Thunder City Read online

  Horace’s round fleshy face, when he turned to answer Harlan’s greeting, was flushed as deep as the flame-colored roots of his hair, a lock of which had sprung free from the sweatband of his derby and dangled Napoleon-like over his bulbous forehead. The flush, together with the pink tint in the whites of his eyes, indicated that the shot glass in his hand had been filled more than once. The brothers, beefy and running to fat, still in their thirties but with broken blood vessels in their cheeks as if they’d been drinking heavily for forty years, had big appetites and thirsts to match. The hand with which Horace took Harlan’s in a bone-pulverizing grip was broken-knuckled, with years of grease under the nails, and nicked all over with old white-healed scars and fresh bleeding ones; owners of one of the most successful machine shops in the Midwest, the Dodges couldn’t resist picking up a wrench and barking their knuckles alongside those of their employees. Harlan considered this democratic streak their one saving grace.

  He didn’t bother to ask Horace what he was drinking.

  He and John invariably started their day with boilermakers, then around noon jettisoned the beer in favor of straight rye. Harlan, who disliked strong drink, ordered a bock.

  “I got the money,” he said, when the beer had been brought and the bartender had retired to the opposite end of the bar.

  “No shit, how much?” Horace raised his glass and knocked the top off a fresh refill.

  “Five thousand.”

  “I’ll be damned. From the old man?”

  “No.”

  “Not the bank. They all run when they hear Henry’s name.”

  “No.” He swallowed some beer and tried not to make a face. Ford’s temperance was a raw spot with both Dodges and he didn’t want his potential partners to think he was opposed to alcohol. “Do you know if Mr. Ford is coming in today?”

  “What for? He don’t drink, he don’t eat, he don’t smoke. The only reason he makes cars is so he don’t have to stay home and fuck.” He jerked down the rest of his drink in one movement and signaled the bartender with a finger.

  “Why do you do business with him if you disapprove of him?”

  “I don’t disapprove of no one. John and me are the kind that other folks disapprove of. Ford’s all right, I guess. If he works out that problem with the rear axle he might even sell somebody a car. I just don’t like no one preaching at me any day but Sunday.”

  “He’s a bit of a stick.”

  “That’s why he ran away from his old man’s farm. If he stayed put longer than a minute, somebody would of strung a fence to him.”

  “Where’s John?” It occurred to Harlan as he asked the question that he’d never before seen the brothers separated. Most of the time they even dressed identically, as if they were twins.

  “Learning to be a typewriter.”

  “A what?”

  “He went and bought him a typewriting machine and locked himself up with it for two days, but he said he couldn’t bang it any faster than a turtle fucking a snail. He went and enrolled himself in a course at the YMCA.”

  “Can’t he afford a secretary?”

  “He says dictating letters and then having them typed and then reading them takes too long. I think he just likes having another contraption to play with. I bet he took it apart and put it back together three times in them two days. Also it keeps him from thinking about Ivy.” John Dodge’s wife had died the previous October. His and Horace’s mother, seventy and confined to a wheelchair, had promptly moved into John’s house to care for his three children.

  “He’s going to work himself to death.”

  “If he does, he’ll die rich. Me too. Every penny we make goes back into the plant. We’re putting up a new building at Monroe and Hastings.”

  “I wondered what was going in there. What was wrong with the Boydell Building?”

  “It shrunk. We just took over all the machinery at Canadian Cycle and Motor.”

  “You bought them?”

  He drank and shook his head. “They swapped us their equipment for the royalties they owed me for that bicycle ball bearing I invented. We needed a place to put it, so we’re building one.”

  “It seems like the only industry that’s doing any building in this town is automobiles. I wish I could get my father to open his eyes.”

  “Well, you can forget that.”

  Other customers were trailing in. Harlan didn’t recognize any of the faces, although Horace nodded to several and twisted around on his stool once, to pump the hand and slap the shoulder of a thick-necked young man in a gray flannel suit with a humorous expression on his face. When the fellow left to claim a booth, Harlan asked who he was.

