Выбрать главу

before becoming good again. Her journey wasn’t turning out like that,

not that she’d expected it to. Everybody was pretty kind but mostly

preoccupied; you asked them for what you needed and sometimes they

could give it but mostly not and they passed out of your attention and

you went on. It didn’t pile up the way it did in books: it was come and

go, over and gone.

But Shirley stayed in her consciousness, speaking and questioning

and a little doubtful, or surprised and admiring; and Terry too, her

makeup and her burns. And then the three women in black leather at

the ferry’s rail.

She’d been early at the dock, making for the streetcar with the

others, standing on the open platform and clinging on, thinking in a

kind of euphoric fear that at any minute she’d be knocked off and

tumble down the impossibly steep hill that the little car trundled over,

bell clanging. The air was rich and cold and watery, nothing she’d seen

or smelled before, clouds of pale birds—gulls!—descending and aris-

ing from the sea-edge where she got off. After the crisp brassy trolley

bell the deep imperious horns, hurry up, she was carried along under

the noses of high black ships being loaded by sky-flown cranes, and

through the gate and onto the little ferryboat, cars creeping in three

lines into its belly and people crowding the decks. Then out onto the

sea, or the bay at least, black heaving water and the insubstantial city

seeming to float away behind. Vi held tight, as though she might float

away too. She saw three women, chums apparently, laughing together,

one leaning on the rail on her elbows and looking down, one beside her

hands in her pockets. The three were all dressed alike, in jackets and

trousers of what could only be black leather, heavy as hides, collars up

against the smart breeze, and high boots laced with a yard of thong.

Their hair was covered, except for one’s blond forelock escaping, in

bright bandannas knotted at the front. And on the back of each jacket

was sewn or stuck a big red V in shiny cloth, their own idea obviously.

90 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

People turned to look at them, intrigued or cheered or a little shocked,

but they didn’t notice, used to it maybe. Vi had always thought of her-

self as brave—her pa said so, her teacher, but she knew it anyway—but

she’d always thought of brave as something you did alone: being alone

in what you did and doing it anyway was what was meant by being

brave. Only when she saw those three (and she couldn’t have said it

then, couldn’t until she’d thought about it, had seen them often in her

mind, their open faces, joshing one another or looking out over water)

did she know that there could be a way of being brave together, a few

together.

The first thing she’d have to do, they told her and her class of new

hires, would be to get some good strong boots. Shipyards are just dan-

gerous places. Dungarees are good but in some jobs you’d be better off

with a pair of welder’s leathers. You’ll pay for those yourself; you might

go down to the Army-Navy store, they’ve got the stuff. You’ll have a

locker and you can keep your work clothes here if you don’t want to

wear them in the street, lot of girls don’t (Vi thought of Terry, brave

too). Now come along and we’ll start you with some basic training.

So she became an arc welder, stitching precut forms together to make

bulkhead walls and then other parts of ships (“it’s a lot like doing

embroidery,” their trainer said, as he obviously had said many times to

women before, but Vi’d never done embroidery so it was no help to

her), and on the Swing Shift she and others would pick up their rod

pot, stinger, wire brush for washing off the slag and getting that per-

fect bead, and the long lead for hooking up to power, looped over your

shoulder: watch out for somebody cutting into your lead, detaching

you at the middle and hooking themselves in, hey what the hell! Sixty

feet overhead the crane car ran on its tracks, the huge steel plates sus-

pended from it that were chunked in place with that vast noise, the

welders lowering their masks and moving in. Vi wore her ranch over-

alls and a sweatshirt of her brother’s, didn’t buy leathers for a while,

feeling somehow she had to earn them, like a varsity sweater or a jock-

ey’s silks; but the sparks from a carbon arc off a steel plate could burn

badly, right through your brassiere—Terry, shaking her head, gave Vi

cream for the burns.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 91

Off-hours she looked for a room, but it was tight. You couldn’t just

get a room in some cheap portside hotel, it looked bad, a girl in a flop-

house, but sometimes when she found a house with a sign in the

window, room for rent, she’d be told it was taken already, only to

find out later that some man had come after her and got it, tough luck

sweetheart. After a week of sneaking into Terry’s room at the Y she got

lucky, the union found her a room to share in an old mansion down-

town that had been swept into a bad neighborhood in the Depression

and never recovered, cut up into small rooms sharing the vast marbled

baths, a dusty ballroom on the third floor where the women danced

and got in trouble. Her new roommate had been sharing with her sister,

but her sister’s husband had been invalided out and she’d gone home to

care for him. She’d left behind her gloves, Vi’s now if she wanted them,

her good lunch box, and an Indian motorcycle, an ancient one-lunger

on which the two of them had got to the docks each day, now to be Sis

and Vi’s transportation, each of them in their welding gear and black

turbans, Vi up behind so tall she could see over the driver’s head: roll-

ing onto that ferry where she’d first seen that trio with the V-sign on

their backs, herself one of them now.

Pretty soon she started playing ball.

8

After the first tryouts Dad said to her: “You’ve played some.”

“Some.”

“Okay. You want to pitch.”

“If I can.”

He smiled. “You can,” he said, “if you can. You certainly may.”

Hearing that the man who’d be coaching her team (and a couple of

others too) was called Dad, she’d expected a grizzled codger, tobacco

chewer, old-timer. Dad wasn’t old; he was an engineer, with a wife and

kids, doing necessary war work. The ball teams were his relaxation. He

spoke little and smiled less, and Vi had to keep herself from staring at

him, trying to figure him out. She’d find out later that he’d noticed that.

Everyone who signed up to play was sorted randomly into the four

women’s teams the shipyard fielded—the Rinky-dinks, the Steel Ladies,

the Stingers, the Bobtails. Just about anybody was allowed to play, but

a rough order was apparent, and if you were better than the team you

were put in, Dad pushed you into a different position on another one,

where maybe you wouldn’t look good for a while, so nobody’d feel

jealous, and then he’d give you the position you could really play, and

the team would rise in the standings.

They played not out on the island where the shipyard was, but at a

little ballpark on the mainland, three diamonds laid out regulation

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 93

softball style, where there was a constant rotation as shifts began and

ended, some teams practicing, others playing. They played each other,

they played teams from the other shipyards and war plants, they played