by John Crowley
From the cigar store Prosper called the icehouse. A new voice
answered, female, blond (how could he tell?). When Mert came to the
phone Prosper said he’d been thinking and that if they still needed that
job done they’d talked about, he would probably be able to do it. If the
money was good.
“The money’s good,” Mert said.
“So when, where will I.”
“Where are you now?”
Prosper named the streets.
“Wait there,” Mert said. “Fred’ll pick you up.”
It wasn’t hard to do. The coupons themselves were crude things. The
Ditto machine in the icehouse office could be adapted to print in red
instead of its usual purple. Prosper went with Fred to a warehouse in
the city filled with paper, paper in high stacks, newsprint in rolls, dis-
count paper in fallen slides like avalanches. Fred distracted the sales-
man while Prosper took a sheet of stamps from his pocket and sought
for a paper like it. The big investment was in spirit masters for the
machine; Prosper spoiled several before he perfected a way to make a
sheetful of stamps rather than a single one. As he drew he had to press
hard enough to transfer the colored wax on the bottom sheet of the
two-ply master to the back of the sheet he was drawing on, like the
wrong-way writing that a piece of carbon paper puts on your typed
sheet if you insert the carbon backward. Then he separated the two
sheets of the master and fastened the top sheet to the drum of the Ditto.
198 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
As he turned the handle of the drum, a solvent with the intoxicating
smell of some sublime liquor was washed over the sheets of paper
drawn in to be printed; the solvent would dissolve just enough of the
colored wax on the master to transfer the backward image right-way-
around to the paper. It worked. Mert said it wouldn’t fool everybody
for long but it’d fool anybody long enough.
How to perforate the printed sheets was a different problem, not
put to Prosper; Mert knew a guy. Prosper’s problem was that the origi-
nal could only print fifty copies or so before it grew dim, and he’d have
to start a new master.
The C book cover was easier; it was just like making documents for
the Sabine Free State. He drew down the lamp over his desk at May
and Bea’s and worked with a magnifying glass, reproducing by hand
every letter and line of type with his pens and India ink, the red bits in
red. Eagle, badge, warning of jail time. He could do two a day, and got
three dollars apiece; the money piled up. He had finished his first one
of the day, stapled it to the coupons, all ready but the signature, when
the doorbell rang.
It was Elaine.
“Here,” she said. She handed him a shapeless lump of brown canvas.
“Let’s go.”
It was her idea: he’d said he had no way to carry a suitcase and walk
at the same time, and after she’d thought about this for a day she’d said
that he could carry a knapsack on his back, like hikers and soldiers,
she’d just seen one in a movie and then realized she knew where to get
one, the Army and Navy Store just then replete with stuff from previ-
ous war eras as useless now as flintlocks and sabers. She’d bring him
one. Here it was. It was time.
Last thing, just before he slung the lumpy kit bag over his shoulders,
filled with his clothes and belongings gathered somewhat at random,
he picked up the fresh C ration book and put it into an inside pocket of
his jacket. And Elaine fixed his hat on his head. The El stop was twenty
blocks away.
“So she left you standing there?” Vi Harbison asked Prosper in Henryville.
They were upright now and dressed, Vi ready for the Swing Shift, she
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 199
was doing double. Pancho Notzing in the parlor listening to the radio
in a straightback chair as though in church. He knew this part of Pros-
per’s story.
“We got there and I couldn’t get up the stairs,” Prosper said. “I
guess we hadn’t thought of that. I mean I think I’d thought of it, but.”
“What did she say? ‘So long, sucker’?”
“She didn’t say anything. I said I’d go around and look to see if
there was another way up. I don’t know what I was thinking.” He
could remember her face when he’d said this to her, as though now
everything that her face had always seemed to express and yet maybe
didn’t—the questions with bad answers, the dissatisfaction—it did
express now for real. “When I came back to tell her, she was gone.”
“She took that train.”
Prosper said nothing.
“So that didn’t change your mind about women?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean liking them better. Thinking they’re better. After she did
that to you, leaving you flat. Did it?”
