Onyx (52 page)

Amid confused shouts and jostling the first men in line were admitted through the pedestrian gate while the next were sent away.

The applicants twisted and turned, dismayed, counting. The next time the gate opened, though, it was twelve in, twelve away.

“What's going on?” Justin asked.

“They done it the other times I was here,” said the big, rawboned job seeker ahead of him. “Some thinks it's Dickson Keeley's way of throwing us off.”

Justin's fifteen was the last group admitted before the
NOT HIRING
sign was hung between the gates.

A clerk behind the barrier in the antechamber pushed back his green eyeshade, yawning as he examined the applicant ahead of Justin. Black hair contrasted with the man's pale, shrunken cheeks. “Pop,” the clerk said. “That dye don't fool me.”

“I'm thirty-three,” said the man. “It's my teeth that are throwing you. I lost my teeth after I was laid off from the foundry last June.”

“Man your age couldn't keep up,” said the clerk. “Sorry, Pop. We got nothing for you.”

“I need a chance,” said the man quietly. “I'm as strong as anyone.”

“Guard!” shouted the clerk.

The applicant shrank toward the door with EXIT painted above it.

The clerk assessed Justin. “
You
don't dye your hair,” he said. “Name?”

“Arthur Hutchins. H-U-T-C-H-I-N-S.”

The clerk consulted four long sheets attached to a clipboard, the blacklist of union men, before pointing Justin around the wooden bar to a foreman. The short, bald man circled Justin, prodding his arms and stomach. Outrage tensed Justin's chilled muscles.

“Ever work in tires?” asked the foreman.

In Gorki he had sweated for weeks alongside the burly Ukrainian tirebuilders. “I was a tirebuilder.”

The foreman nodded. “How long?”

“Two years. Los Angeles. Firestone.”

“You sound like some professor,” said the foreman suspiciously. He drew back to look at Justin. “Well, that's okay by me,” he said at last. “Mr. Bridger takes all colors and types. You got the height, the heft. We'll soon see how good you are.” He extended a slick blue Security badge with
temporary
stamped above the numbers. “Go to Building 8311.” A jerk of his bullet neck indicated the direction. “Hoof it. Shift changes in twenty minutes.”

“What's the pay?”

“If I'm satisfied with you, then we'll talk money.”

Justin hesitated. Tirebuilding required strength, skill, and the starting pay was good. Unscrupulous foremen skimmed a percentage.

The heavy blue cardboard twirled. The bald head turned pointedly to the hopeful, anxious men lined in front of green-visored clerks. “You don't wanta work, just say the word.”

Justin reached for the badge.

On the steps outside, the icy dawn stimulating his lungs, the familiar clatter once again assaulting his eardrums, he paused. This time he was not in Woodland by reason of his tortuously concealed relationships; he had been hired simply because he was a large, strong, healthy male animal. His mouth stiffened into a grimace, mordant and faintly ironic. In that instant his resemblance to Tom was startling.

IV

Woodland Park was one of the neighborhoods that had sprung up in the early 1920s after the plant was built. The Hutchinsons' three-bedroom rental, identical to other houses in the subdivision, was matchbox flimsy with a slanting roof from which narrow upstairs windows peered. The exterior wallboards moulted gray flakes—the salt deposits below Detroit played the devil with cheap paint. Two generations of Inland Steel were doubled up in the house five feet to the right. To their left, Mr. Milacek worked in the body assembly at Chrysler Main. The Milaceks' radio stayed turned to Father Coughlin's station so that barking anti-Semitic remarks mingled perpetually with aromas of poppyseed strudel, cheese pockets, and peppery soup. Yet evidently the message evaporated before it reached Mrs. Milacek's frizzy, graying permanent for, even informed of their Jewish origins, she did not hesitate to gather Elisse and the children to her sagging bosom.

Elisse, though, had little time for neighborly kaffeeklatches. As secretary-treasurer of AAW, she watched over the union funds in the black tin box. When Justin had been taken on at Woodland at a substantial $1.05 an hour—minus ten cents to the foreman—she had suggested they endow the union with his quarterly trust payments. “Get the Brotherhood a headquarters, have a strike fund,” she had said, and Justin had concurred.

