warm glee as the tins in his pocket bounced against his hip.
Larry the shop steward was among those on line. “Lucky,” he said
as though to no one when Prosper passed. “Lucky if they don’t bust.”
Pancho said he’d parked down by the railroad station, and Prosper
was passing beneath the vast bulk of the flour mill and grain elevators
as the last of the midnight train’s passengers were dispersing from the
double doors of the station. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe ran
specials almost daily in that time, so many people coming in to get
work, so many government people come to look over the advancing
aircraft. The taxis waiting along Oklahoma charged seven cents a mile,
it had been a nickel before the war but a cabbie’s life was hard these
days—gas, tires, maintenance on the decaying cars—and everybody
seemed to have the money and didn’t mind the surcharge. As Prosper
neared the station, which was too small for the traffic that passed
through it, he noticed a woman with a child, a boy who clung to her
skirt. He picked her out, maybe because she alone was still and some-
how entranced or bewildered while everybody else was in motion—the
way, in the movie he’d just watched, the girl who would be the heroine
of the story could be picked out from the crowd around her when she
was first seen: alight and glowing, sharply drawn while the others
moving around her were dim and unclear.
Also she seemed to be in trouble.
Prosper stopped before her. Ought, he knew, to lift his hat, but that
gesture always caused more attention than he intended to draw. “Eve-
ning,” he said.
She nodded warily. Prosper knew he could alarm some people,
though he never knew which people.
“You need any directions? Can I get you a taxi?”
“Well,” she said. “Do you know if they go out to the airplane fac-
tory?”
“Oh yes, ma’am, they do. They’d love to take you out there. It’ll
cost you almost a buck.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 205
“Oh dear.”
Her little boy had detached himself from her and was looking at Pros-
per’s crutches with interest: Prosper could tell. Kids liked to watch some-
body walk in a new way, liked to ask why he had them, though their
parents shushed them and pulled them away. He remembered one boy
telling his mother Mommy get me those, as though they were a new kind
of pogo stick. He took a step toward the boy, who smiled but retreated.
“Hello little fella,” he said. The boy’s mother looked down at him,
as though just then discovering him there. “What’s your name?”
The kid didn’t answer, and Mom seemed not to want to volunteer
one. “His daddy’s working out there, at the plant,” she said, still
regarding the boy, as though it was he who needed the information.
She was a rose-gold blonde, one of those whose skin seems to have
taken its shade from her hair, her brows fading almost into invisibility
against it. For a second they stood looking, her at the boy, the boy
wide-eyed at Prosper, Prosper at her.
“Was he coming out to meet you?”
“No,” she said. “He doesn’t know we’ve come.”
“Oh. Aha. Surprise visit?”
“Well.”
“What shop’s he work in? Does he live in Henryville?”
“Where’s that?” she asked in something like despair, as though sud-
denly envisioning more journeying. She looked all in.
“Just the town around the plant. The new houses. Do you have an
address?”
She didn’t answer, as though to let him guess she knew nothing at
all and would have no answer to any further question. She watched
Prosper shift his weight. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you . . .”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Listen. If you’re going out to find him, you
could come with me. My friend’s got a car. There’s room for you two.
We work out there, maybe we can give you some help finding him.”
“Oh gosh. Oh that’s so nice.”
“This way,” he said, and took a few steps under their gaze, the kid
still smiling, interested. “Or no wait. You’d have to lug the bags.
Sorry.”
“No, oh no it’s fine,” she said, reaching for what looked like a one-
ton strapped leather suitcase.
206 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“No wait here,” Prosper said. “I’m to meet him right around the
corner. Wait here and I’ll go get him and we’ll drive around. Okay?
Just wait here.”
He had just turned to set off when a wheezy beebeep behind him
turned him back. Pancho pulled up to the curb, himself beeped at by
the affronted cab behind. Prosper guided his new finds to the car with
one hand. “How’s that for luck,” he said. Pancho pulled the brake and
leapt out to help with the bag, and got the mother and child stowed in
the backseat. Prosper went around and performed his get-in-the-car
act, talking away. “So how far you two come? Where’d you start out
from?”
She named the place, Prosper astonished to hear the name of his
own northern city. They had to compare neighborhoods then, families,
schools, finding no connection.
Pancho leaned over the seat, proffered his hand and gave his name,
and Prosper’s.
“Constance,” she said in reply. “Connie. This my son Adolph.”
“Well,” Pancho said, as if in commendation. “Well let’s get going.”
“This is a good thing,” Prosper said, grinning proudly as the car
rolled off. “This is a very good thing.”
Within minutes they were outside the town and in utter darkness, stars
scattered overhead. Connie Wrobleski tasted something thick and
sweetish in the air they moved through. Crude oil, said the little man at
the wheeclass="underline" you’ll get used to it. He pointed a thumb back toward where
they’d come from, and Connie saw the far-off glitter of lights and a
flare like a titanic match burning. It had turned to warm spring, nearly
summer, as she’d gone south; she opened her coat. The crippled man
smiled back at her as though glad for her. And then—Connie at first
thought it was dawn rising, though it couldn’t be that late—the great
glow of the Pax plant and hangars put out the western stars.
Three days before she’d set out with these bags and Adolph, nearly
two years old, her good suit on but flats because she knew what lay
ahead. She couldn’t face the Elevated with the bags and Adolph, and
her purse felt heavy with money from the war job she’d had, so she
called a cab.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 207
“Leaving home?” the taxi driver said, loading the bags in the
trunk—greasy Mediterranean type Connie had always mistrusted—
and in a sudden rush of careless energy she said “None of your busi-
ness,” smiled, and slammed the door with a satisfying thud; and they
went to the station in silence.
The station was packed, like the first day of a giveaway at the
department store, Connie had known it would be, the newspaper was
full of stories, people in motion. The noise of all of them as she came in
holding Adolph’s hand seemed to rise up toward the ceiling and rain
back down on them, the voices, the announcements over the loud-
speakers, the click of heels. The station was a new one, built only a few
years ago by the WPA; over the doors were stern blocky stone eagles,
and above the row of ticket windows where people patient or impatient
worked out their trips or made demands or pleas, there ran a broad
paneled painting, the history of the city and the region done in forms
of traveclass="underline" Indians with those things they drag, not trapezes, and pig-