Whiskey River (22 page)

“Start with the Indians,” he said. “Well, the limeys was a bitch before them, but they was easier to get along with at least until that tea thing. It took us almost three hunnert years, but we finally rounded up the bastards and stuck them away on reservations. Then it was the Kaiser. We done him pretty good, us and the limeys and the frogs. After the Kaiser it was anarchists, and after anarchists it was gangsters. Now it’s commies. Next it’ll be niggers. Point is, we should of never got rid of the Indians, ’cause all we been doing ever since is fighting them under different names.”

In 1931, with talk of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment in the wind and the bootlegger off the front pages and stuck away on the entertainment reservation—
Underworld, Little Caesar, The Public Enemy
—the Indian in Detroit had taken a new shape, a thickset one with its collar turned up and its hat pulled down, bludgeoning order out of chaos with brass knuckles and a blackjack in factory parking lots and on docks where ore carriers dropped anchor to unload thousands of tons of iron pellets at the Rouge plant.
Strikebreaking
was an unfamiliar new term to Detroiters, but as the months passed and the economic situation began to look less like a depression and more like a black bottomless pit, it would fall on their ears with the dull thud of a phrase heard so often it had lost its power to create emotion.

The people who keep track of such things point to December 10, 1936 as the beginning, when a woman working on the line at the Kelsey-Hayes Wheel Company faked a faint and Walter Reuther climbed on a box and delivered an oration in favor of the United Automobile Workers union. For me it started much earlier, in the middle of January 1931, three weeks before Jack Dance’s trial and almost a year to the day since the night I had accompanied the Machine mob on the Canada run across the ice of Lake Erie. About midmorning, an anonymous call came in to the
Banner
reporting trouble on Wyoming Street in Dearborn. Ernie Swayles was out, so Howard dropped it in my lap.

You could drive down Wyoming every day on your way to and from work for years and never notice the little plant where a few hundred employees made hood latches for the DeSoto straight-eight Chrysler; it was a dumpy square block building set back from the street with only its address visible from the curb. As we pieced it together later, the trouble had started months before when the company began nickel-and-diming workers for replacing lost and broken tools and paying insurance premiums, deducting the amounts from paychecks so that in some extreme cases employees had gone home with less than a dollar for fifty hours’ work. Workers were hired at one salary and paid another much lower, and when they complained, the brass told them nobody was forcing them to work there and if they cared to quit there were thousands of others willing to take their place. There had been a number of slowdowns and one walkout that fizzled when the majority failed to join the rebels, who were then barred from the plant.

On this particular morning, after a pregnant woman was fired because she could no longer stand at her drill press for ten hours, some thirty of her fellow employees shut down their machines and refused to go back to work or leave the premises until the woman was reinstated. The plant brass, who had been anticipating a demonstration of the kind, had then called in strikebreakers to drag them out. A brawl had ensued, other workers joining in, and boiled out into the lot. That was when someone, possibly a striking employee, although more likely one of the timid ones who didn’t take part, had called the
Banner.

When I got there with Fred Ogilvie, the Dearborn police were filling the first of three panel trucks parked in front of the plant with men and women in handcuffs. A crowd of what looked like several hundred people fumed and bubbled on the slushy strip between the block building and the sidewalk, although when things calmed down and a tally could be made it would come out to less than fifty, not counting officers in uniform who moved among them wielding riot clubs equipped with perpendicular handgrips like those on submachine guns for ramming the ends into guts and kidneys, and big men in coats and hats who could have been detectives but weren’t. As I alighted from my Viking V-8 on the edge of the crowd, one of the latter standing not ten feet from me swung his fist and sunlight glinted on brass just before he connected with a hatless man in shirtsleeves and overalls, whose head spun on his neck with a splat just before he dropped into a junkpile of unrelated limbs. Fred took a picture across the roof of the car, eternalizing the thug, faceless in the middle of his follow-through, and the stricken man falling, his arms out like a diver arching backwards off the high board. It was a Pulitzer shot, if only it had appeared.

