was surprised they hadn’t stopped, baffled that he wasn’t already outside on the street, the way it usually went after he mouthed the words “armed robbery.”

  What he didn’t know—because no one had thought to tell him, and he was not a reader of newspapers or magazines—was that hard core hiring had a new, less rigid attitude to prison records, too.

  He was sent to another room where he stripped and had a physical.

  The doctor, young, white, impersonal, working fast, took time out to look critically at Rollie’s bony body, his emaciated cheeks. “Whatever job you get, use some of what they pay you to eat better, and put some weight on, otherwise you won’t last at it. You wouldn’t last, anyway, in the foundry where most people go from here. Maybe they can put you in Assembly. I’ll recommend it.”

  Rollie listened contemptuously, already hating the system, the people in it. Who in hell did this smug whitey kid think he was? Some kind of God? If Rollie didn’t need bread badly, some work for a while, he’d walk out now, and screw ’em. One thing was sure: whatever job these people gave him, he wouldn’t stay on it one day longer than he had to.

  Back through the waiting room, in the cubicle again. The origina
l interviewer announced, “The doctor says you’re breathing, and when you opened your mouth he couldn’t see daylight, so we’re offering you a job. It’s in final assembly. The work is hard, but pay is good—the union sees to that. Do you want it?”

  “I’m here, ain’t I?” What did the son-of-a-bitch expect? A bootlick job?

  “Yes, you’re here, so I’ll take that to mean yes. There will be some weeks of training; you get paid for that, too. Outside, they’ll give you details—when to start, where to go. Just one other thing.”

  Here came the preaching. Sure as glory, Rollie Knight could smell it. Maybe this white nigger was a Holy Roller on the side.

  The interviewer took off his horn-rimmed glasses, leaned over the desk and put his fingertips together. “You’re smart. You know the score. You know you’re getting a break, and it’s because of the times, the way things are. People, companies like this one, have a conscience they didn’t always have. Never mind that it’s late; it’s here, and a lot of other things are changing. You may not believe it, but they are.” The chubby, sports-jacketed interviewer picked up a pencil, rolled it through his fingers, put it down. “Maybe you never had a break before, and this is the first. I think it is. But I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t tell you that with your record it’s the only one you’ll get, leastways here. A lot of guys pass through this place. Some make it after they leave; others don’t. Those who do are the ones who want to.” The interviewer looked hard at Rollie. “Stop being a damn fool, Knight, and grab this chance. That’s the best advice you’ll get today.” He put out a hand. “Good luck.”

  Reluctantly, feeling as if he had been suckered but not knowing exactly how, Rollie took the proffered hand.

  Outside, just the way the man said, they told him how to go to work.

  The training course, sponsored jointly by the company and through federal grants, was eight weeks long. Rollie Knight lasted a week and a half.

  He received the first week’s paycheck, which was more money than he had possessed in a long time. Over the following weekend he tied one on. However, on Monday he managed to awaken early and catch a bus which took him to the factory training center on the other side of town.