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Four Freedoms

Page 5

by John Crowley


  had asked for and wouldn’t dispute Henry if Henry had an idea he

  liked better. All the Van Damme Aero military craft had the names of

  ancient weapons: the A-21 Sword, the F-10 Spear.

  “Mace,” Julius said. “Halberd.”

  Henry stood; his special chair, designed by himself to accommodate

  and conform to his movements, seemed to shrug him forth and then

  resume its former posture. He approached the wide windows, canted like

  an airship’s, that looked down on the floor where the A-21s moved in

  stately procession, growing more complete at every station, though so

  slowly it seemed they stood still. Even through two layers of glass he could

  hear the gonglike sounds, the thuds and roars, the sizzle of arc welders.

  34 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  “You won’t be able to build it like you build these,” he said. “It’s

  too damn big. You’ll have to go back to the old way. Bring the people

  to the plane, a team for each. It’ll cost more, take more time.”

  The vice presidents were solemn.

  “Nor can we build it here,” Henry said. He’d said that before. “Is

  there land we can extend into?”

  “Not contiguous to this plant.”

  “How about the farms and fields?” The present plant had been built

  where once a walnut orchard had stood; they’d said about it then that

  the orchard had taken thirty years to grow and had come down in

  thirty minutes.

  “Almost all of them are producing for the armed forces now,” Julius

  said. “Making a mint. If you want them you’d have to get the govern-

  ment to invoke eminent domain. Could take a year.”

  “Very well, you’re right, it’s a bad idea, take too long, cost too

  much. We just have to find someplace new, someplace we can throw up

  a lot of big buildings very quick.”

  “Very quick,” Julius said. “I’m already working on it.”

  “Lots of land out there,” Henry said, motioning eastward. “Across

  the mountains. Land that’s flat. Empty. Cheap.”

  Julius sighed, and made a note, or pretended to.

  The vice president for Employment crossed his legs and slipped a

  folder from his case, signaling his readiness to report. Henry turned to

  him.

  “If you’re planning a very large expansion,” he said, “we’ll have a

  labor problem. It’s hard enough to collect ’em in the cities. If you head

  out into the desert someplace, I don’t know.”

  “Not the desert, ” said Henry mildly.

  “We’re doing all right now,” the VP said, looking at his numbers.

  “But it’s tight. Men with skills are the tough job. Otherwise we’re

  making do, with women, the coloreds, the oldsters, the defectives, the

  handicaps. We’ll soon be running out of them.”

  “Go out into the highways and the byways,” Henry said. “Bring in

  the lame, the halt, and the blind.”

  “No place to house them if we can find them,” the VP responded.

  Henry Van Damme could just at that moment see, down on the

  floor many feet below, two men gesturing to each other strangely, but

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 35

  not speaking. Deaf men, he realized, talking with their hands. He

  remembered reading about them in the last issue of the Aero. No prob-

  lem for THESE fellows communicating on a noisy shop floor!

  “We’ll build them houses,” Henry said. “Houses are easy. Sell them

  on the installment plan, no money down. Or rent them. Surely we can

  design a little house. Or get a plan someplace. Build it cheap.”

  He turned to face them all, though mostly they saw his broad sil-

  houette against the windows.

  “Clinics,” he said. “Free clinics. Dentists. A staffed nursery, so the

  ones with kids can come work. This isn’t hard. They’ll come if you give

  them what they need.”

  “You’d think,” said the Employment VP, who had a son in the Army

  Air Corps, “they’d come to help win the damn war. Not ask for so

  much at a time like this.”

  “They’re just men,” Henry said. “Men and women. No reason to

  blame them. They want what they need. We’ll get it for them. We can

  and we ought to.”

  On the floor now a piercing horn began to blow, not urgently but

  imperiously, in a steady rhythm. Henry turned back to the windows to

  watch; the line was about to move. The far doors slid apart, opening

  onto the falling day. The last ship on the left end of the U-shaped track

  was moved out, finished; a new unfinished one was poised to move in

  on the right end. All the other ships moved down one place.

  “Pax,” Henry said.

  “What?” Julius looked at his brother.

  “The name,” Henry said. “For this new plane. Not a sword or a

  spear or a hammer or any weapon.”

  “And why not?” Julius asked incuriously.

  “It’s not going to be for war,” Henry said. “If the war even lasts

  long enough for this plane to get in it, it’ll be the last one built. You

  know it.”

  Julius said nothing.

  “It’ll be a peacemaker, peacekeeper. Or nothing.”

  “All right,” Julius said, uncapping his pen.

  “Pax,” Henry said. “Remember.”