“Well I guess not,” he said, actually never having wondered this
before, or considered that it should have changed his mind; maybe it
should have. “I guess she had her reasons. I mean it wasn’t going to be
easy.”
Vi regarded him in what seemed to Prosper a kind of tender disgust,
the look you might give a bad puppy.
“I thought,” he said, “that she’d given up on me, but that if I could
go out there and find her I could show her she didn’t need to. That she
shouldn’t have.”
“But you came here instead.”
“Well, yes, in the end.”
“You know what I think?” Vi said. “I think your heart got broken.
Right then on that day.”
“Really?”
“Yes. And you know, when your heart gets broken it can’t feel the
same way afterward.”
“Oh?”
She put her elbows on the oilcloth to look into Prosper’s eyes. Out-
side the window, troops of people were passing, headed for work,
200 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
marching together, some yellow bicycles moving faster than the crowd.
“I think that after your heart is broken you maybe still want to have
love affairs. Still want to make love, still want to marry even. But
people don’t stir your heart the same.”
“Oh.”
“Your heart,” she said, touching her own. “It can’t be heated up the
same as before.”
“That’s not good, I guess.”
“Depends,” Vi said. “It can keep you from being hurt again. It can
keep you from being jealous. ’Cause you don’t care so much.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t get that stab to the heart,” Vi said.
“Oh.”
“For instance me,” Vi said. “It doesn’t make me jealous that you’re
two-timing me with that blonde.”
“What?”
“Your new friend. The one you knew back home.”
“I didn’t know her. Who?”
“The one with the little boy. She likes ice-cream sodas.” Vi sang:
“The prettiest girl. I ever saw. Was sippin’ soda. Through a straw . . .”
“Oh ho,” Prosper said, as though just remembering. “Oh no. No.
That’s nothing. She’s married. I just
knew her back home. Or actually
I didn’t know her.”
“You,” said Vi, aiming a finger at him like a gun, “are a terrible
liar. But it doesn’t matter. Like I just said. Who cares? If you don’t care
I don’t. And you don’t.”
Prosper sat hands folded on the table that separated them. Caught
out so unexpectedly, he’d got distracted; there was a thread there in
Vi’s story he’d intended to follow, now he’d dropped it, what was it?
Oh yes.
“Who broke your heart, Vi?” he asked.
She stuffed her hands in her overall pockets. “Maybe I’ll tell you
sometime,” she said. “I’m going to work.”
9
It had been a Wednesday night a couple of weeks before when Pros-
per Olander and Pancho Notzing went into Ponca City to see a movie
and pick up some sundries (as Prosper said). Pancho drove, the seats
filled with Teenie Weenies out to do the town, insofar as it could be
done, not something Pancho cared to do, and they’d have to make their
own way home. He let them out by the Poncan, a Spanish-style picture
palace on Grand Avenue and the best in town, and went to park the
car; he joined Prosper at the ticket booth, and they reached doors just
as a black man in a bow tie holding the hand of a small girl in lace and
ribbons did too. Pancho opened the door to let them pass in, and fol-
lowed. Prosper went in after, and a local gent too, coatless in a skim-
mer, his eyes narrowed.
“I wouldn’t open a grave for one of them,” the fellow muttered, not
exactly to Prosper; it took Prosper a minute to put together what the
man had seen, and what he meant by what he’d said—the black man
and his daughter, Pancho opening the door for them. Open a grave?
Had the fellow had that remark ready, or was it just now he’d thought
of it? It didn’t ask for a response, and he made none; the white man
lingered in the lobby, eyes fixed on the black man’s back as he mounted
the stairs to the balcony: for once Prosper felt ignored.
The theater was Cooled by Refrigeration, not necessary on this
202 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
spring night. A few steps to negotiate, hold up the crowd briefly, and
then in. Prosper (as he always would in movie theaters) thought of
Elaine, her uniform jacket, breasts bare beneath it. The picture show-
ing was The Human Comedy, with selected short subjects and a news-
reel. That was what Pancho’d come for, though he chiefly got from it
cues for his own pointedly expressed opinions, which earned him a lot
of shushing. Next week the bill changed: Cabin in the Sky.
