“Barney Oldfield said he might have an opening on his team later this summer. If he’d hire me, and Tess would marry me, we could leave Detroit.”
Jesse puckered his mouth. “To travel with that race crowd? You told me they’re a pretty low bunch, drinking and whoring all the time. Think she’d be happy? Might last—what? Six months? Maybe a year if she loves you as much as you say.”
“She said she’d walk through fire for me, Jess. Her exact words.”
“People in love say lots of things. Then years go by, and the chore of living comes down hard day after day and they wonder how those words ever came to pass their lips. I’d think real hard before dragging a high-class young lady away from all she’s used to, into a lot of barrooms and low-down hotels.”
Carl dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. Jesse was right; to be convinced of that he only had to remember the road house where he’d cornered Barney. He wondered whether this concern for Tess wasn’t also a handy way to hide something he feared. The duty that went with marriage.
He started to speak, but a noise outside forestalled it. He heard footsteps in the backyard. Reflections of the lamp wick glittered in Jesse’s eyes as he turned his head. He’d heard it too.
“Somebody out there, Jess.”
“Isn’t your fight,” Jesse said hoarsely. “Get into the alley.” He bobbed his head toward a second door behind him.
“What fight? With who?” A man in the yard gave a gruff order, and the footsteps quickened. Jesse grabbed a hammer from the tool bench.
“The damn E.A. The petition. Bosses must have sent somebody to—”
The door facing the yard flew open, the peg latch splintering. Carl found himself staring at a hobnailed boot.
Then the man was inside the shed, followed by another. Both had coarse faces, shabby clothes. The first man carried a fish gaff, the second an iron pipe. Just as Carl stepped in front of them, the door behind Jess burst open. A man wearing a dirty driving coat and pea cap came in swinging a ball bat.
Carl shouted at the first two, “What the hell are you doing here? Turn around and get—” A blow to his skull set lights dancing behind his eyes. The man with the ball bat had struck from behind.
Carl fell forward, crashed head first into the shed wall. His flailing hands pulled down parts cabinets, spilled hundreds of sheet metal screws of all sizes.
The man with the gaff dodged in beneath Jesse’s swinging hammer. The gaff hook whirled and sank three inches into Jesse’s left thigh. Pain glazed Jesse’s face; the hammer flew out of his fingers. The man tore the hook out with a vicious motion of his wrist. Clenching his teeth, Jesse sank to one knee. The second man raised the iron pipe to brain him, but the man in the driving coat screamed, “Elroy, you fucking idiot, it isn’t the spade, it’s the other one.”
Carl was clawing the shanty wall, pulling himself up when he heard that. Lorenzo Clymer had told someone about Tess’s refusal, and Carl knew who it was.
The ball bat smashed his legs. He fell on his face. As the man with the gaff made to step on his head, Carl rolled over, kicked the shins of the man with the bat. The man danced back, snickering. He took a firm two-handed grip, lifted the bat over his head. Helplessly, Carl rolled to the right. But the bat never came down. Just then Jesse broke the lamp over the man’s head.
Coal oil soaked the man’s neck and collar. The wick touched it off. The man’s hair and cap burst into flames. He screamed, dropped the bat. More coal oil splattered a work table and ignited. Fire ran up the flimsy wooden wall. In their haste to escape into the alley, the man with the gaff and the man with the iron pipe bumped each other like circus clowns.
Screaming, the other man pulled his long coat over his head. Somehow he snuffed out the flames. Dragging to his feet, Carl had a last look at him as he ran after the others and disappeared, leaving a stench of burned hair.
The wooden walls burned fast, popping like oily fatwood. “Jesse, get up.” Jesse couldn’t get up, or hear; he’d passed out. His trouser leg was blood-soaked from thigh to shoe top.
Carl dragged him outside, laid him in the yard a safe distance from the fire. As a white man from next door rushed through a gate in the board fence, Carl yelled, “Call the fire station, for God’s sake.”
“Already sent my boy Tolliver. What happened to Mr. Shiner?”
“Man sunk a gaff hook in his leg.”
“Oh, Lord. Looks awful.”
The neat backyard with its carefully tended flower beds tilted under Carl. He stumbled to the fence, swallowing sour vomit. He hung on the fence till the spell passed.
