If Walter had not been so desperately anxious to away to college, he might never have been able to stick it out those first few weeks at the factory. His father, once district sales manager for a bankrupt sewing-machine concern, had come down in the world and was now a continually uneasy clerk in the branch office of a usury outfit called the Friendly Finance Corporation; his mother, who had borne Walter late in life, clung jealously to the fading prestige conferred on her by her many beneficences on behalf of the Ladies’ Guild.
Walter had never done anything harder than shovel the neighbors’ snowy driveways and sell magazines to reluctant relatives. But the night of his graduation from high school his father grunted in a choked voice that there was no money to send him to college. Walter swore to himself that he would get a college education if he had to rob a bank. At the commencement exercises a class-mate had told him that you could get a job at the new auto assembly plant if you said on your application that you had worked as a garage mechanic. While his parents rocked creakily, proud but miserable, on the porch glider, Walter mounted the narrow steps to his little room and sat down at his desk. If he could work steadily at the plant for a year he ought to be able to save several thousand dollars even after contributing his share of the house-hold expenses. Without saying a word to his parents, he went to the plant the following morning and filled out an application blank. Three days later he received a telegram asking him report for work at six-thirty a.m.
When he returned, grey and exhausted, from his first long in the body shop to which he had been assigned, Walter found his mother sitting in the parlor and sobbing into a handkerchief. She raised her eyes at the slamming of the door and stared him in horror.
“Look at you!” she cried, and immediately Walter knew that her first shock was at the way he looked, not at how he must have felt. Nevertheless Walter felt it his filial duty to explain that he would not have to march past the neighbors in greasy coveralls, but could wear sport clothes to work and change at the plant; furthermore, he hinted, when his mother was preparing his sandwiches for the next day’s lunch, he could just as easily carry them in a little paper sack as in a metal lunchbox.
His father, keeping them company in the kitchen, took a different tack, and even blustered a little about for a huge corporation.”
I don’t see why Walter couldn’t have started with something more pleasant,” his mother said plaintively, smoothing mayonnaise across white bread. “In an office he could at least use his brains.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” her husband replied. “There’s no shame attached to factory work any more. Besides, Walter has a darned good chance to advance if he shows them the stuff he’s got.”
Implicit in all this was his parents’ fear that Walter had started down a dead-end street, and their own shame at not having been able to send him away to college. Anxious not to inflame their feelings, Walter refrained from defending his decision; even if he were only to point out that he would be making big money, it would be a direct insult to his father, who at fifty-nine was making only five dollars a week more than his son. So he put the case negatively.
“There’s just no place else around,” he said, “that would pay me anything like what I’m going to be making at the auto plant.”
“The boy is right, mother,” his father said decisively, much to Walter’s satisfaction. “You’re doing the smart thing, Walter.”
Thus challenged at home, Walter had no alternative but to grit his teeth and swear to himself that nothing would make him quit until he had reached his goal. Like a groggy but game boxer, he measured out his future not with the end of the fight in view, for that would have been too far away, but rather in terms of more immediate accomplishments: his first automatic nickel raise at the end of four weeks, his second automatic nickel raise at the end of eight weeks, his acceptance as a permanent employee at the end of ninety days, and most of all his listing as a metal-finisher, which would mean that he would be in the highest-paid group in the plant and that he would be recognized as a skilled worker, a man who had made the grade.
His surroundings meant nothing to Walter, who had not expected that the factory would look like an art gallery; but the work, and the conditions under which he had to do it, were a nightmare of endless horror from which Walter sometimes thought, stumbling wearily out the plant after ten hours of unremitting anguish, he would one day awaken with a scream. It was not simply that the idea of working on an endless succession of auto-bodies as they came slowly but ineluctably down the assembly line like so many faceless steel robots was both monotonous and stupefying, or that the heavy work of finding bumps and dents inn them, knocking them out and filing them down was in itself too exhausting.
