A jewelry store. Two of them had broken in at night. All they got was a handful of cheap watches and were caught as they came out. Rollie had been stupid enough to carry a .22. Though he hadn't pulled it from his pocket, the fact that it was found on him ensured the graver charge.
"You were released for good behavior?"
"No. The warden got jealous. He wanted my cell."
The middle-aged Negro interviewer looked up. "I dig jokes. They make a dull day brighter. But it was good behavior?"
"If you say so."
"All right, I'll say so." The interviewer wrote it down.
"Is your behavior good now, Mr. Knight? What I mean is, are you in any more trouble with the police?"
Rollie shook his head negatively. He wasn't going to tell this Uncle Tom about last night, that he was in trouble if he couldn't keep clear of the white pig he had spooked, and who would bust him some way, given half a chance, using scum bag honky law. The thought was a reminder of his earlier fears, which now returned: the dread of prison, the real reason for coming here. The interviewer was asking more questions, busier than a dog with fleas writing down the answers. Rollie was surprised they hadn't stopped, baffled that he wasn't already outside on the street, the way it usually went after he mouthed the words "armed robbery."
What he didn't know - because no one had thought to tell him, and he was not a reader of newspapers or magazines - was that hard core hiring had a new, less rigid attitude to prison records, too.
He was sent to another room where he stripped and had a physical.
The doctor, young, white, impersonal, working fast, took time out to look critically at Rollie's bony body, his emaciated cheeks. "Whatever job you get, use some of what they pay you to eat better, and put some weight on, otherwise you won't last at it. You wouldn't last, anyway, in the foundry where most people go from here. Maybe they can put you in Assembly, I'll recommend it."
Rollie listened contemptuously, already hating the system, the people in it. Who in hell did this smug whitey kid think he was? Some kind of God? If Rollie didn't need bread badly, some work for a while, he'd walk out now, and screw them. One thing was sure: whatever job these people gave him, he wouldn't stay on it one day longer than he had to.
Back through the waiting room, in the cubicle again. The original interviewer announced, "The doctor says you're breathing, and when you opened your mouth he couldn't see daylight, so we're offering you a job. It's in final assembly. The work is hard, but pay is good - the union sees to that. Do you want it?"
"I'm here, ain't it" What did the son-of-a-bitch expect? A bootlick job?
"Yes, you're here, so I'll take that to mean yes. There will be some weeks of training; you get paid for that, too. Outside, they'll give you details - when to start, where to go. Just one other thing."
Here came the preaching. Sure as glory, Rollie Knight could smell it.
Maybe this white nigger was a Holy Roller on the side.
The interviewer took off his horn-rimmed glasses, leaned over the desk and put his fingertips together. "You're smart. You know the score. You know you're getting a break, and it's because of the times, the way things are.
People, companies like this one, have a conscience they didn't always have. Never mind that it's late; it's here, and a lot of other things are changing. You may not believe it, but they are." The chubby, sports-jacketed interviewer picked up a pencil, rolled it through his fingers, put it down. "Maybe you never had a break before, and this is the first.
I think it is. But I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't tell you that with your record it's the only one you'll get, leastways here. A lot of guys pass through this place. Some make it after they leave; others don't.
Those who do are the ones who want to." The interviewer looked hard at Rollie. "Stop being a damn fool, Knight, and grab this chance. That's the best advice you'll get today." He put out a hand. "Good luck."
Reluctantly, feeling as if he had been suckered but not knowing exactly how, Rollie took the proffered hand.
Outside, just the way the man said, they told him how to go to work.
***
The training course, sponsored jointly by the company and through federal grants, was eight weeks long. Rollie Knight lasted a week and a half.
He received the first week's paycheck, which was more money than he had possessed in a long time. Over the following weekend he tied one on.
However, on Monday he managed to awaken early and catch a bus which took him to the factory training center on the other side of town.
