Thunder City (14 page)

The colonial predated the War of 1812. On clear nights when the moon was round, Harlan liked to stand at one of the tall casement windows and picture Brock’s British regulars marching along Howard in their red tailcoats to lay claim to the city they had vanquished without a single shot having been fired in its defense. Without studying the matter too closely he suspected the local garrison commander had invested everything in the war machines of the previous century.

His landlords were a couple in their late sixties, the husband a former Linotypist who had retired on the generous pension provided by his guild, the wife a descendant of one of Detroit’s founding French families who had lost everything in the French and Indian wars except the house where she still lived, and whose upkeep she and her husband managed by renting out the former ballroom. No partitions had been erected there since the days when gentlemen in powdered wigs and ladies in crinolines had glided across the floor to the strains of the scandalous waltz; Harlan, accustomed to the staircases and cubbyholes of the fussy building on Jefferson, could not get over the novelty of being able to drift from his bed to his parlor to his basin and stool—the last items being recent improvements discreetly hidden behind a folding screen—without climbing a flight of steps or passing through a doorway. He had celebrated his independence by laying down secondhand Oriental rugs and hanging the Impressionist prints his father had forbidden him to display even in his own room. Everything else was furnished except for the Morris chair he had found in a Michigan Avenue thrift shop, covered in scuffed brown leather and stuffed with horsehair in wads pleasing to the irregularities in his anatomy. He took his meals out when he was not invited to sit down with his landlords in the preposterously large and gloomy dining room on the first floor.

He was awakened in the gray dawn of a misty July day by a sharp report in the street below. His first thought was that one of the neighbors had set off a firecracker left over from Independence Day. Then he heard the huff and chortle of a motor and knew that Henry Ford was visiting.

He rose in his nightshirt and looked out the window just as his partner drew back on the brake lever, bringing to a stop the little six-year-old runabout he affectionately referred to as the “baby carriage.” Immediately there was another report, and a puff of smoke like a ball of dirty cotton shot out the exhaust pipe in back. Measuring less than six feet from the brass acetylene lamp mounted up front to the little motor straddling the rear axle, the little wooden box perched on wire-spoked bicycle wheels put Harlan less in mind of a baby carriage than a hand-drawn delivery wagon, with Ford’s angular frame propped on the open seat like a broken scarecrow. He spotted Harlan and beckoned him with a sweeping motion of an arm that was all wrist and elbow.

Harlan struggled to open the window, swollen tight by last night’s heavy rain, and leaned out. “I have to leave for work in an hour,” he called.

“I’ll drop you off,” Ford shouted back. “Come see the plant first.”

“I’ve seen the plant.”

“You saw an empty barn with pigeons in the rafters. We’ve started production.”

His heart lurched. “A year early?”

“A month late, if you ask me. Leland’s got his damn Cadillac on the street already.”

“Will that thing carry two?”

“If it didn’t I wouldn’t have spent good money on the wide seat. Get a move on. This thing don’t run on air.”

Harlan put on the clothes he’d worn the day before and went out without shaving. His father, who insisted that Crownovers look like aristocracy on the job, would scold him harshly if he saw him, but he almost never came to the loading dock, and anyway, it was the
plant.
He comforted his landlords, who were standing on the second-floor landing in their robes, gummy-eyed with rats in their hair, and went down to shake Ford’s bony hand and climb in beside him. The little vehicle leaned away over on its springs when he trusted his weight to it; it was just like Cheap Henry to use an inferior system of suspension and avoid paying a royalty to Abner Crownover II.

They started down the street with a snap that made Harlan grab for the edge of the seat. Intimidated at first by the noise and vibration, he held on to his grip; but as the little motorcar chugged on at a brisk fifteen miles per hour, its operator steadying its course with a hand on a knob at the end of a tillerlike device connected to the front axle, he relaxed and permitted himself to enjoy the sensation of the wind in his face. It amused him to reflect that he had invested five thousand dollars in an invention that he had not experienced firsthand until now.