No, it was the strain of having to work with the foreman standing over him and glaring through his thick-lensed glasses, that made Walter dread the beginning of each day. Under the best of conditions, he had three and a half minutes to complete his metal-finishing work from the time he started a job on his line to the time was swung off on hooks toward the bonderizing booths. If he began at the very beginning, as soon as the inspector had indicated spots with a stump of chalk, circling hollows and X-ing high spots, he could finish before the job reached the final inspector at the far end of the line–unless the dents were too deep or too numerous, in which case he was still madly pounding and straining with the sweat running down his temples and cheekbones while the solder-flower worked next to him in a tangle of rubber hose, melting lead, and a blazing gun with a flame so hot that it scorched dry the running sweat on his face, and the final inspector stood over him, imperturbably, chalking newly discovered hollows and pimples in the infuriating metal. Then he would straighten up from his hopeless effort with a despairing glance at the impassive pick-up man, who had to finish what he had left undone, he would hurry back down the line, praying to dear God that the next car–he did every third one–would be in fairly decent condition.
Worst of all were the times when he would hear a piercing whistle and would look up from the damnable dent at which he had been rapping blindly with the point of his file, to see Buster the foreman all the way past the platform, waving angrily with his cigar. Hurrying from his unfinished work to his punishment, Walter would try to steel himself against what he knew was coming, but it was no use.
“You call yourself a metal man?” Buster would ask, stuffing the cigar between his teeth with an angry snap. “You want to get metal-finisher’s pay and you let a job like that go through.” His eyes glinting with rage behind his thick spectacles. Buster would gesticulate at one of Walter’s cars, freshly speckled with chalk marks as it swung in the air. “Get going on it.”
And Walter would hurl himself at the job, dashing the sweat from his brow with the back of his gloved hand and filing away in a clumsy fury.
By the time he had somehow or other repaired what he had left undone, he would find on hastening back to the line that he was far behind once again in his regular work, so far behind that it might take him the better part of an hour to gradually work his way back on the line to where he really belonged, safe for the moment from shouted complaints.
Inevitably the men around him had suggestions as to how Walter might better his condition. Of the two other metal finishers who worked on the line with him, one was a leader in the opposition of the local union and disgusted because it did nothing to provide security for probationary employees like Walter.
“I’ll tell you something else. There’s countries where a bright young hard-working fellow like you, that wants to go to college, doesn’t have to waste the best years of his life in factory work just to save the money for college fees. He gets sent right through school and the government foots the bills. all he has to do is show that he’s got the stuff and his future is secure.”
Walter allowed that this sounded fine, although “having the stuff” sounded uncomfortably like his father’s eulogies of life in America, but he could not see what practical good it did him here and now–unless he was supposed to get satisfaction from the bitterness of knowing that in mysterious other countries his opposite numbers were better off than he.
The third metal-finisher, a lean efficient, sardonic man, had been listening silently to this talk of free college careers. He put his wiry hand inside his open-necked khaki shirt, scratched the coarse curling hair below his throat, and laughed aloud.
“What’s the matter?” asked his fattish colleague suspiciously.
“You think your propaganda’s going to change this boy’s ideas about the other side of the world when everything here tells him he’s got it so good?” He tapped the fat man on the shoulder with the butt end of his file as patronizingly as if he were patting him on the head. “Even if he has to suffer for his education in a way that shouldn’t be necessary, he’s free. He can blunder around and maybe even learn something that isn’t listed in the college catalogues. Those poor kids you want him to envy, they may be getting their college for nothing, but they’re paying a higher price for it than this fellow ever will. And the sad part is that most of them probably don’t even know what the price is.” And he turned back to his work without giving the fat man a chance to reply.
Fortunately for the three of them, the fat metal finisher was transferred. He was only replaced, however, by an intense worker with two vertical wrinkles between his brows, what watched Walter’s ineffectual work with growing impatience. it no more. At last he could stand it no more.
