giving odds against us, though, and they want to get in on this before
the odds change.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” said Vi. She usually never
used a bad word, except around her brothers. Times change. Dad sat
down beside her, the bottle of water in his hands, and gave her a sip
now and then as he explained.
There had never been a time like that for gambling: so much money
flowing into our pockets, so little to spend it on. The horses and dogs
got record purses, and an average Sunday bettor was dropping a hun-
dred dollars at the races, but the trouble was getting to the track—we
weren’t supposed to be wasting gas traveling for amusement, and it was
said that War Resources Board agents were coming to the parking lots
and conning the license plates for cars from far away, issuing warnings,
maybe even canceling your precious B sticker so you’d stay home.
There were the endless poker games too, their pots growing, the
amount won every wild night exactly matching the amount lost, a
continuous float moving from back room to dormitory to rooming house
to basement around the war plants. We’d bet on checkers tournaments,
on ladies’ pedestrian races (a dozen dames wig-wagging along heel-and-
toe toward the tape like a flock of geese), on donkey basketball. Of
course there were bookies, it was the golden age of vigorish, their multiple
phone lines ringing one after the other (one bookie’s operation had
twenty phones crowded on a desk, a sort of homemade PBX with all the
receivers dangling from a wall of hooks). They made book on the remains
of major league baseball, where you couldn’t see DiMaggio or Williams,
who were fighting the war, but there was Stan “the Man” Musial, for
some reason exempt, and there was Pete Gray of the Browns, who had
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 97
one arm, master of the drag bunt, no surprise; the Yankees brought back
smiling old-timers like Snuffy Stirnweiss and Spurgeon “Spud” Chandler,
who doffed their caps to the ironically cheering crowds. There was the
women’s pro ball league, founded by a chewing gum magnate, playing
what was actually softball at the beginning. And there were the leagues
of the war plants, an East Coast, a Middle, a West Coast, playing for
free, their standings known only to the unions and companies that
sponsored them and to the ferrets of the betting book that laid the odds,
which went unmentioned in the Green Sheet; you had to read the plant
news releases and the back pages of small-town papers, better you had
to have seen a team play, aircraft plant against Liberty Ship builder,
welders against riveters, Bay City Bees versus Boilermakers Lodge 72
Sledges, the roster changing every week as workers were hired or quit or
were drafted. It was the women’s teams that were the ones that were
followed, oddsmakers discovering a new science in judging the tenacity,
speed, spirit of coeds and housewives and waitresses.
It had to be hush-hush or the bosses and the government would start
wondering what this had to do with winning the war, but that only
made it more attractive, a secret Rube Goldberg machine you put money
into at one end and it came out double at the other or disappeared
entirely. Like any honorable sportsmen, the coaches and managers
wouldn’t bet, and neither would the players—mostly—but the unions
and the industries wanted their teams to win: all the gifts and the time
off they gave the best players and the little kickbacks for the coaches
hotted up the atmosphere, and staying high in the standings meant get-
ting and keeping the talent, which meant figuring how to convince a
pitcher or a first baseman to quit one plant and take a job at another.
“You’re not telling me you’ve got money on this,” Vi said to Dad.
“If I did I wouldn’t say so,” Dad said. “I’d say no.”
“Are you saying no?”
“I’m saying no.”
“So big help that is.”
“Listen,” Dad said, and he helped Vi to her feet. “I want to win. I
want to see you play with the best team I can give you. I want the shop
to be proud of the team and you, so next day they can think about how
well you did when they go in to work to make ships and send them out
to fight the war. There’s the reason. Okay?”
98 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Vi stood, feeling the world turn about her a bit, then slow, settle,
and stop. She bent to pick up her glove and the world stayed still. She
was okay. “Okay,” she said.
The Stingers won that day, beating that “point spread” that was
evolving among the West Coast bookies just at that time, a new way of
managing the rolling tide of betting money and the unknowability of
outlandish semipro and amateur teams. That was a good day, with a
special commendation from the front office read out over the loudspeak-
ers from which issued on most days the news of battles, of quotas met,
ships launched, and announcements of War Bond drives. Then with
amazing suddenness (amazing if you hadn’t lived there long enough to
witness it) the dry season ended and the rains came; every game was
washed out until they just gave up and called it a day, tossed the bats in
the musty canvas bags and pulled up the sodden bases and locked them
in the dugouts. The end. Vi and Dad and the others went back on the
line, working double shifts now and then to make up for lost time and
wages, but for the two of them also because it was easy on the Graveyard
Shift to find a place deep in the belly of a growing ship that foremen
weren’t going to wander into, one with piles of cotton wadding or insu-
lation to lie on. Reflected glow of a flashlight turned away into the dark-
ness. Echo of their noises off steel walls, walls she had maybe made
herself, how odd, but they two not the only ones to have found their way
down there, repellent litter of cigarette butts, pint bottles, used condoms,
a bulletin had had to be posted about it, Let’s Keep Our Work Spaces
Neat. Too cold anyway soon enough, always cold and damp, clouds
parting for a moment only to gather again like helpless weeping. Vi
thought she was getting athlete’s foot, not fair, since she wasn’t an ath-
lete anymore. Sis said she was getting athlete’s foot up to the knee. Vi
learned that the mere clammy difficulty of getting warm together could
kill a romance that was already chancy at best, illicit, homeless, always
needing to be arranged, willed into being. As the rains fell steadily Dad’s
six-month exemption from military service ran out. He could have got a
new exemption without difficulty, but he chose not to. It was not Vi but
his wife and kids who saw him off for basic training at the station.
A couple of months later—spring coming, blue sky visible now and
then, that smell in the air—Vi was told by the new manager of the
Stingers that she had an opportunity to go down to the Van Damme
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 99
Aero works, get a job building planes, easier work for better money.
Van Damme Aero had one of the best softball clubs in the league,
except for the pitching, which had long been weak. They were eager to
get Vi and had offered to persuade a good shortstop and one of their
top catchers—they were deep in catching—to take jobs up here in the
shipyards, if the benefits were right.
“Play all year round down there,” the manager said to Vi, though
finding it hard to look her in the eye. “Season never ends.”
So she’d gone south, and then west to Ponca when the offer came; she