by John Crowley
air, but not me.”
Outside on the porch as they all went out—Pancho with the two bags
that he had intended to leave for Prosper, still neatly labeled as to their
contents—the little black dog was still waiting, and happy to see
them.
“We’ll take him too,” Sal said.
“Oh no,” Larry said. “I hate dogs.”
But she’d already picked up the mutt and was holding him tenderly
and laughing as he licked at her face. Pancho led them to the side street
where the car was parked.
“Best be on our way,” Pancho said, climbing into the driver’s seat.
“Look at that sky.”
A roiling darkness did seem to be building to the north, and little
startled puffs of breeze reached them. Larry licked his forefinger and
held it aloft. “Headed the other way,” he averred. “Back toward where
we came from.”
“So we’re off,” said Pancho, and turned the key.
“ ‘Git for home, Bruno!’ ” Sal shouted from the back.
“There’s no place like home,” said Prosper; he said it though he
didn’t know and had never known just what that meant. It did occur to
him that if seen from the right point of view, they in the Zephyr were
like one of those movies where the picture, which has all along been
moving with the people in it one after the other or in twos and threes
wherever they go, takes a final stance, and the people move away from
it. (Prosper, in the days when he’d come to pick up Elaine or wait while
378 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
she changed, had seen the beginnings and endings of many movies, the
same movie many times.) Maybe there’s one more kiss, or one more
piece of comic business, and then the car with the lovers or the family
or the ill-assorted comedians in it moves off, hopeful suitcase tied on,
and it goes away from you down the road: and you understand that
you’re not going to see where they get to or what they’re headed for,
even as those two big words arrive on the screen to tell you so.
RECESSIONAL
It was the fiercest tornado ever recorded in Oklahoma history, which
made it remarkable in all the history of weather, because the torna-
does of Oklahoma are themselves top of the standings in almost any
year. It didn’t touch down long or go far, but what it touched it
turned to flinders and waste, and left nothing standing.
Up north where it began Muriel Gunderson was on duty at the
weather station at Little Tom Field, and took the astonishing readings
sent in by the radiosonde equipment that she’d sent aloft attached to its
balloon. Not that you couldn’t already tell that something big was
going to roll over the prairie within the next twelve hours or so: back
on the farm the horses would be biting one another and the windmill
vanes trembling in the dead air as though ready to start flailing as soon
as they perceived the front.
The radiosonde was a blessing most ways. A little packet of radio
instruments, no bigger than a shoe box, that could measure wind
speed, air pressure, humidity, and temperature as a function of height,
and send it all back to the radio receivers in the shack. No more follow-
ing the ascent of the balloon with the theodolite—the instruments
knew where they were, and kept transmitting no matter how far above
the cloud cover they went. Women around the country were putting
these little packages on balloons, sending them up, and then (the draw-
382 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
back) recovering them after they’d fallen to earth on their little para-
chutes. There were instructions on the container for anyone who found
it about how to mail it back, but in the daytime you just went out in the
direction of the wind and looked for it.
Muriel was damp everywhere her clothes bunched. Tootie lay under
the porch as still as though dead, except for his panting tongue. Muriel
began taking down the readings that were coming in from the instru-
ments. She’d had to have training in all of it, RAOB or radio observa-
tion, the Thermistor and the Hygristor, like twin giants in a fairy tale;
it still made her nervous always that she hadn’t got it right.
Well this number sure didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem that baro-
metric pressure could get that low. Radiosonde equipment was myste-
rious: in the old method you knew you could get it wrong, and how
you’d be likely to get it wrong, but now it was as though only the
machine could know if it was wrong, and it wasn’t telling.
Maybe she’d set the baroswitch incorrectly before she let it go.
Well who knows. Better to trust the reading than to guess, she
guessed.
She went to the Teletype and began typing up the readings. The
Teletype was new too, her words and numbers transmitted to other
machines elsewhere that typed them at the same time she did. When
Muriel got to the baro pressure number she put it in, and the time and
height, and then put in a new line:
This is the number, folks, no joke.
Down under the porch, Tootie lifted her head, as though catching a
smell, and ceased to pant.
The twister itself didn’t touch down near that airfield, and Ponca City
itself was largely spared too, a fact that would be remarked on in the
churches the following day—the fine houses and old trees, the Poncan,
the Civic Center, they all stood and still stand, the high school and the
library. But out along Bodark Creek and to the west it churned the
earth and the blackjack oaks and the works of man in its funnel like
the fruits and berries tossed into a Waring blender. Those little houses,
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 383
A Street to Z Street, Pancho’s, Sal’s, Connie’s, never firmly attached to
the earth in the first place, were lifted up from their slabs and stirred
unresisting into the air, block after block, with all their tar paper, bath-
tubs, bicycles, beds, tables, fretwork-framed proverbs ( Home Sweet
Home), Navajo blankets, Kit-Kat clocks with wagging tails, pictures of
Jesus, potted cacti, knives, forks, and spoons, odds and ends.
