open the big machines to show their complex insides, the valves and
springs and levers, to oil them and refill the long slots.
At Honey and Joe’s Diner the cigarette machine was on the fritz, and
Roy settled in to work. Prosper stood at the counter (easier than seating
himself on the roll-around stools) and asked the redheaded woman for
a coffee. It was midafternoon, the place was empty. He’d watched her
watching him as he came in, how he took his stand, reached for a dime
for the mug of pale liquid. She waved away his money.
“Mind if I smoke?” he asked.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 171
She came to push a glass ashtray to where he sat.
“Where’s Joe?” Prosper asked, and she leaned in confidentially to
him.
“There’s no Joe,” she said. “There was, but no more.”
“Just Honey,” he said. An odd silence fell that he was conscious of
having caused. He drew out a smoke and a match, which he lit with a
snap of his thumbnail. She smiled and moved away.
“All done here,” Roy said and clapped shut the steel machine.
“Red hair,” Fred said to Prosper, back at the icehouse. “That your
type? Hot tempered, they say.”
“Fighters,” Mert said. “She and Joe used to go at it hammer and
tongs.”
“Not Prosper,” Fred said. “He’s a lover not a fighter. She’s out of
your league, my boy.”
Fred thought that any single man constituted as Prosper was needed
two things: he needed a line he could use to break the ice and then go
on with, and he needed a type that he was interested in so he could
simplify the chase. Fred’s own type depended on blond curls, chubby
cheeks, and a poitrine approaching Mae West’s; his line started off
with Scuse me, but do you happen to have a cousin named Carruthers?
No? Gosh my mistake. So anyways tell me . . . Prosper though could
not tell if he had a type, and Fred’s attempts to delimit the field weren’t
convincing to him. As for a line, he hardly needed an icebreaker—he
found himself looked at plenty and had only to say hello, and then
keep the starer from rushing off embarrassed. Beyond that he thought
he now knew what to do, though not yet when to do it.
That cigarette machine at Honey and Joe’s seemed to malfunction
with surprising regularity, a lemon maybe, though when Fred said they
ought to pull it and get it replaced, Roy said oh he’d get it going. Roy’s
difficulties weren’t with machines but numbers, he hadn’t a head for
them, and if Prosper was willing to tot up his figures and fill in his
book, Roy was happy to return him to the little diner now and then,
and go read the paper in the truck.
“So does that hurt much?” Honey asked Prosper gently. It was May,
and the air was full of the tiny blown green buds of some opening tree,
even the floor of Honey and Joe’s was littered with them. She picked
one from Prosper’s shoulder.
172 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Doesn’t hurt a bit,” Prosper said. “The other way around. I can’t
feel much.”
“Oh.”
“I mean from the knees down.”
“Oh.”
He cleaned up the last of the plate of goulash she’d put in front of
him. She had a way of looking at him that reminded him of the way the
women looked at themselves in the Mayflower’s mirrors: a kind of
dreamy questioning. He didn’t yet know how to interpret it, but he was
coming to notice it. Somehow a look to the outside and the inside at
once. No man ever had it, not that he’d seen.
“So you get around good,” she said, as though weighing his case.
“Oh sure.”
She considered him or herself some more. Her hair was not only
deep red, a color for an animal’s fur more than a woman’s hair, it was
thick, tense, it strove to burst from her hairnet: it was as though he
could feel it. She bent and pulled from under the counter a bottle of
whiskey, put down a glass before him with a bang, and poured a shot
for him. He took a taste, then a swallow.
“So, Honey,” he said then. “Can I ask you a question?”
Honey lived behind the diner, through a door in the back. She sent
Prosper to turn over the sign in the door that told people the diner was
open or closed. It was now closed. He clicked the switch that turned
off the neon sign above the door (diner), and its red glow faded. He
opened the door and waved to Roy, go on, good-bye, see you later; Roy
didn’t ask him how he’d get back to the icehouse or downtown, just
shrugged and rolled the toothpick he was never without from one side
of his grin to the other and started the truck.
“Now we’re getting someplace,” Vi Harbison said to Prosper in
Henryville. “This is good.”
“Okay,” Prosper said.
“So was she a natural redhead?”
“What?”
“You know. You found out, I’m guessing.”
“Oh,” Prosper said.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 173
What Honey’d learned about Prosper was that he lived with two old
never-married aunts, had never gone to high school or taken a girl out
on a date or been to a dance. That interested her. Not that she hadn’t
known some wallflowers and some deadwood, oh she had, but Prosper
wasn’t that. He’d grown to be good-looking—calm light wide-spaced
eyes; teeth white and even, never a toothache; fine hands like a glove
model’s. Visible beneath the silk shirt he wore were the broad shoul-
ders and back he’d built by using them to walk. All that contrasting so
strangely with the sway back and the legs that had not grown as the
rest of him had. It didn’t assort: man and boy, weak and strong. Honey
liked it: it was the taste of tart and sweet together, the sensation of hot
and cold, it made you think. She mightn’t have liked it though if he
hadn’t been so open and ardent and willing—ignorant as a puppy, but
his grip strong and oddly sure. After they’d gone through the rubbers
Joe’d left behind he still wouldn’t quit, not until late in the night when
she pushed him away laughing, leave me alone, I have to start the range
in about four hours, who taught you that anyway?
But nobody had. He didn’t tell her she was the first woman he’d
been with, but he didn’t need to.
“Mind if I stay till later? I’m afraid I can’t get home from here. Not
in the middle of the night.”
“Hell yes I mind. Think I want you stumbling out of here into my
breakfast crowd? How’d that look?”
“Well.”
She touched him gently, not quite sorry for him. “You got a dollar? Go
into the front and use the phone. Call a cab. The number’s right there.”
She rolled away and pretended to sleep, thinking he wouldn’t want
her to watch him put on his equipment; he did it sitting on the floor
(she could hear it) and then apparently hoisted himself upright on his
crutches. Then she was sorry she hadn’t watched, just to see. Then she
slept, suddenly and profoundly.
Aglow, as though he could find his way in the dark by his own light,
Prosper went out of the little rooms where she lived, wanting to touch
everything he saw or sensed there, the harsh fabric of the armchair, the
cold of the mirror, ashy weightless lace of the curtains through which
the streetlight shone. Careful of the rag rug at the doorway. His arms
were trembly from his exertions, who knew they’d have so much work
174 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
to do, he laughed aloud as though joy bubbled up beneath his heart