Four Freedoms
Page 1
Four Freedoms
John Crowley
FOUR
John Crowley
FREEDOMS
F or LSB, after all
Contents
Prelude
In the fields that lie to the west of the…
1
Part One
13
1
For a time after the war began, the West Coast…
15
2
The day that Henry Van damme and his brother had…
19
3
Glaive,” said Julius.
33
4
Ponca City was an oil town, made rich by successive…
36
5
We weren’t where we were in those times because we…
52
6
The Teenie Weenies all live in Teenie Weenie Town, which…
63
7
Little did she know: that when the great worldwide storm…
78
8
After the first tryouts dad said to her: “You’ve played…
92
Part Two
101
1
Like the disabled and transected body of the Pax B-30…
103
2
That orthopedic hospital, though a source of civic pride pictured…
115
3
He’d been in the cast for four weeks, with as…
128
4
It will be different when you come out, they all…
135
5
Sometime late in that summer, Prosper made a discovery: his…
143
6
Fenix Vigaron hadn’t actually predicted it, but May later could…
160
7
War and the sex urge go together,” Pancho Notzing said.
176
8
Without his uncles’ wages and the odd bill they’d slip…
189
9
It had been a Wednesday night a couple of weeks…
201
Part Three
209
1
The week after Christmas Bunce Wrobleski came home from the…
211
2
For all the talk about her visual acuity and all…
229
3
They stretched the rules at the Van Damme dormitory in…
242
4
Toward the end of his shift, as he was making…
254
5
On a Friday night the Teenie Weenies bused or drove…
261
6
Vi Harbison thought it was odd how her heartbreak, like…
269
7
Oh my heavens look at you,” Connie said. “Oh I’m…
276
8
Back then, Connie had wondered at Prosper too, just as…
280
9
Connie waited another day, exhausted and immobile, and then bathed… 286
Part Four
297
1
Past midnight, and the Lucky Duck on Fourth Avenue was…
299
2
Somehow it was harder going back across the desert with…
315
3
The Bomb Bay was nothing but an extra building not…
322
4
This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
333
5
Summer 1936. Swimming was over for the afternoon and the…
340
6
You remember my friend Poindexter,” Danny said. “Bill.”
351
7
Connie went back north with Andy to bring him to…
357
8
Prosper Olander got his own white pink slip in an…
366
Recessional 379
Afterword 387
About the Author
Other Books by John Crowley
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
PRELUDE
In the fields that lie to the west of the Ponca City municipal airport,
there once could be seen a derelict Van Damme B-30 Pax bomber,
one of the only five hundred turned out at the plant that Van Damme
Aero built beyond the screen of oaks along Bois d’Arc Creek (Bodark
the locals call it). The Pax was only a carcass—just the fuselage, wing-
less and tail-less, like a great insect returning to its chrysalis stage from
adulthood. I mean to say it was a carcass then, in the time when (though
signs warned us away) we used to play on it and in it: examining the
mysteries of its lockboxes and fixtures, taking the pilot’s seat and tap-
ping the fogged dials, looking up to see sky through the Plexiglas win-
dows. Now all of it’s gone—plane, plant, fields, trees, and children.
There is a philosophical, or metaphysical, position that can be
taken—maybe it’s a scientific hypothesis—that the past cannot in fact
exist. Everything that can possibly exist exists only now. Things now
may be expressive of some conceivable or describable past state of
affairs, yes: but that’s different from saying that this former state actu-
ally somehow exists, in the form of “the past.” Even in our memory (so
neuroscientists now say, who sit at screens and watch the neurons flare
as thoughts excite them, brain regions alight first here and then there
like vast nighttime conurbations seen from the air) there is no past: no
scenes preserved with all their sights and sounds. Merely fleeting states
4 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
of mind, myriad points assembled for a moment to make a new picture
(but “picture” is wrong, too full, too fixed) of what we think are former
states of things: things that once were, or may have been, the case.
That B-30 was huge, even what was left of it. The lost twin fin-and-
rudder section—those two oval tails—had stood nearly forty feet high.