It was bad, it was devastating, but it was one of those disasters that
manage to inflict wondrous destruction without really harming anyone
much. For in all of Henryville blown away that afternoon there was
not a single—the word had by then changed from a colorless technical
term to one that came into our mouths, some of our mouths, at the
worst moments of our lives—not a single casualty. A beloved dog; a
caged bird; some miraculous escapes beneath beds or sturdy tables.
The reason was not Providence, though, really, or even wonderful luck;
it was that there was almost no one in Henryville that day.
That day—it was the greatest in Horse Offen’s career, the defin-
ing act of it anyway and certainly productive of an image that would
remain before memory’s eye—that day was the day the last rivets
were banged into the five hundredth Pax bomber to be turned out at
Van Damme Aero Ponca City, and Horse had persuaded Manage-
ment (his memo
passing upward right to the broad bare desk of
Henry Van Damme) that every single person at the plant, from
sweepers to lunchroom ladies to engineers to managers, ought to be
brought onto the floor for one vast picture of the plane and them-
selves: a portrait of the greatest team and the greatest plane in the
greatest war of all time. Everybody’d get a two-dollar bonus for
showing up off-shift.
So we came and crowded in together, complaining—the heat, the
closeness, the air like a fusty blanket, the spirit dejected, the mind dull.
Under the shadow of those wings we sheltered, though of course not all
of us were responsible for its coming into being, some of the smilers in
the back having just been hired and many of those who had indeed
riveted the dural and calibrated the instruments and hooked up the
wiring already gone, dispersed, headed home. Anyway the picture—we
nearly rebelled before the huge banquet camera could be focused and
fired, Horse with bullhorn mother-henning us ceaselessly—the picture
is that one you still see. Connie is in front, beside Rollo Stallworthy,
384 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
and some of the other Teenie Weenies are scattered here and there; you
can find their faces if you knew them.
Then as we stood there, about to break up, the twister came on,
prefigured by the deep nameless dread induced in humans by a precipi-
tous fall in barometric pressure, and then by weird airs whipping
around in the great space and even rocking the ship we stood around,
as though it shuddered. The windows darkened. Soon we could hear it,
distant sound of a devouring maw, we didn’t know that it had already
eaten our houses and their carports, but the Oklahomans and others
among us who knew the signs announced now what it was. As it bore
down on us, the buildings all around were pressed on, the dormitories,
the Community Center, and we heard them shattering and flinging
their parts away to clang against the roofs and windows of ours, and
there might have been a panic if it hadn’t been clear to everyone that
we were already in the one place we would have run to. We were
warned to stay away from the windows, and we milled a little, but
there wasn’t much room, and we hardly even spoke or made a sound
except for a universal moan when all at once the lights went out.
When it had clearly passed over, we went out. A little rain had
fallen. The B-30s lay around the trash-speckled field like dead seagulls
cast on a beach after a storm. One had been lifted up and laid over the
back of another, as though “treading” it like a cock does a hen, to
make more. One flipped halfway over on bent wing. They’d been made,
after all, to be as light as possible. We walked among them afraid and
grieving and delighted.
One death could be attributed to the big wind. A ship had been pushed
forward, lifted, and fallen again so that its left landing gear had buck-
led and it slumped sideways. Connie and Rollo, assigned to the team
checking the ships for damage, found Al Mass in the forward cabin,
dead. He hadn’t been hurt in the fall or in the crushing of the cabin,
and the coroner determined or at least made a good guess that he’d
died of a heart attack from the stress of the storm and maybe the
sudden shock of the plane’s inexplicable takeoff. Midgets aren’t known
for strong hearts, the coroner averred. Rollo and Connie gave evidence
that supported the theory of a heart attack, but (without testifying to
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 385
it, give the little guy a break) they both supposed that it might have
come a little before the big wind, since Al was without his pants when
they came upon him, and nearby was the abandoned brassiere of
another interloper, who’d apparently left him there, alive or more likely
dead: but who that was we’d never learn.
