Wheels

At his desk, he leafed through the next day's production schedule.

Tomorrow was a midweek day, so several "specials" would go on the line - cars for company executives, their friends, or others with influence enough to ensure that an automobile they ordered got better-than-ordinary treatment. Foremen had been alerted to the job numbers, so had Quality Control; as a result, all work on those particular cars would be watched with extra care. Body men would be cautioned to install header panels, seats, and interior trim more fussily than usual. Engine and power train sequences would receive close scrutiny. Later, Quality Control would give the cars a thorough going over and order additional work or adjustments before dispatch. "Specials" were also among the fifteen to thirty cars which plant executives drove home each night, turning in road test reports next morning.

Of course - as Matt Zaleski knew - there were dangers in scheduling "specials," particularly if a car happened to be for a plant executive.

A few workers always had grievances, real or imagined, against management and were delighted at a chance to "get even with the boss." Then the legendary soft drink bottle, left loose inside a rocker panel so it would rattle through a car's lifetime, was apt to become reality. A loose tool or chunk of metal served the same purpose. Another trick was to weld the trunk lid closed from inside; a skilled welder, reaching through the back seat could do it in seconds. Or a strategic bolt or two might be left untightened. These were reasons why Matt and others like him used fictitious names when putting their own cars through production.

Matt put the next day's schedule down. There had been no need to review it, anyway, since he had gone over it earlier in the day.

It was time to go home. As he rose from the desk, he thought again of Barbara and wondered where she was. He was suddenly very tired.

On his way down from the mezzanine, Matt Zaleski was aware of some kind of disturbance shouting, the sound of running feet. Automatically, because most things which happened in the plant were his business, he stopped, searching for the source. It appeared to be near the south cafeteria. He heard an urgent cry: "For God's sake get somebody from Security!"

Seconds later, as he hurried toward the disturbance, he heard sirens approaching from outside.

A janitor who discovered the huddled bodies of the two vending machine collectors and Frank Parkland, had the good sense to go promptly to a telephone. By the time Matt Zaleski heard the shouts, which were from others who had come on the scene subsequently, an ambulance, plant security men, and outside police were already on the way.

But Matt still reached the janitor's closet on the lower floor before any of the outside aid. Bulling his way through an excited group around it, he was in time to see that one of the three recumbent forms was that of Frank Parkland whom Matt had last seen at the foremen's meeting about an hour and a half before. Parkland's eyes were closed, his skin ashen, except where blood had trickled through his hair and clotted on his face.

One of the night shift office clerks who had run in with a first-aid kit, now lying unused beside him, had Parkland's head cradled in his lap and was feeling for a pulse. The clerk looked at Matt. I guess he's alive, Mr. Zaleski; so's one of the others. Though I wouldn't want to say for how long."

Security and the ambulance people had come in then, and taken charge. The local police - uniformed men first, then plainclothes detectives quickly joined them.

There was little for Matt to do, but he could no longer leave the plant, which had been sealed by a cordon of police cars. Obviously the police believed that whoever perpetrated the murder-robbery - it had been confirmed that one of the three victims was dead - might still be inside.

After a while, Matt returned to his office on the mezzanine where he sat, mentally numbed and listless.

The sight of Frank Parkland, who was clearly gravely hurt, had shocked Matt deeply. So had the knife protruding from the body of the man with the Indian face. But the dead man had been unknown to Matt, whereas Parkland was his friend. Though the assistant plant chief and foreman had had run-ins, and once - a year ago - exchanged strong words, such differences had been the result of work pressures. Normally, they liked and respected each other.

Matt thought: Why did it have to happen to a good man? There were others he knew over whom he would have grieved less.

At that moment, precisely, Matt Zaleski became aware of a sudden breathlessness and a fluttering in his chest, as if a bird were inside, beating its wings and trying to get out. The sensation frightened him.

He sweated with the same kind of fear he had known years before in B-17F bombers over Europe when the German flak was barreling up, and now, as then, he knew it was the fear of death.

