by John Crowley
where there are other Teenie Weenies they don’t know. The Lady of
Fashion has been offered the first trip, but has declined, and left the
experiment to the Policeman, the Admiral, and the Cowboy. The Scots-
man and the Carpenter are at work thinking of a way to turn the
rubber band that gives the power.
“The worst idea they’ve had yet,” Al Mass had said when the Sunday
64 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
paper showed this panel. “If they can get that thing wound up and let it
go, good-bye Cowboy, good-bye Admiral, good-bye Policeman. I won’t
miss them three. They always were a pain in the keister.”
It was this panel of The Teenie Weenies that had long ago given the
workers at Shop 128 their name: the picture of the long fuselage, the
graceful wings, the delicate wheels in the tall grasses (tall to the Teenie
Weenies), and the crowd of people around it and on it, laboring to
make it go: the Cook and the Dunce and the Lady of Fashion, Tommy
Atkins and Buddy Guff, the Clown, the Indian, Mr. Lover and Mrs.
Lover holding hands, Paddy Pinn the Irish giant all of four inches high.
There had been a Jap once, but he was gone now, though the clever
Chinaman remained. So they themselves, Shop 128, varied and unique,
with different souls and different skills and Passions, none interchange-
able with any of the others (as Pancho Notzing insisted), not fungible
no matter what the bosses or the government or the union thought.
They even had an Indian, though his black-satin hair was cut short as
a scrub brush and he wore the same work clothes as everybody.
Shop 128 was one of twenty stations where the fuselages were put
together with their wings. Fuselages entered the Assembly Building
from the Fuselage Building, and finished wings—all but their wingtip
sections—were lifted out of the Empennage Building by overhead crane
cars and carried into Assembly. When the wing section was hovering
suspended over the fuselage, a select team, all men but one (Vi Harbi-
son), guided it as it was lowered into place. Then the remaining Teenie
Weenies climbed the rolling ladders and scrambled upon the assembly
to rivet it and connect all those wires and snaking tubes. Al and Sal
Mass, and others not so small as those two, were the riveting team on
that narrow pressurized tunnel that ran from the forward compart-
ment to the rear. Sal on the inside loaded her gun with a rivet, drove it
into the predrilled hole, and on the other side it met the bucking bar—a
piece of steel the size of a blackboard eraser, curved to lie flat against
the aluminum surface—held in place by Sal’s bucker, Marcie. The rivet
struck the bucking bar and was flattened, making a seal; if the seal
looked good to Marcie, she tapped once on the aluminum; if she
wanted Sal to give it another hit she tapped twice. It was so loud all
around that Sal had to listen hard for those taps. It was (she said) like
dancing with a guy you couldn’t see or touch. Sal was the only riveter
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 65
on the team willing to work with a colored woman when they were
both new on the job (“What do you think I care?” Sal’d said), and now
they were the best team in the shop, maybe the floor, and everybody
wanted Marcie, but she and Sal wouldn’t part.
The growing ship then moved up the floor, gaining new things, aile-
rons and wingtips and tables and chairs and lights. When the whole
ship was furnished and complete, the vast central doors opened on
mechanical tracks—it took some time—and a fleet of three little trac-
tors came to draw it out onto the tarmac, everybody not busy doing
something else standing to watch and clap as the impossible thing,
wings drooping slightly like an albatross, ghostly in the purity of its
yet unlettered unmarked duralumin, Plexiglas ports still blinded with
black paper, crept into the sun. It took so long to move into place beside
its sisters on the field that everyone soon went back to work.
The three buildings were actually one building, the walls between
them formed by two lines of offices, machine shops, tool distribution,
production control, big glass windows through which the workers on
the floor could see the supervisors and designers and computers inside,
all of them just as busy as they were in their white shirts and ties.
Henry Van Damme had wanted those glass windows. He was also the
one who chose the new fluorescent lighting for those offices, which
also hung high over the shop floor in vast rectangular banks, the first
building this size lit solely by the cool magic-wand bulbs that many
workers had never seen before they arrived here, that made it bright as
day but somehow unearthly. Along that row of offices was the Press
and Publicity Office where Horse Offen turned out the Aero. Henry
particularly wanted that office open to the shop. He read the Aero with
great interest, cover to cover each week: Horse Offen knew it, and
knew that suggestions reaching him from higher up might well be
coming from the Mountain Man himself.
Horse’s office contained the mimeo machines and a little Harris
Automatic photo-offset printer, with a man and an assistant to run it,
real IPPAU printers, who stamped the International Printing Pressmen
and Assistants Union bug on the last page of every issue of the Aero.
