there were very likely going to be no rooms for miles around. A square
meal at least they ought to be able to get, they thought, and they had to
wait long enough for that, standing listening to the chat on the line
outside the Chicken in the Rough on Grand Avenue (animated neon
sign over the door whereon an enraged rooster took a swing at a golf
ball, and was next shown with a busted club, and then again).
“Dance lessons?” they heard one man ask another in some surprise.
“Thursdays. Tuesdays I got bowling, Mondays the checkers tourna-
ment.”
“Mondays the Moths play the Hep Cats. First game of the season.
They say Henry Van Damme’s throwing out the first ball.”
Once inside they had a further wait at the counter, Ponca City’s
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 55
longtime dry laws modified to allow mild beer for the duration, and
glasses and steins crowding the length of it. Prosper worked in beside a
tall person in the Van Damme uniform, minus the tunic with badge
and name, the blue slacks and a shirt just fine for off-hours, as prom-
ised. Not Norma Jeane. Two blue barrettes held back her black hair,
done in a Sculpture Wave he guessed, though maybe it was natural. A
very tall person. She took no notice of him, looking down the bar away,
but (Prosper thought) at no one in particular.
“Mind if I smoke?” he asked her.
“I don’t care if you burn.” She turned slightly toward him to let him
see her uncaring face, and she noticed the crutches under his arms.
“Oh. Sorry.”
He offered her a smoke, which she declined. “You work at Van
Damme?” he asked. The woman looked at him with kindly contempt,
who doesn’t, what a dumb line.
“I just got hired,” Prosper said.
“Is that so.”
“Doing something I’ve never done.”
“Yeah well. They have their own ideas. I was a welder when I came,
but no more.”
Prosper saw Pancho waving to him, he’d secured a couple of seats.
“Care to join us?” he asked the woman, and as all his remarks so
far had done, this one seemed to rebound gently from her without
making contact. He straightened carefully and stepped away with what
he hoped was a certain grace. As he went to where Pancho waited he
heard laughter behind him, but not, he thought, at him.
Baskets of fried chicken, laid on calico paper as though for a picnic,
and French-fried potatoes; paper napkins and the bottled “3.2” beer.
Pancho looked down at this insufficiency. One of his beliefs was that if all
people received a real competence for their labors, or simply as a birth-
right, they could just refuse poor food until it was replaced with better.
“And what did they say they’d be putting you to doing?” he asked
Prosper.
“Well they didn’t,” Prosper said. “As I was explaining, there.” He
gestured to the counter. Pancho looked over his shoulder; the woman
Prosper had spoken to passed a glance in their direction, maybe a hint
of a smile, and away again.
56 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Day Shift workers went into the Van Damme works through a bank of
glass doors, even as the Victory Shift workers exited through another
bank, looking worn and depleted. The heels of incoming workers made
a din on the tiled floor; Prosper was like a stick in a stream as they
swept around him, and he had to be careful not to get kicked and lose
his footing—they gave him space, when they saw him, but they didn’t
always see him. Prosper had washed his face in a Conoco gas station
toilet, but his cheeks were stubbly and his collar gray; he felt a cold
apprehension he hadn’t felt yesterday.
Where the entrance narrowed to stream the workers past the time
clocks, he handed the cards he’d been given to the clerk behind a
window there, who saw something on them that caused him to pick up
a phone. He flipped a switch on his PBX and waited a time, regarding
Prosper with steady indifference; he spoke a name into the phone, hung
it up, and pointed to where Prosper was to stand and wait. Pancho had
long since gone into the interior beyond. Prosper had time to fill up
with a familiar but always surprising anxiety as the workers went past
him, some glancing his way. Far more women than men, like a city
avenue where the department stores are.
“Olander?”
Prosper stepped forward. The man who’d called his name, without
actually looking for him, was a long thin S-shaped man, knobby wrists
protruding from his sleeves. He wore a tie and round horn-rims. He
motioned to Prosper to follow him along into the plant.
“Through here.”
Prosper Olander had never been in a cathedral, but now he felt
something like that, the experience of entering suddenly a space so
large, so devoted to a single purpose, that the insides of the heart are
drawn for a moment outward and into it, trying to fill it, and failing. It
wasn’t perpendicular like a cathedral, or still and echoey, it was loud
under long high banks of lights; but it was so huge, and the numbers of
people and tasks that filled it so many, that it took a moment before
Prosper’s stretched senses even perceived that what was being scram-
bled over and attended to were units, were all alike, were the bodies of
airplanes. Even then he could doubt the perception: was it really pos-
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 57
sible that things this big (and still they were only parts of things that
would have to be a lot bigger, reason told you that) were meant to fly?
For a second you could feel that they were something more like brood-
ing hens, and the workers were helping them lay and hatch the actual
airplane-sized airplanes out of their vast insides.
The supervisor or foreman he followed, as he would come to know,
was Rollo Stallworthy, and a kinder man than he appeared. Prosper
followed after him as fast as he could down what would have been the
cathedral’s nave, between the plane bodies on either side, Rollo giving
no quarter. Prosper could travel fast but not for long, and eventually he
had to stop; Rollo Stallworthy after a moment’s solo progress divined
something was wrong and looked back to where Prosper panted.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Prosper said. “Just give me a minute.”
Just then a very large man consulting with others at one of the long
tables that at every station held blueprints and paper in piles caught
sight of Prosper, and signaled he’d like a word.
Prosper waited. Rollo nodded respectfully to the big man and put
his hands behind his back.
“New hire?” said the man. His face was the size of a pie and crossed
with gold-framed eyeglasses. Prosper nodded. The man pointed to his
legs and his back.
“Tabes dorsalis?” he asked.
“No,” Prosper said.
“Been to the health clinic?” the man said. Prosper thought he’d
never seen such yardage of seersucker expended on a single suit. “Got
your health card?”
“Yes.”
“Go on over. May well be something they can do for you.”
“All right,” said Prosper.
“Carry on,” the man said cheerily, and turned back to his table.
“That was him,” Rollo said as he set the pace again. He grinned
back at Prosper.
“That was who?”
“Himself. Henry the Great. Here on an inspection tour. He doesn’t
miss a thing.”
“Well say,” Prosper said.
58 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“You’re fortunate he didn’t give you a pill to take,” Rollo said. “His
pockets are full of ’em.”