“In this game, kid, the knack of it is in the speed. The speed,” he said fiercely, “and the way you concentrate on the job. If you’re going to fumble around and just bitch about your mistakes, you’ll be a long time getting straightened out.” He greeted his own badly dented job, rolling towards them, with a smile of genuine pleasure. “Size it up quick, pick out the worst dents, and get going on them right away. Leave the high spots for last–the pick-up men don’t mind doing them.”
The third man, the grey-haired cynic whom everyone liked but no one seemed to know, had been listening quietly, with a strange, mild grin on his long and youthful face. He put a stick of chewing gum in his mouth, ruminated for a moment, and said: “What you really want is for him to enjoy his work, Orrin. Might be more practical if you’d get down and actually show him how to do it. Here, hold on a minute, Walter.”
Walter had been squatting on his haunches before the wheel housing of his job, blindly pounding with a hammer at his hidden screwdriver, trying hopelessly to punch a hole underneath so that with the screwdriver he could dig out a deep dent as the others did, trying so hopelessly that as he smashed the hammer against his left hand, missing the butt end of the screwdriver, he had to squeeze his eyes to keep the tears from starting forth.
“Give me that screwdriver.”
Handing up the tool to the laconic man, Walter noticed for the first time that he bore an unusual tattoo, faded like an old flag, on his right forearm: an American Eagle, claws gripping his wrist, beak opened triumphantly at the elbow–you could almost hear it screaming. Without a word the man took the screwdriver and swiftly pressed it to a grinding wheel, fashioning a beveled point.
“Try it now.”
Walter stuck the screwdriver under several times–bang! it was through and resting against the outer skin of the car, just at the very dent. Gratefully, he turned to the grey-haired man, but the man was gone, like a mirage.
There was something mirage-like about him, anyway. He drove to and from work alone, he never engaged in small talk, he never hung around with a group at lunch hour or before work, he kept a paper book in the hip pocket of his khaki trousers, and always when he was not concentrating on his own work, watching Walter or listening to the others handing him advice, he had that mocking irreligious smile on his long narrow youthful face. What was more, his cold blue eye seemed always on Walter, sizing him up, watching not so much his work, as everyone one else did, but his temperament and personality. It made him uncomfortable.
Gradually Walter began to sort out the other men around him, the ones who had more common reality in their talk and their tastes. Most companionable of them all was Kevin, the former rural school teacher, now an immigrant hook-man. His accent was so delightful, his turns of speech so happy, that Walter engaged the towering redhead in conversation at every opportunity.
“Hey, Kevin,” he shouted at him one day, “how old were those kids you taught in County Kerry?”
“Ah, Walter,” Kevin sighed, showing his long white teeth as he spoke, “they weren’t all such children. If you were to see some of the older girls–quite well-developed, they were. Oh, how shameful if they had known what was passing through their school-master’s mind!”
Kevin laughed at the memory, Walter at the picture the big fellow conjured up of countryside lust; he turned around and there was the grey-haired metal-finisher, smiling too, but so coldly you would have thought him a scientist observing a successful experiment. It was chilling, and yet not wholly unpleasant. In a way that he could not define, Walter felt that he was being judged and approved.
This third man, reserved and anonymous as ever, continued to observe him as Walter chatted not only with Kevin and the second metal-finisher, but with all the other men on their line. Conversation was necessarily shouted and fragmentary, but Walter was astonished at how intimacies could be revealed in the course of a few phrases:
“A man’s a fool to get married.”
“Grab the overtime while you can. In the auto industry you never know when you’ll be laid off.”
“Happiest time of my life was when I was in the army.”
“Only reason I’m here is because I was too stupid to learn trade.”
“I came here out of curiosity, but my curiosity’s all used up.”
“My wife says if I quit I’ll have a better chance to line up a construction job.”
“Walter, don’t turn out like those college men who can tell you how to do everything but can’t do a damn thing themselves.”