He used his flash. There was a suspended moment after the burst, like the vacuum that follows a gunshot in a quiet room; then the man with the brass knuckles turned our way, blinking. I saw his flat nose, the black inverted U of his mouth like a trout’s, the pink insides of the pouches under his tiny eyes, the burst purple capillaries in his cheeks that said he hadn’t been observing Prohibition any more closely than the rest of us. Then he came straight at me, the easy mark, the one without an automobile between him and a new place to plant his brassbound fist. I clawed behind me for the handle of the driver’s door. It wasn’t where I needed it to be. I missed, and then he was on top of me, his ham hand cocked back and glinting. I smelled garlic.

“Stink!”

He halted his swing. He had thrown so much weight into it that stopping propelled the rest of him forward almost into my arms before his big thick-soled Oxfords dug into the slush and asphalt with a crunch like tires braking in gravel. He whirled halfway around, his fist still cocked. The man who had shouted was shouldering his way through the crowd, grasping an occasional body in two hands and shoving it aside. I could tell it was Jack before I ever got a clear look at him, by his gait and the way he went through rather than around the obstacles in his path. A blackjack swung from a strap around his wrist, its bulbous leaded head dangling like a phallus.

“He’s jake,” he told the man with the knuckles. “Can’t you tell he ain’t no striker?”

“One of ’em taken my pitcher.” The words wheezed out as through a broken steampipe.

“Next time smile. C’mon, Connie.” Jack closed a hand around my upper arm. He had a blue welt under his right eye that grew deeper as I looked at it.

“Where we going?”

“There’s a place around the corner.”

Fred was still standing on the running board on the other side of the car with his camera resting on the roof. I tossed my keys at him. He trapped them against his chest with both hands. “Get that picture back to the office. Tell Howard I’ll call in my story.”

It was a workingman’s pig, the walls hung with rusty pictures of prizefighters and lit by a smoky shaft of sunlight canting in through the front window, the kind of place where all the bartender had to do all day long was walk up and down the bar filling the shot glasses from a bottle on one pass and scooping the beer mugs under the taps on the next. We were the only customers until two men Jack’s size in coats and hats came in and sat down at a table near the door. They might as well have been wearing their shields.

“Right on time,” Jack said, turning back to our table. The blackjack in his pocket made his coat hang crooked. “I ain’t lonely these days.”

The bartender, fat and beetle-browed with a faded “Remember the
Maine”
tattoo on his thick right wrist, set beers in front of us. Jack paid, then handed him another dollar. “Ask the gents by the door what they’re drinking.”

When he left us I said, “I thought you were keeping close to the ground until the trial.”

“The work’s legit. The Dearborn cops pay us to nail the lid on the Communists. I need the dough. Nate don’t work on IOU’s and I’m through putting the arm on Vivian. I ain’t no pimp.”

“They didn’t look like Communists.”

He grinned, lopsidedly because it hurt his eye. “What’s one look like?”

“They have scruffy beards and slouch hats and carry big round black bombs with burning fuses. Those were just factory stiffs you were beating on.”

“Thanks for the thanks. You know who that was I pulled off you? Stink Barberra.”

“Whoever named him knew what he was doing. He must’ve had a whole head of garlic for breakfast.”

“Far as I know he never eats it.”

“I couldn’t mistake that smell.”

“It wasn’t his breath you smelled it on,” he said. “It was his fingers. He rubs the stuff on his bullets.”

“What’s it do?”

“It’s supposed to give you blood poisoning in case the bullets don’t kill you. Personally I don’t believe it. It’s just something you do when you ain’t sure how good a shot you are. Someone put a round through Stink’s windpipe in twenty-five and that’s how he lost his voice. Maybe they didn’t use garlic.”

“What’s a professional killer doing breaking heads for the bulls?”

“Same thing I am, making dough to eat. How you think they live from one job to the next? When Stink works, I mean
works,
he works for Joey. The rest of the time he sits around rubbing garlic on his bullets and hitting himself with an ugly stick.”

“You’re working with someone who works for Joey Machine?”

