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he pointed to Rollie Knight. "There he is, bossl Saw him do it." Others at
adjoining work stations were laughing with him.
Though Rollie was the target, he recognized, instinctively, no malice was
involved. It was merely a joke, a diversion, a rambunctious prank. Who
cared about consequences? Besides, the line had only stopped for minutes.
Rollie found himself grinning too, then caught Parkland's eye and froze.
The foreman glared. "You did it? You put this bolt in?"
Rollie's face betrayed him. His eyes showed white from sudden fear
combined with weariness. For once, his outward cockiness was absent.
Parkland ordered, "Out I"
Rollie Knight moved from his position on the line. Tbe foreman motioned
a relief man to replace hini.
"Number?"
Rollie repeated the Social Security number he had learned the day before.
Parkland asked his name and wrote it down also, his face remaining hard.
,'You're new, aren't you?"
"Yeah." For Cri-sakel-it was always the same. Questions, gabbing, never
an end. Even when Whitey kicked your ass, he dressed it up with bullshit.
"What you did was sabotage. You know the consequences?"
Rollie shrugged. He had no idea what "sabotage" meant, though he didn't
like the sound of it. With the same resignation he had shown a few weeks
earlier, he accepted that his job was gone. All that concerned him now was
to wonder: What more could they throw at him? From the way this honky
burned, he'd stir trouble if he could.
wheels-231
From behind Parkland, someone said, "Frank -Mr. Zaleski."
The foreman turned. He watched the approaching stocky figure of the
assistant plant manager.
'IvVh at was it, Frank?"
"This, Matt." Parkland held up the twisted bolt.
. Deliberate?"
"I'm finding out." His tone said: Let me do it my wayl
"Okay." Zaleski's eyes moved coolly over Rollie Knight. "But if it's
sabotage, we throw the book. The union'll back us up; you know that. Let
me have a report, Frank." He nodded and moved on.
Frank Parkland wasn't sure why he had held back in exposing the man in
front of him as a saboteur. He could have done so, and fired him
instantly; there would have been no repercussions. But momentarily it
had all seemed too easy. The little, half-starved guy looked more a
victim than a villain. Besides, someone who knew the score wouldn't
leave himself that vulnerable.
He field out the offending bolt. "Did you know what this would do?"
Rollie looked up at Parkland, towering over him. Normally he would have
glared back hate, but was too tired even for that. He shook his head.
"You know now."
Remembering the shouts, activity, siren, flashing lights, Rollie could
not resist a grin. "Yeah, man I"
"Did somebody tell you to do it?"
He was aware of faces watching from the line, no longer smiling.
The foreman demanded, "Well, who was it?"
Rollie stayed mute.
"Was it the one who accused you?"
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The worker with the Afro hairdo was bent over, decking another engine.
Rollie shook his head. Given the chance, there were debts he would pay
back. But this was not the way.
"All right," Parkland said. "I don't know why I'm doing this, but I think
you got suckered, though maybe I'm the sucker now." The foreman glared,
begrudging his own concession. "What happened'll go on the record as an
accident. But you're being watched; remember that." He added brusquely.
"Get back to work I"
Rollie, to his great surprise, ended the shift fitting pads under
instrument panels.
He knew, though, that the situation couldn't stay the way it was. Next day
he was the subject of appraising glances from fellow workers, and the butt
of humor. At first the humor was casual and tentative, but he was aware
it could get rougher, much rougher, if the idea grew that Rollie Knight
was a pushover for pranks or bullying. For someone unlucky or inept enough
to get that reputation, life could be miserable, even dangerous, because
the monotony of assembly line work made people welcome anything, even
brutality, as a diversion.
In the cafeteria on his fourth day of employment there occurred the usual
melee at lunch break in which several hundred men rushed from work
stations, their objective to get in line to be served, and, after waiting,
hastily swallow their food, go to the toilet, wash off their dirt and
grease if so inclined (it was never practical to wash before eating), then
make it back to work-all in thirty minutes. Amid the cafeteria crowd he
saw the worker with the Afro hairdo surrounded by a group which was
laughing, looking at Rollie speculatively. A few minutes later, after
getting his own food, he was jostled roughly so that every-
wheels-233
thing he bad paid for cascaded to the floor where it was promptly trampled
on-apparently an accident, too, though Rollie knew better. He did not eat
that day; there was no more time.
During the jostling he heard a click and saw a switchblade flash. Next
time, Rollie suspected, the jostling would be rougher, the switchblade
used to nick him; or even worse. He wasted no time reasoning that the
process was wildly illogical and unjust. A manufacturing plant employing
thousands of workers was a jungle, with a jungle's lawlessness, and all
that he could do was pick his moment to take a stand.
