What Rollo had been given was the job of finding something for
Prosper to do. Rollo’d already shown himself ingenious at tasks like
this, and lay awake at night sometimes (none of his own supervisors
knew this, they just assumed Rollo could do it and so they told him to
do it) putting together his crews and subcrews so that everybody could
work just as hard and fast as they were able. The short, the strong, the
old, the weary and querulous, the whites who’d work next to blacks
and the ones that wouldn’t, the helpful and patient ones you could put
next to the stupid truculent ones and get the best out of both. He’d
been thinking about this lame young man he’d been assigned, who was
actually in worse shape (Rollo was now convinced, having studied him
without staring rudely) than he’d been described as being by Intake.
“All right,” he said, and they slowed beside a station that seemed
like other stations, beneath the long unfinished hollow body of a plane,
which was far larger to look at from beneath even than to see from the
door. Workers were riveting panels of the aluminum skin in place, one
outside with the gun and the other on the other side with the bucking
bar that turned the rivet’s end (he didn’t yet know this). Rollo began
talking in a voice so slow and deliberate it was actually hard to follow,
though intended to be easy, describing Prosper’s job, which would
involve assisting in keeping records of tools and materials used and
needed at this station, new orders filled or pending. He understood
Prosper’d not be able to take it all in right off, but a little practice
would put that right, it wasn’t a hard job but it was exacting. And
Prosper tried to listen, but his eyes were drawn up and around, to the
women in their coveralls, their caps, their heavy gloves and saddle
shoes and sloppy socks, till they began to look down at him too, and
smile and wave and welcome him. Colored women and old women and
young women of many shapes, perched on narrow footholds, handling
power tools with grace and equanimity. The repeated tzing of those
guns, like bullets fired every which way in movie cartoons.
“You’ll shadow me,” Rollo said. “Till you get familiar with them
all.”
He seemed to mean the forms and stamps he was gesturing at, which
Prosper at length looked down at. “Yes,” he said.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 59
“You’ll do fine.”
“Yes,” Prosper said. “I think I will.”
Prosper and Pancho spent that night on couches in the men’s dormitory,
and then got beds in the plain bare rooms there, but it wasn’t long
before a house on Z Street became available. Despite all of Van Damme
Aero’s efforts to attract and keep workers, the turnover rate was almost
as high as in the rest of the war industries, people getting homesick,
men’s deferments running out and not renewed, women quitting when
their men were demobilized or when they’d earned enough for a down
payment on a real house in a real place; or they just couldn’t adjust,
despite Van Damme’s psychologists, and they went back to where
people acted and thought the way they once supposed everyone every-
where did.
The Z Street family that departed sold Pancho their two beds and
the other sticks of furniture they’d acquired, they could afford better
now, and Prosper and Pancho picked up other things—Henryville was
a ceaseless rummage sale of lamps and tin flatware and radios and deal
dressers; one fringed pillow with a painted satin cover showing sunset
over Lake George migrated from bed to couch in houses from A Street
to 30th, holding up heads and tired feet, until it wouldn’t plump and
was so soiled that night had fallen on its pines. The house had two
bedrooms and a living room, and that sublessor’s door on the side, and
a yard a little bigger than the others, but otherwise (Pancho thought)
belonged on Devil’s Island for its cheerlessness and separation from all
the identical others. Wave of the future he said sadly, unless things
changed. Prosper was delighted with it. Like a motel, it had no base-
ment, no attic, no high porch with a cliff of steps, nowhere in it he
couldn’t go or couldn’t use, it was all his as much as it could be any-
body’s. He stood looking out his window at the rectangles of the house
opposite his. It was identical to his but had a carport over the minia-
ture driveway roofed in a strange ribbed translucent green material
Prosper’d never seen before. “Fiberglass,” said Pancho, somewhat bit-
terly. “It’s a fabric and a wool and a plastic. No end to its uses.”
“Nice,” said Prosper. “Keep the Zephyr dry if we had one.” Pancho
(as Prosper had hoped) turned to eye him in disgust.
60 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
It was on that day, as Prosper was making his way across the vast
parking lot from where Pancho had to park among the thousands, that
Horse Offen in his little Van Damme electric car stopped beside him to
offer a lift. Pancho had already gone on ahead, at Prosper’s urging,
don’t be late.
“Say, thanks,” Prosper said, figuring a way to climb aboard as
Horse watched with interest.
“Don’t mind if we go a roundabout way?” Horse asked.
“No not a bit. I’m early.” He tended to be, until he was sure how
long a trip like this one would take him, on average.
Horse was out with pad and camera to write up a feature for the
Aero. He’d already done the sports scores and the winning suggestion
of the week (some kind of improvement to a wing jig that Horse didn’t
quite get) and needed more. He questioned Prosper as they rode, how
long he’d needed the crutches, where he’d come from, what he’d done
before, which seemed mostly to be not much. Nothing there for Horse.
“Any hobbies?”
“Well, I don’t have many of my tools here, but I like drafting and
lettering and so on. Working with pens, commercial art.”
“But that’s not your job here.”
“No.”
“Well hey. Who knows. We can use people in my shop who can do
that kind of work. If you want to apply.”
Prosper maintained a silence, one that Horse couldn’t know resulted
from a kind of awed embarrassment, that what he most wanted would
be offered him right here and now, or the hope or suggestion of it.
“So after all this. What’s your goal?”
After a moment’s thought, or silence anyway, Prosper said: “I would
hope one day to achieve greatness.”
“Aha. In what line?”
“I don’t know that yet.”
Horse allowed himself a laugh, but thought it sort of served him
right, getting an answer like that in response to a tease—a “goal,” after
all, for someone like this gangly Plastic Man with the snappy fedora.
“Here we go,” he said. He stopped the little car and dismounted.
They were within the central building; Prosper could see the shop num-
bers receding into the distance, toward his own. “Well, my two gals
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 61
aren’t here yet,” he said looking around. “Let me take your picture.
Never know when I might use it.” Prosper lifted himself off the car, set
himself on the shop floor, and drew himself up, insofar as he could.
Horse thought of a title—“Aiming for Greatness”—and laughed again
as he looked down at Prosper on the screen of the Rolleiflex. Just then
Prosper saw behind Horse two women, a very tall one and a very short
one, both dressed for work, but headed their way.