Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  wipe. That was just joking, but Fred, late one night with half a bottle

  gone between them, gave Prosper a lot of corrective information he’d

  maybe soon need to know—Fred had ascertained, interested in the

  topic, that Prosper’s weakness only reached a ways above his knees, so

  though it was maybe unlikely for someone like him, the Scout’s motto

  was Be Prepared. But how, Prosper asked—hilariously muzzy-mouthed,

  and not sure what had brought this forth—how, when his own part

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 169

  rose at that specific angle so purposefully, was he supposed to get it

  into a girl, whose slot or cleft (he was thinking of Canova, of Mary

  Wilma) ran, well, sort of the other way or seemed to, crosswise, opening

  inward and running through toward the back? Didn’t it? So how was

  he supposed to, was he supposed to bend, or? No no no, Fred said, you

  got it wrong, the thing you see when you look at her, the slot or slit

  there, that ain’t the thing at all, no kid, that’s just what shows. The

  thing you need’s down underneath, see—and here Fred lifted his own

  big knees and thighs to his chest to illustrate, poking at a spot amid the

  creases of his trousers. There, just ahead of the other hole, and it runs

  up up up, just right, trust Mother Nature, she ain’t going to make it

  hard to get into. You got that? You need another drink?

  He learned just as much, or at least heard as much and remembered

  it, listening to his uncles talk during the day at business as he sat at a

  desk they’d rigged for him and did work they thought up for him.

  “You speak to that woman on Wentworth?” Mert said. “The new

  tenant, the bakery?”

  “Funny story,” Fred said grinning. “Yeah, I talked to her. Single

  woman. She was real jittery about the health department inspector

  coming. I says, It’s nothing. You wait for him to make his inspection,

  be nice, keep a ten in your hand. He might find a couple things, so you

  say—I told her—you say Well all that’s going to be hard to fix, isn’t

  there some other way we can handle this? And he might say no, or he

  might say Well, maybe, and you say Oh swell, and you shake hands,

  and the ten passes. Okay?”

  Mert pushed back in his swivel chair, listening, already grinning as

  though he expected what would come next.

  “So she had the inspection, and I asked her how did it go, and she

  says not so good. I ask her, did she do what I said? What did she tell

  him? And turns out what she said was, Well this is going to be expen-

  sive, isn’t there something I can do for you? Jesus, she says it took her

  a half hour to get rid of the guy after that, and he was so pissed off he

  wouldn’t take her ten.”

  “Send her over to Bill and Eddy,” Mert said. “They’ll fix it for

  her.” Bill and Eddy, attorneys-at-law, did a certain amount of work

  for the icehouse gang; Mert often got his own stories from meetings

  with the two.

  170 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  “Attorney Bill,” he told them with mock gravity, “defending a man

  charged with verbally molesting a woman. So Bill’s known this fellow

  a while, he’s not surprised. Tells me how he’ll be in a tavern at the bar

  with him, they see a nice skirt go by outside; this fellow pops out, has

  a few words with the woman, she turns away, he comes back in. Did he

  know her? Nah—just liked her looks. So what did he say to her? He

  asked her if she’d like to have a lay with him. She said no. Bill tells me

  he does that a lot. Always nice and polite, and a tip of the hat for a No.

  I said no wonder he’s got in trouble—he must get his face slapped a lot

  at least. Oh, Bill says, he does—and he gets laid a lot too.”

  “So this time he asked the wrong dame,” said Fred. He put his hand

  by his mouth: “Call for Bill and Eddy.”

  “Turns out there was a beat cop twirling his nightstick just about

  within earshot. Never mind. They’ll get him out of it. Told me the

  lady’s already looking sorry she brought the charges. Who knows,

  maybe this guy’ll get her in the end.”

  The firm of Bill and Eddy (it was George Bill and Eustace Eddy,

  Prosper would learn in time) set up the papers that created and dis-

  solved a number of enterprises operated out of the icehouse—Prosper’s

  first job there was making up stationery for a warehousing and fulfil-

  ment business they’d begun. The uncles had also got into the vending

  machine business, which besides a string of Vendorlators dispensing

  candy and smokes and Pepsi-Cola around the West Side included a few

  semilegal “payout” pinball machines as well. Prosper was sent out on

  the truck that filled and serviced the machines. Mostly it was his job to

  sit in the big doorless truck and see that nobody stole the cartons of

  cigarettes and boxes of Collie bars and Zagnuts. Now and then he was

  allowed out to have a coffee in a diner while Roy the serviceman broke

  open the big machines to show their complex insides, the valves and

  springs and levers, to oil them and refill the long slots.

  At Honey and Joe’s Diner the cigarette machine was on the fritz, and

  Roy settled in to work. Prosper stood at the counter (easier than seating

  himself on the roll-around stools) and asked the redheaded woman for

  a coffee. It was midafternoon, the place was empty. He’d watched her

  watching him as he came in, how he took his stand, reached for a dime

  for the mug of pale liquid. She waved away his money.

