Wheels

by Arthur Hailey

  “I’ve wondered, Hank,” Brett DeLosanto said. “How’d you get started with the auto parts bit?”

  “Long story.” Kreisel reached for the neat sourmash Bourbon which was his habitual drink and took an ample sip. He was relaxing and, while dressed in a well-cut business suit, had the buttons of his vest undone, revealing that he wore both suspenders and a belt. He added, “Tell you, if you like.”

  “Go ahead.” Brett had worked through the past several nights at the Design-Styling Center, had caught up with sleep this morning, and now was relishing the daytime freedom before returning to his design board later this afternoon.

  They were in a small private apartment a mile or so from the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. Because of its proximity, also, to Ford Motor Company headquarters, the apartment appeared on the books of Kreisel’s company as his “Ford liaison office.” In fact, the liaison was not with Ford but with a lissome, leggy brunette named Elsie, who lived in the apartment rent-free, was on the payroll of Kreisel’s company though she never went there, and in return made herself available to Hank Kreisel once or twice a week, or more often if he felt like it. The arrangement was easygoing on both sides. Kreisel, a considerate, reasonable man, always telephoned before putting in an appearance, and Elsie saw to it that he had priority.

  Unknown to Elsie, Hank Kreisel also had a General Motors and Chrysler liaison office, operating under the same arrangement.

  Elsie, who had prepared lunch, was in the kitchen now.

  “Hold it!” Kreisel told Brett. “Just remembered something. You know Adam Trenton?”

  “Very well.”

  “Like to meet him. Word’s out he’s a big comer. Never hurts to make, high-grade friends in this business.” The statement was characteristic of Kreisel, a mixture of directness and amiable cynicism which men, as well as women, found appealing.

  Elsie rejoined them, her every movement an overt sexuality which a simple, tight black dress accentuated. The ex-Marine patted her rump affectionately.

  “Sure, I’ll fix a meeting.” Brett grinned. “Here?”

  Hank Kreisel shook his head. “The Higgins Lake cottage. A weekend party. Let’s aim at May. You choose a date. I’ll do the rest.”

  “Okay, I’ll talk with Adam. Let you know.” When he was with Kreisel, Brett found himself using the same kind of staccato sentences as his host. As to a party, Brett had already attended several at Hank Kreisel’s cottage hideaway. They were swinging affairs which he enjoyed.

  Elsie seated herself at the table with them and resumed her lunch, her eyes moving between the two men as they talked. Brett knew, because he had been here before, that she liked to listen but seldom joined in.

  Brett inquired, “What made you think of Adam?”

  “The Orion. He okayed add-ons, I’m told. Last minute hot stuff. I’m making one of ’em.”

  “You are! Which one? The brace or floor reinforcement?”

  “Brace.”

  “Hey, I was in on that! That’s a big order.”

  Kreisel gave a twisted grin. “It’ll make me or break me. They need five thousand braces fast, like yesterday. After that, ten thousand a month. Wasn’t sure I wanted the job. Schedule’s tough. Still plenty of headaches. But they figure I’ll deliver.”

  Brett already knew of Hank Kreisel’s reputation for reliability about deliveries, a quality which auto company purchasing departments cherished. One reason for it was a talent for tooling improvisations which slashed time and cost, and while not a qualified engineer himself, Kreisel could leapfrog mentally over many who were.

  “I’ll be damned!” Brett said. “You and the Orion.”

  “Shouldn’t surprise you. Industry’s full of people crossing each other’s bridges. Sometimes pass each other, don’t even know it. Everybody sells to everybody else. GM sells steering gears to Chrysler. Chrysler sells adhesives to GM and Ford. Ford helps out with Plymouth windshields. I know a guy, a sales engineer. Lives in Flint, works for General Motors. Flint’s a GM company town. His main customer’s Ford in Dearborn—for engineering design of engine accessories. He takes confidential Ford stuff to Flint. GM guards it from their own people who’d give their ears to see it. The guy drives a Ford car—to Ford, his customer. His GM bosses buy it for him.”

  Elsie replenished Hank Kreisel’s Bourbon; Brett had declined a drink earlier.

