Thunder City (8 page)

“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 1847, 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.”

“The mafia man?”

“So they say. We didn’t seal the arrangement with a black hand, so I can’t be sure.”

The darning needle wagged. “I won’t have a wop telling me how to manufacture automobiles.”

“It was a straight loan, not an investment on his part. When I told him what I wanted it for he wasn’t even interested. All he cares about is that he gets his money back.”

“He was interested. When that butcher comes back for his cut, it comes from you, no one else. I’ve got enough partners as it is. If Bennett comes in I’ll have too many. No greasy dago is going to get his spaghetti hooks on an American automobile company.”

“I promise you he won’t.”

“I promise
you.”
Ford’s voice cracked. The forty-or-so-year-old mechanical genius sounded like a querulous old man. He scooped up his glass and emptied it. It was as if he’d poured water into the radiator of one of his automobiles; the patches of red that had appeared on his sallow cheeks faded, his eyes seemed less bright. Their gleam now was speculative. “You know your father’s a hidebound fool.”

Harlan, unsettled already by the previous scene, felt the need to put up some kind of filial defense. “He has a blind spot when it comes to automobiles. Everyone has one about something.”

“Think he’s senile?”

“He’s only in his fifties.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. That jackass Bryan’s only in his forties, and he tried to ride a silver sled into the White House. The Abner Crownover who saved his father’s company wouldn’t have closed his ears to a new idea, even if he thought it was crackpot. He’d have heard it out.”

“The family decision is I’m an idiot. He wouldn’t listen to me if I brought fire from heaven.”

“He’s right about that one thing. You are an idiot.”

Harlan was nettled but amused. “If this is how you treat someone after he’s given you five thousand dollars, I wonder how you’ve managed to attract any backers at all.”

“You’re an idiot if you let him throw away the business he built up from a hole in the ground, your birthright. An idiot or a coward.”

He was no longer amused. He had begun to realize that as far as bullies went, the Dodges were far less sophisticated, and therefore far less effective, than this son of an Irish-American farmer with gasoline in his veins and a fuel pump for a heart. “I’m gambling money I may have to pay back with my life on your third swing at the plate and your last strike. That may make me an idiot. It makes me anything but a coward.”

“Cowards often do brave things to avoid doing something they’re more afraid of.”

“Tell me what it is and I’ll tell you if I’m afraid.”

“Taking Crownover Coaches away from Abner the Second.”

Harlan had lifted his glass. He put it down without drinking and looked at Ford. “You’re the second person today who suggested that,” he said.

M
EMORIAL DAY WAS ALWAYS
an important date in the life of James Aloysius Dolan.

He was too young to have served in the War between the States, too old to have fought against Spain in Cuba and the Philippines, and though he spoke often of his regret that his country had never found need to put him in uniform, he had an Irishman’s instinctive distrust of the military and shed few tears in private for those who had Given Their Lives. His patriotism ran more toward brass bands and bunting, and his chest swelled nearly as large as his belly when all four Dolans, in all their late-spring finery of red satin, starched white cotton, and blue gabardine, paraded with stepladder and trifold flag through the dewy grass shortly after dawn to affix the Stars and Stripes to the brass pole canting out over the front door of the house in Corktown. It was a matter of considerable pride on national holidays that theirs be the first staff in the neighborhood to display Old Glory; when on July 4, 1899, the McCorkingdales’ flag was discovered already aloft next door when the Dolans rose, Big Jim consulted
The Old Farmers’ Almanac
in order to determine the exact hour and moment of sunrise, then telephoned the party conduit to the
Free Press
and arranged to publish a column accusing Seamus McCorkingdale of violating the Flag Code by hoisting the sacred banner before the sun was decently above wicked Windsor. McCorkingdale, a conductor with the Michigan Central Railroad, a notoriously nonpartisan voter, and a Protestant into the bargain, responded with a withering letter to the editor in which he proclaimed his innocence, identified his neighbor as the instigator of the column, and suggested that Dolan had failed to raise his flag first because he was dissipated by drink and debauchery during a premature celebration the evening before of the birth of the Republic. Dolan wrote an open letter in answer, insinuating that McCorkingdale’s father had given McCorkingdale’s sister’s dowry to an official with U.S. Immigration to overlook a vile disease on the old man’s health chart that otherwise would have kept him out of the country.