  “Barney Everitt. He runs the upholstery shop at Olds.”

  “Olds burned down.”

  “Sooner or later everything does. That don’t mean you leave the business. And just because your old man don’t throw in with you don’t mean you got to go it alone. John and I took over the shop because the old man couldn’t juggle the books with both hands and his feet.”

  Harlan laughed and spun his glass between his palms. “I could never do that.”

  “Why the hell not? If we didn’t, the shop would of closed down. Family’s family, but a man’s business is his living.”

  “Crownover Coaches isn’t a machine shop in Niles.”

  “Suit yourself. You can’t stop a man from hanging himself if he’s bound and determined, John says.” Horace drank.

  Henry Ford walked in ten minutes later. Lean and bony-looking in a charcoal three-piece suit too heavy for the weather and a round collar, he appeared taller than he was, and older than his years, his hawk nose, deep-set eyes, and straight slash of a mouth giving him the resemblance of a Maine farmer dressed for church. Horace spotted him first and hailed him. Harlan saw a brief expression of pain cross Ford’s face when he recognized the younger Dodge. Recovering quickly, he strode over and shook the man’s hand. Horace’s bone-mauling grasp appeared not to distress him. When it came Harlan’s turn to stand and greet the newcomer, he found out why; years of tinkering in his backyard with wrenches and pliers and countless laps with his hands gripping the wheel of a racing car had strung Ford’s fingers with steel wire. Harlan’s own loading-dock grip barely answered.

  “I want to talk to you about that rear axle,” Horace said.

  “I’m working on it,” Ford said.

  “I got a couple of ideas.”

  “So have I.” His eyes moved nervously in their sockets. They had a steely sheen, not unlike Horace’s patented ball bearings. “Mr. Crownover and I have a spot of business to discuss.”

  Harlan, who had not had an appointment with Ford, responded to the implied plea. He spotted the two derby-hatted strangers sliding out of their boom and, excusing himself to Horace, steered Ford in that direction, cutting off John Kelsey, the wheel maker, and a companion. Kelsey muttered an oath, but without conviction; Harlan had heard the man was too tenderhearted even to expect anyone but himself to wash his underwear. An unconventional business attracted unconventional men.

  “Are you a friend of the Dodges’?” Ford asked when they were seated.

  “We’ve barely met.”

  “Well, that’s the way to keep it, if you can’t avoid knowing them at all.”

  “I hear they’re rough customers.”

  “That’s no disadvantage. It’s a rough industry. What color would you say their hair is, auburn?”

  “Red, definitely.”

  “Not reddish brown?”

  “Red. I’d think they were Irish if I hadn’t heard otherwise. Is it important?”

  “Not if I can find a white horse.” Ford looked around the room as if he might spot one there.

  “Are you superstitious?”

  Ford shook a finger at him as long as a darning needle. “Don’t underestimate the element of luck. If you weren’t born the son of a millionaire, you’d be mopping out stables. If my grandparents hadn’t been evicted from a tenant farm in Ireland in 1
847, my boy Edsel would be planting potatoes in County Cork. If I hadn’t seen a steam thresher puffing down a dirt road when I was fourteen and impressionable, I’d be plowing my father’s farm in Dearborn. I built my first steam engine that day, using a five-gallon oilcan as a boiler. So when I see a white horse I have to find a red-headed man, and the reverse. Either one is bad luck without the other.”

  “If you feel that way, I’m surprised you went into business with John and Horace.”

  “They have the best machine shop in the Middle West.”

