Power (48 page)

“All right—talk.”

“I know why Lena and Mark went to Washington. Why did you go there?”

“Ben sent me.”

“What did he send you there for, Al?”

“Ask him.”

“I'm asking you.”

“Oh, the hell with it. It's small and nothing. It's a part of nothing.”

“Good old Al. Loyal to Ben. He worships Dorothy, but loyal to her—oh no.”

“I'm loyal to no one, not even Al,” I said morosely. “I don't want to play any games. I don't even want to weep for Mark Golden, or to remember fourteen years I spent near him and never heard a harsh word from him or a nasty comment, or to remember when I first came to this lousy, misbegotten place and found just one person to make me feel that I was wanted or welcomed.”

“Why did you come here at all, Al?” she asked softly.

“That's the big question. I never asked myself that one, Dotty, no, not at all.”

“Do you know?”

“I know. Of course I know. It wasn't the hardest thing to figure out. There are men who can just live. There are other men who can't just live, because life makes no sense at all to them. Then they spend their lives trying to find a sensible reason for their own existence.”

“As simple as that?”

“It's not so simple, Dorothy Holt,” I answered sadly. “Not one goddamn bit so simple, because no one ever finds the reason, not Mark or Lena or myself—”

“Or Ben?”

I shrugged.

“So you're going to Detroit after all?”

“Yes, Dotty, I'm going to Detroit.”

“A sensible reason for your own existence, Al?”

“More or less.”

“What about Lena? Don't you know one damn thing about women, Al?”

“Very little,” I shrugged.

But I knew enough to know that Dorothy Holt was drained more empty than I, that if I told her about Ben and the picture of a house, it would have tipped her over the edge of something. I didn't want to, mostly because I no longer cared.

 

6

“I'm going to Detroit with you,” Lena said, and I said that was all right, if that was what she wanted—or anything else that she wanted. But she didn't believe me, except about Detroit. “Ben is there,” she said, “so we'll both go to Detroit, Al. I don't want to stretch it any further than that.”

“Don't jump on Ben,” I said, and she said, the hell with Ben, and she didn't give a damn. “Then why are you going to Detroit?” I asked her.

“I hate Pomax.”

That made sense. The following morning, we drove to Cairo and took a plane, and a few hours later we were in Detroit. The struck plant was a few miles outside of metropolitan Detroit, in a suburb called Blent, and the cab driver who took us out there explained that as far as he was concerned, this was his last trip. I asked him why, and he said,

“Because any minute now that sonovabitch place is going to be the worst bloody sonovabitch battlefield on this continent.”

He drove slowly and carefully on a slush-covered road between endless rows of drab houses, dumps, and car graveyards. A few leafless trees; a few wretched farms. Then army tents, row upon row of brown army tents. Tanks, mortars, and a pool of trucks. The town itself swarmed with men in uniform and men out of uniform, and National Guardsmen detoured us around the plant, but in the line of the cross streets, we could see the machine-gun emplacements, and there was one street filled with men in civilian clothes, carrying clubs, picks, and improvised spears. We circled, always with the plant in the distance, like a beleaguered fortress in some strange, silent war.

The hotel was full. They directed us to the Auto Union headquarters. We circled the plant again, back now along the opposite side of it. There were two armies, strangely intermingled, clusters of workers armed with improvised weapons and clusters of National Guardsmen, armed with rifles, bayonets, and machine guns, each apart from the other, tight, suspicious, shivering with the cold and the tension. We, passed a tank, jockeying from tread to tread, grinding and twisting as it shifted its position to cover a cross street.

“You see what I mean,” the cab driver said.

“I see what you mean.”