A dozen terrified neighbors gathered. Several threw buckets of water on the fire, to little avail. The clanging bell of a fire wagon reached them. A woman said, “Merciful God, hurry up before all the houses burn.”
Carl reeled back to his fallen friend. “Someone help me lift him. He needs a hospital.”
The neighbor ran to hitch up his horse and buggy. Carl ripped a piece off his pants for an improvised tourniquet. He tied it above the mangled mess of flesh and muscle in Jesse’s leg. Thank God Jesse was out.
They left in the buggy seconds before the fire horses charged down the alley from the other end of the block. The fire brigade unreeled hoses to soak the glowing ruins of the shed. Only a few sparks floated in the windless air.
Ten minutes later, Carl and the white man carried Jesse through the emergency door of Samaritan Hospital on Jefferson Avenue. A doctor examined him.
“We’ll get him to the operating theater right away. Stitch him up. There’s muscle damage, I don’t know how much.”
Attendants covered Jesse with a sheet and rolled him away on a gurney. The hospital was dark, silent, full of the smell of chemicals and disinfectants. Carl sank down on a bench, filthy with sweat and grime. He was still shaking.
The neighbor said, “Why did those men attack him? Mr. Shiner’s a gentle soul.”
“It was a mistake. They were after me.”
“Do you know where they came from?”
“I do. I know exactly where they came from.”
Sykes & Looby, Advertising Agents, occupied rooms on two floors of the Penobscot Building on Fort Street West. The hushed reception lobby with its gold and forest green color scheme, its dim wall lamps with tiny shades, had a studied quaintness. Several times Joe Crown had taken young Carl with him to the Chicago agency that prepared and placed the brewery’s ads. Crown’s advertising agents were plain-spoken men, working from offices that were, like them, unpretentious. Here, by contrast, there was a rotten air of sham. Busts of Shakespeare and Tennyson gazed from marble pedestals, as though to suggest that the commercial work ground out in these rooms had something in common with the creativity of genius.
“Where do I find Sykes?”
Carl’s tone made the female typewriter draw back warily at her desk. “His offices are upstairs.” She pointed at an ornate circular staircase in the corner. “But he never sees visitors without—”
Carl was already halfway to the next floor.
He pushed people aside, not seeing their faces, how they were dressed, how they reacted to the sight of a man in workman’s clothes stalking along glaring at the brass nameplate on each door. Carl found the plate that said F. WAYNE SYKES, JR. He twisted the ornate doorknob.
“—and I want this radiator, the whole damn auto, larger. I told you yesterday—larger. Are you stupid? I won’t take garbage like this to Mr. Clymer.”
Carl pounded the door open with his fist. Wayne Sykes, smartly dressed in a brown three-piece suit, sat at a mammoth desk littered with layouts. Standing at one side, a gray-faced man with chalk smudges on his shirt and hands nervously made notes on a pad.
“Miss Rumford, I’ve told you expressly, knock before—” Sykes’s eyes focused. “Jesus Christ. What are you doing in this office?”
Carl took in the opulent furniture, framed photos of the Clymer factory, Clymer automobiles, Mr. Clymer, an elderly man who resembled Sykes. There were gaudy plaques,
award certificates, a Harvard diploma.
“Thought you’d like to know your hoodlums didn’t do the job.”
“Are you drunk? Are you a madman? I don’t know what you mean.”
To the flunky Carl said, “You’d better get out.” The flunky ran.
“You’re the one who’d better get out,” Sykes said. “I’ll have you put away for ten years.”
“I don’t think so. One of the men you sent was named Elroy. If the police round up all the Elroys in town and put them through the sweat box, I’ll bet one of them will lay out a trail straight to you. If you’ve bought off the police, then I’ll hire a lawyer through my father in Chicago. A lawyer like Darrow who loves to wipe up scum like you.” It was an outrageous bluff. He’d given the police Elroy’s name and descriptions of all three men. The detectives took down the information as though they intended to forget it in ten minutes. But Sykes didn’t know any of that.
