CHAPTER 1
At three minutes before three oclock on Tuesday, as Jared is buttoning up his coveralls in the locker room, Felton comes in and says, “Draft Marshals here again.”
Jared slams his locker and heads for the stairwell that leads up to the overpass from Building G over the scrap bins to a parts- recovery division, where broken parts are either retooled or sent back to the furnaces. Sure enough, the Draft Marshals black Lincoln limousine is parked diagonally across two of the loading docks. He does this just to piss off Swerdlow, who can be counted on to come out of his office and rail about the Marshal jamming up the works. Swerdlows got to be careful, though; the Marshal has the authority to pick men right off the line and disappear them into the OEI office. Hes the reason theyre all here; hes also connected, and hes also vindictive. Swerdlow has to yell or hell look like he doesnt care enough about production efficiency, but he cant yell too much or hell look like hes sheltering his men at the expense of troop strength at the front.
The guys on the Frankenline read the papers, and they listen to the radio, and they get stories from the returning vets who wash up at the Rouge. Today Winchell says that II Corp has finished off the Axis forces in Tunisia, but who knows? Everything they get is filtered in one way or another, and they know this, so their real sense of how the war is going comes from one source only. When the Draft Marshal comes through more than once a month, it means the OEI is twitchy, and that means things arent so hot. Jared runs through his memory. He thinks its been eight days. The back of his neck starts to prickle. He punches in and relieves Morten Gutersen, who as usual hasnt kept the stations tools clean. Irritation with Mortens dumb laziness takes Jareds mind off the Draft Marshal for the two minutes it takes him to hose off the trowel and rake. By the time hes back to the line, the Draft Marshal is coming out onto the catwalk.
The Draft Marshal is huge, bursting from his ancient uniform with its spangling of medals from San Juan Hill or some other mythological place. One of the Czechs over in the glassworks calls him Sergeant Vanek, after a character in a novel Jareds never read. Jared has a standing request of God that the catwalk will fail under the Draft Marshals weight; he reconciles his hatred by catego- rizing the Draft Marshals many evil qualities. Pomposity, snobbery, bloodlust, avarice, and so on. Individually they dont merit a sudden death, but Jareds a big believer in collective assessment when it comes to sin. The Draft Marshal is flanked by weak-chinned adjutants with clipboards, and his cold blue gaze falls on Jared as they pass overhead. Fourteen times the Draft Marshal has come in and marched along the catwalk before leaving Building G to plague the other lines. Each time he has looked at Jared, and each time Jared prays to be taken and prays to be left. After two years of hacking clay apart, the bloom is definitively off the rose of working on a secret munitions project. Jareds tired of feeling ashamed whenever he sees real soldiers.
The Frankenline grinds to a stop while the Draft Marshal conducts his appraisal; its just impossible to work while hes up there dictating notes to his flunkies, and anyway the shift change is just finished. Swerdlow storms in screaming that the Marshal is killing fine American boys in Europe and the Pacific by stopping the lines to waddle along the catwalk looking for malingerers who arent there. The Marshal ignores him, which is also part of the pageant. Jared is comforted a little by the sameness of it all.
Then the Marshal says, “That one there,” and Jared knows its him. “You. Whats your name?”
Jared looks up at him. “Jared Cleaves.”
“Why arent you at the front, Cleaves?”
Jared holds up his right hand. The ring and pinkie fingers are crooked. When he wiggles the other fingers and thumb, the two fingers move from the knuckle only. They have strength enough, but he can barely bend them. “Nerve damage,” he says. “I cant hold a rifle.”
“Two fingers are holding you out of this war?” The Marshal draws the words out, freights them with contempt.
“Ive been to the draft board every six months. Every time they turn me down.” Shame heats up on Jareds face. Every recitation of those bare facts is like confessing to robbing a blind old woman. Theres also the little matter of him not supposed to be going to the draft board, since the Frankenline is an essential wartime project with OEI stamped all over it, and even if the draft board wanted him they wouldnt take him—but nobody can blame a man for wanting to serve.
“Well find something for you. Report first thing in the morning,” the Marshal says. He pivots with some grace and locks eyes with Swerdlow, holding the gaze as he walks trailed by his flunkies out the door.
The Jeweler walks up to Jared with a wide grin and his hand extended to shake. Jared feints, then pulls his hand back for the traditional smoothing of the hair, prompting a burst of laughter. Its not so much that what hes done is funny, more that when the Marshal leaves, the men of the Frankenline overreact to everything until theyve purged their tension. The handshake gag is already Frankenline tradition, since nobody shakes the Jewelers hand.
