eyes were worried. He had a job at a war plant and they were going to
do all right but they couldn’t find a place to live. The landladies and old
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 319
men in carpet slippers who opened the door to them were mean and
tight-lipped, or kindly but helpless. The girl was pregnant! They needed
someplace safe and warm. The car busted an old tire and ran out of gas
at the same time, which was funny and was supposed to be funny, you
could tell, and it made you think everything would actually come out
all right. They started walking in the snow and he was worried and
gentle and she carried a little suitcase. They went to a sinister motel
where a single light burned and you could hear laughter of the wrong
kind, and a night clerk (Diane recognized the greasy-faced actor from a
dozen pictures) got the wrong idea about the girl and the guy, and asked
if they wanted to stay the whole night, and they were so nice they didn’t
even get what was going on or where they were, which was funny too
for a minute and then horrid, you wanted them to get out of there. They
went on through the snow and the hurrying crowds. Diane fell asleep.
When she woke up, the man and his wife had somehow found a place to
stay, only it was almost a barn, a shed with a donkey looking in the
window, and it was funny again but sweetly serious too: something
about the light or the music told you. The old man with a foreign accent
who rented the space to them and helped them out talked to them about
freedom and decency in a world gone wrong, his white hair like a halo.
It was Christmas. Kids came caroling down the streets, singing about
Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men. As though you were a visitor, some-
one come to call or to investigate, you went into the yard and through
the gate and up to the little shed, and there in a corner in a made-up bed
of blankets is the young woman, and glowing in her arms, revealed to
you as though you’d crept up to take a peek, the baby. Just before that—
just as the carollers came in to see—Diane all of a sudden got the idea
of the picture, no room at the inn, which she hadn’t got all along because
it had made her think only of herself and Danny and where she’d go and
what she’d do. Her heart heaved and she started to sob, that awful won-
derful sobbing that can happen in this darkness, where with all these
people you were alone and spoken to.
The usherette of the Vista—the only one on duty late—was having a
hell of a night. She’d come to believe that all the human beings in the
city without a house of their own were sleeping in the movies. Or they
320 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
just left their kids there to watch the show, and told them Mommy’d be
back later when her shift was done, just stay there. Damn shame.
Shame of the nation, she thought, these were war workers, doing what
needed to be done, and no place for them or their families to go. Kids
falling asleep in heaps on the stairs, picking butts out of the ashtrays to
try out. When the owl show let out and the place finally turned its
lights out at 2 a.m., the kids would still be there, and she’d have to put
them out and line them up on the curb to wait. Then there were the
older ones, “teenagers” they got called nowadays, in the back rows
necking or worse, she’d seen some rather striking things and not been
very descriptive about them when talking to the manager, who thought
it was swell management to leave the whole thing to her for these last
hours of the night. Every hour on the hour it was required of her to
check each of the four thermostats in the theater, see that they all read
right. One was up on the wall behind the last row of seats, and that’s
where she damn well went, flashlight aglow so they saw her coming,
and still they said awful things to her. Just doing my job, said under
her breath because after all the damn picture was playing, not that
these types cared.
And where did they get the bottles they smuggled in, the smell of
booze was distinct in the auditorium, floating here to there in the stale
air like a wandering cloud. It wasn’t her affair, except when the boys
got into fights she had to stop or she had to hold some retching girl’s
head over the toilet, too young to drink, too young to be here, without
anywhere else to go. If she kicked them out, what would become of
them? Churches should stay open, maybe that’d help.
She’d already had it when in the littered and foul-smelling ladies’
she heard some kind of moaning from a closed stall. What now? She
knocked on the door with her flashlight, a harsh sound, and from
inside came a startled cry. Then no more.
Something really wrong.
“All right in there?”
No answer, and she looked down at the tiles and could see what
was certainly blood on the floor of the stall, which the someone inside
had tried to wipe up and failed, oh Lord.
“What is it? Open the door. I can help.” She could? Help by doing
what, exactly, for who, a murdered girl, attacked, raped? The small
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sounds came again, but the door wasn’t opened. She waited. There was
some movement, and the latch was lifted but no more. The usherette
pushed it open.
“Oh my Lord.”
“I’m sorry.”
Blood everywhere, all over her lap, her legs, the toilet, a pile of tis-
sues reddened. The woman, child, girl, was gray, as though all that
colored her had drained away.
“It came out, all this blood,” she said.
“I got to call an ambulance,” said the usherette. “You wait. Don’t
move.” In the movies they always said that, for the first time she knew
why.
“Don’t,” said Diane. “Please don’t. It’s over. I think it is.”
“Dear, you could die. I know so. Don’t move and I’ll come back.
The phone’s right there.”
Diane looked up at the usherette, whose great breasts strained the
uniform she wore, little pillbox hat absurd on her wide wings of hair.
Horror and pity in her face.
“I want to go home,” she said. “Please.”
3
The Bomb Bay was nothing but an extra building not far from the
main assembly plant that had lost its use as more and more Pax
components were being built in other plants in other places. It was
square, low, and window-less, with a makeshift stage hung with
bunting; it was decorated as though for a high school cotillion in crepe
paper streamers and silver and gold moons sprinkled with shiny stuff
(actually duralumin dust, produced when Pax parts were cut or drilled,
but it glittered prettily in the light of a mirrored ball that turned overhead
and reflected the lights). The main reason for the Bomb Bay’s existence
was that it was big enough to hold a crowd, bigger than any place in the
city, and you could drink there. The Oklahoma dry laws came and went
and came again in Ponca City, but the Bomb Bay had been established as
a private club of which all the employees of Van Damme Aero were auto-
matically members—just show your badge at the door, when there was
somebody there to check—and the church ladies and dour legislators
could go hang. The trucks rolled in from the Coast bringing the Lucky
Lager, the unrationed tequila came from south of the border, and the rest
of the array behind the long bar when and if. Waiters were in short supply;
best get your drink from the bar and carry it to a paper-covered table.