She typed correspondence on her college Remington, she held meetings of the Ladies' Auxiliary, which had three other members. She composed militant leaflets to join AAW, cranking them out on the secondhand mimeo machine that jammed the dark hole of a dining room, then bundled Tonia in her pram to trudge through the narrow streets to slip them indiscriminately in mails slots—most of Woodland Park worked for Onyx. Fitting in cooking and cleaning as best she could, she worked all day and many evenings, and was darted with pangs of conscience at how much she enjoyed it all. In her self-deprecatory soliloquies she told herself she should be crushed and listless from missing her parents, agonizing over Ben's pugnacious refusal to adjust. (Her Ben, adjust?) Yet here she was after all those becalmed years of domesticity sailing full tilt into the fray. Nervy. Alive. As at Columbia Pictures, she shared little of Mitch's heartfelt allegiance to the labor movement. She was here because she had been touched deeply by those agonized letters from the workers at Woodland. She was working like a loony-woman at Justin's side because every word of those letters about the Bridgers' rotten repressions was true.

By the end of that snowy March the AAW had a grand total of eight members, including Mitch, who, blacklisted from auto, worked part time as a recreation director for the Works Projects Administration. Justin's calm exterior did not show it, but he fluctuated between morbid hopelessness and anger.

The Depression and Dickson Keeley had the AAW stopped cold as a dead mackerel.

At Woodland the rule against talking on the line was strictly enforced, and during the break strolling pairs of Security deterred conversation of any kind. Justin, having bought a used Seven, would offer the men in the tire shop lifts home. As soon as they were clear of the gates he would remind his passengers of their right under the National Recovery Administration to form their own union. The men would huddle, silent, and when the Seven halted outside their homes, would make a dash for it. Spies were everywhere. However inhuman the stretch-out, regardless of the downright viciousness of Security, a job was a job, and to be on the blacklist of union activists meant your family starved on relief—if you qualified for it. Besides, most of the hands were loyal to Tom. You couldn't blame the Boss for these stinking times—and he paid top wages.

The eight AAW Brothers gathered twice a week in the confines of what had once been a shoe store. Coats on against the penetrating night drafts, they sat around the fat stove planning methods of recruiting the terrified men who, vilified and ostracized, desperately needed them.

After one of these sessions Paul Zawitsky stayed late. A bear of a man, a recent widower, Zawitsky had worked at Onyx for twenty-five years, and though recognizing Justin's former incarnation, had never mentioned it in front of the others. Justin had invited him home once for potluck, and Elisse had fallen for him.

When he and Justin were alone, Zawitsky said, “Get rid of Brother Winstead. He's a stoolie.”

“How do you know?”

“I take Security's bucks too, Prof.” The foreman's nickname had stuck to Justin.

“Then why tell me about Winstead?”

“Because he reports on you. I don't. I guess you'd call me a double agent. I'm all for the AAW.”

Justin rattled the secondhand folding chairs into a pile.
Beautiful
, he thought.
A minimum of two spies in a membership of eight
!

“Prof, let me explain my position,” said Zawitsky, sucking on his pipe. “I got a boy finishing high school, he's bright and he's been accepted at the university. I'd sell my soul to see him finish. There's a layoff every year for retooling. And every year I worry about being hired again. So I kiss my foreman's ass and keep an eye out for Security just like he tells me. No self-respecting man should have to keep his job that way. But that's what I got to do.”

“Thanks for the tip,” Justin said quietly. “I appreciate it.”

He drove home in funereal thoughtfulness.

As he undressed in the center of the bedroom—the roof slanted sharply in the garret-like upstairs, and he was too tall to stand near the walls—he was frowning abstractedly. He should have been booted from Woodland weeks ago. Mitch had remarked several times on his luck at remaining undetected. Elisse, grateful her husband was safe, would chortle to Mitch that Justin was smarter than he.

Unbuttoning his shirt, Justin accepted that he was neither smart nor lucky.

Someone at Onyx was protecting him.

Who?

It had to be one of the Bridgers.

Which one?

Caryll? On his arrival in Detroit, Justin had telephoned to make a date with Zoe. The high, breathy voice had wafted through the instrument to deliver a charmingly dismayed excuse. The family was leaving this
very
afternoon to sail the
Beaufort
in the Caribbean. A week later he had glimpsed Caryll entering the Tower. Did Caryll even know he was at Woodland? Probably not.

