wings drooping slightly like an albatross, ghostly in the purity of its
yet unlettered unmarked duralumin, Plexiglas ports still blinded with
black paper, crept into the sun. It took so long to move into place beside
its sisters on the field that everyone soon went back to work.
The three buildings were actually one building, the walls between
them formed by two lines of offices, machine shops, tool distribution,
production control, big glass windows through which the workers on
the floor could see the supervisors and designers and computers inside,
all of them just as busy as they were in their white shirts and ties.
Henry Van Damme had wanted those glass windows. He was also the
one who chose the new fluorescent lighting for those offices, which
also hung high over the shop floor in vast rectangular banks, the first
building this size lit solely by the cool magic-wand bulbs that many
workers had never seen before they arrived here, that made it bright as
day but somehow unearthly. Along that row of offices was the Press
and Publicity Office where Horse Offen turned out the Aero. Henry
particularly wanted that office open to the shop. He read the Aero with
great interest, cover to cover each week: Horse Offen knew it, and
knew that suggestions reaching him from higher up might well be
coming from the Mountain Man himself.
Horse’s office contained the mimeo machines and a little Harris
Automatic photo-offset printer, with a man and an assistant to run it,
real IPPAU printers, who stamped the International Printing Pressmen
and Assistants Union bug on the last page of every issue of the Aero.
They also printed reports, spec handbooks, notices, calendars, and
every other thing that the incoming workers were handed or saw or
read or were advised and counseled and warned by through the day and
66 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
night. Just today Prosper Olander was working on lettering the new
series of Upp ’n’ Adam cartoons that would appear large-size around
the shop floor and in the toilets and lunchroom, and small-size in the
Aero. At least one idea for an Upp ’n’ Adam had definitely come from
Van Damme himself, who thought the two clowns were funny and
instructive, a big fat one and a little skinny one, always grinning even
when stepping on abandoned tools, shocking themselves with worn
wiring, wasting rivets, sleeping on the job as the drill press went hay-
wire (Hey Upp! Get Your Sleep in Bed—Not on the Job!! ) or making
other messes that wags could alter with a crayon into the vulgar or
obscene—Horse marveled at the human male’s capacity for inventive
crudity. The art was done off-site and mailed in, but Prosper did the
words with his lettering pens, making clusters of exclamation marks
like cock feathers. He did Anna Bandanna too, whose posters con-
veyed more sober remarks, and longer ones, directed at female work-
ers. He’d just finished one of those and it lay on his table ready for
photography.
“ ‘Don’t let that time of the month keep you from doing your best,
girls!’” Horse read, looking over Prosper’s shoulder. “ ‘Get the straight
story, not the old myths—Ask for Pamphlet 1.1 at the Nurse’s Station!’ ”
“What’s the straight story?” Prosper wondered.
“Straight story is, Buckle this pad on it and get back to work.”
Anna Bandanna posters were easier because the picture never
changed, it was only she, bust of a great broadly grinning woman in a
polka-dot bandanna, the straps of her overalls visible on her shoulders;
red wet mouth, maybe fat, eyes alight. Prosper’d heard her referred to
as that damn Aunt Jemima, and there was a resemblance, if only the
strength and joy and white teeth. He got very used to looking into that
receptive but frozen face.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Horse said, “but I had a dream
last night about that woman.”
“Really?”
“Really. I dreamed she and I. Well.”
“I dreamed about President Roosevelt,” Prosper said.
“Swell,” said Horse. “He running for a fourth term?”
“Well we talked about that. I gave him my advice.”
“Oh good. You had a high-level meeting.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 67
“No no,” Prosper said, remembering it. “It didn’t seem that way. We
were at a picnic. A few others around. Then he and I went for a walk, up
into the woods. Talking about this and that. Just ordinary matters.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” It had seemed morning, the sun and the path; they talked
about nothing in that easy way that friends do, friends who gain suste-
nance from the mere exchange of true words. His to the President, the
President’s to him. It felt good to be able to help him.
“So he was walking?” Horse asked pointedly, as though he had a
surprise for Prosper.
“Yes.”
“He can’t.”
“Well, no. I guess he has trouble with it anyway. But he was. So
was I.”
“You didn’t think anything of it?”
“I usually walk all right in dreams. Run up stairs, you know. Like
everybody. I bet so does he.”
“In your dreams you can walk,” Horse said, and for a moment a
kind of wondering pity seemed to invade a face not really suited for a
feeling like that. “Man oh man that’s . . .” But he couldn’t or didn’t say
what it was. He returned to his typewriter, shaking his head.
Prosper, yes, could walk in his dreams, run too; that same morning
he’d awakened in the warmth of one, where he’d been running, running
across an open field under the sky, readying himself to launch from his
hands a great weightless paper-and-wood model airplane, like the one
the Teenie Weenies found; almost aloft himself, he’d lifted it to the sky
like a heartful of hope.
At four o’clock the Day Shift changes to the Swing Shift. The Day Shift
workers down tools, pack their toolboxes, head for the lockers; the
women fill their dressing rooms, yakking and laughing or weary and
silent, showering and changing into their actual clothes and hanging
their boiler suits and overalls and standard-issue uniforms in their
lockers, tossing in their scuffed shoes and limp socks, but some don’t
care and after a swift hand wash and a reapplication of lipstick are out
the door, only a hop to their houses anyway and, for many, no husband
68 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
there to keep up standards for. Marlene, a new inside riveter, said good
night to her team, and “Good night, see you tomorrow,” to Marcie,
who waved back. Then on the way out of the plant it occurred to Mar-
lene that that was the first time she’d ever said Good night, see you
tomorrow to a colored person.
Other Day Shift workers go right from the floor to the cafeteria,
and get their big meal there now, when the evening has cooled the
place. They often skip lunch, it’s too damn hot to eat at the set hour in
that plant all made of metal—it’s like one of those fold-up aluminum
picnic ovens they sell that are guaranteed to cook just by heating up in
the sun. Today a lot of people just took a Popsicle or an ice-cream bar
from the snack trucks that circulated around the floor as break time
moved, the frosty insides revealed when a lid was opened, the momen-
tary cold breath heavenly. Now they were ready for dinner (or supper,