They also printed reports, spec handbooks, notices, calendars, and
every other thing that the incoming workers were handed or saw or
read or were advised and counseled and warned by through the day and
66 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
night. Just today Prosper Olander was working on lettering the new
series of Upp ’n’ Adam cartoons that would appear large-size around
the shop floor and in the toilets and lunchroom, and small-size in the
Aero. At least one idea for an Upp ’n’ Adam had definitely come from
Van Damme himself, who thought the two clowns were funny and
instructive, a big fat one and a little skinny one, always grinning even
when stepping on abandoned tools, shocking themselves with worn
wiring, wasting rivets, sleeping on the job as the drill press went hay-
wire (Hey Upp! Get Your Sleep in Bed—Not on the Job!! ) or making
other messes that wags could alter with a crayon into the vulgar or
obscene—Horse marveled at the human male’s capacity for inventive
crudity. The art was done off-site and mailed in, but Prosper did the
words with his lettering pens, making clusters of exclamation marks
like cock feathers. He did Anna Bandanna too, whose posters con-
veyed more sober remarks, and longer ones, directed at female work-
ers. He’d just finished one of those and it lay on his table ready for
photography.
“ ‘Don’t let that time of the month keep you from doing your best,
girls!’” Horse read, looking over Prosper’s shoulder. “ ‘Get the straight
story, not the old myths—Ask for Pamphlet 1.1 at the Nurse’s Station!’ ”
“What’s the straight story?” Prosper wondered.
“Straight story is, Buckle this pad on it and get back to work.”
>
Anna Bandanna posters were easier because the picture never
changed, it was only she, bust of a great broadly grinning woman in a
polka-dot bandanna, the straps of her overalls visible on her shoulders;
red wet mouth, maybe fat, eyes alight. Prosper’d heard her referred to
as that damn Aunt Jemima, and there was a resemblance, if only the
strength and joy and white teeth. He got very used to looking into that
receptive but frozen face.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Horse said, “but I had a dream
last night about that woman.”
“Really?”
“Really. I dreamed she and I. Well.”
“I dreamed about President Roosevelt,” Prosper said.
“Swell,” said Horse. “He running for a fourth term?”
“Well we talked about that. I gave him my advice.”
“Oh good. You had a high-level meeting.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 67
“No no,” Prosper said, remembering it. “It didn’t seem that way. We
were at a picnic. A few others around. Then he and I went for a walk, up
into the woods. Talking about this and that. Just ordinary matters.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” It had seemed morning, the sun and the path; they talked
about nothing in that easy way that friends do, friends who gain suste-
nance from the mere exchange of true words. His to the President, the
President’s to him. It felt good to be able to help him.
“So he was walking?” Horse asked pointedly, as though he had a
surprise for Prosper.
“Yes.”
“He can’t.”
“Well, no. I guess he has trouble with it anyway. But he was. So
was I.”
“You didn’t think anything of it?”
“I usually walk all right in dreams. Run up stairs, you know. Like
everybody. I bet so does he.”
“In your dreams you can walk,” Horse said, and for a moment a
kind of wondering pity seemed to invade a face not really suited for a
feeling like that. “Man oh man that’s . . .” But he couldn’t or didn’t say
what it was. He returned to his typewriter, shaking his head.
Prosper, yes, could walk in his dreams, run too; that same morning
he’d awakened in the warmth of one, where he’d been running, running
across an open field under the sky, readying himself to launch from his
hands a great weightless paper-and-wood model airplane, like the one
the Teenie Weenies found; almost aloft himself, he’d lifted it to the sky
like a heartful of hope.
At four o’clock the Day Shift changes to the Swing Shift. The Day Shift
workers down tools, pack their toolboxes, head for the lockers; the
women fill their dressing rooms, yakking and laughing or weary and
silent, showering and changing into their actual clothes and hanging
their boiler suits and overalls and standard-issue uniforms in their
lockers, tossing in their scuffed shoes and limp socks, but some don’t
care and after a swift hand wash and a reapplication of lipstick are out
the door, only a hop to their houses anyway and, for many, no husband
68 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
there to keep up standards for. Marlene, a new inside riveter, said good
night to her team, and “Good night, see you tomorrow,” to Marcie,
who waved back. Then on the way out of the plant it occurred to Mar-
lene that that was the first time she’d ever said Good night, see you
tomorrow to a colored person.
