“Why not though.”
“Because ah. Because it’s ah, a little man. That’s the name. Ah. My
little man.”
Another seismic heave and she turned another quarter turn over so
that her back was to him. He pressed close against her and she took his
arm and drew it around her and directed his hand again downward,
her own now atop it, lightly, reminding him (when he thought about it
later) of his aunt May’s hand resting on the planchette of the Ouija
board and waiting for its subtle movements. She lifted her outside or
upper leg a little. “There,” she said. But soon she grew restless, or dis-
satisfied, or encouraged—Prosper tried to gauge her feelings—and
rolled again, now onto her stomach, and her legs opened as though
grateful to be able to, and they lifted Vi up a bit. This was a challenge
for Prosper, he’d learned, since his own legs weren’t up to the power
requirements, but Vi had a way of hooking her lower legs over his to
keep him steady and in place, and she could help too in getting him or
it in past the gatekeepers and on into the interior, which she now did,
with a seemingly pitiful small cry.
“Now you be careful,” she gasped into the pillow. “Prosper. You be
careful. You know?”
“I know.”
This being the second time that morning he thought he could do
all right, in fact it felt a bit wooden and abused after having gone on
in, but she again drew his hand around and onto her to go find that
Little Man he’d met, which now he could easily do, not nearly so
little this way, why hadn’t he identified it before; and with every-
thing then set and going, the round and round along with the in and
out, like rubbing your stomach while patting your head, the train
left the station, picking up speed wonderfully, amazingly: even as he
began making sounds of his own he was able to marvel at it.
76 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“So how do you know these things,” Prosper said later. The bed was
mussed and suffering, not really meant for two if one of them was Vi.
“Who taught you?”
If you lay still in that dry air, as the heat rose you could feel the
sweat pass off you even as it was produced. They lay still. They had
stopped touching.
“You just know,” Vi said. “It’s part of me. I know about it.”
“But those names,” Prosper said. She knew names for what she had
and what he had, what they did, what came of it, some of them useful,
some funny.
“Oh. I learned. From somebody.”
“Man or woman?”
“Man.”
“Tell me,” Prosper said.
“Why should I?”
“Why shouldn’t you? All these things are educational.” He put his
hand on the rise of her thigh. He thought how soon you can get used to
being naked alongside someone naked, so that the two of you can con-
verse just as though you were dressed, and how that ought to be odd
but somehow isn’t, which is odd in itself. “Isn’t that so?”
“You might be asking out of jealousy. People can be jealous of
people’s old lovers. Former lovers. They pretend to ask just out of curi-
osity but it’s a nagging thing, they’re jealous even if they don’t know it.
They think they just want to learn something about someone, but it
poisons them to hear it.”
“Really?”
“Really. It’s like bad earth.” She rolled away from him and looked
upward at the ceiling, which seemed to be hammocking ever so
slightly downward. “Poisoned through the ear. And they asked for it
too.”
“No. I just wanted to know. About you. What you did, what you
thought, before. I’d like to know.”
She turned her head toward him, and he could see that she was con-
sidering him. Her eyebrows rose, asking something, more of herself
than of him: but she smiled.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 77
“Tell me,” he said, smiling too.
“Tell you. Tell you what.”
“Start at the beginning.”
“No,” she said. “I won’t.”
“So start in the middle. Like True Story.”
“Like what?”
“The stories in True Story always start in the middle. ‘Little did I
know when I saw the dawn come that day that by nightfall I’d be locked
up in jail.’ You know.”
“You read True Story? It’s for women.”
“I used to.”
“Little did I know I’d find myself in bed with a ninny.” She reached
down to pluck the crumpled and somewhat soggy pack of Luckies from
the pocket of her shirt, where like a man she kept them. “Okay,” she
said. “Here goes.”
7
Little did she know: that when the great worldwide storm rolled
over at last, after hovering so long undecided, it would leave the
land remade by its passing, the way spring storms and the sun
following them can change the brown prairie to green almost
overnight or overday: that it would move her farther than she had ever
thought to move, though not as far as she had once dreamed of moving.
She’d gone out to the Pacific Northwest first, looking for work, coming
down after a long trip into a port city along swarming roads filled with
others also ready to go to work if they could find someplace to stay.
There were ten shipyards slung out into the bay and a ship was being
launched every month, soon it would be every twenty days, and it was
easy to find out how to get to the employment offices, as easy as fol-
lowing the crowd funneling into a ballpark, and after you signed up at
one—whichever you came to first, you couldn’t know which was the
better place to work but the work was all the same and you had lots of
company no matter which one you picked—they told you about places
to look for a room or at least a bed, and where not to look if you were
a young single girl in a summer dress and a thin sweater carrying an
old suitcase tied up with a length of twine. Not even if you were a girl
just a little short of six feet, wide-shouldered and big-handed with a
touch-me-not coolness in your long narrow eyes.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 79
It was less than a week since she’d left the ranch and her father’s
house. Six weeks since her youngest brother had left for the army
induction center, following his older brothers. Ten since the bulldozer
had covered with dirt the corpses of the last sick cattle shot by the gov-
ernment agents and her father had shut the door on those agents as
though he’d never open it again for anyone.
Bad earth they’d called it, stretches of prairie that were somehow
naturally poisonous, whose poisons could be drawn up into plants
that stock would eat. Maybe for a long time eating the plants hadn’t
hurt them, maybe not for years, but then there’d be a change in the
groundwater, or some new plant would start growing there and take
hold—a kind of vetch, they said, was one—and it could suck up so
much of the poison it could kill. Kill a sheep in an hour, a heifer in a
day; leave cattle with the blind staggers or their hooves softening
and sloughing off, too weak to feed, had to be shot, so poisoned they
couldn’t be sold for slaughter even if they lived. Government gave
you a penny on the pound. She herself had to sell the horses; they
were smarter than the cattle and stayed away from the garlicky smell
of the bad-earth weed, but there was no way now for them to earn
their keep. Without them the ranch seemed to her to be, and always
to have really been, a hostile stretch of nowhere, no friend to her.