Wheels

"I'll fix that date with Adam," Brett affirmed. "Call you tomorrow."

"Okay." The two shook hands.

"About that other," Hank Kreisel said. "Meant exactly what I told you. Don't let me know. Understand?"

"I understand." Brett had already memorized the number on the apartment telephone, which was unlisted. He had every intention of calling Elsie tomorrow.

As an elevator carried Brett downward, Hank Kreisel closed and locked the apartment door from inside.

Elsie was waiting for him in the bedroom. She had undressed and put on a sheer minikimono, held around her by a silk ribbon. Her dark hair, released, tumbled about her shoulders; her wide mouth smiled, eyes showing pleasurable knowledge of what was to come. They kissed lightly.

He took his time about unfastening the ribbon, then, opening the kimono, held her.

After a while she began undressing him, slowly, carefully putting each garment aside and folding it. He had taught her, as he had taught other women in the past, that this was not a gesture of servility but a rite - practiced in the East, where he had learned it first - and a mutual whetting of anticipation.

When she had finished they lay down together. Elsie had passed Hank a happi coat which he slipped on; it was one of several he had brought home from Japan, was growing threadbare from long use, but still served to prove what Far Easterners knew best: that a garment worn during sexual mating, however light or loose, heightened a man's and woman's awareness of each other, and their pleasure.

He whispered, "Love me, baby!"

She moaned softly. "Love me, Hank!"

He did.

Chapter 14

"You know what this scumbag world is made of, baby?" Rollie Knight had demanded of May Lou yesterday. When she hadn't answered, he told her.

"Bullshit! There ain't nuthun' in this whole wide world but bullshit."

The remark was prompted by happenings at the car assembly plant where Rollie was now working. Though he hadn't kept score himself, today was the beginning of his seventh week of employment.

May Lou was new in his life, too. She was (as Rollie put it) a chick he had laid during a weekend, while blowing an early paycheck, and more recently they had shacked up in two rooms of an apartment house on Blaine near 12th. May Lou was currently spending her days there, messing with cook pots, furniture and bits of curtaining making - as a barfly acquaintance of Rollie's described it - like a bush tit in the nest.

Rollie hadn't taken seriously, and still didn't, what he called May Lou's crapping around at playing house. Just the same he'd given her bread, which she spent on the two of them, and to get more of the same, Rollie continued to report most days of the week to the assembly plant.

What started this second go around, after he had copped out of the first training course, was in Rollie's words - a big Tom nigger in a fancy Dan suit, who had turned up one day, saying his name was Leonard Wingate. That was at Rollie's room in the inner city, and they had a great big gabfest in which Rollie first told the guy to get lost, go screw himself, he'd had enough. But the Tom had been persuasive. He went on to explain, while Rollie listened, fascinated, about the fatso white bastard of an instructor who put one over with the checks, then got caught.

When Rollie inquired, though, Wingate admitted that the white fatso wasn't going to jail the way a black man would have done, which proved that all the bullshit about justice was exactly that - bullshit! Even the black Tom, Wingate, admitted it. And it was just after he had - a bleak, bitter admission which surprised Rollie - that Rollie had somehow, almost before he knew it, agreed to go to work.

It was Leonard Wingate who had told Rollie he could forget about completing the rest of the training course. Wingate, it seemed, had looked up the records which said Rollie was bright and quick - witted, and so (Wingate said) they would put him straight on the assembly line next week, starting Monday, doing a regular job.

That (again, as Rollie told it) turned out to be bullshit, too.

Instead of being given a job in one place, which he might have managed, he was informed he had to be relief man at various stations on the line, which meant moving back and forth like a blue-assed fly, so that as soon as he got used to doing one thing, he was hustled over to another, then to something else, and something else, until his head was spinning. The same thing went on for the first two weeks so that he hardly knew since the instructions he was given were minimal - what he was supposed to be doing from one minute to the next. Not that he'd have cared that much. Except for what the black guy, Wingate, had said, Rollie Knight - as usual - was not expecting anything. But it just showed that nothing they ever promised worked out the way they said it would. So ... Bullshit!