  To which statement Harlan might have added: that will have anything to do with a twice-failed manufacturer of automobiles. But he did not. The very fact that the Dodges had agreed to provide engines for Ford cars had decided Harlan to throw in with this odd angular man whose eyes burned like pinpoints in the steel jacket of a foundry. Ransom E. Olds, the anointed royalty of the tiny realm of the motorcar, had found the brothers adequate to build transmissions for the curved-dash Oldsmobile, whose sales had been sprightly before the fire. In fact, Harlan had been considering approaching Olds with the proposition of a partnership when the plant burned. Of the smattering of prospects that remained, Henry Leland, Ford’s own former senior partner, was too well established in the machine-tool business with some dabbling in automobiles on the side to need or want a new associate, and the rest were either parvenus who frittered away their capital buying drinks for one another in the Pontchartrain and talking about machines they would never build, or crooks and con artists. Ford, on the other hand, had ideas; and he certainly knew and loved automobiles. He had built his first fully operational machine from scratch in his shop in 1896, had raced cars with Barney Oldfield, the former bicycling champion, and had quit the Edison company when his supervisor offered him a general superintendency if he agreed to abandon his experiments with gasoline-powered vehicles. Harlan, no stranger to heated family business discussions (although he himself had never taken part until the invention of the automobile), could imagine the conversation that had ensued between Ford and his wife, Clara, when he brought home this news. For all that he was a queer fellow who held that the fumes from internal combustion engines cured tuberculosis and heart disease, and refused to eat sugar because he believed the sharp crystals would shred his stomach. It amused Harlan, when the bartender approached them, to hear his companion order only a glass of mineral water with a slice of lemon; Sal Borneo, whose background was as far removed from Ford’s farm-country upbringing as possible, had drunk the very same thing, without the lemon slice, after helping himself to a single ceremonial sip of Chianti from the bottle he had ordered.

  Harlan asked for another glass of bock and ignored Ford’s disapproving frown. He was not the supplicant here, as he had been with Borneo and Jim Dolan before him; the weight of five thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills in an envelope in the inside breast pocket of his season-rushing seersucker jacket felt like a secure plate of armor against his ribs.

  “I’ve got the money,” he said, after the drinks had been brought.

  “What money?”

  The question unsettled him. “Well, the five thousand. That’s the amount we agreed upon in return for a twenty-percent share.”

  “I’m up to my neck in partners now. Malcolmson’s saddling me with that Daisy man.”

  Alexander Malcolmson, a self-made millionaire who had begun as a simple coal merchant and within a few short years had bought out all his competitors to dominate the Detroit market, was the most upright and legitimate of Ford’s backers. “I don’t know what a daisy man is,” Harlan said.

  “Bennett. The air-gun fellow in Plymouth. He’ll invest if I agree to build my automobiles in the Daisy plant. He even wants to call it the Daisy. I told him no.”

  “Was that wise?”

  “I don’t much care if it ain’t. I never asked Malcolmson to ask him in. If I listen to every damn fool with money in his pocket, I’ll wind up making cars for the emperor of Russia in St. Petersburg, complete with sled runners up front so he and his wife and that nut Rasputin can go motoring through Siberia.”

  “You need partners to operate.”

  “If I had two nickels to rub together I’d tell every last one of them to go back to their coal and their banks. If they refused to leave, I’d drag a dead skunk across their trail and stink them out. Absolute control is the only way anything ever got done in this country worth shouting about.”

  Harlan smiled over his beer. “I’m beginning to understand why some people call you Crazy Henry. Only a crazy man would try to talk someone out of giving him money.”

  “Crazy like a fox.” Ford tapped his bony forehead. His tight grin betrayed Yankee pride at having coined a phrase. “Take back your money. I can use it, but I need bodies more.”

  “Bodies?”

  “Good stout wooden ones on elmwood frames. I want Crownover Coaches to make the bodies for the new Ford car, and I’ll pay fifty-two dollars apiece. Cash up front. That’s the same deal I offered the Dodges.”

  “You had to. They wouldn’t have done business with you otherwise.”

  The tight grin tightened another notch. “Sure they would have. Those boys love to gamble.”

  Harlan shook his head. “I want to be part of something that doesn’t involve my father.”

  “Now who’s crazy? Everything a man does involves his father. I might go sixty, if you’ll give me permission to use the Crownover suspension system.”

  “I can’t. That patent belongs to my father.”

  “I’ll steal it, then. But I still need bodies.”

