Onyx (61 page)

“Woodland,” Tom said to the chauffeur.

Caryll climbed in next to him. “Dad, the plant's been closed tighter than a drum for three days now. You look beat. Mother's waiting for us at the Farm. Tomorrow's time enough to take a look.”

“Gate One,” Tom ordered the chauffeur, who was waiting at attention.

“There's no point, Dad, none. We can't get in. They're picketing.”

“Gate One,” Tom repeated.

The chauffeur touched the patent leather visor of his cap. “Yes, Mr. Bridger.”

The limousine glided between hangars, and Caryll took off his hat, rubbing at the frown lines on his balding forehead. When he had dispatched the Vega to await the arrival of Tom's ship, he had given the pilot a report to deliver to his father: five single-spaced typewritten pages in which Caryll accepted full responsibility for shutting down Woodland. Self-blame harrowed him, he had failed in his trust, he would never forgive himself, but a kind word from his father, pale and erect next to him, would have gone a long way toward easing the painful knot in his stomach.

Tom turned to him. “Your letter said they aren't smashing the machinery. What makes you so sure?”

“Justin's inside.”

Tom's drained weariness grew guarded. “You didn't have a clue that those departments were about to take an in-plant vacation?”

Jerkily, Caryll unwound his cashmere muffler. “There have been problems in Tires since they went on the double work week, sure, but I hadn't heard a hint of unrest in Batteries and Axles. I would have cabled you if I'd thought anything was up. Now, of course, the fat's in the fire. They've been flooding by the thousands to join the AAW. The last three days have been a shambles. Injuries, three fatalities. The police spend their time breaking up pitched battles between the men trying to get inside to work and the pickets. The lines never leave the gates, day or night. They're disciplined and organized. Uncle Hugh swears they've imported strike leaders from party headquarters in New York. For all I know he's right. That Mitch Shapiro is one. A Communist.”

“Your report never mentioned Keeley. It's not like him to sit on his duff. Where's he been in this?”

“The minute it started we met at my place—Uncle Olaf, Uncle Rogers, the cousins, Zemliner, Jackson, Falconet. And Keeley. He was all for blasting them out.”

“That's Keeley, all right. One thing I can say for him is he's a consistent thug.” Tom's voice was flat.

There was no way for Caryll to tell if this last remark was approval or condemnation. “I scotched the idea,” he said, coughing. “Uncle Olaf wanted to call in the National Guard. I said no to that, too. I probably muffed our one chance, but I didn't want any bloodshed.”

“So they're sitting inside?”

“Yes. We've got them isolated. It's checkmate. Uncle Hugh and Argo MacIlvray worked out an ad. I don't know if you've seen a newspaper.” He reached for one of the stack that lay on the lambswool carpet.

WE WANT TO WORK

For two days now the illegal take-over of Onyx's Woodland plant has kept the great majority of Onyx workers away from their jobs.

We don't like it.

We want to work.

Tom glanced at the newsprint, then looked out the window.

Caryll gave a tense little cough. “Dad, there's one more thing. In the report I told you that it happened on Justin's shift. It's more than that. He was the one who pulled the safety switch.”

“He
what
?” Tom's face was greenish in the gloomy light.

“There was some kind of argument between a foreman and a worker. I only heard the foreman's side, so I don't know the whole story. Justin seems to have lost his temper—I'm pretty sure he was right to. The foreman looked guilty. He had a mean squint.” Caryll licked his mouth. “But I want you to know it's not a case of shutting down because their leader's my in-law. It's me, Dad. I'm afraid you have a pacifist for a son.”

Tom shrugged, a wretched movement of his shoulders. It was a bitter thing that Justin should have been the one to raise the hand against him. And it was reproachfully, unbearably bitter that this should have been touched off by some mean-spirited act. To their right the multitudinous chimneys of Woodland had come into view, eerily strange without their tributaries of smoke. Tom shivered at the sight, hiding his misery under sarcasm. “Welcome to the graveyard,” he said.

Caryll hunched into the leather upholstery. “Dad, I don't know what to say. I've cornered you into dealing with them.”

Tom continued to frown at the vast, smokeless chimneys.