The only one to rebuff Walter’s friendly overtures was Pop, the seamy-faced little inspector with a rooster’s ruff of yellowing white hair that rose and tumbled down over his forehead, and sunken old lips from which depended miraculously a heavy, unlit cigar. Wizened, pale and bloodless, he regarded Walter, for no apparent reason, with bottomless contempt. With a little cap
perched sideways on his Niagara of a head like a precarious canoe, and a soft brown cloth knotted about the hand with which he probed Walter’s work for defects and omissions, he seemed Walter like some strange and hateful gnome.
“Kids like you,” he said in a dry and rusty monotone, “they come and go. Twenty-three years I’m here, and I seen a million like you. Not steady, not reliable, don’t want to learn, just out for fun. You’ll never make a metal man.”
I don’t want to be a metal man, Walter wanted to reply; I just want to make my money and get out of here. But this was, he knew, just what Pop was goading him to say, so he held his tongue. A moment later he was glad that he had, for he was startled to hear the third metal-finisher address him.
“Pop is an exception,” he said, bending over Walter’s car and scrubbing at it with his sandpaper as he spoke. “By and large there is a democracy of age in the factory. Men who have been here since before you were born fought for a union contract guaranteeing equal treatment for you. Ninety days after you start you get the same wage as a worker who’s been on the job nineteen years. A man twice your age will treat you as a working partner and an adult. Where else is that true?”
“Yes,” Walter replied angrily, “but Pop –”
“He’s got reason to be bitter. Someday I’ll tell you why.”
He straightened up abruptly and walked away to his own job. But the words he had used reverberated in Walter’s mind. Who was he, with his young-old face and his expressions like “democracy of age”? Walter asked, but no one seemed to know. Some said he was a seaman and adventurer, and his big tattoo was pointed to as proof, for he had been heard to state himself that he had acquired it in Lourenco Marques; but others, who had themselves come to the assembly line from rural homesteads, were positive from clues he had let fall that he had formerly been an itinerant farm laborer; and there were even those who swore that he was really an educated man, a kind of college professor amusing himself by slumming among them.
Whoever he was, for the time he had nothing more to say. But Walter felt his presence, for he was always ready to lend a hand, always laconically helpful, always silently observing and listening.
One day the younger inspector at the beginning of the line, blowing genial clouds of illegal pipe smoke, gave Walter some frank and cynical advice.
“Been listening to the bosses talking about you, buddy.” He took the pipe from his mouth and formed a fat smoke ring. “Want to know what’s wrong with what you’re doing?”
“I guess so,” said Walter dully.
“You try too hard. You’re trying to do a good job–that’s the worst thing you can do.”
Walter stared in bewilderment at the inspector. “But why?’
“They’re interested in pulling production. If you’re going to be running up and down the line all day trying to make every job perfect, you’re just going to get in people’s way. What the bosses will do is, they’ll look for an excuse to fire you before your probationary period is up, or else they’ll stick you in a routine lower-paying job.”
“Then . . .”
“I’ve been here ten years. Believe me” — he drew on his cigar once again and smiled disarmingly — “they’re not interested in making good cars, they’re interested in making cars. You know what production means? Volume. And you know what they hired you for? To camouflage, not to get rid of every flaw. Hide them so they don’t show up after the car’s been through paint, so the customer doesn’t see them at the dealer’s and you’ll get along great.”
“Camouflage them how?”
“With your sandpaper. With the grinding wheel. If you hit them up and down and then across, final inspection will never know what’s underneath. Make it look good, and confusing. Be a camouflage artist and the bosses’ll very seldom bother you.”
Walter could not help laughing. “Listen, how could you stand it here for ten years? Every day I think maybe I ought to get out and look for something else.”
“For six years,” the inspector said pleasantly, “I was like you. This was going to be just temporary until I found something with a real future. It took me six years to realize that I was going to be spending the rest of my life here-it’s like breaking in a wild horse, only with a human being it takes longer. I got married, had three kids, now I’m building a home near the plant. So I make the best of it, I take it easy and I have as much fun as I can, and I hate to see a guy like you breaking his back all for nothing.”