  Brett told the girl, “He’s always telling me things I didn’t know.”

  “He knows a lot.” Her eyes, smiling, switched from the young designer’s to Kreisel’s. Brett sensed a private message pass.

  “Hey! You two like me to leave?”

  “No hurry.” The ex-Marine produced a pipe and lit it. “You want to hear about parts?” He glanced at Elsie. “Not yours, baby.” Plainly he meant: Those are for me.

  “Auto parts,” Brett said.

  “Right.” Kreisel gave his twisted grin. “Worked in an auto plant before I enlisted. After Korea, went back. Was a punch press operator. Then a foreman.”

  “You’ve made the big leagues fast.”

  “Too fast, maybe. Anyway, I’d watched how production worked—metal stampings. The Big Three are all the same. Must have the fanciest machines, high-priced buildings, big overhead, cafeterias, the rest. All that stuff makes a two-cent stamping cost a nickel.”

  Hank Kreisel drew on his pipe and wreathed himself in smoke. “So I went to Purchasing. Saw a guy I know. Told him I figured I could make the same stuff cheaper. On my own.”

  “Did they finance you?”

  “Not then, not later. Gave me a contract, though. There and then for a million little washers. When I’d quit my job I had two hundred dollars cash. No building, no machinery.” Hank Kreisel chuckled. “Didn’t sleep that night. Dead scared. Next day I tore around. Rented an old billiard hall. Showed a bank the contract and the lease; they loaned me dough to buy scrap machinery. Then I hired two other guys. The three of us fixed the machinery up. They ran it. I rushed out, got more orders.” He added reminiscently, “Been rushing ever since.”

  “You’re a saga,” Brett said. He had seen Hank Kreisel’s impressive Grosse Pointe home, his half dozen bustling plants, the converted billiard hall still one of them. He supposed, conservatively, Hank Kreisel must be worth two or three million dollars.

  “Your friend in Purchasing,” Brett said. “The one who gave you the first order. Do you ever see him?”

  “Sure. He’s still there—on salary. Same job. Retires soon. I buy him a meal sometimes.”

  Elsie asked, “What’s a saga?”

  Kreisel told her, “It’s a guy who makes it to the end of the trail.”

  “A legend,” Brett said.

  Kreisel shook his head. “Not me. Not yet.” He stopped, more thoughtful suddenly than Brett had seen him at any time before. When he spoke again his voice was slower, the words less clipped. “There’s a thing I’d like to do, and maybe it could add up to something like that if I could pull it off.” Aware of Brett’s curiosity, the ex-Marine shook his head again. “Not now. Maybe one day I’ll tell you.”

  His mood switched back. “So I made parts and made mistakes. Learned a lot fast. One thing: search out weak spots in the market. Spots where competition’s least. So I ignored new parts; too much infighting. Started making for repair, replacement, the ‘after market.’ But only items no more than twenty inches from the ground. Mostly at front and rear. And costing less than ten dollars.”

  “Why the restrictions?”

  Kreisel gave his usual knowing grin. “Most minor accidents happen to fronts and backs of cars. And down below twenty inches, all get damaged more. So more parts are needed, meaning bigger orders. That’s where parts makers hit paydirt—on long runs.”

  “And the ten-dollar limit?”

  “Say you’re doing a repair job. Something’s damaged. Costs more than ten dollars, you’ll try to fix it. Costs less, you’ll throw the old part out, use a replacement. There’s where I come in. High volume again.�
��

  It was so ingeniously simple, Brett laughed aloud.

  “I got into accessories later. And something else I learned. Take on some defense work.”

  “Why?”

  “Most parts people don’t want it. Can be difficult. Usually short runs, not much profit. But can lead to bigger things. And Internal Revenue are easier on you about tax deductions. They won’t admit it.” He surveyed his “Ford liaison office” amusedly. “But I know.”

  “Elsie’s right. There’s a whole lot you know.” Brett rose, glancing at his watch. “Back to the chariot factory! Thanks for lunch, Elsie.”