  4

  Ponca City was an oil town, made rich by successive strikes, none

  greater than the fabulous Burbank pool discovered in the Osage

  country. Around there in the 1940s we could still get those

  comic postcards of hook-nosed Indians piling their blanket-

  wrapped squaws and papooses into Pierce-Arrows bought with their

  royalties. In Ponca City, oil money built the pretty Shingle Style man-

  sions, the great stony castle on the hill, the Spanish Oriental movie

  palace, the new high school (1927), and the straight streets of houses

  that by the time the war started were beginning to look settled and

  placid, tree shaded and shrubbery enclosed. Beside the proud little city

  another one arose—the towered and bright-lit one of the refinery. Its

  tank farm spread to the southwest, uniform gray drums picked out

  with lights. All day and night the flare stacks burned off gases, some-

  times blowing off a bad batch with a noise like thunder and lighting

  the night, millions of cubic feet, “darkness visible,” as though the city

  beyond was a nice neighborhood of Hell. By the time the Van Damme

  brothers settled on the empty land outside the city for their plant and

  town, the oil boomers were dead or bought out, the oil was just a

  steady flow, the natural gas was firing the town’s ovens and refrigera-

  tors, but the smell of crude and the wastes of the refinery lay always

  over the place; locals had ceased to notice, or liked to say they had.

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 37

  Van Damme Aero worked out an arrangement with the Continental

  Oil Company, taking up land a couple of miles to the north of the refin-

  ery dotted at wide intervals with the black nodding pumps called grass-

  hoppers. A hundred blue Elcar trailers came first, bringing workers and

  engineers and surveyors to build the settlement that Julius jokingly called

  Henryville and then wasn’t able to change, not to West Ponca or Bomber<
br />
  City or Victoryburg. It was Henryville. A spur line of the Atchison,

  Topeka and Santa Fe was laid to reach the Van Damme acreage, and

  while huge Bucyrus steam cranes, brought in on railcars, lifted and fitted

  into place the steel beams of the plant buildings, surveyors laid out the

  streets, all lettered north to south and numbered east to west, with

  hardly a natural feature to be got around, though Henry Van Damme

  insisted that as many trees as possible be left, to breathe out healthful

  ozone. Even before the sidewalks were laid or the tar of the roadways

  was hard the houses started to arrive in boxcars, and the workers

  offloaded them and they went up like things built in a film where magi-

  cally everything takes but a second, people flit like demons, and build-

  ings seem to assemble themselves. The Homasote company’s Precision

  Junior was the model chosen, fifty-six of them a day sent out ready to go,

  all the lumber—sills, plates, joints, rafters—cut to size and numbered

  like toys to be assembled on Christmas Eve for Junior and Sis. Homasote:

  a miracle building material made from compressed newspaper, heavy

  and fireproof and gray, strangely cold to the touch. It took two and a

  half days to set a house up on its concrete slab, then they’d tarpaper the

  flat roof, hook up the water and electricity, and spray the outside walls

  with paint mixed with sand to give the stucco effect. Metal-framed win-

  dows that never quite fit, the wind whispered at them, woke you some-

  times thinking you’d heard your name spoken.

  Van Damme signed on with the Federal Public Housing Adminis-

  tration to borrow the money to build the houses and public buildings,

  and the FHA guaranteed the mortgages, which you could get for a

  dollar down; you could own the house for $3,000, or lease it, or rent it,

  or rent and sublet (there’d be guest entrances in the houses for sublet-

  ters to enter by, or for others to use who might not want to bang on the

  front door toward which the neighbors’ windows were turned). You

  got a stove and a tub and, most wonderful, that gas refrigerator, Van

  Damme’d insisted, and got them all as necessary war materials. Faint

  38 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  crackle of the ice cubes in their metal trays when you opened the

  door.

  A couple of large dormitories (Henry Van Damme had toyed with

  lodge and residence and habitation before giving in to the standard word) were put up too, one for women and one for men, this because

  of the bad Ford experience at Willow Run, where a mixed-sex dormi-

  tory had quickly become a mass of troubles, lots of keyed-up well-paid

  workers looking to unlax, nonrationed rum flowing, parties moving

  from floor to floor, high-stakes strip poker only one rumored aberra-

  tion, the whole system falling into depths of vice, lost work time, and

  bad press before being segregated.

  The whole settlement filled fast, and even the trailers were left

  there when the job was done, to put more people in—eventually most

  of the colored workers were housed there, happier with their own

  kind said the VP for Employment, you had to conform to local cus-

  toms if you could and Oklahoma had the distinction of being the

  first state in these States to establish segregated phone booths. Van

  Damme Aero had addressed the workforce problem by shifting their

  West Coast employees ( associates as management named them,

  workers as the union went on stubbornly calling them) to the Ponca

  City plant, and hiring new people for the older plant from among the

  migrants always coming in. Van Damme paid a bonus to the associ-

  ates who’d go east, then pretty soon raised the bonus, what the hell,

  and that’s how Al and Sal Mass and Violet Harbison and Horse

  Offen and so many others had been summoned (Horse Offen put it

  that way in the Aero) to Oklahoma and that wind that came sweeping

  down the plain, which were being celebrated at that very moment on

  Broadway far away. Some of the associates were originally from

  there, having left the dust bowl farms and sold-up towns to get in on

  the good times on the Gold Coast, and now strangely come back

  again. As more were needed and Van Damme’s recruiters went

  nationwide and the word spread about the new city as foursquare

  and purposeful and wealthy as the communes dreamed of by Brigham

  Young or Mother Ann Lee, people began arriving from everywhere

  else, shading their eyes against the gleam of it coming into view in

  the salty sunlight.