“You'll have to now, of course, Dad. But at least Justin's their president. We know he's ethical.”

Tom shrugged again.

On Archibald Avenue in front of Gate One maybe five hundred men shuffled in a lockstepped oval, each man's breath steaming on the next man's collar. Some had tied bits of linoleum to the sides of their faces to protect themselves from the bitter wind that flapped against their signs.

END THE DOUBLE WORK WEEK

JOIN THE AAW

FIGHT ONYX SECURITY

JOIN THE AAW

KEEP YOUR JOB

WITH

AAW

The car turned. Tom stared back at the picketers. His paternal guilt transmuted itself into fury. These interlopers! Deal with them? Fat chance in hell! He lifted the tube. “Stop here,” he barked at the chauffeur. Before the car had properly halted, he jumped out. Wind tangling glossy white hair around his erect head, he strode toward Archibald Avenue.

Caryll gaped through the rear window, unable to believe that his father intended to face down the rough, hostile picketers. Alone. He breathed with hoarse little gasps, then with a peculiar whinny, plunged from the safety of the Swallow, running after the intrepid madman who had sired him. “Dad … come back.…” Wind shredded his cries.

He caught up as Tom reached the picket line. A huge, square figure in a thick plaid jacket stepped forward.

“Where do you two gents think you're going?”

“Inside,” Tom snapped.

“This ain't no welcoming committee. You're crossing a picket line.”

“To my own fucking shop!”

“Dad,” Caryll warned in a shrill whisper, tugging at Tom's arm.

“Hey,” someone shouted. “The Boss is back in Detroit.”

The news was passed around. Tom's surprise arrival, his coming accompanied only by his son, fit everybody's conception of him, the unpredictable, courageous loner. Tight-packed men smiled grudgingly, but they continued their shuffling, barring his way.

“Who's in charge?”

A rangy man with a knit cap pulled far down over his wind-scraped face eased through the line. “I'm the picket captain, Mr. Bridger,” he drawled in a courteous, well-bred Georgia voice.

“Let me the hell through.”

“It's not up to me, sir. The Brotherhood voted that nobody crosses the line.”

“
They
voted? When I left the country in October, a man could get in his own shop. Has the law changed? If not, tell them to move their asses out of my way!”

“Dad—”

“Mr. Bridger, I reckon you'll have to settle with AAW before you get into Woodland.”

Tom glared, then turned, the wind tugging at his dark gray topcoat as he stamped back to the Swallow.

“That was some risk you took, Dad. They're desperate men.”

Tom ignored the remark, snapping through the tube, “Find a hardware store.” His voice had that loud, sardonic flatness, and Caryll, with a sharp pang near his navel, accepted that his father had fallen into the demon fire of rage, and until this anger burned itself out, he could not approach reason.

After a couple of blocks they came to a dingy garage whose flaking sign announced that hardware items were sold here. Tom went in, emerging with a bulky, jangling package. He ordered the chauffeur to drive them back to Gate One. Caryll said nothing. No demurral would register.

This time Tom waited for the ashen-faced chauffeur to open the door. The long, sleek automobile attracted reporters from the open beer joint, as well as ten policemen. The cops kept glancing up at store roofs where Security watched from behind machine guns.

“Let me at the gate,” Tom ordered. “I promise I won't trespass on my own damn shop!”

The pickets glanced questioningly toward their captain, and in this moment of uncertainty Tom shoved with his heavy, clanking package, barreling through the line. He tore open brown paper.

Metal rang on metal as he passed a shining length of new chain four times around the steel posts of the gates, which were already locked. He snapped a Schlage padlock through the links.

“There,” Tom said loudly. “Let them camp inside until they rot!” Veins stood out in his temples.

The nearest pickets heard him: they blinked as if a sudden, confusing brilliance had blinded them.

A young reporter called, “What did you say, Mr. Bridger?”

“I've given the squatters on my property permission to camp indefinitely. I've closed my shop.”

“We closed it for you!” shouted a picketer with a thin, cold-empurpled face.

“Great!” Tom snapped. “Then both sides agree. The world can get along without any more Onyxes.”

