have to be nice to lawyers.”
Ford guffawed. His voice was light and slightly high-pitched and it drew attention from some of the other tables. I was pretty sure he was drunk. In that bracket it’s sometimes hard to tell. It doesn’t seem to do much for them in the way of having fun.
The outburst was over quickly. The air in the booth seemed clearer. The party relaxed. “Has Izzy been keeping you hopping?” Ford asked.
Zed answered. “I thought it best we keep Connie out of the day-to-day until we had something more concrete to show him than sketches. The less time he spends among the general population the fewer questions get asked.”
“Well, we have to put him to work. I just got through cleaning out the deadwood from the old days. I didn’t do it to make room for my own. How much do you know about cars, Connie?”
“If you don’t put gas and oil and water in them from time to time they don’t go.”
“Get him into Rouge,” he told Zed. “It’s how I learned the business and I guess it’s good enough for him too. Let him slam doors. Let him operate a welding torch if he wants. By the time he’s through I want him to be able to disassemble and reassemble a new car off the line blindfolded. He can’t sell a product he doesn’t know anything about.”
“I’ll start on his clearance right away.”
“Don’t bother.” Ford undid his lapel pin, the company emblem circled in gold, and skidded it across the table. I caught it before it could fall off the edge. “That will get you in anywhere. Take good care of it. It belonged to my grandfather. It’s the only thing the old bastard ever gave me besides a bellyful of grief and it’d be a shame if you flushed it down the shitter.”
7
I T TAKES A LOT OF MONEY TO make a madman into an eccentric. Once that point is reached, it takes a lot of madness to make the eccentric back into a madman. Henry One had had plenty of both—money to burn and insanity by the long ton. In the beginning his friends called him Crazy Henry because the boyhood sight of a steam thresher wheezing down a country road had convinced him that man need not be dependent upon the whims of an animal with a brain the size of a walnut to get him around, and again he had been called Crazy Henry by his enemies when in the darkness following Pearl Harbor he had promised to produce a bomber a day in his Willow Run aircraft plant. Later, when his grandson unleashed his hand-picked Whiz Kids upon a crumbling auto company whose employees were paid in cash because its puritan founder had discovered that Ford paychecks were being redeemed in saloons and whorehouses, his own family had begun calling him Crazy Henry and shunted him into the shadows. There, deprived of an outlet for his fantastic dementia, he perished.
Genius or lunatic, Henry had possessed both the energy and the wherewithal to translate the megalomania of every child’s egocentric wish-dream into the dizzying world-within-a-world of River Rouge.
When you stepped out of the relative quiet of the Administration Building and waded across the narrow strip of marsh behind it, you jumped a fence onto an insane farm where rubble grew like wheat and ashes flew like chaff; where stacks stood in dense rows like cornstalks and the lowing of noon whistles and diesel horns made you think of crazed livestock. Somewhere in that graysward of brick and slag, 63,000 men and women slammed doors, ran forklifts, tugged levers, poured steel, raised and lowered blocks, stacked crates, sprayed paint, stoked coal, placed calls, pulled chains, pushed buttons, threaded wires, turned screws, caught rivets, twirled knobs, pounded keys, tightened nuts, swept, polished, examined, tested, discussed, scribbled, cranked, pedaled, stamped, and watched the clock; but you could wander that vast compound of whizzing belts, throbbing locomotives, belching chimneys, and gliding ships and never lay eyes upon a single living organism. I had been there before,
Ford guffawed. His voice was light and slightly high-pitched and it drew attention from some of the other tables. I was pretty sure he was drunk. In that bracket it’s sometimes hard to tell. It doesn’t seem to do much for them in the way of having fun.
The outburst was over quickly. The air in the booth seemed clearer. The party relaxed. “Has Izzy been keeping you hopping?” Ford asked.
Zed answered. “I thought it best we keep Connie out of the day-to-day until we had something more concrete to show him than sketches. The less time he spends among the general population the fewer questions get asked.”
“Well, we have to put him to work. I just got through cleaning out the deadwood from the old days. I didn’t do it to make room for my own. How much do you know about cars, Connie?”
“If you don’t put gas and oil and water in them from time to time they don’t go.”
“Get him into Rouge,” he told Zed. “It’s how I learned the business and I guess it’s good enough for him too. Let him slam doors. Let him operate a welding torch if he wants. By the time he’s through I want him to be able to disassemble and reassemble a new car off the line blindfolded. He can’t sell a product he doesn’t know anything about.”
“I’ll start on his clearance right away.”
“Don’t bother.” Ford undid his lapel pin, the company emblem circled in gold, and skidded it across the table. I caught it before it could fall off the edge. “That will get you in anywhere. Take good care of it. It belonged to my grandfather. It’s the only thing the old bastard ever gave me besides a bellyful of grief and it’d be a shame if you flushed it down the shitter.”
7
I T TAKES A LOT OF MONEY TO make a madman into an eccentric. Once that point is reached, it takes a lot of madness to make the eccentric back into a madman. Henry One had had plenty of both—money to burn and insanity by the long ton. In the beginning his friends called him Crazy Henry because the boyhood sight of a steam thresher wheezing down a country road had convinced him that man need not be dependent upon the whims of an animal with a brain the size of a walnut to get him around, and again he had been called Crazy Henry by his enemies when in the darkness following Pearl Harbor he had promised to produce a bomber a day in his Willow Run aircraft plant. Later, when his grandson unleashed his hand-picked Whiz Kids upon a crumbling auto company whose employees were paid in cash because its puritan founder had discovered that Ford paychecks were being redeemed in saloons and whorehouses, his own family had begun calling him Crazy Henry and shunted him into the shadows. There, deprived of an outlet for his fantastic dementia, he perished.
Genius or lunatic, Henry had possessed both the energy and the wherewithal to translate the megalomania of every child’s egocentric wish-dream into the dizzying world-within-a-world of River Rouge.
When you stepped out of the relative quiet of the Administration Building and waded across the narrow strip of marsh behind it, you jumped a fence onto an insane farm where rubble grew like wheat and ashes flew like chaff; where stacks stood in dense rows like cornstalks and the lowing of noon whistles and diesel horns made you think of crazed livestock. Somewhere in that graysward of brick and slag, 63,000 men and women slammed doors, ran forklifts, tugged levers, poured steel, raised and lowered blocks, stacked crates, sprayed paint, stoked coal, placed calls, pulled chains, pushed buttons, threaded wires, turned screws, caught rivets, twirled knobs, pounded keys, tightened nuts, swept, polished, examined, tested, discussed, scribbled, cranked, pedaled, stamped, and watched the clock; but you could wander that vast compound of whizzing belts, throbbing locomotives, belching chimneys, and gliding ships and never lay eyes upon a single living organism. I had been there before,
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