  “I wish you’d just take my money. There are plenty of carriage shops in town.”

  “There are, and most of them are every bit as good as yours. Don’t look at me like that, you know it’s true. Abner the Second hasn’t done a new thing since he invented his spring. But those other shops haven’t his name. Motorcars are like skyscrapers; new enough to excite people, but how many of them actually climbed into an elevator and rode it to the top until J. Pierpont Morgan set foot in one for the first time? Go-devils won’t seem so new and scary once it gets out Crownover’s making them. Crownover carried the pioneers to California. If it was good enough for Grandma and Grandpa, I guess it’s all right for Junior.”

  “Are you going to include a history lesson in your advertising?”

  “History is bunk. We’re living in history, but you can trust the writers to get it all wrong. Think about it. A Dodge engine in a Crownover body paid for by Malcolmson coal. Nothing so new and frightening about that.”

  Harlan, hemmed in by Ford’s relentless logic, had no exit but confession. “My father will never agree to it. He thinks automobiles are a thing of the moment and will have nothing to do with them.”

  “He didn’t feel that way when he junked his father’s covered wagons and started making opera coaches.”

  “He was young then. No one had written a book about him.” It came out more bitter than he’d intended. “I wish you’d just take my money.”

  After a moment Ford picked up the envelope, lifted the flap, and thumbed through the corrugated stack inside. It did not appear to have occurred to him that to count the bills in the presence of the man who had given them to him—an American gentleman by birth—might give offense; but Harlan wasn’t offended. Like the Gold Rush, the boom in automaking had attracted goldbricks and four-flushers from all over the forty-five states. It was not in the habit of those who followed the profession to expect honesty. When he was through counting, Ford slid the envelope into his inside breast pocket and emptied his others in search of his receipt book, ejecting in the process an odd assortment of machine screws, washers, spark plugs in white porcelain jackets, and various bizarre-shaped bits of metal, hard rubber, and cardboard that defied identification onto the table. At length he produced a swollen pad stuffed with folded sheets of notepaper scribbled all over with figures and abbreviations and borrowed a fountain pen from Harlan to record the transaction. Harlan accepted the
carbon and his pen and watched Ford gather up his baubles. He noted that they all went back to the precise pockets from which they had been taken; crazy Ford might be, and certainly eccentric in his habits, but he was a walking file cabinet.

  “When do you go into production?” Harlan asked.

  “I’m dickering over a place on Mack. If I get it, I’ll have the first car on the road by next spring, if those Jews at Hartford Rubber don’t hold me up too high on the tires.” He took a bite out of his lemon slice, making Harlan’s own tongue shrink inside his mouth. “What’s your favorite color?”

  “Blue, I suppose. Why?”

  “I’ve been looking at paint chips for a week. Seems it don’t matter what kind of engine or transmission a motorcar’s got as long as the customer likes the color it’s painted, or so C. H. Wills says.”

  “Who’s Wills?”

  “My design engineer. He helped me draw up the nine ninety-nine. Maybe he’s got a point.”

  The 999 was the racing machine Barney Oldfield had driven to a first-place finish in the five-mile Challenge Cup race in 1900. Oldfield had spent the week before the race learning to drive, and had steered the 999 and himself into modern history a few weeks later when he set a world’s record for the mile in 1:01. Harlan said, “Red lacquer is our most popular color. It’s the same shade Napoleon ordered for his coronation coach.”

  “What did that squirt know? Fulton offered him the steamship and he showed him the door. I’m leaning toward black.”

  “What are you planning to make, a car or a hearse?”

  “Japan black dries fastest.”

  “There’s one car for every one and a half million people in the country. I don’t think the demand’s so great they won’t wait for the paint to dry.”

  “Perhaps not. Now.” Ford applied his linen napkin fastidiously to both corners of his mouth as if he’d had a seven-course meal instead of a single slice of lemon. The steely eyes were more brilliant than ever. “Where’d you get the money?”

  The crudity of the question surprised Harlan into giving an honest answer. “I borrowed it from Sal Borneo.”