The hangars where it had been assembled had been huge too, some of
the biggest interior spaces constructed up to that time, millions of
square feet, and flung up in what seemed like all in a day; Van Damme
Aero had designed and built them and the government agreed to buy
them back when the war was over, though in the case of the B-30
buildings and shops there wasn’t a lot to buy back. The wide low town,
Henryville, spreading out to the southwest beyond the plant in straight
rows of identical units to house the workers, went up just as fast,
twenty or thirty units a day, about as solid as the forts and rocket ships
we’d later make of cardboard cartons with sawed-out windows and
doors. The prairie winds shook them and rattled their contents like
dice boxes. While it stood it was a wonder written about and photo-
graphed and marveled at almost as much as the Titans of the Air that
it was set up to serve; how clean, how new, how quickly raised, all
those identical short streets paved in a week, all those identical bunga-
lows, the story was told of a woman who found her own each day by
locating the ladder that workmen ha
d left propped against the side of
it, until one day it was removed while she was gone, and when she
returned she wandered a long time amid the numbered and lettered
streets trying to orient herself, looking in windows at other people’s
stuff not much different from hers but not hers, unable to think of a
question she might ask that would set her on the way toward her own,
and the sun getting hot as it rose toward noon.
When the sun at last set on any given day (there weren’t really week-
ends in Henryville or at Van Damme Aero in those years) those on day
shift would return in the Van Damme yellow buses and be dropped off
at various central nodes, like the Community Center and the post
office; the buses would cycle around downtown Ponca too at certain
times and the workers would get off loaded down with grocery bags
from the Kroger. By eight or nine the air outside the bungalows was
cooler than the air inside, and people’d bring out kitchen chairs and
armchairs to sit in on what some people called the lawn, the strip of
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 5
pebbly dirt tufted with dry grass that ran between the street and the
front door, and open a beer or a soda pop. A Thursday night in May,
when the day shift was coming back and people were calling out the
open windows or turning their radios outward that way for the danc-
ing starting up in the still-hot street, Rollo Stallworthy brought out his
long-necked banjo and began the lengthy process of tuning it up, each
sour note stinging like a little pinprick. Rollo, foreman in Shop 128,
did this with great care and solemnity, same as he would finger your
finished control panel wiring or panel seals. Then almost when nobody
was interested at all in looking or listening to the process any longer
he’d start hammering on, a skeletal rattling of notes, and sing out stuff
that nobody’d ever heard of and that only seemed to resemble the corn-
ball music you expected. It was funnier because his expression never
changed behind the round glasses and that brush mustache like Jeff’s
in the funny papers.
“Teenie time-O
In the land of Pharaoh-Pharaoh
Come a rat trap pennywinkle hummadoodle rattlebugger
Sing song kitty wontcha time-ee-o!”
Horace Offen, called “Horse” for as long as anyone knew and for
almost as long as he himself could remember, sat at the rackety kitchen
table in the unit he shared with Rollo, his portable typewriter open
and a piece of yellow copy paper rolled in it. Horse almost never tried
to write in the heat of the frypan bungalow but on the way back from
the plant that day an idea had begun forming in his mind for a new
piece, a new kind of piece in fact, not just another press release about
how many million rivets, how many kids drank how many gallons of
milk in the nursery and how that milk came from the cows that ate the
hay that grew in the fields that went for miles beyond the plant’s perim-
eters—the “house-that-Jack-built” gimmick, a good idea you could use
only once, or once a year anyway—no this was something different,
something beyond all that, something maybe anybody could think up
(and Horse Offen knew that he tended to think up, all on his own, a lot
of good ideas that a lot of other writers had already thought up) but
which wouldn’t be easy to do really right, and was maybe beyond
6 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Horse’s powers—a thought he found at once chest-tightening and elat-
ing, like placing a bet bigger than you can afford to lose. The first lines
he had written on the yellow sheet looked brave and bold and just a
little anxious, the same as he felt:
I am Pax. Pax is my name, and in Latin my name means
Peace. I am not named for the peace that I bring, but for
the peace that I promise.
The hysterical fan on the counter waved back and forth over Horse
as he tapped the sweat-slippery keys of the typewriter. There was
nowhere, nowhere on earth he had been, as hot as this plain. Horse felt
lifeblood, precious ichor, extracted from his innermost being in the
salty drops that tickled his brows and the back of his neck.
In my belly I carry terrible weapons of war, and I will not
stint to use them against the warmakers. But with every
bomb dropped there comes a hope: that when the winds
of war on which I fly are stilled at last, there will never
again be death dropped from the air upon the cities, the
homes, and the hopes of men and women.