Sykes’s eye shifted to ivory buttons on a box beside his upright phone. Carl pulled the box off the desk, broke its wire, threw it on the floor. Then he tore the telephone loose and hurled it against the wall. The glass on Lorenzo Clymer’s portrait splintered and rattled down. Sykes screamed, “Someone phone the police! Miss Rumford—” Carl reached across the desk and hauled him up by his necktie.
“So you like rough stuff, do you?”
He broke Sykes’s nose with his first blow. The second blow brought a gout of blood from both nostrils. Sykes collapsed on the layouts, bleeding on the sketches of Clymer autos. Carl ran around the desk and dumped him out of his chair.
“Oh please, oh please,” Sykes said, on his knees, hands protecting his gory face.
“Shut up, shut the hell up,” Carl shouted, slapping Sykes backhand, slicking his knuckles with blood. “Your thugs hurt my friend so bad he may not walk again.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Sykes’s tears ran into the blood and mucus dripping from his nose. His crotch was dark; he’d urinated on himself. “I love Tess, I had to do something.”
Carl hauled him up and pounded him twice in the gut, then flung him against the wall. The Clymer plant photo fell on his head, sprinkling broken glass in his hair. Carl wanted to hit him again, but he wasn’t so possessed by rage that he failed to see Sykes couldn’t fight back. Anything further wouldn’t be punishment, just brutality.
He heard noises in the corridor. “In there, in there! He’s killing Mr. Sykes!” Three policemen with hickory billy clubs piled through the door and beat Carl to the floor.
He spent the night in jail. He ached from the beating, couldn’t keep food down, couldn’t sleep. He was sure he’d go to prison for what he’d done.
To his astonishment they released him early in the morning. No charges had been filed by Wayne Sykes. Was there a more telling admission of guilt? Carl derived no satisfaction, though, from the obvious answer.
He visited Jesse in the charity ward. His friend was awake, drowsy, and falsely cheerful. As Carl left, a staff doctor confided to Carl that the damage to Jesse’s leg was severe. He would be on crutches for a while. He might be on crutches permanently.
“He works in a foundry. You can’t work in a foundry on crutches.”
“I’m sure that’s true. He’ll have to do something else.”
Carl found the nearest saloon and knocked back two whiskeys at half past ten in the morning. His world was rapidly collapsing.
At noon he punched the clock at Piquette Avenue. The timekeeping clerk looked out of his booth, stared at Carl’s bruises. “Boss has been looking for you all over the place.”
“You mean Gogarty?”
“The big boss. Henry. You better hightail up to the second floor.”
In the main hall and on the staircase he felt everyone was looking at him. Men in the drafting room stopped their work and broke off conversations when he entered. He walked to Ford’s open door. Ford looked up from a blueprint.
“About time you showed up, Carl. Step in here. You may sit down.”
Ford rolled up the blueprint, snapped an elastic around it. A shaving nick showed on his jaw. Little blue flowers patterned his necktie. He was about as warm and friendly as a piece of iron bar stock.
“Last night I had a telephone call at home from Lorenzo Clymer. He told me something outrageous. He said you beat up a friend of his.” Among papers on the desk Ford located a memo slip. “Sykes. Young fellow in advertising. Is that the truth?”
“Yes, sir.”
“They hauled you to jail and you spent the night there?”
“Yes, sir. I wasn’t charged with anything.”
Ford waited a little. “That’s all? You have nothing else to say?”
“Sykes deserved it. It’s a personal matter.”
Ford shook his head. “I don’t make a habit of climbing out on a limb to hire somebody at your level. I made an exception because I thought I saw some fine stuff in your attitude and deportment. Good potential. You fooled me. You let me down. You let the whole company down. You violated the rules I described at my house. I did describe them, didn’t I?”
“Yes, sir, you specifically said no public brawling to embarrass Ford Motor Company.”
“Yes, I certainly did. You broke the rules and tied a ribbon on it.” Ford gave him a severe look. “You’re discharged. No severance, just your wages for this week. I’ll give you a half hour to empty your locker and leave the plant. That’s all.”
“Mr. Ford, will you allow me to say I’m sorry for—?”
“No, I will not.” He glared like a wrathful preacher. “You keep on, Carl, you’ll amount to nothing. I believe every man should get a second chance. When someone gives you yours, I hope you won’t be stupid and ruin it.”