Bending over his work, Walter raised his file and heard the inspector’s final shot, lightly enough intended but bearing its own weight of bitterness and resignation: “You’d be surprised how many fellows I’ve heard talking just like you, couldn’t stand the work, going to quit any day, and now they’re five and ten year men, starting to think about retirement benefits.”
Walter could not clarify in his own mind what it was about the inspector’s attitude that increased his desperation, not until his silent partner eased up to him from nowhere and said quietly, “Kind of terrified you, didn’t he?”
“Not exactly terrified.”
“Just the same, it’s no fun to be doing time and to be told that your sentence just might turn out to be indefinite. Then if you’ve got a good imagination you can see yourself gradually getting used to it, even getting to like the routine, so that one day follows another and the first thing you know the wrinkles are there and the kids are grown up and you don’t know where it’s all gone to, your life.”
Walter felt himself shuddering. Was it from the blower over- head that he felt his hot sweat turning cold and drying on his face? He said, “I suppose you have to be cynical if you’re going to stay here.”
“Day after day your life becomes a joke without any point, a trick that you play on yourself from punching in to punching out.”
“But that’s only if you’re an imaginative or a sensitive person.”
For the first time, the man’s angular face hardened. “Don’t you think somebody like that inspector had his ambitions? Don’t you think he still has his man’s pride? Did you ever figure the cost of the job in terms of what it does to the personality of a clever intelligent fellow like him? He says if you’re going to be trapped you might as well make the best of it, and by his lights he may be right. Anyway don’t be too quick to blame him–he probably never had the opportunity to save money and go off to college.”
No one had ever, not ever in eighteen years, talked to Walter in such a way. He would never again be able to look at a man like the inspector without compassion. Even at home in the evening with his father, whom he could no longer talk to about anything but baseball or the weather (although they both tried clumsily to broach other more serious topics), Walter found that he was viewing this desolate man not just as his father but as a man who had his own miseries; and this, he knew, was a part of growing up that could not have come about as it had without the influence of his strange friend in the factory.
More and more as the weeks passed and exhaustion was gradually overcome by vitality, only to be transformed into monotony, Walter came to feel that only this man could explain the real meaning of the assembly line. But he remained aloof, insubstantial as a ghost. The more he held to himself, the more Walter was piqued, and determined to make the ghost speak.
At last one day he ventured to demand: “Say, what does that tattoo of yours stand for, that big bird?”
The man smiled with one side of his mouth. “That old bird is the American eagle.” He raised his arm briefly, flexed it, and let it fall to his side. “It’s screaming with rage to the republic.”
“What has happened?”
“Where are the guts? Where’s the drive? In a place like this a man’s life goes down the drain like scummy water.”
“But you’re working here too,” Walter said boldly.
The man shook his head slowly, with such finality that there was something elemental about the gesture. I’m not a settled-down man, I’m just passing through.”
Walter cleared his throat. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Why should you? Instead of learning names, we refer to the fellow with the bad teeth, or the guy with the blue coveralls. When I work next to a man for months and learn that his wife is being operated on for cancer of the breast and still don’t know his name, it tells me something not just about him and me, but about the half-connections that are all the factory allows you the way of friendships.”
“The old-timers are clubby enough, but everybody else claims they’re here for a limited time. The place is so big and everything seems so temporary that I suppose we don’t feel the need of introducing ourselves.”
The older man looked at Walter somberly. “No one who comes here wants to admit that the place has any real connection with his real life. He has to say that he is just putting in his time here, and so no matter how friendly he is by nature he has to think of the people around him as essentially strangers, men whom he can’t even trouble to say goodbye to when he quits or gets laid
off.”
“But your name–”
“Call me Joe.”
Walter pursued him: “Every third guy on the line named Joe. Joe what?”
He smiled again, his long Yankee countenance creasing cold grin. “Joe, the vanishing American.” And he turned his back on Walter and bent to his work as the line resumed its endless progress.