  “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 171

  She came to push a glass ashtray to where he sat.

  “Where’s Joe?” Prosper asked, and she leaned in confidentially to

  him.

  “There’s no Joe,” she said. “There was, but no more.”

  “Just Honey,” he said. An odd silence fell that he was conscious of

  having caused. He drew out a smoke and a match, which he lit with a

  snap of his thumbnail. She smiled and moved away.

  “All done here,” Roy said and clapped shut the steel machine.

  “Red hair,” Fred said to Prosper, back at the icehouse. “That your

  type? Hot tempered, they say.”

  “Fighters,” Mert said. “She and Joe used to go at it hammer and

  tongs.”

  “Not Prosper,” Fred said. “He’s a lover not a fighter. She’s out of

  your league, my boy.”

  Fred thought that any single man constituted as Prosper was needed

  two things: he needed a line he could use to break the ice and then go

  on with, and he needed a type that he was interested in so he could

  simplify the chase. Fred’s own type depended on blond curls, chubby

  cheeks, and a poitrine approaching Mae West’s; his line started off

  with Scuse me, but do you happen to have a cousin named Carruthers?

  No? Gosh my mistake. So anyways tell me . . . Prosper though could

  not tell if he had a type, and Fred’s attempts to delimit the field weren’t

  convincing to him. As for a line, he hardly needed an icebreaker—he

  found himself looked at plenty and had only to say hello, and then

  keep the starer from rushing
off embarrassed. Beyond that he thought

  he now knew what to do, though not yet when to do it.

  That cigarette machine at Honey and Joe’s seemed to malfunction

  with surprising regularity, a lemon maybe, though when Fred said they

  ought to pull it and get it replaced, Roy said oh he’d get it going. Roy’s

  difficulties weren’t with machines but numbers, he hadn’t a head for

  them, and if Prosper was willing to tot up his figures and fill in his

  book, Roy was happy to return him to the little diner now and then,

  and go read the paper in the truck.

  “So does that hurt much?” Honey asked Prosper gently. It was May,

  and the air was full of the tiny blown green buds of some opening tree,

  even the floor of Honey and Joe’s was littered with them. She picked

  one from Prosper’s shoulder.

  172 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  “Doesn’t hurt a bit,” Prosper said. “The other way around. I can’t

  feel much.”

  “Oh.”

  “I mean from the knees down.”

  “Oh.”

  He cleaned up the last of the plate of goulash she’d put in front of

  him. She had a way of looking at him that reminded him of the way the

  women looked at themselves in the Mayflower’s mirrors: a kind of

  dreamy questioning. He didn’t yet know how to interpret it, but he was

  coming to notice it. Somehow a look to the outside and the inside at

  once. No man ever had it, not that he’d seen.

  “So you get around good,” she said, as though weighing his case.

  “Oh sure.”

  She considered him or herself some more. Her hair was not only

  deep red, a color for an animal’s fur more than a woman’s hair, it was

  thick, tense, it strove to burst from her hairnet: it was as though he

  could feel it. She bent and pulled from under the counter a bottle of

  whiskey, put down a glass before him with a bang, and poured a shot

  for him. He took a taste, then a swallow.

  “So, Honey,” he said then. “Can I ask you a question?”

  Honey lived behind the diner, through a door in the back. She sent

  Prosper to turn over the sign in the door that told people the diner was

  open or closed. It was now closed. He clicked the switch that turned

  off the neon sign above the door (diner), and its red glow faded. He

  opened the door and waved to Roy, go on, good-bye, see you later; Roy

  didn’t ask him how he’d get back to the icehouse or downtown, just

  shrugged and rolled the toothpick he was never without from one side

  of his grin to the other and started the truck.

  “Now we’re getting someplace,” Vi Harbison said to Prosper in

  Henryville. “This is good.”

  “Okay,” Prosper said.

  “So was she a natural redhead?”

  “What?”

  “You know. You found out, I’m guessing.”

  “Oh,” Prosper said.

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 173

  What Honey’d learned about Prosper was that he lived with two old

  never-married aunts, had never gone to high school or taken a girl out

  on a date or been to a dance. That interested her. Not that she hadn’t

  known some wallflowers and some deadwood, oh she had, but Prosper

  wasn’t that. He’d grown to be good-looking—calm light wide-spaced

  eyes; teeth white and even, never a toothache; fine hands like a glove

  model’s. Visible beneath the silk shirt he wore were the broad shoul-

  ders and back he’d built by using them to walk. All that contrasting so

  strangely with the sway back and the legs that had not grown as the

  rest of him had. It didn’t assort: man and boy, weak and strong. Honey

  liked it: it was the taste of tart and sweet together, the sensation of hot

  and cold, it made you think. She mightn’t have liked it though if he

  hadn’t been so open and ardent and willing—ignorant as a puppy, but

  his grip strong and oddly sure. After they’d gone through the rubbers

  Joe’d left behind he still wouldn’t quit, not until late in the night when

  she pushed him away laughing, leave me alone, I have to start the range

  in about four hours, who taught you that anyway?