Even at that early hour, people came to their doors and leaned out their windows to watch them pass. What was probably old hat in Ford’s Dearborn was still a novelty in that neighborhood. He felt himself on display, and a little ridiculous; and knew his first doubts about the venture into which he had hurled himself. He had thought to emulate the knights of the Crusades, conquering superstitious hordes with unquestioning faith in the righteousness of his mission; instead he felt like a freak in a circus parade. He wondered if in his zeal to outmatch his father’s youthful triumph he had chosen the wrong—well, vehicle, and managed merely to duplicate the well-intentioned folly that had ruined his grandfather. Sneaking a look at Ford’s granite profile, he envied the man his fanatical belief in his course, as if it were no less simple than the brass knob in his fist. His religion was mechanics, his apostles piston rods and gaskets and butterfly valves, anointed with grease and refined oil. He had no more reservations than the heads on a totem pole.

Ford unnerved and fascinated Harlan. He was uncomfortable to be around, not warm, and clearly impatient with any company that kept him from his spark plugs and spanners. Despite his involvement in automobile races he was not a sportsman; even at the tiller of this primitive prototype he wore a three-piece suit of unseasonable winter wool instead of the jaunty cap, goggles, and duster beloved of newspaper cartoonists who liked to poke fun at the motoring community. He was not driven by the pursuit of wealth, unlike Ransom Olds and his own former partners, Henry Leland and William H. Murphy, with whom he had broken when they insisted upon rushing their new car into production over his protests in favor of testing it on the racetrack. First and last he was interested in producing a reliable machine and offering it to the public at a price that would remove it from the exclusive confines of the rich. It was, in fact, Ford’s belligerent loyalty to his own vision, and not incompetence on his part or an unpopular product, that had driven him out of automobile manufacturing twice. Harlan flattered himself that he was one of the few who had seen that. What he lacked in his new partner’s genius with nuts and bolts, he made up for in his ability to spot a winner.

Or so he had thought until he set foot in an automobile for the first time.

Ford’s first comment after they set out, shouted above the racket of the motor, did nothing to dispel Harlan’s sense of foreboding. “Well, we lost Daisy.”

“The air-rifle people? What happened? I thought that was all set.”

“Lawyers. Bennett’s shysters told him if the car didn’t sell it would hurt Daisy’s stock, so he backed out. He might invest some of his own money, though.”

“That’s something.”

“Not really. I need bodies more than I need money. I don’t suppose you talked to your father about making them.”

“At this point I’m lucky I haven’t had to talk him out of firing me.”

“Firing’s nothing. I’ve been fired from jobs I didn’t even know I had. Nobody ever got anywhere by showing up at the same place every payday.”

“Well, I’m still sorry about Daisy.”

“I’m not. I didn’t want to name the car after a flower.”

“What
are
you going to call it?”

“The Model A, to start. If we show a profit the first year we’ll put out a Model B, then C. We’ll decide where else to go after we run out of alphabet.”

“Not very inspired.”

“Inspired don’t get you out of a mud hole when you’re sunk in up to your axles.”

“People like variety.”

“In coaches and carriages, maybe. Automobiles are different from everything that’s come before, except pins. The way to make automobiles is to make one automobile like another automobile, to make them all alike, just as one pin is like another pin when it comes from a pin factory.”

“You make them sound dull.”

“Dull is good. Dull lasts. It’s the bright and shiny that fades.”

Nothing more passed between them the rest of the trip. The incessant spluttering of the little car’s motor and the sick-sweet smell of exhaust had started Harlan’s head aching. He was depressed by his partner’s mundane approach to a prospect that had excited him and felt the first gnawing uncertainty about the choice he had made. His faith remained in the future of the industry, but he wondered if, with dozens of automobile companies sprouting throughout the city, he had selected one of the inevitable failures.

