two-timing me with that blonde.”
“What?”
“Your new friend. The one you knew back home.”
“I didn’t know her. Who?”
“The one with the little boy. She likes ice-cream sodas.” Vi sang:
“The prettiest girl. I ever saw. Was sippin’ soda. Through a straw . . .”
“Oh ho,” Prosper said, as though just remembering. “Oh no. No.
That’s nothing. She’s married. I just knew her back home. Or actually
I didn’t know her.”
“You,” said Vi, aiming a finger at him like a gun, “are a terrible
liar. But it doesn’t matter. Like I just said. Who cares? If you don’t care
I don’t. And you don’t.”
Prosper sat hands folded on the table that separated them. Caught
out so unexpectedly, he’d got distracted; there was a thread there in
Vi’s story he’d intended to follow, now he’d dropped it, what was it?
Oh yes.
“Who broke your heart, Vi?” he asked.
She stuffed her hands in her overall pockets. “Maybe I’ll tell you
sometime,” she said. “I’m going to work.”
9
It had been a Wednesday night a couple of weeks before when Pros-
per Olander and Pancho Notzing went into Ponca City to see a movie
and pick up some sundries (as Prosper said). Pancho drove, the seats
filled with Teenie Weenies out to do the town, insofar as it could be
done, not something Pancho cared to do, and they’d have to make their
own way home. He let them out by the Poncan, a Spanish-style picture
palace on Grand Avenue and the best in town, and went to park the
car; he joined Prosper at the ticket booth, and they reached doors just
as a black man in a bow tie holding the hand of a small girl in lace and
ribbons did too. Pancho opened the door to let them pass in, and fol-
lowed. Prosper went in after, and a local gent too, coatless in a skim-
mer, his eyes narrowed.
“I wouldn’t open a grave for one of them,” the fellow muttered, not
exactly to Prosper; it took Prosper a minute to put together what the
man had seen, and what he meant by what he’d said—the black man
and his daughter, Pancho opening the door for them. Open a grave?
Had the fellow had that remark ready, or was it just now he’d thought
of it? It didn’t ask for a response, and he made none; the white man
lingered in the lobby, eyes fixed on the black man’s back as he mounted
the stairs to the balcony: for once Prosper felt ignored.
The theater was Cooled by Refrigeration, not necessary on this
202 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
spring night. A few steps to negotiate, hold up the crowd briefly, and
then in. Prosper (as he always would in movie theaters) thought of
Elaine, her uniform jacket, breasts bare beneath it. The picture show-
ing was The Human Comedy, with selected short subjects and a news-
reel. That was what Pancho’d come for, though he chiefly got from it
cues for his own pointedly expressed opinions, which earned him a lot
of shushing. Next week the bill changed: Cabin in the Sky.
Just as the picture, rather dull and uneventful, wrapped up, Prosper
whispered to Pancho that he’d meet him as agreed, and got up to go.
Crowds in aisles always made him anxious, chance of a stray foot acci-
dentally kicking his props away.
Cuzalina’s pharmacy (“Save When You’re Sick”) was a few blocks
away, and open late that year, serving the oil crews as well as the round-
the-clock workers at the Pax plant who lived in town or who poured in
after every shift to get what couldn’t be got out in Henryville, where the
clinics dispensed pills and hernia trusses and Mercurochrome but not all
the other things a person needed and could find in any real drugstore:
razor blades and Brylcreem and hairnets and lipstick, Ipana toothpaste
in its tube of ivory-yellow, the repellent color of bad teeth. And more. At
ten o’clock there was a line that snaked around the displays to reach the
counter where the clerk seemed to be in no great hurry. A couple of
people let Prosper advance, and called on others ahead to let him by,
which Prosper wished they wouldn’t do: how often had he told people
that it was no trouble for him to just stand, cost him no more than it did
them. He reached the counter and stood a moment, pressed from behind
by the many others. The clerk finally raised his eyebrows, let’s go.
“I would like to buy some rubbers,” Prosper said in what even he
could hear was a weirdly solemn murmur.
“Some what?”
“I would like,” Prosper said, a bit more brightly, “a package of rub-
bers. Condoms.”
The clerk looked him over. “And who sent you to buy them?”
“No one sent me.”
“Well then . . .”
“I need them for myself.”
A kind of delighted satisfaction settled over the fellow’s face, as
though he’d just got a small gift of a kind he liked but hadn’t expected.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 203
It was one of those big faces with a set of features tightly bunched in
the middle, seeming too small for it. “Well now. You know the use of
this product?”
“I believe I do,” Prosper said. The line behind him had got longer
and drawn tighter: he could sense it without turning to look. He
propped himself up a little straighter. “Why do you ask?”
“This product is sold for the prevention of disease only. Were you
aware of that?”
Prosper said nothing. The man’s smile had steadied, confirmed.
“Aha,” he said. “So you wouldn’t be able to certify that use. As a pur-
chaser.”
Prosper said nothing again. As though he’d hoped for more, the
clerk said grudgingly, “Well what brand would you like to purchase?”
He bent closer to Prosper and spoke lower. “Skins or rubbers? I believe
you said rubbers.”
“Yes.”
“Choice is yours. We have Sheik. Mermaid. Silver Glow. Lucky.
Co-ed. Merry Widow.”
“Lucky.”
The man shrugged, as though to say that it was up to Prosper but
maybe he should think again. “How many?”
“A dozen.”
“A dozen?” said the clerk, his little eyes widening—this was almost
too wonderful, but Prosper again would say nothing back, he’d placed
his order. “Well as it happens we don’t have ’m by the dozen. We have
’m in tins of three. Sorry. You want four of those?”
“Will you serve that customer?” said a voice from behind Prosper.
“Let’s get this show on the road.”
“Two,” said Prosper humbly, though it meant he’d have to come
back soon, maybe, probably. “Two tins.”
The clerk pulled open a drawer beneath the counter, rummaged in
it for a moment, and extracted a tin, which he tossed into the air with
one hand and caught with the other; then one more. “A couple of the
Lucky,” he said, not quietly, proffering the two as though he’d con-
jured them, and just out of Prosper’s reach. “One-fifty.”
Prosper, leaning on the counter, slipped his right crutch into his left
hand and reached out for the little square tins; he put them into his
204 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
trouser pocket, took money from his jacket, and paid; swapped back
his right crutch into his right hand. Then—he’d been imagining the
moment, in a vague state of alarm, for the last few minutes—he turned
himself toward the line behind, chose a face (rapt indifference, Sphinx-
like) and started out, suffering their inspection but also feeling a deep