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 39

  Prosper Olander began his journey from a northern city with its own

  aircraft plant, though not one that would hire someone like himself.

  He was headed for the West Coast, like so many others (when the war

  was over it would be found that four million of us came out from where

  we lived to the West Coast, and most never went back). On a winter

  morning he stood on a street corner of that city, by the stairs that led

  up to the tracks of the elevated train that could take him to the city

  center where he could buy a ticket for the West; he had money enough

  in the wallet tucked into the inner pocket of his houndstooth sport

  coat, and another fifty that his aunt May had sewn into the coat’s

  lining, which he’d promised to return if he never needed it. A woolen

  scarf around his neck. Everything else he had decided to bring was

  packed into an old army knapsack that was slung over his shoulders,

  somewhat spoiling the lines of his jacket (he thought) and smelling a

  bit musty, but necessary for someone like himself, propelled by his

  arms and his wooden crutches.

  He hadn’t moved from where he stood for some minutes. He was

  contemplating the stairs leading up to the El, and thinking of the stairs

  that would certainly lead down into the station when he reached it.

  He’d never been there, had never before had a reason to go there. And

  so what if he got a cab, flagged one down, spent the money, got himself

  to that station—could he get himself inside it? And then the high

  narrow stairs of the train coaches he’d have to mount—he’d seen them

  in the movies—and all the stairs up and down from here on, as though

  the way west were one long flight of them.

  Alone too, it was certain now, though he hadn’t set out alone.

  He turned himself away from the El as a laughing couple went by

  him to go up—he didn’t care to appear as though he himself wanted

  to go up and couldn’t. Across the street a small open car was parked

  by a sign that said no parking! and showed a fat-faced cartoon cop

  blowing an angry whistle and holding up a white-gloved hand. Lean-

  ing against the fender was a small elderly man, arms folded before

  him, one foot crossed over the other, looking down the street as

  though in some disgust. Waiting for a tow? Prosper Olander, unwilling

  40 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  to think of his own dilemma, contemplated this man’s. Expecting a

  woman? Stood up? Prosper had reason to consider that explanation.

  The man now turned to where Prosper stood in the tiger-striped shad-
/>   ows of the El, and seemed to ponder Prosper’s condition—but people

  often did that. At length—for no real reason, maybe just to be in

  motion—Prosper walked toward the man and the car. The man

  seemed to come to attention at Prosper’s approach, unsurprised and

  already rooting in his pocket for the coin he assumed Prosper was

  about to ask him for—Prosper was familiar with the look. Prosper

  pointed to the car.

  “Out of gas?”

  “Not quite,” said the gent. “But near enough that I have decided I

  won’t go farther without a plan to get more.”

  “Can’t get any, or can’t find any?”

  “Both.” He looked down at the machine, an old Chrysler Zephyr,

  gray and dispirited and now seeming to shrink in shame. The plates

  were from a neighboring state. “You may know there’s a shortage on,

  though you yourself may not have experienced it. I don’t know.”

  “I’ve heard,” Prosper said.

  “I was doing pretty well, what with one thing and another,” said

  the man, “until on driving into this town I began to run low, and all

  the gas stations I passed were all out, or so they claimed.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then a gasoline truck went by me, going the other way,” he said.

  “Good luck! You could tell by the way he drove—slouching around

  corners—he was full. Gravid you might say. A line of cars had figured

  that out and were following him. I turned around and got in line too,

  but I was cut off by others on the way, and fell behind, and was further

  supplanted till when the station was reached I was far in the rear. I do

  not like to battle for precedence or advantage. I don’t do it.”

  “You’re a lover not a fighter,” Prosper ventured.

  “Well. By the time I got my heap up to the front of the line—after

  every car passing by wedged itself in too, and a fight or two had broken

  out—the well was dry. I had just enough left to get me this far.”

  “They say the shortages are local. Farther south they have a lot.”

  “The Big Inch,” said the gent.

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 41

  “The what?”

  “The great pipeline that’ll bring oil from down there up this way.

  When it’s done.”

  “Oh.”

  “We make do now with the Little Inch.”

  “Oh.”

  “In any case finding the gas wouldn’t have done me much good. I

 

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