The plant on Mack Avenue calmed his fears somewhat. A large rectangular frame building that had begun life as a warehouse for iron stove components, it had since Harlan’s last visit acquired a sign,
FORD MOTOR COMPANY,
running the length of the broad side facing the street. The simple white block letters professionally painted on a black background had a permanence he would have found lacking in the bombast of a skirling circus-type legend such as was used to advertise patent medicines and phrenology. Inside, between great bay doors mounted on rollers at the opposing ends, two rows of mullioned windows on the east side allowed the first orange shafts of horizontal light to spill inside. The dust motes swarming inside the shafts appeared no less industrious than the forty or fifty laborers at work on the floor. Clad in grease-stained overalls, with cloth bill-less caps protecting their hair, teams of heavy lifters carried naked engines the size of pigs in from wagons drawn up to the dock and placed them on wooden blocks, where other workers set to work greasing and wiring them and installing spark plugs, dry cells, and coils from open crates at their feet. No sooner was one finished than a lifter carried it away, to be replaced by another engine in need of lubrication and parts.

“I’m buying old bodies and wheels from some of the other manufacturers around town so we can test the engines on the road,” Ford explained, raising his voice above the clattering of hammers and clinking of wrenches and pliers. “Then we’ll furnish them with new bodies and wheels and ship them out. I haven’t got the bodies to spare for testing.”

Harlan leaned close to Ford’s ear. “Do you intend to thank my father for inventing the concept of the loading dock?”

“I’ll thank him for not taking out a patent. Here are some people I want you to meet.” The angular automaker strode off in the direction of a group of men assembled around a block unoccupied by a motor, looking at what appeared to be a map spread out on top and spilling over the sides. They were all dressed in business suits and hats. Two of the three men looked up as Ford approached, trailing Harlan. The third, a squat, bulldog-faced man in a slightly loud pinstripe suit, bow tie, and derby, kept his attention on the sheet of paper. He resembled a circus barker.

“Alexander Malcolmson and C. H. Wills, Harlan Crownover,” Ford said.

Malcolmson, a Scot with old-fashioned muttonchop whiskers even more pronounced than Harlan’s father’s, had the austere features of a bishop. His firm handshake fairly crackled with electricity, as if the nervous energy that had driven him to the top of the highly competitive coal business in Detroit were too much for one man’s body to contain. His gaze was mild but probing, and Harlan was very aware suddenly of his own unshaven condition and that he was wearing yesterday’s clothes. The other man, Wills, was closer to Harlan’s age and very tall, with the cleft chin and chiseled cheekbones of a theatrical leading man. He had an intense, searching stare and his grasp was tighter than it had to be but not deliberately so, as if he were more accustomed to handling instruments. It was impossible to stand in the crossfire of these two men’s scrutiny and not feel as if one had been found out utterly.

“Wills is our engineer,” Ford pointed out. “He’ll be designing the Model A.”

“Designed,” said Wills in a clipped tone, slightly high-pitched. “Past tense.” He tipped a long, elegant hand toward the sheet.

Ford pounced on it, seizing the edges and spreading it out to hold it up to the light, a way in which Harlan had never seen anyone examine a blueprint. The detailed sketch resembled a conventional coach frame, with an extension added to the front to allow for the motor. Realizing that his partner had forgotten to introduce him to the third man, Harlan smiled and held out his hand. “Harlan Crownover.”

“James Couzens.” The circus barker seized the hand, pumped it once, and let go. His eyes remained on the blueprint, following its motion like those of the bulldog he favored. He seemed only peripherally aware of Harlan’s existence.

“We’ll talk about it,” Ford said suddenly, returning the sheet to the block. Both Wills and Couzens moved swiftly to catch it before it could slide to the floor.

“Couzens is my advisor,” Malcolmson told Harlan. “I don’t make a move without him.”

Ford said, “He isn’t exaggerating. Aleck won’t open an umbrella in a rainstorm until Jim tells him it’s okay.”

Malcolmson grunted; a noise Harlan took for laughter. “I wouldn’t question that, if I were you. He’s the one who persuaded me to invest in this company. If it weren’t for Couzens I’d still be peddling anthracite from door to door.”

“Talk about what?” Wills, the engineer, appeared not to have heard anything since Ford put down the blueprint. “The car’s perfect. All it needs is a logo.”

“The wheelbase is too long,” said Ford. “You’d need a cornfield to turn it around in. What’s a logo?”

Malcolmson said, “Henry, I want to talk to you about the Arrow. When are we going to race it?”

“I’m through with races. I’m in the business of making and selling automobiles.”