But he was a curious man, a nosey man, and he was there, listening and leering, when Walter found a minute to respond without cursing to a bitter remark of Pop’s. Walter turned on him with the anger he had managed to suppress when speaking to the old inspector.
“It’s easy for you to stand there and better than anybody else in the shop.”
Joe hitched up his khaki trousers anger, “I never claimed that. I just read little more and ponder a little more than the average fellow. That’s why I don’t laugh at them, I feel sorry for them. If I’m a little freer, I’ve had to make sacrifices for it–no dependents, no ties.” He added cryptically, “They punish you one way or they punish you another way.”
Walter did not quite understand, but it struck him these remarks were a prelude to farewell.
He asked uneasily, “You’re not going to quit?”
“One of these days. Maybe the weather will turn, or I’ll hear of something else, or I’ll have words with Buster…” He added with somewhat more warmth, “But I’ll be back- if not here, some place like here. You won’t, though. That’s why I hope you won’t forget what it was like for the people who made the things you’ll be buying.”
Walter cried indignantly: “How could I? How could I ever forget?” It seemed to him that the thick scurf of silver through which he shuffled as he worked, the glittering waste of lead filings and melted sticks, were so many needles, each carrying its stinging injection of memory–of sweat, exhaustion, harrying, feverish haste, and stupid boredom.
“You forget worse things, don’t you? Pain, and even death? You’ll think back on the days when you were slaving away to save money for college, and they’ll strike you as comical, maybe even romantic.”
“God forbid!” Walter laughed. And yet he had suddenly a shivery foretaste of a future beyond the one of which he day-dreamed as he worked.
When the siren screamed the end of their nine and a half hours. Walter hurled his file and apron into his tool box and trotted down the aisle toward the time clock. Turning the corner of the body shop office just as its lights were extinguished, he ran head-long into the iron antennae of a fork truck and cried aloud with pain as the metal plate struck his shinbone. Tottering backwards, Walter was suddenly gripped by the forearm and pulled erect.
He turned gratefully and found himself staring into the eyes of Joe.
Smarting with soreness and embarrassment, Walter demanded aggressively, “I suppose that’s what you want me to remember.?”
A faint stubble glinted along Joe’s narrow cheeks. Graying his iron hair, it aged him as it grew. He scraped his hand across it wearily and replied quietly, “Never mind the machinery, remember the men. The men make the machines and they make their own tragedies too. Once your own life gets easier, you’ll take it for granted not only that theirs must be easier too, but that they deserve what they get anyway, that some law of natural selection has put you up where you are and them down where they are.”
They had reached the clock bay where they took their place meekly in line, waiting to punch out, shuffling forward every few seconds while they spoke in low voices. Around them a swarm of men surged toward freedom–noisy boys with laughter to spare for the evening; haggard weary men in their forties; surly powerful black men in stained coveralls and scrawny brown men chattering in Spanish; vacant-faced fools with slack jaws and dangling hands; shrewd-eyed men fingering their union contract books, composing their campaign leaflets, and computing their chances of election to positions that would lift them out of the work routine.
“Why do they stay?”
“They’re trapped, that’s why. They say everybody’s supposed to be, one way or another, but it’s worse to be stuck here. Spending your life on the production line means counting out the minutes, being grateful that Mondays go fast because you’re rested, and hating Tuesdays because the week is so long. It means that you’re paying off forever on all the things you’ve been pressured into buying by getting up every day in order to do something you’d never, never think of doing if it was a matter of choice. It means never having anything to look forward to in all of your working life.” Joe took his card from the rack, clicked it in the time clock, and with a wave of his hand was gone.
xxx
What was happening, as Walter woke daily to the dawn’s dull alarm and went from the still house through the newly washed streets to the waiting assembly line, was that his self-pity, so strong that the page blurred before him when he lay in bed reading himself to sleep, was altering into a maturer concern with the fate of others who could not, like himself, set a term to their labor.