Al’s buried in the Odd Fellows cemetery there in Ponca City; Van
Damme Aero acquired a small area that’s given over to Associates who
died in the building of the Pax there from 1943 to 1945 and had no
other place to lie. There are twelve, nine of them women. They fell
from cranes, they stepped in front of train cars, they were hit by engines
breaking loose from stationary test rigs, got blood poisoning from tool
injuries, dropped dead from stroke. It was dangerous work, the way we
did it then.
That ship they found Al in was actually the one that, years after,
was hauled out to repose in the field across Hubbard Road from the
Municipal Airport, wingless and tail-less. The story of Al and how he
was found had been forgotten, or hadn’t remained attached to this par-
ticular fuselage, and no ghosts walked. By then what was left of Hen-
ryville had been bulldozed away, unsalvageable and anyway unwanted,
the land was more saleable without that brief illusion of a town, though
the streets that the men and women had walked and biked to work
along, and driven on in their prewar cars, and sat beside in the eve-
nings to drink beer and listen to the radio, can still be traced, if you
open your mind and heart to the possibility of their being there. There’s
a local club devoted to recovering the layout of it all, the dormitories,
the clinics, the shops and railroad tracks, and marking the faint street
crossings, A to Z. But that’s all.
Afterword
To take on any aspect of the American military effort in World War
II as a subject for fiction, especially any aspect of the air war, is
to invite criticism from the very many experts who know more
about it than you ever will—not only archivists and historians
and buffs, but also those who remember firsthand the planes and the
factories and the people that built them. In part to evade the heavy
responsibility of accuracy, I chose in this story to invent a bomber that
never existed, though it is modeled on a couple that did. Somewhat on
a whim, I placed the factory that is making this imaginary bomber in
Ponca City, Oklahoma, though there was no such factory there—the
nearest was the Boeing plant in Wichita, Kansas. I have taken other
smaller liberties with the historical record, some obvious, some perhaps
not. Some things that might appear to be invented are true: the multiple
suicides of Part One, Chapter Two are among these. The true story of
the Women Airforce Service Pilots (as told by—among others—Adela
Riek Scharr in Sisters in the Sky) is more extraordinary than any
fictional account could suggest. I have drawn extensively on the
personal accounts of the many women who went to work in the
munitions plants, gas stations, weather stations, and offices, who drove
trucks, flew planes, and succeeded in hundreds of jobs they had never
expected to do. For most of them, and for the many African American
388 / A F T E R W O R D
men and women, Hispanics, Native Americans, and people with dis-
abilities who also served, the end of the war meant returning to the
status quo ante: but things could never be restored just as they had
been, and the w
ar years contained the seeds of change that would even-
tually grow again.
Among the hundred-odd books that a complete bibliography for
this novel would include, I am most indebted to A Mouthful of Rivets:
Women at Work in World War II by Nancy Baker Wise and Christy
Wise. The first-person accounts collected there are an enduring monu-
ment to the women of that period. Firsthand accounts like Slacks and
Calluses: Our Summer in a Bomber Factory by Constance Bowman,
and Punch In, Susie! A Woman’s War Factory Diary by Nell Giles,
were helpful. Don’t You Know There’s a War On? The American
Home Front, 1941–1945 by Richard R. Lingeman was important for
the background, as was Alistair Cooke’s America, the recently repub-
lished account of Cooke’s car trip across the country in 1941 to 1942.
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War,
1929–1945 by David M. Kennedy was illuminating on the details of
policy, particularly the draft. Susan G. Sterrett’s Wittgenstein Flies a
Kite was my source for most of the stories about early flight, including
the remarkable one previewed in its title.
Just as useful day to day were the Internet sites with information on
a thousand topics. From the official site of the B-36 bomber I learned—
after deciding that my bomber would be called the Pax and would be
struck by a tornado in Oklahoma—that the B-36 was called the Peace-
maker, and a fleet of them was damaged by a tornado in Texas. I found
pictures of train car interiors on the Katy Railroad, studied salon hair-
styles of the 1930s, marveled at Teenie Weenies Sunday pages, learned
about the rise of sports betting in the war, read about poor posture and
nursing care for spinal fusion in 1940, and far far more.
I am grateful to Michael J. Lombardi of the Boeing Archives in
Seattle for spending a day finding references and answering my ques-
tions, and to Andrew Labovsky and all the crew of Doc, the B-29 being
lovingly restored at the Kansas Aviation Museum in Wichita, for allow-
ing me up into the plane, as well as supplying me with facts from their
bottomless well. In Ponca City my very great thanks to Sandra Graves
and Loyd Bishop of the Ponca City Library for their great help on a
A F T E R W O R D / 389
peculiar errand—casting their hometown for a part it never played.