“You mean this is a
permanent
decision?” asked another reporter.

“The only kind I ever make. Go back to your papers, tell your readers I've quit.”

“Quit?”

“Gone out of business. Is that clear enough?”

A dismayed murmur stirred like the wind along the picket line. On the rooftops the khaki men squinted through their sights. Tom jammed his hands in his pockets, striding back to the Swallow.

They drove northward toward the Farm in silence.

Caryll's jaw was tense, and around his lips the flesh had a sickly bluish cast. His father, having lost his famed temper, to all intents had committed hara-kiri in front of him, and Caryll, in shock, was unable to sort out the multiple repercussions that would affect both sides in the struggle.

After several miles Tom rested his head in his hands, and the sight of that proud, bent neck brought scalding tears of pity to Caryll's eyes.

II

Extra
!

Extra
!

The cries of newsboys shrilled into the wind. Extras were rare in Detroit, and many poor people bought a paper. Wire services spread the news, and Extras were printed in every language. Terrier-sturdy Fivers were still driven by millions, and Sevens, too, had become part of the world landscape. Now there would be no more.

To most people the story was as newsworthy as a declaration of war, and to those millions around the globe who depended—directly or indirectly—on Onyx for their livelihood, infinitely more disastrous.

III

Caryll rubbed the back of his neck as he proofread the draft of his reply to Prime Minister Baldwin, editing out every trace of his mortified horror, and at the bottom of the second paragraph, printing in the margin:
Mr. Prime Minister, my father's decision was reached after years of sustaining heavy losses
.

Like almost everybody else the British leader refused to believe that Tom intended to stand by that symbolic affixing of the Schlage lock two weeks earlier. Who could believe that any man walked away from factories, rubber plantations, mines, a shipping line, railroads, stretches of timber? Tom, for his part, had holed up at the Farm, refusing to open letters that arrived in thick governmental envelopes, in gray Onyx envelopes, or in five-and-dime envelopes: refusing to read any of the inundation of mail from all over the world, some addressed merely
Tom Bridger, USA
. He would not speak on the phone, and Caryll was the only visitor admitted. Abashed gate guards had turned away Hugh's Swallow and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins's flagged Cadillac limousine. Tom's dry, cracked lips formed a smile so bitter and forbidding that even blunt, insensitive Maud kept her silence. Caryll could not bring himself to ask how to carry this albatross, this shut-down industrial giant. His few stammered questions received no reply. There was something unhealthy about his father's undeviating silence that Caryll connected with the coronary he had suffered after Justin's departure. He knew his father's omnipresent grimace was one of mortal anguish. An unstoppable force had met an immovable object and, yes, that could mean another coronary. He saw his fear reflected in his mother's bespectacled eyes.

The two weeks of acting as deputy in what he considered a great public wrong had taken their toll on Caryll. His stomach clenched, his stammer was worse, two of his nails were taped because he had bitten them to the bleeding quick. He saw his inability to so much as raise a convincing argument to his father about reopening as a devastating personal indictment.

He jabbed the buzzer on his desk for a secretary—the guest rooms had been dismantled and furnished as offices for his Tower staff. Plump, lively Betty hurried in, the pleats of her skirt swishing. She took the pile of edited letters for retyping and set down a handful of clippings.

Caryll followed the strike news obsessively. Frostbitten men still tramped with their placards while others huddled self-incarcerated within the dead heart of Woodland; a grotesque denial of Tom's closing up shop. Yet Caryll accepted that Justin—still immured—and the other strike leaders had no choice, for the cruel reality was that in Detroit alone, the closing of Onyx had drafted 125,000 more into the army of unemployed. There were no jobs. There was not enough cash in the overburdened welfare offices to feed the families for a single week, much less furnish coal or pay the rent. So the strikers were condemned to sit or trudge—and hope for a miracle.

The phone rang.

Brewster Vance, Caryll's executive aide, put through only the urgent, top-level calls, so on the other end of the line a government dignitary, a world leader, or a relative was primed to coerce Caryll into doing what he wished, to the point of daft self-flagellation, that he were empowered to do: light up Onyx. Popping one of his antacid mints into his mouth, he picked up the phone.