Matt knew, too, he was having some kind of attack and needed help. He began thinking in a detached way: He would telephone, and whoever came and whatever was done, he would ask them to send for Barbara because there was something he wanted to tell her. He was not sure exactly what, but if she came the words would find themselves.

The trouble was, when he made up his mind to reach for the telephone, he discovered he no longer had the power to move. Something strange was happening to his body. On the right side there was no feeling any more; he seemed to have no arm or leg, or any idea where either was. He tried to cry out but found, to his amazement and frustration, he could not. Nor, when he tried again, could he make any sound at all.

Now he knew what it was that he wanted to tell Barbara: That despite the differences they had had, she was still his daughter and he loved her, just as he had loved her mother, whom Barbara resembled in so many ways.

He wanted to say, too, that if they could somehow resolve their present quarrel he would try to understand her, and her friends, better from now on . . .

Matt discovered he did have some feeling and power of movement in his left side. He tried to get up, using his left arm as a lever, but the rest of his body failed him and he slid to the floor between the desk and chair.

It was in that position he was found soon after, conscious, his eyes mirroring an agony of frustration because the words he wanted to say could find no exit route.

Then, for the second time that night, an ambulance was summoned to the plant.

"You're aware," the doctor at Ford Hospital said to Barbara next day, "that your father had a stroke before."

She told him, "I know now. I didn't until today."

This morning, a plant secretary, Mrs. Einfeld, had reported, conscience-stricken, Matt Zaleski's mild attack a few weeks earlier when she had driven him home and he persuaded her to say nothing. The company's Personnel department had passed the information on.

"Taken together," the doctor said, "the two incidents fit a classic pattern." He was a specialist - a cardiologist - balding and sallow-faced, with a slight tic beneath one eye. Like so many in Detroit, Barbara thought, he looked as if he worked too hard.

"If my father hadn't concealed the first stroke, would it have changed anything?"

The specialist shrugged. "Perhaps; perhaps not. He'd have received medication, but the end result could have been the same. Either way, the question's academic now."

They were in an annex to an intensive care unit of the hospital. Through a glass window she could see her father in one of the four beds inside, a red rubber tube running from his mouth to a gray-green respirator on a stand close by. The respirator, wheezing evenly, was breathing for him.

Matt Zaleski's eyes were open and the doctor had told Barbara that although her father was presently under sedation, at other times he could undoubtedly see and hear. She wondered if he was aware of the young black woman, also in extremis in the bed nearest to him.

"It's probable," the doctor said, "that at some earlier period your father sustained valvular heart damage. Then, when he had the first mild stroke, a small clot broke off from the heart and went to the right side of his brain which, in a righthanded person, controls the body's left side."

It was all so impersonal, Barbara thought, as if a routine piece of machinery were being described, and not the sudden breakdown of a human being.

The cardiologist went on: "With the kind of stroke which your father had first, almost certainly the recovery was only apparent. It wasn't a real recovery. The body's fail-safe mechanism remained damaged and that was why the second stroke, to the left side of the brain, produced the devastating effect it did last night."

Barbara had been with Brett last night when a message was telephoned that her father had had a sudden stroke and been rushed to the hospital. Brett had driven her there, though he waited outside. "I'll come if you need me," he had said, taking her hand reassuringly before she went in, "but your old man doesn't like me, anyway, and being ill isn't going to change his mind. It might upset him more if he saw me with you."

On the way to the hospital, Barbara had had a guilty feeling, wondering how much her own act of leaving home precipitated whatever had happened to her father. Brett's gentleness, of which she saw more each day and loved him increasingly for, underlined the tragedy that the two men she cared most about had failed to know each other better. On balance, she believed her father mainly to blame; just the same, Barbara wished now that she had telephoned him, as she had considered doing several times since their estrangement.

At the hospital last night they had let her speak to her father briefly, and a young resident told her, "He can't communicate with you, but he knows you're there." She had murmured the things she expected Matt would want to hear: that she was sorry about his illness, would not be far away, and would come to the hospital frequently. While speaking, Barbara had looked directly into his eyes and while there was no flicker of recognition she had an impression the eyes were straining to tell her something. Was it imagination? She wondered again now.