“The town ain’t that big, Connie. Anyway, if he’s working, he ain’t
working;
get it?”

“Really like walking the edge, don’t you?”

“Beats reading the wallpaper at Hattie’s all to hell.” He turned and raised his mug to the bulls by the door. One of them lifted his right back. The other ignored him. They’d surprised me by accepting the beers. I don’t know why I should have been surprised. I counted it a good sign that I still could be, living there as long as I had.

I was starting to think of something to say to get loose from Jack—a new experience, rider to the hounds that I was, but I was there to cover a disturbance at the plant, not to discuss career opportunities in labor racketeering or whether garlic is any more deadly on a bullet than on someone else’s breath—when my story walked into the blind pig. Stumbled in, rather, in the person of a square-built young man with short dark hair in disorder on his forehead and one strap of his overalls broken and hanging down. The loose flap of the bib reminded me somehow of a man’s scalp I had seen dangling in front of his face at the scene of an accident I had covered my first year out of sports. That man had scalped himself bucking back through the hole he had punched through a windshield with his head when the Plymouth coupe he was riding in had struck a lamppost. There was less blood in the present case, a crust under the young man’s nose and a spray that had dried on his shirt, but something about that broken strap and the way he came in spoke of a disaster hardly less devastating. His shirt was torn and his eyes had a disoriented cast. Even aside from the way he was dressed, I’d have known he had been involved in the brawl—no, the rout—around the corner.

He held up inside the door, made himself slow down. I saw him hesitate when he spotted the men seated at the table nearby; then when they returned their attention to their beers after a brief curious glance his way, he walked up to the bar and ordered whiskey. Suddenly we were all in a western movie.

“What happened, Al?” The bartender filled an ounce glass and collected his four bits.

Al gulped the top half of his drink, coughed. He was younger than his thick build made him seem, not much older than Jack. “The fuckers murdered us.”

“Which fuckers, Al?”

“The fucking goons, which fuckers you think?”

The bartender paused in the midst of screwing the top back on the bottle. “You ain’t hot, are you, Al?”

Either it was the bartender’s glance in our direction, the first of four strangers who had just come into his place where he knew most of the clientele because they worked at the plant, or the nervous way he kept repeating the young man’s name. Whichever it was, Al caught it and turned to look at us sitting at a table by the wall in a place not noticeable from the door. I could feel his fear and hostility like a shadow across my face. He was standing with his back to the bar now and his hands on it. The movie was
The Virginian.

Meeting his gaze but talking to Jack, I said, “I’m working. See you later, okay?”

Jack was looking too. “You better bring your chair. I don’t think you can take him barehanded.”

“If you leave, maybe I won’t have to. He just saw you beating on his friends.”

“I think he’s the one hit me.”

“I don’t think so. He’s still alive.”

Jack laughed. “Be seeing you, kiddo. I hope your head knows what your ass is up to.”

He left. The two plainclothesmen took one last gulp of their beers and went out behind him. None of this was lost on the young man in overalls, who stood up straight as I approached him. He was shorter than I’d thought, although not short, and everything about him was square except his face, which was round like a boy’s and wore a pouty expression he probably thought was defiant.

“Nothing in here, men.” The bartender laid an ancient bulldog pistol on the bar with the blueing worn down to bare metal in places and a wad of duct tape wound around the grip.

I had my wallet out with the press card showing. “Connie Minor. I’m with the
Banner.”

“I see your picture,” the young man said, relaxing not at all. “You write about gangsters.”

“Not all the time. I’d like to talk to you about what went on at the plant.”

“Why, didn’t your friend tell you? He was there.”

“I’m paid to get all sides. I want to get yours.”

“How do I know you’re not spying for the plant?”

I smiled then. “What am I going to tell them, you’re on strike?”

He appeared to take that in. He wasn’t as dumb or as ignorant as he wanted me to think he was. I have some education myself, and it’s easier to fake than not having any. In the end he proved to be more tired than he was suspicious. He picked up his drink and we went back to the table. I got the bartender’s eye and made a circular motion with my index finger. He broke out a fresh mug and shot glass.