Of course, nobody, but nobody, had told him about the speed of the assembly line. He'd figured that one for himself - the hard way.

On the first day at work, when Rollie had his initial view of a final car assembly line, the line seemed to be inching forward like a snail's funeral. He'd come to the plant early, reporting in with the day shift. The size of the joint, the mob flooding in from cars, buses, every other kind of wheels, you name it, scared him to begin with; also, everybody except himself seemed to know where they were going - all in one helluva hurry - and why. But he'd found where he had to report, and from there had been sent to a big, metalroofed building, cleaner than he expected, but noisy. Oh, man, that noise! It was all around you, sounding like a hundred rock bands on bad trips.

Anyhow, the car line snaked through the building, with the end and beginning out of sight. And it looked as if there was time aplenty for any of the guys and broads (a few women were working alongside men) to finish whatever their job happened to be on one car, rest a drumbeat, then start work on the next. No sweat! For a cool cat with more than air between his ears, a cincheroo!

In less than an hour, like thousands who had preceded him, Rollie was grimly wiser.

The foreman he had been handed over to on arrival had said simply,

"Number?" The foreman, young and white, but balding, with the harried look of a middle-aged man, had a pencil poised and said peevishly, when Rollie hesitated, "Social Security!"

Eventually Rollie located a card which a clerk in Personnel had given him.

It had the number on it. Impatiently, with the knowledge of twenty other things he had to do immediately, the foreman wrote it down.

He pointed to the last four figures, which were 6469. "That's what you'll be known as," the foreman shouted; the line had already started up, and the din made it hard to hear. "So memorize that number."

Rollie grinned, and had been tempted to say it was the same way in prison. But he hadn't, and the foreman had motioned for him to follow, then took him to a work station. A partly finished car was moving slowly past, its brightly painted body gleaming. Some snazzy wheels! Despite his habit of indifference, Rollie felt his interest quicken.

The foreman bellowed in his ear: "You got three chassis and trunk bolts to put in. Here, here, and here. Bolts are in the box over there. Use this power wrench." He thrust it into Rollie's hands. "Got it?"

Rollie wasn't sure he had. The foreman touched another worker's shoulder. "Show this new man. He'll take over here. I need you on front suspension. Hurry it up." The foreman moved away, still looking older than his years.

"Watch me, bub!" The other worker grabbed a handful of bolts and dived into a car doorway with a power wrench, its cord trailing. While Rollie was still craning, trying to see what the man was doing, the other came out backward, forcefully. He cannoned into Rollie. "Watch it, bub!"

Going around to the back of the car, he dived into the trunk, two more bolts in band, the wrench still with him.

He shouted back, "Get the idea?" The other man worked on one more car, then, responding to renewed signals from the foreman, and with an "All yours, bub," he disappeared.

Despite the noise, the dozens of people he could see close by, Rollie had never felt more lonely in his life.

"You! Hey! Get on with it!" It was the foreman, shouting, waving his arms from the other side of the line.

The car which the first man had worked on was already gone. Incredibly, despite the line's apparent slowness, another had appeared. There was no one but Rollie to insert the bolts. He grabbed a couple of bolts and jumped into the car. He groped for holes they were supposed to go in, found one, then realized he had forgotten the wrench. He went back for it. As he jumped back in the car the heavy wrench dropped on his hand, his knuckles skinned against the metal floor. He managed to start turning the single bolt; before he could finish, or insert the other, the wrench cord tightened as the car moved forward. The wrench would no longer reach.

Rollie left the second bolt on the floor and got out.

With the car after that, he managed to get two bolts in and made a pass at tightening them, though he wasn't sure how well. With the one after that, he did better; also the car following. He was getting the knack of using the wrench, though he found it heavy. He was sweating and had skinned his hands again.

It was not until the fifth car had gone by that he remembered the third bolt he was supposed to insert in the trunk.

Alarmed, Rollie looked around him. No one had noticed.

At adjoining work positions, on either side of the line, two men were installing wheels. Intent on their own tasks, neither paid the slightest heed to Rollie. He called to one, "Hey! I left some bolts out."