Though knowing time was against him, Rollie waited. He sensed an
opportunity would come. It did.
On Friday, last day of his working week, he was assigned again to lowering
engines onto chassis. Rollie was teamed with an older man who was the
engine decker, and among others at adjoining work stations was the worker
with the Afro hairdo.
"Man, oh man, I feel somethin' creepycrawly," the latter declared when
Rollie joined them near the end of a meal break, shortly before the line
restarted. '-fou gonna give us all a special rest today?" He cuffed Rollie
around the shoulders as others nearby howled with laughter. Someone else
slapped Rollie from the other side. Both blows could have been
good-natured, but instead slammed into Rollie's frailness and left him
staggering.
The chance he had planned and waited for occurred an hour later. As well
as doing his own work since rejoining the group, Rollie Knight had
watched, minute by minute, the movements and positions of the others,
which fell into a pattern, but now and then with variations.
Each engine installed was lowered from
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overhead on chains and pulleys, its maneuvering and release controlled by
three pushbuttons-UP, STOP, DOWN-on a heavy electric cord hanging
conveniently above the work station. Normally the engine decker operated the
pushbuttons, though Rollie had learned to use them too.
A third man-in this instance the Afro hairdo worker-moved between
stations, aiding the other two as needed.
Though the installation team worked fast, each engine was eased into place
cautiously and, when almost seated, before the final drop, each man made
sure his hands were clear.
As one engine was almost lowered and in place, its fuel and vacuum lines
became entangled in the chassis front suspension. The hangup was momentary
and occurred occasionally; when it did, the Afro hairdo worker moved in,
reaching under the engine to clear the tangled lines. He did so now. The
hands of the other twoRollie and the engine decker-were safely removed.
Watching, choosing his moment, Rollie moved slightly sideways, reached up
casually, then depressed and held the DOWN button. Instantly, a heavy,
reverberating "thunV' announced that half a ton of engine and transmission
had dropped solidly onto mounts beneath. Rollie released the button and,
in the same movement, eased away.
For an infinitesimal fraction of a second the Afro hairdo worker remained
silent, staring unbelieving at his hand, its fingers out of sight beneath
the engine block. Then he screamedagain and again-a shrieking, demented
wail of agony and horror, piercing all other sounds around, so that all
men working fifty yards away raised their heads and craned uneasily to see
the cause. The screams continued, fiendishly, unceas-
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ing, while someone hit an alarm button to stop the line, another the UP
control to raise the engine assembly. As it lifted the screams took on a
new excruciating edge, while those who were nearest looked with horror at
the squashed, mangled jigsaw of blood and bones which seconds earlier had
been fingers. As the injured worker's knees buckled, two men held him
while his body heaved, his face contorted as tears streamed over lips
mouthing incoherent, animal moans. A third worker, his own face ashen,
reached for the mashed and pulpy hand, easing loose what he could, though
a good deal stayed behind. When what was left of the hand was clear, the
assembly line restarted.
The injured worker was carried away on a stretcher, his screams
diminishing as morphine took hold. The drug had been administered by a
nurse summoned hurriedly from the plant dispensary. She had put a
temporary dressing on the hand, and her white uniform was
blood-spattered as she walked beside the stretcher, accompanying it to
an ambulance waiting out of doors.
Among the workers, no one looked at Rollie.
The foreman, Frank Parkland, and a plant safety Man questioned those
closest to the scene during a work break a few minutes later. A union
steward was present.
The plant men demanded: What exactly happened?
It seemed that no one knew. Those who might have had knowledge claimed
to have been looking some other way when the incident occurred.
"It doesn't figure," Parkland said. He stared hard at Rollie Knight.
"Somebody must have seen,"
The safety man asked, "Who hit the switch?"
No one answered. All that happened was an uneasy shuffling of feet, with
eyes averted.
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"Somebody did," Frank Parkland said. "Who was it?"
Still silence.
Then the engine decker spoke. He looked older, grayer, than before, and
had been sweating so that the short hairs clung damply to his black
scalp. "I reckon it was me. Guess I hit that button, let her drop." He
added, mumbling, "Thought she was cleLr, the guy's hands out."
"You sure? Or are you covering?" Parkland's eyes returned, appraisingly,
to Rollie Knight.
"I'm sure." The engine decker's voice was firmer. He lifted his head;
his eyes met the foreman's. "Was an accident. I'm sorry."