At the Auto Union headquarters, the cab driver announced the end of his services. “Pay me off, mister,” he said. “I want to get to hell out of here.” I paid him off, and, carrying our suitcases, I pushed my way through a mass of people into what was once, many years ago, a luxurious mansion. Lena followed me, and my insistence on seeing Ben Holt brought us finally to a room on the second floor. I left Lena with the suitcases and went in. There were about fifteen men in the room, among them Ben. Half of them were talking, and the other half were trying to get some silence and to begin talking themselves; and through it, I could hear Ben's voice as he argued with one of them,

“Hell, no! Don't give me that crap about all that flesh and blood can stand! Sure it's cold in that plant. Sure they're hungry. Half of this stinking country is hungry. But if they don't settle down and make up their minds to hold on for another twenty-four hours, they'll be a lot hungrier and a lot sorrier-looking.”

Someone said something about one of the leaders of the Auto Union, who was evidently ready to give up and capitulate to any set of terms.

“Get that sonovabitch out of town!” Ben roared. “Lose him somewhere!”

Suppose they promised the strikers in the plant that it would end in another twenty-four hours, and suppose it didn't end?

“What am I, God?” Ben yelled. “I told you that I'm seeing the governor tonight! How many times do I have to tell you that? I spoke to the President of the United States! I spoke to the governor—and I'm speaking to him again! All I'm asking is that you sit tight in that plant for another twenty-four hours. That's all I'm asking. Is that so much to ask?”

Some of them left then, and Ben saw me. “Al—for Christ's sake, it's about time! Come over here!” Then he said to one of the men in the room, “I got to have an hour alone with Al Cutter, here. Will you clear this room?”

“An hour, Ben?”

“Make it a half hour. Give us fifteen minutes. The world isn't coming to an end. You can yell at each other outside as well as in here.”

They got out finally, and I sat there with Ben, who stared at me and grinned and lit a cigar and pushed one toward me. I shook my head. “Ever seen the like of it?” he asked. I shook my head again. “What do you think's going to happen?”

“God knows,” I said. “I don't.”

“I do,” he nodded. “So help me God, I do. In the next twenty-four hours, it's going to wind up and finish, and it's going to be the biggest, fattest labor victory there ever was. That's what I'm telling you, Al.”

“How do you know, Ben?”

“How do I know? Because it's in the cards—written all over every card. You saw what's going on outside?”

“I saw it.”

“It's a siege, ten thousand workers in that big plant—the biggest single plant of its kind in the world—and they been sitting in there, day after day, just sitting there with the stipulation that the company recognizes their trade union or they sit there forever. And the hell of it is that it came out of themselves. There's no real union in this industry, just a kind of spit-and-paper organization that a bunch of kids threw together, and these kids are trying to play it by ear—just as the bunch in the plant are trying to play it by ear—and every day the company gets another injunction and another regiment of the National Guard, and every day the ten thousand men in that plant get hungrier and colder and more frightened. So just to look at it that way, you'd think it was pretty damn hopeless, wouldn't you?”

“I might.”

“Sure you might,” Ben grinned. “But you've been around and you've seen one or two things. Like hell it's hopeless! They begged me to come up here because they got scared—who in hell wouldn't, this thing is so big, and day after day, I been fighting them to sit tight. I been pushing it up to the edge, and right now it's as close to the edge as anything can get. The men in the plant were frightened at first, real frightened, but fear's a funny thing, it rubs off. Now they insist that they're going to die to the last man, and all that really bothers them is that they're cold and hungry. On the other hand, the soldier boys were all set to bust into the plant, but now they have had a chance to think about a slaughter of unarmed men, and they're not sure they want to bust into anything. I spoke to the President, and he's like a man on a rail riding this, but he can't stand to think about a plant full of dead workers either, and the company itself is raging all over the place, but they keep wondering how many cars they'll sell if they tell the soldiers to fight their way in there, and meanwhile their competitors are selling cars a mile a minute and their own place is cold and quiet—and might even get all smashed up and burnt down if they force the issue. That's the way it stands, Al—and that's why it's going to be settled tonight—because there's no other place for it to go. I'm meeting with the governor tonight and with the president of the company and with the vice-president of the company, and so help me, I'll come out of there with an agreement! Do you know what that means?”

