Wheels

Usually they agreed because the alternative was pointed out: that the man concerned would lose his job, in which event they would receive nothing, garnishee or not.

The employee - in this case Rollie Knight - would then be asked: What is the minimum amount of money you can live on weekly?

Once this was decided, Rollie's paycheck would be intercepted each week and routed to the Personnel Department. There, every Friday, he would report and endorse the check over to the Personnel man making the arrangements. The Personnel man's office - Wingate told them - was usually crowded with fifty or so workers who had been in financial trouble and were being helped to straighten out. Most were grateful.

Afterward, the Personnel man would deposit Rollie's paycheck in a special account - in the Personnel man's name since the company took no official part in the arrangement. From this account he would issue checks to creditors for the sums arranged, giving Rollie another check - for the balance of his wages, on which he must live. Eventually, when all debts were cleared, the Personnel man would bow out and Rollie would receive his paycheck normally.

Records were open to inspection and the service operated solely to help workers in financial trouble, without charge of any kind.

"It won't be easy for you," Wingate warned. "To make it work, you'll have to live on very little money."

Rollie seemed about to protest, but May Lou interjected quickly, "We kin do it, mister." She looked at Rollie, and Wingate was aware of a mixture of authority and childlike affection in her eyes. "You'll do it," she insisted. "Yes, yo' will."

Half-smiling, Rollie shrugged.

But it was clear that Rollie Knight was still worried - really worried, Leonard Wingate suspected - about something else. Once more he wondered what it was.

***

"We've been sitting here," Barbara Zaleski said as Leonard Wingate joined them, "speculating on whether those two are going to make it."

Barbara, the only one in the group who was a Press Club member, was host to the other three.

She, Brett DeLosanto, and Wes Gropetti had waited at the bar. Now, the four of them moved to a table in the dining room.

As press clubs went, Detroies was among the best in the country. It was small, well-run, with an excellent cuisine, and membership was sought after. Surprisingly, despite an exciting day-to-day affinity with the auto industry, the club's walls were almost bare - self-consciously, some thought - of mementos of the tie. The only one, which greeted visitors on entering, was a downbeat front page from 1947, its headline reading:

FORD DEAD

Dies in Oil-Lit, Unheated House

War and space travel, in contrast, were represented prominently, perhaps proof that newsmen sometimes suffer from hyperopia.

When they had ordered drinks, Wingate answered Barbara's question.

"I wish I could say yes. But I'm not sure, and the reason is the system.

We talked about it earlier. People like us can cope with the system, more or less. Mostly, people like them can't."

"Leonard," Brett said, "tonight you've been sounding like a revolutionary."

"Sounding isn't being one." Wingate smiled dourly. "I don't think I have the guts; besides, I'm disqualified. I've a good job, money in the bank.

As soon as anyone has those, they want to protect them, not blow it all up. But I'll tell you this: I know what makes people of my race revolutionaries."

He touched a bulge in the jacket of his suit. It was a collection of papers May Lou had given him before he left. They were invoices, time payment contracts, demands from finance companies. Out of curiosity, Wingate had gone over them briefly in his car, and what he had seen amazed and angered him.

He repeated to the other three the substance of his talk with Rollie and May Lou, omitting figures, which were private, but apart from that the others knew the story anyway, and he was aware they cared.

He said, "You saw the furniture they had in that room."

The others nodded. Barbara said, "It wasn't good, but . . ."

"Be honest," Wingate told her. "You know as well as I do, it was a bunch of shoddy junk."

Brett protested, "So what! If they can't afford much . . ."

"But you'd never know they couldn't, not from the price they paid." Once more, Wingate touched the papers in his pocket. "I just saw the invoice, and I'd say the invoice price is at least six times what the furniture was worth. For what they paid, or rather signed a finance contract for, those two could have had quality stuff from a reputable outfit like J. L. Hudson's or Sears."

Barbara asked, "Then why didn't they?"