He began to question the men on the line with him, one after another, to find out how many of them felt as he did about what they were doing for a living. More sure of himself with every passing hour, he moved up and down the line, demanding, whenever there was a moment, an answer to his insistent question: “Do you think anybody likes coming in here to work?”
“Everybody does one day a week-flower — payday.” said the solder flower.
“Not even the bosses,” said the deck fitter. “Do you think anyone with sense would knock himself out in this dirt and noise if it wasn’t for the money?”
And the door-fitter said wryly, “Do you know what this kind of of work is? It’s colored man’s work. But even the colored men are smartening up–they turn up their noises at it too unless they get strapped.”
Saddened and bewildered by this last comment, Walter turned away from the man who had made it, and who had punctuated his bitter remark with a series of thunderous blows on a door that he was fitting. Only Orrin, the second metal-finisher, grudgingly admitted that the work was a challenge to him, that the pay was fair, and that there were worse jobs. Behind them all, long-jawed Joe, caught up with his work as usual, stood casually beveling his screwdriver.
“I hear you’ve been taking a little poll,” he said to Walter.
“What’s it to you?” Walter asked truculently. He was in no mood to be mocked.
With apparent irrelevance, Joe replied by demanding, “How come you fixed on being an engineer?”
Walter was taken aback. “Why, that’s where everybody says the future is.”
“That’s not reason enough for a fellow to struggle and sweat to get to college. Damn it, doesn’t anybody go out and do what he wants to any more? I’m not saying you wouldn’t make a good engineer, or that it wouldn’t be fine for a change to have some engineers who care as much about people as they do about gadgets. But supposing you find out after you get to college that you want to spend your time learning something useless–are you going leave yourself open for it?”
“Boy, you sure are free with advice.”
Joe looked at him gravely. His long sad jaw had the hint of a smile. “The men on the line like you, Walter. They don’t think you’re just nosey when you ask questions. They think you’re one of them, and in a good way you are. Maybe that’s why I’ve got hopes for you.”
Walter fought hard against the influence of the older man, whose crabbed and subversive outlook was so foreign to everything Walter had been taught; but he was forced to admit to himself that more and more he was seeing the factory through Joe’s cold discerning eyes; and he began to fear that if Joe were ever to leave, the plant would have no real existence other than as a money-producing nightmare. Not only was there no-one else really to talk to about it, but Joe had forced Walter to formulate his emerging ideas in an adult and comprehensible way.
“The worst thing about the assembly line is what it does to your self-respect,” he said to Joe early one morning as they squatted on their haunches, waiting for the starting siren. “It’s hard to keep from feeling like a fool when you know everyone looks down on what you’re doing, even the men who are doing it themselves.”
Joe hung his hammer and metal spoon from the brass hook at his belt. “The big pitch has always been that we’re a practical people, that we’ve proved to all the impractical European dreamers that production can serve people. But instead people are serving production. Look how frightened, how hysterical the bosses get when the line stops–they can’t afford to figure what it costs youto keep it moving–they only know they’ve got a production quota. Of course when sales resistance starts building up and they put the cork back in themselves, they give you just the opposite story. Who can blame the poor slob in the middle for suspecting that the whole setup is really as nutty as a fruitcake, and for feeling ashamed of himself for being caught up in it?”
“All right,” Walter challenged him. “Who’s crazy? You, me, the guys around us, or the board of directors?”
“Anybody who gets suckered into believing that there’s any- thing real behind the billboards they put up to get the show on the road, so that he commits himself to buying the billboard pictures by selling his life on the installment joker. I sympathize with any joker who begins to suspect that the that the whole world is against him, that he’s the victim of a huge conspiracy organized to make his car fall apart before it’s been paid off. Doesn’t life seem to be deliberately designed to lower your self-esteem? What happens when you’re knocking down a dent? If you rap it too hard from the inside, you have to file it down that much more, and you hate yourself for it. If you don’t rap it hard enough, you only find out after it’s moved on down the line, and then you have to hurry up and wallop it again. In either case you hate yourself instead of hating the car, or the invisible man that started up the line.” He laughed briefly in anticipation of what he was about to add. “It’s like the man that hits his thumb while he’s hanging a picture–only here he keeps hitting his thumb because they’re moving the wall as fast as the union will let them. Who does he yell at every time that ball peen comes down on his nail? Himself.”