I nodded. “You've been waiting for it a long time, Ben.”

“But haven't I! You remember that day in Florida, Al? Can you imagine, that sonovabitch Arnold Clement, that lousy little prick had the effrontery to telephone me here and beg me to call this sit-down off. Promised me everything under the sun, if only I'd call it off.”

“He'd think that way.”

“Al, you know what I'm going to ask you?”

I waited.

“Al,” he said, “right now, this thing is confusion from the word go—sheer hell and confusion. No one knows who is who or what is what. I dreamed of this kind of industrial-union setup for years. I planned for it when everyone else said that I was out of my mind. Now it's here, and a year from now, we'll have fifteen million workers in the biggest and best trade-union organization the world ever knew. I said that about coal, and I was right. I'm saying it here, and I am just as right. And, Al, I'm going to lead it.”

I listened and said nothing.

“You understand me, Al? I want you to be at the meeting tonight. We're meeting at the Prince George Hotel in Detroit. And I want you to write the story of this. I want it to be written officially as the statement of our own union concerning its national leader, Ben Holt. I'm not asking this for myself. I'm asking it for the whole labor movement. If there was anyone else beside me, I'd say what the hell, let the chips fall where they may. But I can't do that. I'm playing a role here, and I want it made plain. Do you understand me?”

“I understand you, Ben,” I said.

“Do you think I'm wrong?”

“You think you're right,” I said. “That's all.”

“I'm holding a room for you at the Prince George. Don't think that was easy. There isn't a bed in Detroit that's for hire.”

 

7

The time was up. They were pushing into the room again, and I left and went outside, to where Lena waited with our luggage. Jack Mullen was talking to her, big red-faced, white-haired Jack Mullen who was Ben Holt's right-hand man, and who said,

“Well, if it ain't Al! Maybe you can convince her—I been telling her that she might as well stay with me. There's no other place to stay.”

“You make me tired, Jack,” Lena said. “Why don't you go away?”

“You hear that, Al? She comes here and tells me to go away.”

“We're going into Detroit, Jack,” I told him. “Do you suppose you could find us someone to drive us in?”

“You name it, we got it,” he grinned. “We rate here. No one ever saw Ben Holt in action until they watched him work here these five days. Between you and me, Al, this would not have lasted two days if they hadn't brought Ben in.”

“So I understand,” I said.

Jack found us a car, and we were driven back to Detroit. As we drove in, I put my arm around Lena. She was shivering. “That louse,” she whispered, and I said to her, “The hell with him. He doesn't matter. Ben doesn't matter.” It had taken me a long, long time to say it that simply and even to understand it a little. We saw the plant in the distance, the huge, sprawling length of it speechless, gaunt, expressive only in what one knew or understood of its present, its past, and its future. I pointed to it, and said to Lena,

“That matters. It's all there.”

“I wish I had a home,” Lena whispered. “I wish to hell I had a home, Al. I want to go home, and there's no place to go. Do you have a home, Al?”

“Not to speak of.”

“Where'd you come from, Al? I think you told me once—someplace near Rochester, New York?”

“Someplace near there.”

It was cold in the car, and she pressed against me. The car was an old Buick. The driver sat in front, with a friend who had come along for the ride and the ride back. I sat in back with Lena.

“Funny, Al,” she said. “I feel comfortable with you. Like I've known you forever.”

“Almost forever, when you think about it.”

“I don't like to think about it. I'm thirty-six years old, Al. It frightens me to think about it.”

Then she was silent, until we came to the hotel. We didn't have to register, since the room was held and paid for in the union's name. It had twin beds. “It'll do for us,” I said to Lena.

“Brother and sister.” She stared at me hopelessly, then walked around the room as if it caged her, long strides, a tall, long-boned, beautiful woman. “Al,” she said, wheeling to face me, “didn't you ever want me—ever once in all those damned years?”

“I wanted you,” I said. “I still do.”