by John Crowley
the light off so as not to see, the only light falling on them then the red
glow of the neon hotel sign that ran up the building’s front), he
refused the present she had brought, which one of the BBs had given
her long before as a joke or a tease. I want to feel you baby not a
sheep’s gut. She felt his fluid absorbed not just into those parts but
seeping, staining, proceeding—what was the word in chemistry for
how it happened, it sounded like the thing it meant—into the whole of
her, her heart and breast and throat. Rather than draining away like
any other flooding would, the feeling went on increasing, and in not
too long a time she knew why. She told him as they sat at dawn on their
bench in the park. He held her a long time very gently and she said she
felt a little icky-sicky now at morning. And without letting her go he
told her that he was shipping out again in a week, to go fly real fighters,
Hellcats, far away. He’d put in for the duty, wangled it, it’s what he’d
always wanted.
It didn’t seem to be a disaster, none of it; it was lifted up with
everything else that was being lifted up all around them, all around
the world, as by a tornado, lifted and swung around to mean some-
thing it hadn’t before. When they had been quiet a long time he lifted
his head suddenly and clipped his hands together and shook them, in
prayer or triumph, and she saw in the dimness the glow of his eyes
looking into hers.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 309
There was a lot to get straight between them, and it wasn’t easy; faced
with it she lost some of that lightness and carelessness she’d learned,
she faltered and felt her eyes fill and then her heart grow small and
cold. First she had to tell him she wasn’t nineteen, had lied about her
birthday, she had actually just turned eighteen, had been seventeen in
fact when they. And he told her he’d guessed she wasn’t as old as she
said, he didn’t know why he knew. She told him her real name too:
wrote it on a paper and gave it to him, solemnly, and waited for his
response.
“Geraldine,” he said, and shrugged, having no preference and
thinking it was funny she did. “Noo-nez? What kind of a name is
that?”
Another reason she’d withdrawn from the BBs when she and Danny
had got serious. They were always dropping hints about her when
Danny was in earshot, telling her she ought to get up and dance to
“South of the Border,” passing her the chili sauce, things like that,
though Danny had never picked up the hints.
“So it’s okay for you to marry a regular white person? It’s legal?”
“Yes it’s legal. Silly.”
“Hey, I don’t know. There’s laws in other states.”
She didn’t respond. He was studying her in a way that made her
shrink, or swell—somehow both at once. She was glad there had been
no Mexicans or anybody but palefaces where he’d come from—he said
it that way himself. Nothing for him to think about except a funny
name and some dumb songs. She told him her parents couldn’t know,
that if her brother knew he’d start trouble. She’d tell them after, when
they were happy and everything had to be the way it was, and they’d be
happy too.
He had nothing to tell her, was exactly what he seemed, all one
piece from front to back. She loved him, the one single thing he was,
and feared for him, and for herself; but she knew she could tell him she
was afraid, and it wouldn’t harm him or change him or pollute him.
The tornado was carrying her on upward away from the city and her
life and her family and all of it, shedding consequences, futureless,
awake.
310 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
They had only a week till he was gone. There was another flier in
his squad who was going to get married too, a fellow who had grown
up just outside the city and had a car still parked in his parents’ drive-
way. He was marrying his high school sweetheart, who was no older
than Diane and whose parents would never allow it, so they were
eloping, Danny said, as though the word itself were funny and sexy
and good. The four of them could get out of the state and across the
desert to where the wedding chapels were tying the knot for soldiers
and sailors by the dozen, they all four knew about them, there weren’t
the laws in that state there were here, you could get the license and get
married all in an afternoon. They could get back the next day.
They would leave early in the morning so they could get to the cha-
pels in time to choose one. They had to have the Wassermann test, but
the people at the chapel would do all the rest and by evening they could
have the ceremony, which only took a minute, like the sudden wed-
dings in old movies—Diane saw in her mind the comic judge or JP
with wide whiskers, his fat wife playing the harmonium, the couple (as
happy as any couple marrying anywhere) turning to each other in shy
delight and expectation. You may kiss the bride.
Danny’s friend picked them up before dawn downtown near the
park, Diane wrapped in Danny’s uniform blouse (she had started shiv-
ering violently in the chilly darkness). The friend was named Poindex-
ter, but Danny told her to call him Bill, and his girl was Sylvia, big and
blond and asleep beside Bill almost as soon as they started out. The car
was ten years old, smelly and noisy, with a spare tire tied on the side
that didn’t look any worse than the four poor things on the car (that’s
what Danny said, laughing, unalarmed). In the trunk were tossed a
dozen big bottles and a couple of empty jerry cans, which they’d fill
with water somewhere as they came down into the desert, as much for
the car to have as for themselves; and in there too was Sylvia’s patent
leather suitcase and now Diane’s round hatbox and case.
