Four Freedoms

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