Just as the picture, rather dull and uneventful, wrapped up, Prosper
whispered to Pancho that he’d meet him as agreed, and got up to go.
Crowds in aisles always made him anxious, chance of a stray foot acci-
dentally kicking his props away.
Cuzalina’s pharmacy (“Save When You’re Sick”) was a few blocks
away, and open late that year, serving the oil crews as well as the round-
the-clock workers at the Pax plant who lived in town or who poured in
after every shift to get what couldn’t be got out in Henryville, where the
clinics dispensed pills and hernia trusses and Mercurochrome but not all
the other things a person needed and could find in any real drugstore:
razor blades and Brylcreem and hairnets and lipstick, Ipana toothpaste
in its tube of ivory-yellow, the repellent color of bad teeth. And more. At
ten o’clock there was a line that snaked around the displays to reach the
counter where the clerk seemed to be in no great hurry. A couple of
people let Prosper advance, and called on others ahead to let him by,
which Prosper wished they wouldn’t do: how often had he told people
that it was no trouble for him to just stand, cost him no more than it did
them. He reached the counter and stood a moment, pressed from behind
by the many others. The clerk finally raised his eyebrows, let’s go.
“I would like to buy some rubbers,” Prosper said in what even he
could hear was a weirdly solemn murmur.
“Some what?”
“I would like,” Prosper said, a bit more brightly, “a package of rub-
bers. Condoms.”
The clerk looked him over. “And who sent you to buy them?”
“No one sent me.”
“Well then . . .”
“I need them for myself.”
A kind of delighted satisfaction settled over the fellow’s face, as
though he’d just got a small gift of a kind he liked but hadn’t expected.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 203
It was one of those big faces with a set of features tightly bunched in
the middle, seeming too small for it. “Well now. You know the use of
this product?”
“I believe I do,” Prosper said. The line behind him had got longer
and drawn tighter: he could sense it without turning to look. He
propped himself up a little straighter. “Why do you ask?”
“This product is sold for the prevention of disease only. Were you
aware of that?”
Prosper said nothing. The man’s smile had steadied, confirmed.
“Aha,” he said. “So you wouldn’t be able to certify that use. As a pur-
chaser.”
Prosper said nothing again. As though he’d hoped for more, the
clerk said grudgingly, “Well what brand would you like to purchase?”
He bent closer to Prosper and spoke lower. “Skins or rubbers? I believe
you said rubbers.”
“Yes.”
“Choice is yours. We have Sheik. Mermaid. Silver Glow. Lucky.
Co-ed. Merry Widow.”
“Lucky.”
The man shrugged, as though to say that it was up to Prosper but
maybe he should think again. “How many?”
“A dozen.”
“A dozen?” said the clerk, his little eyes widening—this was almost
too wonderful, but Prosper again would say nothing back, he’d placed
his order. “Well as it happens we don’t have ’m by the dozen. We have
’m in tins of three. Sorry. You want four of those?”
“Will you serve that customer?” said a voice from behind Prosper.
“Let’s get this show on the road.”
“Two,” said Prosper humbly, though it meant he’d have to come
back soon, maybe, probably. “Two tins.”
The clerk pulled open a drawer beneath the counter, rummaged in
it for a moment, and extracted a tin, which he tossed into the air with
one hand and caught with the other; then one more. “A couple of the
Lucky,” he said, not quietly, proffering the two as though he’d con-
jured them, and just out of Prosper’s reach. “One-fifty.”
Prosper, leaning on the counter, slipped his right crutch into his left
hand and reached out for the little square tins; he put them into his
204 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
trouser pocket, took money from his jacket, and paid; swapped back
his right crutch into his right hand. Then—he’d been imagining the
moment, in a vague state of alarm, for the last few minutes—he turned
himself toward the line behind, chose a face (rapt indifference, Sphinx-
like) and started out, suffering their inspection
but also feeling a deep
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