  The girl got up too, moved beside him, and took his arm. He was aware of her closeness, a warmth transmitted through the thinness of her dress. Her slim, firm body eased away, then once more pressed against his. Accidentally? He doubted it. His nostrils detected the soft scent of her hair, and Brett envied Hank Kreisel what he suspected would happen as soon as he had gone.

  Elsie said softly, “Come in any time.”

  “Hey, Hank!” Brett said. “You hear that invitation?”

  Momentarily the older man looked away, then answered gruffly, “If you accept, make sure I don’t know about it.”

  Kreisel joined him at the apartment doorway. Elsie had gone back inside.

  “I’ll fix that date with Adam,” Brett affirmed. “Call you tomorrow.”

  “Okay.” The two shook hands.

  “About that other,” Hank Kreisel said. “Meant exactly what I told you. Don’t let me know. Understand?”

  “I understand.” Brett had already memorized the number on the apartment telephone, which was unlisted. He had every intention of calling Elsie tomorrow.

  As an elevator carried Brett downward, Hank Kreisel closed and locked the apartment door from inside.

  Elsie was waiting for him in the bedroom. She had undressed and put on a sheer minikimono, held around her by a silk ribbon. Her dark hair, released, tumbled about her shoulders; her wide mouth smiled, eyes showing pleasurable knowledge of what was to come. They kissed lightly. He took his time about unfastening the ribbon, then, opening the kimono, held her.

  After a while she began undressing him, slowly, carefully putting each garment aside and folding it. He had taught her, as he had taught other women in the past, that this was not a gesture of servility but a rite—practiced in the East, where he had learned it first—and a mutual whetting of anticipation.

  When she had finished they lay down together. Elsie had passed Hank a happi coat which he slipped on; it was one of several he had brought home from Japan, was growing threadbare from long use, but still served to prove what Far Easterners knew best: that a garment worn during sexual mating, however light or loose, heightened a man’s and woman’s awareness of each other, and their pleasure.

  He whispered, “Love me, baby!”

  She moaned softly. “Love me, Hank!”

  He did.

  14

  “You know what this scumbag world is made of, baby?” Rollie Knight had demanded of May Lou yesterday. When she hadn’t answered, he told her. “Bullshit! There ain’t nuthun’ in this whole wide world but bullshit.”

  The remark was prompted by happenings at the car assembly plant where Rollie was now working. Though he hadn’t kept score himself, today was the beginning of his seventh week of employment.

  May Lou was new in his life, too. She was (as Rollie put it) a chick he had laid during a weekend, while blowing an early paycheck, and more recently they had shacked up in two rooms of an apartment house on Blaine near 12th. May Lou was currently spending her days there, messing with cook pots, furniture and bits of curtaining, making—as a barfly acquaintance of Rollie’s described it—like a bush tit in the nest.

  Rollie hadn’t taken seriously, and still didn’t, what he called May Lou’s crapping around at playing house. Just the same he had given her bread, which she spent on the two of them, and to get more of the same, Rollie continued to report most days of the week to the assembly plant.

  What started this second go around, after he had copped out of the first training course, was—in Rollie’s words—a big Tom nigger in a fancy Dan suit, who had turned up one day, saying his name was Leonard Wingate. That was at Rollie’s room in the inner city, and they had a great big gabfest in which Rollie first told the guy to get lost, go screw himself, he’d had enough. But the Tom had been persuasive. He went on to explain, while Rollie listened, fascinated, about the fatso white bastard of an instructor who put one over with the checks, then got caught. When Rollie inquired, though, Wingate admitted that the white fatso wasn’t going to jail the way a black man would have done, which proved that all the bullshit about justice was exactly that—bullshit! Even the black Tom, Wingate, admitted it. And it was just after he had—a bleak, bitter admission which surprised Rollie—that Rollie had somehow, almost before he knew it, agreed to go to work.

  It was Leonard Wingate who had told Rollie he could forget about completing the rest of the training course. Wingate, it seemed, had looked up the records which said Rollie was bright and quick-witted, and so (Wingate said) they would put him straight on the assembly line next week, starting Monday, doing a regular job.

  That (again, as Rollie told it) turned out to be bullshit, too.