Hugh, however, must. If he did not already know through the usual channels, with his finger on Security's pulse, he would surely wonder at the AAW organizer's name. He knew Arthur was the name of Justin's dead half-brother, and Hutchins, well, was Hutchins. Would Hugh spread sheltering wings over him? It seemed doubtful.

Tom? The few times Justin had seen Tom erect behind the wheel of his silver Seven, he had felt a prod like electricity. Tormenting, elemental, disorienting.

Justin stood in the center of the attic bedroom, brooding over his kinsmen, the enemies whom he loved. A low, choking sound rose from his throat.

On stockinged feet he padded to the next cubicle. Elisse sat cuddling Tonia, who had awakened with a stuffy nose. He knelt in front of the rocker, clutching his arms around the baby and woman, resting his cheek on the fuzzed, worn flannel robe that covered his wife's slender, consoling thigh.

CHAPTER 24

A few days later, Caryll learned that Justin was in Detroit. He and Tom were at their routine Friday lunch at Hugh's.

These weekly conferences had begun in 1933. At that time President Roosevelt, fresh in office, was attempting to sweep the economic disaster from the country with his new broom of alphabet agencies that included the NRA. This new code, an experiment in industrial self-regulation, had been signed amid patriotic hoopla by manufacturers who then proceeded blithely to ignore any of the measure's regulations that hobbled them. Tom had refused to sign. He viewed the NRA as another Selden patent, a clamp on competition, and he felt, rightly, that the brain trusters in Washington knew nothing about making automobiles. Furthermore, Onyx paid exactly double the NRA's specified minimum hourly wage. Caryll privately shared his father's point of view, yet the economy was petering to a gloomy halt, and he believed with all his gentle, moderate heart that they must support the presidential effort to get things moving. The country agreed with Caryll. Dealers mailed him hundreds—no, thousands—of hortatory letters, the common plea being that times were disastrous enough without the staggering handicap of trying to sell Onyx trucks and Sevens without NRA's Blue Eagle sticker affixed to their windshields.

Hugh suggested Tom go on the air to explain his holdout.
The Onyx Family Variety Hour
, Sundays at 8 P.M. on NBC Blue, was the most popular program on all four radio networks, and the following day everybody was gabbling about Tom Bridger's good old-fashioned belief in individual effort and American ingenuity—and by God, what about those fat pay envelopes at Onyx? Sales jumped. Hugh wheedled his brother into continuing the brief, flat-spoken pithy comments at the end of each program.

During their Friday lunches the three Bridgers disputed the thrust of Tom's Sunday speech while Argo MacIlvray, his plump white fingers racing across the page, took notes. On this particular Friday, after the
oeufs à la neige
, Hugh nodded and the speechwriter's ovoid form fairly bowed itself from the dining room.

Hugh sniffed his cognac. “That union situation, Tom,” he said. “Satisfied?”

Tom, pushing away from the table, did not reply.

“A membership of eight,” Hugh said. “He'll soon give up. Keeley's got him stymied.”

Caryll's round face had become less fleshy with the years, and at Dickson Keeley's name he clenched his teeth until his jawbones showed. “A new local, Uncle Hugh?” he asked.

“We're talking about your brother-in-law,” Hugh said with a faint sneer. Yet there was a feverish flash of pain in his light blue eyes.

“What, Justin?” Caryll asked, surprised.

Hugh shot a glance at Tom, who had gone to the window. “He's working in the rubber department,” Hugh said. “An agitator.”

“Justin?” Caryll asked, still baffled. “Working at Woodland?”

“Yes. Comrade Justin.” Hugh sipped. “You mean to say he hasn't contacted Zoe?”

Caryll had long since jettisoned his suspicions about Zoe and his uncle. “She has no idea,” he said.

“Not taking time to see his own sister certainly proves his dedication.”

“There are millions of people, Uncle Hugh, who believe collective bargaining is the fair way to settle labor disputes,” Caryll snapped, then found himself adding in that sheepish, placating tone he deplored, “The men say our latest speedup is an endurance race, but Uncle Olaf refuses to listen.”