The molders revolted against Moises dictum that a single man had to make a golem from start to finish when the rabbi demanded they make the golems what the textbooks called anatomically correct. “What the hell,” Jem wondered at the time. “We havent made no women golems.” It hadnt made any sense to them then, and still doesnt, but Moises stood his ground and finally a tubby Latvian whose name Jared never learned was elected to specialize in golem family jewels. Immediately Felton dubbed him the Jeweler, and all kinds of superstitions sprang up around him. They didnt shake his hand, they learned all of the Eastern European slang words for queer, they bought him a loupe at Hanukkah after Felton went and looked up when it was. The Jeweler took it all in good humor, or pretended to, because the other molders paid him ten dollars a week for his trouble; everybody else just chalked it up as one more thing about Moises that a rational man couldnt figure out.
Jared finishes his shift in a state of near exaltation. For a second time he has been tapped by the Draft Marshal, who everyone knows was behind the original selection of the Frankenlines crew. This is the big leagues, Jared thinks. Ive been groomed. Im ready.
Is he ever. The initial thrill of taking part in a top-secret project to slow Hitlers advance across Europe—and using the magic of the Untermensch to do it—has long since worn off during the two and a half years Jared has been busting clay. When he started work on the Frankenline, the war was distant; now it is every days headlines. Jared knows four men who have died, one in Tunisia and three in the South Pacific. He doesnt want to join their company, but he wants to be able to tell his daughter Emily that his service to the free world involved more than troweling clay and hosing out freight cars. And hes man enough to admit that hes rankled by the fact that his wife has a better job than he does. Colleen strips damaged engines at Willow Run; shes in the UAW, she makes more money than he does, and he cant even tell her the details of what he does. Sometimes being in on a national secret doesnt quite make up for all of that.
Jem and Felton drag him out after work to a bar Felton knows in Hamtramck across from Dodge Main. It isnt clear how Felton knows a bar in Hamtramck, where bored gangs of teenage Poles spend their evenings looking for coloreds to beat up, but thats Felton for you. The only Negroes in this part of Detroit come to work at the Dodge plant and get the hell out when the whistle blows, especially now that Poletowns all riled up about the Sojourner Truth housing project out on Fenelon. Maybe Felton worked at the plant? Jared doesnt know. Whoever runs the bar either doesnt know that Prohibition was repealed or is waiting for it to be reinstated; from the outside, all you see is a blank door in a windowless part of an apartment house. Walk in, and you find cable-spool tables, a bar hammered together out of scrap lumber by a carpenter unconcerned with finish work, and two or three gloomy survivors of another second shift building tanks. Large swaths of the plaster walls are rotted away, with newspaper pages thumbtacked straight to the wall studs. Their corners ruffle as the door closes behind Jared, and hes thinking to himself that hell be lucky to finish a beer before the whole building falls down. Some place for a sendoff to the war.
“Look smart, here!” Jem shouts. “Our boy Jared is off to the war tomorrow, by God! Lets show him a good time tonight!”
Somehow this works. As if Jem has sent out a homing signal for anyone within ten blocks whos thirsty and wants to show Jared Cleaves a good time—which might be the case, since Jem is one leather-lunged hillbilly and his voice probably carried through the heating ducts into every apartment in the building—all of a sudden people are crowding through the door. Glasses tall and small come to their table. The music gets loud, some women show up, people dance. Jem has performed a mystifying act of conjuration. The goodwill is thick enough that nobody even complains about Felton being in Hamtramck. The women want to dance with Jared, and he goes along with it even though he doesnt like dancing. He likes the feel of a body close to his, though, and the way things are with Colleen lately . . .
Alcohol gives Jared a kind of safety hatch when his thoughts turn in that direction. The hatch clangs down now, and he relaxes into the succession of embraces, the brush of hip and hip, the slide of a partners breasts across his chest—and the look in her eyes as she watches his reaction. He wont go with one of them, of course not; no man has ever been as married as Jared Cleaves. That doesnt stop him from enjoying the sweetness of the desire. Later the girls go home, and as Jared and Jem and Felton head for the door the bartender reminds them to keep Felton east of Woodward—but not too far east—if they dont want trouble. Felton says something back to the bartender that Jared doesnt quite catch, and the bartender is still laughing when the door bangs shut behind them.
They drop Felton at his place in Paradise Valley, in a four-story building with a jazz club called El Sino on the ground floor. Music is still coming from the open door when Felton hops out of Jems car. “Give them Japs hell, boy,” Felton says, and then hes gone.
“Goddamn, aint Detroit a hell of a place.” Jem is laughing as they head down toward Grand Circus Park and across to Fort Street. “A nigger just called you boy.”
“Thats not a nigger, thats Felton,” Jared says.
“I take your point, but still. Detroit is a hell of a place.” Jem roars down Fort Street past the old train depot, squealing his tires around the corners that lead to Jareds house. Jared weaves up his sidewalk, head full of the squeal of tires and whoever it was he heard on the radio talking about conserving rubber: Is this trip necessary?