  But nobody had. He didn’t tell her she was the first woman he’d

  been with, but he didn’t need to.

  “Mind if I stay till later? I’m afraid I can’t get home from here. Not

  in the middle of the night.”

  “Hell yes I mind. Think I want you stumbling out of here into my

  breakfast crowd? How’d that look?”

  “Well.”

  She touched him gently, not quite sorry for him. “You got a dollar? Go

  into the front and use the phone. Call a cab. The number’s right there.”

  She rolled away and pretended to sleep, thinking he wouldn’t want

  her to watch him put on his equipment; he did it sitting on the floor

  (she could hear it) and then apparently hoisted himself upright on his

  crutches. Then she was sorry she hadn’t watched, just to see. Then she

  slept, suddenly and profoundly.

  Aglow, as though he could find his way in the dark by his own light,

  Prosper went out of the little rooms where she lived, wanting to touch

  everything he saw or sensed there, the harsh fabric of the armchair, the

  cold of the mirror, ashy weightless lace of the curtains through which

  the streetlight shone. Careful of the rag rug at the doorway. His arms

  were trembly from his exertions, who knew they’d have so much work

  174 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  to do, he laughed aloud as though joy bubbled up beneath his heart

  and out his throat. Long afterward in another city he’d share a reefer

  with a woman and only then feel again this wondrous hilarity. He did

  it, he’d done it, he was made now of a different and better stuff and

  ever after would be, he hadn’t known that would be so and now he did.

  Ever after.

  In the altogether transformed night, its odors sweet in the liquid air,

  silence of the city, he leaned against the lamppost to wait. He said to

  himself I will always remember this night and this moment, and he

  would, though not always with the rich First Communion solemnity he

  felt then, felt until the laughter rose again.

  The cab was tiger yellow in the dawn, the rear door wide and the

  backseat generous, excellent. The scraggy elder driving it asked Where

  to, and Prosper caught him grinning in the rearview. Grinning at him.

  “Takin’ French lessons, huh, kid?”

  “What?” Prosper at first thought the driver had mistaken him

  maybe for someone he knew. French lessons?

  “I said taking French lessons?” the old fellow said more distinctly.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Prosper said, leaning forward.

  “I mean, you been eatin’ pussy?” the driver practically shouted. “Be

  surprised if you hadn’t! Ha! Whew! Better wash up before you get

  home to Mom! My advice!”

  Prosper got it then, and almost lifted his hands to his face to smell

  the smell still on them and on his face and mustache, but didn’t, retired

  to the back of the seat in silence as the driver laughed.

  French lessons. Because why, something about the French? He’d

  heard it called French kissing, that kiss with
tongues entwined, imagine

  what his mother with her fear of germs would have thought of that.

  How had he even thought of doing it, eating or virtually eating it,

  where had he got the idea, apparently not his alone anyway, so usual

  that even this guy could know it and joke about it. Did it just happen to

  everyone, he guessed it must, that you discovered that certain body

  parts you’d known and used in one way had a set of other functions

  and uses you hadn’t been told about, unexpected but just as important

  and constant—mouths and tongues for more than tasting and eating,

  hands for using and manipulating, the hidden excreting parts able and

  even meant to go together with the other workaday parts, you might

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 175

  not think so but it turned out to be so and you somehow knew to use

  them so even if you hadn’t thought of it before—couldn’t have thought

  of it, it was so unlikely. Like those paperback novels where you read

  one story going one way and then turn the book over and upside down

  to read another going the other way: as you read you might finger open

  the pages that you’d discover later and see them upside down and back-

  ward but they wouldn’t be when you went to read them. You’d just dive

  in. And he had, and she had known why he would want to and why she

  would want him to, even if at first she refused him.

  And the sounds they’d made too, that she’ d made, sounds borrowed

  from the other side, where they meant a different thing—Bea’s coos as

  she handled a length of silk velvet, May’s high whimper at the sight of

  a dead cat in the street, Mert’s grunts of satisfaction at stool, or Fred’s

  as he lifted a full shot of rye to his mouth, the same.

  So he knew, and he would go on knowing that this was possible,

  knowing also that everybody else or almost everybody else (Bea and

  May, surely not, but how could you be sure?) knew it for a thing to do,

  a thing that could be done and was done. A thing you could practice

  even, as the grunting discus flinger or fungo slugger practices, driven

  to enact it over and over. As he would seek to do thereafter whenever

  and wherever he was welcome. He’d follow that Little Man in his boat

  up dark rivers into the interior, that limbless eyeless ongoing Little

  Man, parting the dense vegetation and hearing cries as of great birds,

  nearly forgetting over time how weird a thing it was, really.