Horse turned. “Ah say, how are you, ladies?”
It seemed to Prosper that the two women knew Horse pretty well
and treated him with a kind of impatient tolerance. “Meet our new
employee,” Horse said, indicating Prosper. The smaller woman was
definitely small, a midget Prosper supposed, not with the brawny
shoulders and big head of one or two such people he’d known. The
other, the tall one, he recognized.
She recognized him too. “We’ve met,” she said, as though she
thought something was amusing.
“That’s right, we have,” Prosper said. “I don’t think I caught your
name, though.”
“I don’t think I tossed it.”
Horse said the names—small Sal Mass and tall Violet Harbison,
been around a good while, Vi plays for the Moths, the best softball
team in the industry. As he made the introductions he conceived the
idea of lining up all three of them and taking a picture and running it
with some kind of joke about a sideshow or something, “So Where’s
the Fat Lady?” but of course that was stupid. The two women, though,
went together naturally: they worked in the same shop. No forced
humor there. They just happened to be the shortest and the tallest. And
Vi was a stunner in a kind of unsettling way. They both wore the flying
“E” badges awarded for effort, and that, of course, would be the lead,
but he still planned to call the story “The Long and the Short of It,” all
in good fun.
Prosper watched Horse set up his shot, clicking off a surprising
number, this way, that way. He got Sal to climb a stepladder and sit, to
bring their two heads together. Finally he asked Vi to maybe hoist Sal
on her shoulder, or hold her in her arms like (he didn’t add) a ventrilo-
quist’s dummy, or something cute. They looked at each other and then
at him, and shook their heads.
62 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
During all that time, all that posing, Vi Harbison, untouched it
seemed however Horse tried to catch her soul with his camera and his
wisecracks, kept glancing toward Prosper Olander as though she’d like
to ask a question, or make a remark, that couldn’t or oughtn’t be asked
or made here and now, when shift was starting, both for him and for
her; and Prosper noticed that, and his eyes answered hers as they some-
times put it in the issues of True Story magazine he’d read, and he
thought he knew where he stood. Both she and Sal waved as Prosper
was carried off with Horse.
“Tough broad,” Horse said to Prosper as he negotiated the crowded
pathways through the building. “A ballbuster, frankly. In my humble
opinion.”
“The tall one? Violet?”
“Her,” Horse said. “But the midget’s no honeydrop either.”
6
The Teenie Weenies all live in Teenie Weenie Town, which is hidden
under a rosebush in a backyard not so very far away from you or
me. The path through the town leads past the sauce dish which is
the Teenie Weenies’ swimming pool, and the syrup can that is
their schoolhouse, and the teapot where the Chinaman lives. A glass
fruit jar is a greenhouse, a coffee can a workshop. Several Teenie Weenies
live together in a house made from a shoe. The trail leads on to the
garden and to the Big People’s house, where the Teenie Weenies some-
times go, to find things the Big People no longer want or won’t miss.
Today the Teenie Weenies have come upon a toy that a Big People
child has lost. It is an aeroplane! It is made of “balsa” wood and is very
light, though not to the Teenie Weenies. The aeroplane works by a
rubber band, which is wound up tightly and then released to turn the
propeller. Some of the bravest of the Teenie Weenies have decided to
see if the plane can fly! Perhaps they will use it to fly to other places,
where there are other Teenie Weenies they don’t know. The Lady of
Fashion has been offered the first trip, but has declined, and left the
experiment to the Policeman, the Admiral, and the Cowboy. The Scots-
man and the Carpenter are at work thinking of a way to turn the
rubber band that gives the power.
“The worst idea they’ve had yet,” Al Mass had said when the Sunday
64 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
paper showed this panel. “If they can get that thing wound up and let it
go, good-bye Cowboy, good-bye Admiral, good-bye Policeman. I won’t
miss them three. They always were a pain in the keister.”
It was this panel of The Teenie Weenies that had long ago given the
workers at Shop 128 their name: the picture of the long fuselage, the
graceful wings, the delicate wheels in the tall grasses (tall to the Teenie
Weenies), and the crowd of people around it and on it, laboring to
make it go: the Cook and the Dunce and the Lady of Fashion, Tommy
Atkins and Buddy Guff, the Clown, the Indian, Mr. Lover and Mrs.
Lover holding hands, Paddy Pinn the Irish giant all of four inches high.
There had been a Jap once, but he was gone now, though the clever
Chinaman remained. So they themselves, Shop 128, varied and unique,
with different souls and different skills and Passions, none interchange-
able with any of the others (as Pancho Notzing insisted), not fungible
no matter what the bosses or the government or the union thought.
They even had an Indian, though his black-satin hair was cut short as
a scrub brush and he wore the same work clothes as everybody.
Shop 128 was one of twenty stations where the fuselages were put
together with their wings. Fuselages entered the Assembly Building
from the Fuselage Building, and finished wings—all but their wingtip
sections—were lifted out of the Empennage Building by overhead crane
cars and carried into Assembly. When the wing section was hovering
suspended over the fuselage, a select team, all men but one (Vi Harbi-
son), guided it as it was lowered into place. Then the remaining Teenie
Weenies climbed the rolling ladders and scrambled upon the assembly
to rivet it and connect all those wires and snaking tubes. Al and Sal
Mass, and others not so small as those two, were the riveting team on
that narrow pressurized tunnel that ran from the forward compart-
ment to the rear. Sal on the inside loaded her gun with a rivet, drove it
into the predrilled hole, and on the other side it met the bucking bar—a
piece of steel the size of a blackboard eraser, curved to lie flat against
the aluminum surface—held in place by Sal’s bucker, Marcie. The rivet
struck the bucking bar and was flattened, making a seal; if the seal
looked good to Marcie, she tapped once on the aluminum; if she
wanted Sal to give it another hit she tapped twice. It was so loud all
around that Sal had to listen hard for those taps. It was (she said) like
dancing with a guy you couldn’t see or touch. Sal was the only riveter
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 65
on the team willing to work with a colored woman when they were
both new on the job (“What do you think I care?” Sal’d said), and now
they were the best team in the shop, maybe the floor, and everybody
wanted Marcie, but she and Sal wouldn’t part.
The growing ship then moved up the floor, gaining new things, aile-
rons and wingtips and tables and chairs and lights. When the whole
ship was furnished and complete, the vast central doors opened on
mechanical tracks—it took some time—and a fleet of three little trac-
tors came to draw it out onto the tarmac, everybody not busy doing
something else standing to watch and clap as the impossible thing,