  Instead of being given a job in one place, which he might have managed, he was informed he had to be relief man at various stations on the line, which meant moving back and forth like a blue-assed fly, so that as soon as he got used to doing one thing, he was hustled over to another, then to something else, and something else, until his head was spinning. The same thing went on for the first two weeks so that he hardly knew—since the instructions he was given were minimal—what he was supposed to be doing from one minute to the next. Not that he’d have cared that much. Except for what the black guy, Wingate, had said, Rollie Knight—as usual—was not expecting anything. But it just showed that nothing they ever promised worked out the way they said it would. So … Bullshit!

  Of course, nobody, but nobody, had told him about the speed of the assembly line. He’d figured that one for himself—the hard way.

  On the first day at work, when Rollie had his initial view of a final car assembly line, the line seemed to be inching forward like a snail’s funeral. He’d come to the plant early, reporting in with the day shift. The size of the joint, the mob flooding in from cars, buses, every other kind of wheels, you name it, scared him to begin with; also, everybody except himself seemed to know where they were going—all in one helluva hurry—and why. But he’d found where he had to report, and from there had been sent to a big, metal-roofed building, cleaner than he expected, but noisy. Oh, man; that noise! It was all around you, sounding like a hundred rock bands on bad trips.

  Anyhow, the car line snaked through the building, with the end and beginning out of sight. And it looked as if there was time aplenty for any of the guys and broads (a few women were working alongside men) to finish whatever their job happened to be on one car, rest a drumbeat, then start work on the next. No sweat! For a cool cat with more than air between his ears, a cincheroo!

  In less than an hour, like thousands who had preceded him, Rollie was grimly wiser.

  The foreman he had been handed over to on arrival had said simply, “Number?” The foreman, young and white, but balding, with the harried look of a middle-aged man, had a pencil poised and said peevishly, when Rollie hesitated, “Social Security!”

  Eventually Rollie located a card which a clerk in Personnel had given him. It had the number on it. Impatiently, with the knowledge of twenty other things he had to do immediately, the foreman wrote it down.

  He pointed to the last four figures, which were 6469. “That’s what you’ll be known as,” the foreman shouted; the line had already started up, and the din made it hard to hear. “So memorize that number.”

  Rollie grinned, and had been tempted to say it was the same way in prison. But he hadn’t, and the foreman had motioned for him t
o follow, then took him to a work station. A partly finished car was moving slowly past, its brightly painted body gleaming. Some snazzy wheels! Despite his habit of indifference, Rollie felt his interest quicken.

  The foreman bellowed in his ear: “You got three chassis and trunk bolts to put in. Here, here, and here. Bolts are in the box over there. Use this power wrench.” He thrust it into Rollie’s hands. “Got it?”

  Rollie wasn’t sure he had. The foreman touched another worker’s shoulder. “Show this new man. He’ll take over here. I need you on front suspension. Hurry it up.” The foreman moved away, still looking older than his years.

  “Watch me, bub!” The other worker grabbed a handful of bolts and dived into a car doorway with a power wrench, its cord trailing. While Rollie was still craning, trying to see what the man was doing, the other came out backward, forcefully. He cannoned into Rollie. “Watch it, bub!” Going around to the back of the car, he dived into the trunk, two more bolts in hand, the wrench still with him.

  He shouted back, “Get the idea?” The other man worked on one more car, then, responding to renewed signals from the foreman, and with an “All yours, bub,” he disappeared.

  Despite the noise, the dozens of people he could see close by, Rollie had never felt more lonely in his life.

  “You! Hey! Get on with it!” It was the foreman, shouting, waving his arms from the other side of the line.

  The car which the first man had worked on was already gone. Incredibly, despite the line’s apparent slowness, another had appeared. There was no one but Rollie to insert the bolts. He grabbed a couple of bolts and jumped into the car. He groped for holes they were supposed to go in, found one, then realized he had forgotten the wrench. He went back for it. As he jumped back in the car the heavy wrench dropped on his hand, his knuckles skinned against the metal floor. He managed to start turning the single bolt; before he could finish, or insert the other, the wrench cord tightened as the car moved forward. The wrench would no longer reach. Rollie left the second bolt on the floor and got out.