Morning city, pale and unpopulated, they were all quiet putt-put-
ting through the streets and out of the suburbs. At the edges of the
wide farmlands, the low buildings where the picker families lived. Men
and women and children, awake early, were climbing into the backs of
trucks. Sylvia said it was an awful life but those people were grateful
for the chance, they’d never had anything better. What Danny won-
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 311
dered was how they knew people would want that many artichokes:
he’d never eaten one in his life.
They rose up gradually into pine mountains littered with sinister
boulders as big as cottages, rose until they came to a place where a tower
of crossed timbers was built topped by a lookout shack high up, you
could climb up it if you wanted, but they had no time. From that last
height they could see far into the brown lands they had to cross, and
effortlessly the old car fell down over the folds of earth that turned at
length into wind-combed dunes, as though any minute they would reach
the sea. Bill and Danny joked about life in the service and told stories
full of acronyms and abbreviations that the girls couldn’t understand,
but they laugh
ed too. When the road stretched and straightened there
was a big government sign warning travelers that the desert ahead was
dangerous, that they shouldn’t attempt it unprepared, that there would
be little in the way of help for them: and on top of the sign a big black
bird perched. “A vulture,” Sylvia said in horror, but it wasn’t really.
They stopped at a gas station building so low and flat it seemed to
have been stepped on by God. It had a big warning sign too about the
road ahead, handmade, with a skull and crossbones on it; the place
claimed it was the last stop for water and gas until the city on the other
side was reached. They filled the tank, and bought water.
“Gwaranteed alkali-free,” said the dried old hank of a man work-
ing the pump.
“Alkali will kill you,” said Bill.
Actually in a few miles there was another place that said it was
really the last, and had rattlesnakes and lizards in cages to look at; and
then another place farther on, the same. “The last last place’ll be just
when we get there,” said Bill.
As the day reached noon Sylvia dropped her joking about vultures
and mirages and Indians and who painted the Painted Desert; Bill
drove the straight road with one finger on the wheel. Diane curled her-
self against Danny in the back, feeling suspended, shaken by the car
but not in motion at all: becalmed, like a ship. She started awake (when
had she fallen asleep? She didn’t remember) and felt she was still in the
same place. Danny’s head against the seat back, eyes closed, mouth
slightly open: he seemed not to breathe. For an instant she couldn’t
recognize him, a large stranger close to her.
312 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Then there was a sudden band of green, as though drawn by a
crayon, and a river to cross, they’d known it was to come but it seemed
to slice across their journey with both a greeting and a warning. After
that it was easy enough to see where they were supposed to go. Almost
as soon as the iron bridge was crossed there were signs for competing
places, billboards with pictures of linked rings, doves, hearts. It seemed
not to matter which one you picked, but she and Sylvia rejected the
first one that Bill tried to pull into, not feeling they had to give a reason,
and the boys didn’t argue. The next was worse, but the next, a white
cottage under tall slim gray-leaved trees, a little pretend steeple on top
and a picket fence, looked cheerful. It had a pretty rose-covered arcade
to enter by and a discreet sign in front that was welcoming and mild
and helpful and didn’t say Cut-Rate like the others.
“Here,” Diane said, and tugged Danny’s sleeve.
Later on, a long time after, when maybe she told the story of those days
to someone younger, Diane would try to think about having missed so
much that was so important to so many people, things that she too had
always thought, when she was a child, or a kid in school, would be
important. Getting married, after a long courtship; a proposal, and a
little plush box opened before her to show the ring and its promise
inside, to put on her finger forever; and the church, with the smiling
priest and the people and even the flowers seeming eager and impatient
and glad for her in her hampering white dress coming slowly, slowly up
to where he stood. Wedding night, and the gift of her innocence; hon-
eymoon; house. How could she tell them that it never seemed to her to
be a loss, or to be full of loss: not as it happened, and not as she looked
back on it. Because what was important then, in that time, was not so
much what you got as what you escaped. Escaping the worst was like
joy. It was joy. It was freedom, it was freedom from, and just then
that’s what freedom meant. She thought she had been lucky. She knew
she had been.
The two big hotels downtown were full and the others didn’t look
nice; at one a bellhop steered them to a place out of town that he said
would do right by them, he’d call up on the phone, and Danny gave
him four bits. They had some drinks and a steak dinner and it was
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 313
deep dark when they reached the place, Desert Courts. The sign said
modern comfort. telephone. flush toilets.