The telephone rang.
“One more thing. Clymer said that if you set foot on his property, here or in Grosse Pointe, he’d put you away for five years.”
Again Carl tried to speak. The phone rang a second time. Angrily, Ford waved him out as he picked up the receiver and said, “Henry. Go ahead.”
32. Separation
At Third Street and the river, next to the Michigan Central depot, stood the Wayne Hotel. With its marble floors and fountains, its three bars, five restaurants, and ten-chair tonsorial parlor, it vied with the Ponchartrain for the honor of being “Detroit’s finest.” Carl had strolled through once under the suspicious eye of front-desk men, but he couldn’t have afforded so much as a breakfast at the Wayne, where he arrived Sunday morning at half past ten, wearing his old brown corduroy coat with Tess’s scarf wound around his neck. He waited by the closed ticket booth of the hotel’s roller-skating pavilion. A sleepy black man was opening the shutters one by one. Out on the sunny river a coal boat sounded its whistle.
Tess appeared breathlessly at fifteen before eleven. She carried a small hamper. She looked rested, refreshed. They walked down to the ferry terminal, where day trippers lined up to board Pleasure, the gleaming white boat of the Detroit, Belle Isle & Windsor Ferry Company.
“Father told me what you did to Wayne.”
Fishing in his pocket for seventy cents, Carl looked at her for signs of condemnation, saw none.
“I hurt him pretty badly. The men he sent spiked the leg of my riding mechanic with a fish gaff, by mistake. You met Jess. He may never walk without crutches. You can’t work in a foundry on crutches.”
“Oh, God, that’s dreadful.”
“Damn right. Jesse’s built a fairly good life working in the foundry. It’s my fault.”
He paid for two round-trip tickets. They boarded Pleasure as a brass bell rang, signaling departure.
“Did Wayne admit he sent the men?”
“Yes, but I can’t prove it to anyone. It’s a terrible mess.”
Tess sank down on an outside bench overlooking the starboard rail. “Yes, it is. At the same time, these are the sweetest months I’ve ever known. Why is life always so mixed up, the good with the bad?”
“Maybe someone brainy like Emers
on knows. I sure as hell don’t.”
The Detroit River ran between the lakes for a distance of about thirty miles. Downstream from the city, opposite Amherstburg, lay Bois Blanc, one of the area’s most popular destinations for lovers, Sunday school classes, and all manner of excursionists. It was not yet warm enough for the island bathhouse to be open. The stone dance pavilion was closed on Sundays, but the café was busy, the shady pathways and athletic fields crowded in the early afternoon. Carl and Tess ate their picnic at a rustic table. She’d brought a jar of cold tea, lukewarm by the time they drank it but delicious. No alcohol was allowed on Bois Blanc.
Carl brushed crumbs off the checked cloth; she’d baked a loaf of oat bread for thick liverwurst sandwiches enhanced with strong Swiss cheese and hot German mustard. Unused to the deep waters he was treading, Carl was awkward in bringing up the subject that was bothering him so deeply.
He held her hand across the table. Sun and shadow from the new leaves above them played on her face. He said, “Do you regret what we—what happened out in the country?”
“Not for a minute. Do you?”
“No. Well, yes if I took advantage of you.”
“You didn’t.” Carl’s gaze remained fixed on the table, and she squeezed his hand. “You didn’t.”
He looked at her. There was no way to make the leap but to do it. “Will you marry me, Tess?”
“No.”
Stunned, more than a little hurt, he sat back. “Why not? We could leave Detroit, settle down somewhere else.”
“Is this guilt talking?”
“It’s me talking, damn it. I’ve told you over and over. I love you.”
“And I love you. Which is exactly the reason I wouldn’t say yes. You’re not a factory man, a time-clock man, how often have you told me? I know some other things you are. Brave, kind—very exciting, because there’s a wild streak in you. What’s deeper than that, I’m not sure. Maybe you don’t know either.” Sun glistened in her eyes suddenly. “But you won’t discover the answer staying here out of some misguided sense of duty. I release you, Carl. I’ve never really had any hold on you, or intended one. I want you to leave. Chase down Barney Oldfield. I know it’s what you want.”