FOUR
John Crowley
FREEDOMS
F or LSB, after all
Contents
Prelude
In the fields that lie to the west of the…
1
Part One
13
1
For a time after the war began, the West Coast…
15
2
The day that Henry Van damme and his brother had…
19
3
Glaive,” said Julius.
33
4
Ponca City was an oil town, made rich by successive…
36
5
We weren’t where we were in those times because we…
52
6
The Teenie Weenies all live in Teenie Weenie Town, which…
63
7
Little did she know: that when the great worldwide storm…
78
8
After the first tryouts dad said to her: “You’ve played…
92
Part Two
101
1
Like the disabled and transected body of the Pax B-30…
103
2
That orthopedic hospital, though a source of civic pride pictured…
115
3
He’d been in the cast for four weeks, with as…
128
4
It will be different when you come out, they all…
135
5
Sometime late in that summer, Prosper made a discovery: his…
143
6
Fenix Vigaron hadn’t actually predicted it, but May later could…
160
7
War and the sex urge go together,” Pancho Notzing said.
176
8
Without his uncles’ wages and the odd bill they’d slip…
189
9
It had been a Wednesday night a couple of weeks…
201
Part Three
209
1
The week after Christmas Bunce Wrobleski came home from the…
211
2
For all the talk about her visual acuity and all…
229
3
They stretched the rules at the Van Damme dormitory in…
242
4
Toward the end of his shift, as he was making…
254
5
On a Friday night the Teenie Weenies bused or drove…
261
6
Vi Harbison thought it was odd how her heartbreak, like…
269
7
Oh my heavens look at you,” Connie said. “Oh I’m…
276
8
Back then, Connie had wondered at Prosper too, just as…
280
9
Connie waited another day, exhausted and immobile, and then bathed… 286
Part Four
297
1
Past midnight, and the Lucky Duck on Fourth Avenue was…
299
2
Somehow it was harder going back across the desert with…
315
3
The Bomb Bay was nothing but an extra building not…
322
4
This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
333
5
Summer 1936. Swimming was over for the afternoon and the…
340
6
You remember my friend Poindexter,” Danny said. “Bill.”
351
7
Connie went back north with Andy to bring him to…
357
8
Prosper Olander got his own white pink slip in an…
366
Recessional 379
Afterword 387
About the Author
Other Books by John Crowley
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
PRELUDE
In the fields that lie to the west of the Ponca City municipal airport,
there once could be seen a derelict Van Damme B-30 Pax bomber,
one of the only five hundred turned out at the plant that Van Damme
Aero built beyond the screen of oaks along Bois d’Arc Creek (Bodark
the locals call it). The Pax was only a carcass—just the fuselage, wing-
less and tail-less, like a great insect returning to its chrysalis stage from
adulthood. I mean to say it was a carcass then, in the time when (though
signs warned us away) we used to play on it and in it: examining the
mysteries of its lockboxes and fixtures, taking the pilot’s seat and tap-
ping the fogged dials, looking up to see sky through the Plexiglas win-
dows. Now all of it’s gone—plane, plant, fields, trees, and children.
There is a philosophical, or metaphysical, position that can be
taken—maybe it’s a scientific hypothesis—that the past cannot in fact
exist. Everything that can possibly exist exists only now. Things now
may be expressive of some conceivable or describable past state of
affairs, yes: but that’s different from saying that this former state actu-
ally somehow exists, in the form of “the past.” Even in our memory (so
neuroscientists now say, who sit at screens and watch the neurons flare
as thoughts excite them, brain regions alight first here and then there
like vast nighttime conurbations seen from the air) there is no past: no
scenes preserved with all their sights and sounds. Merely fleeting states
4 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
of mind, myriad points assembled for a moment to make a new picture
(but “picture” is wrong, too full, too fixed) of what we think are former
states of things: things that once were, or may have been, the case.
That B-30 was huge, even what was left of it. The lost twin fin-and-
rudder section—those two oval tails—had stood nearly forty feet high.
The hangars where it had been assembled had been huge too, some of
the biggest interior spaces constructed up to that time, millions of
square feet, and flung up in what seemed like all in a day; Van Damme
Aero had designed and built them and the government agreed to buy
them back when the war was over, though in the case of the B-30
buildings and shops there wasn’t a lot to buy back. The wide low town,
Henryville, spreading out to the southwest beyond the plant in straight
rows of identical units to house the workers, went up just as fast,
twenty or thirty units a day, about as solid as the forts and rocket ships
we’d later make of cardboard cartons with sawed-out windows and
doors. The prairie winds shook them and rattled their contents like
dice boxes. While it stood it was a wonder written about and photo-
graphed and marveled at almost as much as the Titans of the Air that
it was set up to serve; how clean, how new, how quickly raised, all
those identical short streets paved in a week, all those identical bunga-
lows, the story was told of a woman who found her own each day by
locating the ladder that workmen had left propped against the side of
it, until one day it was removed while she was gone, and when she
returned she wandered a long time amid the numbered and lettered
streets trying to orient herself, looking in windows at other people’s
stuff not much different from hers but not hers, unable to think of a
question she might ask that would set her on the way toward her own,
and the sun getting hot as it rose toward noon.
When the sun at last set on any given day (there weren’t really week-
ends in Henryville or at Van Damme Aero in those years) those on day
shift would return in the Van Damme yellow buses and be dropped off
at various central nodes, like the Community Center and the post
office; the buses would cycle around downtown Ponca too at certain
times and the workers would get off loaded down with grocery bags
from the Kroger. By eight or nine the air outside the bungalows was
cooler than the air inside, and people’d bring out kitchen chairs and
armchairs to sit in on what some people called the lawn, the strip of
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 5
pebbly dirt tufted with dry grass that ran between the street and the