“I wonder,” Walter said slowly, “how many people actually feel that way.”
“More than you can count. It’s always safe to figure that if you feel something, the world must be full of people who feel the same way. Every sensible man realizes as he gets older that his feelings aren’t unique. After all, that’s the basis of the best art: the fact that you recognize yourself in it, and all those inner experiences that you’d thought no one else but you could know.”
Walter was willing to recognize that he was not the only one to cringe when Buster called him back on a badly done job, to swear at himself for the mistakes that made him fall behind, to realize how he was being trapped into swearing at himself and deflecting his anger from what he did to the way he did it. But it was hard for him to believe that there were others who felt as intensely as he did, who beat their heads against the bars as he did, who dreamed of sunlight and freedom as he did, even though Joe tried to persuade him that the difference was often one of degree, or of his being able to express his feelings in a way that others couldn’t. This was one of the questions that Walter was eager to argue with Joe, who moved from one extreme position to another, always mocking, always challenging him to learn what he stood for and to defend it like a man.
“You know something,” Walter burst out impetuously one day, “I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
Instead of laughing, or belittling this praise, Joe’s face darkened. The next morning he was not on the line.
By the third day of his absence Walter as though it had all been a dream, as though he were slipping once again into the awful pit of loneliness, exhaustion, and self-doubting despair. As a last resort he sought out what they thought of Joe.
“He’s irresponsible,” said Pop.
“He’s the kind of guy that just don’t care,” said the younger inspector. “No wife, no kids–no wonder he can take off three days without worrying about getting a reprimand or getting fired.
“He knows his work,” said Orrin grudgingly. “I don’t know where he learned it, but he did. Just the same, he take off. You can’t afford to take off like that nowadays, not if you want to hold down a job.”
On the fourth day he came back. He told no one where he had been. “Am I glad to see you!” Walter indicated,– but Joe merely indicated, with a cold grin and a turn of his tattooed arm, that from time to time things came up that were more important than the making of automobiles. He did not set to work, but almost immediately was engaged in serious with Buster the foreman and with the union shop steward. The two were arguing vigorously, but suddenly Joe cut them off by simply lifting his hand. He said something very briefly, shoved his hands into his pockets, and the discussion was finished.
To Walter’s amazement, he came back toolbox, and nodded casually to him.
“I just quit, Walter,” he said. “Going to hit the road.”
“But–”
“You’ll make out all right, no matter what you do. I don’t even have to wish you good luck.”
Then he was off down the aisle, on his way to the tool crib and the plant police and the parking lot and God alone knew where after that, without so much as a handshake or an inclination of his lean frame. Suddenly Walter remembered something: “Hey!” he shouted. But Joe–if he heard him–did not turn around and soon was out of sight.
You never told me about Pop, he wanted to tell Joe, you never answered all the questions I was going to ask you–but even if Joe had not gone for good, Walter would not have known how to say to him all the things that should have been said, the words of gratitude and self-confidence.
When the relief man came a few minutes later to give him a twelve-minute break, he hurried to the bathroom. There just beyond the big circular sink that could accommodate a dozen men, he could see out the tilted window to the vast parking lot.
The dull winter light was gloomy and was the air that the dark ranks of massed automobiles were no more than darker blurs against the background of the grey steel fencing and the lowering sky. One of the cars moved, or was it his imagination? But no, the red tail-light dimmed, glowed, dimmed. Joe, the vanishing American, was swinging out of the lot and away from the production line, out of Walter’s life and into someone else’s, out of the present and into what lay beyond the gate. He was leaving the future to Walter, who now at last could wave his farewell, with his face pressed to the cool window as he watched the little light disappearing from view.
Then he washed the sweat from his face and returned to work.