"You should be," the safety man said. "You cost a guy his band. And look
at that I" He pointed to a board which read:
THIS PLANT HAS WORKED
1,897,560 MAN HOURS
WITHOUT AN ACCIDENT
"Now our score goes back to zero," the safety man said bitterly. He left
the strong impression that this was what mattered most.
With the engine decker's firm statement, some of the tenseness had
eased.
Someone asked, "What'll happen?"
"It's an accident, so no penalties," the union man said. He addressed
Parkland and the safety man. "But there's an unsafe condition at this
work station. It has to be corrected or we pull everybody out."
"Take it easy," Parkland cautioned. "Nobody's proved that yet."
"It's unsafe to get out of bed in the morning," the safety man
protested. "If you do it with your eyes closed." He glowered again at
the engine decker as, still deliberating, the trio moved away.
wheels-237
Soon af ter, those who had been questioned returned to work, the absent
worker replaced by a new man who watched his hands nervously.
From then on, though nothing was ever said, Rollie Knight had no more
trouble with his fellow workers. He knew why. Despite denials, those who
had been close by were aware of what had happened, and now he had the
reputation of being a man not to cross.
At first, when he had seen the smashed, bloody hand of his former
tormentor, Rollie, too, was shocked and sickened. But as the stretcher
moved away, so did the incident's immediacy, and since it was not in
Rollie's nature to dwell on things, by the next working day-with a weekend
in between-he had accepted what occurred as belonging in the past, and
that was it. He did not fear reprisals. He sensed that, jungle law or not,
a certain raw justice was on his side, and others knew it, including the
engine decker who protected him.
The incident had other overtones.
In the way that information spreads about someone who has achieved
attention, word of Rollie's prison record leaked. But rather than being
an embarrassment, it made him, he discovered, something of a folk hero-at
least to younger workers.
"Hear you done big time," a nineteen-year-old from the inner city told
him. "Guess you give them whitey pigs a run bef ore they gotcha, huh?"
Another youngster asked,'-fou carry a piece?"
Although Rollie knew that plenty of workers in the plant carried guns at
all times- allegedly for protection against the frequent muggings which
occurred in toilets or in parking lotsRollie did not, being aware of the
stiff sentence he would get if, with his record, a firearm were ever
discovered on him. But he answered, noncommit-
238-wheels
tally, "Quit buggin' me, kid," and soon another rumor was added to the
rest: The little guy, Knight, was always armed. It was an additional cause
for respect among the youthful militants.
One of them asked him, "Hey, you want a joint?"
He accepted. Soon, though not as frequently as some, Rollie was using
marijuana on the assembly line, learning that it made a day go faster,
the monotony more bearable. About the same time he began playing the
numbers.
Later, when there was reason to think about it more, he realized that
both drugs and numbers were his introduction to the complex, dangerous
understratum of crime in the plant.
The numbers, to begin with, seemed innocent enough.
As Rollie knew, playing the numbers gameespecially in auto plants-is,
to Detroiters, as natural as breathing. Though the game is Mafia-
controlled, demonstrably crooked, and the odds against winning are a
thousand to one, it attracts countless bettors daily who wager anything
from a nickel to a hundred dollars, occasionally more. The most common
daily stake in plants, and the amount which Rollie bet himself, is a
dollar.
But whatever the stake, a bettor selects three figures-any three-in the
hope they will be the winning combination for that day. In event of a
win, the payoff is 500 to 1, except that some bettors gamble on
individual digits instead of all three, for which the odds are lower.
What seems to bother no one who plays numbers in Detroit is that the
winning number is selected by betting houses from those combinations
which have least money wagered on them. Only in neaxby Pontiac, where
the winning number is geaxed to race results and published pari-
wheels-239
mutuel payoffs, is the game-at least in this regard -honest.
Periodically, raids on the so-called "Detroit numbers ring" are made much
of by the FBI, Detroit police, and others. RECORD NUMBERS RAID or BIGGEST
RAID IN U.S. HISTORY are apt to be headlines in the Detroit News and Free
Press, but next day, and without much searching, placing a numbers bet is
as easy as ever.
As Rollie worked longer, the ways in which numbers operated in the plant
became clearer. janitors were among the many taking bets; in their pails,
under dry cloths, were the traditional yellow slips which numbers writers
used, as well as cash collected. Both slips and cash were smuggled from
the plant, to be downtown by a deadline-usually race track post time.
A union steward, Rollie learned, was the numbers supervisor for Assembly;
his regular duties made it possible for him to move anywhere in the plant
without attracting attention. Equally obvious was that betting was a daily
addiction which a majority of workers shared, including supervisors,
office personnel, and-so an informant assured Rollie-some of the senior
managers. Because of the immunity with which the numbers game flourished,
the last seemed likely.
