F O U R F R E E D O M S / 51
showed the same young woman in various situations, wearing the new
outfit, which satisfied all the requirements of the job but could be worn
anywhere. It was a deep blue (the article said blue), a pair of high-
waisted slacks and a tunic the same color, with company badges on the
shoulder and the breast pocket. All you had to do was swap the tunic
for a nice blouse or sweater and you were dressed for a date or a dance.
There were pictures of the young woman in full uniform on the wing
of a plane, gazing into the clouds; then holding an electric tool of some
kind; then, tunic-less, laughing at a bar, holding a drink, the same
slacks, and two—maybe three—servicemen around her for her to
ignore. The girl’s name was Norma Jeane.
Prosper closed the magazine. Norma Jeane on the cover stood with
her back to the camera, hand on her hip and her head turned back to
smile at Prosper, like Betty Grable in that picture. No girdle for her.
“So get this,” the barber said.
Prosper sought out the article again, flipping the big pages, unable
to locate it, pages filled with tanks and planes and advancing and
retreating armies, generals and statesmen, the united nations. Here.
Norma Jeane. He envied her; envied her soldiers, her smile. Many
suitors for each one. The plant where she worked building airplanes
with her tools was in Oklahoma. Van Damme Aero’s brand-new plant
for the making of their huge new bombers, using the most modern and
up-to-date methods and materials. A workers’ paradise, it’s said, and
workers are pouring in from all parts of the country to sign up for the
thousands of jobs. Skilled and unskilled. Old and young.
Oklahoma. If he remembered his geography right they would pass
through there on their way to the Coast. They had to.
“Say,” he said, looking up, spoiling the barber’s punch line. “I’ve an
idea.”
5
We weren’t where we were in those times because we had been
thrown or removed to there. We didn’t think so. We felt we
had impelled ourselves, like the faring pioneers and immi-
grants driving their wagons or pushing their barrows who
somewhere somehow along the way stopped and settled as a bird does
on a branch or a catarrh does on the lungs: those pioneers whose
grandchildren we were, now again pulling up stakes, uprooted in the
mobilization, the putting-into-motion, that began before the real war
did and continued all through it. True, in some places we stayed on
where our fathers and mothers and grandfathers had first settled, but
even so we were caught up in that motion if our parents and grandpar-
ents had happened to settle in places that those on the move were now
headed for or drawn to—seemingly blown to, you might think seeing
them, as by one of those comic tornadoes that lift a boy on a bicycle or
a chicken coop full of chickens or a Ford car with Gramps and Gram
inside and set it down unharmed somewhere else. Those stories always
made the papers, and the new migrant herds did too, arriving purpose-
fully, getting off trains carrying their bags and kids, pulling into town
in panting jalopies with bald tires, looking around for a place to stay.
Alarming, sometimes, to those already there and living in the homes
and going to the churches and the shops they thought were theirs.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 53
Those trains go both ways the locals would now and then say to new-
comers whose ways they didn’t like. People from elsewhere were more
different from you than they are now. They came from farther away.
Pancho Notzing with Prosper beside him reached Ponca City the
next afternoon and they were immediately caught up in the stream of
traffic headed out of the city—every Ponca spare room, hotel bed,
guesthouse, and shed held a worker or two that hadn’t got accommo-
dation in the dormitories or houses of Henryville, and the second shift
was about to begin. Yellow Van Damme buses, yellow bicycles that
Van Damme loaned out free to workers, cars of every description all
going out along roads not meant for much traffic beyond a leisurely
touring car going one way and a hay wagon going the other: tempers
could get frayed, including those of the folks on their porches by the
roadside watching.
Getting a job at Van Damme Aero Ponca City was like being drafted
by a tornado. A hundred people were involved in nothing but looking
you over, asking you questions, filling your hands with forms, examin-
ing you, putting you through tests, chivying crowds from one station
to another in a wide circle (though you couldn’t see a circle) until you
reached where you’d started from, but now with all you needed to be
an employee. Now and then as you were blown around you heard vast
noises outside the processing center, the big Bee engines starting up,
horns sounding, wide steel doors rolling open—that’s all it was, but
you didn’t know that and jumped a little each time. They sorted you
into shifts, sent some home to come back the next morning or mid-
night to begin, and some they simply put to work—especially the
skilled men, who’d arrived dressed for it, and not in a suit and a pair of
wingtips or a frock and stacked heels, and who had their own tools in
sturdy cases. If you wanted that Van Damme Aero uniform for work,
and they suggested it would be a very good thing, you got a ticket for
one and could pay it off out of your first pay envelope, or take a little
out for three weeks or four. There wasn’t a stair in the place: Van
Damme wanted every space accessible to the fleet of electric trucks that
scooted everywhere, pulling trailer-loads of materials, running
unguessable errands, tooting their little horns and flicking their lights.
Pancho and Prosper were immediately drawn apart, stepping into two
different intake lanes and swept inward in different directions. Prosper
54 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
kept up with the crowd, though he spent longer in Physical Examina-
tions than most, and at the end he got a time card, and instructions,
and a form to fill out to get a badge.
Prosper Olander had a war job. He started on the first shift, next
morning.
Pancho Notzing, also taken on, was looking pale and somewhat
asweat when Prosper found him by the car in the parking lot.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” the older man said. “I would like to
be able to refuse.”
“It seems good to me,” Prosper said. His shirt was damp at the
arms from all the walking. “Are you antiwar?”
“Well not in the usual sense maybe,” Pancho said. “I regret the stupid
waste. No one would go to war if their lives were gratifying, if their
associations gave them satisfaction, if they had pleasure and delight.
They go because they can’t think why they shouldn’t. Their leaders are
filled with rage and envy and fear, and no one laughs them down.”
“You have to defend yourself.”
“Ah yes. Well. Perhaps. In defending ourselves we may also change
ourselves, without seeing that we do, and for good too. These vast
engines of destruction. The vast System that’s needed to build them
and send them on their way. We don’t know the outcome.”
He said it as though he did know the outcome, and Prosper—not
only to forestall him from saying so—said, “Let’s get some dinner.
Speaking of pleasure.”
They went back to Ponca, looking at a night spent in the car, as