“That’s good to know,” said Sylvia coldly. Then, laughing: “Hear
about these Okies coming in from Arkansas or someplace, they’ve never
seen a flush toilet but think it’s mighty nice for washing your feet. Push
down the little handle and you get clean water for tother foot!”
Yes, everyone had heard that, and because everyone had heard it
Diane thought it probably had never happened. They turned in at the
gate. The tourist cabins were low and heavy, made of adobe; a long
trellis or breezeway sheltered their fronts and joined them like a happy
family, and vines grew up from big red pots to clamber over them, and
tall cacti too in bigger pots, fat and prickly. In the hot white moonlight
it looked like the land Krazy Kat lived in. The motherly lady at the
desk gave them keys and smiled on them all; Diane knew she was Mex-
ican but didn’t know if the others did: there was a cross on the wall
behind her desk wrapped in last Easter’s plaited palms. She and Danny
parted from Bill and Sylvia in a sort of hilarity of embarrassment, a
joke about getting some shut-eye, and then their door closed and she
was alone with her husband.
He turned on the little fan at the window and watched its propeller
whip the air. He was smiling as though at some secret thing.
“Danny.”
“So you promised,” he said, turning to her. “You’ll go to tell your
parents, as soon as we get back.”
“Yes. I will.”
She sat on the bed, on the broad red Indian blanket that covered it.
He came and sat by her. “Show ’em that picture of me,” he said. “The
one I gave you. They’ll like to see that.”
“Yes.”
“What were their names again?”
“Joe and Maria.”
“Oh right. And your brother’s . . .”
“Paul. He’s in the Army.”
“I’ll be glad to meet ’em all. Uncles and cousins too.”
She knew what she should say to that but she didn’t say it. She lay
back on the pillows and he turned to lie and nuzzle her, his arm across
her. She took his wrist to stop him.
314 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Hey,” he said. “What.”
“I don’t know, Danny, please. It might hurt the baby.”
“What?”
“I mean if we.”
“Why? Who says?”
“It’s what I heard.”
“Aw no,” he said. “My kid’s bound to be tough.”
“Danny really.”
He put his hands beneath her white skirt. “Maybe we can give him
a little brother,” he said smiling. “Come out as twins.”
“Jeez, Danny. My God.” The bed was as though afloat, about to lift
and exit out the window into the desert night with them aboard; she
lay still to keep it still, but his hands kept on, and everything within
her
flowed toward him.
“There’s things we can do,” he said. “Now that we’re married.”
“Oh Danny.”
“Baby I love you.”
“Just go gentle, Danny, you have to be very gentle.”
“I’ll sneak in. Just up beside him. Won’t even wake him. I promise.”
“How can you talk that way,” she said, but he stopped her with a
kiss, and stopped talking himself.
2
Somehow it was harder going back across the desert with the sun
at their backs, not an adventure now but only drab miles to
cover. It was cold till the sun rose high and Bill kept the win-
dows rolled up and drove stolidly on, leaning over the steering
wheel. Sylvia wasn’t telling them what she knew about the world and
people; once, pressed against Bill’s arm, she wept, Diane thought:
they’d soon be parted, and who knew what might happen then. Diane
didn’t weep: she felt herself to be living on a higher plane than Sylvia,
where not weeping was required no matter what you felt, a duty to
your man, your ser
viceman. Danny slept—she’d begun to think he
could sleep anywhere, that he did it out of boredom, like a cat with
nothing to mouse after.
For herself she was feeling sick, conscious of her insides in a way
that was new, of a queasy fullness that was in her stomach and not in
her stomach. She ignored it, or when she couldn’t, she tried to stay
calm and will it to pass by. But then, not rising or whelming but stab-
bing suddenly, she felt a new bad feeling, a real and distinct pain, not
just in her middle but along a line she could trace from here to there.
She shivered and made a sound, and Danny’s eyes opened.
What if she’d been right, and they shouldn’t have done what they
did the night before? For a moment she was sure, just sure, they
316 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
shouldn’t have, and an awful premonition filled her from her bottom to
her heart. Then when the pain passed it passed too. She said nothing.
Danny slept again.
Back in the city the two flyboys had to make a run for the embarka-
tion point, their car stuck in traffic, quick kisses and hugs and tugs
away, Poindexter turning back just at the last minute to toss Sylvia the
keys to the car before he and Danny were lost in the crowds. Sylvia got
into the driver’s seat, now overwhelmed with something that might