A couple of times after the crushed fingers incident, Rollie received
oblique suggestions that he himself might participate actively in running
numbers, or perhaps one of the other rackets in the plant. The latter, he
knew, included loan sharking, drug pushing, and illegal check cashing;
also, overlapping the milder activities, were organized theft rings, as
well as frequent robberies and assaults.
Rollie's criminal record, by now common knowledge, had clearly given him
ex-officio stand-
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ing among the underworld element directly involved with crime in the
plant, as well as those who flirted with it in addition to their jobs.
Once, standing beside Rollie at a urinal, a burly, normally taciturn
worker known as Big Rufe, announced sof tly, "Guys say you dig okay, I
should tell you there's ways a smart dude can do better 'n the stinkin'
sucker money they pay square Joes here." He emptied his bladder with a
grunt of satisfaction. "Times, we need hep guys who know the score, don't
scare easy." Big Rufe stopped, zipping his fly as someone else came to
stand beside them, then turned away, nodding, the nod conveying that
sometime soon the two of them would talk again.
But they hadn't because Rollie contrived to avoid another meeting, and
did the same thing after a second approach by another source. His
reasons were mixed. The possibility of a return to prison with a long
sentence still haunted him; also he had a feeling that his life, the way
it was now, was as good or better than it had been before, ever. A big
thing was the bread. Square Joe sucker money or not, it sure corralled
more than Rollie had known in a long time, including booze, food, some
grass when he felt like it, and little sexpot May Lou, whom he might
tire of sometime, but hadn't yet. She was no grand door prize, no beauty
queen, and he knew she had knocked around plenty with other guys who had
been there ahead of him. But she could turn Rollie on. It made him horny
just to look at her, and be laid pipe, sometimes three times a night,
especially when May Lou really went to work, taking his breath away with
tricks she knew, which Rollie had heard of but had never had done to him
before.
It was the reason, really, he had let May Lou find the two rooms they
shared, and hadn't pro-
wheels-241
tested when she furnished them. She had done the furnishing without much
money, asking Rollie only to sign papers which she brought. He did so
indifferently, without reading, and later the furniture appeared,
including a color TV as good as any in a bar.
In another way, though, the price of it all came high-long, wearying
work days at the assembly plant, nominally five days a week, though
sometimes four, and one week only three. Rollie, like others, absented
himself on Monday, if hung over af ter a weekend, or on Friday, if
wanting to start one early; but even when that happened, the money next
payday was enough to swing with,
As well as the hardness of the work, its monotony persisted, reminding
him of advice he had been given early by a fellow worker: "When you come
here, leave your brains at home."
And yet... there was another side.
Despite himself, despite ingrained thought patterns which cautioned
against being suckered and becoming a honky lackey, Rollie Knight began
taking interest, developing a conscientiousness about the work that he
was doing. A basic reason was his quick intelligence plus an instinct
for learning, neither of which had had an opportunity to function
before, as they were doing now. Another reason-which Rollie would have
denied if accused of it-was a rapport, based on developing mutual
respect, with the foreman, Frank Parkland.
At first, af ter the two incidents which brought Rollie Knight to his
attention, Parkland had been hostile. But as a result of keeping close
tab on Rollie, the hostility disappeared, approval replacing it. As
Parkland expressed it to Matt Zaleski during one of the assistant plant
manager's periodic
242-wheels
tours of the assembly line, "See that little guy? His first week here I
figured him for a troublemaker. Now he's as good as anybody I got."
Zaleski had grunted, barely listening. Recently, at plant management
level, several new fronts of troubles had erupted, including a re-
quirement to increase production yet hold down plant costs and somehow
raise quality standards. Though the three objectives were basically in-
compatible, top management was insisting on them, an insistence not
helping Matt's duodenal ulcer, an old enemy within. The ulcer, quiescent
for a while, now pained him constantly. Thus, Matt Zaleski could not
find time for interest in individuals-only in statistics which regiments
of individuals, like unconsidered Army privates, added up to.
This-though Zaleski had neither the philosophy to see it, nor power to
change the system if he had-was a reason why North American automobiles
were generally of poorer quality than those from Germany, where less
rigid factory systems gave workers a sense of individuality and craf
tsmen's pride.
As it was, Frank Parkland did the best he could.
It was Parkland who ended Rollie's status as a relief man and assigned
him to a regular line station. Afterward, Parkland moved Rollie around
to other jobs on the assembly line, but at least without the bewildering
hour-by-hour changes he endured before. Also, a reason for the moves was
that Rollie, increasingly, could handle the more difficult, tricky
assignments, and Parkland told him so.
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