Leonard Wingate put both hands on the table, leaning forward, "Because, my dear innocent, well-to-do friends, they didn't know any better. Because nobody ever taught them how to shop around or buy carefully. Because there isn't much point learning any of that if you've never had any real money.

Because they went to a white-run store in a black neighborhood, which cheated them - but good! Because there are plenty of those stores, not just in Detroit, but other places too. I know. We've seen other people travel this route."

There was silence at the table. Their drinks had come, and Wingate sipped a neat Scotch on the rocks. After a moment he went on, "There's also a little matter of the finance charges on the furniture and some other things they bought. I did some figuring. It looks to me as if the interest rate was between nineteen and twenty percent."

Wes Gropetti whistled softly.

Barbara queried, "When your Personnel man talks to the creditors, the way you said he would, can he (to anything to get the furniture bill or finance charges lowered?"

"The finance charges, maybe." Leonard Wingate nodded. "I'll probably work on that myself. When we call a finance outfit and use our company's name, they're apt to listen and be reasonable. They know there are ways a big auto manufacturer can put the squeeze on, if we take a mind to.

But as to furniture . . ." He shook his head. "Not a chance. Those crooks'd laugh. They sell their stuff for as much as they can get, then turn their paper over to a finance company at a discount. It's little guys like Knight - who can't afford it - who pay the difference."

Barbara asked, "Will he keep his job? Rollie, I mean."

"Providing nothing else happens," Wingate said, "I think I can promise that."

Wes Gropetti urged, "For Christ sake, that's enough talk! Let's eat!"

Brett DeLosanto, who had been unusually quiet through most of the evening, remained so during the meal which followed. What Brett had seen tonight - the conditions under which Rollie Knight and May Lou lived; their cramped, mean room in the run-down, garbage-reeking apartment house; countless other buildings in the area, either the same or worse; the general malaise and poverty of the major portion of the inner city - had affected him deeply. He had been in the inner city before, and through its streets, but never with the same insight or sense of poignancy he had known within the past few hours.

He had asked Barbara to let him watch tonight's filming, partly from curiosity and partly because she had become so absorbed with the project that he had seen little of her lately. What he had not expected was to be drawn in, mentally, as much as he had.

Not that he had been unaware of ghetto problems of Detroit. When he observed the desperate grimness of housing, he knew better than to ask: Why don't people move somewhere else? Brett already knew that economically and socially, people here - specifically, black people - were trapped. High as living costs were in the inner city, in suburbs they were higher still, even if the suburbs would let blacks move there - and some wouldn't, still practicing discrimination in a thousand subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Dearborn, for example, in which Ford Motor Company had its headquarters, at last count didn't have a single black resident, due to hostility of white, middleclass families who supported wily maneuverings by its solidly established mayor.

Brett knew, too, that efforts to aid the inner city had been made by the well-meaning New Detroit Committee - more recently, New Detroit Inc. - established after the area's 1967 riots. Funds had been raised, some housing started. But as a committee member put it: "We're long on proclamations, short on bricks."

Another had recalled the dying words of Cecil Rhodes: "So little done - so much to do."

Both comments had been from individuals, impatient with the smallness of accomplishment by groups - groups which included the city, state, and federal governments. Though the 1967 riots were now years away, nothing beyond sporadic tinkering had been done to remedy conditions which were the riots' cause.

Brett wondered: If so many, collectively, had failed, what could one person, an individual, hope to do?

Then he remembered: Someone had once asked that about Ralph Nader.

Brett sensed Barbara's eyes upon him and turned toward her. She smiled, but made no comment on his quietness; each knew the other well enough by now not to need explanations of moods, or reasons for them. Barbara looked her best tonight, Brett thought. During the discussion earlier her face had been animated, reflecting interest, intelligence, warmth.

No other girl of Brett's acquaintance rated quite as high with him, which was why he went on seeing her, despite her continued, obstinate refusal to join him in bed.

Brett knew that Barbara had gained a lot of satisfaction from her involvement with the film, and working with Wes Gropetti.