Free Entrapment and Other Writings by Nelson Algren Page B

he knew good and well that wheels make the world go round and get the job done and done right and for keeps while you would be scratching your head and thinking of it any other way.
    When he started his automobile factory, a man could have roamed it from front to back and from ceiling to floor without seeing more than a few trucks and barrows and such like on wheels. In them days a bunch of men got around in a ring and pretty soon here come one with a part of the frame and laid it down on the floor and another one soon follows suit until they got enough to start out on. Then they started reaming and trueing and whamming and bammingand sledging and boring and bolting until it looked like a thing that might take a snifter of gasoline and go skedaddling down the pike to a faretheewell.
    I tell you, boys, when you put in a wheel here and a roller there and a belt in the other place, it ain’t long till you got to be hell on wheels and no brakes, and it was goodbye crapping a smoke or drinking a rest. If you had to hold up two fingers like a kid being excused in school, you’d meet yourself coming back or they’d know the reason why. You had to pick ’em up and lay ’em down right there at your post and make believe you liked it or ask them to pull your card. You would just walk outside talking to yourself if you couldn’t stand the gaff.
    Hank decided that iron was too high and lasted too long so he got to scouring the back alleys for every tin can he could lay his hands on and made flivvers out of them. As long as they held together long enough to get off the belt and outside the gates he never worried his mind but hollered: “More tin! More wheels! Roll ’em, boys, roll ’em!”
    I told ’em what would come to pass, and it will yet. It will yet as sure as God made little apples. Two men will run the whole shooting-match. Number one will just politely dump a load of cans on a great big steel block, and—bing! flash! bing! bang! squeak! just like that, down’ll come a million-ton die and when it raises they’ll be a new black flivver ready to be driven away by number two or maybe even a radio, for chrissakes. Maybe one man would do the whole job and mow the old man’s lawn when he’s got nothing to do but just fool around and keep busy.
    This will come to pass, good peoples, as sure as you’re born, and plenty of men already without a hair on their heads or a tooth in it will live to see that day. It’s been inching along ever since Hank found his first wheel and put it on a wagon and when he found out that anything round will roll and speed up work and take the beans and bacon right out of a man’s jaws because he ain’t needed no more.
    It got so you couldn’t throw a pork-and-beans can in the alleythat it wasn’t picked up and hustled right along to Hank’s factory. The little children on street corners and in vacant lots began to sing:
    There was an old man, he had a wooden leg,
    He had no auto nor no auto could he beg.
    He got two spools and an old tin can;
    He made him a flivver and the darned thing ran!
    A man’s got wheels same as a factory, and no matter how much you pour the old oil to them, they wear out. You can get your two-thousand-dollar-an-ounce oil and it’ll keep them bearings rolling a little longer than 3-in-1 or two-bit cylinder oil, but there’s nothing lasts forever, not even the bearings of a man like Hank Lord.
    Hank’s bearings began to wear out. Old age sprinkles the worst kind of emery dust in a man’s bearings, and even if you take some of them out and put in a diamond-studded one, it’s going to feel that wear and tear and get lopsided and go to jumping and gum up the works.
    There was ten thousand doctors with half a million shots in the arm shaking their heads mournful around Hank’s five-hundred-room house when he turned in his checks to the tool crib. Fifty thousand nurses couldn’t do a thing but cry a little and say: “He was a good man for the shape he was in.