An awful pity took hold of Horse Offen, and a chill inhabited him.
What words could do; how rarely they did anything at all when he
employed them!
Belly was wrong. It made the bombs seem like turds. In my body.
Outside, the nightly ruckus was kicking up, Horse could hear a radio
or a gramophone and Rollo’s ridiculous banjo, the most inexpressive
musical instrument Man ever made. People calling from lawn to lawn,
bungalow to bungalow; laughter, noise. The ten thousand men and
women.
These things I know, although truthfully I have not yet
been born. When at last I come forth from the huge han-
gars where ten thousand men and women work to bring
me and the many others like me to birth, I will be the larg-
est and most powerful weapon of the air ever built, the
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 7
latest child of all the thinkers and planners, the daredevil
pilots and the slide-rule engineers who made this nation’s
air industry. Yet I am a new generation. The Wright broth-
ers’ first flight was not longer than my wingspan of TK
feet. When the men and women with their hands and their
machines have given me wings, they will be so broad that
a Flying Fortress will be able to nestle beneath each one,
left and right.
Was that true? He thought it was. It would need some checking.
When he’d first started writing press releases at Van Damme and sub-
mitting copy to the Aero, the editor (little more than a layout man in
fact) had asked him what the hell this TK meant. Horse had worked
briefly for Luce (well he’d been tried out for a couple of months) and he
sighed and smiled patiently. TK means To Come. Information or fact
to come. Why T K then? Because that’s the way it’s done. The way the
big papers do it. Time. Life. Fortune.
The workers who build my growing body come from every
state in this nation, from great cities and little towns. They
come from the Appalachians and the Rockies, the Smok-
ies and the Catskills, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Green
Mountains, the White. They are men and women, Negro
and white, American Indian, Czech, Pole, Italian, Anglo-
Saxon. They are old and young, big and small, smart and
stupid
Inspiration was leaking away, and Horse was where he had been
before, writing what he had written before. But there was a place this
was meant to reach, Horse felt sure, whether he could reach it or not.
That voice speaking. Why did it seem to him female? Just because of
&n
bsp; all those ships, those old frigates and galleons? He had almost written
to bring me and my sisters to birth.
They believe that they came here just because the work to
be done is here, because they’ve got sons or husbands at the
front, because they saw the ads in the papers and listened to
8 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
the President’s appeal, because they want this war to be
won, and most of all they want it over. And that is my
promise. But this they do not know: that it is I, Pax, who
have drawn them to me. Here to this place I drew them
before I existed, I drew them to me so that I could come to
be: and as I grew, I reached out to more and more, to every
corner of this nation, calling the ones who would rivet, and
weld, and draft, and wire, and seal, and
With a sudden cry Horse Offen yanked out from the typewriter the
yellow sheet, which parted as he pulled, leaving a tail behind. Oh God
what crap. What was he thinking? Outside the fun was rolling, sum-
moning Horse, offering a Lucky Lager, an It’s-It ice-cream bar. He
closed the lid of the typewriter and locked it shut.
A few units down, Pancho Notzing entertained the Teenie Weenies,
the ones anyway who hadn’t been moved to other shifts in the last
reshuffle of forces, which somewhat broke up that old gang o’ mine.
From an oddity of the settlement’s geometries, certain of the corner
units, like Pancho’s, had a wider spread of ground around them, so
Pancho’s was the place to wander to at day’s end. Pancho’d piled up
stones he’d found around the place left over from construction and
built a barbecue grill, topped with a rack of steel that had served some
function at the plant, airplane part, something, but that nobody seemed
to need or to miss when Pancho appropriated it. He burned branches
of blackjack oak, winter-broken and gnarly, that he picked up from the
roadsides, and lumber scavenged from the building sites. People
brought their meat rations, steaks and chickens and the odd out-of-
ration local rabbit, and Pancho slathered them with stuff he claimed
he’d learned to make on a hacienda in Old California long ago. Wear-
ing his hat and an apron over his gabardine pants, he flipped and slath-
ered and plopped the meats on platters and talked.
“Happiness,” he was saying to those waiting for meat. Cooking and
serving didn’t interfere with Pancho’s talk; nothing did. “I am a person
who knows people. I think I can say that. I’ve worked all my life. I take