But on Tuesday, tiredness won. He failed to wake until, through the curtainless dirty window of his room, the sun shone directly on his face. Rollie got up sleepily, blinking, and went to the window to look down. A clock in the street below showed that it was almost noon.
He knew he had blown it, that the job was gone. His reaction was indifference. He did not experience disappointment because, from the beginning, he had not expected any other outcome. How and when the ending came were merely details.
Experience had never taught Rollie Knight or tens of thousands like him - to take a longterm view of anything. When you were born with nothing, had gained nothing since, had learned to live with nothing, there was no long-term view - only today, this moment, here and now. Many in the white world - nescient, shallow thinkers called the attitude "shiftless," and condemned it. Sociologists, with more understanding and some sympathy, named the syndrome "present time orientation" or "distrust of the future." Rollie had heard neither phrase, but his instincts embraced both. Instinct also told him, at this moment, he was still tired. He went back to sleep.
He made no attempt, later, to return to the training center or the hiring hall. He went back to his haunts and street corner living, making a dollar when he could, and when he couldn't, managing without. The cop he had antagonized miraculously left him alone.
There was only one postscript - or so it seemed at the time - to Rollie's employment.
During an afternoon some four weeks later, he was visited at the rooming house, where he was still sharing space on sufferance, by an instructor from the factory training course, Rollie Knight remembered the man - a beefy, florid-faced explant foreman with thinning hair and a paunch, now puffing from the three flights of stairs he had been forced to climb.
He asked tersely, "Why'd you quit?"
"I won the Irish Sweep, man. Doan need no job."
"You people!" The visitor surveyed the dismal quarters with disgust.
"To think we have to support your kind with taxes. If I had my way ...
" He left the sentence unfinished and produced a paper. "You have to sign here. It says you're not coming any more."
Indifferently, not wanting trouble, Rollie signed.
"Oh, yes, and the company made out some checks. Now they have to be paid back in." He riffled through some papers, of which there seemed to be a good many. "They want you to sign those, too."
Rollie endorsed the checks. There were four.
"Another time," the instructor said unpleasantly, "try not to cause other people so much trouble."
"Go screw yourself, fatso," Rollie Knight said, and yawned.
Neither Rollie nor his visitor was aware that while their exchange was taking place, an expensive, late-model car was parked across the street from the rooming house. The car's sole occupant was a tall, distinguished-appearing, grayhaired Negro who had watched with interest while the training course instructor went inside. Now, as the beefy, florid-faced man left the building and drove his own car away, the other car followed, unobserved, at a discreet distance, as it had through most of the afternoon.
Chapter 10
"C'mon baby, leave the goddamn drink. I gotta bottle in the room."
Ollie, the machinery salesman, peered impatiently at Erica Trenton in the semidarkness, across the small black table separating them.
It was early afternoon. They were in the bar of the Queensway Inn, not far from Bloomfield Hills, Erica dawdling over her second drink which she had asked for as a delaying device, even though recognizing that delay was pointless because either they were or weren't going through with what they had come here for, and if they were they might as well get on with it.
Erica touched her glass. "Let me finish this. I need it."
She thought: He wasn't a bad-looking man, in a raffish kind of way. He was trimly built and his body was obviously better than his speech and manners, probably because he worked on it - she remembered him telling her with pride that he went to a gym somewhere for regular workouts. She supposed she could do worse, though wished she had done better.
The occasion when he had told her about workouts in the gym had been at their first meeting, here in this same bar. Erica had come for a drink one afternoon, the way other lonely wives did sometimes, in the hope that something interesting might happen, and Ollie had struck up a conversation - Ollie, cynical, experienced, who knew this bar and why some women came to it. After that, their next meeting had been by arrangement, when he had taken a room in the residential section of the inn, and assumed she would go to it with him. But Erica, torn between a simple physical need and nagging conscience, had insisted on staying at the bar all afternoon, and in the end left for home, to Ollie's anger and disgust. He had written her off, it seemed, until she telephoned him several weeks ago.