Other Day Shift workers go right from the floor to the cafeteria,
and get their big meal there now, when the evening has cooled the
place. They often skip lunch, it’s too damn hot to eat at the set hour in
that plant all made of metal—it’s like one of those fold-up aluminum
picnic ovens they sell that are guaranteed to cook just by heating up in
the sun. Today a lot of people just took a Popsicle or an ice-cream bar
from the snack trucks that circulated around the floor as break time
moved, the frosty insides revealed when a lid was opened, the momen-
tary cold breath heavenly. Now they were ready for dinner (or supper,
depending on where you came from in these States and how you learned
to name your daily meals) in the Main Dining Commons as you were
supposed to call the cafeteria, though no one did.
The cafeteria’s the source of some of Horse Offen’s best statistics—
five hundred pies an hour coming out of the ovens, three automatic
potato peelers peeling fifty pounds a minute and slicers slicing and
dumpers dumping them into batteries of French fryers over which a mist
of hot oil continuously stands. The thousands of Associates served every
hour. The specially designed dishes of unbreakable Melamine, washed
by the largest washing machines allowed under wartime regulations.
There’s a stage at the far end for shows and War Bond promotions, and
at the entrance, before the food service area, Henry Van Damme decreed
a fountain—white porcelain, round, a wide-lipped gutter surrounding a
column from whose many chromed faucets or pipe-mouths thin streams
of warm water pour when the foot treadle is stepped on. Not everybody
but almost everybody pauses there to wash, as the large sign urges them
to do, before they enter the serving lines beyond.
“He’s not a normal person,” Prosper Olander was telling the Teenie
Weenies around him, which included Francine, who might be the Lady
of Fashion, though dressed now like everybody in bandanna and over-
alls. “You should see him. Not even the photographs show you how big
he is. I mean he looks big in them but in the flesh he just takes up more
room. He’s a behemoth.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 69
“Well be he moth or be he man,” Francine said, with a Mae West
shrug to one shoulder, “he can put his shoes under my bed any time.”
The other women at the table—they were all women—laughed at that;
they said things like that around Prosper they wouldn’t have around
other men.
At the next long table some of the women were reading from an
article in Liberty magazine about the new world to come after the war,
and how men and women and even children will have been tested in
that fire, and how they’ll deserve the bounties of peace that the end of
the war will bring, when our enormous war power will be turned to
other uses.
“Well I don’t know,” a dark and somewhat saturnine woman said. “I
sorta can’t see it that way. I can’t see that this’ll come out right for us.”
“Who’s this us?” the reader wanted to know.
“Us who are getting these jobs, putting in these hours, earning this
overtime. Us here in this country, where we never were bombed, just
Pearl Harbor, nowhere in the States, and we’re not going to be. And
over there people starving and getting killed—I don’t mean soldiers,
everybody’s soldiers die and get wounded, I mean people who don’t
fight. People like us.”
“Hey we’ve made a sacrifice. Every one of us.”
“Yeah? Seems to me we’re actually doing pretty well. Seems to me.”
The women around her were variously dismissive,
or scandalized,
or affronted. Some wanted to respond, wanted to tell her to shut up,
they were all doing what they could, but they didn’t say any of that.
“We’re doing too well out of this war,” she said at last, but more to
herself than to the rest. “It’s not right.”
She looked around herself then. No one who’d heard her was look-
ing her way.
“Well what do I know,” she said, returning to her meat loaf. “I’m
just a clog in the machine.”
Elsewhere, Larry the union shop steward was holding court, as
Pancho Notzing described it, at a table near to the one where Pancho sat
today. Pancho turned now and then to glare at him. Larry is something
of a bully, which many workers think is an all right thing, since he’s their
bully, and he’s won something or wangled something or mitigated some-
thing for a lot of them. Most of those at his table were men.
70 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Loud enough so that Larry was sure to hear it, Pancho himself
expatiated. “You know what they want to do,” he said. “They want
to put the whole population under the control of the government.
They want a labor draft—manpower to be shifted to whatever task
the military deems necessary. Conscription of free labor! Male and
female!”
“A crank case,” Larry said to his chums. He thumbed secretly over
his shoulder, indicating Pancho.
“A what?” one of them asked
“Yeah. One of those crank cases who comes along with some big
homemade idea about how people should live, how the society ought
to change, all out of his own brain.”
His chum was still regarding him puzzled. “Crank case?”
“Crank. Nut case,” Larry said testily. “Jeez.”
“Dear Mrs. Roosevelt thinks this regimentation should simply con-
tinue after the war,” Pancho said. “And very likely it will. The monop-
olies, the government, the army, and the unions will share out the
world, and we’ll be forced into a single mold, no more different from
one another than gingerbread men.”
“Why don’t you shut up, old man,” Larry said, turning his chair
suddenly with a scrape. “Nobody wants to hear your guff. This union’s
fought the company and the government for workers’ rights, and—”
“You just wait till this war’s over,” Pancho exclaimed, still facing